Hey Drifters, Continuing on the food improvements, we bring you: The Chef. To better manage food in the endgame, you can now prioritize what your drifters eat, just like you prioritize their duties. Additionally, every drifter now has a favorite food that gives them a big morale boost when they eat it!
We've added three new crops; Potatoes, Tomatoes and Wheat. The food pipeline has been rebalanced, introducing new dishes for the Food Truck and a new building: the "Fancy Restaurant" :) A place where you can create culinary food and even add your own decorations on top.
During experimental we'll be working on additional balancing, food-related decorations and adding more depth to the drifter's diet.
What's next?
For now, crops like corn and potatoes can be found on supermarket landmarks. Instead of this we're planning to add a new region with new landmarks for these crops.
This patch is still in development and can be tested on the experimental branch to give feedback.
This is how you can enable the experimental branch of Flotsam. This will only work when you're not in a game: 1. Open Steam Library 2. Right click Flotsam 3. Select Properties 4. Go to tab 'Betas' at the top. 5. Select 'Experimental' in the drop-down.
Early Access 0.8.2e1: The Chef
An early version of The Chef update, that introduces a fancy restaurant, favorite and culinary food!
The Chef
Added culinary food, a step above yummy food. Drifters eating this high-end food will gain a highly positive morale modifier.
Drifters now have a favorite food. Drifters that eat their favorite food will gain a highly positive morale modifier.
Added the Drifter Food Priorities Panel, where you can set priorities on what drifters eat.
New construction: Fancy Restaurant. A place where you can create culinary food, as well as place decorations on top.
New construction: Fryer. You can fry potatoes and fish here, used as ingredients for some yummy and culinary food.
New specialist: The Chef. The Chef currently has +10 to cooking, the requirement to unlock the Fancy Restaurant.
New Crops: Potato, Tomato, Wheat.
Iterated upon current food pipeline to integrate the culinary foods and new ingredients.
Temporarily added the new crop items to supermarket landmarks.
Fixes
Fixed issue where loading old saves sometimes lead to landmarks being unusable.
Fixed issue on the map, where salvage icons would be created for finished duties.
Fixed issue with OFF icons not always showing above buildings that were turned off.
Fixed issue when starting a new game, the inventory top-bar would show empty icons from the previous game.
Fixed issue where a dead drifter could cause the town movement to mismatch between the map and default view.
0.8.1: Fancy Parks!
0.8.1: Fancy Parks
Heya Drifters, Just dropping a small patch! It brings a nice variety of new and fancy park decorations inspired by French parkitecture. Enjoy beautifying your town and don't forget to place some Rubber Ducks :)
What's next?
The Chef is still next on the horizon! We'll be introducing new crops and culinary food. As well as player control over what food your drifters eat.
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Early Access 0.8.1: Fancy Parks
Just a small decoration patch which gives various new options to increase your town's beauty :)
Fancy Parks
New construction: Tiled Park (1x1 - 5x5)
New Decorations: Benches, Iron Fences, Iron Gates, Tiled Paths, Iron Lantern, Hedges, Parasol Table, Pond, Knight Statue, Mermaid Statue, Gazebo, Seagull Fountain, Rocks and a Rubber Duck.
Decoration slots can now have borders, like fences, that can be placed in addition to other decorations.
General
Fields and Fish Farm now show errors when required items (food, water) are missing.
If the game fails to save, an error message will now pop-up.
Fixes
Fixed issue where growing fish in Fish Farms would no longer work after loading a saved game.
Fixed issue where drifters would keep swimming to landmarks with the boat toggle ON if you toggled on actions first.
Fixed issue where drifters would keep yelling for attention even after you've rescued them.
Fixed issue where toggled landmark actions would not persist after saving and loading.
Fixed issue where Fish Farm did not work using Joystick.
Fixed issue where using the Remove Decoration tool on decorations that were not finished could cause drifters to get stuck.
Fixed issue where removing decorations did not remove their beauty benefits.
Fixed issue where fields were consuming too much water that stacked higher when saving and loading often.
Fixed issue where loading a save file when a doctor was curing a patient could cause the diseased patient to stay in the MedPod.
Fixed issue where drifters would not upgrade a grass or tiled walkway.
Fixed issue where water would not be counted and be stuck in export inventories.
Fixed issue where drifters were not initialized correctly when they were rescued with the drifter duties panel open.
Visuals
Added UI animations to broodstock.
Added Seaweed Salad animation to the Seaweed Spinner.
0.8.0f1
Hey Drifters,
Here's a small hotfix patch for 0.8.0, mainly fixing the architect mode (again!) and some issues with the water and botanist :)
Early Access 0.8.0f1
General
Botany duties are now locked until Botanist is rescued. Once rescued, Botany duties are available for all drifters.
Removed Architecting from duties window, as it had no actual purpose.
Fixes
Fixed issue where Architect Mode broke on use.
Fixed issue where water storages could not be deconstructed.
Fixed issue where the drink counter would not count water stored in water storages.
Fixed issue where Botanist was not needed to unlock farming related research.
Fixed issue where Changelog scrollbar did not work with scroll-wheel.
Fixed issue where Botany priority was not used for planting seeds.
Hey Drifters, Farming is here! For the longest time, sustaining a large town with food has been notoriously challenging, often resulting in a ton of unhappy drifters. Additionally, obtaining early-game food has been tricky and came with a needless amount of pollution. In short: the food pipeline just wasn't great. We've been building towards changing it for the longest time, and are ready to roll out the first changes :)
So let's jump into the details: In patch 0.8.0, The entire food pipeline has been reworked, polluted food is no longer a thing. Fields and Corn have been added, along with a Fish Farm where various fish can be cultivated. Additionally, known features of the game have been improved; the Seaweed Grower now functions as a farm, and overall pacing adjustments have been made.
You might have noticed that the Doctor is useless when there's no pollution, and you're right! We're keeping her in for now as pollution will play a different part in the future. We've also decided not to make the Farmer specialist, as there was too much overlap with the Botanist.
What's next?
The Chef is next on the horizon! We'll be introducing new crops and culinary food. As well as player control over what food your drifters eat :)
We might throw in some small patches inbetween, too. As we're brewing with the idea of adding a biofuel pipeline with the seaweed, and making some changes to weights. More info soon.
Early Access 0.8.0
This patch introduces Crops, Fish Farming and improvements to the Seaweed Grower!
Reworked the entire food pipeline, changing most recipes. Re-balanced pacing of food creation. 'Icky' food is now much easier to produce, while 'Yummy' food requires proper pipelines.
Reworked Food Pollution. Food no longer has any pollution value. Pollution will be re-introduced later on in a different manner.
The above change makes the Doctor useless this patch, they will make a re-appearance later.
The Seaweed Farm now continuously produces seaweed, without needing to refresh the spores.
New construction: The Fish Farm. Here, you can slot in 'Broodstock' that will lay eggs. These eggs will grow into adult fish when fed, allowing you to harvest them. The Broodstock will remain in the farm and continue spawning eggs until removed.
New construction: The Animal Chow Grinder. This building allows the creation of various Animal Chow. Various Animal Chow is needed to feed fish in the Fish Farms.
New construction: The Seaweed Spinner. The Seaweed Spinner now handles Seaweed recipes, while the Chop Shop has changed to handle Icky fish recipes.
New construction: The Manual Dryer. You can now build a Manual Dryer to dry Wet Wood into Dry Wood. This increases the speed by which you can get Dry Wood in the early game and fixes some of the pacing issues.
Re-balanced the early game to depend much less on passive buildings. The early buildings had a high dependency on waiting, not allowing direct fixing of problems when they arose. Changes to the Desalinator, Chop Shop and more should now relieve that.
Removed constructions: Drying Rack (the one slot version), Solar Still, Fish Sticks.
Added freshwater farming, you can now grow crops! Crops grow by consuming water and can be harvested once fully grown.
New Construction: Field (1x1 - 5x5)
New Crop: Corn
Temporarily added Corn to supermarket landmarks, which can be used to cultivate more Corn.
With the introduction of fields, we've made water cheaper to produce. This alleviates early game worries, but this ramps up mid-game and end-game with fields.
Increased yields of Fish Schools and added small variance.
Misc
Behind the Scenes: Changed how items are handled in the game.
Selecting drifters in the drifter overview while the 'LevelUp' filter is active now opens the Drifter Expertise page.
Added various animations.
Various small fixes and balancing.
Fixes
Fixed issue where pressing ESC would close a panel and open the main menu at the same time.
Fixed UI issue where players would select the 'boat' option to salvage a landmark again, it would act as 'swimming' instead.
Fixed issue where the building panel's scrollbar would often be jittery.
Fixed issue where weight was not displayed above some buildings.
Fixed issue where a save game could not be loaded because a building was being removed during loading.
Fixed issue where the architect mode breaks when attempting to move a building that a drifter was going to.
0.8.0: The Farmer is ready for testing!
0.8.0e1: The Farmer
Hey Drifters, You can finally test out the Farmer! For the longest time, sustaining a large town with food has been notoriously challenging, often resulting in a ton of unhappy drifters. Additionally, obtaining early-game food has been tricky and came with a needless amount of pollution. In short: the food pipeline just wasn't great. We've been building towards changing it for the longest time, and are ready to roll out the first changes :)
So let's jump into the details: for 0.8, we're changing up our usual workflow a bit and hopping onto Experimental much sooner. While some of the new features are not yet fully implemented, and the UI remains unclear, the most important aspect is that it works and you can play :) Share your thoughts and feedback and we'll iterate upon the patch with quick consecutive patches!
Starting off, the entire food pipeline has been reworked, polluted food is no longer a thing, the Seaweed Grower has been improved to functions as a farm and the Fish Farm is now available to let you grow some fish. Later on, we'll be looking at adding Fresh-water Farming (vegetables) during experimental.
What's next?
This update will be on experimental until all features are properly implemented. After that, The Cook will make it's appearance!
This patch is still in development and can be tested on the experimental branch to give feedback.
This is how you can enable the experimental branch of Flotsam. This will only work when you're not in a game: 1. Open Steam Library 2. Right click Flotsam 3. Select Properties 4. Go to tab 'Betas' at the top. 5. Select 'Experimental' in the drop-down.
Early Access 0.8.0e1: The Farmer
This is an early version of 'The Farmer', featuring the introduction of Fish Farming and improvements to the Seaweed Grower. Some of the new features have not fully been implemented and UI is still very unclear, but consecutive small patches during experimental will quickly tackle these issues. Additionally, we're looking at adding 'Freshwater Farming' (vegetables) during the experimental phase.
Reworked the entire food pipeline, changing most recipes. Re-balanced pacing of food creation. 'Icky' food is now much easier to produce, while 'Yummy' food requires proper pipelines.
Reworked Food Pollution. Food no longer has any pollution value. Pollution will be re-introduced later on in a different manner.
The Seaweed Farm now continuously produces seaweed, without needing to refresh the spores.
New construction: The Fish Farm. The fish farm will grow fish from egg to adult stages where they will reproduce and create new eggs, then continue to a harvest stage where they can be harvested. It currently only works for Gobblers.
New construction: The Extr-egg-tor. (temporary) This building will harvest eggs from fish. It currently only works for Gobblers. This building will most likely be removed during experimental.
New construction: The Animal Chow Grinder. This building allows the creation of various Animal Chow. Various Animal Chow is needed to feed fish in the Fish Farms.
New construction: The Seaweed Spinner. The Seaweed Spinner now handles Seaweed recipes, while the Chop Shop has changed to handle Icky fish recipes.
New construction: The Manual Dryer. You can now build a Manual Dryer to dry Wet Wood into Dry Wood. This increases the speed by which you can get Dry Wood in the early game and fixes some of the pacing issues.
Re-balanced the early game to depend much less on passive buildings. The early buildings had a high dependency on waiting, not allowing direct fixing of problems when they arose. Changes to the Desalinator, Chop Shop and more should now relieve that.
Removed constructions: Drying Rack (the one slot version), Solar Still, Fish Sticks.
Behind the Scenes: Changed how items are handled in the game.
0.7.6f3
Hey Drifters,
Another quick hotfix patch, mainly fixing an issue with rescue landmarks that could cause the game to no longer be savable.
Early Access 0.7.6f3
Fixed issues with the persistence of rescue landmarks, which caused the game to no longer be savable.
Fixed issue where a rescue landmark could be completed multiple times upon saving and loading subsequent to rescuing the drifter.
Fixed issue issue where boats could be left abandoned on landmarks after saving and loading twice while drifters were doing that landmark's tasks.
Fixed issue where using the overlay button to open the Architect Mode could cause the water to remain in Architect Mode even after exiting the mode.
Fixed issue where the energy overlay button did not open the energy overlay.
Fixed issue where clicking on research notifications would no longer open the Tech Tree.
Drifters with items in their inventory no longer become immobilized when storage space is unavailable.
Various small UI improvements.
0.7.6f2
Hey Drifters,
Here's another small hotfix patch for 0.7.6, mainly fixing some additional issues with the Architect Mode not working properly.
Early Access 0.7.6f2
Fixed issue where Korean symbols defaulted to square symbols.
Fixed issue where Drifter morale icons were not correct in regards to their attributes.
Fixed issue where the Upgrade Tooltip was always the first Upgrade Tooltip shown during that session.
Fixed issue where the Control Mapper data was not saved.
Fixed issue where you could open the SurvivalGuide and Map in the Architect Mode.
Fixed issue where the boatwake would spawn an error, clogging log files.
It is no longer possible to apply in Architect Mode while moving a building.
Various small fixes to landmark salvageables.
Various small UI Improvements.
0.7.6f1
Hey Drifters,
Here's a small hotfix patch for 0.7.6, mainly fixing the issue with Architect Mode not working properly! We're also aware that the tooltips of upgrades can be incorrect due to this update, this will be fixed in the next hotfix patch :)
Early Access 0.7.6f1
Fixed issue where Walkways were not stored correctly in the Architect Mode.
Fixed issue where Architect Building Menu would remain open when Architect Mode was closed.
Fixed issue where Birdhouse salvaging toggles would not be persisted.
Fixed issue where the Upgrade Tooltip would show an incorrect resource amount.
Fixed issue where some UI elements were cut off in the Building Panels.
Fixed issue where the Fullscreen and Research Panels would not close on cancel.
Fixed issue where 'R' would no longer reset the camera rotation.
UI scale can now be scaled to 0.5.
Draining Water on landmarks now has a drifter animation.
Various small UI improvements.
0.7.6: Controller Support is ready for testing!
0.7.6e1: Controller Support
Hey Drifters, Controller Support is ready for testing! We've put in some serious effort implementing controller support and searching for the most optimal joystick experience. We're close, but not done yet! The version is now ready for testing, and with your feedback will get to the next level. (so jump in and share your thoughts!)
But that's not all, we've taken the opportunity to rework the entire UI. Our goal was to improve clarity, and make it more understandable and useable. Let us know what you think :)
Keep in mind, the patch is still work-in-progress, so expect some bugs and UI quirks. We'll swiftly address any issues as feedback comes in.
What's next?
With the holidays near, this update will most likely be in experimental for that entire period. After that, The Farmer will make it's appearance and tackle the food pipeline.
This patch is still in development and can be tested on the experimental branch to give feedback.
This is how you can enable the experimental branch of Flotsam. This will only work when you're not in a game: 1. Open Steam Library 2. Right click Flotsam 3. Select Properties 4. Go to tab 'Betas' at the top. 5. Select 'Experimental' in the drop-down.
Early Access 0.7.6e1: Controller Support
0.7.6 brings Controller Support to the game! While this is a big feature, the changelog is pretty straightforward:
Controller Support
Added Controller Support: all features of the game are playable with controller.
Reworked the entire user interface.
Various small bugfixes.
4 Years of Making Waves!
Heya Drifters,
From the very first day of Early Access we set out to make waves together! Flotsam has come such a long way and it's all thanks to your support!
2023 was a great year! We released the first specialist, the Doctor, and soon after introduced their friends: the Engineer, Botanist and Architect. It's also the year where the experimental and handmade maps merged finally into one continuous and endless experience, and many other quality of life improvements :)
Flotsam continues to be a Labor of Love, our small team of three always appreciates the kind messages and enthusiasm from all of you. It's fuel to our fire! If you've enjoyed this journey with us, we'd be incredibly grateful for your nomination in the 'Labor of Love' category for the Steam Awards!
