One day, I will remember to never ever write something about the lack of bugs or crash in an update :)
Anyway, this small update fixes a crash with manual battles, which was a side effect on the recent optimizations. It also fixes several minor problems with the AI which when combined on a struggling base could lead to a death spiral.
Cheers.
Full Changelog
AI: Starving settlers who are cooking something can no longer have this task interrupted by any other AI process
AI: Tweaked logic to make sure that someone with 0 work ethics will still do something productive, sometimes
Balance: Depressed trait no longer cancel the ability to do expeditions as it was sorta confusing
Fixed: Negative value inventory
Fixed: Crash in manual combat expeditions (regression bug due to optimization pass)
Fixed: Minor problem with factory logic due to saturday's optimization pass
Fixed: When food is lacking and people are looking for stuff on the ground, they would incorrectly identify fodder as proper food, throwing their AI in a disarray
Fixed: Some tests done when looking to grab something left on the ground wouldn't check if the tile is accessible or not
0.8.6.2 Patch: Optimization Pass
Hey there!
Here's the first update for 0.8.6. This time I heavily focused on improving performances, especially during raids. It still includes the usual batch of fixes and UI improvements. Full changelog at the end, but I really want to mention the important bits :)
Optimization Pass
While the game's performances are, in general, very good. There was still a couple cases where they would go down significantly during very large enemy raids. Even more so when your base is fully walled off while a raid is ongoing, in that case, the game would have frequent micro-freezes.
While, obviously, it depends on your CPU (and the map size to some limited extent), the game can now happily deal with more than 200 raiders at a time without slowdowns or freezes, no matter if the base is walled-off or not. Such numbers being way beyond what you'd normally encounter in a non modded game, I'm pretty satisfied.
The improvements are not limited to the raids. People who love mega-bases with 150+ survivors will enjoy slightly better performances. Map generation is faster, especially on maps with many underground layers. Save-games are smaller and take less time to process. Finally, the game's memory footprint has also been reduced.
UI and Fixes
The recently introduced keyboard shortcut to c[o]py stuff you have already built is better at its job. Now if you try to copy a factory, the copy will have the same queued recipes and if you copy a depot, the new one will have the same settings.
The "new game" menu also got larger, nice title images for the scenarios.
Oh, there's a bug fix I want to mention as it might be related to some comments I received. It's apparently quite old. I never noticed it but I can see why it would affect the base of new players.
Basically, there was a logic issue in the crafting stations, if the base has resources for only one instance of a given recipe and those resources are not close-by, the station could be tricked into thinking that there's no longer enough resources when the worker is gathering them. It would then cancel the order, and loop to the next item in the queue if any. Anyway, this should be fixed.
And for the price of the silliest bugfix in a while. Apparently, it was possible for a dead body to go around doing jobs, hanging out at the lounge and so on. It could happen when someone dies of negative traits (like blood loss) while being in the hospital. The dead will stay dead now :)
Full Changelog
AI: Raiders no longer look like they are all acting in perfect sync thanks to the randomization of the time they stay idle
Balance: Slightly reduced at which rate small plants reproduce (to reduce the amount of "gardening")
Balance: Increased healing rate of doctors
Content: New expedition event: mutant mercenaries which can be recruited
Engine: Massively improved performances in raids when the player base is fully walled off
Engine: Further improved performances during raids in general
Engine: Increased map generation speed, especially on maps with many underground layers
Engine: Reduced savegames size and increased save speed
Engine: Reduced memory consumption, especially in large/deep maps
Engine: Additional performance tweaks, because why not
Modding: Added "DefaultFaction" field to factions, if set to false, this faction won't be loaded unless specified by a scenario
Modding: Added "AllowedFactions" (faction id list) to scenario files, to replace the factions with a "DefaultFaction" flag by a list of the modder's making
Modding: Added "BlackListID" in Scenario (Events sub section) files. It works like BlackListTag but is used to blacklist events by their filename
Modding: Added "DisableTech" to Scenario files, prevents techs in the list from being researched or looted
Modding: Added "LootSurvivor" to Scenario files, overrides the default npc file who "looting" a POI for survivors
Modding: Clutters' PlantData field can be accessed in LUA
UI: The shortcut to copy furniture will also copy the settings of the depot or factory if one is to be copied
UI: Added Mo[v]e shortcut to move selected/hovered furniture around
UI: Sorted recycling bench recipes by alphabetical order
UI: Made scenario selection screen prettier with larger title images
Fixed: In dev/creative mode, the placement of objects you haven't the tech for was disabled (regression bug in 0.8.6)
Fixed: Exploit where making a tile incompatible with a wild tree could accelerate its growth, trees on the wrong tiles will just self delete after a while now
Fixed: Wild trees wouldn't take roofs into consideration
Fixed: There was still a room in the starting underground bunker which could spawn with a broken lamp
Fixed: If someone dies as a hospital patient, they could enter some weird zombie state where the dead body would keep doing jobs for a while
Fixed: Planted trees could be moved
Fixed: The game wouldn't "untag" tiles after removal, which could cause constructed tiles to be removed by error after loading a save
Fixed: Logic issue with recycling and crafting stations: if there's resources for only one instance of a recipe, it might not complete if they are too far away
Fixed: Already discovered technology could be looted multiple times from map locations (wasn't breaking anything but was annoying)
Fixed: Doors on the map (already placed ones) could be tagged as "Debris" which could interfere with some of the game's logic
Fixed: Misc minor issues
After The Collapse 0.8.6: Nature's Wrath (hot-patch 1)
Welcome to After The Collapse 0.8.6: Nature's Wrath.
I know I said this update would be smaller than usual, while it's still technically true it's not by much. As usual, we'll only go over the major improvements and changes. The full changelog is at the end of this article.
Fire is a thing now (which we're using extensively)
Cycle of nature, trees and plants grow, multiply and die over time
Massive performance boost during large raids and within very large bases
New map generator and new biomes
Improved combat AI script, Extensive balance, UI and bug fixing update
Fire
So, fire is a thing now. Not just the flamethrower effect, but actual fire that will propagate over tiles as long as there's fuel to get it running. It's not something you'll encounter very often, but it can catch you by surprise. It can appear during heat waves when plants can catch fire, when using the flamethrower, the RPG launcher or other energy weapons.
Survivors (and prisoners) will automatically try to extinguish nearby visible fires. When in doubt, you can switch to combat mode and order your guys to "attack" the fire to get it under control. In the same spirit, rainy weather patterns will help by dousing the flames.
[previewyoutube="oC-xb2XKwPs;full"]
Survivors are generally pretty good at avoiding tiles on fire. But when trying to extinguish it or when getting trapped, they might get 1st to 3rd degree burns. First degree burns have very little impact and will heal on their own after a couple hours. 2nd degree burns are more detrimental and will need antiseptic to get cured. 3rd degree burns will make your survivors pretty miserable and will need antibiotics to get cured. Exoskeletons and fire vests will protect your survivors against those effects.
Tiles on fire apply fire damage over time to everything (that can burn) standing on said tiles. Tiles maxed out of fire intensity will "jump" to an adjacent tile with something it can use as a fuel source. In practice, dense forests with a lot of vegetation might get wiped out without your intervention. Constructed tiles (like marble or cement) are pretty much fireproof, but a house built on wood foundations will burn very quickly.
Cycle of Nature
Until now, trees would just "spawn" fully grown every month at midnight according to some arcane formula. It was a supposedly temporary hack implemented like 2 years ago. It's time to let it go. Now, each plant is growing from a "sprout" to an "old" stage, visibly changing over time. They also reproduce according to rules set in their data files. Different tree "species" grow on different tiles and at different rates: for instance the newly introduced palm trees grow on sandy and ground tiles while standard trees will grow on the several variants of the grassy tiles.
[previewyoutube="wuczldqeSIs;full"]
The change is not just graphical, younger trees will give a lot less resources than fully grown ones when cut down. You can also collect sprouts and plant them to generate your own forests. Last but not least, I'm introducing the first wild tree you can use as a "factory". By exploring farms or dealing with traders, you'll find apples you can plant to grow an apple tree. Apple trees, once fully grown work as seasonal (15 days on/off cycle) self-replicating food production factories. You can make cider or pies out of the collected apples. Both item giving happy thoughts to your survivors when consumed.
All the trees you can plant yourself are in the new "Nature" tab of the building menu. Make sure you plant them on the proper tile type (a little guess work is needed), otherwise they will die off quickly.
Note that the cycle of nature is very slow, it takes a total of 50 days for a standard tree to grow from "sprout" to "dead". And within that time it might spawn a few new trees. On the other side of the spectrum, bushes grow & die in a few weeks, spawning as many children as they can within their limitations. I tried to keep it relatively on par with previous versions when it comes to forest density and wood availability but given how different the system is, it's something that will probably need some tuning over time.
Of course, all of this can be modded, new plant species can be implemented and existing ones altered.
Combat & Performances
I was technically supposed to add more buildings for the expedition manual combat encounters, that didn't happen as I got sucked into a vortex of fixing several low level problems with the combat AI and given the end result, it was for the best. I rewrote the whole AI logic for what's basically the "attack" order. Simply put, performances in large raids are about 10 to 20 times better. You can have 100 hostile raiders on the map without suffering from (too noticeable) slowdowns now.
Additionally the attack script is a lot better at what it does. Hostiles should be a hell lot better at understanding what they can attack, what they can't and what door they should break to get their ways. It's literally night & day in terms of performances and efficiency. It's not perfect of course, and I'm sure that the old script was covering a couple edge cases this one ain't yet, but on average it's definitely a lot better.
The optimizations are not limited to combat encounters either, the game's performances are a lot less tied to the size of the map you're playing on. Deletion/Addition of path-blocking items on gigantic maps no longer trigger a small slow down. Same goes with your own population and previously very CPU intensive calculations are a lot smoother now. I've seen save-games with 120+ survivors running at barely below 60fps.
Balance Pass
There's a couple balance changes worth talking about.
Firstly, the Food/Drink consumption difficulty settings work differently. Instead of making your survivor eat more often, it changes how efficient is the food. At the highest difficulty level, a settler will need to grab 2 meals instead of one to achieve the same result. The big difference being that it won't impact the base's productivity nearly as badly. It makes those settings a lot more viable. Given how common "too much food" is a complaint from the more experienced players, I encourage you to experiment with it.
Secondly, a new "World Map Loot" setting has been added to the difficulty settings. It does what it says on the tin, and alters how much loot is available in the world map. The default value correspond to roughly half of what was previously available. The rational behind the change is that there was too much loot in the world, making the cheap generic loot run pretty pointless compared to the more costly focused one.
Procedural Generation
I added desert variants of the Riverlands and Lakes biomes, coming with the new palm trees. Those biomes are also easier to spot on the world map, as they'll have a small body of water on the tile.
I also added a new world generator: Rocky Desert, taking advantage of those new biomes.
User Interface
Here's the highlights.
First, a long overdue change. I rewrote the water collecting barrel's menu entirely. It looks and works like a standard factory menu now. You can set limits to how much dirty water you want to collect, change priority, the usual. In the same spirit, all lamps (no matter if normal or grow lamps) can be toggled on/off from their respective menus.
Secondly, thanks to a very good suggestion from BallC, I've implemented a new keyboard shortcut to c[o]py whatever object your mouse is hovering, ready to be build. Works with walls, furniture, crafting stations, doesn't matter. You can change the shortcut in the settings, as usual.
Bug Fixes
I don't normally list bug fixes in the articles, but I'm happy to tell the old guard that I fixed 2 of the oldest bugs in the game. Namely, a build order would complete but the target building wouldn't be created and the resources would still be consumed. It was as rare as it was annoying, but it's finally over. Same goes with a bug where an animal or human would still use a recently deleted stair.
That's on top of 30 other fixes ranging from incredibly minor to sorta annoying.
Savegame & Mod Compatibility
There's no major change to modding only additions. As such, mods should work as usual.
This version is technically compatible with saves dating from 0.8.3 and over, however plants in existing saves won't grow or multiply until you start a new game.
Closing Words
This version is pretty solid. Handling large fires and thousands of plants on very large maps was kind of a challenge, but I am very happy with the results, performances have never been that good and the game is very stable. No doubt I will be proven wrong by someone within a few days, but that's what hot-patches are for. You can expect a few small weekly patches before the next large update as there's still some features and improvements I'd like to make.
Hotpatch 1
Fixed: Problem with pickup sub-job causing water collectors and some other systems not to work properly
Full Changelog
AI: People will generally try to navigate around the fires when possible
AI: RaiderAI and attack jobs have been rewritten, much faster and slightly better at what they do
AI: Melee combatants should get less confused by inaccessible ranged enemies (like turret walled off by barbed wire)
AI: Settlers and prisoners will try to extinguish fires around them
Balance: Exoskeleton type armors negate the "Heavy Equipment" debuff
Balance: Food and Drink consumption difficulty settings alter how efficient are meals instead of modifying how often people have to eat/drink
Balance: Default values for "Loot Left" in world map locations have been tuned down significantly
Balance: Heavily encumbered survivors (carrying a lot of stuff) move a bit slower. This can be counter-balanced with a high Hauling skill
Balance: Due to the recent performance boost, you'll keep receiving new settler events organically until your reach 50 people, instead of 40
Balance: Game starts with preset settings for cattle (auto milk, collect egg...)
Balance: Slightly reduced max loot from 1x1 "large rocks" and full grown trees
Balance: Reduced direct damage of flamethrowers (to balance out the additional damage from flames)
Content: Fire has been added. It can spread over the terrain, objects and people. Praise Zorg!
Content: Flamethrowers, RPG/grenade launchers and similar weapons will cause things they hit to catch fire
Content: Heat waves will occasionally cause a tree/plant to catch fire
Content: Rain helps against fire
Content: Attacking a fire in combat mode will order people to extinguish it, which is useful when a fire starts way outside the base
Content: Added World Loot setting to the difficulty settings, alters the quantity of loot in the world map
Content: Scorpions can be farmed for their poison (like spiders)
Content: Trees and plants grow over time replacing the monthly spawn of full grown trees
Content: Palm trees can be found in arid and new sandy biomes
Content: Fires, on top of the HP damage will cause different levels of the new "burnt" medical condition
Content: Second degree burns can be cured with disinfectant, 3rd degree burns require antibiotics
Content: Exoskeleton and fire vest protect from heavy burns
Content: Trees can be planted (by harvesting or buying sprouts/saplings). They will die if not placed in a proper terrain, though
Content: Added apple trees and apples. Apple trees alternate between 15 days of fruits production and 15 days of downtime
Content: Apples can be used to make apple pie (food & mood bonus) at a kitchen and cider (drink & mood bonus) at a still
Engine: Massive performance boost when large amounts of raiders/zombies are attacking your base
Engine: General performance boost in bases with large population and in large maps
Engine: Other minor code and performance optimizations
Engine: Added "MinGameSpeed" & "MaxGameSpeed" fields to settings.json (modifying those values past the default ones is
NOT* officially supported)
Graphics: The more fires on screen, the more the ambiant lighting will move toward red (mostly visible by night or underground)
Graphics: River and lake type biome tiles on the worldmap have a small amount of water making them easier to spot
Graphics: Small plants & bushes become brown when they are about to die
Modding: Added "GenerateFire" (true/false) to weapon files, determines if a weapon will causes fires whenever it hits something
Modding: Added "SpawnFireRate" (float) to weather files: if set to > 0, it will spawn fire over a plant. 1 is every hour, 2 every 30 minutes, 0.5 would be every 2h
Modding: Added "SpawnFireChance" (float) to weather files: likelihood of the spawn fire above to be successful
Modding: Added "DisableDeathMessage" (true/false) to NPC files, allows to disable the message posted when said NPC dies
Modding: Added "PlantData" folder to define wild plant/tree species and added "PlantData" field to clutter data files (see clutter/plant_* files)
Modding: Added "RemoveTraits" field to traits: when trait applied, remove all existing traits in this list (while OppositeOf offers protection but doesn't remove)
Modding: Data validator now checks for a lot more potential errors (notably with traits)
ProcGen: New desertic/sandy variants of the riverland and lake biomes
ProcGen: New world map generator (desertic world which is definitely not New Vegas themed, nope)
ProcGen: Different worlds have different modifiers for vegetation and mountain quantities (Eden has more trees, desert world has more mountains)
ProcGen: Giant mushrooms can appear in more underground biomes
Settings: The "Antialiasing" graphical setting has been removed (it was not functional and the game already has basic AA)
Settings: Added "Higher Luminosity" accessibility checkbox to graphical options (makes night & caverns a LOT less dark)
Sound: Fires produce an ambient sound effect (volume varying with intensity)
UI: World map is accessible from Combat UI (both button & shortcut) and going back to base from map will restore the correct UI mode
UI: The menu to select a person for a room will show people who need one first
UI: Added search bar to the encyclopedia's item screens
UI: Clicking "Items" (without selecting a sub category) in encyclopedia will open a searchable list of
all* items
UI: All lamps (connected grow lamps, normal lamps) can be toggle on/off
UI: Skill info added to single recipe crafting stations
UI: Overhauled the water collector menu (works the same as the factory menu, also prettier)
UI: Pharmacy moved to utility section and camp fire moved to crafting section of the build menu (makes more sense)
UI: Added game log message when the base is revealed (basically when you build a stair to the surface from your underground bunker)
UI: Added keyboard shortcut to make a c[o]py of the selected furniture, crafting station or wall (shortcut can be changed in game settings)
UI: Added "Nature" tab to build menu (for the new and future buildable trees)
Fixed: Some minor issues with the way people in expeditions were stored in memory
Fixed: It was technically possible (not sure in practice) for seeds/crops to get stuck inside a farm without being used
Fixed: Rain droplet quantity wasn't consistent with zoom level, roofs also made it inconsistent
Fixed: The item category dropdown in the Stocks menu was cut short by the menu's border
Fixed: Exo skeleton armors/helmets disassembling recipe had a typo resulting in them giving out less items than expected
Fixed: Floor removal jobs aren't saved when saving/loading a game
Fixed: The expedition vehicles could, incorrectly, be selected in the new game setup screen
Fixed: Giant spider queen spawning as male
Fixed: Job templates are not applied to people being made prisoners, again (I apparently tried to apply cattle settings to them instead, oops)
Fixed: In manual expedition battles, mood and need debuffs for lack of bed and other social stuff were still applied
Fixed: Disabled needs would still count toward mood calculations (this was affecting prisoners the most)
Fixed: In the New Game menu, switching to/from the inventory panel would reset the player's selection
Fixed: In very rare occasions, a build job wouldn't spawn the designated building on completion
Fixed: If no one is coming to take care of a knocked out prisoner, they might end up waking up and still hold their weapons
Fixed: A rare case where a raider could try to attack something that cannot take damage (stairs and such)
Fixed: Multiple minor issues with pathing logic which caused the game to query the pathfinder more often than necessary
Fixed: Cattle's newborns could escape confinement on birth by spawning a bit too far away. they'll spawn on their mother's tile now
Fixed: If a pregnant cattle was in a fully walled off 1x1 pasture, it could cause a crash on baby birth
Fixed: If no player built bed are available, and the map has bedrolls, settlers would (incorrectly) use them
Fixed: Switching layer while the game is paused wouldn't update the ambient lighting
Fixed: Traps could be moved around from the clutter menu (which wasn't the intended effect)
Fixed: Tribal beds would upgrade directly to beds instead of upgrading to sleeping bags
Fixed: Floors can be laid multiple times in the same space
Fixed: On new game, decay was applied to the starting underground bunker which could lead to broken lamps and such
Fixed: Rain collectors' job was prioritized over all other jobs (very old "optimization" that is now hurting more than it's helping)
Fixed: Stair deletion wasn't taken in consideration for pathing purpose for a while, allowing mobs/people to use recently deleted stairs
Fixed: Disassembling skill wasn't taken into consideration when razing some of the structures
Fixed: Starting a second game after one that was going for long while could prevent weather from changing properly
Fixed: Player's underground base would get automatically revealed when loading a savegame
Fixed: Inconsistency between max game speed set by keyboard shortcut and by the UI buttons
Fixed: Equipment supposed to protect from sickness/wounds could also (incorrectly) cure them whenever used
Plans for the 0.8.6 release
Hi,
After our five weeks of weekly patches, it's time to go for a proper devlog. The next large update will be smaller in scope than 0.8.5 (not every update can have a 120+ item long changelog), but it's still going to add a few new fun toys for you to play with.
Beside adding & fixing stuff regarding the expeditions, questlines and buildings, it will add fire (which can spread), proper growth for wild trees and plants, and a few more weather and nature related things.
Fire
Last week, I've mostly been playing with fire. If I recall correctly, it was an early development promise too, so one of the few remaining checkboxes is being ticked. I could write 10 paragraphs about fire propagation and how well it's modeled, but in reality, it seems that starting fires IRL for game development purpose is against the law. I had to make do with an approximation.
Here's a video of the very much "work-in-progress" result:
[previewyoutube="AOeTQfdqJNU;full"]
The video is unedited and a bit too long. Skip to 30 seconds before the end when it gets boring so you can see the new flame-thrower in all it's glory. The graphical rendering of the fire is still subpar. I will try to find better animations and make better particle systems for it. Don't hold your breath, it's not going to be super nice looking either. I'd rather save frames than waste CPU cycles on something over complicated.
Anyway, yes, fire will be a thing. It won't be very common, and it is possible to plan around it. Stone walls and constructed floors (except wood ones) will keep you relatively safe. And it won't spread without something that can burn on the adjacent tiles. It will also add a drawback to the overpowered flamethrowers, balancing them out a bit without making them boring. Heat waves might also cause some trees to catch fire occasionally, and there's a rare late game event, called "wall of flames" which will be, I reckon, subject of much hate in the future. Oh, and yep, it's likely that your electric grid might cause a few fires too, maybe :)
Rain will of course work against fires, and your settlers will do their best to avoid walking in flames and extinguish them (that, I have yet to implement in the internal build). It's not out the question that I add more wacky (optional) weather patterns taking advantage of the fire.
There's also a whole thing about 1st, 2rd, 3rd degree burns that is being added, but I will keep that for the release post.
Nature's Cycle
You might have wondered why trees keep "staying here" after you razed them. The reality is that every month, more trees will spawn next to existing ones, fully grown, at midnight. It is an old, quickly written "hack" to get that done. It's time to replace it by something a bit more interesting.
I am going to introduce a simple growth system for bushes, plants and trees. The general idea is to have them grow gradually in a manageable fashion and go through different stages. It should even be possible to have different species of trees growing under different conditions. We could have a desert bound cactus and more generic trees elsewhere. Same goes for the giant mushrooms in the rare underground biomes. All of this being moddable, of course.
There are performances concerns, with trees in the thousands on some maps, it's not efficient to have each plant running it's own individual script. Instead I'll use a more top down approach with a daily "nature" update, probably placed just before the autosave event to make the update un-noticeable, even on extremely large maps. I'm not really worried, but it'll need some brainstorming nonetheless. :)
Expeditions
Expeditions are in a pretty good place, but there's always more stuff to do. I will likely add more building/maps for some of the locations which are currently using the fallback default layout. It's quite time consuming, especially for a feature few people are really using, so it's something I do gradually.
I'll also try to see if I can reasonably make AI factions run their own expeditions. I mean they technically do, but it's entirely abstracted. The idea would be to allow you to see potential attacks against your production centers before they happen. And optionally be able to intercept them with your own expeditions.
I'm also in the process of figuring how to balance the manual and the automatic combat methods so they don't feel like being completely different difficulty levels.
Misc. Stuff
With this version being focused on smaller additions, it's not going to take nearly as long as for the 0.8.5 release. I will continue to go over the various threads/posts to implement requested features, tweak the UI, etc. By now, you probably know the drill, I'm not going to list every single little item here. Fire and the nature cycle are the big announcements.
Anyway, that's all I have to show for now. More will come soon. :)
Cheers!
0.8.5.6 Maintenance Patch
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.
Changelog
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
0.8.5.5 Patch: Medical and UI Tweaks
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:
Medical Tweaks
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.
Encyclopedia
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.
User Interface
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.
Full Changelog
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
0.8.5.4 Patch: More Stuff (tm)
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:
Flee From Expedition Battles
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.
General Storage Menu
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.
Balance
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.
Savegame and Mod Compatibility
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.
Full Changelog
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
0.8.5.3 Patch: Misc. Fixes & Improvements
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:
Better Eating Habits
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.
Depot Presets
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.
Full Changelog
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
0.8.5 Hotpatch 2
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:
Razing / Disassembling / Mining
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.
Population Menu improvements
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.
UI Feedback about common problems
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.
Full Changelog
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
0.8.5 Hotpatch 1
Here's the first obligatory hot-patch. It's, as usual, compatible with previous save-games. However, If you are settled in Lost Eden, you will probably have to restart. My apologies for the inconvenience.
Cheers.
Changelog:
Fixed: A typo in the "Lost Eden" world file caused some parts of the map to cause a crash when settled in (and other very unfun side effects).
Fixed: A rare/new problem with mountain generation in the overworld could cause an infinite map generation loop
Fixed: Deleting tutorial critical buildings during the tutorial would cause a crash (those buildings are now protected against raze orders for the duration)
