Surviving the Aftermath News

Greetings survivors old and new!

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We’re very excited to reveal what we’ve been doing amidst all the updates up to this point. It’s the first part of our Season Pass and will be released very soon. Here are some of its key features which gives the game’s sandbox a whole new dimension with more replayability and new challenges!

Surviving the Aftermath: ”New Alliances” adds an in-depth layer to world map societies and a new, powerful rival faction as your adversary. Help your neighbours deal with new threats and gain unique rewards while uniting the wasteland under a single banner! Or use your specialists to conduct covert missions inside other societies for your own gain…

Form the federation
Assist societies and complete requests to gain enough reputation to ally with them. Build embassies to unlock unique permanent bonuses and buildings for your colony. Help your alliance population grow and bring the wasteland on your side by forming a federation!

Rival faction
A powerful opposing faction has taken an interest in your part of the world. Their control over societies grows every time you ignore or fail requests, so fight back by helping those in need or use specialists to reduce rival influence.

Covert missions
Your specialists can now embark on covert missions within societies to steal resources or incite its population. But beware as the same tricks can be used against you! Build new protective buildings such as Surveillance Vans and Anti-propaganda Towers to defend against these attacks.

Roaming bandits and animals
Bandits, society convoys and even animals are now active on the world map. Move out of their way or risk an attack. Raid convoys for loot or defeat bandits for loot and reputation. Hostile units can even take over your outposts, so be prepared to clear them out to resume production.

With the Lunar New Year celebrations passed, we’re back with a new and quite a hefty update. It includes the already teased new game mode “Scenarios” with two winter-themed experiences along with a ton of other improvements to logistics, statistics and so on. But wait, there’s more! In addition to this new twist on the familiar gameplay, we’re also bringing you Custom Game mode. It allows players to really tweak the experience how they want with dozens of new settings from a very laid-back experience to a pure horror show.



Scenarios allow you to dive into Surviving the Aftermath’s sandbox with new themes and twists on the basic formula, adding more replayability to the game. Some offer a more compact and narrative-driven experience with heavily modified rules while others throw a wrench in the works on how the long-form game plays out. This might mean a permanent weather effect or limiting the tools at your disposal, forcing you to overcome obstacles in new ways. In “Cold Rush” you start with a small colony suffering from a permanent winter storm with no other option than to find a way out. Explore and exploit your surroundings to guide the colonists away from the cold in a way previously unseen in the game. “Eternal Winter” is a more traditional sandbox experience with a never-ending winter storm along with custom rules. Can you survive in an environment where open field farming is no longer an option and the ever-present cold takes a constant toll on your colonists?



You’ve requested the ability to customize your playthrough further, and here it is. The new Custom Game adds dozens of settings you can flip around to tailor the experience to your liking. Disable catastrophes, increase the number of starting specialists and remove death by old age completely for a more chill game. Remove societies, halve food nutrition and disable childbirth to really ramp up the difficulty. You can also adjust map generation even further with more soil settings, amount of terrain features, forest coverage, amount of lakes and more. On PC it’s also possible to remove the population cap completely. Since these settings can drastically change the difficulty level, achievements will be disabled in custom game mode. There’s a lot to experiment with, so give it a go!



On the logistics front, you can now control how goods are distributed around the colony by controlling which storages request and receive various resources. These “storage requests” allow players to move and maintain specific amounts of resources between storages to create independent production areas or distribute food more evenly around the colony map. You can, for example, add a storage request for meals at the food storage next to a metal production site, so your workers don’t need to walk all the way to the colony center to eat. This, with workers living close to their job from the previous update, allows you to spread around the map more efficiently. Carriers will also divide big tasks between more people, so you should see large stacks of resources move faster - provided you have idle colonists available.



The map seed for your generated game world is now visible and customizable. This allows you to save interesting maps to be reused on subsequent playthroughs or shared with the community. Your current map seed is visible in the lower right corner in the pause menu. The first set of numbers refers to the various map parameters while the second set shows your pregame selections in numerical fashion.



In other improvements, the statistics overview page has been completely overhauled. Instead of the massive spreadsheet of already known info, it has several sections with high-level info with more detailed data in the right column. All types of wind turbines are now less effective when placed next to trees to make solar panels a bit more competitive in your colony’s energy production and add a layer of planning required for your wind parks. Specialists will now move and spend their Action Points immediately at the beginning of a new day, if you’ve set a destination for them. This was done to make the multi-turn movement feature clearer when you order them to return to the colony, for example. The full list of balance changes and improvements can be found in the patch notes post, as usual.

And here we are! The new game modes, logistics upgrades and other additions should provide a lot of replayability for Surviving the Aftermath, so we sincerely hope you’ll enjoy them! We’d love to hear in comments what you think of the new scenarios, and what you’d want to see next.

Stay safe, survivors, and play games!

Change notes - “Update #3”
[expand]General

• New game modes have been added to the game.
  
• When starting a new game, you will now be asked to choose from either the original New Game, creating a Custom game or starting a Scenario.
  
• Creating a Custom game allows you to change various different settings in your game.
  
• The older pregame settings are still present, as are a lot of new settings such as changing the sizes of deposits, the amount of features in the colony terrain and altering the birth rate in the colony.
  
• Please note that some settings will not be present on all platforms due to performance limitations.
  
• Playing the game in a custom mode will disable the ability to unlock any achievements. They can still be unlocked normally by playing the original version of the game.
  
• We have also added two new Scenarios to the game.
  
• These scenarios will challenge your skills in surviving.
  
• The Cold Rush scenario will give you a challenge unlike before where you must find a way to escape the cold within the time given to you!
  
• The Eternal Winter scenario will not restrict the amount of time you have however as implied by the name, the colony is under constant winter! Can you survive and be able to finish the main quest?
  
• Note: Due to technical limitations these scenarios will not be available on the Switch. We are working on bringing them to the Switch as well in a future update if possible.
  
• The ability to select the Map Seed has also been added to the pregame settings for the Normal Game.
  
• Using a specific Map Seed will allow you to have the exact same colony, world map and pregame settings as in a previous game.
  
• The Map Seed can be seen in the bottom right corner when the Pause Menu is accessed in game.
  
• On the PC the seed can also be copied to clipboard by clicking on the button next to it.
  
• The Map Seed is only visible in new games started after the game has been updated.
  
• Once you have the Map Seed you wish to apply in your next game, you can edit this in the Summary page of the Pregame Selections when starting the new game.
  
• The Statistics Menu’s Overview page has been redone.
  
• We’ve clarified the Overview page of the menu and added in new information to be visible.
  
• Each section will show more detailed information when hovered over.
  
• Note that the information shown here will not count what happened in the save before the game was updated.
  
• For example Techs unlocked will only show what techs you have researched after updating and continuing with your save.
  
• Added an option to storage buildings that allows you to select a resource that the colonists will bring to that specific storage building.
  
• You can select this resource from each storage building by selecting the building first and then selecting the slot under the Request resources section.
  
• After selecting a resource you will be able to select the amount of that resource you want carriers to bring to this storage building.
  
• This change also added the option to select how many resources you wish buildings such as the Burner to hold in them.
  

Gameplay

• Specialists on the World Map that have queued movement will now move automatically when their APs are filled.
  
• Previously they would move only right before their APs would be filled again, causing confusion if they are actually using the queued movement.
  
• Now if there is a target set for them, the Specialists will immediately move or start action once the APs are filled.
  
• Wind Turbines are now affected by trees that are close by.
  
• All Wind Turbines will now show a radius around them when being placed and when selected in the colony.
  
• All trees within this area will have an effect on the efficiency of the turbine.
  
• Note that the efficiency of the turbine can change if trees grow or are cut down around it.
  
• Changed how the carriers can carry resources to construction zones.
  
• Previously only one colonist could carry a specific type of resource, causing construction zones to wait for resources longer.
  
• Now multiple carriers can bring the same resource to the construction zone which should allow construction to be faster.
  
• Snow on the terrain and ground is now shown immediately when saves are loaded instead of requiring the game to be unpaused first.
  
• Fixed an issue that would cause some sectors to block outposts from being built without any visible reason.
  
• Children should no longer visually all try to go to the same one school.
  
• The bug would cause all children to visually try and be at the same school despite being in different schools’ occupants lists.
  
• Now they should all go to their corresponding schools.
  
• Colonists should now run inside their homes if they are fleeing instead of running in front of them.
  
• Fixed an issue that would prevent saving the game after an error happened with broken Solar Panels.
  
• The game should no longer spawn any events if the Game Over screen has been shown.
  
• Colonists should no longer run inside resource boxes for a moment before they pick the box up.
  
• Added a failsafe to the game that prevents quest locations from spawning into unreachable places in the World Map.
  
• Fixed an issue with the indicator arrows that would cause them to point wrong when playing with specific resolutions.
  
• Fixed an issue that would cause the game to focus on the notifications instead of rotating the building when the corresponding button was pressed on the controller.
  
• The Escape button will now cancel building placement even after moving the camera with the mouse while in placement mode.
  
• Upgrading the campsite should no longer reset the allowed resources that were selected in the previous version of it.
  
• Fixed an issue that would cause a Specialist to be stuck in the colony until commanded after saving and loading the game.
  
• Construction zones that have been canceled will now also show a floater similarly to buildings that are being demolished.
  
• If colonists have nothing to do they should now idle close to their home or workplace instead of close to the Campsite.
  
• This should now allow your colonists to be in proximity to their workplace and be able to start work faster when they are able to.
  
• Fixed an issue that would cause several tutorials to show at one time or cause them to become stuck.
  
• The Building Health Overlay will now show the Repair floaters on top of damaged buildings.
  
• A limit to how many buildings and how many tiles of road can be built has been added to the game on the Switch.
  
• This was put in place to ensure the game can still function without issues even after progressing further in the game.
  

Graphics

• Added new icons for Insect and Plant seeds to the game.
  
• These should now be easy to differentiate from the actual resource itself, especially when trading with societies.
  
• Updated the Pregame selection header panel and some button icons.
  
• Floaters should no longer appear grainy or pale in the game.
  
• This issue was most visible when playing on the Switch.
  
• Crops growing on open fields should no longer be invisible.
  
• This issue was most visible when playing on the Switch.
  
• Building decals should now always be shown despite having low graphics settings.
  
• Trees should no longer flicker during catastrophes.
  
• This behavior was visible especially when playing on consoles.
  
• Updated images for a few events in the game.
  

Balance Adjustments

• Switch only: The speed of gathering knowledge for the main quest has been increased by 50%. This adjustment was done to compensate for the smaller World Map that is generated on the Switch due to technical limitations.
  
• The skills of each starting Specialists have been adjusted to ensure that they all have the best values in their respective skill based on their archetype.
  
• When a building is demolished, you will now gain back 75% of the construction costs.
  

[/expand]

Hello, survivors! The team here has been hard at work since our last free update in January, and we now want to share with you what’s coming next.

We are working on our third free update that will add new ways to play our game and bring you some of the most requested features and improvements.

We’ll share all the details once the update is closer to release (very soon) but here’s what you can expect:

• Eternal Winter Scenario: survive a permanent winter.
  
• Cold Rush Scenario: your colony starts in the middle of the map, in harsh winter conditions. You have to explore old abandoned structures, gather resources and find a way to escape before running out of time.
  
• Custom Game: new starting conditions (birth rate, terrain flatness, lakes, number of available specialists, and more).
  
• Map Seed Selection: now you can choose the map seed to play your favorite maps (or the community's favorite maps) again and again.
  
• Statistics Overview Improvement: an overhaul to the statistics overview page.
  
• Logistics Improvements: new ways to manually manage and prioritize resources between storages.

Happy Year of the Tiger, survivors!

We’re continuing our free 2022 updates with a celebration of the Lunar New Year. This includes new cosmetic buildings along with a new system, which allows you to change how your colony looks like in a flash! It’s not all tigers and fireworks, though, as we’re including quality-of-life improvements to colony combat, how people choose where they live and more.

Buildings with and without Lunar New Year pack enabled

The Lunar New Year content pack includes a banner stand to display your colony flag (also available as a non-themed version), a tiger flag symbol, a red Double Lantern, a mighty Scrap Tiger statue and a cute Waving Cat statue for you to build. Regular torches and lamps are replaced with Lunar-themed versions for the duration of the event. You might also spot some of the colonists wearing festive hats. And last but not least, the Fireworks Launcher allows you to light up the sky in red and gold to kick off the celebrations! You can unlock all the new decorative buildings in two parts by completing colony milestones for prestige. We’d very much like to see how your colonies are transformed, so maybe post a screenshot here?

Lunar decorations can be toggled on or off at any time from the main menu banner, or from Settings -> General. The event ends at the end of February, but you can restore the Lunar theme via the Settings menu after that date. Please note that you must enable or disable the content pack BEFORE loading a saved game or starting a new one.

New unit highlights in combat

In addition to the more cosmetic aspects of the game, we’ve added several quality-of-life improvements for colony combat. All units that are engaged in combat have color-coded outlines, so you can spot bandits running and rat beetles scurrying around much easier. Guard and specialist hitboxes have also been enlarged to help you select and order them around better. Colonists will now flee from combat by default to save themselves and will retaliate only as a last resort. They will no longer attempt to defeat a sandworm in hand-to-hand combat. Be sure to have guards and specialists around to deal with hostiles, as you’ll be relying on them more than before. Colony alarm happiness penalty has also been drastically reduced so you can call people to safety and increase guard aggression range without a major hit to morale.

Isolated working area

On more peaceful news, colonists will now attempt to automatically move close to their place of work if there’s capacity available, but will never kick current tenants out. When you load up a large colony for the first time, this process might take awhile. This aims to allow players to create specialized production areas further away from the main colony and speed up production.

Other notable changes include storage, which now dump out all resources marked as “blocked”. Previously this only prevented bringing in new items of that type. Incorrect processing cycles in scavenge buildings such as Scrapper and Lumber Yard have been fixed, and workers will now refine the collected resources inside the building before handing them out. Since this increases the total processing times, production output quantities have been slightly increased in several buildings. And as a small but significant change, both transformers’ area of effect has been increased.

Hope you’ll have an awesome Year of the Tiger. Post a screenshot of your Lunar Year themed colony on this thread to celebrate together and stay safe out there! And as a final teaser, the next update will have a new game mode to look forward to!

Fireworks over the colony

Greetings, Survivors! It’s time for the next free update, which brings quite a few new things to the game. It’s the Year of the Tiger, and to celebrate it we’re giving you several cosmetic buildings, lights and even hats! We’ve improved the lives of your colony in a few intense ways, like colonists running away from a fight and guards being more effective. We’ve also included some quality of life updates for you as a player, like the return of the feedback button and that colonists will now try to move closer to where they are assigned to work which will lead to shorter commutes and improvements to the AI.

General

Added Lunar New Year content to the game.

• Celebrate the Year of the Tiger with colorful lanterns, impressive statues and fireworks!
  
• 4 new cosmetic buildings include a colony banner stand, two statues and a fireworks launcher to light up the night.
  
• 6 cosmetic variants to decorative lights.
  
• Other decorations have also been added as well as Lunar-themed hats for the colonists and lanterns to colony buildings to make the whole colony celebrate the lunar new year.
  
• You can unlock some of the content by completing milestones for prestige.
  
• Some of the content will be automatically applied when the game is loaded, such as the colonist hats and other smaller tweaks to existing buildings.
  
• This content will be automatically turned on when the game is updated and will be turned off at a specified time.
  
• The content can also be toggled on or off from the ingame settings in the Main Menu.
  

Colonists will now prefer housing buildings that are closer to their workplaces.

• This should allow your colonists to spend more time working instead of running around the colony to go to sleep in their homes.
  
• After you load your previous save, the colonists will start looking for free houses closer to their workplace, which can cause a chain reaction as they all start moving around, but this should cool down after a moment.
  

Improvements and fixes to the colony combat.

• Colonists will now always flee from combat instead of fighting. Only Guards and Specialists will fight attacking hostiles.
  
• The penalty from the Alarm mode has been significantly decreased.
  
• Added a highlight to units in combat in the colony.
  
• If a Colonist or Specialist has a target to attack, this highlight will be shown.
  
• Enemies with a target to attack will also show this highlight.
  
• Guard and Specialists should also now be easier to select in the colony.
  
• Colonists working as Guards at the Gate should now be constantly working at the gate instead of working as carriers around the colony.
  
• They should also now change to the Guard clothing just like the Guards at the Guard Post.
  
• Fixed an issue that would cause Guards to be less effective in combat after saving and loading.
  
• Previously any colonist that had been assigned to work as a guard would have the same values as a regular colonist after saving and loading.
  
• Now the values are saved and loaded correctly.
  
• Hostile animals should no longer attack open fields or Water Wells when they attack the colony.
  
• Increased the damage the Guards and the level 1 weapons do to enemies.
  

Gameplay


PC Only: Added back the possibility to write feedback of the game to the developers.

1. In the Pause Menu, there is now a button Write Feedback. This can be used to write feedback straight to the developers regarding the game.
   
2. If you encounter any game breaking bugs, please use this to immediately report the issue so that the issue can be investigated as soon as possible.
   

When a resource is now disallowed from a specific storage building, the building will eject all units of that resource onto the ground.

• They will be spawned next to the building as a resource box the colonists can then carry to other storage buildings that allow the resource.
  

The resource order shown in Allowed Resources for the Campsite, Warehouse and the General Storage has been changed.

• Resources should now be in a more consistent order.
  

The Colonists working at the Gate will remain working there even after upgrading the Gate.

• Previously the extra work slots were closed after upgrading.
  

Fixed an issue with the Industrialist ideology that would cause two techs to overlap each other.

• This issue caused the Conveyor Belts tech to overlap with the Rare Metals tech.
  

Changed the way how tooltips for resource deposits and work areas are shown in the colony.

• The game should no longer attempt to show them if you are for example only moving past a resource deposit.
  
• This should improve the performance of moving around the colony.
  

Also changed the way how panels are shown in the World Map.

• The panel should only become visible if you stop at a location or sector.
  
• This should improve performance when moving around the World Map.
  

Fixed an issue that would cause the game to become stuck if events were closed too quickly.

Fixed an issue that would cause the Work Area tooltip to change resources to different ones after hovering over the same resources for a while.

Fixed an issue that would cause small decorations to switch their location if they were rotated when placing.

• This should make placing decorations such as the Small Bush a lot easier.
  

Fixed an issue that would cause the Trade button to move in the Society window based on the length of the description of the other society.

• The button should now remain still.
  

The work area resource tooltip should no longer overlap with the repair mode tooltip.

The Specialist Menu tooltip now shows the prompts on how to select and focus the camera on the specialist.

Fixed an issue that would cause the extra panels shown for specific buildings (such as the recipe selection panel) to not close when the cross icon at the top right corner was pressed.

Fixed an issue that would cause the achievement “Look, No Hands” to not complete if the Metal Extractor had been upgraded to the Magnetic Separator.

Fixed an issue that would cause green highlights to remain visible constantly for multiple buildings around the colony.

Changed the way how buildings which require colonists to gather resources work.

• Previously the colonists would only drop some resources to the building and not actually work at the building at all.
  
• Now the colonists will work at the building as well, though their work cycle is a lot shorter than other buildings.
  
• This change affects buildings such as the Scrapper and the Recycler.
  
• These buildings will now produce slightly more resources due to the work taking a bit more time.
  

The colonists will now take resources inside production buildings instead of dropping them off at the corner of the building.

Fixed the description of the Motorization tech.

• Previously it would mention that it unlocks the Oil Refinery as well.
  

Fixed an issue that would cause a combat event at the gate to result in combat instead of avoiding it despite the text indicating that you have avoided combat.

Graphics

Updated some of the icons of the Build Menu categories.

Tweaked the visual look and animations of the following buildings:

• The Insect Farm.
  
• The Sawmill.
  
• The Logging Camp.
  
• The Lumber Yard.
  

Widened the panel shown when a trade needs to be confirmed.

• This should now allow texts and resources to fit better.
  

Added a resource box for Medicinal Herb.

• Previously the colonists would be carrying an invisible box to the storage when Medicinal Herb was being produced.
  

Fixed an issue with the icicles shown on the Botanical Garden.

Balance Adjustments


Updated the resources the society Coalition offers to be more consistent.

Slightly increased the work area of the Radiator and its upgrade.

Increased the work area of the Transformer and its upgrade.