0.8.7.5: Tweaks and Fixes
Hey, I hope you enjoyed the scenario released for Halloween :)
This new update goes over a lot of reported problems, while improving the UI and the game's economy, rebalancing a few things in the process. It's not a very large patch but it's featuring improvements which should have been made a long time ago.
You can expect at least one or two more before the next devlog explaining my plans for the future.
As usual, saves & mods are compatible, and the full changelog is at the end.
[h2]Production and Economy[/h2]
First, a new setting has been added to all crafting stations (and water collectors) recipes, it allows you to produce a given recipe until adjacent (compatible) depots are full.
While this work for everything, this is especially useful with dirty water production/collection. You can now set your collectors and well(s) to produce only until your adjacent dedicated depot for dirty water is full, which is a lot easier than micro managing it or setting a global limit.
Regarding cattle management, butchering stations can now be paused and will detect adjacent compatible depots and the products will automatically be moved there, saving some travel time in well designed bases.
Additionally, animals can individually be moved from a pasture to another. Click on a pastured animal, and using the new "Relocate" button.
While this is not particularly useful when handling food or work cattle, anyone who has used sand crabs as a defense system will appreciate. It can also be used to separate "good" animals from "bad" ones when trying to do selective breeding.
Oh, and if you've played through the new scenario (or done any cannibal run), you probably would have loved a way to mass-assign dead bodies to butchering jobs. This is now possible! A keyboard shortcut has been added to btcher everything in the selection (which you place like a zone after pressing the shortcut). As usual with keyboard shortcuts, it can be changed in the settings.
[h2]Fire[/h2]
Fire's effectiveness at ruining you day has been tuned down.
First, rain, on top of dousing the flames, prevents fire from spreading through grassy and other non constructed terrain. This should make it a lot more effective at killing large fires.
Secondly, survivors on low health (
Finally, and this is what I suspect to be the crux of the issue: fires will no longer be able to incapacitate whoever they hurt. I think that's what happened to players who got too many deaths or heavily injured people when dealing with fire. Due to the way fire damage is applied, very small damage but in a repeating pattern, it made wildfires the most effective way to incapacitate someone.
[h2]User Interface[/h2]
A few nice QoL improvements.
First, those barebone popups shown during game events (raids, traders...) or weather changes are a lot nicer to look at now. Some of them are more informative or/and have additional functionalities.
This is also working when clicking events and weather changes in the log.
Additionally, HP information has been added to the "settler/animal selector" panel used in a lot of menus. This is especially useful when selecting people to send in an expeditions so you can make sure you don't send people with next to no HP.
The multi-survivor panel displayed when you have multiple people selected at once (generally in combat mode) now show who is using what weapon. This should make it a lot more useful.
[h2]Bug Fixing: Savegame Failure[/h2]
Simply put, on very rare occasions, an auto/quick save would fail and give you a message. The game does not crash, and saving again would work as normal, but it would still rotate the quick/auto slots, making you lose the older version.
After looking at this bug for a few days, there's no real way for me to fix the failure entirely and definitely at this point without massively tanking performances during those saves. Given how uncommon it is and the fact it has no real impact on the game, it's not worth that cost.
So, I did the next best things:
1. I heavily reduced the likelihood of it happening at all.
2. If an auto/quick save operation still happen to fail, it won't erase any previous file anymore.
I really hate to leave a technical bug standing, but it's the closest I can get here. I might still be able to completely fix it later granted it triggers again in front of me while I am debugging the game, but that will have to do for now.
[h2]Bugs Fixed and Bugs Remaining[/h2]
As usual there's a small list of reported bugs being fixed. Most notably, custom player-made equipment presets in the new game menu wouldn't always be displayed, some inconsistent / non working settings, nothing really game breaking or major.
This leaves us with one last remaining long standing bug I consider "major". The dreaded settler teleport bug. And I'm not talking about settlers walling themselves off when placing objects or a settler being force-pushed outside of a wall not exactly where it should, while annoying, it's just inherent to colony-sims. I'm talking about a survivor flat out "teleported" into the middle of nowhere in the underground.
Comparatively to the overwhelming majority of bugs I had to deal with, this one is really annoying to locate for due to its nature. Player reports are, understandably, way after the fact and can't really provide useful or reliable information (not your fault, it's just not that kind of bug). Even if I see it happen in one of my playthroughs, it's after the fact. And, of course, it's rare and irregular enough that brute forcing things doesn't seem to work.
My point for this long rambling is that I'm going to dedicate some more time trying to get rid of it, but it's going to be a pain and it might take a while. :)
[h2]Full Changelog[/h2]
This new update goes over a lot of reported problems, while improving the UI and the game's economy, rebalancing a few things in the process. It's not a very large patch but it's featuring improvements which should have been made a long time ago.
You can expect at least one or two more before the next devlog explaining my plans for the future.
As usual, saves & mods are compatible, and the full changelog is at the end.
[h2]Production and Economy[/h2]
First, a new setting has been added to all crafting stations (and water collectors) recipes, it allows you to produce a given recipe until adjacent (compatible) depots are full.
While this work for everything, this is especially useful with dirty water production/collection. You can now set your collectors and well(s) to produce only until your adjacent dedicated depot for dirty water is full, which is a lot easier than micro managing it or setting a global limit.
Regarding cattle management, butchering stations can now be paused and will detect adjacent compatible depots and the products will automatically be moved there, saving some travel time in well designed bases.
Additionally, animals can individually be moved from a pasture to another. Click on a pastured animal, and using the new "Relocate" button.
While this is not particularly useful when handling food or work cattle, anyone who has used sand crabs as a defense system will appreciate. It can also be used to separate "good" animals from "bad" ones when trying to do selective breeding.
Oh, and if you've played through the new scenario (or done any cannibal run), you probably would have loved a way to mass-assign dead bodies to butchering jobs. This is now possible! A keyboard shortcut has been added to btcher everything in the selection (which you place like a zone after pressing the shortcut). As usual with keyboard shortcuts, it can be changed in the settings.
[h2]Fire[/h2]
Fire's effectiveness at ruining you day has been tuned down.
First, rain, on top of dousing the flames, prevents fire from spreading through grassy and other non constructed terrain. This should make it a lot more effective at killing large fires.
Secondly, survivors on low health (
Finally, and this is what I suspect to be the crux of the issue: fires will no longer be able to incapacitate whoever they hurt. I think that's what happened to players who got too many deaths or heavily injured people when dealing with fire. Due to the way fire damage is applied, very small damage but in a repeating pattern, it made wildfires the most effective way to incapacitate someone.
[h2]User Interface[/h2]
A few nice QoL improvements.
First, those barebone popups shown during game events (raids, traders...) or weather changes are a lot nicer to look at now. Some of them are more informative or/and have additional functionalities.
This is also working when clicking events and weather changes in the log.
Additionally, HP information has been added to the "settler/animal selector" panel used in a lot of menus. This is especially useful when selecting people to send in an expeditions so you can make sure you don't send people with next to no HP.
The multi-survivor panel displayed when you have multiple people selected at once (generally in combat mode) now show who is using what weapon. This should make it a lot more useful.
[h2]Bug Fixing: Savegame Failure[/h2]
Simply put, on very rare occasions, an auto/quick save would fail and give you a message. The game does not crash, and saving again would work as normal, but it would still rotate the quick/auto slots, making you lose the older version.
After looking at this bug for a few days, there's no real way for me to fix the failure entirely and definitely at this point without massively tanking performances during those saves. Given how uncommon it is and the fact it has no real impact on the game, it's not worth that cost.
So, I did the next best things:
1. I heavily reduced the likelihood of it happening at all.
2. If an auto/quick save operation still happen to fail, it won't erase any previous file anymore.
I really hate to leave a technical bug standing, but it's the closest I can get here. I might still be able to completely fix it later granted it triggers again in front of me while I am debugging the game, but that will have to do for now.
[h2]Bugs Fixed and Bugs Remaining[/h2]
As usual there's a small list of reported bugs being fixed. Most notably, custom player-made equipment presets in the new game menu wouldn't always be displayed, some inconsistent / non working settings, nothing really game breaking or major.
This leaves us with one last remaining long standing bug I consider "major". The dreaded settler teleport bug. And I'm not talking about settlers walling themselves off when placing objects or a settler being force-pushed outside of a wall not exactly where it should, while annoying, it's just inherent to colony-sims. I'm talking about a survivor flat out "teleported" into the middle of nowhere in the underground.
Comparatively to the overwhelming majority of bugs I had to deal with, this one is really annoying to locate for due to its nature. Player reports are, understandably, way after the fact and can't really provide useful or reliable information (not your fault, it's just not that kind of bug). Even if I see it happen in one of my playthroughs, it's after the fact. And, of course, it's rare and irregular enough that brute forcing things doesn't seem to work.
My point for this long rambling is that I'm going to dedicate some more time trying to get rid of it, but it's going to be a pain and it might take a while. :)
[h2]Full Changelog[/h2]
- AI: People on low health (
- Balance: Rain prevents fire from spreading through grassy and other non constructed terrain (on top of the droplets dousing the flames)
- Balance: Animal hide from butchering mutants & humans (only apply to newly spawned ones if loading from old save)
- Balance: Manual combat maps no longer drop any loot to prevent farming and flee/attack loop exploits
- Balance: Fire damage can no longer incapacitate targets (so people don't fall "asleep" in the middle of a fire)
- Balance: The game makes sure that the spawn location selected by default when starting a new game is not in a very hostile biome (or a location you can't settle into)
- Content: Animals can be assigned/relocated to specific pastures via new button in their info panel
- Content: Like factories, if there's an adjacent compatible depot next to a butchering station, the products will automatically be moved there
- Content: Added option for crafting stations and water collectors to produce until adjacent container is full (in the recipe selection menu)
- Content: Specific butchering tables can be disabled/paused
- Engine: Heavily reduced likelihood of an autosave to fail (a bug that cannot be completely removed at this point without massively tanking save performances)
- Graphics: Added some light randomization of water droplets placement during rain so they don't always fall at the right center of a tile
- Modding: Added TexturePath to both Events and Weather effect, adds a specific image for their new improved panel shown when clicked (or when set to auto pop)
- UI: Added weapon icons to the panel shown when multiple survivors are selected (making sub selection easier)
- UI: Added HP information to settler/animal selector used in many menus (garage, room, prison cell, pet attribution)
- UI: Added hotkey to butcher everything in a zone (U by default, rebindable)
- UI: Queue in Factory screen is color coded to show which recipe can complete
- UI: Nicer looking weather change and game event menus (for those who popup on screen, or when clicking them in the log)
- UI: Events spawning map locations have a window showing an option to center & select the location on the map
- Fixed: Quick and auto save wouldn't recognize when a save is already in progress. The game will now properly recognize it and skip the second attempt
- Fixed: Auto/quick save file rotation would still be done on failure, deleting the oldest instance
- Fixed: Reset speed settings in game options was inconsistent (both for raids and traders)
- Fixed: In the RotM scenario it was possible for the "Leadership Change" event to fire for (the perma-hostile) Neo Roma, causing minor relation glitches
- Fixed: Traders stuck in houses will self delete after a while, this ain't very elegant but it will serve as a temporary solution until i figure out the cause
- Fixed: Clicking on events on the short log panel and the expanded window wasn't consistent
- Fixed: Remove Tile job and Fire wouldn't update the game's internal map when destroying a bridge or other tiles allowing passage between 2 areas
- Fixed: Disappearing player-made equipment presets in the "new game" menu
- Fixed: Rare failure in "drop items" job
- Fixed: A couple minor typos and glitches