A small update in preparation for the full release.

Changes:
- A new main level has been added
- Fixed a bug where the game crashes on rebinding of certain controls

Hey Folks!

Ostranauts v0.12.1.15 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Rate My Ship" update, which includes some performance improvements, helmet and airlock fixes, and some other bug fixes.

Saves from v0.12.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

• Fixed a bug that caused AI to put helmet on when considering a task in the void, even if they have no airlock permissions.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused AI to be gasping for an instant when donning a helmet.
  
• Changed AI to ignore helmets and airlock rules if player manually orders them outside.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause NPCs spawned in off-screen ships to have zero atmo in their helmets when that ship became on-screen.
  
• Added code to prevent multiple AIs from doing costly decision-making and pathfinding in the same frame. Instead, they will spread their cost over time.
  
• Added pathfinding optimization to pre-check origin and destination pressures against airlock permissions, to cut short any invalid attempts.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused accessing the fridge to use a point too far away, sometimes causing strange pathfinding/airlock issues.
  
• Changed AI to only tell player they will find a suit if they add the pledge to do it.
  
• Fixed the food carts on K-Leg to use correct art for each cart.
  
• Fixed a bug that added extra O2 to charged EVA helmets every time they were put on.
  
• Changed several sections of code to use cached values, for better performance.
  
• Added RoomA and RoomB to all door objects in game, for consistency.
  
• Changed debug overlay to show more user-friendly names for rooms.

A number of the changes in this patch involve AIs, helmets, and airlock rules. There were some inconsistencies in the way those rules were applied, which could result in AIs not wearing helmets when they should (and wearing them when they shouldn't), as well as AIs going and/or not going through airlocks when they should.

Overall, the AI behavior surrounding airlocks and helmets should be more consistent now. Namely, if the player manually orders a task outside the ship, the AI will just do it, regardless of helmet status and airlock permissions. And if the AI self-assigns a task from the PDA orders (or otherwise), it will decide about helmets and honor the airlock permissions.

We also fixed a few issues that contributed to NPCs walking around OKLG with voided helmets, causing them to die. Hopefully, you should only see NPCs with voided helmets now when encountering them on a derelict.

This patch also includes a few more performance improvements, aimed at reducing the laggy framerate and framerate spikes.

One big change is to spread out costly AI pathfinding and decision-making processes so they don't all pile-up in the same frame. Instead, after one AI uses those code paths, any others that want it must wait 0.1s and try again. So if 10 AIs are all deciding what they should do next, it'll take a minimum of 1.0s for them all to get a turn. Framerate might still slow a bit if that happened, but at least it won't be a single paused frame.

A second optimization we added was to pre-check paths against airlock rules, so we can skip any potentially-expensive pathfinding calculations on paths doomed from the start. Not all paths will benefit from this, but in large, crowded places like OKLG, we found this could reduce the time spent pathfinding significantly.

We also realized the food carts in OKLG have their art swapped! So we fixed that.

And finally, there were a handful of smaller, less notable optimization and AI fixes. As mentioned before, performance tuning is mostly slow, incremental improvements. Rarely do we find a silver bullet to fix it all at once. So we'll be continuing to work towards better performance in 0.12 builds alongside our work in developing 0.13 features and content.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Dragons!

Get into gear with increased rates during our Golden Time Event! Starting at midnight, enjoy a 2x EXP, 2x Skill, and 2x Drop event!

Event Duration:
September 8, 2023 00:00 - September 10, 2023 23:59 Pacific

This increased rate event will only last until Sunday, September 10th, before midnight, so don't wait to take advantage of these increased gains!

Fixes/Improvements
- Optimized some systems to speed up the time it takes from "Match Found" to getting into game
- Weekly Quests & New Player Quests are now automatically claimed, which should resolve any lingering issues with quests not being earned properly
- Fixed a major long-standing issue with Power Score sometimes incorrectly calculating previous wave income. This should provide noticeable improvements especially when taking various resource Legion Spells.
- Fixed some tooltips

Balance

Bone Warrior
- Health: 140 → 150
This change was accidentally missed in the initial v10.08 release.

Iron Maiden
- Blade Storm: Damage: 40 → 42

Intentionally kept changes light for now. We are still gathering data & feedback on meta health (long-saving/one-shotting, etc) before doing a more major balance patch, if needed. Also note we are out-of-office next week (9/11-9/15) and will likely patch the following week (9/18-9/22).

When you win a fight, you get the option to collect your rewards. Hooray! There’s no real reason to reject gold, but sometimes the cards you’re offered don’t synergize with the deck you’re building, and you don’t want to muddy up your so far perfectly curated hands with stuff that doesn’t really fit.

No problem! You can select which of the rewards you want and leave the others behind!

First, claim the gold, because there’s really no reason not to.

Then, mouse over any Relics to see what they do to decide if you want them. If you do, click to keep them. If not, leave them be.

Then, click the card option and see what’s on the table. If you like one of the options, great! Click to claim it and you’re good to go. But if none of the choices look good? Hit the back button to return to the rewards screen and go ahead and hit “proceed” on the bottom right. It’ll give you a little warning message and make you hit the button again (which now says “skip”) and you’ll leave behind anything that remains on the rewards board.



It might seem counter intuitive to reject a free gift at first, but Sigil is all about synergy, and cards that don’t fit your playstyle will just end up getting in the way down the line and make it less likely that you’ll be able to draw that clutch card right when you need it.

P.S. This also works for the Treasures locations that you can visit on the map!

Greetings,

I made some fixes and improvements.

Daily challenge & Sandbox:

• After completing the daily challenge and returning to the leaderboard, the result wasn't properly highlighted. Now fixed
  
• 65 instead of 70 turn limit for daily challenge
  
• Added a slider in the sandbox for free terraforms frequency adjustment
  
• Added randomize map button in the sandbox which generates map settings using the daily challenge algorithm
  
• More resources on smaller maps in the daily challenge
  
• Easy terrain complexity is now harder in the sandbox
  
• Bigger maps in the daily challenge will have harder terrain complexity on average
  
• Sandbox and daily challenge panels position for various aspect ratios

Fixes:

• Added a description to the noise filter module that factories no longer dehydrate adjacent fertile soil
  
• The terraforms shop was sometimes not displaying the correct listings which led to the wrong terraform delivery

- Andriy

If you played our game "Time Survivors: Prologue", the forthcoming "Time Survivors: Chapter 0" may sound confusing. With this post everything will be much clearer! It's quite simple actually...

Time Survivors: Prologue marked the initial free release of our game. It offered a limited selection of characters and features, and it won't receive further updates.

Time Survivors: Chapter 0 is the evolution of our free game, inspired by the invaluable feedback from our players who experienced the "Prologue". We've diligently worked to implement significant enhancements, introducing fresh gameplay mechanics. These include unique activable abilities for our historical heroes and a tree-based meta progression system, allowing you to unlock and refine various gameplay elements.

Time Survivors represents the full game. A free demo will be available at the end of September, and it will be featured at the Steam Next Fest in October. The official launch is scheduled by the end of 2023 and promises a wealth of additional content compared to "Chapter 0". Expect more stages, historical characters with distinctive abilities, items, weapons, and much more.

TL;DR

• "Time Survivors: Prologue": no more updates; switch to "Time Survivors: Chapter 0" (free-to-play!)
  
• "Time Survivors: Chapter 0": a separate new game, introducing new content and gameplay mechanics. If you played the "Prologue", your progress will transition to "Chapter 0"
  
• "Time Survivors": the full game with more content than "Chapter 0". Featured at Steam Next Fest in October, full release by year-end. Your "Chapter 0" save game will continue in "Time Survivors"

Join our Discord server if you want to know more or have any questions!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2455500/Time_Survivors_Chapter_0/

We've also made some updates to some of the dialogues.

Realism!

If the bolt is locked open on a pistol, pressing the bolt release will send the bolt flying forward. Very useful for reloading pistols, doesn't happen on any other weapons than the m4a1. The Spas-12 now requires a button to be held to be loaded as well.

New gun, KS-23 12g version

A four-shot pump-action shotgun that has some kick! It doesn't have a stock by default. It was orginally a Russian 4 gauge shotgun (or equivalent, shotgun gauge measurements are strange).

Added attachable stocks

Two stocks have been added, an AR-15 styled tube stock and a wooden stock from the double barrel shotgun. Depending on what gun they are mounted on, they can look either really cool or really, really cursed.

Magazine ejection force

More of a functionality change rather than a realism change. The magazines now pop out of the gun with a bit of force instead of flopping out on their side. A bit of angular resistence (damping) is applied for a split second coming out of the gun to prevent the mag from ejecting sideways.

Added nutella

Very unhealthy, what else should I put here?

Added tooltips for shells

A beta feature, pressing down on the interact button whilst holding a single shell will allow you to bring up a tooltip showing stats for the shell.

Lag fixes

Generally some maps are a bit less laggy. Still working to fix all lag.

You can now pull the charging handle with your offhand

If I'm holding the m4a1 with my right hand, I can hold the foregrip with my left hand, drop the right hand, and pull the charging handle using my right hand. Previously that hand wouldn't attach.

Hey! Welcome to Kingdom Crier #27!

The Dwarves have been around long enough to share their cherished Furniture Plans - use these new sets to decorate your Underground Keeps or High End Noble Lodging!

Enjoy the new set of Stone Furniture - better than Ramshackle, not quite as good as Wood.


Keep your Nobles Happy with Top-tier Fine Stone Furniture - including lots of Colorization options.


Keep them warm using the new Fine Stone Hearth and Chimney!


We continue to burn through our Quality of Life Backlog. Here are the latest improvements!

We took buffs on higher end gear up to the next level - moving to a ceiling of +5 for top-end gear.

We rebalanced crafting times for mid and high level gear.

We rebalanced the Esteem effects of Unmet Needs. They now ramp up over time.

In addition, we revisited the lasting effects, and the importance of unmet needs to other Mortals including the Ruler.

We added Buff filtering to the trading screen.

You can now Randomize Props that can be Randomized while placing them using the [R] Key.

Randomizing a placed Prop will now Randomize and Color slots that support it.

We dropped the records of No Opinion and decreased the likelihood that Mortals would talk about not having one.

In addition, we switched from Mortals having explicit opinions about all the Meal types to deriving their Opinions of Meals from the ingredients.

These should greatly reduce the Noise in the Opinion System.

We found and released ~200mb in redundant Memory!

The game will no longer crash when you run out of Disk Space or receive a File System Error. It will warn you and give you a chance to correct the issue before trying to save again.

In addition, it will no longer leave you with corrupt partial save files when this happens.

We improved background performance when rebuilding pathing and greatly improved performance in a few scenarios related to building.

In addition, several other notable patches have dropped recently
Restart the game and steam to make sure you're up to date!

Minor Updates like those above arrive on the Experimental Branch first.

If you have the stomach for brief bouts of instability and want to help us out - switch to (or stay in) the Experimental Beta on Steam and participate in discussions here or on discord.

v0.28 Saves will remain compatible until we launch the Beta for Feature Update #6 - some time from now.

Expect occasional issues - but know that we appreciate you helping us make the game better!

Theus built this sick Keep both Above Ground...
and Below!

cypr' continues to do their thing...

Plum released Cyclops!
Note: It received a few fixes just today, so if you've been waiting to try it out, now's your chance!

Join the Official Discord to participate in Development!


If you like the game, please consider leaving a Review. These can help players decide that Noble Fates is worthy of their attention.


Thanks for reading and thanks for playing!
The Noble Fates Team