Our new patch is here. Since our last one, we've made huge strides in development. Some of it you will be able to see now, some are getting polished and will be ready in the next patch, and others we will tell you about in the future.
With this patch, we expanded our tutorial system, increased performance, and added building upgrades. We are also adding some additional life improvement features that hopefully will make everyone’s experience more pleasant. A lot of those systems in this patch were requested by you on our discord, steam, and social media. We are extremely grateful to have such a great community and we’ll keep working with you in order to create the best possible experience for everyone.
Thank you for your ongoing support and we hope that you enjoy this patch and we'd appreciate it if you'd leave us a review on Steam.
Now let's dive in.
Expedition Quest Nuggets have always been curious about the world around and above them, but it is time for them to finally meet the thing that lies below. This quest is a part of a major mechanic that will be expanded on in the next patch. Prepare to dive deep underground and help your nuggets during their journey.
Shortcut System Who doesn’t like taking a shortcut from time to time? By toggling on the shortcut menu with “x” the player can turn on a labeling system that will show them how to select menus and buildings with just a few keystrokes. For example, pressing B-1-1 will bring up an engineer hut ready to be placed.
Tutorials ( Part 2 ) We are continuing to expand our tutorial system. For the second part of this expansion, we added additional 6 different tutorials that will explain mechanics in the game such as:
Reservoirs and how they operate
Engineer Huts explanation
Explanation for the radius around certain buildings and how they influence the gameplay
Where to find the expanded building functionality
How to assign nuggets to buildings
How to get additional herbs to the hospital and why your hospitals might have an issue
Infection and how to fight it
We plan to continue expanding this system. If you have something that you don’t understand or find confusing, drop us a message on our discord. We’ll be sure to review it and potentially add a tutorial for it.
Ministers Revamp As we proceeded with adding new systems to the game, we saw that Ministers needed more and more love. For this patch, we decided to take our time and redesign how their algorithms worked. Initially, all the ministers were “fixers” of issues but that wasn't enough. Now ministers do their best to prevent issues from appearing in the first place. We reworked almost every algorithm for the Ministers system and we’re eager to hear what you think.
Modern Movie Theater We were starting to think that modern nuggets might be getting bored with the “talkies” that were being shown in the old theaters. So now they will be able to snack on their popcorn in fancy new theaters.
Planet Seed Have you ever found the perfect planet to later wish you could start over? Planet Seed functionality will allow you to type the specific seed of the planet in the main menu and load that exact planet on which you played previously.
Improvements and balance changes
Full Screen Mode Full screen mode support was added to the game, which should provide better stability and experience for some of our players.
Change in the saving system ( Archives Removal ) For quite some time we debated about our unique save system. Some people loved it, some people hated it. Based on our analytics and research, we had to take a step back and remove the archive dependent safe system. Now you can save the game at any time through the ESC menu and set up autosave frequency in the game menu settings.
Save Files Management Since we started to rework our save system, we also added additional functionality to it. Now you can select all or multiple save files to delete. No more one by one deletion of save files.
Building Within a range Indicators Engineers and Firefighters are important buildings for keeping your city afloat. Placing a building outside the range of Engineers Hut or Firefighters Hut will display an icon above the building you are trying to place indicating that engineers and firefighters won’t be able to reach it.
Concrete City One of the main distinctive parts of the big cities is the amount of concrete in them. We added roads, we added tall modern buildings, but the city was still missing that little piece that sets it apart from other ages. So now you can have a true “concrete jungle.”
Educated Nugget displayed in the filter system Educated nuggets now can be found in the filter system and you can see how many nuggets in your civilization have an education.
Performance We keep working on our performance with every patch. For this patch we improved the resource distribution algorithms and their interactions with other systems, which should provide an additional 5%-10% of the performance improvement.
Extinct Animals Icon A status Icon was added to the Hunters Hut that will appear when an animal is extinct and your hunters are no longer able to hunt it.
Construction Panel for the buildings that were automatically built Previously, any building that was constructed automatically ( Black Market, Temple etc ), didn’t have a panel that would indicate the progress of their construction. Now you can see how long it will take to behold it in it’s glorious final form.
Bug Fixes:
Fixed: Main Menu planet had a wrong season
Fixed: Issue when certain seeds of the planet will keep repeating despite starting a new game
Fixed: Interaction with trees in certain cases produced an error, which was breaking save files
Fixed: Incorrect tree textures on birch trees
Fixed: Shader used for the main menu planet was breaking on certain PC’s
Fixed: An issue where not all objects were cleared up by nuggets when the building was placed on top of them
Fixed: An issue when the dead animal was not removed from the pool of animals and nuggets would get stuck in an infinite hunting loop
Fixed: After killing an animal, nuggets would not bring food back
Fixed: In certain cases roads were able to stop the bridge placement
Fixed: Bridge constructions sites now have a hover outline
Fixed: Bridge and roads were not reconnecting when the road position was updated
Fixed: Damage dealt to the nugget health was not calculated properly
Fixed: Lens Flare effects were bleeding through the planet
Fixed: Nuggets names were not updated in the residential tooltips
Fixed: An issue that would prevent the completion of the “Finish House” quest.
Fixed: Visual bug that was appearing when you try to enter the escape menu during a tutorial transition
Fixed: Search in the nugget list panel was not working correctly
Fixed: Building Status Icons were sometimes blinking
Fixed: Saving the game while load screen was opened, caused a broken save file
Fixed: Ecology panel sometimes caused an error that lead to a corrupt save file
Fixed: Tornado creator power had a chance to spawn multiple Tornado’s if the creator power was used in quick succession.
Fixed: Evolution tower could have been placed while being in the ESC menu
Fixed: Localization in the garage display panel
Fixed: Using the vortex creator power above the eatery to get cooked food and after that dropping them on the ground, caused an error that was breaking the game
Fixed: Picking up a space box with a vortex and then dropping it while pressing Press F to fly to, caused the space box to get stuck
Fixed: Using Vortex about the factory caused nuggets to get picked up as well
Fixed: Using Vortex above the lake calculated the usage of creator points incorrectly
Fixed: Picking up fruits from one bush sometimes caused other bushes to react as if the fruit was picked up from them as well
Fixed: Telekinesis system was not cleared correctly after it was canceled and code kept the reference from the previous object causing “Unable to pick up” effect.
Fixed: Extreme jittering in certain cases when the Vortex creator power was used
Fixed: Bug that caused tooltips to stay open on the screen
Fixed: Cupidon Rainbow effect was getting stuck on the screen
Fixed: Bug where nuggets would get trapped in the bunker
Fixed: Battery parts from the quest were not saved to the save file properly, causing the failure of the quest
Fixed: Bug that prevented the Ministers of Water from placing pumps in the Stone Age
Fixed: Bug that prevented the Minister of Agriculture from properly placing food production buildings
Let us know how you feel about our improvements and if we nailed it. Your feedback means a lot to us and we take it seriously. If you would like to see something to be added to the game, please make sure to join our discord channel and drop your suggestions there. We are always checking it.
This is our first patch in 2021. Yay! We hope everyone was able to see The Universim special event during New Year’s day. If not, don’t worry, you can see what you missed in the short gif below.
After everyone was done celebrating on January 2nd, we got back to work on a bunch of improvements and even some new systems.
We know a good number of you can’t wait for Space age to be released, and honestly neither can we. But we ask you to bear with us a little bit longer. Every system and every bug fix brings us one step closer to that goal. We want to release Space when it’s ready, so that you’ll have a great time playing The Universim and exploring new planets endlessly. You may have noticed that our patches are a little bit smaller as of late. This is due to us shifting more forces to work on Space Age in order to release them in the shortest possible time, while still providing new features and life improvement changes to the game. We are extremely thankful for your support. As always, if you enjoy the game, make sure to leave us a review on Steam!
Now let's dive in.
Alex is Streaming new Patch Right now! Live on Twitch
Garages We had roads, we had cars, but no parking space for them? Welp we had to fix this issue. Garages will provide a limited number of cars that your nuggets can use. Based on the era you are in, garages will consume either oil or fuel in order to function properly. If you’re out of those resources, your nuggets will have to learn to walk again. But if you have amazing oil magnate skills, you won’t have to worry about that issue! Each garage will display the total number of resources that are being consumed by all of your garages on the billboard. Individual garage stats can be seen by opening the garage panel itself.
Medieval Cars Time to get rolling with Steam! Let us introduce you to our own interpretation of cars in the Medieval era! You heard it right. Your nuggets will be able to get a headstart with that technology and start driving in the Medieval era. Maybe those cars are not as efficient as Modern cars, but they definitely can beat pedestrians in a race.
Telekinesis (Vortex Power) For a very long time we wanted to simplify the collection of resources via creator powers. Telekinesis provided great interactions with the world and individual objects, but it was far away from the best tool to use in order to bring all the materials to a construction site. For this patch we decided to change that and expand on our Telekinesis creator power. By pressing and holding telekinesis for a longer time, you’ll be able to create a vortex that is so strong, that it will suck everything nearby into a whirlwind. In addition to picking up Nuggets, stones, and trees, you’ll be able to grab what’s made in buildings like, refined wood and stone, metal, glass, cement and etc. Then with those resources in your creator clutches, you’ll be able to supply a construction site or a building upgrade. Just be careful that no nuggets are being harmed during your use of your fancy new creator power! With great power comes great… well, you get the idea.
Water System Improvement As we are working on some new alien planets, we had a need to expand our functionality with water. Starting from this patch, you will be able to use the Vortex to pick up water in the oceans and move it wherever you need it.
Tutorials ( Part 1 ) New features and mechanics are always cool and exciting to work with, but we wanted to make sure that anyone who picks up our game will know what to do. What’s the best way to ensure that? Of course tutorials. Starting from this patch, we will be adding tutorials for the most confusing systems and mechanics in the game. This will be an ongoing task for us. For this patch, we created a backbone system for our tutorials and added some basic ones. Next patch will expand on that system and provide even more content for our new players. But if this isn’t your first time ruling over Mother Planet, or if you're that kind of daredevil, you’ll have the option to turn them off when starting a new game.
Brightness Setting We received a lot of feedback after we released our last patch about the brightness in the game. Since everyone has various monitors, the brightness is different for each player. For some our “standard” setting was perfect, but for others it was not so good. We decided to hand over that control to the player and added a Brightness Setting screen. We hope this improvement makes your day a little brighter, or darker, or somewhere in between. ;)
Improvements and balance changes
Snow Changes
Some player’s reported that winter was too bright and buildings were too hard to find. Our initial intent was to create a cold feeling for the player, but in the process we overshot it. The brightness of snow was reduced and it won’t cover 100% of the buildings anymore making them more visible.
Static Combine
We added a very experimental setting to the game that can be found in the gameplay settings. The setting is called “Static Combine”. It basically allows the game to combine multiple similar objects into one, which increases the overall performance of the game. The biggest performance improvement we saw was on the lower end machines, but since this is still experimental and we can only test on so many computers, we wanted to make sure people could still play the game if something goes wrong.
Building Progress
Previously all the buildings that were built automatically (Black Market, Temple etc.) the player couldn’t tell how long it would take to finish. Now clicking those buildings will show the construction progress.
Status Icons interaction
You can use creator powers on Status Icons in order to interact with its associated building. For example, you can use Healing creator power in order to restore the durability of the building. Regular clicking on an icon will still bring your camera to it.
Bug Fixes:
Fixed: Korean language had major issues with the characters display Fixed: Removed outdated Narrator Dialogue regarding wells in the game Fixed: UFO’s caused nuggets to get stuck in the fearing state and caused UFO itself to get stuck in one place Fixed: CP usage error when a very small amount of trees was created Fixed: Bug that would cause the Camera to get stuck when LMB and RMB were pressed at once. Fixed: Quest Givers sometimes would end up underground Fixed: Bugs related to Tesla quest, which caused the disappearance of the parts and not being able to complete the quest Fixed: Debris Fixed: Visual bug fixes related to roads and bridges Fixed: Visual / Shadow / snow issues on medieval bridges Fixed: Name a nugget quest could have been completed by renaming the same nugget twice Fixed: Planet filters incorrectly displayed information in certain cases Fixed: Visual and performance issues related to the toxic lakes Fixed: Bug that was crashing twitch integration system when invalid characters were used in OAuth field. Fixed: Certain sounds in the game were extremely loud compared to other in game sounds.
Thank you guys a lot for all your feedback, positivity and support. It means a lot to us and we are working extremely hard to deliver the best possible experience while playing The Universim. Let us know how you feel about our improvements and if we nailed it. Your feedback means a lot to us and we take it seriously.
Did you hear the news? Our friends at META Publishing is working with two awesome games: HordeCore and Time Loader!
HordeCore is a cool side-scrolling shooter, where you blast the hordes of angry Hordelings! Make your kick-ass team of survivors and join the fight!
Time Loader is a cozy puzzle-platformer with a cute robot and time travels! What a mix! If you like physics based puzzles, 80-90s atmosphere, and beautiful handcrafted locations — this is a game for you!
From our entire team, we would like to wish you a Happy New Year and Happy Holidays! We worked really hard this year and are eager to bring you even more amazing content next year!
Before saying goodbye to 2020, we prepared one last patch that brings with it some major life improvements and some changes that people were waiting for. Plus we left you a nice surprise that you’ll be able to see in the game during the night on the 31 of December & 1st of January.
Now let's dive in.
Filter System We added a new filter system that allows you to easily see the current status of your city, nuggets, and buildings in the world space. For example this will help you identify areas with a high density of hunger or deteriorating buildings so that you can add another food source or Engineer hut.
Similar Buildings Location Filter
On top of the filter above, we added another one that will highlight the same type of building as the one you have selected to place. This should allow you to nicely spread your hospitals, eateries and other necessary buildings for your civilization across your planet.
Debris System
We added a Debris system. Previously when a building was destroyed, you were not able to identify which one it was unless you manually checked the news archive. Now, when the building is destroyed manually or by any unnatural cause (twitch #explode, lightning strike, meteor, exiles etc), it will leave debris. You will be able to click on them and select 3 different options as well as to see what building was destroyed: - Clear - Salvage - Rebuild
Clear option will allow you to clear those debris.
Salvage option will allow you to receive partial cost of the building
Rebuild will allow you to rebuild the same building. In that case, resources that were supposed to be salvaged, would be automatically applied.
If debris is ignored, it will slowly disappear over time. If it does disappear, you won’t receive any resources back. Once a building is destroyed the longer you wait the less resources you will receive from salvaging or to rebuilding it. In short, the longer you will wait the less resources you will be able to salvage.
Black Market We added some additional visual improvements to the black market. You will now see what causes the black market to appear.
Improvements and balance changes
Roads were polished a bit more and we fixed multiple issues connected to them.
Minor performance fixes
Minor memory usage optimization
Props can no longer spawn on roads or other places where they don’t belong
New road shapes were added which allows more curvature for the roads
Bug Fixes:
Fixed: Kickstart creator power prevented nuggets from eating and drinking
Fixed: Road segments were breaking due to large curvature angles
Fixed: Fixed an issue that was causing an infinite save load
Fixed: Minor visual issues related to the UFO’s crashing
Fixed: Redesigned Eatery drinking meter that was not displaying the amount of water correctly
Fixed: Low environment level did not influence exile nuggets at all
Fixed: The player was able to pick up rocks from inside the construction zones
Fixed: Cemetery grave slots were cleared too fast
Fixed: Residential Blocks were able to overlap each other and overlap with other buildings as well
Fixed: Various UI windows had a chance to close unexpectedly without a player interacting with them
Fixed: Gravediggers has a chance of losing bodies when they were switched back and forth between a car and a nugget
Fixed: In certain situations, it was not possible to drop a nugget while being close to the ground
Thank you for all your support and your positivity. We are really happy to have such an amazing community and we will do our best to deliver the most outstanding experience possible in 2021.
We hope you are staying safe with all that is going on in the world. While we’re still working full speed on Space Age, we put a lot of effort into this patch enhancing performance during the late game as well as some life changing improvements that a lot of you were asking for.
And as you know, our developers are on a marathon, doing everything possible to win over you and your support. Every time you leave a review for us on steam we pop a mini champagne, and feed our pocket giraffes with skittles, everyone just gets so much happier. And if today you have a few minutes to spare and have been enjoying what we do, leave us a review on steam. Let’s make our pocket giraffes happy!
Performance We spend a lot of time trying to bring all things together and improve the performance as much as possible. There are still some bits and bobs that can be improved, but we worked our booties off with this patch and improved the performance by more than 120%. This should provide a better experience later in the game on top end machines and especially on lower end machines.
Black Market
Throughout time there’s always been someone in a back alley willing to get the supplies you needed at a cost. In The Universim the Black Market will be auto constructed and upgraded at various points offering a variety of interesting resources for you to buy from 4 different traders. Each trader will be unlocked as you progress through the eras, selling wares that you might need to upgrade your buildings.
All the resources are traded for Nuggets, Ecology, Creator Powers or even disasters. But are you willing to pay the price ?
Kinetic Generator
Nuggets spent a lot of time practicing their running skills inside these wooden hamster wheels. Now it's time for a modern age upgrade. A new building will provide a safer and more efficient environment.
Roads are now connected to the bridges
As we introduced the roads, we had to iterate over them a couple of times in order to polish how they’re structured and improve the overall algorithm that is responsible for the road generation. During this month we worked on one of those improvements that allows roads to smoothly connect to bridges and resolve multiple potential problems with the roads and additional systems in the future.
Key Features:
Outline buildings and objects. All the objects which you can interact with in the game will be highlighted when the moused over. These features will be ON by default, but it can be turned off in settings/game.
Unlocking a new building now has an animation that plays when you first open the building menu. This should allow you to easily detect when a new building was unlocked.
The Creator Points generation setting was added to the Game Customization screen when you start a new game. Now you will be able to choose to play either with a normal CP generation rate, increased CP generation rate (2x speed) or Unlimited CP generation rate.
Shortcuts for creator powers now exist on each nugget info panel, population log and on building worker slots
Kickstarter Creator Power received an improvement and can be used on an area
Nuggets affected by the Kickstarter power will have Red Halo above their heads
Kickstarter Creator power now will freeze all nuggets stats except their age status and health
This power will constantly drain nuggets health. Make sure to not over use it.
Kickstarter will improve nuggets movement speed, increase their strength and carry capacity
Healing creator power received an improvement and can be used on an area
Nuggets healed by the creator power will receive a white halo above their heads for a short period of time
Creator power now allows you to heal all nuggets in the specified area.
Each building received a hyperlink for its respective perk that unlocks it. Clicking on it will open Research panel and show where the perk is located
Priority button added to the building upgrades which will allow you to prioritize the upgrades
Improvements and balance changes
Nugget AI for delivery reworked and improved which will improve the timing on resource delivery
CP generation will now be shown in CP per minute inside the temple
CP granted for Sacrifices will be displayed in the Temple
Added insects that will be flying during night time next to the street lights
There is a chance that after cutting a tree stumps will stay on the ground
“Fly To” event now can be interrupted by using scroll on your mouse
Wind and Kinetic Generators received a shlight rebalance which improve their energy generation speed
Modern Wind Generator is now available to be built in the early modern era
Stone age engineering huts received an additional slot for the engineer
Stone and Wood refineries output increased by 40%
Adahy and Elu’s strength has been increased from the range 2-5 to 4-6 in order to provide a consistent start of the game as well as to increase the speed in the beginning of the game.
Improved Food Production System that will send only a couple of nuggets at a time to gather food instead of sending all available nuggets to gather it
Cook, Doctor / Shaman, Gravedigger will go and collect resources themselves if there are no laborers available to collect resources needed for them.
Farms will display an icon above them if the crop was not selected
Animals being hunted by Hunters will now have an icon above them
If an animal is extinct, the Hunter’s hut will have an icon indicating this. Hunters won’t do anything until a new animal type is selected.
Resource tooltips now include materials for upgrades
Bug Fixes:
Fixed: Issue where nuggets should ignore the nearby resource and move to pickup the resources further on due to incorrect computation error.
Fixed: Issue that would cause multiple errors in the game when the game was loaded with fire in it
Fixed: In certain situations roads were generated incorrectly when the evolution tower was placed
Fixed: Crytivo Club was not showing up when the game was loaded
Fixed: Renaming the buildings was not working properly
Fixed: Nuggets repeatedly were reentering roads
Fixed: Wind was updated incorrectly, which was causing wind related buildings to work incorrectly
Fixed: Killing an Alpha wolf during wolf attack would not kill the wolf actor and upon load it was causing major errors in the game
Fixed: Upgrading a building would trigger the “Building was destroyed” message in the news channel.
Fixed: Nugget thumbnail was not displayed correctly in the houses
Fixed: Nuggets were stopping their movement when the new request was taken
Fixed: Certain parts of the roads blueprint were incorrectly removed from the game upon placing a new construction zone on top of them
Fixed: Oppress Health stat effect on nuggets was incorrectly working with Hospitals which caused nuggets to get stuck inside the hospital
Fixed: Camera movement was not paused when different popup windows were on the screen, such as creator power carousel, quest log screen, research screen etc.
Fixed: Picked nuggets in certain cases would go underground and they would continue walking underground
Fixed: Following the nuggets and picking him up during the camera “follow: event would break the camera and it would try to follow the cursor instead
Fixed: Stuck matchmaking lines over Le Cupidon nuggets
Fixed: Multiple panel sorting issues when the Research panel was opened
Fixed: Missing nuggets status while being in Prison or Rehabilitation Center
Fixed: Adahy and Elu appearance was different from the menu start screen upon loading the game
Fixed: Farms without water would produce news messages that would never disappear from the screen causing news messages to stack and cover the majority of the screen space
Fixed: Confetti upon landing the successful shot would spawn in the incorrect location
Fixed: Some road nodes were duplicated causing errors upon loading the game
Fixed: Relationships with exiles were not changed upon killing exile nuggets
Fixed: Terrain deformation near the roads was causing nuggets to start waking up in the air
Fixed: Le Cupidon matchmaking lines did not disappear upon partner sudden death
Fixed: Overpacked quest would break if it was loaded from the saved game
Fixed: Residential building panel was using upgrade panel instead of its own panel
Fixed: In certain cases road nodes were created underground, which would cause nuggets to go underground
Fixed: Some animals animations were incorrectly working when the game speed was increased
Fixed: Incorrect birds animations
Fixed: Kickstarter creator power was not adding bonus stats correctly
Fixed: Planet nodes which are being used by nuggets were not always updated correctly, leading nuggets to wander around
Fixed: Error that was happening when the roads were building during paused game
Fixed: Electrical parts from Tesla Quest and Delivery packages from Overpacked quests could have been dropped through the ground, leading to the quest failure
Fixed: Law was not always taking an effect when the candidate was selected during the election process.
Fixed: Bug that was preventing various roads segments to not but built
Fixed: Overpacked quests was not spawning packages if the building was placed too close to the roads
Fixed: Nugget clothes not being set correctly when nuggets changed their jobs
Fixed: Nuggets would not receive clothing when the research for clothing was complete
Fixed: Issue where the roads could end up above or below the ground
Fixed: Issue where very long roads were generated automatically without the player’s input
Fixed: Issue where decoding a spacebox had the lowest priority and therefore it was taking a long time to do so.
Fixed: Planet environment will always start at 100%
Fixed: Nuggets will no longer wander the entire planet when the city is low on food. They will still try to search for food, but they won’t go across the planet just .
Fixed: Houses did not correctly display Nugget’s status
Fixed: Error that was appearing when Explosion of the nugget was caused by Twitch viewer
Fixed: Animals will no longer be extremely stretched when thrown
UI and Art:
Black Market panel.
Oh boy, it took us a good amount of time to put together this beautiful panel for you to enjoy. Unique aliens were designed to fit with the design, each alien has their own mood and animations. New sparkling icons were created to support your imagination. We hope you’ll enjoy ordering intergalactic goodies from the newly opened Black Market.
The new notification Panel was designed to let you know if there’s something missing and we hope it will help. We’ll continue reusing this panel as we develop, yay.
Nuggets God Action panel. Now you can use your god powers on specific Nuggets from the following panels - Nugget List, Nugget ID card and Building Panels. This was a frequently requested feature and we’re excited to scratch that itch for you, we hope you enjoy it!
An evolution progress bar has been added to your research screen. Now you can easily see your progress in the evolutionary research tree. It looks fancy, we know it, but thanks for all compliments anyways.
Thank you all for being awesome. We’re continuing our work on the Space Age and listening closely to everyone who provides feedback on our social media or discord in order to improve our current systems. Very soon we’ll have an exciting announcement. Again, leave a review on steam to boost our Devs moral and help them output the best results, like ever!
We hope you’ve had fun watching your Nuggets truck along the roads and are ready to play with a new bunch of features. Plus a bunch of bugs was hunted down and squished. Our developers worked really hard to deliver the most stable and fun version of The Universim yet.
Below are some key features that were added or improved in the game. As usual, we ask you to leave us a review on Steam if you enjoy what we do. We have really exciting stuff coming your way very, very soon.
Alrighty, let’s get to it:
New Main Menu Screen
The entire Main Menu and Settings were redesigned and improved. Now it’s more clear and hopefully easier to navigate. We will continue improving your user experience as we develop, but at the same time let us know on a discord if there is something missing from our settings.
Game Customization Screen
Natural Disasters
You’ve been asking us to add the ability to play without natural disasters for a while and it’s finally here! Now you can choose how often you’ll have them. You can set it to “Never,” which pretty much means what it says - disasters will never happen on your planet. You can keep it on “Occasional” - this is what we recommend for a balanced experience, or Often - for the players who like it extra spicy.
Wild Animals Attacks
On top of choosing the frequency of the disasters, you can also choose how often Wild animals attack your village. It can also be Often, Occasional or set to Never happen.
Exile Attacks
And finally, you can also tweak Exile attacks with similar parameters.
We know you wanted these options for a while and we spent a good amount of time making the game fun and engaging no matter what you chose. We hope you’ll love it and of course we’re open for feedback. Let us know on discord.
Nugget Traits
We know a good number of you play The Universim a lot, replaying it over and over and over. To help you keep things fresh, we’re adding the ability for you to customize your Nuggets’ skin tones along with starting Nugget Traits. These Traits will alter your gameplay, check out what our internal QA Team had to say about them:
True Believer: This is an easy mode trait. This trait brings in a lot of extra CP when starting a new game. This can help the player in many different areas. The downside is that there will be more UFOs that can steal Nuggets away.
Arnold: A fun Easy Mode trait. It allows things to be delivered faster which speeds up the early part of the game. However, they also eat a lot of food and tire easily.
Matenator: A very fun trait. Also easy mode. This also speeds up the early part of the game by greatly increasing population for a few generations until it breeds/dies out. This is a great trait for those players who struggle with population early in the game. The downside is that these Nuggets will die from exhaustion before their time, and they also eat a lot of food!
Fugitive: Fun and Easy mode trait as Nuggets move fast for a few generations. However, Nuggets may steal some of your resources!
Nugg Norris: This is a hard mode trait. Nuggets start off very strong, and they can build things very fast. However, Nuggets severely damage other Nuggets for a few generations. This can cause many injuries and death. So be careful!
Greenlander: At a glance, this trait may seem easy to play, but it is not. While these Nuggets will create trees, they have shorter lifespans and consume a lot of water.
Highlander: This is an easy/normal mode trait as it boosts the population early in the game. It's REALLY fun when Elderly mating is active and all the old Highlander's breed. However, if one gets infected, it can RAPIDLY spread. The player must be vigilant to keep any potential infections from starting or spreading.
Coffin Dodger: This is the hardest trait in the game to play. Once zombies start to spread, it can be an incredible challenge to bring them under control and may burn a lot of CP. This is recommended for more hardcore players.
Each Trait will need to be unlocked by playing the game.
We will continue reviewing Traits, and potentially adding new ones, if you guys will like ‘em. Please let us know on our Discord if you have any ideas what Traits we can add or change in the future.
Overpacked Quest
An enterprising Nugget wants your help to open his business. In order to do so, you need to place a Couriers hut and deliver the boxes to appropriate mailboxes.
Sitting On Powder Quest
Nuggets may not have arms, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be armed. One Nugget who is Pro Gun is asking for you to help elect the Pro Gun candidate.
Improvements and balance changes
Merge of Wells and Reservoirs
Wells and Reservoirs are now merged into a single building. Previously, having two buildings would often confuse everyone. Since both buildings’ functionality is to preserve water, one building provided water purely for the buildings, while wells provided water only for Nuggets. We decided to simplify that aspect of the game and merged those two buildings into one. Now the well part of the building will take water from the reservoir that is being filled with water pumps.
Perk Finder
With each patch, the amount of perks was only increasing, and it got to the point where it was a chore to find it in the research tree. This is why we decided to add some extra help that allows a player to find and identify the needed perk. Each perk description now has a small eye icon next to the Perk Requirement. Clicking on that eye will bring you to the required perk.
Improved trait / skin color inheritance
Due to the addition of the customization screen before the game starts, we also reviewed how our traits and skin color were passed on, and we decided to improve that aspect of the game as well. Previously, your Nuggets would get the trait from their parents no matter what, and therefore, your civilization was always limited to a certain amount of traits. The current system provides a high chance of passing one of the parent’s traits, but it also has a chance to generate a new one or be left out without a trait.
Skin color of the Nuggets, similar to traits, was passed down based on the parents color skin. It was either from a father or a mother. We added some changes to the system, and now it will take a middle color between two colors of your parents. This way their kids can have slightly different shades of the colors based on their parents skin color.
Street lights Simulation
Previously, all street lights located on the modern roads were turned on all at once when night time was falling. It created an illusion of a lightbulb that would turn on immediately when you flip a switch. It was breaking the immersion of the game and didn't feel right. We added some randomization to it. Now certain lights might flikker on while others will turn on after a short delay.
Fish respawn in the lakes
To our surprise, this was one of the most asked for features to be added to the game. When the lake/ocean would dry out, all the fish would be destroyed and never replenished. This was causing a lot of players to constantly build and destroy their fishing piers. With the new system, the fish will regenerate back to its original state based on the amount of water in the lake. So if the lake does not have water, there won’t be any fish, but as you add more and more water, the fish will start regenerating slowly, and based on the amount of water the regeneration, speed will be increased.
Construction pause button
This is another request that was asked for on multiple occasions. Sometimes, when a lot of buildings are placed all at once, Nuggets will do their best to build all the buildings in order they were placed. But if there were not enough resources for the first placed building, they would try to deliver resources that they have to other buildings. In some situations this caused a pretty long delay for that first building. The Pause button allows you to stop the construction, and any delivery of the resources. Now Nuggets will concentrate on the other buildings that are being constructed first.
Save Game option
The Save Game option was added to the ESC menu. It will be available immediately after the epicenter is placed. A lot of players, who were not familiar with the game, were struggling with our unique saving system. Quite often, it led to frustration and confusion. We reviewed that system and added a save game option to the ESC menu. The Archive is still being used to autosave the game, but you no longer need to place it in order to save the game.
Continue button was added to the Main Menu
You’ll now find a new continue button that allows you to continue from your last saved game, getting players back to their game faster.
Save Filters
Buildings Menu and Nuggets Menu will save the filters now for 5 minutes before being reset to default settings. Previously, opening one of those windows, selecting certain filters, and then closing it would reset all the filters immediately and you had to go through this whole process once again. Not any more.
UI Scaling & Saving Settings
While completely reworking the settings screen, we also went through our current settings and made sure that they are all working properly. Besides that, we also tested our UI scaling on very high and low resolutions and adjusted our UI to work correctly.
Improved Nuggets speed on the road
Roads will provide an additional speed to Nuggets which will allow your Nuggets to zip around your sprawling world and transport materials more quickly.
Improved Couriers and General Transportation AI
We reviewed the efficiency of our Nuggets delivering resources to their destination and found some aspects that needed to be improved. Couriers and Nuggets that transport resources will choose the most efficient route to deliver resources to the destination based on a score system that evaluates distance, the amount of Nuggets that are delivering those resources as well as other Nugget needs.
Improved Engineers AI
With additions of the roads, instead of helping our engineer Nuggets, it actually increased the travel time for them due to incorrect building prioritization by engineers. We reviewed & improved AI in order to make sure that they will always select the most efficient path to the buildings, and they will make a better decision on which building they should be fixing next based on the distance, building health, and their needs.
Option to disable camera shake
Out settings received an additional setting for people who have motion sickness. Now you will be able to turn off camera shake when you bump into the buildings or when any explosions or rumblings are happening in the game.
Additional Improvements
-Construction supporters are limited to 10 -Nuggets will be removed from the buildings if it is being turned off manually by the player -If crop is not selected, farm will display an icon above it -Nuggets drink twice as fast as before -Сars and Roads appear at the same time after industrialization perk is researched -Building Boundary Changes We heard you say that buildings were spread too far apart - especially on the shorelines. Pumps and Fishing Huts can now be placed much closer together. Regular buildings had the needed space between them reduced by 50%. This will also allow you to build a bit closer to roads as well.
Bug Fixes
Fixed: The roads were not showing up properly for hardware supported mac users.
Fixed: Dead Nugget quest did not trigger a second part of the quest which led to the quest failure.
Fixed: Le Cupidon would cause connection lines between Nuggets to stay on the screen.
Fixed: Nuggets in some cases would not select the best and optimal way to reach a resource
Fixed: The game had a chance to crash if it was saved and loaded while buildings and ground were on fire.
Fixed: Road would not be correctly built based on evolution tower placement
Fixed: In some cases Crytivo Club on the main screen would not show up
Fixed: Rename a Nugget quest could have been completed by utilizing Nuggets found in the space box
Fixed: Nuggets sometimes would repeatedly reenter the road
Fixed: Construction site supporters would not show up immediately when assigned to the construction site
Fixed: Building area radius would blink when clicked at night time
Fixed: Random Nuggets and hunters were getting stuck on the roads
Fixed: Building ghosters would not scale correctly on certain resolutions
Fixed: Multiple issues with culling system that would remove parts of the world objects from the screen
Fixed: Nugget would get stuck if a building was shut off while he was heading to it
Fixed: Added the correct Blizzard sound
Fixed: Camera sometimes would flip over when “Fly To” button was clicked in order to move to an important location
Fixed: Creator powers would not work consistently during pause menu
Fixed: Nuggets’ tooltip staying up on a screen from the Nugget panel
Fixed: Graveyards would keep slots reserved even after the grave disappeared, preventing new Nuggets to be added to the graveyard
Fixed: Unable to cancel archive while it is being constructed
Fixed: Quest icons did not show up consistently on the game load
Fixed: Nuggets would proceed going to the hospital despite being healed before reaching it
Fixed: Exile Airport had a status icon that indicated no water or electricity
Fixed: Exile village orators and priest were constantly adding a negative effect which was breaking the game after some time
Fixed: Incorrect Archive Icon
Fixed: Pre-Medieval warehouse was missing the storage space for the glass
Fixed: Firefighters modern building was unlockable without unlocking prior age building
Fixed: Grass was not appearing in the game
Fixed: Incorrect windows sporting while being in the construction menu
Fixed: Connect Button to twitch would not always be clickable
Fixed: Twitch Connection Issues
Fixed: Drinking water in wells carries over between upgrades
Fixed: Incorrect name handling during Twitch Integration
Fixed: Nugget kids were able to wonder underground in some cases
Fixed: Icon filter in the Nuggets menu
UI and Art
Completely redesigned Main Menu
Completely redesigned Settings Menu
New Nugget customization screen that includes Nuggets Skin Color Tone Picker and disaster frequencies selections toggles.
Unique Nugget Traits perks design
Redesigned and merged water well with water reservoir UI Panel
New - Farm No Crop Selected Icon
Redesigned and Merged Water Well and Water Reservoir 3D models for Stone Age, Medieval and Modern Ages
Thank you all for being awesome. We’re working really hard on a Space Age, and soonish we’ll have an exciting announcement. Again, leave a review on steam to boost our Devs morale and help them output the best results, like ever!
First of all we hope you, your family, and friends are doing alright during difficult times. We hope the new content update for The Universim helps make your days a tad brighter. We’re excited to let you finally play with the Road system and the other features that made it into this patch.
Before you hop in reading about all the awesomeness we would like to ask our passionable fans to leave us a review on Steam if you’re enjoying the game and didn’t have time to review it, you can do it here.
Alrighty, let’s get to it:
Roads
The wait is finally over. Our engineering team was hard at work adding a magnificent, extremely challenging, road system over the past few months. We’re finally happy with our progress to let you play with the roads and let us know what you think. Keep in mind that this is going to be an initial (beta) release of this system so we expect that you may experience some bugs or issues, but hopefully not. If you do experience any issues, please make sure to let us know about them on our Discord Channel here.
In the future updates roads will be connected to the bridges and tunnels built by you or Nuggets. We’re also planning to add smaller roads that will connect key structures to bigger roads.
The Nugget’s Fierce Enemy Quest
A new quest has been added to the game. You’ll come across Nuggets in need of your help to tear down some trees that they consider their mortal enemies (weird right?) Help them tear down those tall monsters of bark and leaves!
The Last Exhibitionist Quest
After the development of Clothing, a certain Nugget refuses to conform to society and adopt clothing. They say “I came into this world naked, and I’ll remain that way.” However, it’s really getting awkward, and they aren’t exactly a sight to behold. You will need to convince this Nugget to learn the benefits of clothing and get them to join in on the clothing revolution.
Motorcycles!
Vroom, vroom! You’ve been playing with trucks for a while, so we decided to spice things up and add motor bikes that Nuggets can use to cruise down the brand new roads. More variations in transportation are coming your way soonish that will add a bit of carbon monoxide into the fresh air of your future civilization, but hey your Nuggets will definitely look way cooler.
Nugget Stories
With an addition of the Nugget Stories window that allows you to track your progress, our art department knocked out an image for almost every single quest that we have. So now you'll be able to reflect on your awesomeness in style! Please, give some love to our art department.
Crytivo Club
For all those who love to unlock cool stuff, participate in our closed tests, and receive news before everyone, we added some improvements to the Crytivo Club system. Now you can finally restore your lost password with ease. We also added a way for you to resend the confirmation email in order to activate your Crytivo Club account.
If you're not in da Club yet cut the line while the bouncers arn't looking 💪😎👍 . Join now to unlock exclusive content in your favoritve Crytivo Games, receive Free Games, participate in a Giveaways and Incentives. Receive invites to test latest and sometimes secret Games that Crytivo or our Partners Develop.
Improvements and balance changes
Exile Villages
To make your life easier, we now marking Orators and Priests from exile villages to help you to spot them easily and take appropriate (or not so much) measures against them.
Global Temperature
While the world is concerned with global warming, we had a problem with global freezing in The Universim. We reviewed the global temperature system and fine tuned the numbers in order to make your seasons slightly more comfortable for a playthrough.
Energy
Based on our analytics, a lot of our creators are just in love with Wind Turbines. We wanted to review our energy system and improve certain electrical buildings. Almost all of the energy generators received substantial buffs which means you won’t have to worry about your electricity as much as you did. But don’t get fooled, there is still plenty of work to be done to help your civilization thrive.
Medieval Wind Turbines wind resistance changed from 4 -> 4.2
Modern Wind turbines received a slight bonus to the wind resistance 4 -> 4.6 points.
Kinetic Generators no longer do any harm to the environment.
Kinetic Generators output increased from 25 -> 35 points
Gas plant received a debuff and its energy output was decreased from 300 -> 200
Water
Along with the energy system, we did a review of our water system. Almost every aspect of it was improved and buffed in one way or another.
Stone Age water pump production rate increased from 20 -> 30
Pre-medieval water pump production rate increased from 60 -> 80
Medieval water pump production rate increased from 90 -> 120
Modern Water pump production rate increased from 150 -> 180
Reservoirs changes include:
Stone Age reservoir capacity increased from 30000 -> 40000
Pre-Medieval reservoir capacity increased from 45000 -> 60000
Medieval reservoir capacity increased from 60000 -> 100000
Modern Reservoir capacity increased from 90000 -> 150000
Toxic Lakes
With the initial release, toxic lakes brought a lot of challenges upon our creators and required some changes and life improvements.
Chance to get sick by your Nuggets during the Medium Environment level was lowered from 30% -> 15%.
Improved Nuggets Assignment System
During the last patch we noticed that some of our creators had an issue with educated Nuggets taking all the spots in the buildings that did not require them, therefore leaving a lot of uneducated Nuggets to work in buildings that actually require education. That was a big no-no for us and that issue was immediately addressed. The system was upgraded so that jobs will be prioritized by a Nugget’s education. Buildings that require educated Nuggets will be filled with educated Nuggets, as well as buildings that don’t require and education will be filled with uneducated Nuggets. Easy peasy.
Improved Planet Node System
We reviewed our node system once again in order to resolve the issue of very small lakes that don't contain water, but still prevent the player from placing the building over those spots. Now during the creation of the planet, our system eliminates those small spots. No more weird useless lakes! Hooray!
Buildings Upgrade System
Some buildings during their upgrade would lose their settings and cause all sorts of issues and frustrations. Now warehouse, farms, hunter huts, employment centers, and cemeteries will carry over their old settings through the upgrade.
Other Changes
Added the ability to click on any icons above the buildings in order to “Fly To” those buildings.
During disasters all Nuggets won’t prioritize one bunker. Instead they will evaluate each available bunker and slots in the bunker and make a smart decision where they should go, reducing the time Nuggets need to reach the bunker during the disaster.
Updated animals to use a new animation system in order to improve their movements and transition between them.
Birds and whales can be picked up now.
Bug Fixes
Fixed: Injured Doctor would take a patient spot and a new doctor won’t be assigned to the hospital.
Fixed: Sometimes when you would receive an error in the game, it might affect your Nugget panel and show different debug panels which were not working properly and they would further break the game.
Fixed: Removed Wiki button from the oxygen panel .
Fixed: Turtles spawned next to the residential area would create errors in the game.
Fixed: Minister news messages were not correctly displayed when a Minister ordered a new creation of the building.
Fixed: Issue when Animals would walk through the middle of the ocean.
Fixed: Using the tornado creator power in a rapid sequence could have caused the appearance of 2-3 tornados in one spot causing the error and breaking the game.
Fixed: Dropping Nuggets on top of the mountain would cause death for your Nugget. Welp, not anymore…
Fixed: Shore buildings were not placed on certain sports next to the store.
Fixed: The wheel on the water pump ghoster model was offset incorrectly.
Fixed: Buildings during winter time were completely submerged into snow leaving almost no indication to identify the building.
Fixed: News messages were sorted incorrectly.
Fixed: News messages log was never deleted causing all sorts of unpredictable issues.
Fixed: Boats turned 90 degrees upwards after the water level was dropped.
Fixed: Multiple animation issues related to boats.
Fixed: Incorrect boats passing.
Fixed: Players were able to trigger game pause during loading which was leading to infinite load.
Fixed: Blur during “No UI” mode.
Fixed: Population log was not sorted correctly.
Fixed: Persisting Cupidon light on the screen.
Fixed: Crashes on AMD cards.
Fixed: Nuggets sometimes could appear without hair or clothes.
Fixed: Baby Nuggets would appear on the edge of the house instead of walking from the house entrance.
Fixed: Exile building won’t be placed inside the player territory.
While you'll enjoy playing this update brought to you by our dedicated developers we'll continue work on the Space Era in The Universim. We appreciate the love and support you send us through your positive comments on our social media and it definitely motivates us to "go the extra mile." As a reminder, if you enjoy the game please leave us a review on steam, every review increases our developers’ smiles an extra inch.
We've been running cool new initiatives, one of them is Crytivo Connect, where we chat with other developers that make awesome games you might be interested in. The previous Crytivo Connect was with the developers of the Prehistoric Kingdom, an upcoming Dinosaur Zoo Tycoon game. We had a lot of fun. Check out the recording here and be sure to follow our Twitch channel to not miss our future streams.
