After The Collapse 0.8.0 Released

After The Collapse 0.8.0 has just been released!

This first 0.8.x release is not as large in scope as my previous major releases. The main goals here were to make the game more friendly to newcomers, give more options to experienced players who want a challenge, while fixing many issues and doing the necessary internal groundwork for the next set of massive changes planned for it.

Before we start. I want to announce that I will be taking a break until early January. Beside the holiday season, I have important family matters to deal with and I also personally need to get some time off the game. I will still be around on our Discord channel, and will publish the usual hot-fixes if need be, just not at the pace you're used to.

Anyway, let's get to the update.

[h2]Scenarios, Events and Difficulty Settings[/h2]



This is the core component of this new update. The new game menu has been reorganized through several start scenarios. Each scenario can be customized and difficulty can be tweaked to satisfy anyone from a total beginner to expert players.



Food and water consumption can be tweaked, alongside dozen of other aspects of the game. One of which is the "Rare Water" toggle. This one dramatically changes the way water is handled in game. If this setting is selected, water wells must be placed next to a water source and must be placed at least 8 tiles apart from each other. It's also tagging purified water as a "rare" item, making it much less likely to appear while looting or trading. This, coupled with various other settings, like Lethal Sickness and high Pandemonium infection rates can make this game extremely difficult.

Of course, all of this is entirely optional.

Additionally, the distribution of "random" events (raids, traders, and so on) and frequency can be tweaked from this same menu.



Most scenarios allow you to preview and reroll your starting survivors to further tailor your experience.



The world map menu used to select your starting position in some scenarios is also a lot more user friendly and informative. It quickly explains what you can expect from a location, the reason why you can or cannot settle somewhere, and so on.

[h2]Notable Additions and Balance Changes[/h2]

Gas masks who were until now situational and overpriced items now protect against most illnesses and against the dreaded acid rains' effects.

Two new mobs have appeared in the city. The Fire Crab and the Explosive Shambler. While both can, very rarely, appear in standard event difficulty, they are more common with difficult events selected. The fire crab is relatively tanky and will hurl fireball at anyone hostile. The explosive shambler will explode on contact AND on death causing a short range but deadly chemical explosion.

Water is a more prominent features, you'll find small lakes dotting the surface and the underground caverns on a regular basis.

If you decide to start the game underground, you'll notice that the game will no longer trigger recruitment, raids and trading events until you've breached the surface. This was a common issue I finally addressed. Creatures will still occasionally appear on the surface map, though.

New events and traders will appear on your map. Notably, the exotic pet trader, who can start appearing after you've discovered the Animal Care technology and who will sell you those rare and valuable eggs so you can build your own army of mutated animals.

A new "Mature Content" checkbox is available in the gameplay settings menu. If unchecked, cannibalism, most blood effects, and prisoner traders will be removed from the game (it is still possible to take prisoners, just not to trade or eat them). This setting is best changed before starting a new game.

[h2]Graphics[/h2]



The water is now animated and, much, much, much nicer to look at. In the same spirit, wheat, tomato and mushroom farms got a much needed facelift with plants actually looking like what they are supposed to represent.

[h2]User Interface[/h2]



The most notable changes regarding the UI, outside of minor tweaks, are two important additions to the Combat UI. You can now order your survivors to go fetch more ammunition, either through a keyboard shortcut or through the new button in the bottom menu.

Additionally, it is now possible to add/remove individual survivors to your combat group without having to reset combat mode completely though the Recruit/Release button in their individual menu.



Furniture now have their own menu which allow you to move and rotate said item without having to raze and rebuild it. Same goes for power relays.

[h2]Engine & Fixes[/h2]

I went through a lot of old code and either rewrote or improved it, fixing bugs, improving performances and reliability. It's a very slow and tedious process which has very little directly visible benefit to the end user. But it's work that needed to be done nonetheless if I want to continue improving it. At least It led to a lot of fixes for both reported bugs and unreported bugs.

Oh and I've added support for the Cyrillic charset, which should open the door to the game being translated to new languages through modding.

[h2]Mod and Savegame Compatibility[/h2]

This version is NOT compatible with save-games from previous versions. You can roll back and finish your game by going in AtC steam properties, beta tab, and select the 0.7.7 version.

All mods I am aware of should work in 0.8 without any issue. Mods for which it could have been a problem have already been updated.

[h2]Author's Notes[/h2]

I hope you will enjoy this version, while it's not as large as I wanted it to be, I've done my best to provide most needed improvements. After taking my break, we'll resume our usual schedule and start working on the next content updates.

[h2]Full Changelog[/h2]

• Balance: New and reorganized difficulty settings (there are a LOT more of them)
  
• Balance: Greater ability to customize event distribution and frequency
  
• Balance: Gas masks now protect from the negative effects of acid rains (both light & heavy) and most illnesses
  
• Balance: When starting underground, most surface events (raids, traders, recruits) won't fire until you build your first staircase
  
• Balance: Traders should, on average, have a larger selection of goods
  
• Content: New and reorganized game scenarios
  
• Content: Updated Halloween DLC to work with the new scenario system
  
• Content: New and difficult "The Plague" scenario
  
• Content: New "Really Bad Day" scenario (unfair solo survivor start, inspired by CDDA)
  
• Content: Player faction flag can be customized
  
• Content: Ability to start as a standard faction or as cannibals (more options coming)
  
• Content: Ability to customize your starting survivors and add as many as you want
  
• Content: New rare special traders (ammo trader, egg/pet trader after Animal Care tech)
  
• Content: New and altered raid events
  
• Content: Added ability to toggle "Mature Content" in the gameplay settings. Makes the game more kid-friendly by disabling blood effects, cannibalism, prisoner traders, human meat and so on...
  
• Content: Furniture and power relays can be moved easily (thanks to a new button in their menu) without having to deconstruct and reconstruct them again.
  
• Content: New Fire Crabs variant. Yes, they are basically a tanky flamethrower. Dangerous, but great as defensive pets if you manage to get some eggs
  
• Content: New Explosive shambler variant. Will explode on contact and death, causing massive but localized AoE damage
  
• Content: Added achievement for reaching day 60 in Last Stand (Steam only)
  
• Content: Added achievement for reaching 30 survivors in The Plague (Steam only)
  
• Content: The job template settings are now applied to prisoners too
  
• Engine: Technical debt payment (fixed/improved/removed a lot of crappy old code)
  
• Engine: The code in general should be more "secure" (crash preventing) and a tad faster (i have no idea if it's noticeable to the end user or not)
  
• Engine: Replaced the white screen of death during game loading by the console (showing that there's some progress being done)
  
• Engine: Added support for Cyrillic character set (opening the door for more translation mods)
  
• Graphics: Water is way prettier and properly animated
  
• Graphics: New sprites for wheat, tomato and mushroom farms
  
• Graphics: Minor tweaks and improvements
  
• ProcGen: New garage building added to map generation
  
• ProcGen: All surface maps and caverns can now contain lakes, also added a lake quantity setting to custom map generation menus
  
• ProcGen: In the Military Base map, the main building is more organic but also more difficult to clear
  
• ProcGen: It's possible to settle in city center, commercial districts and suburbs (no special map feature for now)
  
• UI: Completely reworked the "New Game" menu to manage all the new options
  
• UI: Reworked the Game Settings menu (larger menu, more tooltips, clarified obscure settings)
  
• UI: Added Encyclopedia button to the main menu
  
• UI: Overhauled the "select spawn location on city map" menu to give more helpful information (and made it better looking)
  
• UI: Refreshed the Recruitment panel (fixing alignment problems, added colors)
  
• UI: Added button/shortcut to order survivors to go fetch more ammunition (if needed) in combat mode
  
• UI: Individual settlers can be added/removed to/from combat mode on the fly using their info panel
  
• UI: Added menu when clicking on furniture (chair, beds, tables..) with the ability to move the item somewhere else.
  
• Modding: Replaced event handlers by scenario files with extensive gameplay and difficulty customization settings
  
• Modding: Added "Mature" to events, items and traits' tags. Also added to recipes (as a true/false flag). Mature tagged items will not be applied/run if the user unchecked "mature content"
  
• Modding: CattleAI is permanently deprecated
  
• Modding: Older turret component versions are permanently deprecated
  
• Modding: If only some of a mod's textures are compiled, the game could fail to load those which are not. This is fixed.
  
• Modding: Added WaterNoiseColor to terrain files (colorize the water plane if any. default blue-ish.)
  
• Modding: Thanks to the new "furniture" menu, things like chair, beds (and so on) can now be upgraded like other clutter
  
• Modding: Added "mod_examples" folder, containing a documented example to write your own translation for the game
  
• Modding: Added DeathShot to weapon files. Assuming the weapon is AoE, it will trigger a shot when the owner dies, shooting at itself. Useful for mines and such.
  
• Modding: Moar LUA hooks into the game: (Game.Time, Game.Paused, Tile.HasRoof, Tile.RoofStatus, ERoofStatus, and several UI components) (by Alex)
  
• Modding: Trade events can now have a list of preselected items (see trade_special_* events)
  
• Fixed: Survivors would occasionally ignore likes & dislikes when calculation their opinion of each other
  
• Fixed: The raid from "exiled" survivors couldn't trigger
  
• Fixed: Power generators were supposed to automatically make their job prioritary when near empty but weren't
  
• Fixed: The game wouldn't take the male/female ratio into account for the species which use this parameter
  
• Fixed: Mods couldn't override leader portraits and other textures (trait -> replace body part for instance)
  
• Fixed: If both "tech is unlocked" and "query is sent about player technologies" happen in the same frame, it could potentially lead to a crash
  
• Fixed: Rare crash related to minimap being updated by 2 threads at the same time
  
• Fixed: Potential crash on world map
  
• Fixed: In the new game menu, when customizing equipment, it was possible to crash the game by entering something else than a number in the quantity field
  
• Fixed: Right clicking items in the 'expedition result' panel wouldn't open the associated info panel
  
• Fixed: Several more internal issues way too obscure to go over
  
• Fixed: Fixed a bunch of typos in trait descriptions
  
• Fixed: Some more missing french localization strings (laws and traits especially)
  
• Fixed: When editing settings for a custom map, changing map architecture would not update settings properly
  
• Fixed: Clearing up an abomination nest from the map could lead to a crash when looking at the world map
  
• Fixed: Pausing game would remove clouds and fog from the map
  
• Fixed: The game wouldn't indicate you can't build over water (or other impassible tile) properly
  
• Fixed: The game would allow you to place walls directly over water
  
• Fixed: Monster spawner/nests could accidentally be hidden below mountains during map generation, causing animals to spawn around the mountain.
  
• Fixed: Issue preventing translation mods from translating the User Interface
  
• Fixed: In some cavern maps, it was possible for the bunker to "infect" the cavern, causing razed cavern walls to uncover metal walls instead of more cavern ones
  
• Fixed: Rare bug in underworld map generation which could lead a bunker to contain cavern walls and features
  
• Fixed: Mines would only explode on contact, not when being shot