Hi everyone,

The new languages update (1.3.36) is now live for everyone, and includes a couple of bug fixes.

Changelog:

*Added French, Korean, Italian, Hungarian, and Turkish language support
*Fixes bug where giving a gift to an NPC caused the gift action to happen twice in rapid succession
*Fixes furniture rotation bug for "stools"
*Fixes morning music not being played correctly
*(spoiler) Fixes Junimos not disappearing after the final goodbye
*New "About/Credits" menu on title screen

Thanks everyone who helped test out the beta, your feedback was really helpful!

Next up is a big free content update (1.4), that includes lots of new stuff, as well as some really nice quality of life features.

Thanks for playing Stardew Valley!

-ConcernedApe

Update: Just a heads up... you may have noticed a couple of very small additional updates recently (after the 1.3.36). These are minor tweaks/fixes for a couple things that weren't caught in the beta (typos, etc.)

• Fixed crashes related to Lua errors. more
  
• Fixed a crash when opening the fluid wagon GUI in the map editor. more
  
• Fixed that pressing "back" on the login prompt in the other settings GUI would exit the other settings GUI. more
  
• Fixed that robots could get stuck when trying to upgrade in some cases. more
  
• Fixed that the tooltips for tooltip times where backwards. more
  
• Fixed Lua commands wouldn't work show help correctly. more
  
• Fixed portable fusion reactor and rocketry tech pre-requisites - added military science pack. more
  
• Fixed uranium processing tech pre-requisites - added sulfur processing. more
  
• Removed ghost buildability consistency check until we properly integrate building of ghosts into the fluid mixing prevention logic.
  
• Fixed crash related to train pathfinding. more
  
• Fixed layouting of Map Generator gui when the preview is shown. more
  
• Fixed issues with rich text tags referencing entities that have no icon.
  
• Fixed crash related to moving blueprints from game blueprints to player blueprints. more
  
• Fixed crash related listing all players while while processing event of player being removed.
  
• Fixed a crash related to research that would continue even though the research queue is empty. more
  
• Fixed Compilatron placing a chest on top of things. more
  
• Fixed crash during quest to reactivate assembler in NPE. more
  
• Fixed that script render text would scale with GUI scale. more
  

• Made MiningDrillPrototype::radius_visualisation_picture tintable.
  

You can get experimental releases by selecting the 'experimental' beta branch under Factorio's properties in Steam.

First of all - Your save files are likely broken. We're extremely sorry about this. However, we now know how and why it has been happening (better late than never, I guess?). So it won't happen in future patches. We have implemented Chapter III into the chapter selector which starts you exactly where Chapter II left off. Very sorry for the inconvenience.

Just a reminder that we are in Early Access, so please let me know if you experience any bugs or find any spelling/grammar mistakes. My team and I do our best to pick these up, but some always end up slipping through.

Also, some of these puzzles are harder than what you would have experienced with Newfound Courage in the past. Our intention with these puzzles is to make them satisfying but not to make them so hard that you have to stop playing and look up solutions for them. If you find yourself doing that, please let me know.


New content, fixes and improvements:

* The final Chapter and Epilogue for the game have been added
* A new Feature, the "Lorebook" has been added. There are ten parts to it hidden around Silverpine. Find them all to unlock secrets
* There have also been countless small fixes and improvements throughout the whole game

We hope you enjoy the conclusion to Alex's tale. Thank you so much for your support.Known issues:

* Shadows still disappear sometimes
* there are some spelling mistakes in the lorebook that need to be corrected
* there is a strange flash during the final scene

- The Newfound Courage Team

As promised, we will soon release the first content update, the side-story "Double Trouble", as our way to thank you for your continued support.

Sigma finally gets a week of rest in between deployements. She changes into her civilian skin, and is ready to spoil Linde rotten, but when she reaches Linde's house...

The side-story will feature an additional outfit for Sigma and two CGs! We will include file optimization and several fixes in the update.

Follow us on Twitter to keep in touch and read exclusive announcements including our upcoming game as well!

A kid from Akron who conquered the NBA. But 16 years, four MVPs, three rings and two 2K covers later, this king is far from finished. Add to your 20th Anniversary collection with new packs featuring a shot at Pink Diamond King James himself, along with PD Scottie Pippen and Diamond Kawhi Leonard.

Available only until March 8 in MyTEAM!

THE DAY HAS FINALLY COME!

Alien League has been released! So make sure you grab your copy and call all your friends for a game session today!

The end is near.

We're currently gearing up for launch and it's great to see all the pieces of the game coming together. Since last fall we've changed the game a lot - feedback from our alpha players and other trusted folks led to changes in our inventory system, new systems for changing gameplay and story elements in replays, and a new conversation system for how you interact with the friendly characters in Freedom Town. Now we've moved on to tracking down those last elusive bugs. Working with our new publisher we're getting a bunch more testing than we expected, which I hope translates to a more stable game when we launch.

I mean it when I say no one is as bummed by our delays in shipping as we are. But on the other hand I like how stable the game is feeling, how some of these design changes make the game feel a bunch better. I hope you'll think it's worth it and I'm very appreciative of everyone's patience.


Our voice and music recording has officially wrapped on the game - we just did a final music session with our cult leader John Patrick Lowrie.

When we first revealed our character trailer last December, you may have noticed it features some voices you have not heard before, and I want to tell you who they are.



Rafeedah Keys plays KeeAnne and Theresa. On The Suffering games I did years back, Rafeedah played Carmen - player character Torque's (ghostly) wife. I remember after a long search we finally cast her and that’s when The Suffering really started to get its emotional core. Working with her on those games over many sessions over many years was very creatively fulfilling back then, and reconnecting with her for The Church in the Darkness has been tremendous.



Arif Kinchen plays Alex and Charles. Arif and I first worked together on The Suffering - Ties that Bind where he played one of the main characters, Torque’s best friend Miles. Since The Suffering Arif has been staying super busy, perhaps most famously playing Pierce Washington in the Saint’s Row games, but recently you might also have heard him in anything from Mafia III to Where the Water Tastes Like Wine to State of Decay 2.

To read more about our actors and the characters they play, check out our in-depth blog post:
http://churchinthedarkness.tumblr.com/post/181224780839/cults-inspire-such-devotion-in-their-members-at


And as a final note, we're happy to say we'll be back at PAX East (Boston, March 28-31) again this year, showing off a near-final build of the game. With our ramp up to full launch this will be our last big show before shipping. Players who can make it to Boston will get to see the game in its best state yet, and everyone else will get to try out the full game not that long after.

Last year PAX East was one of our favorite shows, and we're glad to do be there again.



Thanks again to everyone for their patience - the end is in sight!

- Richard
Director/Designer/Writer on The Church in the Darkness

Read the post on our website.


https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-284-rocket-launch.mp4

So we finally released the 0.17 experimental this week. (patch notes) Hooray :)

Fun fact: The release script failed to post the release announcement on Steam and Reddit and we were wondering why. The reason is that the patch notes were so big, that it exceeded the maximum post size (40k characters). If this isn't the indication that we should split our releases into smaller chunks, than nothing is :).

Code wise, it is clearly the biggest release, and the amount of bugs we have to go through correlates with it. In other words, there are tons of bugs of all variety. We want to fix everything eventually, but it will take time, so we had to prioritize this week to aim for the most generally playable version before the first weekend after release. That means mainly unloadable saves, unavoidable crashes, game failing on startup, and the most frequently occurring problems. Our automatic bug reporting system is helping us a lot with the last one.

It is uncommon, but sometimes the automatically uploaded crash report doesn't have enough information for us to be able to fix the bug right away, but the number of times we see a crash happening is still extremely useful for prioritizing. When we see a crash on the forum, we can cross reference it to our automatic reports, and if is one of our 'top-hits', we know to investigate it right away. The most prominent crash related to loading specific kind of save happened with pipe ghosts happened more than 200 times. It was fixed (obviously), but lets wait and see what our top hit of 0.17.4 will be after the weekend.

Overall this means, that bugs that are not critical, require design discussions or are not that simple to fix are not being dealt with right now.

Also, we got quite a surprising cake gift today. It is extremely delicious and we are extremely thankful for it :).



0.17 is out and with it our new Introduction scenario. This FFF will be spoiler heavy, so if you want to play it without insider knowledge then go do that and come back.

One thing that you might have noticed is that the Introduction is not complete. The systems, quests, and graphical elements are all still under development and not up to the usual standard of our experimental releases. It is at the point where in house focus testing starts to be less useful than large scale community testing. That said, I think it is already an enjoyable experience.

During experimental, when you complete the scenario you will receive a message asking you to send us some automatically generated screenshots of your playthrough. The response has been enormous and my inbox has roughly 10gb of replies already. Most of the feedback has been very positive, but we are certainly not done tweaking, as you will see below.

Perhaps the biggest failing during the development of this Introduction was right at the start when deciding the design constraints. If I were a sane human, I would have settled for just making a new tutorial. Instead what we decided upon was:

• The scenario will be used as the free demo.
• It should be the first thing a new player sees.
• It must demonstrate the art style.
• It must demonstrate the open design gameplay of Freeplay.
• It should still be fun for seasoned players.
• First half should have tutorial elements.
• Second half gives the player a chance to test themselves in a 'real' environment.
• No jumping through hoops and simply obeying orders.
• Encourage the player to be creative.
• The player must learn the game, not how to finish the scenario.
• Include as much organic learning as possible.
• It must limit the environment enough that the player cannot become confused with choice.
• Players should not receive help until they need it.
• No quests without purpose.
• Nothing that I add should affect the Freeplay experience.

As you might expect I try not to mention the word tutorial anywhere.

If you have been on reddit or our forums in the last few days you will probably notice that many players feel the scenario is too difficult for new players, or that they played 'like a new player' and found it too hard themselves.

Two reasons were frequently given for this:

• The lack of splitters and underground belts make solving the design puzzles more difficult.
• Combat heavy gameplay is not what Factorio is about especially at the difficulty presented in the scenario.

We will come back to my thoughts on this, but for now just think about your own idea of 'how a new player interacts with the game'.

A normal video game tutorial is a terrible thing. Mechanics are broken down into smaller chunks and sorted by which order they must be done in the the main game. Sometimes when a game is complex the smallest chunk is still impossibly large, leading to walls of text that must be read before playing (see the Civilization mobile title). Sometimes the chunks are made very small but then the designers want to speed players through, so they force a series of narrow interactions (see Factorio’s old tutorial).

Neither of these solutions are bad, if your goal is to have the player finish the tutorial. If your goal is to teach them to play, then... well... we as educators can do better.

The deepest, broadest and most important concept we need to teach in Factorio is that of Production. That is the end goal, but where does it begin?

The blueprint for production is the humble recipe tooltip. This is where the player first sees how to make an item in the game. Our job is to teach them how to take the recipe and translate it into a production chain. This is the single most important lesson on the road to automation, so I set out to remove all obstacles. Let’s break our discussion down into the mechanical parts: Assembling Machines, Belts, and Inserters.





Assembling Machines are the core of automation but in Freeplay they have a dependency: Electricity. If this was a regular video game tutorial, we would first need to teach the player the following steps (in reverse order): Build power poles, Setup steam engine, set up coal mining.

What if we could just do away with all of this? Oh, we can? Wonderful! During the Introduction there are two assembling machines which require no electricity, one for Science packs and one for Iron gear wheels.

Now the main puzzle pieces are there, the player just needs to connect them. During focus testing, it was noted that the interaction between belts and inserters was not very intuitive to begin with. So again we need to break the concept of Logistics down into two concepts: traversal of items and change of inventory.

If this were a normal video game tutorial, we would probably just ask the player to obey, placing a belt in one place and then the Inserter next. Here in the Introduction, I want the player to see both concepts working separately, and to interact successfully with each one.



Compilatron builds a mining setup for the player and then the Objective window directs the player to feed the produced plates into the 'feeder'. Once that is complete, the 'feeder' is removed and the player needs to load and unload the assembling machine with inserters.

In the next step, the player needs to apply what they have learnt by building a copper smelting setup and then feed two different items (iron gears and copper plates) into a single 'feeder'. Once this objective is complete, the player has, without knowing it, set up Science pack automation.



There was a lot of feedback about the player not being given access to Splitters and Undergrounds. Some even considered this akin to 'handicapping the new player'. I would argue that there is a difference between complexity and difficulty. Having those tools makes the puzzle easier yes, but also more complex.

Many of the long time players mentioned that they enjoyed solving 'simple, long ago optimized' problems with a reduced toolset. Using an inserter to split a belt does work, and also makes the player realise the importance of Splitters when they are unlocked. #NoWrongWayToPlayFactorio

The factory must grow. This is Factorio. Progress never ending. How do we teach a new player the concept of never having enough?

I mentioned above that we wanted to remove quests which ask you to produce items for no reason. Several times in the old campaign the player was asked to produce 100’s or even 1000’s of items "because you will need them", only to move to the next level and take them all away. So, how do we give production a purpose?

Consumption. Consumption is the intent of Production. You produce with the intent to consume.

In Factorio there are only three ways that the player consumes items:

• Converting items into research progress.
• Constructing the factory.
• Killing Biters (either for defense or for land acquisition).

The first item, research, is a constant pressure in Freeplay Factorio, and not a large one at the beginning. In the Introduction we have created an entirely separate technology tree with much higher costs to support teaching production. However, it fails at showing the player they need to increase production (as opposed to just having some) because the costs are static. We see many players set up basic science pack automation and then go AFK while it finishes.

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blog/fff-284-NPE-slideshow.mp4

As for construction, in the second part of the Introduction we allow the player to build their factory any way they want, and to consume all of their resources to do so. Only after they are settled do we apply the third consumption pressure... combat.

I received a lot of feedback in the form of "Factorio is not about killing Biters" or "Factorio is not a tower defense". My response would be "killing Biters is not about combat, it is a production challenge". We all know that trees are the real enemy.

Not only is it a production challenge, it is one that requires no explanation. Also, unlike the other two consumption pressures, this one is reactive. The player must meet the demands or be overrun.

To understand production you need to experience the state of not having enough. This is accomplished best when you have two conflicting choices, but can only take one. I've heard it described at "A slave to two masters" and I think that sums it up nicely.

Many successful games use this to good effect. In Dragon Age you are forced to choose between your love interests and "doing what is right". In Factorio it is one step more complex than love because the decisions are not Boolean... we have ratios!

So I would argue that the most 'representative' way to make the player think about this is to ask them to research something while slowly increasing the consumption of ammunition.



Actually no, it isn’t so hard for new players. It is hard for veteran players. The attack system emulates Freeplays pollution system. If you pollute hard, you are attacked hard. The only difference is that the 'price' of a biter is lowered inversely to how far you are through the final research.

Dynamic difficulty is a big topic in the office, but even its staunchest opponent, kovarex, admits he had fun with the final wave. He also holds the high score for kills during the Introduction; Over 9000 :D.

We already use dynamic difficulty in the Freeplay, so I would consider it representative. The difficulty will of course get a bunch of balance passes and something will be added to warn players better of the dangers ahead.

The introduction is far from done, or even ready for all new players. My task for the next weeks is go over the massive amount of high quality feedback and start testing some tweaks. The scenario will not receive updates every time we update 0.17, instead I will bundle the changes once every few patches. If you would like to share any feedback about the new Campaign, we have set up a dedicated forum here, and if you find any bugs, we also have a place for them here.

As always, let us know what your think on our forum.

Hmm looks like Steam ate my previous update announcement. Retyping it from memory and we'l see if we get a double post!

Just working my way through bugs-and-crashes on this one. We started out with 920 messages in the crash-and-bugs discord channel and we're now down to 560 so we're making progress here :) Thank you everyone for bearing with me as I work this all out!

This is also the start of month 3 of EA development, out of a total of about 9 months. So we're still really in the early stages here. That said, I'm planning on spending march 'consolidating' all the gains we've made in the past few months. What I mean by this is that by the end of March I'd like to have all possible issues with the current build debugged, polished, and working as intended. This will include the following things, in rough order of priority:
- Completely clear all bugs, crashes and unintended behavior.
- Fix any 'app' issues ex. game not closing correctly on some computers, resolution, stretching and blurring issues, F11 not opening console on macs, F12 not taking steam screen shots etc.
- Optimization and performance: get the game running silky smooth at 60FPS on everything faster than a potato.
- Stat Server Round II
- Quality of Life Features, interface and UI stuff, help / tutorial / in game knowledge. Will be creating a big thread in forums + discord looking for suggestions on this part. Basically everything that makes the game just 'play' better, or helps new players get into it.

So pretty much by the end of March I'd like the game to be completely stable, polished, running fast, and with a ton of improvements to the UI, controls, in game knowledge etc. This will be a nice solid milestone, basically a 'complete' game as far as all currently existing content / mechanics are concerned. From there we can then proceed to much everything up again with a big push on content.

UPDATE:

BUGS_AND_CRASHES:
- Fixed a generation error causing big solid squares to appear in caves.
- Strafe attack now targets hell portals
- Tab attack now targets hell portals
- Lunge now follows the path indicated by the targeting (lots of bugs were reported where the player took an alternate path, hit traps, fell down pits, bumped walls etc.)
- Falling or jumping down a pit in the Abysmal Altar (or any end level) will now result in death rather than a crash.
- Crystal chests now make sounds when opened and picking up the item.
- Fixed a crashed when player is hit by his own sleep dart bounced off a reflective enemy.
- Altar of wealth will not spawn gold over pits.
- Rapier lunging or sprinting onto an item will now pick it up (on the last tile of the path).
- Tab will now attack the nearest 'attackable' enemy rather than giving the 'line blocked' message if the nearest enemy happened to be behind something.
- Changed homing fireballs hp from 18 => 12 (back before the 1.5x hp update) since they use their hit points as a timer.
- Rand-Art evasion +5 => +3 in line with rings of evasion.

INTERFACE:
- Pits will give a different message if they are bottomeless and not give the option to jump in (knock back will still kill you).
- Up and down stairs buttons are always visible on the HUD so you can click them with mouse to fast travel.

BALANCE:
- Level gen will try to balance the number of locked treasure rooms and keys.
- There should never be more keys than treasure rooms.
- More treasure rooms is fine since it can 'force' a choice

Raids Update
- Raids
- Removed Cotten Candy from recipes since it's been removed.
- Fixed Forest Tigaragons not spawning.
- Added a last transform keybind - T.


Player Shops Update:
- Added the Shop structure! Build it and start selling Norpons to others!
- When your team faints you will now spawn at your closest bed (or town if you don't have any beds).
- Wooden Floor is now longer so it doesn't float.
- Escape now closes all open menus.
- Buffed tamed Norpons level from Raids.
- Nickname now shows in "Switch" list in battle.
- Auto rotation for the battle camera now starts disabled.