Lubricated Hinges & Gravestones (Patch Notes 16)

Hear ye Dwarves! Our engineers have been hard at work to make your bases into well-oiled machines! Reduced loading times, reduction of lag spikes during gameplay, a lot of minor quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes, a snoring sfx for sleeping dwarves and a way to temporarily increase the game speed!

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]
Features & Design Changes:

Game Speed Cog - You may not have been aware, but the little cog in the bottom-right corner of the minimap was a button that paused/unpaused the game. You can now click and hold this cog to speed up the game-time! We deliberated on this design a lot, and are happy with our choice for the 'hold' mechanic, but we'll be fully explaining our reasoning in our next blog post.
Support/Lamp Posts - Before placement and when selected, these now show the radius within which they support against cave-ins.
Combat Exp - Non-warrior units now also gain exp while in combat, though to a lesser degree than warriors. Also corrected some errors in combat calculations and abilities.
Claims - Allies were claiming springs too aggressively in caverns mode. Now any springs you've fought for are considered yours until a certain cooldown ends.
Caverns-mode Options - The menu at the start has been revamped to be more flexible. You can now both choose a starting condition and tick extra options like 'more schematics' as well. A new option has been added that prevents other dwarf clans from spawning anywhere near you.
Tech Table - Can now craft schematics at the tech table using 6 old artefacts. This is in addition to being able to trade for them with gold at trade stalls (in certain modes only). The kindlewick trade stall still trades for 5 artefacts.
Skirmish-mode - Smaller update introducing some resource balance changes, updated region design & colour-schemes.
Iron Roots - Now provide 2 wood & 1 iron ore when harvested.
Sleeping SFX - You can now hear dwarves snoring in beds.
Star bars - When a unit is particularly low health/stamina/hunger, that bar will now have a red outline, so you can more easily identify when units may be in need of assistance.
Upgraded Hinges - The ballista part of this technology has changed. Instead of ballistas triggering in groups, pressure plates are now given the option to trigger a second ballista. We feel this is more intuitive, and allows for greater flexibility and strategy.
Gravestones - A new building under Infrastructure that allows you to bury the dead with dignity. This is in combination with a new tab in the dwarf-list that allows you to browse through your fallen dwarves. For now this is only an aesthetic/sentimental feature, there are no mechanical benefits to building gravestones yet. Please note that units that died prior to this patch will not show, as they were not maintained in pre-existing saves.
Auto-Pause - Added toggleable option to gameplay settings that automatically pauses the game when a unit becomes low-health.

Fixes & Improvements:

Multi-threaded Pathfinding - It took a lot of work, but pathfinding now runs on a separate thread outside of the game loop, which should stop many of the fps judders experienced while playing medium-large maps. There may still be some for other reasons, we will continue to track these down. There may also be some new quirks in unit behaviour, for this reason we've provided a checkbox in gameplay options to toggle multi-threaded pathfinding on/off.
Assembling & Prioritising - Engineers should behave a bit more intelligently when assembling, and prioritising buildings should work as expected. Before, when another engineer was already working on the job, the chosen engineer would refuse to do it. You can now select additional engineers and right click an assembling building to assist with it.
Saving & Loading - Fixed UI flickering with the save & load game list. Unit counts for new saves should now work. Also reduced loading time by pushing certain graphically generated content to run later.
Manual Mining - When telling a miner with a full inventory to mine a new tile, they will now drop the items where they stand instead of returning to storage.
Caverns-mode Generation - Balanced mushroom spawning, fixed bug with quests not ticking off, added a couple of new cave types.
Double-clicking - Some mice have an issue where clicking one of the buttons will sometimes fire 2 click events instead of 1. Although this isn't an issue with TDoG specifically, we decided to try to account for it anyway. The game should now detect and ignore double-clicks of this kind.
Crafting UI - The crafting options shown when a building like a forge or claim is selected will now update as items are added or removed from storage.
Doors - Mobbits, fireflies, and other little bugs should no longer be able to interact with doors.
Items - Items on the ground now have shadows. Items carried while in battle are given transparency since they're less important in those moments.
Feedback form - Fixed various bugs involving the feedback form, including unclickable send button, too limited writing box, malformed screenshots and a certain 'socket timeout exception'.
Ballista - Was behaving as if there was a shot remaining even though ammo is depleted.
Dwarf-list - Clicking dwarves in the list no longer immediately centres the camera on them. To centre the camera on them now, click them a second time.
Fixed various other intermittent bugs including a couple involving achievements & stats, and one very rare bug that had a pandora's box of outcomes. If you've ever seen a 'peeper' talk or a unit spontaneously combust, this is the bug we're talking about. I don't know who let Loki into the script engine but he's now banished back to Asgard!

We've also been working hard scripting the levels for the chapter 2 release. We can't give too much detail about that, but we might be sharing a teaser about one of them in an upcoming blog!

That's all for now, stay safe out there!