The Dwarves of Glistenveld News

Fellow Dwarves! Our engineers have made two important discoveries in the world of Glistenveld! First, a new technique of organising storage spaces that blows previous designs out of the water! Second, a new technology that reprocesses materials for industrialisation, such as repopulating fish!

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

1. Storage Arrangements - Instead of toggling individual resources for each tile of storage, the configure button now takes you to a new UI that allows you to create arrangement templates where you can configure what items are permitted as well as the arrangement's priority. You can then easily set which storage corresponds to which arrangement. Newly placed storage tiles copy the arrangement of their neighbours.
   
2. Game Speed SFX - When fast-forwarding using the cog, sounds and voices should now play back sped-up to correspond with the game-speed.
   
3. Unit Aggro - Warriors should attack enemies on sight more, rather than relying mostly on defend zones or being idle. This change also applies to other classes, but at a much smaller radius. We're still experimenting with aggro cooldowns, so this may be adjusted in future patches, we'll see.
   
4. New Tech: Farming II - The first tier-3 technology unlocks 2 buildings: the charcoal kiln and fish lure. The kiln turns piles of wood into coal by burning them under a mound of dirt. Keep your dwarves out of its vicinity however, as it produces lingering toxic smoke. The fish lure consists predominantly of algae that is found on growing green mushrooms, and can be placed near waterfalls to spawn fish. This tech also unlocks the ability to harvest growing green mushrooms, just tread carefully!
   
5. Idle Dwarves - When dwarves are idle, they will stop themselves from crowding certain buildings including: tables, beds, doors, tracks, storage and food barrels.
   
6. Skirmish Mode - 'Random cave' setting will no longer spawn empty caves. Setting a team number to '0' will now match the species, for example if a dwarf camp spawns there, they will be allied with all other dwarves.
   

Fixes & Improvements:

1. Engine Crash Fix - Stability fixes for the sound engine, which includes a multi-thread fix that was causing most of the game's (rare) crashes.
   
2. Pick-up Instruction - Placing an instruction over storage will stop units from dropping items there until the job is complete.
   
3. Move Instruction - Telling an engineer to prioritise this instruction should now work as intended.
   
4. Minecarts - Units will now drop all their items on the pick-up location, instead of on neighbouring tiles when the pick-up location has a full stack.
   
5. Caverns Mode v0.54 - Enemy spawn balance improvements, and improvements to some cave spawns, in an attempt to ensure every type of cave has a purpose.
   
6. Dead Units - The deceased unit tab of the dwarf-list should now correctly show unit portraits, and gravestones should now retain their text.
   
7. Windy Rivers - Fixed some soft-lock bugs that were recently introduced at the beginning segment of this level.
   
8. Mobbits - Some mobbits were frozen in place after loading a save game or wouldn't leave their warrens.
   
9. Assembling - Fixed bug where engineers might build the wrong building on top of another instruction, during major batch constructions.
   
10. Building Sprites - Buildings that you own outside of visible light will now still appear opaque, rather than transparent, to be more easily recognised.
    
11. Scenarios & Skirmish - Polished up and fixed some bugs in scenario maps & skirmish mode.
    
12. Various other fixes including a change to how save-file icons are generated, FPS drops caused by pathing issues with scripted movement, and inconsistencies with selection in one-button mode.
    

Next month we will be focusing mostly on preparing chapter 2 content. The next patch will feature Halloween mode, but probably won't have too much else in terms of features.

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

Fellow Dwarves! A small bit of news today. Our engineers have figured out how to use less stone when paving, and our foragers have reworked their food production strategies!

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

1. Borderless Window - Added borderless-window mode as a third option alongside full-screen and windowed. Due to occasional issues with fullscreen this is now default.
   
2. Cooking Station - The third meal recipe no longer requires fish, it now requires 4 mushrooms and 2 meat instead. This means when fish sources are depleted, you can still make meals using more than just mushrooms!
   
3. Farming Plots - No longer harvests all grown mushrooms, but instead leaves at least 1/3 of mushrooms in its radius to ensure re-sporing can continue.
   
4. Battle - Units can escape from battle more easily now when clustered together, pushing past other friendly units.
   
5. Cobblestone - Rebalanced to cost 2 stone instead of 3. This should cause less of a stone shortage each time you are paving your bases.
   
6. Autosaves - Instead of autosaving every 5 minutes, the game will now autosave every 2 minutes using 3 different autosave files. We will eventually provide settings for autosave features.
   

Fixes & Improvements:

1. Minecarts - No longer jump tracks on very large track lines, or drop more food than tables / food barrels can hold. Units riding minecarts will now jump out at the end of a track.
   
2. Hardware Mouse - The mouse pointer will now automatically switch to a hardware rendered mouse whenever the FPS is low. This means moving your cursor should remain relatively smooth.
   
3. Frenzied Allies - In rare situations, frenzied ally dwarves could be unfrenzied but continue to attack your buildings. This should no longer happen.
   
4. Warrens - Mobbit & bat warrens were spawning a new mobbit/bat between each load & save, regardless of whether one already existed, causing large numbers to exist.
   
5. Textures & Sprites - Updated various graphics including iron ore, iron hammer and some traits.
   
6. Saving - Certain creatures like mobbits were getting stuck in a decision loop, which significantly slowed down saving times due to large amounts of retained data.
   
7. Recipe Info UI - Should no longer vanish periodically while the game is playing.
   
8. Floody Hell - Some data was being lost in the properties of water after a load & save, which could cause this map to be incompletable.
   
9. Survival - The survival map under scenarios has been updated with the ability to buy schematics using a trade stall, to reflect the changes to schematics in a prior patch.
   
10. Various fixes including screenshot mode not interacting correctly, building sprites disappearing and AI fixes.
    

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

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:

1. 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.
   
2. Support/Lamp Posts - Before placement and when selected, these now show the radius within which they support against cave-ins.
   
3. 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.
   
4. 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.
   
5. 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.
   
6. 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.
   
7. Skirmish-mode - Smaller update introducing some resource balance changes, updated region design & colour-schemes.
   
8. Iron Roots - Now provide 2 wood & 1 iron ore when harvested.
   
9. Sleeping SFX - You can now hear dwarves snoring in beds.
   
10. 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.
    
11. 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.
    
12. 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.
    
13. Auto-Pause - Added toggleable option to gameplay settings that automatically pauses the game when a unit becomes low-health.
    
    

Fixes & Improvements:

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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.
   
4. 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.
   
5. Caverns-mode Generation - Balanced mushroom spawning, fixed bug with quests not ticking off, added a couple of new cave types.
   
6. 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.
   
7. 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.
   
8. Doors - Mobbits, fireflies, and other little bugs should no longer be able to interact with doors.
   
9. Items - Items on the ground now have shadows. Items carried while in battle are given transparency since they're less important in those moments.
   
10. 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'.
    
11. Ballista - Was behaving as if there was a shot remaining even though ammo is depleted.
    
12. 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.
    
13. 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!

Fellow Dwarves! A small bit of news today, our notification messengers have upped their game, and our engineers are finally figuring out how to assemble multiple tracks in a row!

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

1. Notifications - Certain notifications will now persist instead of being removed when clicked on. The battle notification will remain as long as the battle goes on. The level-up notification persists until you've chosen an ability for the dwarf. Once any notification ceases to be relevant, a count-down arc appears indicating that that notification will disappear on its own soon, but you can also click to remove it at this point.
   
2. Assembling - When many of the same building instructions are to be assembled in the same region, engineers will now assemble them in sequence, until they run out of parts. This is most notable for tracks and pressure plates.
   
3. Instruction Assignment UI - Selecting an instruction zone brings up the assignment UI where you can select which dwarves work what jobs. A new button has been added 'Apply to all' which will set the current configuration to all instructions of that type.
   
4. Caverns Mode - Introduced some new quests, and balanced some of the cave generation (only found when playing a fresh game).
   
5. Guide - Added many more guide entries, and fixed some bugs including a couple of broken entries.
   
6. Campaign - A few small refinements have been made to reduce confusion in the earlier levels.
   

Fixes & Improvements:

1. Trade Stalls - Fixed various bugs and the general glitchiness surrounding these should be resolved. Trade stalls can now also be packed up.
   
2. Mushrooms - Fixed bugs both with the farming plot, and that mushrooms could not be removed on soil patches.
   
3. Battle - Battles taking place around mobbits or vehicles, characters were prone to dancing back and forth instead of fighting. Also the hit counters weren't always showing the correct numbers.
   
4. AI Improvements - Ally teams should no longer steal food, or stand around doors begging to be let in for the same reason. AI miners should stop mining down your walls (fingers-crossed we nipped this in the bud this time). Made various other improvements to AI teams, and resolved some scenarios where units were getting stuck in a rut. Bats should no longer get confused about how to avoid lamps and light sources.
   
5. Placing Buildings - Fixed a bug where in large maps, occasionally what you were trying to build instead turned into beds.
   
6. Pathfinder Optimisation - Longer paths should now be a little more efficient, but less accurate.
   

We're also saying goodbye to easter mode tomorrow, although you will still be able to enable it manually for a while longer by going to Options > Gameplay > Seasonal.

That's all for now, have a good weekend!

Fellow Dwarves! Recent training advances will make your Warriors better at choosing their fights, and your working dwarves easier to boss around!

[h3]Easter Mode[/h3]
For the next few weeks, easter mode will be enabled, and 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 now harvest easter eggs using the gather instruction, and they can be stored on tables similar to meals. How many can you find? (Total is at the bottom of the Stats window)
   

As usual, seasonal modes can be disabled in the options menu under Gameplay > Seasonal.

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

1. Dwarf-List - Added a 'select-all' button, which allows you to select all dwarves within the active tab.
   
2. Accident-prone - Dwarves with this trait will no longer injure themselves randomly, but continue to fumble more frequently in combat.
   
3. Blood-thirsty - Dwarves with this trait now attack enemies on-sight regardless of class, and gain bonus exp in combat. This change removes the stance restriction, as we will be removing stances in a future build (more info below).
   
4. Sound FX - Added sound FX for the schematic & tech table.
   
5. Guide - Added more guide entries. The guide now indicates how many entries have unlocked / unread sections.
   

Fixes & Improvements:

1. Flee - Warriors that are in the vicinity of enemies will now return home to rest anyway if they're low health. Spiders were giving up on fleeing too easily.
   
2. Unit Control - Dwarves that are being manually controlled by the player (selected and controlled) will slow down their autonomous behaviour. This gives the player more time to give multiple orders without the dwarf trying to leave.
   
3. Doors - The sprites for doors were getting confused. The symbols for which mode is selected should now be correct.
   
4. Music - Will no longer play the same track twice in a row. Added new track 'Aegis' which plays around more advanced bases.
   
5. Stats - Stats for units on your team are now bolder and should stand out more than stats for other teams.
   

In a future update, we plan on removing stances from the game. We feel stances require too much micromanagement for the benefit, and have decided to replace this with something else to give you greater control over when units choose to attack enemies. Once we have a more concrete design, we'll write a blog post about this change.

That's all for now, have a good Easter break!