Lost Legends Expansion - June Dev Log And July 24th Release
Hi hi!
That's right, I've got a release date in sight for the Lost Legends update, July 24th. Things are shaping up well, and I'm hoping to release into beta in a couple weeks to get some testing. Let's see what I've been up to since the last dev log.
More UI stuff???
I've been working a lot on trying to make the game easier to use and less frustrating. I've got improvements in this update for AI and gameplay, but UI is a big part of the pain that I see players experiencing. So, I've put tons of time towards making things simpler, clearer, and more intuitive.
Uniforms
I've done some clean-up on how uniforms work, and are interacted with in the UI. Players can now create uniforms and assign them to a bunch more options. You can still assign them to control groups and professions, but also many other things like skills, gender, effects, etc. This will be key for players that want entities to switch uniforms when in various states. For example, when in combat, and not.
I'm also making uniform priority clearer to help understand why an entity is using a certain item or not.
Block Tooltips (And Layers!)
It can be confusing understanding what a block 'layer' is, let alone what it contains. Block tooltips now have options to toggle the visibility of layers around the block your cursor is on. In the above gif, you can see me toggling the visibility for the block layer above the one I'm on. This is helpful to see what is above and below the selection I'm about to make.
Additionally, I've increased the size of tooltip icons. This should make things a bit easier to see.
The tooltip also shows what is stacked on the cursor's block. No longer do you need to select a block to see that what plants, platforms, items it has. And speaking of items...
You can expand the block tooltip to show a visualization of its contents. I find this extremely helpful when I want to see contents at a glance. You can still see a detailed list and inventory of items within a block, but this is part of a new 'selections' panel.
Entities Tooltip
Much like the block tooltip, I've done lots of work to make it easier to see important info for an entity. Everything is now compartmentalized based on functionality. Attacks grouped together, survival stats grouped together, status effects grouped together, etc.
Much like the block tooltip, you can expand the window to see more, less important, info. This expanded window shows everything that the entity window did, so I decided to remove that window altogether. You can also now see what rooms, jobs, and skills entities are using/doing from here too. Don't worry, there are still other windows to edit these things on a settlement-wide scale. This is just here if you want to see and edit individual info quickly.
Performance Improvements
I wrote a whole new system for displaying tooltips/text which is much, much more efficient. Tooltips and UI text were a huge drain on performance, and now it runs very fast. This should provide noticeable FPS gains for a lot of the lower end machines, if not for everyone.
Final Thoughts
I'm finishing up these last few polish items and tuning tasks. Very excited for everyone to see the new changes. Overall, I think this will be a huge improvement for QoL, but you'll also get lots of new content to check out. It's going to be great!
As always, thank you for reading and for the support!
Waylon
Lost Legends Expansion - May Dev Log
Hello friends!
First off, thank you all for being super patient waiting for these updates. I had intended to put the new content out into beta in March, and I was very close to doing this. In my last log, I had said it was two weeks out, and, at the time, that was true. The new Gwdir race was just about there. However, there were some things I needed to address first. While I've been working on these updates, I've received quite a few messages that talk about several issues with the UI. These are issues I've encountered myself, and they were bugging the heck out of me too. The last thing I want is for the core of the game to be worsened by annoying and unpolished UI. I couldn't just ignore the feedback I was getting. Since the last dev log, I've meticulously worked on those issues. Let's take a look!
Window Improvements
Job and Room Toolbar
This one was a huge annoyance for myself, and I'm sure a lot of you found it to be not great as well. It was implemented when there were only a handful of blueprints and rooms to choose from. So, it wasn't terrible back then. Now, there are just way too many entries to have to search through for the old UI to work. I've done a bunch of work on the layout, functionality, but you also won't have to open a separate window to see placed rooms/jobs now. Everything can be done from the newly updated selection window.
First thing you'll notice is that the jobs and rooms are now listed vertically. It shows the names of the jobs/rooms, and what requirements they may have. Rooms will show previously designated rooms, which you can select to add to, as well as what entities do not have the room. This is to help players understand who is missing, say, a Home when playing as the humans.
As well, along the top, I've added filters for job categories, and special rooms for races. You can see in the gif below that I'm using the arrow keys to navigate selections. This is something I've added to windows the selectable lists and tabs.
Settlers Window
This is another window which desperately needed some love. One common piece of feedback I got was that players hated having to scroll, especially on this window. So, I've gone through all the windows and done my best to make everything fit. As you can see on this screen below, you no longer need to scroll horizontally to see all your skills. And, I did some work to the visuals of skills. I've made it so they are easier to read, and toggle. It's much easier to toggle all skills off/on, as well as reset them.
Entity Window
Here's another window which suffered from scrolling. I've done a pass on it to fit everything into one screen. And, hopefully, the overall layout is clearer.
Production Window
This window is the king of complexity and I did soooooo much work to make every part of it easier to read and use. I've added tons of functionality to be able to edit permissions for everything involved in a job. What items are used, what entities, as well as props if any are required. Don't want items stored in water blocks in your stockpile? You can now edit that level of detail if you wish. There's a million little polish items which went into this screen.
Inventory Window
I've added a ton of new categories to help distinguish items in game. As a result, I've also added some functionality to the inventory window to help organize things.
Bees
This post mostly focuses on the window improvements, but I have also been working on content. One of the new additions is the Honeybee. You'll be able to place an Apiary and farm Honey.
Livelier Marine Life
I've added some new plants that grow only in bodies of water. Also, I've added to color to all the fish to help distinguish them.
Conclusion
There's an absolute ton of work left to do. I'm going to hold off saying when this one will come out because I honestly don't know. Most of the stuff I'm working at the moment is very small details which is tedious. I am so thankful for all of you following the game's progress and providing feedback. This community is amazing. I'll do my best to get this update done asap. Just know that I'm still extremely passionate about this game, and I work every day on it. I hope you don't worry that I've dropped off or anything. I'm in the final home stretch and it is quite the challenge, but we are getting there! Thanks so much for going on the journey with me. :)
Waylon
Lost Legends Expansion - March Dev Log
Hey everyone!
Sorry for the lack of updates. I have been so busy working away on adding tons and tons of stuff to the next expansion. I am so excited to share it with you guys. Not only does it introduce a race that I think is super fun to play, the Gwdir, it has lots of new content, UI improvements, and quality of life stuff.
I'm going to save a full detail of everything for the patch notes but here are some things to tease.
New Entities!
There are four new entities with very unique behaviors, including the Haast (seen above). I greatly improved my entity creation pipeline over the last two months, making it so much quicker to make entities. So, I'm going to start adding a bunch more!
New Rooms!
Bunch of new ones including a few you have all been asking for (such as the Fishery seen above).
UI Improvements
Tons of UI improvements based on feedback, especially for the room management UI. Lots of cleaning up and making things clearer. Without getting too far into the weeds, I've made it so there aren't so many blueprints for players to look through. Instead, a blueprint acts as an action on an item. For example, there is now a Boil item blueprint which can be used on quite a few items to spit out a boiled version of that item. Players can then choose which items not to boil to narrow down those jobs a bit. But, again, I'll get into way more detail when I release the version into beta.
New Plants And Improved Plant Growth
I've added a bunch of new plants that grow in the water. So, now, the oceans and lakes won't be so devoid of life. As well, trees will now grow out, having much bigger trunks, roots, and canopies. This is a big part of the Gwdir gameplay loop! :)
Next Steps
There's a huge amount to still show off and I'm barely restraining myself from spoiling things. I think I'm about two weeks out from having this ready for beta. It's taken a bit longer than expected as I wanted to get a lot into this version. So, thanks for waiting so patiently!
Best,
Waylon
Performance Improvements and Better Carry AI - Beta 0.12.0.2 Patch Notes
Hello dear friends!
I've been working away on the Gwdir race and they are very close to being ready for the beta branch. I wanted to put out this patch in the meantime as it has quite a few performance improvements, but, most importantly, carrying behaviour improvements. Settlers were wasting so much time carrying inefficiently and I needed to address that. Settlers will now focus on items closest to stockpiles first, and you should notice they will keep animal enclosure stockpiles filled in a more reliable way too. As long as you have the haulers and items of course.
I'm working on a job which lets you designate items to haul immediately. As an example, this will make it so you could force settlers to carry items on the edge of the map over items right beside the stockpile.
There are a few tuning and bug fix changes for you to check out in the patch as well. They should make things a bit more enjoyable and less teeth-grindy.
-Feature: Command line item spawn can now recognize item spawn groups with the '-ig' option. i.e., spawn -ig isg_starting_loadout_settlers -Feature: Trees can now grow and many have larger trunks and roots. This change supplements the giant trees the Gwdir race rely on for their gameplay mechanics. -Polish: Plants with low health will now get a color shift to show they are dying. -Tuning: Containers will now show a different visual when full instead of when they have at least one item. This is to indicate at a glance how many containers are at full capacity. -Tuning: Hated/harmful items are now added to prohibited items for room stockpiles if the room has 'Auto-populate diet items' on. -Tuning: Entities will not put items into containers if they are lying on the ground in a stockpile room (as long as the item is permitted in the container). -Tuning: Entities should stop less often when going about their duties. Cleaned up some unnecessary pauses in their behaviour. -Tuning: Command line prediction is more accurate when comparing strings. -Tuning: Plants will spawn less as their numbers grow. This is to avoid too many growing in one biome at a time. This does not affect planted crops, just naturally spawning plants. -Tuning: Bumped up old age for Humans, and decreased their chance to die of cardiac arrest. -Optimization: Item storing and management has been tuned and optimized to be more efficient. Entities should be much better at getting closer carry jobs to stockpiles to avoid going to collect items on edges of the map. -Optimization: Music no longer creates a lag spike when it starts playing. -Bug Fix: After 60 days, a settler wave event would occur every hour forever. -Bug Fix/Tuning: Entities were continuing to move to a set point for a job even though they were close enough to do it. They will now start the job as soon as they are in an adjacent block. -Bug Fix: Selecting New Map from the overworld screen without selecting a tile would load the tile from the previous map. -Bug Fix: Items were being spawned in trees. -Bug Fix: A null reference related to the lighting algorithm going out of world bounds. -Bug Fix: Some item counts weren't displaying correctly.
I'm very excited to share the Gwdir soon. They are super cool and I think that you will all like them. Stay tuned over the next few weeks for that update to the beta. :)
Thanks everyone!
Lost Legends (BETA) 0.12.0.0 - Initial Release For Testing
Hello everyone!
I've started work on implementing the next race, the Gwdir. In addition to them, I'm adding some other fun things to the game. The Gwdir aren't quite ready to play just yet, but I do want to get some testing help for the other new things being added. Let's take a look at those!
Artifacts
I want to start telling more of the history of Odd, and artifacts are a way for me to do this, but also give players more things to discover in the world.
Some items have the tag 'Artifact' and 'Can Be Studied' on them. These indicate that players can study them at the Library to unlock historical details and, potentially, new knowledge.
Regarding tags, I'm going to start using these more and more. And, I've made it so you can now search items by tag in the inventory list. Searching 'artifact' or 'can be studied' will only list those items with those tags. I'll also be getting rid of 'Item Categories' and replacing them with the tag system. This won't really affect the player too much. You'll still see Raw Food, Cooked Food, etc, but they'll be tags instead of a separate category system. My intention is for players to be able to make their own filters (like the ones you see at the top of the inventory window) based on tags, and even to make their own tags to categorize things. And, you'd be able to list the tag at the top of the HUD like you can with item categories. Again, not really something players need to care about, but some of you might find this helpful or interesting, so there you go.
Stealth Entities
Stealth entities have been a thing in the game for a while, but a few of the events weren't really set up correctly. This version re-introduces them with two events, the kidnapper, and the thief. These have hostile entities show up to steal children, and/or valuables. Entities can see stealthed entities when they are not working, and when the entity is in their sight for long enough. I will be introducing guard posts and some patrolling very soon, which will help players detect these entities. In the meantime, you should still be able to set up traps and the like to capture these lurking bad guys in your base.
Patch Notes
-Content: Study Artifact job in Library. Studying artifacts can unlock new blueprints and bits of lore. -Content: Several new blueprints and items related to artifact studying. -Content: Trinket item type. -Content: Several artifact items to discover in the world. -Content: Added stealth thief event that steals Ren. -Content: Added stealth kidnapper event that steals children. -Feature: Tags can now be searched to filter item lists. i.e., typing 'can' will list items that 'can be studied'. -Feature: Unlocked research now appears in a popup to show what has been added to the player's repository of blueprints and rooms. -Bug Fix: Rare/Epic/Legendary items were not spawning in dungeons correctly. -Tuning: The survival skill can no longer be disabled. -Tuning: Generated Ardyn settlements now use Ardyn props and platforms.
Final Thoughts
Lastly, you'll no longer be able to disable Survival. Too many players were disabling this and then their entities would die of hunger/thirst and didn't know why. Instead of coming up with a bunch of annoying notifications to communicate this, it made more sense to just lock that skill. I could be wrong, so let me know if you can't play without being able to disable it for some reason I'm not seeing. Would love to hear your feedback there, and if you have a better solution. I'm happy to tune that stuff further.
As for the Gwdir race, it's going along very well. I'm currently making up the art and figuring out the details of their mechanics. I'm not going to spoil them just yet, but I am super excited about how they play. Personally, I think they are my favorite race so far.
Some other things to be excited for that will go into Lost Legends are: more social interaction amongst settlers, a family tree UI, more pros/cons for skills and jobs (i.e., making better items, or critically failing things), and more events.
That's all for now! Hope you are all well. Thank you for your continued support, feedback, and kind words.
Waylon
Timeless Tyrants 0.11.0.20 + 0.11.0.21 Hotfixes
Hello!
I just uploaded 0.11.0.21 and a day or so ago I uploaded 0.11.0.20. They include fixes for a few more serious bugs. Here are the patch notes for the two of them:
0.11.0.20
-Bug Fix: Some players had trouble saving their games.
0.11.0.21
-Bug Fix: Sometimes the unreachable job/item notification would not activate correctly. -Bug Fix: Entities would not do jobs because less important jobs like hauling to stockpiles would reserve the items. This would cause entities to not eat/drink/build. -Bug Fix: Entities would sleep on the ground instead of their beds.
Thanks to everyone that reported these!
Waylon
Timeless Tyrants Expansion 0.11.0.19 (RELEASED)
Hello, dear friends!
The Timeless Tyrants expansion is now live! It introduces a whole new race to play in addition to a ton of other things. Let's take a look!
The Ardyn Race
Senectia
The Ardyn are a completely different race from Humans in pretty much every way. The main difference being that they don't need food or water to survive. Instead, they age much faster than all the other races. For them, every hour is equivalent to one day of aging for normal entities. This means that they die of old age (Senectia - an aging disease unique to their race) much faster.
They prevent themselves from getting old through a process called retroanimation. Retroanimation takes the life-force from one entity and gives it to the Ardyn, stealing their youth to keep the Ardyn young. This requires the Ardyn to constantly need to maintain large populations of captured entities to survive. Many other races fear the Ardyn because they ruthlessly hunt and capture all living things.
Reproduction
The Ardyn also differ from Humans in how they reproduce. They can have companions but they don't procreate with a partner and spawn offspring. Instead, when an Ardyn dies, their bodies can be turned into Astrasomes. These organic seed-like pods are used to grow a plant called a Chronoblast. Caretakers of Chronoblasts must feed them life-force to help them grow, and when they are mature, they produce one adult Ardyn settler.
Ardyn Rooms
There are three new rooms for the Ardyn to use. These can only be unlocked by having an Ardyn settler.
Astralarium
This is the main fabrication room. It is where Ardyn workers can create items like Astralite, Astrasomes, and Nyctium. As mentioned previously, Astrasomes are used to create more Ardyn settlers, but Astralite and Nyctium are mainly used for constructing things.
Astralite
Astralite is a dense material that is the biproduct of Nyctium being fused with the life-force of an Ardyn. It is extremely valuable because of its difficulty to make and is often used to make advanced containers like Astracubes.
Nyctium (and the Nyctoid plant)
Nyctium is an organic material that is heavily used in Ardyn construction. It is unique in that it can only be harvested from the Nyctoid plant (more on that later).
Somnic Pools
The Somnic Pools are where the Ardyn use retroanimation on entities to remove Senectia and make themselves younger.
Hortichron
The Hortichron is where Chronoblasts and Nyctoid plants are grown.
Nyctoids
This plant is grown by Ardyn Technochrons (weavers of time) to produce the rare material, Nyctium. It requires the remains of an entity to be planted, and, over its lifetime, must be fed life-force by the Ardyn farmers.
Production Window
With the Ardyn basics covered, let's talk about some improvements that have been made to the various windows and UI elements.
The production window and room edit windows have been merged into one. And the three main functions of auto-jobs, room owners, and stockpiles can all be edited from here.
One change that I think makes things much clearer is that the jobs are now immediately placed in the room, and no longer queued by default. If you manually add a job, it will be placed in the room. However, this can only happen if the requirements are met. Manually added jobs that don't have a workstation to be placed at will be queued like before, and will auto-place on the workstation when it's free.
Lots of work has been done to better communicate job requirements. There are five main areas of requirement:
Skill - i.e., Carpentry
Items - i.e., 2 wood logs
Blocks - Where the job is done. i.e., Workbench
Worker - The one doing the job. This may require a race, status, or intelligence type. i.e., Human, with Tired (Status), with Sapient Intelligence.
Subject - The one being used for the job. i.e., The victim of retroanimation. This can have the same requirement specs as Workers. (seen above).
Job Scheduling
You can now specify the hour and season jobs get created. This could be handy if you only want people to farm certain crops in winter, while switching over to something else for spring.
Room Stockpiles
I've added four new features to this window:
Stockpile Priority
This lets you make stockpiles a high priority if you want items moved their first.
Item Prohibit List
This lets you specify items that you don't want in a stockpile.
Min/Max Settings
This lets you choose the min amount of items you want in the stockpile at all times, as well as the max amount. The settlers will do their best to keep the item inventory count in between these values.
Hauler settings
This lets you see who's hauling items to the room's stockpile and also gives you the ability to edit which entities are used as haulers.
Tracking, Notifications, Designations, and Control Groups
You'll notice a couple new buttons on the HUD (as if we needed more!) which are intended to clean up and organize some things. The inventory button has also been moved over there. I'm trying to group these various buttons together based on functionality. So, the buttons on the top-left are grouped together because they all open up 'tracking' windows. Whereas, top-right is utility windows, bot-right is toolbars, bot-left is overlays.
Let's take a look at the new buttons/windows:
Tracking
I've added a new window for tracking stats on the top bar in the HUD. There are five types of stat to track up there:
Items - "3 Carrots"
Item Categories - "3 Raw Foods"
Races - "3 Sheep"
Statuses - "3 Hungry"
Control Groups - "[1] 3 Entities" (1 is the hotkey)
The top bar didn't have a localized place to manage these things, and I felt like it was time to add something to help with confusion. Also, there's no longer any limit to how many can go up there.
Notifications
I did a huge pass on notifications to make things a bit clearer. With work and attacks especially. You can hover over each notification to get more info which is great to understand why your entities might be doing more or less output when mining. I plan on adding more notifications in general to help communicate various things, so feel free to let me know if you'd like to see any added.
Designations
This is the panel you normally see when you open the jobs or rooms toolbar. I want to expand upon this window some more, but you'll notice the addition of a linking button. This lets you toggle whether the window opens when the jobs/rooms open. Helpful if you don't always want this window to open with jobs/rooms.
Control Groups
As you can see, I've removed the far right control group buttons and put those into their own window. You can edit and view control groups just like before from here.
Character Appearance Upgrade
Characters now show the items they have equipped on their sprite. So, if you deck out an entity in full rutile armor, you'll see a little red settler running around. If they have a pickaxe equipped, you'll see this on their back.
Skill Defaults Window
This is a new sub-window that is part of the Settlers window. Its purpose is to let you specify which skills start enabled when an entity spawns. So, for example, if you want new Void Woken summons to not have mining on, you can set that here.
Modding
Ok, I put in an absolute ton of work into this for the update. In fact, I completely changed how the game's data was handled to allow for modding. Before, everything was part of a big ol' JSON text file. Yes, this let you mod but it was really not fun. It also made it impossible to have multiple mods at once. Now, all the game data is represented by Unity's scriptable objects. I've also expanded my build pipeline to export a separate Unity Project which houses all of the scripts and data required to make these. This project can be accessed by anyone through github. It can be used to create and edit the data which can then be built and used as a mod. All the modder needs to do is put this data into the Mod folder in the game's folder, and the game will try to use this new modded data. Either overwriting old data, or adding it into the game.
One thing I still need to add to the mod pipeline is the ability to have multiple texture atlases. Right now, if players wanted to have multiple art style mods, that wouldn't really be possible unless, the art mods were all from the same modder and they created just one atlas. As soon as you have multiple different modders with their own atlases, it won't know which ones to use. But, that's definitely on my to-do list! :)
You'll notice a new room called Region in the production window. This room represents the entire map, and it houses all of the core jobs that entities need to create in order to do basic jobs to survive. For example, eating and drinking can be found here. Players won't really need to edit these jobs, but I wanted to surface all of these to players to make sure things are clearer. Before, all of these jobs were created under-the-hood, and it was tough to know what requirements were used to create them. Now, you can see all of these from Production.
Tavern Room
It's time to re-enable this room as I am starting to feel like it has an actual purpose. That is, to improve the spirits (heh) of the masses. Right now, the Tavern has one job you can give it, and that's, "Relax With Drink." Entities will grab a drink, and go sit at a seat in the tavern, and refill their Will (happiness). I'm going to add a bunch more little jobs for this room. It won't just be this one job. But this is a start! There are even plans to have travelling bards which could come and play at your Tavern, but that's getting ahead of myself.
One thing about tuning I'll mention related to this. Alcohol no longer has the same buffs as things like water. Alcohol now provides a smaller thirst buff, a negative energy buff, BUT increases happiness for a time.
Hunting Grounds Room
Much like the Tavern, this is the early stage of this room. For now, it provides one job which is the automation of capturing entities in cages. I will soon be giving it the added job of having hunters actively hunting prey and the sort.
Workshop Room
The Workshop is a new room which provides job automation for the most rudimentary of jobs out there. Those jobs that don't really have a specific profession or skill that can be associated with them. You know, making coal, wicker objects, and, oh, I don't know, BONE ARMOR!
Yep, you can now unlock bone armor from the War tech tree. I will be adding more bone items soon!
Prison Cell Room
You'll notice their is a new faction (much like player, neutral, hostile) called 'captured'. This faction is applied to, you guessed it, captured entities from cages. It has all the same functionality as the player faction, however, captured entities will try to stay in their designated rooms AND will only eat/drink from those room. Make sure to keep those rooms stocked with food/water so your captured entities can eat/drink.
As well, factions can be used to limit room occupants. The prison cell is one such room that uses this setting to determine occupants. You can edit this faction setting from the Room Edit Window.
The Prison Cell is pretty much the equivalent of the Animal Enclosure, but for Sapient entities. Pretty soon I'm going to add some deeper mechanics to how captured entities react to their situation. And how they are housed in cells will play a big part into whether they choose to join you or try to escape or get sick, etc.
Integrating Captured Entities
There's a new job, "Integrate As Citizen," which lets you convert captured sentient entities into full citizens. This coincides with a slight naming change for the research skill. This skill is now called writing. I made this change because I feel writing can be more broadly used than research. For example, the aforementioned integrate job requires someone with the writing skill to draft up the documents to make the captured prisoner a citizen. Captured, sentient entities are given permission (lol) to have relationships, change profession, and unlock their technology in the Saga window. But, keep in mind, they need to also be happy! So, make sure they have a bed to sleep on and, hey, maybe let them go to the Tavern for a drink every once in a while?
Apothecary Room (And Bonus Alchemy Skill!)
You can now unlock the Alchemist profession, and the Apothecary room in the Saga, cooking tree. This is very, very early days for alchemy. I have so much planned for this profession. I will be introducing strange and unique diseases to the game soon and the alchemist will be a big part of fighting those afflictions. As well, and this is far down the road, I want players (perhaps the more sinister ones) to be able to infect other kingdoms with diseases using their alchemists and merchants.
For now, I've added two items to make here. Health Potions, and Sablixian Tar. Also, you'll notice the new item category, Potions. Health potions can be used to heal wounded entities, while Sablixian Tar is a rare refined material that is created with Sable Chunks. It is used by the resurrection process, but will also be used by maaaany other dark magic focused things in the future.
I want to also add the ability for entities to hold types of items for quick use. For example, in uniforms, you would be able to tell certain entities to hold, say, potions. That way, in combat, they could quickly consume a potion instead of having to go to the alchemist for healing. I'd also set this up for food and drink items to be quickly consumed.
Resurrection
You'll notice the Arcana research tech tree is a bit sparse. I've moved a lot of stuff over to the Ancient tech tree, to round out some of their uniqueness. Magic isn't intended to be this easily obtained thing. It's supposed to be difficult to achieve. Unless, of course, you're the Ancients and have thousands of years of mastery to work from. Don't worry, I'm adding much more stuff to the Arcana tree.
The first of these additions, as you'll see, is the Dark Magic I node. This introduces a new job (done at the Arcane Study) which lets summoners resurrect entities. This required the addition of some new code to assign more unique information to items. Later on, I want players to be able to edit this information and make their own unique items, but, for now, it is being used by entity remains to connect an entity to an item. For example, a Human remains item having the information for the Human that created it. These remains can then be used to resurrect that past entity.
Resurrected entities have all the same stats as their previous selves, with the exceptions of a few things. They don't get hungry, thirsty, or lose energy, but they also don't naturally heal, or procreate. Now, they will still die from old age, but I'm a bit on the fence as to whether this is good or bad. The intention is to keep Ardyn players from cheesing this ability to have an infinite supply of resurrected bodies to retroanimate. But, who knows, maybe I'll change this down the road based on feedback.
Lastly, coffins and tombs will keep remains from decaying. I think I'm going to add some sort of graveyard/tomb room soon to make it easier to organize and stockpile the dead into coffins and such. For now, you can use a regular old stockpile with just remains enabled to have them carry the remains into those props. They are a great way to preserve the dead for later resurrection. >:)
New Music
Matt Creamer, our wonderful composer, has created five new tracks for the game. They are amazing and I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Archenthrall
This is a new status that can be applied to Ancients. It makes them extremely powerful, but it does make them less effective in void crafting and summoning. It's essentially a rage-mode for Ancients. Keep in mind it cannot be reversed!
New Props/Blocks
I added quite a few things to the various material types. I didn't get to add all of the ones I wanted, but you'll notice a few new things. Check them out in the Saga window the next time you play. :)
Next Steps
I'm going to spend a small amount of time responding to any fixes which arise from the beta going live, but I have many fun things to work on going forward. My main goal will be to add the Gwdir race. They are going to be fun to play and I'm excited for you to see them in action. Additionally, I want to add a bunch of new entities to the game, including some bugs (The animal. We have enough of the other thanks!). The Apiary room is definitely on my list. Lastly, I want to update the overworld map to have some kingdoms and additional options for players to interact with them. As you can see, big plate of work for me. But I'm stoked! Hope you are too.
I'd like to take a sec to thank everyone that has supported the game with reviews, left feedback on the various forums, and helped report bugs in the beta. I really cannot stress how important you all are to this game. So, thank you very much. I appreciate you all.
Fixes, Tuning, QoL - Beta 0.11.0.15 Patch Notes
Hey all!
This is hopefully the last little patch before Timeless Tyrants goes live. Thank you to those sharing bugs and feedback. That has helped out so much!
Notes
-Bug Fix: Some auto job settings/info would not update when changing rooms/jobs. -Bug Fix: Floating trees. Ya. -Bug Fix: Entities having multiple companions. I believe this was causing some extra issues with entities joining rooms properly. -Bug Fix: Children weren't being added to the family tab in the entity overlay. -Bug Fix: Manual saves right at the moment that the auto-save occurs threw an error. -Bug Fix: Some entity scenarios weren't saving/loading. -Bug Fix: Sometimes newly acquired Ancients wouldn't start their dialogue for being freed from an immortality tomb. -Bug Fix: Sometimes names weren't inserted into dialogue text, appearing as {@0} instead of the name. -Bug Fix: Auto saves could happen when selection input was active, and could cause issues. -Bug Fix: Light was not being removed when a light prop was. -Bug Fix: Hatches wouldn't allow vertical pathing if a platform was below. -Bug Fix: Water plant job couldn't be re-added to farm/arboretum. -Bug Fix: Some names wouldn't update in the entity list for the entity info window. -Bug Fix: Liquids item category was being added to stockpiles by default when it is not used in-game (yet). -Bug Fix: Several tutorial arrows had incorrect positions. -Bug Fix: Spellbooks were built by the chaos construct but unlocked with the arcane study. Now, they will be unlocked by the arcane study and built there. As well, the lectern of knowledge is now unlocked there too. -Tuning: Added some dialogue for discovering immortality tombs to communicate that players should use the free job on stasis crystals. -Tuning: Increased the time it takes for trees to mature. -Polish: Added feedback to job buttons in the toolbar menu to indicate when the settlement doesn't have anyone with the required skill. -Polish: Added additional hotkeys to skill toggles to enable/disable/reset all skills for an entity.
I might put out one very small patch after this, but we'll see. If you see anything crazy, let me know!
This update includes mostly fixes and tuning, but I snuck in a new panel for rooms. It's part of the room stockpile panel. This panel lets you select who's hauling for a stockpile. By default stockpiles now pull haulers from the region (so, all player controlled entities with carry enabled). However, you can select a specific owner group to do the hauling if you choose. Additionally, the window will show a list of candidate haulers and why they may not be hauling for the stockpile.
Ok, here are the notes:
-Feature: Added hauler options to room stockpiles. This lets players change who is hauling items for stockpiles. By default, stockpiles will use the region as a pool for haulers, but players can change it to any room owner groups if they wish. Lastly, candidates will be listed and any errors for keeping them from hauling items will be shown. i.e., missing carry skill. -Feature: Added option to add inline icon to room naming. -Bug Fix: Migrating to a new tile without items would have jobs appear as unable to start. -Bug Fix: Trees which produce fruit (Apple and Palm) were not spawning items. Trees will now spawn items when mature and in the correct season. -Bug Fix: The freezing notification settings used the wrong inline icon. -Bug Fix: Some item stats weren't showing. -Bug Fix: Some scroll bars in the settings window didn't change their respective setting. -Bug Fix: Sickles were buffing Harvest (deprecated skill) and not Horticulture. -Bug Fix: Small glitch when job/build/room menu is first opened where the designations list is maximized for one frame. -Polish: Added tooltip info to communicate when trees spawn items. -Polish: Added an overlay option for item jobs. Item jobs will no longer be visible when the jobs menu is open. Players can hold G or TAB to show the item jobs overlay. The reason for making this change was to clean up the visuals while building. Item job overlays would obscur lots of the terrain when placing blueprints, meaning players would need to toggle jobs on/off in order to see where they are building. -Tuning: Cabinets can now also hold tools. -Tuning: Bows now fire farther than crossbows, but deal less damage.
Thank you and have a wonderful weekend!
Waylon
Archenthrall, New Props/Blocks, Fixes, Tuning - Beta 0.11.0.13 Patch Notes
Hellooooo!
Long time no see. I have had quite the event filled last month, which includes my SSD corrupting and me needing to reset my desktop. So, I do apologize for the longer wait for an update! Also, sorry for the lackluster patch notes. I lost my patch notes on the corrupted SSD, but I did my best to create a new patch note list from memory. As you you'll see, my memory is apparently like a spaghetti strainer.
This patch adds in quite a few new content things. Lots of new blocks and props to build from things like sable, rutile, bronze, etc. But additionally, a new summon. Sort of. I guess it's more like a new spell? What I'm referring to is...
Archenthrall
This is a new status that can be applied to Ancients. It makes them extremely powerful, but it does make them less effective in void crafting and summoning. It's essentially a rage-mode for Ancients. Keep in mind it cannot be reversed!
New Props/Blocks
I added quite a few things to the various material types. I didn't get to add all of the ones I wanted, but you'll notice quite a few new things. Check them out in the Saga window the next time you play. :)
More UI Polish???
I can almost hear the groans about yet another change to screens. I'll admit, UI is not my strong point. I'm really trying haha. That said, let's take a look at what I've gone and done now.
Namely, I've consolidated the room owners, production, and stockpile options into one window. I've cleaned up a lot of the various screens by removing unnecessary visuals, moved lists to the left of windows, unified colors schemes, etc. The production window has seen a lot of changes to help make things easier to use and clearer. You'll notice that you can now collapse and expand a ton of the UI elements to reduce the clutter. Plus, it should be much easier to tell why you can't do a job.
I've added (back) in the ability to queue jobs. So, if you manually add some jobs to a room, it will add as many as it can based on available work stations, and the remainder will be queued until the work station becomes available.
Patch Notes
-Feature: Job Queueing in Room Edit window. When increasing the job count for an auto-job, any number that exceeds the available work station count will be queued. Queued jobs are then added to the room when work stations become available. -Content: Added more props, and blocks for several material types. -Content: Archenthrall summon. -Tuning: Increased stockpile max cap to 99999. -Tuning: Climbing down 1 block now receives a small speed bonus. This is to simulate an entity simply jumping down onto the ledge below. -Tuning: Ancients will now start with the Magic Fighting skill enabled by default. -Polish: Moved all window lists to the left to help players read left to right better. -Polish: Added quite a few utility options to lists, especially for things like remove/add all. -Polish: Unified the colors for all windows to better communicate button purpose and reduce clutter. -Polish: Combined the production, owners, and stockpile room windows into one window. -Polish: Redid the layout for production to make job management clearer and easier. -Polish: Added better feedback to jobs and room owner settings to communicate why a job can't be done, and why an entity won't join a room. -Polish: Added the option to select where room job workers/subjects are pulled from. You can now select specific rooms groups or the entire region. -Bug Fix: System keys like ESC were not working in the front end. -Bug Fix: Some information in the overworld screen could get cut off on smaller resolutions. -Bug Fix: Many scenarios/threats weren't activating if the settlement had a complete water border. -Bug Fix: Control group entities weren't saving. -Bug Fix: Cages and traps weren't triggering correctly.
Next Up
This will be my last content update for the expansion. The next two weeks are going to focus on bug fixing and tuning as I want to move the beta to the live branch in the middle of October. I think this patch will have a couple nice production window bugs for me to fix right away. So, if you see anything there, please let me know!
