Subsistence News

Hi all! This new update aims to expand on the later-game subsistence mechanics, bringing greater depth to player self sufficiency, while adding a progression mechanic to the overall health system.


There are now 3 new types of collectable plants that spawn in the world; wild carrots, potatoes and onions.

While these plants can be found from day one, they are fairly rare and not meant as a reliable source of early-game veggies (although they are a fair supplement). In fact much of the time they will only yield a seed for the given plant type, requiring the player to plant and grow their own crops.

The new seeds can all be used in the plantbed to grow an abundance of vegetables in your base.

Each seed will yield 3 veggies of its type, and each vegetable can be used to yield a single seed. Meaning, technically, players only need a single seed to mass-produce vegetables of its type.

I slightly decreased the amount of water and fertilizer each plant uses while growing in the plantbed. However be aware that overloading plantbeds puts heavier demands on water and fertilizer, so try to only grow what you can afford.


Players can now craft an oven in the BCU. This is a powered device that provides an assortment of new food recipes for players to cook.

The oven is designed as a later-game item, and requires the workbench as well as expanded power/mass storage capability to craft.



In order to use the oven. Several types of pans are required, which can be crafted at the workbench.

Each pan unlocks its own tier of recipes. There are 3 tiers: Fried, Boiled and Baked. Some recipes even require pre-cooked ingredients from other tiers. The pans increase in cost across the 3 tiers.

The oven requires power to use. It can queue recipes (much like crafting in the workbench or BCU) and deducts the power required for each recipe when the player queues the item. Queued recipes can be cancelled, which refunds the ingredients and power.

The oven will visibly show heated hobs, steaming pans, etc to indicate which recipe types are cooking at any given time.



The oven can be upgraded to increase its power efficiency. There are two separate upgrades, each reducing the power cost of each recipe by 15%.



There are a total of 10 new cooked food items. Many of which required reared animal produce and home grown vegetables.


Makes use of the new vegetables while pairing with the base-grade meats and chicken eggs.



All of the boiled recipes require a canteen of clean water. I’ve added a mechanic to empty only the contents, leaving the empty canteen in the player’s inventory. If the player cancels the recipe, the clean water will be administered back into the empty canteen (if the player is still holding it).



Considered the more elaborate cooked recipe items, which offer the greatest benefits to the new health system (explained below). These recipes take the longest to cook, and the required baking pan is the most expensive of the three pans.



Once a chicken levels up to level 10, they will now yield a whole raw chicken when butchered, which can be roasted in the oven (currently the highest tier cooked meal).



All of the new cookable recipes are in place to support an overhauled player health system.

Players start with a specific max health and max strength (which differs across difficulty modes). These values can be viewed in the updated health hud:

Under both the health and strength meters, you will notice a small sub-meter indicating the progress of boosting another level to the max value.

Different cooked food items will boost these meters. Some basic cooked items will offer very little boost, while other more elaborate cooked meals will add substantial boosts.

Each time you fill the sub-meter of health or strength, it will boost the max value. There is currently a max cap of 125.

The intention behind this system is to put greater emphasis on raising animals, farming crops and producing higher quality foods. Also a sense of your character slowly growing stronger and more agile if you are living well.

It makes sense that there should greater reward to eating a hot homemade tomato soup, over eating 10 raw kelp straight out of the lakes.

Finding the correct balance to this new system will take time, so I strongly welcome opinions and suggestions once you’ve had a chance to try it out. It is intended as a subtle progression system to tie-in with later-game progression, not a race to hit max levels.


Dying will deduct progress on max health and strength (easy/normal == -5, hardcore == -10). Untreated/prolonged illness or cold exposure will also have a gradual negative impact on these levels.


Many of the cooked meals can only be eaten if the player is hungry enough. The player’s hunger bar needs to accommodate ⅓ of the total provided by the meal. I thought it was necessary to put some restraints on the new system to avoid it being spammed. Lets see how it plays out.


I needed to update the old item hover tips to better display the new stats. They now show larger/higher-detail item images, and layout the stats in a cleaner format. They are also responsive to screen location (so they won’t display partially off-screen, like previously with the clothing hud slots).

Food items that offer a health/strength boost will display these stats in green (see image above).


The Wellhead was added as a means of acquiring water prior to lakes/rivers being added to the game - which some of you may remember. It soon became redundant when the first Lakes update dropped, which was a shame as it was a cool device and I put in a lot of care when implementing it.

I decided to repurpose it into the Mining Drill. While mostly operating the same, players can now select a specific ore-type to target and slowly mine that one ore-type.This should be handy for when players are running low on a specific ore-type.

• Eating low-grade raw chicken and rabbit now causes illness.
  
• Antidotes now require raw liver (not cooked/burnt/rotten).
  
• Fixed bug that could cause hunters and animals to spawn outside the fence (at the 90° fence corner by the new expansion).
  
• Jumping and landing in shallow river water now triggers appropriate splashing sound.
  
• Players can now mouse-hover + use-key on the canteen to fill it with water.
  
• Fixed splashing footsteps not playing at the lower section of the new wide stream.
  
• Increase max stack counts of many items (too many to list), to accommodate for growing number of item types.
  
• Fixed rare bug that would cause clients of network games to not lose stamina and health stats.
  

I think I’ve detailed all the key points of the new changes. I’ve touched many of the core systems, so I fully expect to make required balancing tweaks moving forward.

I welcome all feedback on the update. If you haven’t yet, please join myself and other players on the official Discord (invite below). You can also follow the game on Twitter and Facebook.

Thanks to all the community for the support, it means a lot. Hope everyone has an awesome week!
CG

Discord invite: https://discord.gg/zyy4jQs

Hi guys! Today’s update brings a vast expansion to the west side of the map. A new forest type hugs the mountain slopes and stretches out around the large central lake. Waterfalls, streams, lagoons and cliffs offer new points of navigation and locations for interesting base designs.

I’ve implemented new tree and foliage types to give the new areas a distinct aesthetic from the previous regions of the world. The increased foliage density may affect the difficulty in finding resources. Let me know what you think once you’ve tried it out.

The large central lake is now fully accessible from all sides. It always bothered me to have to fence off the central section of the lake, so I’m pleased to have this opened up.

The expanded lake area also means there are much greater areas of deep water. These depths aren’t currently accessible due to oxygen capacity. I definitely want to explore some ideas so that there are reasons and means for players to explore these depths in a future update.



Players can now choose the hunter attack setting that best suits their taste. There are 3 settings:

1. Normal attack patterns:
   Hunters will launch periodic attacks on player bases and revenge attacks.
   
2. Only revenge attacks:
   Hunters will only attack player bases if they are avenging a player attack against them.
   
3. Never attack:
   Hunters will still guard their territory, but will not launch attacks on player bases.
   

These new settings should give players better freedom to customize their own games. This setting can be changed whenever when launching a profile.


Many players have mentioned that the predators are too overbearing (no pun intended) in easy mode, and I have to agree. It’s not very welcoming to new players looking to get a feel for the mechanics to be bombarded by attacks. The reduction is close to 20%, so not a total nerf, but should make a positive impact for players of this mode. Note: This does not affect cougar spawns.



Given the much larger space for players to explore, I’ve implemented a basic compass as an additional tool of navigation. This has been notably requested by co-op players, new to the game, to help locate one another.

This isn’t currently a craftable item, and simply displays as default in top-left of the hud. It didn’t seem worth making it craftable until there is a map implemented.


Up until now interior base lights have been quite expensive on fps. This is due to their expensive dynamic shadow casting. It looks really cool, but could get needlessly taxing on system resources when there are many lights on at the time. I’ve implemented a system to dynamically toggle their individual shadow casting based on the current fps, so it should scale appropriately while maintaining a stable fps.


Due to the expanded map size, there are now slightly more rogue squads on the map at any given time. I’ll be keeping a close eye on how this balances out. I appreciate any feedback on this in the forums or discord.

• Fixed bug that caused predator to group-up at one particular spot on the map (details for those interested: https://steamcommunity.com/app/418030/discussions/0/2561864094348880301/).
  
• Fixed bug/exploit where clients of co-op games could build overly close to hunter bases (thanks GameEdged, Ohno, Emma, Selebear, Dread for finding this one ;) ).
  
• Added splashing particle effect for players running through water.
  
• Sinew removed from grenade recipe.
  
• Updated sound for upgrading structures to armor-plated.
  
• Glass roofs now require glass to repair (was previously wood).
  
• 9mm ammo now stacks to 50 and 7.62 stacks to 25 (included in prior hotfix).
  
• Added system to ensure more even spread of deer in the world.
  
• More pronounced hairs on wolves and bears.
  

Some players may feel that focus should have been on balance and expanding on gameplay mechanics. It’s important the map continues to grow incrementally to accommodate for future mechanics (there will certainly be more expansions in the future). I want travel and exploration to start to play a greater role as the game continues to grow. This month I had family visiting, so it made sense for me to take the opportunity and commit to a large map expansion for this particular sprint.

After such an art-heavy sprint, I’m really looking forward to moving onto many other pressing tasks. All with a much larger world to work within.

Thanks for everyone’s patience on this one. It means a lot to see support from players on the forums and discord. Please come and join the discord if you haven’t already (link below).

Hope you have a great weekend.
CG

Discord invite: https://discord.gg/zyy4jQs

It’s been a while since any new animals have been introduced. You will now find wild deer roaming the landscape. The idea being to add greater diversity to the wildlife population, while adding a non-aggressive, elusive and agile animal to hunt.


Unlike the other animals that stay somewhat localized to their territory, deer will traverse the entire world while grazing and dodging predators. They are stealthy and spook easily, so players should be careful while hunting.

They are coded to understand where they’ve previously been and to explore new areas, so you may find one wandering into your backyard or into unexpected areas (so keep an eye out). Their hearing and sight sensitivity differs across easy/medium/hardcore.

Predators will now chase and kill deer. It has been tricky to balance the predator/prey life-cycle, so i’ll be keeping a close eye on how this balance plays out and will make adjustments as necessary.


Because of how quick deer can flee, focus on landing a headshot to ensure a kill. The vanilla 9mm won’t kill on a single hit, but all other weapons (including the bow) will.


Harvesting deer will yield antlers (as well as meat and cloth). Antlers can crafted down with biofuel and ash to create a strong adhesive.

Adhesive is now used in several of the advanced crafting recipes (especially glass structures which now require less scrap).


A new ladder hatch can now be found in the default crafting menu (under wood ceilings). Placed like any normal ceiling, it can be opened and closed to gain access to floors in your base without the need for stairs.

The ladder hatch can also be upgraded to armor-plated using the hammer.



Players can now craft claymores at the workbench. These can be placed around your base perimeter to help deal lots of damage during hunter attacks.

Here are their rules:

• Players that place them will be safe from triggering them.
  
• Teammates of a player who placed them will not trigger them (so don’t forget to add your teammates to the player list in the BCU).
  
• Animals will not trigger them, so there are primarily intended to defend against hunter attacks.
  

They can be moved and/or disassembled, much like buildables. They can also be shot to trigger a detonation, which may come in handy during a fight.



Hunters can also now use claymores. Once their base becomes large enough, they will start placing them to ward off raids (so watch your footing).


I’ve added three new glass roof buildables (compact, slanted and curved). These can be found in the default player crafting menu.

My hope is this will give players a bit more freedom with their base layouts, and lead to some interesting and cool looking designs.


I’ve finally gotten around to adding an inverted variant of the corner stairs, which many players have politely asked for for a long time. While I was at it, I also added armor plated variants for each.



There have been a lot of small improvements to the hunter AI.

• They now use a deeper tree of pathing decisions while travelling large distances across the landscape.
  
• I’ve reworked their swimming behavior. They no longer flip and spin on their back while crossing water. They now smoothly swim across bodies of water. This also means they reach their destination quicker, making them less vulnerable to fire while swimming.
  
• I’ve fixed many of their odd quirks while in combat. Such as; they no longer aim away from their target and spin at the last moment to take shots, instead taking time to aim at their target, allowing players time to react. I’ve slightly reduced their firing frequency to balance these changes.
  
• They now use new pathing to find dry land while in deep water (this is also applied to animal AI).
  

Please note: The hunter AI is very much a work in progress, and I know they still need a lot of work. I have a lot planned for them to make them capable and believable adversaries who are fun to fight. It will take time.


I’ve spent some time trimming out a lot of unnecessary network calls during co-op play. Digging through various systems I managed to find a great deal that were needlessly using up bandwidth. Netcode is something I’ll be continuing to improve as the game evolves. The plan is to soon support dedicated servers for greater stability.


Some players have reported lag spikes during auto-saves. While I investigate the cause of this issue I’ve added the ability to disable auto-save from the options menu (under the gameplay tab). Please note that this does not disable the auto-save on death (in normal and hardcore). If you choose to disable auto-save, please don’t forget to save manually (using F8) and the “Save and Exit” when leaving the game.


Fixed bug that prevented players from picking up items or harvesting animals in shallow water.
Inflicting a headshot now gives the player obvious audio feedback, regardless of distance to the target.
Fixed bug that would cause the camera to get stuck if using co-op text chat while butchering animals.
Added in-game option to toggle windowed mode (found in the graphics option menu).
Animal AI now will now choose to cross bodies of water if they cannot find a dry route to their destination.
Scrap metal now stacks up to 50 (previously 40).
Cougars now do slightly more damage to base structures.
Added some of the new items to the loot tables for hunter bases and locked crates.
Increased the color saturation of grass in the green meadows.
Prevented animals playing out suspicious animations while swimming.
Staggered the workload of the save system to reduce system demand during saves.
Fixed bug where hunters would build their campfires on river surfaces.
Fixed issue of hunters sometimes spawning on the wrong side of the fence. If you currently have hunters outside the fence, you can either reset them, or destroy their base with a BCU cracker.
Placing a second BCU now lights up the BCU build sphere on the original, so it is easier to know when you are linking them.
Fixed audio feedback not playing when upgrading base buildables.


Thanks as always to everyone that’s been supporting the project. It’s great to have you joining the discussion, making suggestions and reporting issues. It feels pretty amazing to be working on the project full-time now. I’m excited for the future and to truly start shaping and expanding the game.

If you haven’t already, please join myself and other players on the Discord server, and on the Steam forums. Please let me know if you experience any issues with the update. I’m sure there will be balancing tweaks needed.

Have an awesome weekend.
CG


Discord invite: https://discord.gg/zyy4jQs


Edit (hotfix): I needed to release a hotfix (at 6pm PST 10th April) to fix a reported bug that could lead to animals not tiring when giving chase.

It’s been a while since any new animals have been introduced. You will now find wild deer roaming the landscape. The idea being to add greater diversity to the wildlife population, while adding a non-aggressive, elusive and agile animal to hunt.


Unlike the other animals that stay somewhat localized to their territory, deer will traverse the entire world while grazing and dodging predators. They are stealthy and spook easily, so players should be careful while hunting.

They are coded to understand where they’ve previously been and to explore new areas, so you may find one wandering into your backyard or into unexpected areas (so keep an eye out). Their hearing and sight sensitivity differs across easy/medium/hardcore.

Predators will now chase and kill deer. It has been tricky to balance the predator/prey life-cycle, so i’ll be keeping a close eye on how this balance plays out and will make adjustments as necessary.


Because of how quick deer can flee, focus on landing a headshot to ensure a kill. The vanilla 9mm won’t kill on a single hit, but all other weapons (including the bow) will.


Harvesting deer will yield antlers (as well as meat and cloth). Antlers can crafted down with biofuel and ash to create a strong adhesive.

Adhesive is now used in several of the advanced crafting recipes (especially glass structures which now require less scrap).


A new ladder hatch can now be found in the default crafting menu (under wood ceilings). Placed like any normal ceiling, it can be opened and closed to gain access to floors in your base without the need for stairs.

The ladder hatch can also be upgraded to armor-plated using the hammer.



Players can now craft claymores at the workbench. These can be placed around your base perimeter to help deal lots of damage during hunter attacks.

Here are their rules:

• Players that place them will be safe from triggering them.
  
• Teammates of a player who placed them will not trigger them (so don’t forget to add your teammates to the player list in the BCU).
  
• Animals will not trigger them, so there are primarily intended to defend against hunter attacks.
  

They can be moved and/or disassembled, much like buildables. They can also be shot to trigger a detonation, which may come in handy during a fight.



Hunters can also now use claymores. Once their base becomes large enough, they will start placing them to ward off raids (so watch your footing).


I’ve added three new glass roof buildables (compact, slanted and curved). These can be found in the default player crafting menu.

My hope is this will give players a bit more freedom with their base layouts, and lead to some interesting and cool looking designs.


I’ve finally gotten around to adding an inverted variant of the corner stairs, which many players have politely asked for for a long time. While I was at it, I also added armor plated variants for each.



There have been a lot of small improvements to the hunter AI.

• They now use a deeper tree of pathing decisions while travelling large distances across the landscape.
  
• I’ve reworked their swimming behavior. They no longer flip and spin on their back while crossing water. They now smoothly swim across bodies of water. This also means they reach their destination quicker, making them less vulnerable to fire while swimming.
  
• I’ve fixed many of their odd quirks while in combat. Such as; they no longer aim away from their target and spin at the last moment to take shots, instead taking time to aim at their target, allowing players time to react. I’ve slightly reduced their firing frequency to balance these changes.
  
• They now use new pathing to find dry land while in deep water (this is also applied to animal AI).
  

Please note: The hunter AI is very much a work in progress, and I know they still need a lot of work. I have a lot planned for them to make them capable and believable adversaries who are fun to fight. It will take time.


I’ve spent some time trimming out a lot of unnecessary network calls during co-op play. Digging through various systems I managed to find a great deal that were needlessly using up bandwidth. Netcode is something I’ll be continuing to improve as the game evolves. The plan is to soon support dedicated servers for greater stability.


Some players have reported lag spikes during auto-saves. While I investigate the cause of this issue I’ve added the ability to disable auto-save from the options menu (under the gameplay tab). Please note that this does not disable the auto-save on death (in normal and hardcore). If you choose to disable auto-save, please don’t forget to save manually (using F8) and the “Save and Exit” when leaving the game.


Fixed bug that prevented players from picking up items or harvesting animals in shallow water.
Inflicting a headshot now gives the player obvious audio feedback, regardless of distance to the target.
Fixed bug that would cause the camera to get stuck if using co-op text chat while butchering animals.
Added in-game option to toggle windowed mode (found in the graphics option menu).
Animal AI now will now choose to cross bodies of water if they cannot find a dry route to their destination.
Scrap metal now stacks up to 50 (previously 40).
Cougars now do slightly more damage to base structures.
Added some of the new items to the loot tables for hunter bases and locked crates.
Increased the color saturation of grass in the green meadows.
Prevented animals playing out suspicious animations while swimming.
Staggered the workload of the save system to reduce system demand during saves.
Fixed bug where hunters would build their campfires on river surfaces.
Fixed issue of hunters sometimes spawning on the wrong side of the fence. If you currently have hunters outside the fence, you can either reset them, or destroy their base with a BCU cracker.
Placing a second BCU now lights up the BCU build sphere on the original, so it is easier to know when you are linking them.
Fixed audio feedback not playing when upgrading base buildables.


Thanks as always to everyone that’s been supporting the project. It’s great to have you joining the discussion, making suggestions and reporting issues. It feels pretty amazing to be working on the project full-time now. I’m excited for the future and to truly start shaping and expanding the game.

If you haven’t already, please join myself and other players on the Discord server, and on the Steam forums. Please let me know if you experience any issues with the update. I’m sure there will be balancing tweaks needed.

Have an awesome weekend.
CG


Discord invite: https://discord.gg/zyy4jQs

Ever since the release of co-op, players wishing to host were forced to forward ports to allow their friends to join. This was always a huge pain and resulted in many players not being able to play with their friends.

I’ve implemented a new system that will detect when your Steam friends are playing, and allow you to join them (without the host needing to forward any ports). It’s still early, so I expect there may be some issues. However this should hopefully allow many players who were previously unable to play co-op to now play with their friends.

Players need to be Steam friends to see each others games in the new menu. Players also need to be visible in Steam (so not appearing offline).

Hosts should use the same in-game host menu as before. Once launched, their friends should see them popup in the “Join/Friends” menu, and can join from there.



I’m still yet to implement proper error reporting for when joins fail. As such it’s not always clear why a client would fail to join. Please ensure you set the required amount of open slots when launching the game. There’s also an issue where sometimes it will report that it failed to join, but then go in after anyway. I’ll be working to improve this and add better error messaging.


The existing server list is still in. Players that wish for their games to be publicly listed (so non friends can join) will still need to forward their Steam port (27015). Eventually I plan to add dedicated server support.


Several players mentioned they were unable to play with their core group of friends due to the player cap. I’ve increased the cap to 8.

We should treat this as an experiment to see how the netcode scales with more players, so let me know if you experience issues in games with higher player counts.


I've created an official Discord server for Subsistence players to meet, play and discuss. If you are looking for players to team-up with, please come and join us in the Discord. I haven’t yet set up moderators etc, so will get that ironed out over the coming days. I’ll be on the server fairly often to help troubleshoot and discuss development.

Discord invite: https://discord.gg/zyy4jQs

• I’ve updated the placeholder wood log image:
  
• I’ve added a glass doorway after a few players mentioned they needed one for the their builds. No glass door yet, but that will come.
  
• Dismantling upgraded walls now returns half the upgrade cost back.
  
• Fixed hammer not functioning correctly for clients of co-op games (previously only the hosts could use it to upgrade walls).
  

The goal of this update is to attempt to make it much easier for friends to play together. This is just an iteration and still needs more work (and I imagine there will still be players experiencing networking issues). If you do, please post on the forum or discord so that myself and other players can help troubleshoot any issues.

Hope you have a great Friday and weekend!
CG