Endzone - A World Apart News

Greetings, survivors!

With the sixth update for Endzone - A World Apart a couple of changes come into play. We have reworked a system that dates back to the Closed Beta and needed an overhaul. When implementing the Confidence System, we deliberately built in advantages and disadvantages early on, which should have a significant influence on the flow of the game and the player's decisions. With the previous system, this effect was unfortunately hardly noticeable, or expressed itself mainly through negative influences. The reworked system now brings much more depth and complements the Gameplay with meaningful and credible needs of the settlers and, of course, their reaction to fulfilling or not fulfilling them. We also aimed on making Endzone easier to observe and read. With two new Heatmaps, the created electricity network can be surveyed better, and the newly implemented attractiveness of the settlement can be tracked.

• With this Update, we enable the possibility of an Autosave. It is disabled by default, but can be activated manually in the settings. You can also change the time interval, in which the Autosave saves your current game. Right now the system can hold up to 5 automatically saved savegames per session. After reaching this number, older saves are automatically deleted.

• User Interface: Added a new UI for Confidence and overhauled the confidence system. Confidence is now divided into 3 sections: Negative, Neutral, and Positive confidence. The Negative and Positive sections are further divided into 3 Tiers. Slipping into the negative confidence zone will cause riots in your settlement and people may start to leave. Being in the positive confidence zone will give you benefits such as special side missions.
  
• User Interface: Added a new Analytic View for Electricity. This view helps you to view and analyze your electricity network without having to click on individual buildings. It displays valid power line connections and highlights all power consumers and producers.
  
• User Interface: Added a new Analytic View for Attractiveness: Since buildings now have different Attractiveness values and your settlers react to them, it is important to have a clear overview on how buildings affect the attractiveness of your settlement and, therefore, your settlers’ confidence.
  
• User Interface: Added special notifications when a seed or a new technology has been unlocked. In addition, a new notification triggers when new settlers are joining your settlement.
  
• User Interface: Added a food variety indicator to show how many different food sources are available in the settlement. Having different food sources was always important for the health of the individual settler, but it was never really properly displayed.
  
• Settlers: Added Birth Control as part of the functionality unlocked when upgrading your town center to level 2. Birth Control will result in a negative confidence debuff, but also prevent any new births for a certain period of time.
  
• Buildings: Added the kitchen which allows your settlers to produce processed food/meals and can help to withstand a food shortage.
  
• Buildings: Added 5 decorative buildings to the game that also contribute to the attractiveness of an area.
  
• Expeditions: Added sound effects to all expeditions for better immersion. When making a decision for an expedition, there are sets of sound effects to complement your actions.
  
• Savegames: Added optional AutoSave functionality to the game. You can enable AutoSave and a timing interval in the Options menu.
  
• Achievements: Added 17 new achievements to the game.
  
• Side Missions: Added 17 new side missions to the game.
  
• Music: Added 1 new music track to the game.
  
• Social Media: Added several social media icons in the main menu with direct links to Endzone.
  

• Statistics: Temporary Storeroom and Warehouse are now contributing to statistics.
  
• Statistics: The UI of the statistics window now works better with different aspect ratios.
  
• Buildings: Orchards now correctly change their seed. Beware: trees are immediately chopped down when selecting a new seed, but you’ll also get some wood out of it.
  
• Buildings: Fixed coal pile not marked as blocking during building placement.
  
• Buildings: Fixed wind effect for the School.
  
• Buildings: Fixed possible errors caused by the building system.
  
• Buildings: The inspector for farms now shows “Hemp” instead of “Food” to signal that hemp is not a food resource.
  
• Buildings: Hemp is now correctly decontaminated in all storage buildings.
  
• Settlers: Fixed possible error when a pub is among the possible visitable buildings.
  
• Settlers: Prevent error when a settler is living in a non existing house on startup.
  
• Expeditions: The tool requirement for one of the Endzone expeditions now increases the chance as expected.
  
• Expedition Post: Expedition Post now gives correct feedback when the production limit is reached or inventory is full.
  
• Side Missions: Fixed several missing headlines for Side Missions.
  
• Feedback (Stomt): Fixed that shortcuts were still fired in the background, when the feedback popup was opened.
  

• Electricity: Warehouses, Cisterns, Irrigation Plants, and the Weather Station no longer consume power. This was done since they did not have any gameplay related effects.
  
• Electricity: Settlers working at Gatherer’s Cabins, Herbal Huts, Forester Lodges, Scrapyards, and Hunting Lodges now work faster if their production building has power connected.
  
• Electricity: A Power Line now loses all connections if it is in a demolished state, making it clearer as to why a power grid might be malfunctioning.
  
• User Interface: The "?"-button in building inspectors now shows the building tooltip instead of only title and description, so that all the info is right there.
  
• User Interface: Changed icons of some happiness buffs.
  
• Balancing: Tweaked balancing values for protective clothing and tools.
  
• Balancing: Doubled the wood cost for metal tools.
  
• Buildings: Created new visuals for the tailor building.
  
• Buildings: Changed visuals for the tank to be more immersive and fitting to the game’s story timeline.
  
• Buildings: Damaged buildings no longer show a large and clumsy UI in their inspector but are marked as “damaged” with a visual indicator on top. Additionally, the condition bar below the icon of the building now provides detailed information about the repair status in its tooltip.
  
• Glossary: Updated and added glossary entries for new and existing buildings.
  
• Research: Added the kitchen as a researchable technology.
  
• Performance: Ported entity tracing to a faster GPU solution.
  
• Sandstorm: Sandstorm no longer does percentile damage, so that hit points of buildings actually have an impact now.
  
• Side Missions: Tweaked Overloaded mission, so it only triggers if there is no battery connected at all.
  
• UI: Goals that involve the production or storage of resources now indicate whether the production limit of that resource prevents the goal from being solved.
  

With this update we have significantly revised the confidence system, so that there is now a clear added value in both positive and negative directions. Confidence was for a long time a value that should be kept in positive territory, but was difficult to bring into negative territory through the regular game flow. Mainly differences arose due to the death of a relative of a settler, which of course could not be averted. The system therefore offered only a small added value and was rather used or regarded as an accessory.
Through the refurbishment, Confidence is now a sensitive system, which is influenced by each individual settler in the settlement. Each settler has his own list of needs that can be met, not met or triggered. How happy an individual settler is now proportionally contributes to the overall Confidence of the settlement. This means that an average is calculated, which can effect which missions or actions are triggered and can influence the behavior of the settlers in a negative way as well as in a positive way. The new Confidence System is staggered in 3 sections, each consisting of 3 tiers which are in the negative, neutral and positive range.



This value is influenced by existing buildings, as well as food and events within the settlement. Confidence can fluctuate. The neutral area can be seen as a buffer zone in which the player has the possibility to protect himself from sliding into the negative area or to take effective steps to change into the positive area.



A well-known problem in Endzone was the readability of the electricity network. Electricity poles are not easy to recognize in the turmoil and also the overview of the connected power line quickly left a lot to be desired in a larger settlement. With the new Heatmap for electricity, buildings can now be distinguished more easily. Connections and consumption are also marked and can now be observed more easily. The change in readability, which was very positive for us, inspired us to introduce another Heatmap to illustrate the Attractiveness. In this view, the attractiveness of individual buildings is also shown very simply and schematically. It also shows how other buildings influence the status even before construction.

Electricity Heatmap

Attractiveness Heatmap



This update has only added one building to the world of Endzone, but it was intended to help new players in particular. Also, the proposal has been submitted many times as feedback, so we were happy to follow up on the request. Oh, and we redesigned the Tailor for better visual feedback and a more suitable presentation:

Tailor

Kitchen

The Kitchen can be explored as a building and allows the player to increase the amount of valuable food for his settlement significantly by using a simple recipe. 10 units of food and 10 units of water can be processed in the kitchen to 100 units of food. It doesn't matter which food is used to create it. In addition, dishes that are produced in the kitchen are counted as variations in food and thus contribute to the diversity in the settlers' diet. Up to 5 cooks can work in the kitchen, but the amount of processed food does not increase proportionally from the fourth cook onwards, but increases slightly less.

Food Variety icon Processed Food icon



Together with the new Confidence System, the first Decorative Elements are now available in Endzone. Decorations beautify the settlement by increasing its attractiveness. The 5 new elements have their own construction costs and can theoretically be placed infinitely often. Decoration buildings are not explicitly visited or viewed by settlement to give a bonus; the effect is permanent and passive.

New Decorations

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]





We know that there are a few more things we need to address, and we are listening to your feedback. We're trying to address all the important issues in a timely manner and make the game as a whole more understandable and fair. However, it is important to remember that Endzone - A World Apart is a survival game, so we have made it challenging with full intention.

- Your Team von Gentlymad & Assemble Entertainment

Changelog Version - 0.7.7544.27831

[h2]Endzone - A World Apart will be streamed as a part of the Gamevasion during the Gamescom on the official Twitch-Channel of the Rocket Beans on friday, August 28 - 14.00 CEST!
[/h2]
[h2]We will also be streaming the "A new Civilization Update" together with developer and Community Manager Kai on our Twitch Channel from 15.00 CEST[/h2]

[h2]Greetings, survivors![/h2]

This time the total number of units sold has reached a number of 2.498 and we have decided to plant trees in Uganda. This is especially to help the chimpanzees living there, who lost a major area of their natural habitat due to heavy clearing of the forest.
The trees will be planted in the Albertine Rift forests of Uganda, close to where Dr. Jane Goodall began her extraordinary career and fell in love with chimpanzees - our closest wildlife relatives.

Thanks again to everyone who decide to buy the "Save The World"-Edition to help us make the world a little greener!



https://store.steampowered.com/app/933820/Endzone__A_World_Apart/

Greetings, survivors!

With this "emergency hotfix" we're addressing the problems with cloth/the Tailor and change the values for now to previous ones. But please note that this is not final and we will investigate this problem more in-depth again soon.

• This Hotfix focuses on resetting the unbalanced clothing production in the Radiation Update. Please be advised that we’ll look into the issue in the near future again.
  

• Production amounts and production times for Tailor, Recycler, Refinery and Workshop have been reset to a previous version.
  

• In savegames that were created before this hotfix, in order to apply the new values for all production buildings that have already been built and that are affected by this hotfix you’ll need to change their recipe once and swap back to the one that is intended.
  

- Your Team from Gentlymad & Assemble Entertainment

Changelog Version 0.7.7517.30497

Greetings, survivors! Saudações, sobreviventes! ¡Saludos, supervivientes!

The fifth update for Endzone - A World Apart brings again two more buildings into play. The new additions are used to combat radiation. Previously, players repeatedly had problems with the growing radiation and also had difficulties protecting themselves against it. With the new changes and implementations it is now easier as long as you build a good infrastructure and invest some time in researching the new technologies. We also added two new languages and different keyboards layouts, and custom keybindings are now supported!

• With this update we are migrating to a new savegame system. Your old savegame will not be compatible with this version. We hope that our new savegame system is more flexible and will no longer require us to break old savegame in the future. Also, you should notice slightly faster save and load times.
  

• Controls: Players can now rebind all key mappings of the game based on their needs in the “Controls” menu found under “Options”.
  
• Localization: Added Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.
  
• Localization: Added special characters for Turkish and Vietnamese language to font assets.
  
• Visuals: Replaced all settler avatars with new and improved ones, providing a larger variety of looks and distinct differences between ages of settlers.
  
• Buildings: A Decontamination Post has been added. It allows the player to clean contaminated goods that are stored in a logistics building. This new building produces Decontamination Kits, which are distributed among the inventories of buildings within its work area and clean resources from contamination.
  
• Buildings: A Mine has been added that allows you to mine coal or iodine from mountains. Both ways of mining have to be researched in the Research Station. Iodine can be used to create Iodine Tablets, an effective way to treat your settlers' radiation levels.
  
• Recipes: Added a new production recipe to the Medical Facility that allows to convert Iodine into Iodine Tablets. Iodine Tablets are consumed by settlers to free themselves from contamination. The production recipe is unlocked together with the Iodine Mining technology in the Research Station.
  
• Technology: Added the technology “Mining Tunnel Construction”. Researching this technology heavily reduces the negative effect on the efficiency of mines that are placed close to each other.
  
• Side Missions: Added 8 new side missions.
  
• Expeditions: Added 4 new expeditions.
  
• Graphic Options: Added settings to set the visual quality of objects.
  
• Visuals: Added new ruins to the game.
  
• Visuals: Added animations to some existing and new buildings.
  
• Visuals: Added destruction effects to all ruins, when they are destroyed.
  
• User Interface: Buildings of the same type are now highlighted during Build Mode. This effect can be toggled on or off in the game options in the Main Menu or using a shortcut on the keyboard (default key: ‘H’).
  
• Technology: Added a maximum amount for Research Points. This is also reflected in the UI.
  
• Glossary: Added new Glossary entries for the Decontamination Post, Iodine and Iodine Tablets.
  
• Savegames: We added a completely new savegame system. This system speeds up saving and loading files significantly.
  

Some of the new settler avatars (16 in total with numerous variations)

The new Highlighting shows related buildings in a blue overlay

• Engine Update: Updated our engine version from Unity 2019.2 to 2019.4 LTS. Being on this new version includes numerous bug fixes by our engine vendor. It also allows us to benefit from upcoming bug fixes in the future.
  
• Savegames: The new system fixes wrong and spontaneous erratic behavior that could lead to broken or corrupted savegames.
  
• User Interface: Assigning workforce to a profession using right click now assigns all remaining free settlers if the maximum possible amount is higher than the amount of free settlers.
  
• User Interface: Advantages on Expeditions that require all settlers to apply to them are now highlighted correctly during the configuration of an expedition.
  
• User Interface: Fixed several occurrences where buttons in the options of a building where wrongly hidden.
  
• User Interface: Fixed an error that occurred when entering a share code without “#”.
  
• User Interface: The share code input field now allows the correct number of characters.
  
• User Interface: Position Markers on the minimap from previous session no longer consist in new sessions.
  
• Visuals: Settlers now look into the direction of their task (e.g. when cutting down trees) to improve animation authenticity.
  
• Visuals: Settlers should not have holes in their 3D representation anymore.
  
• Gameplay: Resource piles will no longer be automatically transported to storage buildings but rather used if settlers require resources from them.
  
• Gameplay: “Schroedinger’s Settlers” have been fixed. Demolishing a house and cancelling the demolition immediately could lead to “invisible” settlers. This has now been fixed.
  
• Side Missions: Side Missions no longer throw an error if the Glossary was opened beforehand.
  
• Tutorial: Fixed some wrongly locked or unlocked buildings.
  
• Tutorial: Market quest now rewards coal masks.
  
• Performance: Several performance optimizations to avoid stuttering.
  
• Startup: When the game was opened for the first time it was possible to be stuck in a black screen when no button was pressed. This is now fixed.
  
• Buildings: Settlers who walk to scrap piles or the Scrap Catcher now use correct paths which are not wrongly offset anymore.
  
• Expeditions: A ruin with several story threads never spawned the last one. This has been fixed now.
  

• Gameplay: Children in Sturdy Houses are born faster now. This prevents the issue that less children were born when upgrading to this house type.
  
• Controls: Players with non QWERTY keyboards (e.g. AZERTY) can now play the game with the correct key mappings.
  
• Gameplay: Settlers will now always use the nearest building that has a resource available instead of following a strict priority queue.
  
• Visuals: Nights are now brighter.
  
• Visuals: Changed the model for the derelict tank and removed the WW2 version that did not fit with the game's timeline.
  
• Balancing: Settlers are now noticeably affected by contaminated water and food.
  
• Balancing: Tweaked the work times of Tailors and Technicians to improve the output of tools and clothing.
  
• Balancing: Increased the respawn time of wildlife.
  
• Balancing: Minor balancing changes to some Side Missions.
  
• Balancing: Researchers have a much larger inventory now, so they are able to supply resources for new technologies much faster.
  
• Market: Markets now also accept refined resources like Metal or Electronics.
  
• Tutorial: The tutorial has been slightly adjusted to introduce some of the new buildings and features.
  
• User Interface: Assigning professionals in the inspector of a building now also allows you to right click the increase button in order to assign the maximum amount.
  
• User Interface: The production limit interface in the Refinery has been reworked to avoid that increase and decrease production limit areas are misleading due to their position in the UI.
  
• Building Placement: It is now possible to place buildings on parking lot ruins.
  
• User Interface: Fields now show “Food” as a production limit instead of individual resources.
  
• User Interface: Production Limits in the Production Limit Menu now update correctly if a production limit is changed in the inspector of a building.
  
• User Interface: The tooltip, when hovering over a building in the build menu now shows the number of buildings of this type.
  
• Expeditions: Several Expeditions now unlock Iodine Tablets as a reward. Iodine Tablets can be used by settlers to treat their individual radiation levels.
  
• Expeditions: Added checkmarks for expeditions when progress is at 100%.
  
• Expeditions: Added Iodine Tablets to some Expeditions as a reward.
  
• Expeditions: Added a new option to the Nuclear Power Plant Expedition that allows you to go back one step.
  
• Resources: Local piles will no longer be auto transported to storages. Instead they act like mini storages and your settlers take goods only when needed. The resources of these piles will now directly contribute to your global inventory.
  

Comparison of the brightness in the new patch vs. the old status

• Gameplay: The tooltip for a Sturdy House is not describing that children are now born twice as fast.
  
• Plantations: Changing a seed on a plantation is currently bugged and nearly impossible, because Plantations are rarely completely harvested. To change a seed you need to tear down the plantation. We are already working on a fix for that.
  

[h2]Decontamination Post[/h2]

The Decontamination Post is the place where Decontamination Kits are produced by the new profession "Decontaminator", with which already contaminated food can be cleaned again. Any building with an inventory can receive the kits and thus remove the radiation. Note, however, that while Cultivated Fields and Orchards can hold food in their inventory, they do not count as buildings. That's why you should always supply a dedicated Warehouse with Decontamination Kits.



[h2]Mine[/h2]

A Mine can be built directly on mountains. Research unlocks the branches "Coal" and "Iodine", which can only be mined individually in a single Mine.
Iodine can be used in a Medical Facility to produce Iodine Tablets, which settlers can use to reduce their existing radiation. Settlers can even become fertile again if the radiation is completely removed using Iodine Tablets!








[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]




We know that there are a few more things we need to address and we are listening to your feedback. We're trying to address all the important issues in a timely manner and make the game as a whole more understandable and fair. However, it is important to remember that Endzone - A World Apart is a survival game, so we have made it challenging with full intention.

- Your Team von Gentlymad & Assemble Entertainment


Changelog Version 0.7.7514.32672

[h2]Greetings, survivors![/h2]

As you sure remember, we started working together with "One Tree Planted" far before we even launched into Early Access and planted around 8.000 trees until then.
Now, with over 20.000 units sold of the "Save The World" Edition on Steam, we just planted another 22.315 trees, this time in Brazil!

Thanks to everyone who participated in either wishlisting the game or directly supporting us and the organization by buying the "Save The World" Edition! Together we can make this a greener world!




https://store.steampowered.com/app/933820/Endzone__A_World_Apart/