Easter Eggs & Runestones (Patch Notes 30)

Fellow Dwarves! A new exciting technology 'Runestones' as well as manned ballistas, and a myriad of bug-fixes come with this year's Easter patch!

[h3]🐰 Easter Mode 🐰[/h3]
In Easter Mode, you will experience the following changes to the game:

1. Atmosphere - The environment has a different look and feel.
   
2. Mobbits - Mobbits are larger than normal, and provide more meat!
   
3. Easter Eggs - You will find easter eggs sprawled about everywhere, even hidden in the walls! You can harvest easter eggs using the gather instruction, and they can be stored on tables similar to meals. How many can you find? (Find out at the bottom of the Stats window)
   

[h3]The big stuff:[/h3]

1. Runestones - Runestones are a new unlockable building that, when placed, can be marked with one of four effects: Forging, Growth, Resistance and Warding. Forging speeds up forges and can reduce the amount of ore required for smelting. Growth creates moisture which speeds up mushroom & sapling growth, and can also trigger the power-slider combat ability. Resistance reduces incoming damage dealt to your dwarves and buildings. Warding prevents undead creatures like Draugr from reawakening. As Runestones are used they will charge up energy which will eventually release and spawn an elemental!
   
2. Elementals - In this patch elementals only appear in caverns mode or as a result of Runestones charging, but they will feature more in future patches. Each runestone triggers the respective elemental: Fire, Water, Rock & Wind. Each elemental has its own special ability unlocked when it reaches level 2.
   
3. Manned Ballistas - This one is a game-changer in our opinion! Now when you select an engineer or warrior to interact with a ballista, they will 'man' it and remain in position. Then whenever enemies come close, your unit will automatically rotate the ballista around and fire at them! Your dwarves are smart enough not to fire at allies in the way, but sometimes their shots might not meet their mark. Their accuracy is determined by combat level, so if you use a high level warrior, fewer shots will miss.
   
4. Spiders - Rebalanced and redesigned some behaviours. Level 1 spiders can no longer lay eggs. Spiders will now only flee if their hitpoints are very low, which means harder-hitting dwarves have greater chance of defeating them without having to chase. Higher level spiders will flee sooner. When a spider mother is attacked, it calls for help. If it then dies, all nearby spiders will flee from battle for a while.
   
5. AI Territory - Allies in caverns mode will now avoid building, mining or gathering resources near your buildings, based on a new territory system. This system is hidden but essentially each building is given a weight based on its type and distance, and nearby buildings are counted up to determine whose territory a particular hex belongs to.
   
6. Draugr Heads - Draugr can be a thorn in the side, especially in caverns mode. Well, now you can roll their heads around and move them out of your way! No, you can't play footie with them, but you can hide them in the closet!
   

The small stuff:

1. Schematics & Barrels - You can now obtain these resources using the gather instruction, rather than having to select a dwarf and interact with them manually.
   
2. Call for reinforcements - This button used to be hidden away in the escape menu, since it only applied in the campaign and would only be used rarely. Now the dwarf button in the instruction panel on the bottom left opens up a sub-menu which provides the dwarf-list, by-laws (if it is unlocked) and call for reinforcements. To maintain previous UX click patterns, you can double click the dwarf button to open up the dwarf-list without having to move your mouse into the new menu.
   
3. Build Wall - If items are in the way of a wall instruction, a pickup instruction will now be automatically assigned and executed before the wall is built.
   
4. Engineers - Fixed some behaviour where they refused to build a building that they clearly had access to without putting it back in storage first or trying to build a new one. This may still occur under certain circumstances, further testing is necessary to confirm this.
   
5. Repair - Increased engineer's priority of repair instructions.
   
6. Guide - Updated with a new look & feel. More entries have been added and some have been rewritten for clarity.
   
7. Various other fixes including ambient SFX panning, some voice lines not triggering, removing random dwarf complaints from the dialog history.
   

We've also been hard at work on Chapter 3 assets and content, some of which we cannot reveal yet, but we will continue to trickle in updates regarding Chapter 3 in future patches & blog posts!
That's all for now, stay safe out there, and Happy Easter!