After the Collapse News

Hello!

This was supposed to be a small and fun scenario for Halloween, but I might have been carried away. Just you know, a bit. So, here is both a new scenario and a fairly chunky update for you to enjoy!

As usual, full changelog at the end, save-games and mods compatible.


[h2]Rise of the Mutants[/h2]

Let's start with the main attraction. RotM is a new scenario for ATC where you play as a group of mutants in search of their origin. It's not just a quick reskin, this scenario is designed to showcase what can be done in a week of work (and testing) with my engine.



(a note before we start: this scenario features cannibalism and a quest with some non-kid friendly content, nothing that's out of character in a fallout-ish game, but I'd rather mention it.)

The scenario features:

• A customized tech tree
  
• A decently sized quest mixing research, combat, exploration and text based adventure
  
• A playable race with unique mechanics (more on that below)
  
• New and altered game events
  
• A few new weapons, armors and items

So, the mutants, which are not inspired by any other mutant from any other franchise, definitely not, are big, green and mean. On the plus side, they have super human strength and endurance, an immunity to scorched biome and acid rain debuffs, increased melee damage, HP, and have a natural resistance to damage. They are excellent fighters and can one-on-one most mobs in the game even without fancy armors or guns. Oh, and they have no philosophical problem with eating humans, on the contrary.



On the negative side, they eat and drink more (20%), they are god awful at medicine and science. Most of the tech tree beyond electronics is closed to them. No robotics, no drones, automated kitchen, advanced turrets or modern weapon/armor repairs. They however start with exploration and animal care unlocked immediately and have access to unique bone melee weapons and armors. The weapons have a very high chance to incapacitate a target, and the armor is very good for its cost (better than the metal armor).



They also are quite asocial and will brawl and fight each other a lot. Keeping them content is quite difficult but it is not as bad as it sounds. The "depressed" mood doesn't apply to mutants. Instead, they become "agitated". An agitated mutant will brawl even more, but will also be stronger, get a military skill boost, and will be better at all jobs involving razing something, however they'll be slower builders in this state.



With a very slow research rate and no easy access to the high-end tier, they are meant to be played as a low tech faction relying on numbers and animals to defend themselves against raiders and other factions (speaking of which, Neo Roma is perma-hostile to you here, it's a feature, not a bug).

A few words of advice:

• I would suggest to start on a large desert river/oasis village map, preferably with a special underground biome and/or bunker. It's not necessary, but it's a nice change of pace from the less interesting city maps.
  
• Mutants need a lot of food and water, better make sure you have more farms and kitchens than normally. It is also a very good idea to allow them (Faction menu) to butcher sentient beings.
  
• Take advantage of the fact that you can collect and grow giant eggs right from the start. Just make sure you have a wheat farm and access to animal food before growing them.
  
• To start the quest, you'll have to complete the "Remembering The Past" research, which is just after Masonry. Pay attention to your (clickable) message log after researching it as it will reveal a world map location.
  
• This is a combat heavy scenario, you'll be raided slightly more often than usual and you will lose people, especially when dealing with raids from other factions.

I hope you'll enjoy this scenario and quest, it's still a bit clunky and the writing is, well.. mine (who isn't a native English speaker), but it should still give you a window to what will be done in the future. :)

[h2]AI, Balance and Content[/h2]

Of course, it wouldn't be an update without the usual list of changes and improvements. I will list a few of the most notable ones here.

Previously, it was notably difficult to keep incapacitated enemies alive. I made that a tad easier: your survivors should be a lot faster at noticing they shouldn't shoot at their target anymore (assuming they aren't blood-thirsty) and newly incapacitated people get a few seconds of invulnerability so they can soak up bullets that were still flying at them (only if your faction menu is set NOT to attack incapacitated people).

Fire will also properly stop at walls now, no matter which tile those walls are built upon. It does make very large fires a bit more taxing on the CPU, though. Nothing dramatic, but it was the reason why it didn't work that way before. Speaking of fire, sand crabs are now immune so they stop burning themselves to death.

Oh, fun little fact, animals now get an unique name (well, from a list) the first time they get adopted by a survivor. Mutants also have their own name generator.

And as usual, I also included many new UI improvements and fixed a bunch of bugs.

[h2]Full Changelog[/h2]

• AI: Hospital patients will no longer starve themselves if a doctor doesn't come to visit for a long time
  
• AI: Fighters under your control are better at not shooting at incapacitated targets (if incapacitate is set in faction menu)
  
• AI: Survivors can detect when they can no longer pickup something from storage and will cancel their movement instead of traveling all the distance
  
• Balance: Strengthened all active factions and increased their maximum range
  
• Balance: Factions' main HQ have a minimal amount of enemies to kill an exploit where it would be way too easy to attack them in manual combat
  
• Balance: Tweaked event frequency (reduced cough, increased some raiders, removed some technology gating for late game raids)
  
• Balance: Fire will stop at walls, independently of the type of tile it's built upon
  
• Balance: Incapacitated people, assuming your faction settings are set to keep them alive, get a few seconds of invulnerability after going down
  
• Balance: Slightly reduced the time it takes to boil water at camp fire
  
• Balance: Sand crabs are now immune to fire damage, because they really need to for their own sake
  
• Balance: Most animals/people yield more bones when butchered and/or dying
  
• Content: New unique "Rise Of The Mutants" scenario, see post for details
  
• Content: Unique name generator for mutants
  
• Content: Bone equipment (bone axe, club, armor and face mask)
  
• Content: Added recipes to armor forge and crafting station for bone weapons (mutant scenario only)
  
• Content: Lot of additional content added to the mutant scenario only
  
• Content: Pets get baptized the first time they get adopted by a settler (only apply to newly created animals if loading from pre update save)
  
• Engine: Many improvements to the interactive travel event system, allowing for much more complex quests to be built
  
• Graphics: Additional leader faces for some of the factions
  
• Graphics: Reduced the scale of survivors' footprints to be more on par with their actual size
  
• Modding: Added "EventOnDiscovery" (string) field to tech files, will automatically launch the specified game event whenever the tech is discovered/researched
  
• Modding: Ability for scenarios to override "happy" and "depressed" traits (see mutant scenario for all the new/recent scenario related features)
  
• Modding: Added "EventTextDump" game event type, does pretty much what's written on the tin (seen events/scen_rotm_mutagen for example)
  
• Modding: Travel events can set, increment, decrement and test global and persistant variables (GetVar Validator, SetVar/IncVar/DecVar Effects)
  
• Modding: Added MinHostileCount to POI files (defines a minimal number of opponents in manual combat mode, assuming there is actual any opposition)
  
• Modding: Footprint scale is moddable
  
• UI: Minor tweak to faction list, longer descriptions, font the same size as the rest of the UI.
  
• UI: More space in Population menu for settlers' names (so long names don't wrap into the text)
  
• UI: Made sure the recruitment menu cannot be canceled by a misclick outside of it
  
• UI: Added "required techs" to individual tech info panels/encyclopedia entries
  
• UI: Minor improvements to the UI of the interactive travel events' menu
  
• UI: Animal Nursery's menu got improved, species field can be clicked for info, and the egg selector menu got a facelift
  
• UI: Added "Recruit All" button to recruit menu
  
• UI: More minor changes not worth bloating a changelog with
  
• ProcGen: Village maps can feature some surface mountains
  
• Steam: Replaced the pictures of many of the older achievements
  
• Steam: Added achievement for completing the 'Rise of the Mutants' storyline
  
• Fixed: After loading a save, wild plants marked for deletion wouldn't be highlighted in red like they should (0.8.6.0 regression bug)
  
• Fixed: Last stage of pandemonium would turn people into the hostile faction instead of the infected one
  
• Fixed: Text being cut in farms' crop selection panel
  
• Fixed: Sound effects coming from other layers would still be played
  
• Fixed: A few of the debris/clutter already on the map could still be used by your survivors which goes against lore and gameplay
  
• Fixed: Enemies waiting in ambush in building wouldn't fight back against anyone but the player
  
• Fixed: Apple trees are invisible for a few days after being planted
  
• Fixed: Fauna had a tendency to stare forever at doors they encounter (since 0.8.6.2)
  
• Fixed: Plants would die in pastures and in other zone types where this effect wasn't intended (only apply to new zones if continuing from old save)
  
• Fixed: (modding) Interactive event validators for Tech and NoTech were non functional
  
• Fixed: (modding) Issue with traits causing npc to morph into another one if KeepTrait is not set
  
• Fixed: Doors would "push" people who stay on the tile for too long, which could lead to unwanted teleportation
  
• Fixed: Ordering soldiers to move on a tile with a door wasn't working as it should
  
• Fixed: Recruited prisoners wouldn't have the law and job settings applied
  
• Fixed: Minor rendering issue with doors copied using the shortcut

One day, I will remember to never ever write something about the lack of bugs or crash in an update :)

Anyway, this small update fixes a crash with manual battles, which was a side effect on the recent optimizations. It also fixes several minor problems with the AI which when combined on a struggling base could lead to a death spiral.

Cheers.

[h2]Full Changelog[/h2]

• AI: Starving settlers who are cooking something can no longer have this task interrupted by any other AI process
  
• AI: Tweaked logic to make sure that someone with 0 work ethics will still do something productive, sometimes
  
• Balance: Depressed trait no longer cancel the ability to do expeditions as it was sorta confusing
  
• Fixed: Negative value inventory
  
• Fixed: Crash in manual combat expeditions (regression bug due to optimization pass)
  
• Fixed: Minor problem with factory logic due to saturday's optimization pass
  
• Fixed: When food is lacking and people are looking for stuff on the ground, they would incorrectly identify fodder as proper food, throwing their AI in a disarray
  
• Fixed: Some tests done when looking to grab something left on the ground wouldn't check if the tile is accessible or not

Hey there!

Here's the first update for 0.8.6. This time I heavily focused on improving performances, especially during raids. It still includes the usual batch of fixes and UI improvements. Full changelog at the end, but I really want to mention the important bits :)

[h2]Optimization Pass[/h2]

While the game's performances are, in general, very good. There was still a couple cases where they would go down significantly during very large enemy raids. Even more so when your base is fully walled off while a raid is ongoing, in that case, the game would have frequent micro-freezes.



While, obviously, it depends on your CPU (and the map size to some limited extent), the game can now happily deal with more than 200 raiders at a time without slowdowns or freezes, no matter if the base is walled-off or not. Such numbers being way beyond what you'd normally encounter in a non modded game, I'm pretty satisfied.

The improvements are not limited to the raids. People who love mega-bases with 150+ survivors will enjoy slightly better performances. Map generation is faster, especially on maps with many underground layers. Save-games are smaller and take less time to process. Finally, the game's memory footprint has also been reduced.

[h2]UI and Fixes[/h2]

The recently introduced keyboard shortcut to c[o]py stuff you have already built is better at its job. Now if you try to copy a factory, the copy will have the same queued recipes and if you copy a depot, the new one will have the same settings.



The "new game" menu also got larger, nice title images for the scenarios.

Oh, there's a bug fix I want to mention as it might be related to some comments I received. It's apparently quite old. I never noticed it but I can see why it would affect the base of new players.

Basically, there was a logic issue in the crafting stations, if the base has resources for only one instance of a given recipe and those resources are not close-by, the station could be tricked into thinking that there's no longer enough resources when the worker is gathering them. It would then cancel the order, and loop to the next item in the queue if any. Anyway, this should be fixed.

And for the price of the silliest bugfix in a while. Apparently, it was possible for a dead body to go around doing jobs, hanging out at the lounge and so on. It could happen when someone dies of negative traits (like blood loss) while being in the hospital. The dead will stay dead now :)

[h2]Full Changelog[/h2]

• AI: Raiders no longer look like they are all acting in perfect sync thanks to the randomization of the time they stay idle
  
• Balance: Slightly reduced at which rate small plants reproduce (to reduce the amount of "gardening")
  
• Balance: Increased healing rate of doctors
  
• Content: New expedition event: mutant mercenaries which can be recruited
  
• Engine: Massively improved performances in raids when the player base is fully walled off
  
• Engine: Further improved performances during raids in general
  
• Engine: Increased map generation speed, especially on maps with many underground layers
  
• Engine: Reduced savegames size and increased save speed
  
• Engine: Reduced memory consumption, especially in large/deep maps
  
• Engine: Additional performance tweaks, because why not
  
• Modding: Added "DefaultFaction" field to factions, if set to false, this faction won't be loaded unless specified by a scenario
  
• Modding: Added "AllowedFactions" (faction id list) to scenario files, to replace the factions with a "DefaultFaction" flag by a list of the modder's making
  
• Modding: Added "BlackListID" in Scenario (Events sub section) files. It works like BlackListTag but is used to blacklist events by their filename
  
• Modding: Added "DisableTech" to Scenario files, prevents techs in the list from being researched or looted
  
• Modding: Added "LootSurvivor" to Scenario files, overrides the default npc file who "looting" a POI for survivors
  
• Modding: Clutters' PlantData field can be accessed in LUA
  
• UI: The shortcut to copy furniture will also copy the settings of the depot or factory if one is to be copied
  
• UI: Added Mo[v]e shortcut to move selected/hovered furniture around
  
• UI: Sorted recycling bench recipes by alphabetical order
  
• UI: Made scenario selection screen prettier with larger title images
  
• Fixed: In dev/creative mode, the placement of objects you haven't the tech for was disabled (regression bug in 0.8.6)
  
• Fixed: Exploit where making a tile incompatible with a wild tree could accelerate its growth, trees on the wrong tiles will just self delete after a while now
  
• Fixed: Wild trees wouldn't take roofs into consideration
  
• Fixed: There was still a room in the starting underground bunker which could spawn with a broken lamp
  
• Fixed: If someone dies as a hospital patient, they could enter some weird zombie state where the dead body would keep doing jobs for a while
  
• Fixed: Planted trees could be moved
  
• Fixed: The game wouldn't "untag" tiles after removal, which could cause constructed tiles to be removed by error after loading a save
  
• Fixed: Logic issue with recycling and crafting stations: if there's resources for only one instance of a recipe, it might not complete if they are too far away
  
• Fixed: Already discovered technology could be looted multiple times from map locations (wasn't breaking anything but was annoying)
  
• Fixed: Doors on the map (already placed ones) could be tagged as "Debris" which could interfere with some of the game's logic
  
• Fixed: Misc minor issues

Welcome to After The Collapse 0.8.6: Nature's Wrath.

I know I said this update would be smaller than usual, while it's still technically true it's not by much. As usual, we'll only go over the major improvements and changes. The full changelog is at the end of this article.

(source on the official website)

[h2]TL;DR[/h2]

• Fire is a thing now (which we're using extensively)
  
• Cycle of nature, trees and plants grow, multiply and die over time
  
• Massive performance boost during large raids and within very large bases
  
• New map generator and new biomes
  
• Improved combat AI script, Extensive balance, UI and bug fixing update

[h2]Fire[/h2]
So, fire is a thing now. Not just the flamethrower effect, but actual fire that will propagate over tiles as long as there's fuel to get it running. It's not something you'll encounter very often, but it can catch you by surprise. It can appear during heat waves when plants can catch fire, when using the flamethrower, the RPG launcher or other energy weapons.



Survivors (and prisoners) will automatically try to extinguish nearby visible fires. When in doubt, you can switch to combat mode and order your guys to "attack" the fire to get it under control. In the same spirit, rainy weather patterns will help by dousing the flames.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Survivors are generally pretty good at avoiding tiles on fire. But when trying to extinguish it or when getting trapped, they might get 1st to 3rd degree burns. First degree burns have very little impact and will heal on their own after a couple hours. 2nd degree burns are more detrimental and will need antiseptic to get cured. 3rd degree burns will make your survivors pretty miserable and will need antibiotics to get cured. Exoskeletons and fire vests will protect your survivors against those effects.

Tiles on fire apply fire damage over time to everything (that can burn) standing on said tiles. Tiles maxed out of fire intensity will "jump" to an adjacent tile with something it can use as a fuel source. In practice, dense forests with a lot of vegetation might get wiped out without your intervention. Constructed tiles (like marble or cement) are pretty much fireproof, but a house built on wood foundations will burn very quickly.

[h2]Cycle of Nature[/h2]
Until now, trees would just "spawn" fully grown every month at midnight according to some arcane formula. It was a supposedly temporary hack implemented like 2 years ago. It's time to let it go. Now, each plant is growing from a "sprout" to an "old" stage, visibly changing over time. They also reproduce according to rules set in their data files. Different tree "species" grow on different tiles and at different rates: for instance the newly introduced palm trees grow on sandy and ground tiles while standard trees will grow on the several variants of the grassy tiles.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The change is not just graphical, younger trees will give a lot less resources than fully grown ones when cut down. You can also collect sprouts and plant them to generate your own forests. Last but not least, I'm introducing the first wild tree you can use as a "factory". By exploring farms or dealing with traders, you'll find apples you can plant to grow an apple tree. Apple trees, once fully grown work as seasonal (15 days on/off cycle) self-replicating food production factories. You can make cider or pies out of the collected apples. Both item giving happy thoughts to your survivors when consumed.

All the trees you can plant yourself are in the new "Nature" tab of the building menu. Make sure you plant them on the proper tile type (a little guess work is needed), otherwise they will die off quickly.

Note that the cycle of nature is very slow, it takes a total of 50 days for a standard tree to grow from "sprout" to "dead". And within that time it might spawn a few new trees. On the other side of the spectrum, bushes grow & die in a few weeks, spawning as many children as they can within their limitations. I tried to keep it relatively on par with previous versions when it comes to forest density and wood availability but given how different the system is, it's something that will probably need some tuning over time.

Of course, all of this can be modded, new plant species can be implemented and existing ones altered.

[h2]Combat & Performances[/h2]
I was technically supposed to add more buildings for the expedition manual combat encounters, that didn't happen as I got sucked into a vortex of fixing several low level problems with the combat AI and given the end result, it was for the best. I rewrote the whole AI logic for what's basically the "attack" order. Simply put, performances in large raids are about 10 to 20 times better. You can have 100 hostile raiders on the map without suffering from (too noticeable) slowdowns now.

Additionally the attack script is a lot better at what it does. Hostiles should be a hell lot better at understanding what they can attack, what they can't and what door they should break to get their ways. It's literally night & day in terms of performances and efficiency. It's not perfect of course, and I'm sure that the old script was covering a couple edge cases this one ain't yet, but on average it's definitely a lot better.

The optimizations are not limited to combat encounters either, the game's performances are a lot less tied to the size of the map you're playing on. Deletion/Addition of path-blocking items on gigantic maps no longer trigger a small slow down. Same goes with your own population and previously very CPU intensive calculations are a lot smoother now. I've seen save-games with 120+ survivors running at barely below 60fps.

[h2]Balance Pass[/h2]
There's a couple balance changes worth talking about.

Firstly, the Food/Drink consumption difficulty settings work differently. Instead of making your survivor eat more often, it changes how efficient is the food. At the highest difficulty level, a settler will need to grab 2 meals instead of one to achieve the same result. The big difference being that it won't impact the base's productivity nearly as badly. It makes those settings a lot more viable. Given how common "too much food" is a complaint from the more experienced players, I encourage you to experiment with it.

Secondly, a new "World Map Loot" setting has been added to the difficulty settings. It does what it says on the tin, and alters how much loot is available in the world map. The default value correspond to roughly half of what was previously available. The rational behind the change is that there was too much loot in the world, making the cheap generic loot run pretty pointless compared to the more costly focused one.

[h2]Procedural Generation[/h2]
I added desert variants of the Riverlands and Lakes biomes, coming with the new palm trees. Those biomes are also easier to spot on the world map, as they'll have a small body of water on the tile.



I also added a new world generator: Rocky Desert, taking advantage of those new biomes.

[h2]User Interface[/h2]
Here's the highlights.

First, a long overdue change. I rewrote the water collecting barrel's menu entirely. It looks and works like a standard factory menu now. You can set limits to how much dirty water you want to collect, change priority, the usual. In the same spirit, all lamps (no matter if normal or grow lamps) can be toggled on/off from their respective menus.



Secondly, thanks to a very good suggestion from BallC, I've implemented a new keyboard shortcut to c[o]py whatever object your mouse is hovering, ready to be build. Works with walls, furniture, crafting stations, doesn't matter. You can change the shortcut in the settings, as usual.

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]
I don't normally list bug fixes in the articles, but I'm happy to tell the old guard that I fixed 2 of the oldest bugs in the game. Namely, a build order would complete but the target building wouldn't be created and the resources would still be consumed. It was as rare as it was annoying, but it's finally over. Same goes with a bug where an animal or human would still use a recently deleted stair.

That's on top of 30 other fixes ranging from incredibly minor to sorta annoying.

[h2]Savegame & Mod Compatibility[/h2]
There's no major change to modding only additions. As such, mods should work as usual.

This version is technically compatible with saves dating from 0.8.3 and over, however plants in existing saves won't grow or multiply until you start a new game.

[h2]Closing Words[/h2]
This version is pretty solid. Handling large fires and thousands of plants on very large maps was kind of a challenge, but I am very happy with the results, performances have never been that good and the game is very stable. No doubt I will be proven wrong by someone within a few days, but that's what hot-patches are for. You can expect a few small weekly patches before the next large update as there's still some features and improvements I'd like to make.

[h2]Hotpatch 1[/h2]

• Fixed: Problem with pickup sub-job causing water collectors and some other systems not to work properly

[h2]Full Changelog[/h2]

• AI: People will generally try to navigate around the fires when possible
  
• AI: RaiderAI and attack jobs have been rewritten, much faster and slightly better at what they do
  
• AI: Melee combatants should get less confused by inaccessible ranged enemies (like turret walled off by barbed wire)
  
• AI: Settlers and prisoners will try to extinguish fires around them
  
• Balance: Exoskeleton type armors negate the "Heavy Equipment" debuff
  
• Balance: Food and Drink consumption difficulty settings alter how efficient are meals instead of modifying how often people have to eat/drink
  
• Balance: Default values for "Loot Left" in world map locations have been tuned down significantly
  
• Balance: Heavily encumbered survivors (carrying a lot of stuff) move a bit slower. This can be counter-balanced with a high Hauling skill
  
• Balance: Due to the recent performance boost, you'll keep receiving new settler events organically until your reach 50 people, instead of 40
  
• Balance: Game starts with preset settings for cattle (auto milk, collect egg...)
  
• Balance: Slightly reduced max loot from 1x1 "large rocks" and full grown trees
  
• Balance: Reduced direct damage of flamethrowers (to balance out the additional damage from flames)
  
• Content: Fire has been added. It can spread over the terrain, objects and people. Praise Zorg!
  
• Content: Flamethrowers, RPG/grenade launchers and similar weapons will cause things they hit to catch fire
  
• Content: Heat waves will occasionally cause a tree/plant to catch fire
  
• Content: Rain helps against fire
  
• Content: Attacking a fire in combat mode will order people to extinguish it, which is useful when a fire starts way outside the base
  
• Content: Added World Loot setting to the difficulty settings, alters the quantity of loot in the world map
  
• Content: Scorpions can be farmed for their poison (like spiders)
  
• Content: Trees and plants grow over time replacing the monthly spawn of full grown trees
  
• Content: Palm trees can be found in arid and new sandy biomes
  
• Content: Fires, on top of the HP damage will cause different levels of the new "burnt" medical condition
  
• Content: Second degree burns can be cured with disinfectant, 3rd degree burns require antibiotics
  
• Content: Exoskeleton and fire vest protect from heavy burns
  
• Content: Trees can be planted (by harvesting or buying sprouts/saplings). They will die if not placed in a proper terrain, though
  
• Content: Added apple trees and apples. Apple trees alternate between 15 days of fruits production and 15 days of downtime
  
• Content: Apples can be used to make apple pie (food & mood bonus) at a kitchen and cider (drink & mood bonus) at a still
  
• Engine: Massive performance boost when large amounts of raiders/zombies are attacking your base
  
• Engine: General performance boost in bases with large population and in large maps
  
• Engine: Other minor code and performance optimizations
  
• Engine: Added "MinGameSpeed" & "MaxGameSpeed" fields to settings.json (modifying those values past the default ones is
• NOT* officially supported)
  
• Graphics: The more fires on screen, the more the ambiant lighting will move toward red (mostly visible by night or underground)
  
• Graphics: River and lake type biome tiles on the worldmap have a small amount of water making them easier to spot
  
• Graphics: Small plants & bushes become brown when they are about to die
  
• Modding: Added "GenerateFire" (true/false) to weapon files, determines if a weapon will causes fires whenever it hits something
  
• Modding: Added "SpawnFireRate" (float) to weather files: if set to > 0, it will spawn fire over a plant. 1 is every hour, 2 every 30 minutes, 0.5 would be every 2h
  
• Modding: Added "SpawnFireChance" (float) to weather files: likelihood of the spawn fire above to be successful
  
• Modding: Added "DisableDeathMessage" (true/false) to NPC files, allows to disable the message posted when said NPC dies
  
• Modding: Added "PlantData" folder to define wild plant/tree species and added "PlantData" field to clutter data files (see clutter/plant_* files)
  
• Modding: Added "RemoveTraits" field to traits: when trait applied, remove all existing traits in this list (while OppositeOf offers protection but doesn't remove)
  
• Modding: Data validator now checks for a lot more potential errors (notably with traits)
  
• ProcGen: New desertic/sandy variants of the riverland and lake biomes
  
• ProcGen: New world map generator (desertic world which is definitely not New Vegas themed, nope)
  
• ProcGen: Different worlds have different modifiers for vegetation and mountain quantities (Eden has more trees, desert world has more mountains)
  
• ProcGen: Giant mushrooms can appear in more underground biomes
  
• Settings: The "Antialiasing" graphical setting has been removed (it was not functional and the game already has basic AA)
  
• Settings: Added "Higher Luminosity" accessibility checkbox to graphical options (makes night & caverns a LOT less dark)
  
• Sound: Fires produce an ambient sound effect (volume varying with intensity)
  
• UI: World map is accessible from Combat UI (both button & shortcut) and going back to base from map will restore the correct UI mode
  
• UI: The menu to select a person for a room will show people who need one first
  
• UI: Added search bar to the encyclopedia's item screens
  
• UI: Clicking "Items" (without selecting a sub category) in encyclopedia will open a searchable list of
• all* items
  
• UI: All lamps (connected grow lamps, normal lamps) can be toggle on/off
  
• UI: Skill info added to single recipe crafting stations
  
• UI: Overhauled the water collector menu (works the same as the factory menu, also prettier)
  
• UI: Pharmacy moved to utility section and camp fire moved to crafting section of the build menu (makes more sense)
  
• UI: Added game log message when the base is revealed (basically when you build a stair to the surface from your underground bunker)
  
• UI: Added keyboard shortcut to make a c[o]py of the selected furniture, crafting station or wall (shortcut can be changed in game settings)
  
• UI: Added "Nature" tab to build menu (for the new and future buildable trees)
  
• Fixed: Some minor issues with the way people in expeditions were stored in memory
  
• Fixed: It was technically possible (not sure in practice) for seeds/crops to get stuck inside a farm without being used
  
• Fixed: Rain droplet quantity wasn't consistent with zoom level, roofs also made it inconsistent
  
• Fixed: The item category dropdown in the Stocks menu was cut short by the menu's border
  
• Fixed: Exo skeleton armors/helmets disassembling recipe had a typo resulting in them giving out less items than expected
  
• Fixed: Floor removal jobs aren't saved when saving/loading a game
  
• Fixed: The expedition vehicles could, incorrectly, be selected in the new game setup screen
  
• Fixed: Giant spider queen spawning as male
  
• Fixed: Job templates are not applied to people being made prisoners, again (I apparently tried to apply cattle settings to them instead, oops)
  
• Fixed: In manual expedition battles, mood and need debuffs for lack of bed and other social stuff were still applied
  
• Fixed: Disabled needs would still count toward mood calculations (this was affecting prisoners the most)
  
• Fixed: In the New Game menu, switching to/from the inventory panel would reset the player's selection
  
• Fixed: In very rare occasions, a build job wouldn't spawn the designated building on completion
  
• Fixed: If no one is coming to take care of a knocked out prisoner, they might end up waking up and still hold their weapons
  
• Fixed: A rare case where a raider could try to attack something that cannot take damage (stairs and such)
  
• Fixed: Multiple minor issues with pathing logic which caused the game to query the pathfinder more often than necessary
  
• Fixed: Cattle's newborns could escape confinement on birth by spawning a bit too far away. they'll spawn on their mother's tile now
  
• Fixed: If a pregnant cattle was in a fully walled off 1x1 pasture, it could cause a crash on baby birth
  
• Fixed: If no player built bed are available, and the map has bedrolls, settlers would (incorrectly) use them
  
• Fixed: Switching layer while the game is paused wouldn't update the ambient lighting
  
• Fixed: Traps could be moved around from the clutter menu (which wasn't the intended effect)
  
• Fixed: Tribal beds would upgrade directly to beds instead of upgrading to sleeping bags
  
• Fixed: Floors can be laid multiple times in the same space
  
• Fixed: On new game, decay was applied to the starting underground bunker which could lead to broken lamps and such
  
• Fixed: Rain collectors' job was prioritized over all other jobs (very old "optimization" that is now hurting more than it's helping)
  
• Fixed: Stair deletion wasn't taken in consideration for pathing purpose for a while, allowing mobs/people to use recently deleted stairs
  
• Fixed: Disassembling skill wasn't taken into consideration when razing some of the structures
  
• Fixed: Starting a second game after one that was going for long while could prevent weather from changing properly
  
• Fixed: Player's underground base would get automatically revealed when loading a savegame
  
• Fixed: Inconsistency between max game speed set by keyboard shortcut and by the UI buttons
  
• Fixed: Equipment supposed to protect from sickness/wounds could also (incorrectly) cure them whenever used
  

Hi,

After our five weeks of weekly patches, it's time to go for a proper devlog. The next large update will be smaller in scope than 0.8.5 (not every update can have a 120+ item long changelog), but it's still going to add a few new fun toys for you to play with.

Beside adding & fixing stuff regarding the expeditions, questlines and buildings, it will add fire (which can spread), proper growth for wild trees and plants, and a few more weather and nature related things.

[h2]Fire[/h2]

Last week, I've mostly been playing with fire. If I recall correctly, it was an early development promise too, so one of the few remaining checkboxes is being ticked. I could write 10 paragraphs about fire propagation and how well it's modeled, but in reality, it seems that starting fires IRL for game development purpose is against the law. I had to make do with an approximation.

Here's a video of the very much "work-in-progress" result:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The video is unedited and a bit too long. Skip to 30 seconds before the end when it gets boring so you can see the new flame-thrower in all it's glory. The graphical rendering of the fire is still subpar. I will try to find better animations and make better particle systems for it. Don't hold your breath, it's not going to be super nice looking either. I'd rather save frames than waste CPU cycles on something over complicated.

Anyway, yes, fire will be a thing. It won't be very common, and it is possible to plan around it. Stone walls and constructed floors (except wood ones) will keep you relatively safe. And it won't spread without something that can burn on the adjacent tiles. It will also add a drawback to the overpowered flamethrowers, balancing them out a bit without making them boring. Heat waves might also cause some trees to catch fire occasionally, and there's a rare late game event, called "wall of flames" which will be, I reckon, subject of much hate in the future. Oh, and yep, it's likely that your electric grid might cause a few fires too, maybe :)

Rain will of course work against fires, and your settlers will do their best to avoid walking in flames and extinguish them (that, I have yet to implement in the internal build). It's not out the question that I add more wacky (optional) weather patterns taking advantage of the fire.

There's also a whole thing about 1st, 2rd, 3rd degree burns that is being added, but I will keep that for the release post.

[h2]Nature's Cycle[/h2]

You might have wondered why trees keep "staying here" after you razed them. The reality is that every month, more trees will spawn next to existing ones, fully grown, at midnight. It is an old, quickly written "hack" to get that done. It's time to replace it by something a bit more interesting.

I am going to introduce a simple growth system for bushes, plants and trees. The general idea is to have them grow gradually in a manageable fashion and go through different stages. It should even be possible to have different species of trees growing under different conditions. We could have a desert bound cactus and more generic trees elsewhere. Same goes for the giant mushrooms in the rare underground biomes. All of this being moddable, of course.

There are performances concerns, with trees in the thousands on some maps, it's not efficient to have each plant running it's own individual script. Instead I'll use a more top down approach with a daily "nature" update, probably placed just before the autosave event to make the update un-noticeable, even on extremely large maps. I'm not really worried, but it'll need some brainstorming nonetheless. :)

[h2]Expeditions[/h2]

Expeditions are in a pretty good place, but there's always more stuff to do. I will likely add more building/maps for some of the locations which are currently using the fallback default layout. It's quite time consuming, especially for a feature few people are really using, so it's something I do gradually.

I'll also try to see if I can reasonably make AI factions run their own expeditions. I mean they technically do, but it's entirely abstracted. The idea would be to allow you to see potential attacks against your production centers before they happen. And optionally be able to intercept them with your own expeditions.

I'm also in the process of figuring how to balance the manual and the automatic combat methods so they don't feel like being completely different difficulty levels.

[h2]Misc.  Stuff[/h2]

With this version being focused on smaller additions, it's not going to take nearly as long as for the 0.8.5 release. I will continue to go over the various threads/posts to implement requested features, tweak the UI, etc. By now, you probably know the drill, I'm not going to list every single little item here. Fire and the nature cycle are the big announcements.

Anyway, that's all I have to show for now. More will come soon. :)

Cheers!