Hey everyone, I've added chickens to the game, in the publicbeta branch :) If you start a new map, some of the settlements will have chickens which you can buy, or possibly steal. They're kind of cute, the hens will lay eggs for you which you can boil, or they'll breed if you happen to have a rooster. You can build a chicken coop and a feeding trough and a water bowl, and assign someone to feed them.
The roosters will crow in the mornings.



I realized last weekend that there was a bug introduced in v143 which is causing NPCs to attack you more often than they should do. Basically if anyone gets hurt, they'll start attacking you. This patch fixes that bug. But because I wanted to get the patch out and fix the bug, I haven't finished everything I wanted to do with the chickens yet - I just got them to a playable state. So they're in the game, but they don't serve much purpose yet. That will come.

Besides chickens there's a pretty major change to farming: corn, pumpkins, cucumber and chili peppers aren't plantable but have separate seeds which aren't edible, like the other crops. This just makes it simpler, I hope, because you don't have to tell people not to eat your corn so you can plant it. I also think it will make it simpler for the AI. I'm trying to fix some bugs where the AI communities often starve to death after a couple of winters, this patch has another possible fix for that as well. But I'm not sure it's fixed yet as it's a difficult thing to test. I'll be working some more on that problem in the coming weeks as well.

Loading old savegames will populate your inventory with some of the new seed types. This might be a good time to start a new savegame though, if you're in the publicbeta branch.

Here's the full change list:

• Chickens
  
• Separate seeds for maize, pumpkin, cucumber and chilli pepper
  
• Fix for NPCs often blaming you for injuries where the culprit was actually known to them already (bug introduced in v143)
  
• Fix for NPCs sometimes getting stuck on insides of your gates if you haven't given them permission to enter
  
• Fix for traders not spawning in re-occupied bases
  
• Possible fix for AI communities not having enough food to last the winter
  
• Only add possessive suffix in English and German, and some other spelling and grammar fixes
  
• Marked fetch and loyalty quest items as not destroyable
  
• Characters can always sleep at night if they are in a building, even if they aren't tired

v146 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".

Hello, I've put a new patch into the publicbeta branch. The Turkish and Italian translations have been updated and improved, many thanks to those translators!

There's a major fix for the framerate when you fast-forward, and especially when you fast forward at x4 speed. I really should have realized this before now but it looks like it has never worked correctly since the beginning (of Survivalist: Invisible Strain). It has always caused a framerate spike, and in multiplayer it has always caused players to keep pausing and waiting for each other. With the fix it might feel a bit slower than what you're used to, but it's actually the correct speed - and the framerate is much smoother.

The rest of this patch is just various miscellaneous fixes:

• Stop AI from throwing molotovs/pipe bombs if friendlies are in the way and unable to dodge (i.e. because they are grappling a zombie)
  
• Fix for framerate being terrible and multiplayer being almost completely broken when you fast-forward
  
• Fix for Paper Trail quest immediately failing
  
• Fix for rogue FEMA raiders never having helmets
  
• Fix for not being able to target enemies who activate invisible strain
  
• Fix for NPC communities not rebuilding for a long time (if someone died)
  
• Fix for Lost Item quests breaking if items are combined, and made friendship quests fail if the quest giver leaves your community
  
• Fix for tracker squad in Loyalty quest sometimes feuding with quest giver
  
• Some small AI fixes and translation fixes
  
• Italian and Turkish translation updates
  
• Crash fix

v144 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".

Hello, patch time again! This patch focuses on a few different things. Firstly I've always thought molotovs and the throwing code needed some love - it used to be impossible to throw them over walls, for example. Now you can, and you can see a graphic showing the arc of your throw when you do so:



I've also always thought it looked silly that you can throw a molotov or pipe bomb at someone directly in front of you, and any enemies nearby would die while you and any friendlies would be completely unaffected. This game has never had friendly fire for bullets because when I first got shooting working on the original Survivalist I immediately realised it was too chaotic to have to worry about not shooting your allies. And I think it looks okay when you shoot bullets through your friends, but for area of effect weapons it just looks a bit crap.

So I've added friendly fire for splash damage - you can however turn it off in the difficulty settings, and it's off by default on the easiest setting. Also, your community members will generally jump out of the way if you throw a molotov or pipe bomb at them. But they might not be able to if they're grappling with a zombie, or something. The hud will show the area of effect for the damage, and will go red if there are friendlies in it, or yellow for friendly buildings.



The other new feature is when you click Set Policy on an item of equipment, you can assign people to Auto Collect that type of equipment from bodies, so for example you can make them automatically collect gold from nearby corpses.



And on the crafting screen I've made it possible to assign someone to rip up clothes to make rags on a recurring basis (i.e. they'll go looking for clothes from corpses). This should make the process of making bandages or molotovs less labor intensive.

Lastly I've increased the amount you can carry without a backpack! That amount dates back from the original Survivalist, but in that game you never had to make campfires. As many people have pointed out, it's weird that you need a backpack to make a campfire, so this fixes that. (I also decreased the weight of a unit of wood slightly).

All of the above may need some refinement so let me know how it goes. It'll be in publicbeta for now. Here's the full list:

• When throwing something you see a parabolic path displaying where it will go, and if not targeting someone you can aim the camera up to throw over walls. If targeting someone a higher angle will be used if the lower angle is blocked.
  
• Molotovs and pipe bombs can deal damage to friendly characters and structures (if set by a difficulty setting). Characters will try to dodge out the way.
  
• Increased the amount you can carry without a backpack and reduced the weight of wood a bit, so you can more easily make a fire without a backpack. Removed wood from the recipe for rabbit traps and tripwires.
  
• You can now assign someone to rip up clothes without manually doing each one, same as other types of crafting
  
• Added Auto Collect from bodies option to equipment policy dialog
  
• Reduced the frequency of raider bands and hordes a little
  
• If you destroy equipment that is stacked, you get a dialog asking how many you want to destroy
  
• Fix for satphones being spawned in long-dead bodies whose graves have disappeared
  
• Fix for character highlights not working in online co-op
  
• Fix for deer taking too long to respawn
  
• Fix for savegame screenshot sometimes being incorrect
  
• Turkish translation (still work in progress)
  
• Sledgehammer

Meanwhile I'm moving the previous patch, v142, to the main branch. This contains the friendship quests.

v143 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".

Hello, I've released a new patch in publicbeta. This is one of those "fixing bugs in the previous patch" patches, along with other miscellanea:

• Stop graves with satphones in them from being deleted
  
• Fix for hugs not working through locked gates when trying to bribe a guard with them
  
• Don't say such and such are a great couple if one is dead. Say they *were* a great couple.
  
• You have to hold the button when kicking someone from your community
  
• Limit approval/disapproval gained from cannibalism
  
• Fix for breakup speech triggering with the wrong people
  
• Fix for farmers depositing gifted stew in buildings
  
• Error message if you try to cook manually without emptying your pot first
  
• Some tweaks and fixes to the friendship quests
  
• Default to High graphics quality setting
  
• Another action menu optimization
  
• Gender option on equipment, for languages with gendered nouns
  
• Korean and Brazilian Portuguese translation updates
  
• Crash fix

v142 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".

Hey everyone, it's March - my first month of working full time on this! In this patch I'm introducing friendship quests. When you ask your community members "What's up?", and if they like you, they'll ask you to go on these little side missions with them. There's 3 types of quest so far, and once you've done them you'll become friends next time you ask what's up, and the time after that they'll suggest some future plans, the same as your romantic partners would. This means it's a bit easier to reach the end of the game (as you can do it either by 'romance' or 'friendship'), and also there's just more stuff to do that lets you get to know your community members :)




Here's the full change list:

• Friendship quests
  
• Some fixes for crafters saying they don't have enough space in their inventory to carry something, when they really do
  
• Fix for traders starting a war by attacking our walls when trying to attack a passing enemy
  
• Fix for crash that occurred when a remembered speech got deleted from a mod
  
• Some usability improvements to the script editor - e.g. made different object types different colors, and use names like Speaker and Quest Giver depending on context instead of Actor, Target etc.
  
• Some small fixes to the flirt quests
  
• Show ellipses instead of going to more than 2 rows on Take All
  
• Make Take All require hold if there's a large amount of stuff, as can be annoying if you take them all by accident
  
• Some menu optimizations
  
• Some new menu sounds
  
• Hungarian translation update

v141 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".

Just a quick note to say I've now moved my latest patch, v140, from publicbeta to the main branch, so everyone now has the latest fixes. Here are the change lists again:

v140:

• Fix for crash when trader asked to be let into gates in online co-op
  
• Fix for character getting stuck inside gates
  
• Updated Japanese and Chinese translations

v139:

• Fix for NPCs coming in gates without permission, if the gates are open
  
• Fix for military zombies not spawning with armor or helmets
  
• Fix for characters waiting 10 seconds to bandage themselves after an injury, if the player stops controlling them
  
• Fix for watchtowers not counting towards Presence even though it says they are
  
• If you selected multiple characters in Command Mode, deselect them on returning to Direct Control mode (it was too easy to forget you had selected them and order them all to do something by mistake)
  
• Updated translations
  
• Action menu text optimization
  
• Memory leak fix!

v138:

• Dialog options to set whether characters from other communities can come into your base (by default they won't enter gates now)
  
• Fix for traders not moving on when you tell them to
  
• More dialog variations when interrogating people to try and find out if they have invisible strain
  
• Graves deteriorate and disappear over time, but you can keep them around by "paying respects" to them from time to time
  
• AI communities bury bodies from other communities that die near their base (not zombies etc as those disappear anyway)
  
• Make feuding less likely if people fear each other
  
• Don't plummet morale because fences got destroyed
  
• Some deer spawning fixes
  
• Moss Effect on cars, rocks, old buildings etc
  
  
• Hungarian and Brazilian Portuguese Updated
  
• Fix for characters sometimes stealing stuff in non critical situations
  
• Fix for crash when deer became infected (which isn't supposed to happen)
  
• Fix for character circling around someone forever in MoveAdjacentTo goal
  
• Fix for surrender dialog not working because the Alert goal was taking higher priority than the conversation goal
  
• Fix for some towns being set to no infection when they should have been white strain
  
• Fix for people being able to slide around when getting up after being depressed
  
• Fix for dark past speech not playing after hug because another queued speech about approaching invaders was blocking it
  
• Fix for zombies grappling with someone not being visible in pip
  
• Fix for "subgoal not possible" error in FleeFromAllEnemies

Yo, it's time for another update. This one is fixing a bunch of bugs, most importantly a memory leak that I introduced a few patches ago (which means over time the game uses up more and more memory and I suppose would probably crash if you played it for long enough). As with all new patches this is in publicbeta to start with but I'll aim to get it onto the main branch quickly, along with v138, because of the memory leak. Here's the full changelist:

• Fix for NPCs coming in gates without permission, if the gates are open
  
• Fix for military zombies not spawning with armor or helmets
  
• Fix for characters waiting 10 seconds to bandage themselves after an injury, if the player stops controlling them
  
• Fix for watchtowers not counting towards Presence even though it says they are
  
• If you selected multiple characters in Command Mode, deselect them on returning to Direct Control mode (it was too easy to forget you had selected them and order them all to do something by mistake)
  
• Updated translations
  
• Action menu text optimization
  
• Memory leak fix!

EDIT - someone reported a crash in the gates code so I've released another patch with a fix for that, plus some translation updates (v140). Here's that change list:

• Fix for crash when trader asked to be let into gates in online co-op
  
• Fix for character getting stuck inside gates
  
• Updated Japanese and Chinese translations

v139 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".

Patch time! This one is mainly about two things - giving you some dialog options to control who comes into your gates (in case they have invisible strain), and stopping the map from being overrun by graves or corpses. Here's the changelist:

• Dialog options to set whether characters from other communities can come into your base (by default they won't enter gates now)
  
• Fix for traders not moving on when you tell them to
  
• More dialog variations when interrogating people to try and find out if they have invisible strain
  
• Graves deteriorate and disappear over time, but you can keep them around by "paying respects" to them from time to time
  
• AI communities bury bodies from other communities that die near their base (not zombies etc as those disappear anyway)
  
• Make feuding less likely if people fear each other
  
• Don't plummet morale because fences got destroyed
  
• Some deer spawning fixes
  
• Moss Effect on cars, rocks, old buildings etc
  
  
• Hungarian and Brazilian Portuguese Updated
  
• Fix for characters sometimes stealing stuff in non critical situations
  
• Fix for crash when deer became infected (which isn't supposed to happen)
  
• Fix for character circling around someone forever in MoveAdjacentTo goal
  
• Fix for surrender dialog not working because the Alert goal was taking higher priority than the conversation goal
  
• Fix for some towns being set to no infection when they should have been white strain
  
• Fix for people being able to slide around when getting up after being depressed
  
• Fix for dark past speech not playing after hug because another queued speech about approaching invaders was blocking it
  
• Fix for zombies grappling with someone not being visible in pip
  
• Fix for "subgoal not possible" error in FleeFromAllEnemies

All this took rather longer than I would have liked. I did a bit of a playthrough to try and make sure it was having the desired effect, and found and fixed a number of bugs along the way.. but for that and other reasons it ended up being a bit of a time sink. There's some good news coming on that front though - I'm quitting my day job and I'm going to work on this game full time, starting from March!

Having this game on Steam is something really special - one and a half years after the early access launch it has good reviews, people are still buying it, and there's a whole community of people waiting for updates and even making mods! But it's clear that at the current rate of progress it would have taken me years to finish it properly. Hopefully now (from March onwards) I'll be able to fully dedicate to it the time it deserves.

It's still gonna take time, and I don't have a specific completion date in mind or anything, I've just got a long wishlist of features including of course Story Mode, and this should really help me get through them properly :)

In the meantime, the above patch (v138) is now in the publicbeta branch, and I have moved the previous patch (v137) to the main branch.

v138 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".

Hello, it's patch time! This one is mainly about addressing a bunch of bugs people have reported, and adding some small Quality of Life improvements.

The biggest change is that the tracks you leave in towns will time out after a while. Up until now after you entered a town you would be told you'd "left some tracks" there which resulted in hordes of zombies spawning from the town and coming to your base at intervals over the course of the rest of the game. Now those tracks will "disappear" after a while and the zombies will stop spawning.

I think having done this I also need more ways to attract you back to the towns after the tracks fade away, so there's an element of risk/reward. They do have resources you might need, but I probably need to add some quests or something that will make you keep wanting to return from time to time and brave the hordes again, but in a more controlled way. But the current rate of horde spawning was causing problems for some people in the late game so I've done this step for now. Hopefully it doesn't get too easy as a result, but in any case there are probably better ways of adding challenge. Let me know how it goes.

(P.S. for existing savegames the fade-out timer will just start from the moment you start playing with the new version, so it'll still take a while for them to fade. I didn't save the time you entered the town originally, so I wasn't able to base it on that)

Here's the full changelist:

• Tracks in towns time out after a while
  
• Stop characters from drinking water immediately after give them a direct order (such as chop a tree)
  
• AI characters equip armor if you sell them it and they don't have any on already
  
• Option to turn hints off (under Settings/Graphics, for now)
  
• Set Farm Zone option is available in action menu when highlighting your crops, and now shows all crops you have already planted, not just the ones you currently have seeds for in your inventory
  
• Only play the peeing sound for the currently controlled character
  
• Fix for bug where tree stumps were cleared when a group were set to follow a lumberjack
  
• Fix for invisible strain bites triggering a war if they come from someone in another community
  
• Fix for a case where characters got stuck trying to deposit items they'd crafted, if the desired depot was inaccessible
  
• Crash fixes

v137 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".

This patch has several new features in it. First of all, deer! I've always wanted to add more animals, so deer are just the beginning - I intend to add more down the line. Their AI is quite similar to the rabbits, which is why I started with them. They're nervous and very fast, but you can creep up on them in bushes. Shoot them in the legs to slow them down a bit. If you can catch them, they'll provide a good food source in those early stages of the game before you've got farming up and running.



Next, leg armor! Ever since launch, many NPCs have been protected with body armor and helmets, but they've always been vulnerable to being knocked over by shooting them in the legs. But not anymore as some characters will have leg armor now, so you'll have to vary up your tactics.



I've also changed the way armor works, a little. Previously when armor was damaged a few times, it disappeared, and was instantly replaced by another piece of armor if you happened to have one in your pocket. I've changed it so the armor doesn't disappear now, and you can't change armor in the middle of combat. Instead, it stays on you and can be repaired afterwards at workbenches. (NPC communities now have workbenches as well.) Idle characters will automatically repair their armor at the nearest workbench.

Why do this? I want to cut down on the amount of busywork you need to do to manage a community, and picking up every piece of armor and helmet you see on corpses, in order to use them as spares, felt like busywork to me. Now, once you've kitted a character out once you can just leave them to it as they'll repair their own armor when it gets damaged. Admittedly it wasn't the biggest problem but I figured I might as well do it while I was adding the leg armor. (Probably the biggest source of busywork imo is collecting gold from corpses, I do aim to address that at some point too.)

The next new feature is these cool blood effects:



Because it's a zombie game.

The rest of the patch is some small tweaks to this and that, Here's the full change list:

• Deer
  
• Leg Armor
  
• Armor can be repaired at workbenches, but you can't change your current armor while in combat
  
• Fancier Blood Effects
  
• Recover faster from damaged animations
  
• Aiming penalty when target is moving sideways or away from you
  
• When highlighting a campfire, workbench, etc, show recipes in a separate section at the bottom of the action menu if you have no ingredients for them
  
• Need less vodka to make bandages
  
• Some tweaks to the action menu
  
• Some crash fixes

The above will be in publicbeta for a time, as usual. I've also moved v135 to the main branch! v135 contains the (optional) new hud layout and optimizations, nicer grass, and some improvements to the action menu.

v136 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".