After the Collapse News

This is just a small maintenance patch. It fixes a few problems reported on the Discord channel. I also "secured" the part of the code where the rare few remaining crashes are encountered, meaning that if a settler's job/order encounters an error, the game will try to continue as normal while posting a message.


Oh, and the devlog for 0.8.6 will be published in a couple hours, tops.

[h2]Changelog[/h2]

• Engine: Secured the job/order system to prevent crashes when an error happens
  
• Fixed: Issue where the expedition car wouldn't exit map after loading a save (made at a specific moment)
  
• Fixed: Potential crash with Farming and DisposeBody jobs

Hello!

Well, this 5th weekly patch is going to be shorter than his predecessors. I can't say it has been a good week between wasting time on a feature I can't possibly implement in such a timeframe, a sudden heat-wave and personal family matters I had to attend to. Can't win them all, I guess.

This doesn't change much, though. Outside of the possible "emergency" hot-patches (if someone manages to crash the game or find a problematic bug that's easy to fix), I am going to switch gear toward the next major update. A devlog explaining what's planned will be posted during the coming week.

As usual, full changelog at the end, previous save-games (0.8.3+) and mods are compatible. Let's get to the notable improvements:

[h2]Medical Tweaks[/h2]

The last update to the medical system had some unintended side effects, like people failing at applying simple bandages way too often. This is fixed.

The new system is a LOT more generous than the 0.8.5.4 system where every item was rolling 1000 against the skill unless the medical skill was over 600. It was very dumb.

Now, each medical consumable has an individual "difficulty" rating. This rating is rolled against the doctor's medical skill. For instance, a disinfectant has a 250 difficulty: A roll between 0 and 250 is done, if medical skill is higher than this value, the item does its thing, if not, it's wasted and the doctor will need another one.

This only apply to Medical consumable. It's also applied when using the pharmacy.

[h2]Encyclopedia[/h2]

I made the main page nicer to look at by moving the game tips to their own article.



I also added 3 comparison pages for armors, headgear and weapons. Each one of those displays a table listing all the items in the related category, making stats comparison a lot easier.



I still need to work on those pages a bit, so you can filter out things you settlers can't get (claws and such) or sort the items by a particular bit of info.

[h2]User Interface[/h2]

I added some much needed info to the Faction Summary menu including barrack, private bed, and prison cell occupancy info. It also lists your current research (it's clickable and will open relevant menu), and tells you if your base is revealed to the outside world or not (which is mostly useful when starting underground).



The user interface should be much better at handling mouse scrolling as well. For instance, the depot menu should behave a lot better: it will scroll whichever list your mouse is currently hovering. It's not perfect and never will be as the UI middle ware ain't very good at dealing with mouse scroll and I have to fight it every step of the way, but it's a noticeable improvement compared to before.

There are a couple more tweaks but nothing major.

[h2]Full Changelog[/h2]

• Balance: Medical items (antibiotics, bandages...) have a difficulty rating, some are easier to use than others (info added to encyclopedia)
  
• Balance: Changed the way medical skill check is passed: an item with a 250 difficulty will roll(250) against medical skill instead of doing a roll(1000)
  
• Modding: Added "MedicalDifficulty" field to consumable (default = 0), only used on medical item; a failed roll(MedicalDifficulty) vs Skill.Medical = item wasted
  
• UI: Faction summary screen indicates detailed private room, barrack and prison cell information
  
• UI: Faction summary screen indicates current research,and if the outpost is revealed to the outside world + reorganized checkboxes
  
• UI: When an AI faction conquers a POI, clicking on the message will center map on target
  
• UI: Skill/Job in settler info menu is sorted alphabetically
  
• UI: Job auto settings in Faction menu are sorted alphabetically (new game only)
  
• UI: Reorganized encyclopedia main page and moved tips to their own category
  
• UI: Added weapon, headgear and armor comparison pages to the encyclopedia
  
• Fixed: No warning when trying to save a depot preset without giving it a name
  
• Fixed: Mouse scroll wasnt consistantly working in all menus
  
• Fixed: Exploit where using the pharmacy was bypassing the medical skill check
  

Hey!

Here's the 4th weekly patch for the 0.8.5 update. This time we have two new requested features, a bunch of balance changes, and the usual bug killing pass. Expect another one next week, followed by a devlog about the next proper update.

Before we start, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who've sent proper bug reports and feedback to the forums, discord or even by email. I don't say it nearly often enough but taking time out of your day to contribute to the game is incredibly nice and helpful. ATC wouldn't be anywhere close to what it is now without your help. So, again, thank you very much, all of you!

Anyway, full changelog at the end, previous save-games (0.8.3+) and mods are compatible. Let's get to the notable improvements:

[h2]Flee From Expedition Battles[/h2]

As promised, the ability to flee from a manual combat encounter (during expeditions) has been added. As shown in the screenshot, a "white flag" button replaces the usual green/red fist during those sequences.



You can press the button at any time. However, it's not entirely free. Any survivor with less than a total of 50% HP left has to roll against their movement speed statistic (if someone has 60 speed stats, they have 60% chances to flee unharmed). If the roll fails, they will either be killed or receive a random amount of HP damage (which might also kill them if their health is very low).

While I'm still talking about expedition battles. Yes, I am fully aware that the auto and manual battles are not scaled; Generally speaking, auto battles are way more likely to be a win (without even taking damage). This will be addressed very soon.

[h2]General Storage Menu[/h2]

This is one of the oldest menus in the game. It probably hasn't been updated since v0.6. Long story short, a makeover was long overdue. It's now, like many other menus, multi tabbed.

We have a summary page which details the essentials, like food and fodder (separately, yay!), water & dirty water (again, separate) and all the basic early game resources. Please note that the "total storage" gauge can be misleading: it's not because your total storage space is 40% full that you can still store a specific item. It all depends on your individual depots' settings.



Then we have the "containers" tab, which is basically the old menu, except that mouse scrolling works a lot better.



And then we have several tabs for specific subjects: the "armory" listing all your weapons, armors, ammo and artifacts; the "pantry" detailing all your food; the "resources" listing all basic, manufactured and fuel items. I might (or not) add tabs for the non covered categories later. (yes, I am aware those screenshots don't have the resource tab, but it's in the game, screenshots are just a bit old)



More importantly, all those additional tabs are mod friendly, and will list everything you have instead of picking from a pre-selected list of items from the main game. Before you ask: yes, you can click any item in the list to display their encyclopedia info screen.

[h2]Balance[/h2]

In my unending quest to make skills more relevant:

- People with a below average Medical skill have a chance (a roll(1000) against medical skill) to fail when using a medical item to fix a wound or illness. On failure, the item will be wasted and a new one will be necessary. To keep things relatively friendly, the roll doesn't happen when the medical skill is over 600. Past that point, this skill only influences the pace at which injuries are healed. And yes, I know this 600 threshold should depend on the item, It will likely be a thing in the near future.

- The prison guard skill has been fleshed out. Until now, only the social stat was taken into account when chatting with prisoners (or trying to convince them to join the settlement). Now it's 2/3 this skill and 1/3 social stat. Each interaction, positive or negative, with a prisoner will increase the prison guard skill. Successful ones giving more skill points than failures, of course.

Also, the recently implemented traps (spike and fall traps) got nerfed. Sentient enemies (pretty much anything on 2 legs) have a chance to "dodge" traps now. The dodge chance depends on the "Perception" stat of whoever triggers it. The more modern the item, the lowest the dodge chance. Dodged traps are still triggered and will need to be reloaded. Note that this can be modded (both difficulty and stat being tested). The new info is included in the trap's right click / encyclopedia menu. Robots and animals will still trigger traps 100% of the time.

[h2]Savegame and Mod Compatibility[/h2]

As I said at the beginning, it's compatible, but there's one detail I need to address. While it's not game breaking by any stretch of the imagination, it's still worth mentioning.

One of the bug fixes in this version is:

• Fixed: Clicking "Enable All" button on a depot would allow items that the depot is not supposed to accept (eggs in a non egg container)

Depots now work as expected. However, if you've clicked those buttons on existing depots, especially if you're using one of Mack's modded large depots dedicated to a specific item type (or my base game egg container) in a save-games, well, those depots won't fix themselves. The easiest way is to click "Disable All" then "Enable All" to reset them.

It's still a very minor problem. If you haven't noticed anything wrong, it's probably because you don't need to change anything. But if you're wondering why "this depot which can only accept this item type" is full with "that other item type", well, you might want to reset it.

[h2]Full Changelog[/h2]

• Balance: Traps have a chance to fail (depending on trap, it tests an enemy stats against a value, info in trap's info screen)
  
• Balance: People with a low medical skill have a chance to waste a medical consumable without fixing the wound/illness they were trying to fix
  
• Balance: The Prison Guard skill now influences the likelihood of increasing compliance on prisoners, and skill increases with prisoner interactions
  
• Content: Added ability to retreat from manual combat (during expeditions)
  
• Content: Added Prison Guard former job for settlers (police and soldier also influence this skill)
  
• UI: New General Storage menu, replacing what's likely the oldest menu in the game by something a hell lot more useful and prettier
  
• UI: Added more info about traps in their right click info menu (detection, reload info)
  
• Sound: 3 more background music tracks
  
• Sound: All music tracks should now be at roughly the same volume level
  
• Fixed: Having the garage menu open when it's being destroyed by something hostile could cause a crash
  
• Fixed: Items not marked as "CanBeHit" could still receive combat damage or be considered valid attack targets (which is what caused the bug above)
  
• Fixed: Long gauges / progress bars had a small black "zone" on their right side
  
• Fixed: Not all menus would check if their associated object is still active, which could potentially lead to a crash if destroyed by 3rd party (enemies, explosion)
  
• Fixed: Exploit where pasting a factory queue wouldn't always reset the progress properly
  
• Fixed: Doctors wouldn't consume the items they use to treat someone (regression bug from a while back)
  
• Fixed: Clicking "Enable All" button on a depot would allow items that the depot is not supposed to accept (eggs in a non egg container)
  
• Fixed: The job used to bring incapacitated people to their prison cells wasn't attributed to the Prison Guard skill
  
• Fixed: It was possible for vehicles (traders, suppliers) to use stairs which wasn't intended
  
• Fixed: More text related stuff: typos (mostly faction dialogs), translations, and so on

Here's the third weekly patch for the 0.8.5 version of After The Collapse. Expect a couple more of those before I get back to more content-centric updates. As usual, previous save-games (0.8.3+) and mods should be compatible.

The full changelog is at the bottom, but I want to highlight 2 major improvements:

[h2]Better Eating Habits[/h2]

This is still a bit experimental and under-tested, but it seems to work very well.

When survivors are hungry or thirsty, instead of fetching drinks or food one item at a time, consuming it, and eventually looping back to fetch more, they will now try to retrieve everything they need in one go and then go to the dining room to consuming everything they gathered.

Additionally, drink and food needs are treated at the same time. So if a survivor is very hungry and slightly thirsty, they'll fetch like 2 food and 1 water in one go. As such situations where a survivor would eat something, go to work, and then cancel the job 10 seconds in to go drink something are a lot less common.

Overall it should be a great base productivity boost, especially if the base ain't very well optimized.

The only small downside compared to the previous system is that survivors might consume a bit more food than before. Nothing big, and the added productivity should more than make up for it.

[h2]Depot Presets[/h2]

This new feature is aimed at the more experienced players who like to have complex / optimized settings for their depots.



Simply put, you can now save/load presets for your storage buildings by clicking the small "Preset" button on the bottom of their associated menu.

[h2]Full Changelog[/h2]

• AI: Whenever possible, survivors will try to gather all the food and drinks they need before eating, saving a lot of travel time (experimental-ish)
  
• Content: You can enable/disable reproduction for whole species in the faction / cattle manager submenu
  
• Content: Road and Pavement tiles can now be built (construction tech)
  
• Content: New exotic egg trader map events (2 variants, after animal care tech)
  
• UI: Preset settings can be edited/added/applied to the depots (click the new 'preset' button in their associated menu)
  
• UI: If a settler info screen was opened from the population menu, exiting the menu will bring you back to the population menu
  
• UI: Added individual neutering checkboxes to all (owned) animals, not just pets
  
• UI: Selecting an animal in the pasture or butcher menu will center screen on target
  
• UI: Animals marked for butchering have a small icon over them
  
• UI: Added ability to filter out young/old/adult animals in butcher screen
  
• UI: The "[N]ext Unit" keyboard shortcut can be used both in combat and build mode now. It does keep the settler info panel open (the same submenu if any)
  
• UI: The faction logo selector in the new game menu can be clicked to display a complete list to pick from
  
• UI: Feedback message if a survivor can't grab food/drink because their inventory is full.
  
• UI: Several minor tweaks (menu highlighting, typos, information...)
  
• Fixed: On death, survivors wouldn't always put back their job in the queue, which could cause some tasks to stall until a game is saved/reloaded
  
• Fixed: Another possible task stalling problem on farms
  
• Fixed: Pressing "End Communication" in diplo screen wouldn't send you back to the proper tab in the faction menu
  
• Fixed: The "Apply to new animals" checkbox in Cattle Manager sub-menu was always considered to be true
  
• Fixed: It was possible to cause a crash when clicking the remove settler in the garage menu
  
• Fixed: In combat mode, switching from a settler to a drone with [N] shortcut while the Relation subpanel is open would cause a crash
  
• Fixed: Some of the Discount Dan map-event traders wouldn't go back to the correct menu after a purchase
  
• Fixed: Marking an animal for butchering wouldn't cancel its associated work (shearing, milking, etc.), occasionally causing survivors to follow the butcher around
  
• Fixed: Pressing "Exit to Desktop" would exit to the main menu (regression bug in 0.8.5)
  
• Fixed: Disabling a factory wouldn't immediately cancel the job of someone using it
  

Hey!

Here's the new small week-end patch for ATC. As explained in a previous post, after the last massive 0.8.5 release, I'm now going to focus on smaller scale things like getting rid of long standing bugs, dealing with player/modder requests, and general UI and balancing issues for at least a few more weeks. You can expect roughly a small patch each weekend.

The full changelog is at the bottom, but there are 3 improvements I want to explain in more details:

[h2]Razing / Disassembling / Mining[/h2]

Until now, razing something would yield 100% of the resources. To a point that it was more economical to destroy and remake a damaged wall or turret than to repair it. This is no longer the case.

The amount of recovered resources is, roughly, proportional to the survivor's disassembling (or mining) skill. With the occasional lucky/unlucky dice roll causing all or very little of resources to be retrieved.

Objects using a Furniture type item (like most of the electrical stuff, solar panels, generators, batteries...) can still be safely disassembled independently of that skill.

It means that, at least in the early/mid game, you'll get a lot less bang for your buck when razing stuff. On the plus side, disassembling tiles (pavement, wooden planks...) can now yield resources, which wasn't the case before.

[h2]Population Menu improvements[/h2]

As requested, the population menu can now sort people by wounds/sicknesses.



It also got a small makeover, and many oddities while using the drop down menus have been fixed. Additionally, by default (when no sorting is applied) people are sorted alphabetically.

[h2]UI Feedback about common problems[/h2]

It seems that many new players get into a sort of death loop for which the game doesn't provide any useful feedback.

The problem in question occurs when there's no room to store something that the base produces in great quantities (dirty water and wood are very common culprits). It leads to survivors storing the surplus in their inventory until it's, in turn, full. And when their inventory gets completely full, they can no longer pickup food or water or move other stuff around. This is probably something the player should be made aware of! :)

As a result, if for a reason or another, a survivors is unable to empty their inventory, a message in the log will be posted, highlighting the item(s) and the incriminated survivor. So the player knows that it would be a good idea to build more depots. Additionally, the inventory tab in the individual survivor info panel now displays how much cargo they are carrying (and the total capacity).

There will be more things done to deal with this issue (like the ability for settlers to always be able to pickup food/water that they plan on consuming) in the next patch.

[h2]Full Changelog[/h2]

• AI: In combat, NPC under fire are better at selecting who to attack when multiple people are attacking them
  
• Balance: Disassembling clutter/walls is no longer always returning 100% of resources, it depends on the mining or disassembling skill (whichever applies)
  
• Balance: Disassembling tiles can recover resources now (same restrictions as above)
  
• Balance: Boosted HP and armor values of Abominations (especially the melee variants)
  
• Modding: Traders' money can be modded (Added MinMoney and MaxMoney to the trader events)
  
• UI: Settlers are sorted by name in the population screen (default / no filter)
  
• UI: Added ability to sort people by illness / wound in the Population menu
  
• UI: Drop down menus used to sort people in population screen work better
  
• UI: Added feedback when survivors can't store something from their inventory because there is no storage space in the base
  
• UI: Added feedback when a survivor can't equip a piece of equipment due to lack of inventory space (or item grabbed by someone else)
  
• UI: Added cargo space information to survivor's inventory panel
  
• UI: New difficulty setting/cheat to disable death of pets by aging in New Game menu / Difficulty [user request]
  
• Fixed: Melee enemies/settlers would stop whatever they are doing each time they get shot at, rendering them a lot less dangerous than intended
  
• Fixed: Need values in population screen shown as raw values instead of percentages
  
• Fixed: Issue with calculations of weight in individual tiles' cargo. Not sure what issue it might have caused (if any), but it's fixed nonetheless.
  
• Fixed: Agents' needs going into negative values (after consuming something or when disabled by trait, job, or something else)
  
• Fixed: Loading a save-game with missing mods will no longer spam the same messages, it'll just post one message for each different missing item
  
• Fixed: You couldn't toggle active pause on/off or jump to a different layer when placing constructions or zones