After the Collapse News

Here's the first small patch for our massive 0.6.5 anniversary update. It's fixing a couple minor bugs and adding some requested features. More similar patches will be released in the coming days.

Also, it's replacing our extremely ugly giant spiders by those new adorable ones (I was planning to include them in the update itself, but that would have delayed it too much).



This patch (and all future hot-patches for 0.6.5) is fully compatible with existing save-games.

Enjoy :)

• AI: Settlers should be slightly faster at resuming work after loading a savegame.
  
• Balance: Slightly reduced experience gain from building & razing (it was reaching 1000 way too quickly)
  
• Content: Farming skill determines plants' starting health (planting seeds will increases the skill)
  
• Graphics: Replaced the 2 giant spiders models by ones more in tune with the rest of the graphics
  
• Graphics: Tweaked giant crab carapace to be more in tune with the rest of the graphics
  
• Sound: Slightly reduced volume of button clicks
  
• UI: It is now possible to change the amount in the recipe and trade menus using the mouse wheel (hover the cursor over the number, and scroll the wheel to change value)
  
• UI: Similarly, you can switch between "total units" and "until X units" using the same method
  
• Fixed: Skill tooltip was mixing up some of the raw information (experience vs innate)
  
• Fixed: Blood pools couldn't be selected and removed the same way as other items (disassemble button)
  
• Fixed: It was possible to crash the game by erasing the value in a recipe menu and pressing the add button
  
• Fixed: Possible crash if the "select next military unit" key is pressed under some situations
  
• Fixed: The "Room Info" menu wouldn't update in real time
  

To mark After The Collapse's first anniversary, I am very happy to release the largest update for the game to date. With close to 90 changes, improvements and bug-fixes, there's a lot to go over. As usual, I will keep this post focused on the major things and you can refer to the full change-log is at the very end for a more complete overview.

Important: This update breaks compatibility with save-games from previous versions. As usual, you can go in the game's properties in Steam to restore the previous version (in the Beta tab).


This is the core new gameplay feature in this update. The map and expeditions have been tied together and improved. You can refer to this article for the nitty-gritty details, but the major points are the following:

• Destinations are now proper locations on the map and there are several instances of each.
• The travel duration and difficulty depends on the world map and what's between your base and the destination.
• Destinations can run out of resources (that will take a while, don't worry).
• New tech tree to increase your travel speed and your reach.
• Ability to search for survivors and resources simultaneously.
• New destinations (mines, lumber mills) and tweaked existing ones.
• Special events can happen during the scavenging part of the expeditions.

The associated user interface has also been tweaked to accommodate the changes. You select the destination on the world map, which will also show travel information whenever relevant. Also, I added health and carry capacity information to your group. And, while at it, I fixed some minor rendering issues on the world map itself.




The diplomatic screen introduced in the previous version was bare-bone, to say the least. I took some time to flesh out both the menu and the factions themselves. Each faction got its own leader selected from a pool, and their own history they'll generally be happy to tell you about.



A new faction has been added too, the Mutants. They are green, big and mean. Right now they behave like other standard factions, except that their "citizen" are green and fans of pipe weapons. You'll meet them during the random raids (don't worry, defending yourself won't impact the opinion of the faction as a whole). And, yes, more will be done with the factions in the future, there's a reason why they aren't procedurally generated.




Again, it would take too long to list every little change here. Still, there's a few nice features which deserve to be listed on their own:

• It is now possible to copy & paste settings from a storage zone to another.
• An optional "Research Completed!" popup has been added summarizing all the changes made by the technology.
• Many menus give way more information using better tool-tips (bio and character screen, recipe sub-menu, research menu)

As usual, the general goal is to show more useful information in less clicks. There's still more to do here, of course, but it's getting there. Hopefully, next stop will be to merge the combat & normal UI (with the ability to toggle that state for some survivors while keeping the rest of the UI unchanged), and multi selection for construction jobs.




Pipe weapons are now a viable alternative to modern weapons. I added 2 new techs to unlock 4 new pipe weapons (smg, rifle, flamethrower, rocket launcher). As usual, they are slightly worse than their modern counter-parts, but they are much easier to produce and maintain. To make this change more effective, bandits will often use pipe-weapons themselves. Hopefully, it will make it more difficult for you to acquire mid and high tier modern weapons.



Fuel is now an item category containing our good old "charcoal" and the new and relatively rare "gasoline" resource. Gasoline is mostly used in the construction of flamer-thrower ammunition and can serve as fuel for a new Power Generator building. While i'm talking about new items, with the proper tech, you can now build metal fences, and flame-throwing turrets.


Weather can influence a lot more things than it could previously. It can change the ambient light, affect plants' health, tweak the temperature, give traits to your survivors and so on.  As such the "heat wave" is no longer a special event, but a somewhat rare weather pattern with roughly the same effects as the event itself.



Another new weather type is the "Acid Rain". It will render anyone on the surface sick and will gradually damage the health of your plants. Of course, it's a rare pattern that won't trigger in the early game. To complete this feature, a plant's health now influences how much you'll be able to gather. It also means that "hostile" weather patterns will no longer "take the spot" of other potential events when it's time for one to fire. It's now perfectly possible to be raided or for a trader to visit during a heat-wave.




As you may have noticed by looking at the screenshot, graphics got an improvement pass too: survivors leave footprints on non constructed ground (grass and such) now. They will also be shown holding items whenever they are moving them around. And, granted you've placed small tables in front of your chairs in the dining room, they'll be placing whatever they are consuming on said table. "Hit" animations are also being played over some of the objects being "razed" (trees and big rocks).

Most of those graphical changes can be toggled on/off in the settings.


It's not a secret that After The Collapse's sounds are lagging behind the rest of the development. While this update isn't going to fix everything, it's definitely a big step in the right direction. I've added 6 new music tracks for variety sake. More importantly, the soundscape (ambient sounds) got a bunch of new background tracks and effects. And yes, it means that the game will no longer be playing that "crow"track nearly as often.

There's also about 40 new sound effects, dispatched between different buildings and activities. The general goal was to make things less repetitive. As such, there's now 3 different effects for eating and drinking. New effects have been added to the basic kitchens, crafting stations, water purifiers, tinkering stations and electric kitchens. Same goes for most common actions, there are new sounds being played when removing trees, rocks and bushes. In the military area, single shot rifles and melee weapons got their own specific sound effects. Same thing for most of the of the fauna (spiders, lizards, mantis, crabs).

There's plenty more planned in that area, but that will have to wait for a more dedicated update.


This is, by far, my largest update to date. With it, After the Collapse is really taking shape. I took extra time to get rid of most, if not all, of the bugs, big and small, I am aware of. I've also played the game in multiple settings for several hours using this version. Yet, with such a change-log, it's pretty much impossible to be certain that every potential problem has been caught. So, do not hesitate to report any (new or old) issue arising in 0.6.5, I'll patch them out as quickly as possible.

Expect another article in a week or two, giving out details about the next updates :)

• AI: Survivors will generally avoid walking over farms' ground when not actively needing to
• AI: Doctors will no longer stop in the middle of an operation because they are somewhat hungry or bored
• Balance: After 2 days, a settlement with less beds (in total) than survivors will get a mood penalty proportional to the discrepancy
• Balance: Settlers can hold less stuff in their inventory (won't impact base building much, but will impact expeditions)
• Balance: Reduced potato & rice food production a small bit (as it was getting kinda ridiculous)
• Balance: Bandits more likely to use a mix of pipe weapons instead of pre-collapse ones exclusively
• Balance: Increased shotguns and flamethrowers' damage output
• Balance: Less extreme infestations: capped the max amount of creatures per room
• Balance: Rooms containing hostile creatures are highlighted in dark red to "simulate" the fact that your survivors can guess something is wrong
• Content: The whole expedition logic has been overhauled, see release post for details
• Content: Expeditions are now using real map locations when selecting a destination
• Content: The world map / expeditions have new special locations (mines, lumber mill, and so on)
• Content: Expedition destinations will run out of resources (right now it won't impact your game much, if at all, it's in preparation for future updates)
• Content: Several new technologies to expand expeditions' range, size and travel speed
• Content: Added the Mutant faction
• Content: Added mutant raids (those mutants are not tied to the above faction and you won't suffer repercussions for defending yourself)
• Content: New rare weather pattern "acid rains", damaging plants and causing a debuff to people outside while it's running
• Content: The "heat wave" is now a (rare) weather pattern instead of being an event
• Content: Added a few sources of wood to the underground (dead bushes in caverns, more crates in sewers)
• Content: Added metal fence "wall". Blocks pathing, but let pass bullets and light (metallurgy tech)
• Content: The less healthy the plants in farms, the less food they will produce
• Content: Added "Craft small wooden statue" to the basic crafting station (lower trade value than stone statue, but cheaper & faster to make)
• Content: New item category "fuel source", charcoal moved to this category (making it easier to have charcoal at the ready near the demand)
• Content: New Advanced Pipe Weapons tech leading to low tech smg & hunting rifles
• Content: New "Heavy Pipe Weapons" tech leading to low tech flamer & rpg launcher
• Content: Added "Gasoline" item (fuel source category, ofc)
• Content: Added gasoline fueled Generator to advanced electronics (2x duration and +50% power generation compared to a charcoal one)
• Content: Added recipe to convert fuel into ammo for flamethrower (under the explosive ammo technology)
• Content: Flamethrower turrets (under the advanced turrets technology)
• Content: Fleshed out each faction with their own dialogs and history
• Engine: Reduced CPU cost of playing/loading animations
• Engine: Minor performance improvements
• Engine: Properly tied up all the weather stuff together (weather data can now modify temperature, ambiant light, affect plants, give traits)
• Graphics: Expedition group (and destination) shown on the world map when relevant
• Graphics: In farms, unhealthy plants are shown with a brownish color
• Graphics: Survivors eating/drinking in front of a table will "spawn" the food on said table
• Graphics: Survivors moving items around will (generally) have said items being shown in their hands (can be toggled on/off in graphical settings)
• Graphics: Survivors leave footprints on non constructed ground (can be toggled on/off in graphical settings)
• Graphics: Added "hit" animations to some objects being disassembled/mined/chopped off (trees, rocks so far)
• Graphics: Preliminary improvements to world map rendering
• Graphics: Added faction leaders' portraits to the relevant diplomacy screens
• ProcGen: Improved mountain procedural generation
• ProcGen: Made mountains more common in the full game (more frequent in suburbs especially)
• Sound: Added more sound effects for eating & drinking actions
• Sound: Additional sounds for disassembling trees, bushes and rocks, new shovel sounds for farming
• Sound: New fire & reload sounds for hunting and sniper rifles
• Sound: New "attack" sound effects for spears, combat knife, and fists
• Sound: Giant spiders, lizards, mantis and crabs got their own sound effects
• Sound: Additional sound effects to basic kitchens, crafting stations, electric kitchens, water purifiers, tinkering stations
• Sound: Added some variety to the soundscape (more thunder, rain, wind sfx) and with 50% less crows.
• Sound: Added 6 new music tracks
• Sound: Some audio feedback to the UI (button clicks, more will come over time)
• UI: Improved expedition menu (health info, carry capacity, and other additional stats)
• UI: Added raw skill values to the survivor job/skill menu. Tooltips for each job is much more informative (showing which trait impacts each job)
• UI: Redesign of the survivor character menu. Tooltips for each stats is much more informative (showing which trait impacts each stats)
• UI: Added option to copy/paste settings from a storage menu to another (like we already have for factories)
• UI: Pressing the Cancel Order shortcut (C by default) when the "building in progress" menu is open will directly cancel the construction
• UI: Added map keyboard shortcut (M by default)
• UI: Pressing ESC on map screen brings you back to previous screen (incidentally fixing a bug causing the controls to disappear)
• UI: Added specific tips for electricity and expeditions
• UI: If multiple keyboard shortcuts are using the same key, it will be highlighted in red in the settings
• UI: In the Room menu, clicking on the owner (if assigned) will center the camera on them, and open their associated panel
• UI: Full trait information directly in the tooltip, no longer need to click a trait to get its full effect
• UI: Factories' "add a recipe" menu redesign, using graphics, longer list and tooltips for recipe content
• UI: Recruitment menu will automatically update the bio/skill sub menu when switching selected recruit, making comparisons easier
• UI: Added optional "Research completed" popup when a research is.. completed. Can be toggled on/off in game settings
• UI: Research info panels show to which crafting station belong newly unlocked recipes
• UI: Research info panels show tech requirement needs in a tooltip for unlockable techs
• UI: In the "new game" map, added the ability to highlight locations with a bunker (making it easier to find potentially underground starting locations)
• UI: Better looking and more interactive diplomatic screen
• UI: Made tutorial windows draggable to prevent issues for people playing on lower than recommended resolution
• UI: Other minor tweaks
• Fixed: The camera will no longer slow down when changing direction with the WASD keys
• Fixed: Problem with event driven raids which might cause the event to never finish, preventing further random events
• Fixed: World map's coloring was influenced by day-night cycle
• Fixed: Minor memory, performance and behavior degradation over time during long play sessions
• Fixed: Some issues with world map generation and rendering
• Fixed: Bug in the game-tips system preventing tips from being hidden "forever" if you don't click on the checkbox (my apologies for the confusion it might have caused)
• Fixed: Some of the survivors' "activities" (in the settler info panel) couldn't be translated, resulting in missing/weird sentences in the french version
• Fixed: Smoke animation over a destroyed object not always proportional in size to said object
• Fixed: Top Left info about date and funds are now properly shown as UI elements and no longer subject to day night cycle
• Fixed: Hit and explosion SFX played at the shooter's location instead of the bullet's location
• Fixed: Large walls would "connect" to wood palissades (or metal fences) in a jarring way
• Fixed: A case where raiders (and probably NPC) would go derp in (0,0) after their target is killed/removed
• Fixed: Survivors could very occasionally "forget" to grab items from the ground
• Fixed: People would sleep "upside down" in standard and medical beds
• Fixed: People wouldn't get properly treated for injuries in medical zones even if the proper tool is available (regression bug from 0.6)
• Fixed: Fixed extremely rare corruption of some graphic assets on game loading (this fix will make the main menu laggy for a couple seconds, though)
• Fixed: Power generator would show up twice as an unlock for the metallurgy tech
• Fixed: The last few missing items in the french translation should be completed now

In a couple weeks, After The Collapse will have been in Early Access for one year. To mark this milestone, I will be releasing the largest update to date, featuring many near features and noteworthy graphical and UI improvements on the 14th of October.

Here's a short summary for this update:

• Much deeper expedition mechanics, interacting with the world around your base
  
• Whole new tech branch for pipe weapons (smg, rocket launchers, flamers..)
  
• Whole new tech branch for expedition efficiency
  
• Refreshed user interface, replacing most of the older menus with better looking ones
  
• New "hostile" weather patterns with a visible impact on your survivors and farms
  
• Graphical improvements, with people visibly holding items, leaving footprints and so on
  
• Lots and lots of new sound effects and ambient sounds (crows begone!)
  

It's in no way drawing the complete picture. The changelog is already 60+ items long, and should be much larger by the time I release the update publicly. It's just to give you a taste for what's planned :)


I do believe in full transparency when it comes to such things, so the game will be on a 15% discount when this update gets released and will get another 15% discount during the Halloween sale. Our base price will then be increased from $9.99 to $10.99 at the end of the month.

The base price will further increase as we get closer to 1.0 (as stated on the store page) and you will be warned in a similar fashion. Note that this game won't be discounted at a lower price than it was until now, at least not until several months after the full 1.0 release. The percentage itself might increase, but the raw price won't get any lower so the early adopters don't get penalized.


I will be working on the double until release. Expect a much faster update cycle in the coming months. The stated goal is to get to a full 1.0 release somewhere during Q1 2020.

Before you freak out: I know it's kind of the "thing" for base builders to stay in E.A. forever, which is precisely why I want to avoid this sad state of affair. An official 1.0 release doesn't mean that I'll be done with the game, on the contrary. It just means that I consider it in a good enough shape to be properly released on Steam. As with my previous game, many more updates will be released after that.

It's time for a new devlog (and testing the new features in steam while at it).

I will mostly be discussing After The Collapse’s development. And this time, I will be resurrecting a kind of devlog I used a lot with Unending Galaxy, the deep dive into a specific (soon to be released) feature. In this particular case, we'll look at the expedition system. As usual with this kind of post, everything below is subject to changes during implementation. Still, the core principles should stay consistent.

(source article on my official website)



Until now, expeditions were basically running in their own little parallel universe. You'd pick a destination from a list and your selected group would pretend to travel to that imaginary destination. All those places were incidentally at roughly the same distance from you, and would never run out of resources. While, sure, it worked as a placeholder, it's no longer enough now that we have a proper world map to interact with. Let's see what we can do.



So, the first step is to integrate those destinations into the world map, which I'm already doing. The 0.6.0 version had a few "military bases" icons laying around, more are being added to match the old list. Some, more generic, destinations (suburbs, city center, forests) can already be generated from the city map, based on the location (no road, heavy forestry leading to a Forest destination type).



Of course, just sprinkling the map with such locations wouldn't be very interesting if we stopped there. But now, we have a way to attach more information to each destination. Firstly the position, meaning that each location is at a different distance from your base, modifying travel time accordingly. As such, placing your initial base takes a much more important strategic role. Will you place it in a dangerous location but close by to juicy resource centers, or in a remote, safe(ish) location, but making expeditions more difficult?

Additionally, given that the map will provide several instances of the same destination type, we can make them run out of resources after multiple runs, depending on the decay value of the cell they are in. Lastly, travel events can be influenced by the type of terrain your group will have to go through.



Of course, for all that to work correctly, I'm also changing how the expeditions will proceed.

Traveling to the destination is mostly unchanged technically. Still, the travel length will be proportional to the distance between your base and the target. The random events happening during your travels will change a bit: their likelihood of being "bad" and their difficulty will generally be determined by the current map location of the traveling group. I'll also be adding a new setting, something like a "reckless/standard/cautious" selector which will influence your travel speed and the events further.



When it comes to the exploration part, things will change a bit more. You will be asked to select how long you'll be staying there. You will be able to loot nearby locations for longer as a result, which wasn't possible with the old system. To balance this out, bad events will also happen during that phase. The intensity and probability will heavily depend on the location type and position. The general idea is to have events specific to each location in the long run. We'll probably start with generic ones first, and expand upon it during the rest of the development.

Traveling back to your base won't change much, travel time will be halved and without events as your group will already know which road to take. At least that's the in-game explanation for it. In reality, it would be extremely bad form in terms of game design to wipe out your group when going back home with backpacks full of food and fancy weapons.



All those changes are begging for an associated tech tree. Until now we only had a group size increase and the radio tech to send a recall order. I'll be adding a couple more things. A pathfinder tech,with multiple levels that will increase your group's travel speed seems like a good first candidate. Additionally, a mapping tech (again with multiple levels) will increase the max distance you can reach on the city map. In a similar vein, the group size increase tech will probably get a new level as well.



I went over this in previous devlogs, but it's a good place to reiterate and go into further details.

Right now we can only send completely automated scavenging runs. And until the above changes have been published and tested, we'll stick to that. However, later during this 0.6 branch, we'll be introducing two new types of expeditions which will have the option (at least once I've made the associated map generators) for you to manually handle your group during the encounter if you wish to.

1) The "claim location" run. You'll be sending a group to a specific resource producing location, like a mine or a factory. Your group will have to clear the map from hostiles. Assuming they win, the location will switch to your ownership. That done, you'll be asked to send some settlers (permanently) to maintain the location. Doing so will net you a regular daily resource income coming from that place. There's a lot more to that claiming business, but that will be subject of another article.

2) The "raid location" run. This is for much later, so it's only here for completion sake. To summarize, you'll be able to attack other hostile (or soon to be, at least) factions' bases and resource centers. It will work similarly to the above option, except that you're there to trash the place. Assuming your group wins, you will come back with a lot of loot, and might remove their claim on that location. Later down the line, it will also be used to clean up mutant nests and other late game threats.



Obviously, I am also updating the map screen and related menus to make all that a bit easier to manage and nicer to look at. You'll be able to see your expeditions traveling on the map.

Now there's a few more things I'd like to implement, but their ratio of "do want" to "code to write" isn't the greatest. The ability to run multiple expeditions at the same time is the most obvious one, but that would require to edit a lot of things both internally and in the user interface. Another, more realistic, idea would be the ability to build/repair/fuel a vehicle which would in turn improve your group's safety / travel speed and carry capacity for the run. I have the graphical assets for that, but I'll still have to decide how the whole "car building" part would work. Another change I'm playing with is to add food ration requirements for far away expeditions.



That's about all for the expeditions. Large parts (at least for the scavenging side of things) have been written already and should be made public in a couple weeks. Of course expeditions are not my sole focus for this 0.6 branch. Other factions will get busy too, doing the same as you (well mostly). The event system will also get updated. There's a lot of fun things in store :)

Before we go, a quick note. As you might know already, After The Collapse got validated for access to Steam Cards. I was technically supposed to have released those by now, but that will have to wait for a little bit. I don't want to make half-assed cards and icons, and there's a lot (and i mean a hell lot) of images to provide to feed their system. It's going to happen soon-ish, no worries, but actual development takes precedence over this.

This update is adding a few new important features to the base building game. Namely private property, room quality, and the break room.

It is also improving the user interface and menus while fixing a bunch of minor bugs that have been present for a while but which for I couldn’t find the time to properly fix until now.

Simply put, 0.6.1 should feel more professional than the previous releases and leave a much better first impression to new users.



ːneospqrː The detailed release post is on the official website ːneospqrː

• AI: Older survivors who did a lot of things for your base will start requesting individual bedrooms (the better the room, the better the morale bonus)
• AI: Survivors with claimed rooms favor sleeping or using items in those rooms
• AI: Special AI package when in the lounge: sitting, walking around, stretching, etc.
• Content: Added ability to build individual bedrooms (zone) for your survivors.
• Content: Renamed the old bedroom to “barracks” and changed icon/desc/tutorial accordingly
• Content: Added ability to build lounges (zone) where your survivors will hang out when they have no specific task
• Content: Furniture have a “decorative” value which, when placed in an owned bedroom or a lounge, will improve its quality/rating
• Content: Lounges provide some entertainment (proportional to its ‘room quality’) to the survivors taking a rest there
• Content: Individual bedrooms give a morale bonus to their owner, proportional to the room’s quality
• Content: Added above-ground mountain settings to custom game menu (non city map archetypes)
• Graphics: Switched/edited a few animations (food eating is no longer using dancing moves, I know :sadface:)
• ProcGen: Better above-ground mountain generation (there’s still work to do)
• UI: Added links to the last official articles about the game on the title screen (optional, added to general settings menu)
• UI: The game now asks if you want to auto-save before exiting a game
• UI: Refreshed the save/load screen and the summary for new saves will also contain more information
• UI: Load screen select the last save automatically
• UI: Added an equipment preset tuned for underground bunker starts
• UI: The room menu will show the room’s quality, and allows you to change the owner if relevant (individual bedrooms)
• UI: Added decorative value info to clutter info panel
• UI: Changed the way “game tips” work: added checkbox to each menu to never show them again (can be reset in the settings menu. limitation: tutorial resets them)
• UI: Game will favor selecting zones over objects when the room menu is open (same as when the zone menu is open)
• UI: Modernized a few menus, added colors and other minor adjustments
• UI: Added game tips for private bedrooms, lounges and experienced survivors
• Fixed: Minor issues with the procedural generation, mostly performance related ones.
• Fixed: Title screen song resets each time you exit the settings or new game menu
• Fixed: Camera jumps (during tutorial mostly) caused a very short but annoying flickering
• Fixed: You could move the camera way out of the playable area, it’s now constrained properly
• Fixed: The in-game dynamic lighting would still be visible when switching to the world map
• Fixed: Changing graphical resolution in the middle of a game would cause problems with the camera
• Fixed: In the world generator screen (for resolutions below 1920*1080), the left panel could be too tall and clip into the bottom menu.
• Fixed: Minor issue with “please restart” warning in settings menu while in-game (also added important information when changing language when applicable)
• Fixed: “Combat” help tool-tip to not being shown (Regression bug from 0.5.9)
• Fixed: Some issues with trait attribution (hits from spider spitters would cause “webbed” message spam and things like that)
• Fixed: The “remove terrain” order wasn’t visibly marking tiles on the screen
• Fixed: After the end of the interactive tutorial, trying to save/load a game would cause a crash (regression bug from 0.6.0)
• Fixed: Couldn’t cancel orders to remove tiles from the ground
• Fixed: Minor issues/tweaks