Improved building of walls. Can now build under doors, haulers will now place wall pieces on the floor instead of shoving it into the wall when replace wall is used.
Fixed a case of walls not being built.
Improved construction job to prevent colonists from getting stuck in windmills.
Fixed pathing bug causing colonists to get stuck on ladders.
Fixed issue with overlapping music.
Fixed manning of defensive buildings, colonists should now stop if their squad is not alerted.
Increased bag sizes.
Increased maximum squad size to 10.
Improved colonists dropping of items, should fix issue with items getting stuck in beds and walls.
Improved combat pathing.
Fixed prospecting for real this time.
Update 0.526
0.526
Added keyboad bindings for zooming in and out.
Fixed creature equipment UI show correct attack speed value.
Fixed bug with taking squad equipment getting stuck in loop.
Torches should now be passable.
Fixed harvest plant/tree mode and a few other issues when UI scaling is used.
Fixed issue with keys like spacebar triggering some UI elements.
Implemented erosion amount setting in the options menu, try turning it to low if you are crashing during world preview generation.
Slightly increased food and drink priority when colonists are starving.
Update 0.525
0.525
Fixed writing job for bookshelves.
Fix for prospecting turning up false positives.
Fix to terrain gen, ores were not being created at the right heights before.
Prospecting should now only store the closest 30 hits for a vein.
Added rename option in the creature details panel.
Allowed building buildings from 1 block away, should fix placing torches one block high.
Increased maintain order limit to 100. Job system should also be slightly more efficient now.
Miners should now be able to dig underwater.
Prevented mining through the bottom of the world.
Added autosaving. Can be changed in options menu. This change will reset all your option settings.
Turned on the friends and rivalry system for relationships. The idea is it colonists should form friendships or rivalries which are more permanent.
Limited the maximum feelings colonists can have for each other to 100. This should reduce all the incest happening now.
Fix bug with wall building ordering. Should fix the issue with building roofs.
Update 0.523, 0.524
Posting today's fixes early because it fixes a pretty critical issue now with the job system. Should help a lot with cooking and other crafting tasks.
0.523
Fixed bug with combining clothing meshes causing crazy visual glitches.
Found the bug causing idle colonists!
Improvement to job system assigning jobs.
Fixed typo causing fertile trait to be way more powerful than it should be.
0.524
Added notification for hands full.
Added check to apply 0.523 to jobs from previous save games.
You can view and comment on the current outstanding issues on the Trello board. After the high priority list is done we'll be going back to the normal slower but more substantial pace of updates.
Update 0.522
0.522
<*> Apple trees should now produce seeds and can be used for juice.
<*> Fixed rare multithreading crash with sleeping on beds.
<*> Colonists should stop murdering tamed creatures.
<*> Slight wolf nerf.
<*> Fixed bug with temperature in concave rooms.
<*> Colonists should stop trying to talk to sleeping friends.
<*> Tweak job recovery rate and pathfinding to try to fix issues with idle colonists. If you have many colonists idle it usually means you have a lot of open jobs at high/critical priority which can't be completed because of lack of ingredients.
<*> Fixed mechanisms getting destroyed when blocks under them are dug out.
<*> Buff to prospecting (hits now show more exact distances). Slightly increased ore vein size.
<*> Fixed bug in temperature display in imperial for starting location screen.
<*> Fixed notifications settings panel
<*> Added a count of creatures selected bar in the military mode.
<*> Wild animals should no longer starve to death by themselves and cause colonists to wander off to collect their corpse.
<*> New roasted seeds recipe.
Thanks for all the bug reports and save game upload guys! I see a bunch of reports of colonists going idle and not doing anything. Often the cause is a lot of high priority jobs which they can't complete. It is a limitation of the current job system that if you have a lot of jobs which don't have materials or are inaccessible it will start to confuse the colonists.
Will work on improving the job system, but for now you have to be careful not to go too crazy with orders and to heed the warnings about inaccessible jobs. Also I've seen bases with crazy numbers (80+ people)! Didn't expect people would be able to get so many people so fast ːsteamhappyː.
Update 0.521
0.521
<*> Fixed bug with traded for items not registering as "known"
<*> Fixed crash with water flow and issue with water pools breaking.
<*> Increased water output amount from saltworks.
<*> Fixed bug with graves not being able to be built
<*> Fixed issue with "Under Siege" alert being stuck on if AI squad gets stuck.
<*> Decreased event difficulty escalation rate. Also made event difficulty less random.
<*> Added popup notification for extreme hunger, thirst, cold, heat, and bleeding.
Update 0.520
More fixes and tweaks to balance.
0.520
<*> Added support for binding mouse buttons to keyboard.
<*> Fix bug with hunting jobs sometimes not clearing after target dies.
<*> Fix issue with bottom of starting menu being hidden with low resolution.
<*> Fixed issue with stills draining way more water than they're supposed to.
<*> Increased rate at which rain refills pools.
<*> Nerfed wolves slightly more.
<*> Slightly increased safe space near start.
<*> Fix crash if starting with single parent.
Update 0.518, 0.519
Fixes a number of issues users have encountered.
0.519
Fix Saltworks not producing as much water as it should.
Fix issue with trade parties sometimes dropping traded items very far from base, thus causing colonists to walk to their deaths.
Fix bug with forbidding items not working correctly.
Fix bug where entire map of plants got assigned for harvesting.
0.518
More strict with minimum age for pairing of couples
Fix bug with traded items counting towards maintain item orders
Fix for crash at world generation screen. Added option for world generation quality (try setting it to low if the game is still crashing at world gen).
Fix for soft lock when rescuing unconscious colonists. Should increase performance of other save games too, there was an issue with too many "Rescue friend" jobs being created when colonists got injured.
Fixed issue with being able to trade with the same trading party multiple times. Should now only be able to trade once with each trading party.
Reduced wild plant reproduction rate
Embark Roadmap
Embark is launching on Early Access in a little over 32 hours!
It has been awesome watching streamers play the game. In this announcement I will talk a little about the current plans for the next few major updates.
Embark has always been made with the intention to lean towards the Dwarf Fortress school of game design. Depth over having super streamlined game mechanics.
Because of this, there's a significant learning curve, especially for people new to the genre. The tutorial has helped a lot in this regard, but there is still a lot of work to be done. The first few updates will try to address the common ways new players get confused when starting out in addition to addressing the feedback from players at launch.
0.6
The main goal art wise is to overhaul the plant models and rendering system. This should address the visual glitches with the current plants and improve the way the world looks.
A more detailed healthcare system, with items you can craft to help with healing is also planned. Another addition will be a basic minecart system to improve efficiency for later game bases.
Lastly new events will be added for the "mid-game". The goal being to provide more goals to the player in the mid game in addition to your normal sandbox style goals.
0.7
The big goal for 0.7 is both localization and Steam Workshop modding support. Complete localization might take longer because of how much text is in Embark.
Also planned is a system to handle localized effects, such as smoke from a fireplace. Bases will need to be designed carefully to allow proper ventilation for buildings like fireplaces.
A look at the temperature system coming in version 0.5
With the upcoming 0.5 update the temperature system in Embark has been upgraded. Here's a deep dive into its inner workings.
Speed
The obvious way to implement temperature in a voxel world would be to have a temperature value for each block. That's clearly not feasible for Embark, the game world is 2 kilometers wide and 255 meters deep, so even just one byte for each block would take a whopping 4 gigabytes of memory!
Lucky for us most of that space is air or deep underground. What we want is for only places relevant to gameplay to have a detailed temperature simulation. Enter rooms, rooms in Embark are collections of blocks which form around certain objects.
They keep track of not just temperature but also a bunch of other stats which colonists care about. Enclosed rooms are the simplest, but rooms can also form in the open in depressions. So if you need a quick place for your colonists to warm up you can build a quick firepit.
The lack of detailed temperature for the rest of the world doesn't mean that it's a single static value. We can still have the temperature at any block be based on several factors such as altitude and underground depth.
Sources of Heat
So now we have a simplified system which chunks temperature based on collections of blocks. Too simple! First we have rooms have a heat capacity, there may be only one temperature value for an entire room but we can still make changes in temperature dependant on the size of the room.
Then we have sources of heat. Living creatures add heat to a room slowly. Kitchens and furnaces add heat while worked. Fireplaces and evaporation coolers add heat at the cost of fuel.
Conductivity
Next we need heat to move between rooms and the outside world. Doors and grates are the obvious candidates for this. They just have to check for adjacent rooms and conduct heat between them. We can also have them conduct more heat when opened.
But that isn't enough, after all if we had a huge room with walls made of paper in the middle of a blizzard we wouldn't expect it to stay warm for long. Again we run into the problem of performance, rooms might be a lot more manageable than the entire game world, but if we check every surrounding block in every room constantly the game would slow to a crawl once bigger bases are built.
Lucky for us the system doesn't have to be so granuler. All we're interested in is the temperature of a room over time.
Instead of checking all blocks, we simply choose a block at random in a room. We start checking in all directions, if the neighbouring block is part of the same room we stop and continue with the next direction. This means blocks buried inside a room don't conduct heat out at all, this has the happy effect of simulating surface area too. Squarish rooms will tend to lose less heat than long skinny rooms.
If we make it out of the room we add the insulation of each wall we encounter as we continue in the same direction. If we find another room or open space we can then conduct heat between the two areas based on the total insulation between them. It might seem like this might lead to inaccuracies since a room could get lucky or unlucky, but thanks to the law of large numbers we get a pretty accurate idea of heat conductivity even with very few checks each frame.
This gives us a system which is cheap on performance, yet gives us a very detailed temperature simulation. A wooden structure would be poorer at keeping warm than a stone structure. Building structures with walls thicker than 1 block would help keep the heat out (or in). An underground cellar would stay cool easier than an above ground storage room. Although building underground makes lighting the room harder, but that is a topic for another post...
