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.




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!




Bunch of new ones including a few you have all been asking for (such as the Fishery seen above).




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.


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! :)


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

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!

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!

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 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.

-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.

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

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:

-Bug Fix: Some players had trouble saving their games.

-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

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 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.






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.


There are three new rooms for the Ardyn to use. These can only be unlocked by having an Ardyn settler.




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 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 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).






The Somnic Pools are where the Ardyn use retroanimation on entities to remove Senectia and make themselves younger.




The Hortichron is where Chronoblasts and Nyctoid plants are grown.




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.




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).

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.




I've added four new features to this window:

This lets you make stockpiles a high priority if you want items moved their first.

This lets you specify items that you don't want in a stockpile.

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.

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.




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:




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.






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.




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.




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.




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.




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.


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! :)

Here's a link to the mod project:

Modding



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.




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.




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.




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!




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.


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?




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.




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. >:)


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.




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!




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. :)


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.

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!


-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!

Thanks and have a solid day!

Waylon

Hey everyone!

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

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...




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!




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. :)






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.


-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.

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!

Thanks and hope you all have a solid weekend!

Waylon

Hello everyone!

Version 0.11.0.11 is live! Thanks for waiting patiently on this one.


I took a bit longer with this patch because I needed to make some tools to help me work on tuning. Tuning has always been an extremely difficult and slow process for me on this game. So, I figured it was time to dedicate hours towards making that stuff easier for myself. I've tuned a bunch of things in the update, but there's still lots of work to do, especially with late game progression.

There are some other great things in this update. Let's take a look!




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:




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.






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.




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.




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.

-Content: Added Ardyn settler wave.
-Content: Added late-game Human settler wave for settlements with low populations.
-Polish: Did a complete pass on notifications and added a bunch of tracking windows.
-Polish: Added feedback to the Saga button to indicate if a node can be unlocked.
-Polish: Added an 'auto-slot' feature to inventory items. When a uniform slot is visible, and an equippable item is clicked, it will automatically be slotted to the best slot candidate. The best candidate is one that is empty, or doesn't have the same item id, or doesn't have an item about to be equipped.
-Polish: Added hotkey info to inventory items to show how to equip items if no equipment display is visible.
-Bug Fix: Hostile and neutral entities would teleport to the closest player position if they were stranded.
-Bug Fix: Sometimes items being unequipped would be destroyed instead of spawned.
-Bug Fix: Added missing iron hammer icon.
-Bug Fix: Stone buckler, bronze cap/blood cap mushrooms, and iron hammer had incorrect graphics.
-Bug Fix: Dead entities were not being removed from rooms if the rooms were set to manual.
-Bug Fix: Temperature would not show a negative sign on the entity tooltip.
-Bug Fix: Work logs weren't showing the correct target attribute.
-Bug Fix: The difficulty rating determined by avg settler level was incorrect.
-Bug Fix: General visual layout fixes for lists where items were misaligned or popping into position.
-Bug Fix: Entities were not gaining happiness when sleeping in beds.
-Bug Fix: Very rarely an Ancient could get stuck in a sleeping loop.
-Bug Fix: Entities should no longer enter combat if all their combat skills are disabled. This resolves an issue where entities would not equip any items or work if a threat was nearby.
-Bug Fix: Entities that are given an attack order and have no combat skills enabled, will have those skills auto-enabled.
-Bug Fix: Worlds would not load when the Z depth was changed from the default 64 depth to 16.
-Bug Fix: Production rooms would show jobs for blueprints that had yet to be discovered.
-Bug Fix: Incorrect icons for several butcher blueprints
-Bug Fix: Uniform buffs and attacks weren't updating right away when items were added/removed.
-Tuning: Having two one-handed weapons now provides a 10% chance for both items to attack/work on a target.
-Tuning: Ancients will now gain happiness from sleeping in a Sarcophagus.
-Tuning: Re-organized several industry research nodes. Stone/wood, and iron/steel can now be unlocked as a choice rather than sequentially.
-Tuning: Did a complete tuning pass of all tools and weapons which focuses on the progression and differentiates types of weapon. i.e., Crossbows will shoot farther than bows, but do a small amount of damage less.
-Tuning: Evasion is now a chance to dodge an incoming attack as a percent, rather than as a comparison to a dice roll.
-Tuning: Added Happiness % to entity tooltip.
-Tuning: Stoneleaf items are now made at the workshop using the misc skill.
-Tuning: Stone/wood workbenches now unlocked in the Basics I research node.
-Tuning: Entities now spawn with randomly generated items based on player progression.
-Tuning: Harmful diet items will damage entities over time.
-Tuning: Loved diet items will improve entity happiness over time.
-Tuning: The Wyrm event should no longer spawn thousands of items.
-Tuning: Spellbook of healing now actually heals.

That's all for now. For 0.11.0.12, I'd like to focus on adding more events, especially mid-late game ones. Going to focus on adding some fun ones for the Ancients. Plus I'll continue to bug fix/respond to feedback and requests.

Thanks everyone! Have an awesome day. :)

Good evening (or morning, or... day?!)!

Today's patch has some great fixes and tuning changes, but it also has some new rooms. Well, the Tavern won't be new to some of you as, once upon a time, it used to be a room in the game. But enough reminiscing! Let's take a look.




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.




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.




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!


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?


I've done a bunch of balancing for the Ardyn race. Namely, they will no longer take 1:1 age off animals they retroanimate. Instead, 1 year of the animal gets multiplied by the Ardyn survival skill. Also, animals live a tiny bit longer. These things should keep your critters around for much longer.

I've also gone ahead and merged the fishing rod unlocks into the industry materials progression nodes. This is to make some space for new agriculture tech, but also because it was annoying to unlock fishing in the agriculture tree.

There are some other tunings mentioned below...

Here are the notes:
-Content: Added 4 bone armor items.
-Content: Added bone armor node to War research tree.
-Content: Added workshop room. This is where super basic crafting jobs can be done. i.e., bone/clay/thatch item crafting.
-Content: Added hunting grounds room. This is where capture jobs can be automated.
-Content: Re-enabled the Tavern room.
-Content: Added relax with drink job to Tavern. This improves settler happiness.
-Bug Fix: Some items would appear as inaccessible for containers surrounded by other containers on their four adjacent sides.
-Bug Fix: Unreachable item notifications would sometimes show the wrong item when the job required a type of item, rather than a specific item.
-Bug Fix: The item slots weren't updating after an item wasn't added/removed.
-Bug Fix: Some Nyctium items had incorrect inline icons.
-Bug Fix: The missing diet items in room notification was firing even when a room didn't have the diet items toggle enabled.
-Bug Fix: Sometimes entities (mostly animals) could start a gather item job.
-Bug Fix: Entities could sometimes start the same job at the same time.
-Bug Fix: The profession 'unused2' will no longer show up in the default skills list.
-Bug Fix: A typo where the Raw Food tooltip said it provides a worse bonus than Raw Food.
-Bug Fix: Companion statuses were being reset which would cause entities to leave/join homes constantly.
-Bug Fix: Inline icons on the room edit screen would appear duplicate for additional room owner group entries.
-Bug Fix: Newly spawned entities would show healing FX.
-Bug Fix: Fish would get stuck at the bottom of bodies of water.
-Bug Fix: Stone Dart and Stone Spear would not spawn a projectile.
-Bug Fix/Tuning: Hauling jobs weren't being created when there were other hauling jobs present.
-Tuning: Alcohols now provide less of a thirst buff, an energy debuff, and a new happiness buff.
-Tuning: Tired entities will now receive a small debuff to happiness.
-Tuning: Sleeping on the ground will lower entity happiness, and sleeping on a bed will raise it.
-Tuning: Non-sapient entities now get a small buff, "Ignorance Is Bliss", to happiness.
-Tuning: The manual input for room auto jobs was displaying incorrect text for queueing jobs. This has been changed to accurately describe that the jobs are manual. Additionally, if no manual jobs can be added, it explains why.
-Tuning: The default skills page now lists professions alphabetically.
-Tuning: Animal Enclosure stockpiles now start with a default priority of 2.
-Tuning: Beverage and food provide higher hydration/metabolism buffs.
-Tuning: Raised entity age to become elder for several animals.
-Tuning: Retroanimation now only adds 1 age to the target entity on each use. The amount lost for the Ardyn caster is based on their survival skill, so they'll still get a good return back.
-Tuning: Added extra action text to show when the source entity receives a bonus from their attack. i.e., when an Ardyn lowers their age from retroanimation.
-Tuning: Captured non-sapient entities will no longer jump into combat unless given an attack order.
-Tuning: Research has been renamed to Writing.
-Tuning: Coal, rope buckler, and pointy stick are now made at the workshop and requires misc skill.
-Tuning: Fishing rods are now unlocked in industry instead of agriculture.
-Tuning: The melt threshold for ice blocks has been raised.
-Optimization: Reduced memory allocation within pathfinding.

That's all I've got for now! I meant to add some more tools for various professions into the patch, but I didn't have the time so I'll save them for next week's update.

Special thanks to those constantly giving me bug reports, save files, and feedback. You are stars!

Have a great weekend!

Waylon