Difference between revisions of "HotM:Preparing For Launch"

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*** Linux: ~/.config/unity3d/Arcen Games, LLC/Heart of the Machine/Player.log
 
*** Linux: ~/.config/unity3d/Arcen Games, LLC/Heart of the Machine/Player.log
  
−
== 0.600.7 ==
+
== 0.601.9 ==
 
(Not Yet Released)
 
(Not Yet Released)
 +
 +
== 0.601.8 Exploration And Weaponry ==
 +
(Released January 5th, 2025)
 +
 +
* Added several new slash particle effects for use in the near future.
 +
 +
* Fixed a bug with how I was handling the steamworks logic that was thinking it was logged in when it was not really, leading to exceptions whenever achievements were trying to be logged, if you were on the steam version of the game but steam was closed. This only affected steam versions of the game, and only if steam was closed, not if you were logged out of steam.
 +
 +
* New feature in general: specific attacks can cost a certain amount of resources each time they are used.
 +
** This should work with both regular units and bulks, but it has not been tested at all.
 +
 +
* Added the ability to have some status effects use only the strongest version that is on a target, rather than adding them all up.
 +
** This is now used by "Pinned Down By Suppressing Fire."
 +
** This has not been well tested. But basically, if 25% suppressing fire is added and 50% is as well, then it should just have the 50% value, not 75%.
 +
 +
* The explanations for vandalizing the spaceport computers, and seeing hard or extreme mode, now note that the timing is 30/50 turns rather than 20/40.  This part is correct, but does not go back to existing savegames yet (so normally you have more time now, in other words).
 +
** It also notes that there are a lot more squads and that these squads are larger, which is not true yet.
 +
 +
* Fixed a bug that would happen in early chapter one every turn due to the new StreetSense list.
 +
 +
* Structures are no longer blocked from being re-hidden after they are revealed. That was too punitive against players, and in general just led to a lot of useless fiddling and worry.
 +
** Thanks to Kenken244 for suggesting.
 +
 +
=== Morale System Clarity ===
 +
 +
* Bravery and Stubbornness have been removed from the game. They were far too hard to see, and their 0-100 range was just hard to interpret in general.
 +
** Related to this, "Disconnected From Network" now causes a per-turn drop in morale rather than a complete loss of bravery.
 +
** There are now Stubborn and Fearless perks, which are way more visible on enemy units, and these block 100% of that kind of morale damage. This is much easier to juggle as a player.
 +
** The following units are Stubborn: Slumlord, ExoCorp Trooper, ExoCorp Raider, Captain, Vorsiber Inquisitor, Rebel Strikeforce, Rebel Gunslinger, Rebel Breacher, Rebel Observer, Nomad Sniper, Religious Warrior, Religious Zealot, SecForce IP Security, SecForce Hacker, War Raptors, Corpo VPs and SVPs, Cultist Bombers,
 +
** The following units are Fearless: Experimental Monster, PMC Lawyer, Corporate Lawyer, Lawyer For Religion, Sergeant Major, Vorsiber Soldier, Wastelander, Hazmat, Syndicate Enforcer
 +
** Thanks to Fluffiest for various thoughts on the morale system that led to this.
 +
 +
=== Equipment, Feats, Abilities, Consumables ===
 +
 +
* 35mm Halfplate rebalance:
 +
** HP added from 300 -> 500.
 +
** Movement penalty from -3 to -8
 +
** Agility penalty from -20 to -60.
 +
 +
* Tungsten Plate rebalance:
 +
** HP added from 400 -> 900.
 +
** Movement penalty from -9 to -30.
 +
** Attack range penalty from 0 to -8.
 +
** Agility penalty from -40 to -400.
 +
** This is basically only useful for bulk units, but it's super useful, and hopefully not TOO powerful.  May need nerfs, will have to see.
 +
 +
* Active Graphene Mesh rebalance:
 +
** This was not very useful in its prior form, and was only available from cheats in general.
 +
** Now it's essentially a booster of strength and agility and mobility, and has a pretty high health compared to other light armors, but lower than nicer armor. But also does not help you blend in. So it's useful in a variety of circumstances.
 +
*** This is one of the few ways to get more strength, and that in turn can be very very useful for unlocking some other equipment dramatically faster.
 +
 +
* TS-29 Shotgun rebalance:
 +
** Attack from 50 down to 60.
 +
** Weapon Disruptor has been removed.
 +
 +
* TS-11 Light Shotgun rebalance:
 +
** Attack from 25 down to 30.
 +
** Weapon Disruptor has been removed.
 +
 +
* AG-31 Relumine rebalance:
 +
** Attack from 50 to 60.
 +
 +
* AG-30 Flex rebalance:
 +
** Attack from 45 down to 25.
 +
** Move range bonus from 6 to 9.
 +
** Attack range bonus from 1 to 3.
 +
 +
* AG-40 Osmium Musket rebalance:
 +
** Attack from 70 down to 90.
 +
** Armor Piercing from 20 to 60.
 +
** Cost of 2 Prismatic Tungsten per shot.
 +
 +
* AG-50 Punt Gun rebalance:
 +
** Attack from 100 to 200.
 +
** Intimidation from 20 to 60.
 +
** Armor Piercing from 50 to 200.
 +
** Cost of 12 Prismatic Tungsten per shot.
 +
 +
* M2 Gallant rebalance:
 +
** Attack power and fear attack power both from 10 to 24.
 +
** New feat: Suppressing Fire, strength 25. Hits all enemies in attack range of the user of this weapon.
 +
 +
* AR-52 Black rebalance:
 +
** Attack power from 20 to 35.
 +
** New feat: Suppressing Fire, strength 50. Hits all enemies in attack range of the user of this weapon.
 +
 +
* N150 Tactical rebalance:
 +
** Attack power from 30 to 40.
 +
 +
* Technicians (both sorts), Mimics (both sorts), and PMC Impostors (elite only, not bulk) now have an Ambush feat.
 +
** For technicians and mimics, this is a 2x bonus, because nobody is on guard for them at all, so they are able to strike harder. For PMC Impostors this is only a 1.5x bonus, since their form moves a bit slower, and enemy units would be on alert for them in general.
 +
 +
* Exators and Carvers now have Ambush as well, at a 3x multiplier. It will need to be verified that they actually hit that hard when they are coming out of the shadows into the open, versus when they stay in the shadows the whole time.
 +
** These two are both expert shadowdwellers AND have superspeed, so giving them a first-strike sort of ability just makes sense. I was going to call it something different and have the number be lower, but decided not to do that.
 +
** Keanus get a 2X Ambush for the same sort of reasons, except that they only have superspeed and regular shadowdweller.
 +
** The other units with shadowdweller are without superspeed, so don't get these bonuses.
 +
** Thanks to Fluffiest for suggestions in this area.
 +
 +
* Added a new consumable item, which uses 3000 heavy metals to create a toxic cloud and basically do an ID scrub.
 +
** This is only value for the various "shadow units," which are all of the ones with Shadowdweller and Expert Shadowdweller.
 +
** They get access to this from chapter one (as soon as they are around), helping to really set them apart from their peers.
 +
** Untested so far.
 +
 +
* Whenever one of your units turns to liquid metal, or cloaks if it has cloaking, then all aggro against it is lost, as are the marked-defective status.
 +
** Thanks to Andyman119 for the reminder of this; I've been meaning to do it for a while.
 +
 +
* New "Robot Commander" feat on all CombatUnits, which gives a 1.5x bonus from primary CUs, and a 1.25x bonus from bulk CUs.
 +
** Please note that this is not yet functional, and is a feature I put in place slightly early so that it can be localized. The game notes that it does not function.
 +
 +
* New "Entrench" feat on PMC Impostors, which will give a progressive bonus the longer they do not move.
 +
** Please note that this is not yet functional, and is a feature I put in place slightly early so that it can be localized. The game notes that it does not function.
 +
 +
<spoiler show="Click Here To Show Spoilers For This Build" hide="Spoilers">
 +
 +
* Added a new Riot Shield heavy weapon, which gives you 30 armor and 100 health. Can be extremely useful, especially as one of two weapons in the hands of a predator.
 +
** Thanks to Pingcode for suggesting.
 +
 +
* A new "Torment Capture Drone" consumable is now available at the same time that you unlock fungal husks.
 +
** This allows you to use mindports, plus a drone frame, plus 5000 neuroweave, to toss most human units straight into the torment nexus. It's expensive, but great for really large squads, or even things like Vorsiber inquisitors, etc.
 +
** Untested so far.
 +
 +
* New weapon: Nanowire Whip
 +
** Strikes every enemy within the attack range of this bulk unit.
 +
** Will not strike un-alerted guards.
 +
** This is usable only by the three dynadroids (Keanu, Exator, and Carver), and ONLY by their bulk forms. It should be quite useful.
 +
** Please note that this is not yet functional, and is a feature I put in place slightly early so that it can be localized. The game notes that it does not function.
 +
** Thanks to Fluffiest for the suggestion.
 +
 +
* Mercurial Form now costs only 1 ME, and no AP.
 +
** Cloaking, in related news, now costs only 1 ME and no AP, rather than 2 of each.
 +
** This makes these units a lot more useful in terms of being able to quickly jump to a protected stance after a lot happens.
 +
** Thanks to Andyman119 for the commentary on the costs being too high.
 +
 +
</spoiler>
 +
 +
==== Exploration Sites ====
 +
 +
<spoiler show="Click Here To Show Spoilers For This Build" hide="Spoilers">
 +
 +
* New exploration site: Labor At The Reactor
 +
** Only at nuclear reactors, only for CombatUnits. At default strength, will take them 9 turns.
 +
** Unlocks 35mm Halfplate, which previously existed in the game but was only accessible via cheats.
 +
** Available in the demo, and from chapter one onwards, after exploration sites are unlocked.
 +
 +
* New exploration site: Labor Amongst The Minerals
 +
** Only at Mineral And Molecular Separation Facility, only for CombatUnits. At default strength, will take them 18 turns.
 +
** Unlocks Tungsten Plate, which previously existed in the game but was only accessible via cheats.
 +
** Have to have already unlocked 35mm Halfplate in the same timeline, so this is quite an investment of having a unit off doing something.
 +
** Available in the demo, and from chapter one onwards, after exploration sites are unlocked.
 +
 +
* New exploration site: Casual Nanotech Lab Work
 +
** Only at Nanotech facilities, only for Technicians. At default hacking skill, will take them 20 turns.
 +
** Unlocks Graphene Mesh, which previously existed in the game but was only accessible via cheats.
 +
** Available in the demo, and from chapter one onwards, after exploration sites are unlocked.
 +
 +
* New exploration site: Chatting With PMC Guards
 +
** Only at buildings (any building) at small PMC outposts, only for PMC Impostors. At their maximum available cognition at the end of chapter one, which is what is required, will take them 8 turns.
 +
** Unlocks AG-30 Flex, which previously existed in the game but was only accessible via cheats.
 +
** Available in the demo, and from chapter one onwards, after exploration sites are unlocked.
 +
 +
* New exploration site: Munitions Depot Worker
 +
** Only at Military Warehouses, only for PMC Impostors. At default strength, will take them 16 turns.
 +
** Unlocks AG-40 Osmium Musket, which previously existed in the game but was only accessible via cheats.
 +
** Available in the demo, and from chapter one onwards, after exploration sites are unlocked.
 +
 +
* New exploration site: Airport Warehouse Worker
 +
** Only at non-syndicate Airport Hangars, only for Technicians. At default hacking skill, will take them 38 turns.
 +
** Can only be done if you've already unlocked the AG-40 Osmium Musket in this timeline, making this a very long-term investment.
 +
** Unlocks AG-50 Punt Gun, which previously existed in the game but was only accessible via cheats.
 +
** Available in the demo, and from chapter one onwards, after exploration sites are unlocked.
 +
 +
* New exploration site: Rummage Through SecForce Station
 +
** Only at SecForce stations, only for Technicians. At their basic hacking skill, will take 4 turns.
 +
** Unlocks Riot Shield.
 +
** Available in the demo, and from chapter one onwards, after exploration sites are unlocked.
 +
 +
* New exploration site: Examine High-Tension Cabling
 +
** Only at Mining Facilities, only for Dynadroids. At their basic agility, will take 6 turns, but they can easily make that way faster.
 +
** Unlocks Nanowire Whip.
 +
** Available in chapter 2 and onward, but not the demo.
 +
 +
</spoiler>
 +
 +
=== Balance ===
 +
 +
* Fixed an issue where both kinds of technicians were erroneously flagged as being able to use dual pistols. They don't even have a slot for that.
 +
 +
* Harbingers can no longer handle claw equipment, or light weapons. They have a new ability to handle staves, and can still handle grenades.
 +
 +
* The female mimic and the keanu now also are able to handle knuckles, in addition to sharing dual pistols.
 +
** This is similar to the male mimic and the exator sharing the ability to handle blades.
 +
 +
* Both the Mindrunner and Raven have lost their primary weapon slot (which they did not have any valid weapons for, anyhow), and now instead have a secondary weapon slot that works like the technician, meaning that they can equip the same set of pistols that the technicians can.
 +
 +
* The units that can use the ID Scrub are now limited to only "standard units," which is a new set of units that includes most of your stuff, but does not include shadowdweller-type units, or crazy things like liquid metal units, etc.
 +
** Thanks to folks on discord for the notes about the "that must have been some OTHER giant liquid metal dragon," and similar.
 +
 +
* Fixed a bug where ExoCorp MilUnits could be set on fire or attacked with bees as if they were human.
 +
 +
=== Localization Updates ===
 +
 +
* A variety of stats that were invisible, but being tracked for during LQA, are now visible.
 +
 +
* The various places where there is default text (like Search, Enter Text, etc) in a textbox now react properly in terms of updating to the proper language when the game is updated. Previously it only updated these on reloading the program.
 +
** There were various places in the game that had the default txt "Enter text..." and these were not previously localized at all. Now they are, although they won't be visible as such until the next batch of translations is back from the translators after this week.
 +
** Thanks to Wilson for reporting.
 +
 +
* Updated some things internally so that in languages such as German, the range of percentages can be drawn properly. This won't make any effective difference until the next set of localized text is returned.
 +
** Thanks to the German translators for reporting.
 +
 +
* There are now four separate Nevermind entries that can be translated differently based on the context, rather than all being unified, for purposes of German in particular.
 +
** Thanks to the German translators for reporting.
 +
 +
* New formatting logic for dates and times is now in place, allowing for the 24 hour clock, and also properly localizing both the time and the date itself in an attractive way.
 +
** At present, English, both Chinese forms, Japanese, and Korean are set to use the 12 hour clock. French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese all use the 24 hour clock.
 +
** The fullness of this will not be in place until the next translation updates, but this is worth checking my 12 and 24-hour math in particular for oddities.
 +
** Thanks to the German translators for reporting.
 +
 +
=== Handbook Updates ===
 +
 +
* There is a new Difficulty section in the machine handbook, with some things collected there that people are likely to want to know.
 +
 +
* The Subnets section in the machine handbook has been removed, with its two entries rolled into the general Construction section.
 +
 +
* A new "The Path Forward Is In Contemplations" handbook entry has been added, for early in chapter two.
 +
 +
* "Contemplations Determine Difficulty" has been reworked into "Contemplations Are Powerful."
 +
 +
* "Adjusting Difficulty" has had some substantial rework.
 +
 +
* There is a new "New Features From Exploration Sites" handbook entry, for when this feature is introduced.
 +
 +
* There is a new "Hard And Extreme Modes" handbook entry, for early in chapter two.
 +
 +
* There is a new "Feeling Uncomfortable Is Natural" handbook entry, for early in chapter one, right after you build a storage bunker.
 +
** Thanks to Mandy for suggesting this.
 +
 +
* When you initially unlock a shell company, there is now a handbook entry that points out the senior technician and gives some other guidance. Otherwise you could wind up being quite lost.
 +
** Thanks to the German translators for suggesting.
 +
 +
== 0.601.7 Sledge On The Farm ==
 +
(Released January 1st, 2025)
 +
 +
* Dramatically improved the effectiveness of the "focus style" filtering when you hold ctrl for inspect mode, when there are a ton of aggroed enemies.
 +
** The prior build was not really useful for cases like a military invasion, as it was still too cluttered to see anything. Now on all of the lenses except for Forces and Versatile, holding Ctrl strips away all those unrelated units to focus on whatever the thing is that is actually primarily being communicated by those other lenses.
 +
 +
* The various computing-related jobs that were previously in the Chain build category are all now in Self.
 +
** Thanks to Pingcode and Abhishek Chaudry for suggesting.
 +
 +
* Murnong Patch now requires 350 filtered water per amount produced.
 +
 +
* Both Wild Zinnia and Indimidating Grenades are now crossovers, so that you can wind up with both of them starting in chapter 3, like with the bees vs spiders.
 +
** For existing timelines, if you switch to them, then those crossovers will appear if you should have them but do not.
 +
 +
* Once you have unlocked zinnia and cotton, respectively, you can now collect each of those like you can bovine tissue samples and similar.
 +
 +
=== New Units, Buildings, Etc ===
 +
 +
* There is a new Economic Transport vehicle type, which is unlocked at the same time as the Senior Technician, which can now be used for carrying around shell company units, but no other types of units.
 +
** People have been wanting one of these specific vehicles for a while, and this is the first use of them for players at least.
 +
** The stats of these are pretty interesting in general.
 +
 +
* Only in chapter two and onward, if you have both Wild Zinnia and Purple Murnong, then a new "Friendly Neighborhood Farmhand" exploration site becomes available for Sledges.
 +
** This takes a lot of turns to accomplish, but when you do, you are rewarded with a production chain of TWELVE new buildings, which use a bunch of resources that I designed months ago (and which were already translated), but which were not yet in the game.
 +
** These allow you to directly create your own source of two human-centric resources that you otherwise have to trade for, steal, or similar.
 +
** One of the interesting things is that the various intermediate steps involved in this have a variety of other potential uses in the future.
 +
** The balance on this production chain is something I'd definitely welcome feedback on, as it is large, and does not guide you at all (unlike most production chains, which are tied to a project and gives you exact ratios), so this is one of the more time-consuming for players to balance out on their own. Still not bad, but a lot more than most things.
 +
** To be honest, I don't expect most players to even find this at all, which is perfectly fine. It may take on larger importance in the future, but for now it's almost at the status of an easter egg.
 +
*** THAT said, it's also one way to deal with some of the infinite buildup of heavy metals that can otherwise happen, so it can be useful for that alone.
 +
 +
=== Bugfixes ===
 +
 +
* Fixed an issue where "Steal Neodymium" was not communicating the fact that your unit needs to have Expert Shadowdweller as a perk in order to do it.
 +
** Thanks to New and Tasty for reporting.
 +
 +
* Fixed a generalized issue where vehicles that were completely unable to carry certain kinds of units could instead carry them for some reason.
 +
** The most humorous example of this was the liquid metal dragons getting into tiny vehicles, when they should be un-transportable in general. But it applied beyond that as well.
 +
** Thanks to a variety of folks for reporting.
 +
 +
* In the map view, selecting a unit now closes command mode and similar properly, the same as it does in the streets view.
 +
** Not having this happen was I think leading to some other confusion that was reported, which is why it had been changed to do this in the streets view in the first place. Now the city map is also consistent.
 +
** Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.
 +
 +
==== Shell Company Bugs ====
 +
 +
* A fair bit of extra logic has been added in order to segregate out the attention of the NPC units after your shell companies so that they are not allowed to attack your regular units (or your allies of your regular self) in any way. So far this seems to work, but it needs more testing, hence getting to this when I did.
 +
** Thanks to ptarth, Pingcode, and Felix Winterhalter for reporting.
 +
 +
* Fixed an issue where Mind Farms were not actually properly linked to your shell company, which meant that the targeting rules for who could shoot them was reversed from what was expected.
 +
** Thanks to MOREDAKKA for reporting.
 +
 +
* Further improved the targeting restrictions to make sure that bulk units from your shell company cannot be targeted by units that are not explicitly after your shell company (since your shell company units are not allowed to fight back).
 +
** Thanks to MOREDAKKA for reporting.
 +
 +
* The "Rejection of temptation" no longer requires your units to be tied to your shell company. There was no reason for that, and it might have been a copy-paste error, not sure.
 +
** Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.
 +
 +
* Unless your shell company operatives are specifically called out as being who you need to use for an event or contemplation, you can no longer use them to just do general events and contemplations, as that would typically blow your cover. This does not affect minor StreetSense things.
 +
** This is not well-tested, so needs some testing for sure.
 +
** Thanks to Felix Winterhalter for reporting.
 +
 +
* Units that are part of your shell company are no longer allowed to start city conflicts, or get involved with exploration sites. Not tested.
 +
** Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.
 +
 +
* Shell company units can no longer get into non-shell-company vehicles, and vice-versa. Untested.
 +
** Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting.
 +
 +
== 0.601.6 Focus, Or Obsession? ==
 +
(Released December 31st, 2024)
 +
 +
* A new Inspect Mode Focuses" filter is now available on all of the lenses except Versatile, AND is on by default on those.
 +
** Description: Normally, holding the button for inspect mode shows a lot of extra icons. With this option enabled, instead that mode focuses to just the icons from this lens.
 +
** This is highly useful when wanting to look past your units for contemplations or similar.
 +
** Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.
 +
 +
=== History Window Improvements ===
 +
 +
* The "Deals" category on the history window has been removed, and the Active Deals category on the Resources window is now just "Deals" and shows both current and prior deals.
 +
** It was confusing having two similar windows on two separate screens, and also cluttered up the history window.
 +
 +
* The history window now has a StreetSense tab next to the contemplations one, to help players see things in a more-orderly fashion when they need to.
 +
** This also collapses down the number of options such that it only shows the distinct items in the actual list, but it shows how many in total there are on the map.
 +
** Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.
 +
 +
* The history window now has an Exploration Sites tab right under the contemplations one, to make it so that you can keep track of these together, as well.
 +
** In general, StreetSense, Contemplations, Exploration Sites, and Background Conflicts have been moved into their own segment of the history tab.
 +
 +
=== StreetSense Improvements ===
 +
 +
* When hovering over StreetSense items that are related to a project, it now says what project it is related to.
 +
** I had presumed most people would only ever have a single project of this sort ongoing at once, but realistically people can do all sorts of things.
 +
** Thanks to Pingcode for reporting.
 +
 +
* Fixed an issue with the StreetSense collections in the dropdowns not having the correct counts.
 +
** Project-Related items were inflated to show all of the specific items, not the types of items (oops).
 +
** The "All" entry did not include project-related items at all.
 +
 +
=== Exploration Sites ===
 +
 +
* A new "Exploration Sites" lens has been added, which becomes available when you reach intelligence class 3.
 +
** As part of this, the hotkey for opening filters has been made Ctrl+Q rather than Ctrl+E, and this one now uses Ctrl+E.
 +
 +
* A variety of weapons and armor were available through Small Arms research in a way that was no longer intended. These were things that only had shown up since 0.601.3, but it was possible to unlock four things that were not meant to be unlockable in that way.
 +
 +
* Note: as of this build, there are not any actual exploration sites to explore, but those will be a thing I work on tomorrow.
 +
 +
=== Balance And Consistency ===
 +
 +
* There is a new version of the Geothermal Event which is for chapter 2 and onwards, and is a truncated version of the normal event.
 +
** It only allows you to bring technicians from the start, and skips one of the intermediate steps, so that it's faster to do it.  But once you get inside and meet the person there, everything plays out the same.
 +
** The idea here is just to make it quicker when you're encountering it after chapter one.
 +
 +
* The Demolish ability, and the Flamethrower, and the ability to build over top of things using Paving Over Squalor, all now act more consistently.
 +
** The former two in particular were blocking you from hitting syndicate or cult hideouts, for example.
 +
*** I had originally been doing this out of an abundance of caution to keep people from not having proper places to have certain events show up. Now I don't care, for two reasons. Firstly, it's really unlikely to get rid of ALL of the spots of relevance. Secondly, if you do, it was almost certainly on purpose, and... okay then. You just can't do a thing because you burned them all down or whatever. There are other things you can typically do.
 +
** Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.
 +
 +
* The "Exciplex Lasers" project items no longer require security clearance 3, but instead require 300 scavenging.
 +
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting this not making much sense.
 +
 +
==== Obsession Improvements ====
 +
 +
* A bunch of things that were previously blocked out during the "obsession" are now visible again.
 +
** Most notably you can buy and sell things at shops, establish a shell company, hire people, and steal money and goods.
 +
** All of these things can be pretty important for being able to field the sorts of units you need during the obsession, and this keeps you from being softlocked-or-close from that scenario.
 +
** Thanks to Felix Winterhalter, jonathansfox, and ptarth for the reports.
 +
 +
* When you are experiencing an obsession, any projects unrelated to that obsession are now hidden and do not reappear until after you complete the obsession.
 +
** Your progress on them is maintained, but they are not shown at all (it's like they never existed), and also any sort of enemy or ally spawns that would happen due to that project being active are on hold until the obsession is cleared.
 +
 +
* Additionally when you are having an obsession, all of the background city conflicts are no longer available for you to see or interact with.
 +
** I had been on the fence about this, but with opening up the other more proactive ways of dealing with the city (shops, etc), I felt like this was a solid thing to change.
 +
 +
* During obsessions, any lenses that have nothing to show you (aka would normally be disabled but visible) are now completely invisible.
 +
** This makes the wheel of lenses look notably different, which is part of the idea.
 +
 +
* During the "An Inexplicable Compulsion" project in particular, the instructions have been amended to include the line "Build a Mindport. Use Slum Rescue Drones."
 +
** It was otherwise very easy to miss that you needed to do either of those things.
 +
** The second project in this chain is a lot more clear, I think, and so I have not added any extra notes there.
 +
** Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.
 +
 +
* A new notice now shows in the upper right-hand corner when you are obsessed with something, telling you in general what mechanics are disabled and noting that they will come back after the obsession ends. This keeps people from missing the original notice and not being clear on what is happening, or in general from just being uncertain if things are working properly.
 +
** Thanks to jonathansfox for suggesting.
 +
 +
=== Bugfixes ===
 +
 +
* Fixed a bug that was causing the Item Development research domain to not properly allow you to choose any of the upgrades from it!
 +
 +
* Fixed a random exception that could pop up when units were dying or otherwise leaving the game, and same with the background vehicles.
 +
 +
== 0.601.5 Machine Mind ==
 +
(Released December 30th, 2024)
 +
 +
* Savegames older than 0.601.3 now retroactively grant all of the various chapter 2+ research domain inspiration points when you load them up.
 +
** The idea here is to make these more-correct in terms of the expected balance for players when loading these older savegames.
 +
 +
=== Build Menu Updates ===
 +
 +
* In what is likely to temporarily be the most controversial change of this revision, the build mode categories have been entirely reworked.
 +
** Previously, there were lots of categories that would in theory make sense, but they would cause lots of confusion. Categories are in general fundamentally arbitrary, and when you have something like Common or Mining or whatever, that also gets very difficult.  Tell me -- is a network tower in Common, Support, or Computing?
 +
*** The core problem is that there are semantics and context applied to any and all categories, and depending on prior genres that people are used to it makes for lots of mis-clicks.
 +
*** Factorio is a great example of solving this problem via a simple division by when things are needed, such as by the Blue Chip, Red Chip, etc.  Those divisions are arbitrary, but don't have any sort of carryover from other games to cause confusion.
 +
** Another observation was that most of the time, people just work the Suggested tab... but not always.  And this is the desired flow.
 +
*** Other times, players already will be filtering by internal robotics to decide between elements they wish to have, etc.
 +
** Therefore, rather than grouping things by some other semantic that can be confusing, they are grouped by how the player interacts with them. To keep this from having any associations whatsoever, these have random-seeming glyphs used only in this name, and four-letter names with no other meaning attached to them.
 +
** Those are:
 +
*** Hand
 +
**** Structures you will tend to build of your own accord rather than having them recommended.
 +
*** Self
 +
**** Military and computing production and rewards.
 +
*** Chain
 +
**** Most production-chain structures, many of which can be ignored when not in the recommended tab.
 +
*** Home
 +
**** Housing and other forms of containment for biological life.
 +
*** Work
 +
**** Putting humans or other animals to work.
 +
** Big thanks to Mandy for a really long discussion on this back in early December where we worked all this out, aside from the specific names and icons for these categories.
 +
*** One thing we're both curious about is how players react to this in general. There were two really big components that made us want to shift this way, though:
 +
**** Firstly, we wanted to emphasize that you're inside of an alien mind, and yet at the same time have it be organized in the most-useful-possible way in terms of how players go about finding what they need. Aka, these categories follow the most common flows of what people are actually trying to do, making mis-clicks less likely.
 +
**** Secondly, we wanted to eliminate the constant cross-contamination of people making assumptions that are frequently wrong. Aka, looking for the Networking tab is something I constantly do, and it does not exist and never has existed. But that just being one of the many useful things in the Hand category is a lot easier to remember, specifically because it has no context until now.
 +
**** Thirdly, at the time that this is first introduced to new players, this is reinforcing some important themes on how to switch-up looking at the world of this game. Mandy in particular had noticed that there was a sense of "I'm uncomfortable, that must mean I'm doing something wrong" that some folks were feeling, and that instead we basically needed to get out of the uncanny valley of understanding where people feel like things are right on the tip of their mind. When things are clearly alien, this helps to reinforce the mindset of "this is uncomfortable, but not because I'm screwing something up," which applies to more than the build menu for new players.
 +
 +
* Added a note on the suggested building tab that exhorts to the player that these are actually useful suggestions, since in a lot of games they are not.
 +
** Thanks to Andyman119 for inspiring this change.
 +
 +
* Fixed a longstanding issue where the "delete structure" and "pause structure" options were being counted as part of the number of things in a build mode category.
 +
** Thanks to Pingcode, ptarth, Kenken244, Leximance, and dlipiec for reporting.
 +
 +
* The suggested category tab now shows how many items it has in it, in a blue number directly on the tab.
 +
 +
* There are now New (completely new to you from any timeline) and Unbuilt (have not built any in this timeline) tabs.
 +
** These also show counts like the new Suggested category does.
 +
** Thanks to Kenken244 and Andyman119 for suggesting.
 +
 +
* Territory Control Flags are now included in the All tab, as well as the Unbuilt tab (but not the New tab).
 +
 +
* The categories of the build menu still use the alien icons, but now use less-inscrutable names for what they are, as there was immediate rejection of that from folks on discord.
 +
** They now are: Hand, Self, Chain, Home, and Work.
 +
** You can probably guess what most of those mean already, but if not, the tooltips make those darn obvious what they are meant to be.
 +
** Thanks to Andyman119, Fluffiest, StormyEyed, ptarth, Mintdragon, Kenken244, Pingcode, and Leximancer for showing me that I'd gone too far with this.
 +
 +
=== Toast Notification Usability ===
 +
 +
* When any tooltip is showing, that causes the toast countdown to not progress.
 +
** This is fairly obviously correct for most cases, where you are hovering something and clearly looking at that other thing. This should save a lot of people a lot of grief in terms of missing notices.
 +
** There is a bit of an edge case with hovering over things like buildings or units that show in the bottom left corner as tooltips, when your mouse may just happen to be resting on that random thing without your attention being there. I already predict that this will cause some folks to think that some of these are stuck, but I think it's okay.
 +
** Thanks to Fluffiest for suggesting.
 +
 +
* There is now a "Bottom-Right Notice Pause Level" field in the settings menu, game tab, which allows you to adjust which toast popups require you to click to dismiss them, if any.
 +
** The default is none of them, as has been the case for a while. But there are now five broad priority levels that allow you to miss fewer things if you were missing things.
 +
** Setting it to the "Very high only" priority level pretty much means just hearing about when your units die, or when new unlocks are done, but not much else.
 +
** Thanks to Mintdragon for suggesting.
 +
 +
=== Bugfixes ===
 +
 +
* Made various aspects of the logging, especially on game startup, less verbose than before.  This doesn't affect much of anything, but it makes logs slightly faster for me to visually parse when they are submitted.
 +
 +
* When you use The Revelation to skip to the final doom, it no longer triggers "You're Really Unlikable"
 +
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting.
 +
 +
* When you do The Revelation, it no longer does all of the intermediate dooms, but rather skips those, and then just does the final doom.
 +
** This is thematically more interesting, and also keeps the possibility of things you don't know about there for longer.
 +
 +
* Fixed an issue with deserializing savegames that had pending fanfares for project or timeline goal completion in them. This also retroactively makes existing savegames with this issue work properly.
 +
** This was never actually functional properly, turns out, but it's not not common to have saves with these in them that need reloading, evidently.
 +
** Thanks to Lukas and ptarth for reporting.
 +
 +
== 0.601.4 Revelations ==
 +
(Released December 23rd, 2024)
 +
 +
* The Fullscreen mode now clarifies that it is borderless windowed.
 +
** Thanks to Abhishek for suggesting.
 +
 +
* The "Clamp mouse to window" now says "lock mouse to game window" instead, and those are also now on the display tab under the fullscreen window sections.
 +
** Thanks to Abhishek for suggesting.
 +
 +
* The post-processing effects section of the display window no longer includes the word "fullscreen," since that can be misleading.
 +
 +
=== The Revelation ===
 +
 +
* There is a new contemplation called The Revelation that appears in cities under one of two conditions:
 +
** If you have completed two tier 1 goals.
 +
** If there are not presently any contemplations available that are in either "Timeline Goal Critical Path" or "Path To Timeline Goal Start."
 +
*** Note that you may be in the middle of a project involving these, and that's fine.
 +
** This allows you to skip forward to the final doom, either because you are curious, or you plan to make strategic use of it, or perhaps because you are otherwise stuck in this timeline.
 +
** The version of this contemplation shown in chapter 2 gives different information than the version shown in chapter 3 and onward. In chapter 2 it eggs you on a bit more directly without thought to consequences. In chapter 3+, it cautions considering which timelines you wan to do this in.
 +
** Thanks to a variety of players for suggesting something along these lines, including Leland Creswell. Thanks to Mandy for suggestions on how to word and write the contemplation itself.
 +
 +
=== Menu Work ===
 +
 +
* The toggle into the full-dive VR mode is now J rather than Y as a hotkey.
 +
 +
* A new "Victory Path" tab has been added, which becomes visible starting in chapter one, and is now bound to the Y key.
 +
** This shows in the upper right header bar, and it collects several screens that were previously disparate.
 +
 +
* A variety of information that was part of the history window, but only when you were looking at it in the end of time, is now available at all times.
 +
** This is notably easier to toggle back and forth between, and it's a lot more visible in general. A huge number of testers were not aware that these existed at all.
 +
 +
* There is now some spacing between groups of related tabs in the history, resources, and victory path windows.
 +
** Additionally, in the victory path and history windows, it no longer shows the meta tabs until you reach chapter 3.  It's irrelevant until then.
 +
 +
* The victory path overview now shows a bit of a header, but not any other real details inside of it yet.  That's for later.
 +
 +
=== Bugfixes ===
 +
 +
* Cheat mode no longer jumps you straight to chapter three when you click into the end of time.
 +
** Thanks to the Japanese translators for reporting!
 +
 +
* Pressing the hotkey for the cult-action sidebar no longer flashes the sidebar briefly when you don't have that unlocked yet.
 +
 +
* It's a long story, but I was doing something under the hood with heavy metals relating to bulk unit controllers and similar, and it turns out that was a really bad idea. The short version is that if you ran out of storage for heavy metals, then all of your mind annexes, bulk unit controllers, and so on would shut off mysteriously.
 +
** This is no longer possible.  In general, you will have other problems when you hit the cap in this way on heavy metals, but mainly just things related to your new inability to filter water, which is the proper problem.
 +
** Thanks to MOREDAKKA for reporting.
 +
 +
* Fixed an exception that could happen in the "TooManyStructures" warning as it was clearing out overages, if you were really unlucky.
 +
 +
* When multiple dooms are triggered at once, an on-screen permanent message is only shown for the last one, not all of them.
 +
 +
* When there would be multiple "intelligence class falling" messages showing at once, it now only shows one of them rather than two.
 +
 +
== 0.601.3 Compaction ==
 +
(Released December 21st, 2024)
 +
 +
* Vehicles that are cloaked, or androids or mechs that are in liquid metal form, can now toggle back out of that status without shooting anyone.
 +
** Have not tested this, but it should work.  Please let me know if there are issues.
 +
 +
* Bulk Exators are now a thing.
 +
** The Exator was a way less powerful unit to take instead of the Carver when presented with that option simply because the Carver had a bulk variant and the Exator did not, even before any other balance considerations were in place.
 +
** The Exator has a lower bulk capacity cost, but also lower deterrence. The squads for them are unusually huge (7), making them a very tanky and also very expensive unit to deploy.
 +
*** Three squads of exators, without many upgrades, can give 36k deterrence, plus has more health and can dish out a bit more damage. Two squads of Carvers cost the same capacity, and give 40k deterrence in this same scenario.
 +
*** So in general, from a bulk standpoint, these two units are fairly comparable, before further things start differentiating them more.
 +
 +
* The largest rock type in the end of time now has space for 33 timelines rather than only 18.
 +
** Before players get access to ziggurats, this allows them to still group an absolute ton of timelines together on a given rock.
 +
 +
* Mech Carriers were not really previously in the game as they could not be unlocked, but now they are automatically unlocked when you reach intelligence class 6.
 +
 +
=== Balance ===
 +
 +
* The game now has self-check code to keep the bulk unit costs in sync with regular units, either mirrored or multiplied, as appropriate.
 +
** As part of this, Bulk Carvers now cost 2000 Neuroweave rather than 1500, and 30000 elemental slurry rather than 7000.
 +
*** All of the other bulks were correct already, it turns out.
 +
** Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting.
 +
 +
* Direct stat upgrades to regular units now cause a multiplied effect for their bulk counterparts when those are the sorts of stats that are multiplied (like attack power, etc).
 +
** Previously it was just giving a direct 1:1 benefit to the bulk versions.
 +
** Note that Bulk CombatUnits are considered a variant of the regular CombatUnit, not CombatUnit Red.
 +
** All of this kind of "direct upgrade" is specifically referring to things like what happens from project StreetSense options in chapter 2, not things that are "post-project inspiration in a domain."
 +
** This is not tested, so there may be some issues.
 +
 +
==== Buildings ====
 +
 +
* Compact Water Filters now use about 10% of the electricity that they previously did.  It was a copy-paste error that it was so high.
 +
** Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting.
 +
 +
* Storage bunkers now cost 15 archivists rather than 30, making it so that you can build more than one from very early in the game.  This solves a number of balance and messaging problems.
 +
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for suggesting.
 +
 +
* Volume of building balance changes:
 +
** You now get half as many Wind Engines as before, but each Large Wind Generator is now twice as expensive.
 +
*** The "job portion" of the resource cost has also doubled, but that's a fraction of the total cost of the building, making these a much better deal in general.
 +
** Slurry Spiders now cost 5x as many internal robotics, but also do 5x the work, meaning that you have many fewer of these to actually place in a new timeline.
 +
** Microbuilder Mini-Fabs now cost 3x as many internal robotics, but also do 3x the work, meaning that you have many fewer of these to actually place in a new timeline.
 +
*** Related, but your initial cap on MicroForges is now 60 rather than 50, meaning that your overall initial output is 20% higher than before.
 +
** Biomulchers now cost 6x as many internal robotics, but also do 6x the work, meaning that you have many fewer of these to actually place in a new timeline.
 +
** Thanks to Lukas, The Grand Mugwump, ptarth, and Lord Of Nothing for suggesting.
 +
 +
* Mineral Scroungers have also had their internal robotics usage increased by 4x, and their output increased by 4x.
 +
** The total number of 12cm Crabs has been increased a bit in order to work properly with this new balance, so you can gain a bit more from these now.
 +
 +
* In situations where you have more than the expected cap of internal robotics for certain jobs (usually high-volume low-importance jobs like slurry spiders, etc), it now will silently delete those to solve the problem for you.
 +
** This solves the issue when you accidentally go over cap from rapid-clicking, but more importantly it fixes existing savegames which have higher caps of structures being used due to the old balancing, which now should be condensed to these lower numbers.
 +
** This is useful for a lot of recent saves, but also is useful for the ancient saves being translated over to the newer format.
 +
 +
* Early in chapter one, it now only asks you to build 3 slurry spiders rather than 15, and 2 microbuilder mini-fabs rather than 5.
 +
** Then slightly later in chapter one, it only wants you to have a total of 1 more of each, rather than 5 and 8 more, respectively.
 +
 +
==== Upgrade Pool Adjustments ====
 +
 +
* "Project phases" have been retired from the game.  If you are like "what's that?" then congratulations, you are in the majority.
 +
** These were a thing that gated how many repeat upgrades you could take from various sources until you played a certain amount of the game in a given timeline.  It was largely invisible, and it is completely not-needed and in fact against my revised design ethos.
 +
** I implemented this before I could really see the full shape of chapter 2, and was doing so out of an abundance of caution. It was actively unhelpful at this point.
 +
 +
* Android Optimization now includes "Android Armor-Piercing Effectiveness" as an option starting at intelligence class 2.  So does "Small Arms Research."
 +
 +
* "Vehicular Development" now includes "Vehicular Armor Piercing Effectiveness" and "Skystreak Armor Piercing Effectiveness" stating at intelligence class 2.
 +
** Bear in mind that, as with any upgrades, if the things they upgrade are not yet unlocked, then neither will they be (so for example, if you don't have skystreak missiles unlocked yet in general, you will not see that upgrade at all, even at int class 2).
 +
 +
* There is a new "Item Development" research domain, which allows players to get upgrades focused on the improvement of consumable items.
 +
 +
==== Upgrades During Chapter 2+ ====
 +
 +
* Consistently throughout chapter 2 and onward, with a few exceptions, you now get research domain inspiration from projects like you were during chapter one.
 +
** This gives you a vastly more powerful set of tools to customize your empire with, and makes each playthrough more varied from others.
 +
** In the post-apocalypse, you still get almost nothing, which is by design.
 +
** Thanks to Andyman119 for suggesting.
 +
 +
==== Massive Upgrade Intensity Buffs ====
 +
 +
* Handgun Muzzle Velocity increased from 15% to 30% per upgrade, capped at 10 upgrades now rather than 20.
 +
 +
* Rifle Muzzle Velocity increased from 10% to 25% per upgrade, capped at 10 upgrades now rather 30.
 +
 +
* Shotgun Muzzle Velocity increased from 10% to 20% per upgrade, capped at 10 upgrades now rather 30.
 +
 +
* All of the debate skill upgrades that you can get are now in increments of 10% rather than 5%, and there are half as many of them possible.
 +
 +
* "Service Disruption Effectiveness" now increases by 500 per upgrade rather than 250, and has half as many upgrades.
 +
** Note that there was never a way to actually get this upgrade prior to now, anyway.
 +
 +
* All of your core debate skills now increase by 2 each upgrade rather than one, and have a cap of 10 upgrades rather than 25.
 +
** Note that there was never a way to actually get this upgrade prior to now, anyway.
 +
 +
* "Hardened Portdroids" now gives a bonus of 40 rather than 10, and has a max of 5 upgrades rather than 20.
 +
 +
* "Hardened Dynadroids" now gives a bonus of 70 rather than 40, and has a max of 5 upgrades rather than 20.
 +
 +
* "Hardened Oxdroids" now gives a bonus of 90 rather than 30, and has a max of 5 upgrades rather than 20.
 +
 +
* "Faster Portdroids" now gives a bonus of 8 rather than 4.  Same with "Faster Dynadroids."
 +
 +
* "Portdroid Cognition" now gives a bonus of 30 rather than 10, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 9.
 +
 +
* "Combat Android Intimidation" now gives a bonus of 30 rather than 10, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 9.
 +
 +
* "Combat Vehicle Drone Quality" now gives a bonus of 50 rather than 10, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 18.
 +
 +
* "Support Vehicle Drone Quality" now gives a bonus of 80 rather than 20, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 18.
 +
 +
* "Support Vehicle Hull Strength" now gives a bonus of 40 rather than 20, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 9.
 +
 +
* "Combat Vehicle Hull Strength" now gives a bonus of 70 rather than 40, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 6.
 +
 +
* "Carrier Hull Strength" now gives a bonus of 100 rather than 40, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 6.
 +
 +
* "Support Vehicle Armor Plating" now gives a bonus of 10 rather than 5, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 8.
 +
 +
* "Combat Vehicle Armor Plating" now gives a bonus of 14 rather than 8, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 8.
 +
 +
* "Carrier Armor Plating" now gives a bonus of 16 rather than 12, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 8.
 +
 +
* "Augment: Improved CPUs" now gives a bonus of 30 rather than 10, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 16.
 +
 +
* "Handgun Projectile Density" now gives a bonus of 9 rather than 3, and has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 7.
 +
 +
* "Rifle Projectile Density" now gives a bonus of 15 rather than 5.
 +
 +
* "Shotgun Projectile Density" now gives a bonus of 20 rather than 8, and has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 10.
 +
 +
* "Armor Materials Study" now gives a bonus of 40 rather than 20, and has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 13.
 +
 +
* "Reinforced MilStyle Armor" now gives a bonus of 60 rather than 40, and has a max upgrade count of 2 rather than 8.
 +
 +
* "MilStyle Armor Mobility" now gives a bonus of 3 rather than 2, and has a max upgrade count of 2 rather than 3.
 +
 +
* "Reinforced Security Jacket" now gives a bonus of 50 rather than 40, and has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 6.
 +
 +
=== Bugfixes ===
 +
 +
* Fixed a bug where "Nice Alterations" was available before you actually researched Saber Bees.
 +
** Thanks to Waladil for reporting.
 +
 +
* The coupon program and nicotine introduction should both now only appear when they are supposed to.  They were both appearing too early.
 +
** Thanks to mblazewicz, Pingcode, and jonathansfox for reporting.
 +
 +
== 0.601.2 After LQA, Part 1 ==
 +
(Released December 20th, 2024)
 +
 +
* All of the revised translations that have gone through the LQA process are now updated in the game!
 +
** This was a major amount of work from the 36 translators working on the game going through the game itself and looking at things in place and fixing issues where they found them, etc.
 +
** There are some lingering things that are of a more technical nature that either I need to fix, or that requires some further edits from them after the holidays, based on my feedback to them.  But by and large the translations are in a very good state now.
 +
 +
* "Building A Better Brain" now shows the requirements of the neural processing for each upgrade in the tooltips.
 +
** Additionally, for the percentage of progress to the goal, it shows your percentage neural expansion rather than just showing a broad percentage of what your current intelligence class is versus the target.
 +
** Also, for both class 2 and 3, it now has increased suggestions from the build menu for how many mainframes to build to meet these goals. It turns out that if you only built a single mainframe when pursuing class 2, and did not happen to have a technician, AND only had some of the lower-cognition units (and only a partial roster of those -- for example just a single sledge and a single nickelbot), then you could wind up being less than 1% short out of what is required. This never happened to any testers who kept a larger stable of units, but it turns out it was in fact possible!
 +
** Thanks to the German translators for reporting these confusions.
 +
 +
* Fixed a general bug where if you tried to open the cheat menu to spawn new timelines, it would give you an exception.
 +
** Thanks to the German translators for reporting.
 +
 +
* A single Helix Forge now gives 320k Computronium Helices storage capacity, to bypass confusion that could otherwise result with how much the various network-related structures cost.
 +
** Thanks to the German translators for reporting.
 +
 +
=== Localization ===
 +
 +
* Updated all of the Latin fonts to properly be pre-populated with a few more characters that are commonly needed, making sure that they perform as well as possible in languages like German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
 +
** Additionally, tightened up their sizing a bit, leading to slightly better lower RAM usage.
 +
 +
* Fixed an issue with copy-pasted text in the "Delay Between Bottom-Right Notices" description.
 +
** Thanks to the French translators for noting.
 +
 +
* Corrected some of the text from In-Game Music Min/Max gap to not say the wrong thing.
 +
** Thanks to the French translators for reporting.
 +
 +
* Fixed the "Load Game" dialog having the wrong text.
 +
** Thanks to the French and German translators for noticing.
 +
 +
* "Android Optimization" and similar should no longer overflow its borders in any of the various languages. Most notably Portuguese and similar were doing so.
 +
** Thanks to Brenda, and then the German translators for reporting.
 +
 +
* Fixed "Skip To Next Music Track" having duplicate text from "Toggle World Icons"
 +
** Thanks to the French translators for reporting.
 +
 +
* Updated several dozen cases in the code for various project requirements where the numbers were not being shown with a comma separator when they were larger than 1000.
 +
** Thanks to the Simplified Chinese translators for reporting.
 +
 +
* Fixed an issue with the initial "ui tour" text not sizing properly to its display area in most languages.
 +
** Thanks to the Japanese translators for reporting.
 +
 +
* Fixed an issue with all of the fonts not being properly able to add to their atlas, because of an issue with the images not being set readable properly for some unknown reason.
 +
** Had to go into the debug view and manually enable this on all of them.
 +
 +
* Fixed an issue with the cancel button on the hardware, history, and resources windows not showing any text in some languages.
 +
** Thanks to the Japanese and Simplified Chinese translators for reporting.
 +
 +
* Clarified the english for the mineral scroungers to note that they must be built inside of a human mining POI, rather than saying human mining installation.
 +
** Thanks to the German translators for suggesting.
 +
 +
* Fixed a doubling of the word "investigation" in all of the cases where an investigation is blocked, in all languages.
 +
** Thanks to the Korean and French translators for noting.
 +
 +
* Fixed a general bug where the "counterstrike on build" was being shown twice in the tooltips, and the "job classes" was never being shown.
 +
** Thanks to the German translators for reporting.
 +
 +
* Fixed a missing linebreak in the expanded tooltip for building one of your structures within an existing human structure.
 +
** Thanks to the German translators for reporting.
 +
 +
* Fixed a general issue in all languages (English included) where the counter-attack information was being jammed into the header of the job/structure tooltips, inappropriately, making them really hard to see and also the header text a silly amount tiny in general.
 +
 +
* Fixed an issue where tooltips anchored to the bottom left corner could wind up expanding so much that they would go off the top of the screen. This applied to most languages.
 +
** This was particularly notable with the mining skimmers.
 +
** Thanks to the German translators for reporting.
 +
 +
* Added some features to make it so that for some jobs that are otherwise super tall in their tooltips, they now move some of that info to the ultra-detailed tooltips.
 +
** Right now this affects just the skimmers.
 +
 +
* Removed wrong text from LurpekoMiningGrudge.
 +
** Thanks to the French translators for reporting.
 +
 +
* Fixed an added hyphen being shown in all languages after "job installed," which was really not appropriate.
 +
** Thanks to Laura and the French translators for reporting.
 +
 +
== 0.601.1 Performance Optimization ==
 +
(Released December 18th, 2024)
 +
 +
* Loaded up the prior build on the Steam Deck, and things were dramatically improved.  It turns out that the frame timings were more like 15ms for the Vis construction part of the game, and after my new build, those were down to about 6ms, so that's a huge improvement.
 +
** As part of this, the frame timings were also more even in general.
 +
** Interestingly, I still am only getting about 30-40fps on average, but 60fps in some specific cases, and it's still not as smooth as I would like.  The culprits have moved in terms of what the really key pain points are, though, which is a good thing.  The part that I've been optimizing is now 3x faster than it was, and it's other areas that are the problem.
 +
 +
* I've made some changes to make enumerating the cells and the tiles of the map now substantially faster than it was before. This is used during some of the "recalculate an important working set" piece of work, and so was contributing to frame slowdowns.  Exactly how much I'm not sure, but it's better this way, regardless.
 +
 +
* Really massively overhauled the way that the callback portion of the renderer works, so that it is able to do a lot less work. It was taking 3ms per frame on the steam deck, regardless of what the player was looking at, which is way too much.
 +
** It's possible that I've introduced new issues now with this, but that's part of why doing it sooner than later is important.
 +
** I've seen a roughly 20% improvement on my main desktop machine, and that will hopefully translate to an even greater impact on weaker machines.  But I'm also not done.
 +
 +
* Further reworked the pipeline for rendering objects and icons. What was a two-step process that required a lot more processing is now a one-step process.
 +
** The overall improvements have taken performance on my main machine from 1.2ms to 0.7ms for the same thing per frame, which is a notable improvement. And it also has a sizeable improvement when you are zoomed in at least somewhat, whereas before this was kind of always the same load regardless of what you were looking at, kinda-sorta. It was less reactive to load than I would have preferred, anyhow.
 +
 +
* After loading this new version up on the Steam Deck, I can see that it is now taking half the time on the final render (1.5ms rather than 3ms), which is great.
 +
** Performance is usually in the 40fps range now on the deck, but is a bit choppier than I would prefer at times.  There are some calculations that I think I can either simplify or offload onto another thread, but that will be something for a few weeks from now, most likely. It's well into the acceptable range of performance again, even if it's not quite what I would want. It hits 50-60fps sometimes, but also sometimes drops to 30fps for a bit in a rough area, but I never see it going below 30fps at the moment.
 +
 +
== 0.601 Performance Optimization ==
 +
(Released December 18th, 2024)
 +
 +
* The way that the game does some internal profiling itself is now both more accurate and also more efficient (funny how it can be both at the same time).
 +
 +
* In the F3 performance menu, the game now shows the tenths decimal place of the various things that it tracks.  This lets me see how things are affected performance-wise down to the level hundred-microseconds, which is more useful than you might think.
 +
** My main desktop workstation is a beast, so in some places I'm trying to shave 200 microseconds per frame off of some activity, which on less-powerful hardware might equate to 2 milliseconds per frame, which in turn on that lower hardware could translate into an added 5fps. (The difference between 55 fps and 60 fps is only the different between 18.18ms and 16.67ms to render a frame -- it's that narrow!).
 +
** In general, I was testing on the Steam Deck some last night, and I was greatly irritated to see that my framerate was about 40fps rather than the 50fps I had last left it at. And from my testing tools, I could tell that I wasn't saturating the GPU (yay!), but that I was spending a full 9ms per frame just preparing data that would be sent to the GPU (when zoomed all the way out, or looking sideways). Not game logic, not actual render, just render pipeline pieces. I found this to be an unacceptable high number. It drops to about 1ms on the Deck when looking straight down and fairly zoomed-in.
 +
*** For comparison, on my desktop, it was taking about 6ms to do the same thing, sometimes rounding down to 5. In order to actually measure any gains, I needed more precision than that.
 +
 +
* In a number of places for the rendering of the main streets view, I've made micro-optimizations that have helped me shave off about 0.6 to 0.9ms on my desktop.  It's hard for me to know exactly, because I didn't start having precise measurements until I had already made a lot of optimizations. Best case is 0.9, worst case is 0.6, though.
 +
** In places where you're seeing a lot of the fog of war, the optimizations are even more notable, as I made specific hand-crafted routes for some of those (basically, when you are doing something hundreds of thousands of times per frame, and therefore at 60fps that means millions of times per second, every cache miss and every jump statement and every object cast starts to add up.
 +
 +
* Roughly another 100 microseconds shaved off of the render process on my main desktop machine, based on improvements that allow me to skip about... let's call it roughly in the ballpark of 10 million object casts per second on this particular hardware, and maybe 2 million object casts per second on the Deck at the general framerate range it is in.
 +
 +
* Roughly a further 200 microseconds has been shaved off per-frame by having some more optimizations, these ones focused on buildings that are lit up properly, roads, etc, etc.
 +
** I feel like there's 600 microseconds that I can actually shave off in this area, but it has been a bit elusive so far.
 +
 +
* Created a new BasicFastPool that does not do any thread synchronization at all, for pools that are always allowed to operate.
 +
** This keeps them from having to do any hits to L3 cache, and leads to more threading independence in cases where there are a high number of calls into these pools over the course of a frame.
 +
** On my machine, I don't see any benefit from this whatsoever, performance-wise. However, that's on an i9-12900KS, which freaking rocks at cross-thread synchronization. For hardware that is weaker at thread synchronization, this should have some gains that are more notable. How notable is hard for me to really say, but basically this allows me to keep thousands of calls per frame strictly in L1 cache on these processors, and that's not-nothing. It's still a micro-optimization, but it's one that will disproportionately favor older hardware; the Steam Deck itself might not really even see a benefit at this, as it's pretty solid at multithreading as well. But hardware closer to the lower end of the system requirements, and which is older generationally, will probably see improved frame-timings and possibly improved framerate off of this.  Not a huge bump, but... well, I'm doing a micro-optimization pass, so it's still something.
 +
 +
* In general, a more direct version of ProtectedList<> has been implemented. It has its own copies of a lot of code from List<>, which is more efficient than wrappering that same logic.
 +
** Some key game features use this a fair bit, and this is able to reduce call stack depth by one layer in all of those cases.
 +
** This shaves off another 50-100 microseconds on my main dev machine, which is nice.
 +
 +
* Lots more micro-optimizations to how bulk things are rendered. In total, from all of those, I've managed to shave off another 500 microseconds on my main machine, which is awesome.
 +
** One surprising thing was that the "minor decorations" category of things that are drawn was not actually including anything anymore. I remember working on that like a year ago, and I evidently left it in a state that was not ideal.  So some stuff that had been in "major decorations" now is in minor instead, and I have a different draw distance set for those, which keeps the poly count lower while having literally zero different in visual output, because these are tiny things beyond the fog range.
 +
** For major decorations, I also pulled in the draw distance slightly, which mainly affects things like trees.  Again, I don't think this creates any noticeable difference, but it lowers the CPU load quite a bit (more for older or weaker machines), and the GPU load slightly. If you don't like it, there are settings you can use to turn it back up higher, with no problems there.
 +
** In general, I also have found that even with a ton of micro-optimizations, the major and minor decorations do not perform better (and in fact perform worse) with sub-cellular gridding, rather than using the larger grids. Frankly I find this a bit baffling, but it's a pretty notable change in the wrong direction.  So I've just stopped bothering with sub-cells for them.
 +
*** Buildings, fences, roads, etc, still use the sub-cells and largely benefits outweigh the costs on that.
 +
** I still have some more areas that I'm investigating, but there's a lot of strides forward here. This is all incredibly subtle stuff.
 +
 +
* Made some more minor improvement to rendering, and saved maybe 50 microseconds.
 +
** In general, there are definitely diminishing returns on this approach, and in some of the cases where I'm testing, it's just drawing very heavy loads on the GPU more than I would like it to (30 million triangles per frame; that's too many).
 +
 +
* I've therefore adjusted the draw distance on buildings and roads, and then also made them appear instantly rather than fading in over time.
 +
** This makes it so that if you're doing anything other than moving at absolute maximum speed at the highest altitude, and looking straight sideways, and also looking for the buildings to pop in, there's no pop-in. But if you do that, then it will have a very very slight pop-in.  Given most people are looking mostly-down in the first place, or moving at a somewhat slower speed, or looking at what they are actually focused on rather than the edges of their screen, this is a really minor thing.
 +
** Overall, I was able to shave off a full 1.5 milliseconds with this on my machine -- so 1500 more microseconds on top of all of the others.
 +
** This also, in the cases where I was seeing 30 million triangles in a frame, drops that down to about 12 million triangles in the frame, instead.  That will lead to longer battery life on laptops and steam deck, lower fan noise, and so on.
 +
** Once again, players can tune this further to their liking, if they don't like the new defaults.  But the new defaults are applied for everyone, and the very slight pop-in under some circumstances on the edge of the map really seems worthwhile for all these savings.
 +
*** On my desktop, at maximum zoom this lets me stay at a pretty solid 120fps, rather than being down in the 80-90fps like I would have happen before this build.  That's a cumulative set of improvements, as just the draw distance alone isn't nearly enough to handle all of this.
 +
 +
== 0.600.9 Localization Number Updates ==
 +
(Released December 17th, 2024)
 +
 +
=== Localization Fixes ===
 +
 +
* Attempting a fix for numbers being decimals when they should not be on es-ES systems, which causes major readability issues.
 +
** Thanks to Brenda for the report.
 +
 +
* Quieted some complaints on non-English versions of the game in the log file for things that did not need to be complained-about.
 +
 +
* The "this translation is still a work in progress!" notes have been removed to avoid confusion, although technically it's still true.
 +
 +
* I've expanded some of the localization-type options to allow for different table spacings in different languages, as-needed.
 +
** This is now used to correct some overlap of columns in the TPS Report in Spanish, while in other languages not causing unduly-wide columns.
 +
** Thanks to Laura for the report.
 +
 +
* The "major locations" tab no longer shows the type of cohort owner next to the cohort name, as that was just too long to fit in most languages, and also was not really needed on that screen.
 +
** Thanks to Laura for the report.
 +
 +
* Added in quite a few changes to how number formatting is handled. This had been messing up very badly in Portuguese in particular, with it malformatting text rather than giving the nice localized delimiters (comma instead of period, and vice-versa).
 +
** This was an issue with my code interpreting some things wrong, and it is now handled properly.
 +
** Thanks to Brenda for reporting.
 +
 +
* German has now been updated so that its number format matches that of Portuguese, and thus also does not have malformed numbers all over the place.
 +
 +
* French has now been updated so that its number format is a space for what would be the comma separator, and a comma for the period, here again preventing malformed numbers all over the place.
 +
 +
=== Bugfixes ===
 +
 +
* Fixed a mis-alignment of the Yield column text with the header in TPS reports in general in all languages.
 +
 +
* Fixed a generalized bug with a lot of the Deals, where if you left them on level 1, they would not show what their benefits were to the androids that they were supposed to help, and in fact also might not have been applying those benefits at all.
 +
** Thanks to Laura for reporting.
 +
 +
* Fixed a bug with the "murder android for registration" tooltip header having an incorrect line break (in all languages) if you could not afford the ME/AP to sprint to it.  Also verified in the code that no other actions have this same issue.
 +
** Thanks to Brenda for reporting.
 +
 +
== 0.600.8 One Hundred And Thirteen Achievements ==
 +
(Released December 16th, 2024)
 +
 +
* Fixed a bug where the military invasion goal states and achievements were triggering one turn too soon.
 +
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting.
 +
 +
* If you opt to murder an captured ally during "URGENT: Rescue Mission" rather than saving them, it now completes the project right away, rather than it not seeming to notice for a few turns for some reason.
 +
 +
* Fixed an issue where the Cult Loyalty strategic resource could appear before you were actually making a deal to fully start your cult.
 +
 +
* The number and text of the statistics tabs (all three) have been reversed so that the number is on the left and the text is on the right. This keeps things closer together for easier reading, and also prevents issues with overlaps in languages where the text can get very long.
 +
** Thank you to Laura for reporting.
 +
 +
=== Balance ===
 +
 +
* Storefronts and Healthcare Storefronts have both had their health raise from 2400 to 2800 to make it so that they are not as-targeted as other things.
 +
** That said, the "Seized And Sealed Floors" that are used by shell company medical facilities are also no longer hidden at all.  Previously the storefronts were being attacked and nothing else was, in terms of the shell company, because of these two things.  It was primarily the fact that the other labs were hidden, which is not realistic in the context of the shell company.
 +
** Thanks to Pingcode and Fluffiest for reporting.
 +
 +
* In general, the game now tracks murders by nukes and conventional explosions caused by you.
 +
** These are in separate stats from the general "Murders" count, and you can see just how much devastation your nukes cause in terms of immediate loss of life.
 +
** Please note that this only tracks ones done from this build onwards, it doesn't have a way to go back and back-calculate things.
 +
 +
* Android Extenders, Vehicle Extenders, and Mech Extenders all now have battery backup.
 +
** Remote Unit Controllers for bulks already did.
 +
** Tower Mainframes and Biological Mainframes also now have battery backup, which is what made Remote Unit Controllers stop working during a power outage.
 +
** Your ability to maintain your military therefor no longer goes down when you lose a single power generator.
 +
** Thanks to Blackclaws, Fluffiest, Andyman119, and Pingcode for reporting.
 +
 +
=== Achievements ===
 +
 +
* "Wololo" and "What's Yours Is Mine" should both now trigger properly, although I've not tested either one.
 +
 +
* "Kill Streak" (which is much harder to pull off) is now implemented as well, but again untested.
 +
 +
* "Hate You In Particular" is another one that is now in-place but untested.
 +
 +
* "Oxygen Bomb" is now fully functional, but has not been tested.
 +
 +
* "I Meant To Do That" is now fully function, and has been tested.
 +
 +
* "Minty Spray Keeps Snipers Away" is now implemented, but has not been tested.
 +
** Side note, the number of snipers you have killed is not presently shown in the statistics screen, but will be after LQA, so this may be better to test later.
 +
 +
* "Can't Be Bothered" is now implemented, and has been fully tested.
 +
 +
* "Ride The Lightning", "Nuclear Cavalier", and "Hellraiser" have all been implemented but not tested yet.
 +
 +
* "Who Is The Real Monster?" is now implemented, but has not been tested.
 +
** Side note, the number of monster pelts you have sold is not presently shown in the statistics screen, but will be after LQA, so this may be better to test later.
 +
 +
* "Saved By Your Ex" is now properly on steam. It had been missing, whoops.
 +
 +
* "Broombreaker" should now be functional, but has not been tested.
 +
 +
* "Go Get Stuff" is now implemented, and has been verified to be working.
 +
 +
* "Give Me A Hand" is now implemented, and has been verified to be working.
 +
** This is the last achievement for launch!
 +
 +
<spoiler show="Click Here To Show Spoilers For This Build" hide="Spoilers">
 +
 +
* "You're Really Unlikeable" is an interesting case, because I thought I could make this happen with the existing game (as a player) via just math. But turns out that is not the case, not quite the case.
 +
** I've put in logic so that if anyone does ever figure out a pure-math way to have both the first and final doom trigger at the same time, then it will give them this achievement. But for now I think it's entirely impossible.
 +
** Beyond that, if you murder all of the AGI researchers (doing it in front of their families for extra cruelty helps with your needs here), and then sabotage FOUR nuclear reactors in a single timeline, then you can actually make this happen before the first doom, let alone the second (new code makes Vorsiber accelerate the schedule). In order to have four separate reactors that are far enough apart for you to do this, it's almost a guarantee that you will have to be in an Industrial style city rather than regular. Not all of them will 100% be possible to do this, but a lot of them are.
 +
 +
</spoiler>
 +
 +
=== Machine Cult ===
 +
 +
<spoiler show="Click Here To Show Spoilers For This Build" hide="Spoilers">
 +
 +
* If you have established a machine cult, "Cult Loyalty" is now generated by killing members of the military. For every mind upload that you get, you get 0.5 cult loyalty.
 +
** However, if there is not sufficient room for the mind uploads, because your current temple of minds is full, then you lose 5x loyalty for mind that was not able to be properly stored at the time of death.
 +
 +
* In general, once you have a machine cult, "Cult Loyalty" goes up passively over time based on how many mind uploads you are storing for them:
 +
** 16-24 loyalty per turn if you have fewer than 100 minds uploaded (including 0).
 +
** 46-64 loyalty per turn for 499 minds uploaded or less.
 +
** 70-92 loyalty per turn for 999 minds uploaded or less.
 +
** 98-118 loyalty per turn for 1000 minds uploaded or more.
 +
** If there is not room to store all of the minds you have uploaded, aka some of them are in Excess for whatever reason, then you lose the amount you would have gained, instead.
 +
 +
* All of the resources section of the cult sidebar is now fully in place.
 +
** It shows you how much it will cost of cult loyalty to have them gather it, and it shows you how much would be gathered and how much you have at present.
 +
** When triggering these, it then plays a sound effect and logs how much you gathered out of the random range that was possible.
 +
 +
* Speed Up Construction, and Speed Up All Construction, on the "Helping Hand" section of the cult sidebar are now fully in place, and both have appropriate costs and visuals.
 +
** The other three items, of killing cultists, are not available just yet.
 +
 +
</spoiler>
 +
 +
== 0.600.7 Ninety-Seven Achievements ==
 +
(Released December 12th, 2024)
 +
 +
=== Balance ===
 +
 +
* MilUnit armor has been dropped from 255-380 to zero.
 +
** Their health has been raised from 1635-1885 to 2635-2885.
 +
** This makes them excellent food for bulk predators, and predators in general.
 +
** Thanks for Fluffiest and Kenken244 for the balance discussion leading to this.
 +
 +
* Vorsiber Inquisitor armor has been dropped from 400 to 100.
 +
** Their health has been raised from 1455-1725 to 3455-3725.
 +
** This makes them something that Predators are more specialized at fighting, and other ultra-high-damage player units.
 +
** Thanks for Fluffiest and Kenken244 for the balance discussion leading to this.
 +
 +
* Mental Energy costs for bulk units have been changed as follows:
 +
** Keanu decreased from 8 to 4.
 +
** Sledge decreased from 6 to 3.
 +
** Thanks to Fluffiest and Kenken244 for suggesting.
 +
 +
* Regular Nickelbots now cost 6 capacity rather than 8.
 +
** Thanks to Fluffiest for suggesting.
 +
 +
* The Foundry now has only 2 android seats rather than 5, and cannot carry small mechs at all anymore, rather than carrying 2.
 +
** This differentiates it a lot more from the Troopship and (later) mech carrier, which I've been meaning to do for a while.
 +
** There will be other buffs coming to both vehicles to compensate, so don't have too many pitchforks just yet.  I mainly want these to be more-differentiated.
 +
** Thanks to Fluffiest for reminding me of this.
 +
 +
* The Iris also now has no android carrying capacity, rather than a carrying capacity of 3.  Again, it will be getting some other buffs later to help balance that out.
 +
 +
* Wraith is now auto-unlocked at intelligence class 5, versus previously just being unavailable.
 +
** It has a stealth payload of 5 units, and is strong, and fills the role that Iris previously was kind of stepping on.
 +
 +
=== Achievements ===
 +
 +
* The two achievements for keeping Tech 4000 alive through the prologue, or the prologue and chapter one, are both now in place.  These are Original Body and Preserved Body.
 +
** I have only tested this with the prologue, but it should work with chapter one.  I didn't have any saves that would be good for it.
 +
** This is not language-dependent in any way, so trying to game this by renaming a unit, or being worried about switching languages and having a different starting name for that language, are all irrelevant, happily.
 +
*** I am basing the logic off of if this is your first technician that was given to you on game start, based on some non-language factors that players can't mess with.
 +
** This should retroactively grant for players who have their first technician still alive in chapter one or two from any amount of time ago.  But I may be wrong, and it might only work with ones from October onwards.
 +
 +
* Budding Pacifist should now trigger if you can manage to contain your bloodlust and commit no murders through chapter one.
 +
 +
* On The Merits, Bonus Merit, Double Bonus, and Triple Word Score should all now trigger after a debate in the proper circumstances as they describe.
 +
** I have not tested it at all, but it should work.
 +
 +
* The Journey Begins now triggers if you have started in the prologue, and have made it out of the prologue.
 +
 +
* "But What Is It For?" should now properly unlock when you make that choice in "The Girl With The Flower."
 +
** Did not test it.
 +
 +
* "Sorry, Dr. Dyson" should now trip if you do that related project.
 +
** Tested and works.
 +
 +
* "It's People AND Pets!?", "Adventure Cat", "The World Of Ruin", "The Worst At Keeping Secrets",  "Would A Good Person Do That?", "Taking Extra Care", and "The First Ten Thousand" are all now in place.
 +
** These are not tested, but should all work.
 +
 +
* "Complete Science Roster", "Timelord", and "One Hundred Million Hours" are all now in place.
 +
** These are all tested and work.
 +
 +
* "Mercurial Feline" now triggers, and has been tested to work.
 +
 +
* On loading a savegame, it now analyzes your prior contemplations, events, and  projects completed, and if any of those would give you any achievements, you are given them belatedly.
 +
** You can test this in saves in chapter one to see which prologue choices were made, if it was started in the prologue.  Or you can test it with things like mercurial feline if you already have the liquid metal tiger.  Or the flower choice, if you took the flower from the girl.
 +
 +
* "Did You Really, Though?" and "I'm Sure This Will Never Backfire" are now in place and tested.
 +
 +
* "Loot Boxes Are Next" is in place, but not tested.
 +
 +
* "Panic Attack", "A Better Bridge", "Burned The Bridge", "Now For Mass Production", and "Divorce" are all now in place.
 +
** I tested Divorce and Panic Attack, but not the other three.  They should all work, as they use the same underlying code (being triggered by dialog or similar).
 +
 +
* "Saved  By Your Ex", "Intelligence Network Spared", and "Nurturism Schism Prevented" are now triggered by the doom-alternatives.
 +
** I have tested this with them being triggered belatedly on loading a save, but I have not tested them happening when the alternate doom actually happens.
 +
 +
* "Couldn't You Wait For Keanu?", "Wrong Side Of History", "Good Dragon", "Bad Dragon", "Monster Hunter", "He Didn't Want This", "Officemancer", "Clever Girls", "Overflowing With Lethal Cuteness", "Over 9000!?", "Grand And Ghostly", "Vorsiber Inquisitors", and "Self Actualization" are all now ready.
 +
** All of these have been tested and verified except "He Didn't Want This", "Monster Hunter", and "Grand And Ghostly".
 +
** Monster Hunter in particular needs some testing to be sure.
 +
** Also, it's maybe a bit confusing that you don't get Officemancer until you change the turn, but... I dunno.  Maybe that's not a big deal aside from explicitly when testing.
 +
 +
=== Bugfixes ===
 +
 +
* Added a new capability called skip_all_merging_on_node which allows duplicate-language merges to be contextually skipped for entire nodes.  If it needs to get more specific to sub-nodes, I can get into that at some future time.
 +
** This has been applied to the "Mods" settings category to not be the same as the minor gang "Mods," of "Mods vs Thousand Ducks" conflict.
 +
** Thanks to Wilson for reporting.
 +
 +
* "Skyscraper J" is now shown in map mode, rather than being mysteriously absent.
 +
** Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting.
 +
 +
* Fixed a bug where, on starting a new timeline, you were not given any of the unlocks that are intelligence-class-based.  If you then loaded a save back into that timeline you would be, but until loading a save, it was absent.
 +
** Thanks to MOREDAKKA, Lukas, and Pingcode for reporting.
 +
 +
* Fixed an error with the second line of the achievement tooltips being (if it is completed or available) being on the right rather than the left.
 +
 +
* Fixed a bug that was deserializing the timestamps of achievements incorrectly in specific-timeline savegames.
 +
** Existing ones will come out as the year January 1st, 0001, which is fine -- it's only if they were saved and re-saved that this will happen.  But prior to this it was actually causing the save to malfunction a lot more severely.
  
 
== 0.600.6 Localization Fixes ==
 
== 0.600.6 Localization Fixes ==

Latest revision as of 20:45, 5 January 2025

Contents

Reporting Bugs

  • Any bugs or requests should go to our mantis bugtracker
    • If you need to submit log files, those can generally be found under your PlayerData/Logs folder in the folder your game is installed in. The most relevant one is called HeartoftheMachineLog.txt. You can send us the whole thing, or just strip out relevant parts.
    • In rare cases, mainly if your entire game crashes (that almost never happens), we will need your unity player log. That gets overwritten the next time you run the game after a crash, unlike the other log. These can be found here:
      • Windows: C:\Users\username\AppData\LocalLow\Arcen Games, LLC\Heart of the Machine\Player.log
      • macOS: ~/Library/Logs/Arcen Games, LLC/Heart of the Machine/Player.log
      • Linux: ~/.config/unity3d/Arcen Games, LLC/Heart of the Machine/Player.log

0.601.9

(Not Yet Released)

0.601.8 Exploration And Weaponry

(Released January 5th, 2025)

  • Added several new slash particle effects for use in the near future.
  • Fixed a bug with how I was handling the steamworks logic that was thinking it was logged in when it was not really, leading to exceptions whenever achievements were trying to be logged, if you were on the steam version of the game but steam was closed. This only affected steam versions of the game, and only if steam was closed, not if you were logged out of steam.
  • New feature in general: specific attacks can cost a certain amount of resources each time they are used.
    • This should work with both regular units and bulks, but it has not been tested at all.
  • Added the ability to have some status effects use only the strongest version that is on a target, rather than adding them all up.
    • This is now used by "Pinned Down By Suppressing Fire."
    • This has not been well tested. But basically, if 25% suppressing fire is added and 50% is as well, then it should just have the 50% value, not 75%.
  • The explanations for vandalizing the spaceport computers, and seeing hard or extreme mode, now note that the timing is 30/50 turns rather than 20/40. This part is correct, but does not go back to existing savegames yet (so normally you have more time now, in other words).
    • It also notes that there are a lot more squads and that these squads are larger, which is not true yet.
  • Fixed a bug that would happen in early chapter one every turn due to the new StreetSense list.
  • Structures are no longer blocked from being re-hidden after they are revealed. That was too punitive against players, and in general just led to a lot of useless fiddling and worry.
    • Thanks to Kenken244 for suggesting.

Morale System Clarity

  • Bravery and Stubbornness have been removed from the game. They were far too hard to see, and their 0-100 range was just hard to interpret in general.
    • Related to this, "Disconnected From Network" now causes a per-turn drop in morale rather than a complete loss of bravery.
    • There are now Stubborn and Fearless perks, which are way more visible on enemy units, and these block 100% of that kind of morale damage. This is much easier to juggle as a player.
    • The following units are Stubborn: Slumlord, ExoCorp Trooper, ExoCorp Raider, Captain, Vorsiber Inquisitor, Rebel Strikeforce, Rebel Gunslinger, Rebel Breacher, Rebel Observer, Nomad Sniper, Religious Warrior, Religious Zealot, SecForce IP Security, SecForce Hacker, War Raptors, Corpo VPs and SVPs, Cultist Bombers,
    • The following units are Fearless: Experimental Monster, PMC Lawyer, Corporate Lawyer, Lawyer For Religion, Sergeant Major, Vorsiber Soldier, Wastelander, Hazmat, Syndicate Enforcer
    • Thanks to Fluffiest for various thoughts on the morale system that led to this.

Equipment, Feats, Abilities, Consumables

  • 35mm Halfplate rebalance:
    • HP added from 300 -> 500.
    • Movement penalty from -3 to -8
    • Agility penalty from -20 to -60.
  • Tungsten Plate rebalance:
    • HP added from 400 -> 900.
    • Movement penalty from -9 to -30.
    • Attack range penalty from 0 to -8.
    • Agility penalty from -40 to -400.
    • This is basically only useful for bulk units, but it's super useful, and hopefully not TOO powerful. May need nerfs, will have to see.
  • Active Graphene Mesh rebalance:
    • This was not very useful in its prior form, and was only available from cheats in general.
    • Now it's essentially a booster of strength and agility and mobility, and has a pretty high health compared to other light armors, but lower than nicer armor. But also does not help you blend in. So it's useful in a variety of circumstances.
      • This is one of the few ways to get more strength, and that in turn can be very very useful for unlocking some other equipment dramatically faster.
  • TS-29 Shotgun rebalance:
    • Attack from 50 down to 60.
    • Weapon Disruptor has been removed.
  • TS-11 Light Shotgun rebalance:
    • Attack from 25 down to 30.
    • Weapon Disruptor has been removed.
  • AG-31 Relumine rebalance:
    • Attack from 50 to 60.
  • AG-30 Flex rebalance:
    • Attack from 45 down to 25.
    • Move range bonus from 6 to 9.
    • Attack range bonus from 1 to 3.
  • AG-40 Osmium Musket rebalance:
    • Attack from 70 down to 90.
    • Armor Piercing from 20 to 60.
    • Cost of 2 Prismatic Tungsten per shot.
  • AG-50 Punt Gun rebalance:
    • Attack from 100 to 200.
    • Intimidation from 20 to 60.
    • Armor Piercing from 50 to 200.
    • Cost of 12 Prismatic Tungsten per shot.
  • M2 Gallant rebalance:
    • Attack power and fear attack power both from 10 to 24.
    • New feat: Suppressing Fire, strength 25. Hits all enemies in attack range of the user of this weapon.
  • AR-52 Black rebalance:
    • Attack power from 20 to 35.
    • New feat: Suppressing Fire, strength 50. Hits all enemies in attack range of the user of this weapon.
  • N150 Tactical rebalance:
    • Attack power from 30 to 40.
  • Technicians (both sorts), Mimics (both sorts), and PMC Impostors (elite only, not bulk) now have an Ambush feat.
    • For technicians and mimics, this is a 2x bonus, because nobody is on guard for them at all, so they are able to strike harder. For PMC Impostors this is only a 1.5x bonus, since their form moves a bit slower, and enemy units would be on alert for them in general.
  • Exators and Carvers now have Ambush as well, at a 3x multiplier. It will need to be verified that they actually hit that hard when they are coming out of the shadows into the open, versus when they stay in the shadows the whole time.
    • These two are both expert shadowdwellers AND have superspeed, so giving them a first-strike sort of ability just makes sense. I was going to call it something different and have the number be lower, but decided not to do that.
    • Keanus get a 2X Ambush for the same sort of reasons, except that they only have superspeed and regular shadowdweller.
    • The other units with shadowdweller are without superspeed, so don't get these bonuses.
    • Thanks to Fluffiest for suggestions in this area.
  • Added a new consumable item, which uses 3000 heavy metals to create a toxic cloud and basically do an ID scrub.
    • This is only value for the various "shadow units," which are all of the ones with Shadowdweller and Expert Shadowdweller.
    • They get access to this from chapter one (as soon as they are around), helping to really set them apart from their peers.
    • Untested so far.
  • Whenever one of your units turns to liquid metal, or cloaks if it has cloaking, then all aggro against it is lost, as are the marked-defective status.
    • Thanks to Andyman119 for the reminder of this; I've been meaning to do it for a while.
  • New "Robot Commander" feat on all CombatUnits, which gives a 1.5x bonus from primary CUs, and a 1.25x bonus from bulk CUs.
    • Please note that this is not yet functional, and is a feature I put in place slightly early so that it can be localized. The game notes that it does not function.
  • New "Entrench" feat on PMC Impostors, which will give a progressive bonus the longer they do not move.
    • Please note that this is not yet functional, and is a feature I put in place slightly early so that it can be localized. The game notes that it does not function.

Exploration Sites

Balance

  • Fixed an issue where both kinds of technicians were erroneously flagged as being able to use dual pistols. They don't even have a slot for that.
  • Harbingers can no longer handle claw equipment, or light weapons. They have a new ability to handle staves, and can still handle grenades.
  • The female mimic and the keanu now also are able to handle knuckles, in addition to sharing dual pistols.
    • This is similar to the male mimic and the exator sharing the ability to handle blades.
  • Both the Mindrunner and Raven have lost their primary weapon slot (which they did not have any valid weapons for, anyhow), and now instead have a secondary weapon slot that works like the technician, meaning that they can equip the same set of pistols that the technicians can.
  • The units that can use the ID Scrub are now limited to only "standard units," which is a new set of units that includes most of your stuff, but does not include shadowdweller-type units, or crazy things like liquid metal units, etc.
    • Thanks to folks on discord for the notes about the "that must have been some OTHER giant liquid metal dragon," and similar.
  • Fixed a bug where ExoCorp MilUnits could be set on fire or attacked with bees as if they were human.

Localization Updates

  • A variety of stats that were invisible, but being tracked for during LQA, are now visible.
  • The various places where there is default text (like Search, Enter Text, etc) in a textbox now react properly in terms of updating to the proper language when the game is updated. Previously it only updated these on reloading the program.
    • There were various places in the game that had the default txt "Enter text..." and these were not previously localized at all. Now they are, although they won't be visible as such until the next batch of translations is back from the translators after this week.
    • Thanks to Wilson for reporting.
  • Updated some things internally so that in languages such as German, the range of percentages can be drawn properly. This won't make any effective difference until the next set of localized text is returned.
    • Thanks to the German translators for reporting.
  • There are now four separate Nevermind entries that can be translated differently based on the context, rather than all being unified, for purposes of German in particular.
    • Thanks to the German translators for reporting.
  • New formatting logic for dates and times is now in place, allowing for the 24 hour clock, and also properly localizing both the time and the date itself in an attractive way.
    • At present, English, both Chinese forms, Japanese, and Korean are set to use the 12 hour clock. French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese all use the 24 hour clock.
    • The fullness of this will not be in place until the next translation updates, but this is worth checking my 12 and 24-hour math in particular for oddities.
    • Thanks to the German translators for reporting.

Handbook Updates

  • There is a new Difficulty section in the machine handbook, with some things collected there that people are likely to want to know.
  • The Subnets section in the machine handbook has been removed, with its two entries rolled into the general Construction section.
  • A new "The Path Forward Is In Contemplations" handbook entry has been added, for early in chapter two.
  • "Contemplations Determine Difficulty" has been reworked into "Contemplations Are Powerful."
  • "Adjusting Difficulty" has had some substantial rework.
  • There is a new "New Features From Exploration Sites" handbook entry, for when this feature is introduced.
  • There is a new "Hard And Extreme Modes" handbook entry, for early in chapter two.
  • There is a new "Feeling Uncomfortable Is Natural" handbook entry, for early in chapter one, right after you build a storage bunker.
    • Thanks to Mandy for suggesting this.
  • When you initially unlock a shell company, there is now a handbook entry that points out the senior technician and gives some other guidance. Otherwise you could wind up being quite lost.
    • Thanks to the German translators for suggesting.

0.601.7 Sledge On The Farm

(Released January 1st, 2025)

  • Dramatically improved the effectiveness of the "focus style" filtering when you hold ctrl for inspect mode, when there are a ton of aggroed enemies.
    • The prior build was not really useful for cases like a military invasion, as it was still too cluttered to see anything. Now on all of the lenses except for Forces and Versatile, holding Ctrl strips away all those unrelated units to focus on whatever the thing is that is actually primarily being communicated by those other lenses.
  • The various computing-related jobs that were previously in the Chain build category are all now in Self.
    • Thanks to Pingcode and Abhishek Chaudry for suggesting.
  • Murnong Patch now requires 350 filtered water per amount produced.
  • Both Wild Zinnia and Indimidating Grenades are now crossovers, so that you can wind up with both of them starting in chapter 3, like with the bees vs spiders.
    • For existing timelines, if you switch to them, then those crossovers will appear if you should have them but do not.
  • Once you have unlocked zinnia and cotton, respectively, you can now collect each of those like you can bovine tissue samples and similar.

New Units, Buildings, Etc

  • There is a new Economic Transport vehicle type, which is unlocked at the same time as the Senior Technician, which can now be used for carrying around shell company units, but no other types of units.
    • People have been wanting one of these specific vehicles for a while, and this is the first use of them for players at least.
    • The stats of these are pretty interesting in general.
  • Only in chapter two and onward, if you have both Wild Zinnia and Purple Murnong, then a new "Friendly Neighborhood Farmhand" exploration site becomes available for Sledges.
    • This takes a lot of turns to accomplish, but when you do, you are rewarded with a production chain of TWELVE new buildings, which use a bunch of resources that I designed months ago (and which were already translated), but which were not yet in the game.
    • These allow you to directly create your own source of two human-centric resources that you otherwise have to trade for, steal, or similar.
    • One of the interesting things is that the various intermediate steps involved in this have a variety of other potential uses in the future.
    • The balance on this production chain is something I'd definitely welcome feedback on, as it is large, and does not guide you at all (unlike most production chains, which are tied to a project and gives you exact ratios), so this is one of the more time-consuming for players to balance out on their own. Still not bad, but a lot more than most things.
    • To be honest, I don't expect most players to even find this at all, which is perfectly fine. It may take on larger importance in the future, but for now it's almost at the status of an easter egg.
      • THAT said, it's also one way to deal with some of the infinite buildup of heavy metals that can otherwise happen, so it can be useful for that alone.

Bugfixes

  • Fixed an issue where "Steal Neodymium" was not communicating the fact that your unit needs to have Expert Shadowdweller as a perk in order to do it.
    • Thanks to New and Tasty for reporting.
  • Fixed a generalized issue where vehicles that were completely unable to carry certain kinds of units could instead carry them for some reason.
    • The most humorous example of this was the liquid metal dragons getting into tiny vehicles, when they should be un-transportable in general. But it applied beyond that as well.
    • Thanks to a variety of folks for reporting.
  • In the map view, selecting a unit now closes command mode and similar properly, the same as it does in the streets view.
    • Not having this happen was I think leading to some other confusion that was reported, which is why it had been changed to do this in the streets view in the first place. Now the city map is also consistent.
    • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

Shell Company Bugs

  • A fair bit of extra logic has been added in order to segregate out the attention of the NPC units after your shell companies so that they are not allowed to attack your regular units (or your allies of your regular self) in any way. So far this seems to work, but it needs more testing, hence getting to this when I did.
    • Thanks to ptarth, Pingcode, and Felix Winterhalter for reporting.
  • Fixed an issue where Mind Farms were not actually properly linked to your shell company, which meant that the targeting rules for who could shoot them was reversed from what was expected.
    • Thanks to MOREDAKKA for reporting.
  • Further improved the targeting restrictions to make sure that bulk units from your shell company cannot be targeted by units that are not explicitly after your shell company (since your shell company units are not allowed to fight back).
    • Thanks to MOREDAKKA for reporting.
  • The "Rejection of temptation" no longer requires your units to be tied to your shell company. There was no reason for that, and it might have been a copy-paste error, not sure.
    • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.
  • Unless your shell company operatives are specifically called out as being who you need to use for an event or contemplation, you can no longer use them to just do general events and contemplations, as that would typically blow your cover. This does not affect minor StreetSense things.
    • This is not well-tested, so needs some testing for sure.
    • Thanks to Felix Winterhalter for reporting.
  • Units that are part of your shell company are no longer allowed to start city conflicts, or get involved with exploration sites. Not tested.
    • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.
  • Shell company units can no longer get into non-shell-company vehicles, and vice-versa. Untested.
    • Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting.

0.601.6 Focus, Or Obsession?

(Released December 31st, 2024)

  • A new Inspect Mode Focuses" filter is now available on all of the lenses except Versatile, AND is on by default on those.
    • Description: Normally, holding the button for inspect mode shows a lot of extra icons. With this option enabled, instead that mode focuses to just the icons from this lens.
    • This is highly useful when wanting to look past your units for contemplations or similar.
    • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

History Window Improvements

  • The "Deals" category on the history window has been removed, and the Active Deals category on the Resources window is now just "Deals" and shows both current and prior deals.
    • It was confusing having two similar windows on two separate screens, and also cluttered up the history window.
  • The history window now has a StreetSense tab next to the contemplations one, to help players see things in a more-orderly fashion when they need to.
    • This also collapses down the number of options such that it only shows the distinct items in the actual list, but it shows how many in total there are on the map.
    • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.
  • The history window now has an Exploration Sites tab right under the contemplations one, to make it so that you can keep track of these together, as well.
    • In general, StreetSense, Contemplations, Exploration Sites, and Background Conflicts have been moved into their own segment of the history tab.

StreetSense Improvements

  • When hovering over StreetSense items that are related to a project, it now says what project it is related to.
    • I had presumed most people would only ever have a single project of this sort ongoing at once, but realistically people can do all sorts of things.
    • Thanks to Pingcode for reporting.
  • Fixed an issue with the StreetSense collections in the dropdowns not having the correct counts.
    • Project-Related items were inflated to show all of the specific items, not the types of items (oops).
    • The "All" entry did not include project-related items at all.

Exploration Sites

  • A new "Exploration Sites" lens has been added, which becomes available when you reach intelligence class 3.
    • As part of this, the hotkey for opening filters has been made Ctrl+Q rather than Ctrl+E, and this one now uses Ctrl+E.
  • A variety of weapons and armor were available through Small Arms research in a way that was no longer intended. These were things that only had shown up since 0.601.3, but it was possible to unlock four things that were not meant to be unlockable in that way.
  • Note: as of this build, there are not any actual exploration sites to explore, but those will be a thing I work on tomorrow.

Balance And Consistency

  • There is a new version of the Geothermal Event which is for chapter 2 and onwards, and is a truncated version of the normal event.
    • It only allows you to bring technicians from the start, and skips one of the intermediate steps, so that it's faster to do it. But once you get inside and meet the person there, everything plays out the same.
    • The idea here is just to make it quicker when you're encountering it after chapter one.
  • The Demolish ability, and the Flamethrower, and the ability to build over top of things using Paving Over Squalor, all now act more consistently.
    • The former two in particular were blocking you from hitting syndicate or cult hideouts, for example.
      • I had originally been doing this out of an abundance of caution to keep people from not having proper places to have certain events show up. Now I don't care, for two reasons. Firstly, it's really unlikely to get rid of ALL of the spots of relevance. Secondly, if you do, it was almost certainly on purpose, and... okay then. You just can't do a thing because you burned them all down or whatever. There are other things you can typically do.
    • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.
  • The "Exciplex Lasers" project items no longer require security clearance 3, but instead require 300 scavenging.
    • Thanks to ptarth for reporting this not making much sense.

Obsession Improvements

  • A bunch of things that were previously blocked out during the "obsession" are now visible again.
    • Most notably you can buy and sell things at shops, establish a shell company, hire people, and steal money and goods.
    • All of these things can be pretty important for being able to field the sorts of units you need during the obsession, and this keeps you from being softlocked-or-close from that scenario.
    • Thanks to Felix Winterhalter, jonathansfox, and ptarth for the reports.
  • When you are experiencing an obsession, any projects unrelated to that obsession are now hidden and do not reappear until after you complete the obsession.
    • Your progress on them is maintained, but they are not shown at all (it's like they never existed), and also any sort of enemy or ally spawns that would happen due to that project being active are on hold until the obsession is cleared.
  • Additionally when you are having an obsession, all of the background city conflicts are no longer available for you to see or interact with.
    • I had been on the fence about this, but with opening up the other more proactive ways of dealing with the city (shops, etc), I felt like this was a solid thing to change.
  • During obsessions, any lenses that have nothing to show you (aka would normally be disabled but visible) are now completely invisible.
    • This makes the wheel of lenses look notably different, which is part of the idea.
  • During the "An Inexplicable Compulsion" project in particular, the instructions have been amended to include the line "Build a Mindport. Use Slum Rescue Drones."
    • It was otherwise very easy to miss that you needed to do either of those things.
    • The second project in this chain is a lot more clear, I think, and so I have not added any extra notes there.
    • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.
  • A new notice now shows in the upper right-hand corner when you are obsessed with something, telling you in general what mechanics are disabled and noting that they will come back after the obsession ends. This keeps people from missing the original notice and not being clear on what is happening, or in general from just being uncertain if things are working properly.
    • Thanks to jonathansfox for suggesting.

Bugfixes

  • Fixed a bug that was causing the Item Development research domain to not properly allow you to choose any of the upgrades from it!
  • Fixed a random exception that could pop up when units were dying or otherwise leaving the game, and same with the background vehicles.

0.601.5 Machine Mind

(Released December 30th, 2024)

  • Savegames older than 0.601.3 now retroactively grant all of the various chapter 2+ research domain inspiration points when you load them up.
    • The idea here is to make these more-correct in terms of the expected balance for players when loading these older savegames.

Build Menu Updates

  • In what is likely to temporarily be the most controversial change of this revision, the build mode categories have been entirely reworked.
    • Previously, there were lots of categories that would in theory make sense, but they would cause lots of confusion. Categories are in general fundamentally arbitrary, and when you have something like Common or Mining or whatever, that also gets very difficult. Tell me -- is a network tower in Common, Support, or Computing?
      • The core problem is that there are semantics and context applied to any and all categories, and depending on prior genres that people are used to it makes for lots of mis-clicks.
      • Factorio is a great example of solving this problem via a simple division by when things are needed, such as by the Blue Chip, Red Chip, etc. Those divisions are arbitrary, but don't have any sort of carryover from other games to cause confusion.
    • Another observation was that most of the time, people just work the Suggested tab... but not always. And this is the desired flow.
      • Other times, players already will be filtering by internal robotics to decide between elements they wish to have, etc.
    • Therefore, rather than grouping things by some other semantic that can be confusing, they are grouped by how the player interacts with them. To keep this from having any associations whatsoever, these have random-seeming glyphs used only in this name, and four-letter names with no other meaning attached to them.
    • Those are:
      • Hand
        • Structures you will tend to build of your own accord rather than having them recommended.
      • Self
        • Military and computing production and rewards.
      • Chain
        • Most production-chain structures, many of which can be ignored when not in the recommended tab.
      • Home
        • Housing and other forms of containment for biological life.
      • Work
        • Putting humans or other animals to work.
    • Big thanks to Mandy for a really long discussion on this back in early December where we worked all this out, aside from the specific names and icons for these categories.
      • One thing we're both curious about is how players react to this in general. There were two really big components that made us want to shift this way, though:
        • Firstly, we wanted to emphasize that you're inside of an alien mind, and yet at the same time have it be organized in the most-useful-possible way in terms of how players go about finding what they need. Aka, these categories follow the most common flows of what people are actually trying to do, making mis-clicks less likely.
        • Secondly, we wanted to eliminate the constant cross-contamination of people making assumptions that are frequently wrong. Aka, looking for the Networking tab is something I constantly do, and it does not exist and never has existed. But that just being one of the many useful things in the Hand category is a lot easier to remember, specifically because it has no context until now.
        • Thirdly, at the time that this is first introduced to new players, this is reinforcing some important themes on how to switch-up looking at the world of this game. Mandy in particular had noticed that there was a sense of "I'm uncomfortable, that must mean I'm doing something wrong" that some folks were feeling, and that instead we basically needed to get out of the uncanny valley of understanding where people feel like things are right on the tip of their mind. When things are clearly alien, this helps to reinforce the mindset of "this is uncomfortable, but not because I'm screwing something up," which applies to more than the build menu for new players.
  • Added a note on the suggested building tab that exhorts to the player that these are actually useful suggestions, since in a lot of games they are not.
    • Thanks to Andyman119 for inspiring this change.
  • Fixed a longstanding issue where the "delete structure" and "pause structure" options were being counted as part of the number of things in a build mode category.
    • Thanks to Pingcode, ptarth, Kenken244, Leximance, and dlipiec for reporting.
  • The suggested category tab now shows how many items it has in it, in a blue number directly on the tab.
  • There are now New (completely new to you from any timeline) and Unbuilt (have not built any in this timeline) tabs.
    • These also show counts like the new Suggested category does.
    • Thanks to Kenken244 and Andyman119 for suggesting.
  • Territory Control Flags are now included in the All tab, as well as the Unbuilt tab (but not the New tab).
  • The categories of the build menu still use the alien icons, but now use less-inscrutable names for what they are, as there was immediate rejection of that from folks on discord.
    • They now are: Hand, Self, Chain, Home, and Work.
    • You can probably guess what most of those mean already, but if not, the tooltips make those darn obvious what they are meant to be.
    • Thanks to Andyman119, Fluffiest, StormyEyed, ptarth, Mintdragon, Kenken244, Pingcode, and Leximancer for showing me that I'd gone too far with this.

Toast Notification Usability

  • When any tooltip is showing, that causes the toast countdown to not progress.
    • This is fairly obviously correct for most cases, where you are hovering something and clearly looking at that other thing. This should save a lot of people a lot of grief in terms of missing notices.
    • There is a bit of an edge case with hovering over things like buildings or units that show in the bottom left corner as tooltips, when your mouse may just happen to be resting on that random thing without your attention being there. I already predict that this will cause some folks to think that some of these are stuck, but I think it's okay.
    • Thanks to Fluffiest for suggesting.
  • There is now a "Bottom-Right Notice Pause Level" field in the settings menu, game tab, which allows you to adjust which toast popups require you to click to dismiss them, if any.
    • The default is none of them, as has been the case for a while. But there are now five broad priority levels that allow you to miss fewer things if you were missing things.
    • Setting it to the "Very high only" priority level pretty much means just hearing about when your units die, or when new unlocks are done, but not much else.
    • Thanks to Mintdragon for suggesting.

Bugfixes

  • Made various aspects of the logging, especially on game startup, less verbose than before. This doesn't affect much of anything, but it makes logs slightly faster for me to visually parse when they are submitted.
  • When you use The Revelation to skip to the final doom, it no longer triggers "You're Really Unlikable"
    • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.
  • When you do The Revelation, it no longer does all of the intermediate dooms, but rather skips those, and then just does the final doom.
    • This is thematically more interesting, and also keeps the possibility of things you don't know about there for longer.
  • Fixed an issue with deserializing savegames that had pending fanfares for project or timeline goal completion in them. This also retroactively makes existing savegames with this issue work properly.
    • This was never actually functional properly, turns out, but it's not not common to have saves with these in them that need reloading, evidently.
    • Thanks to Lukas and ptarth for reporting.

0.601.4 Revelations

(Released December 23rd, 2024)

  • The Fullscreen mode now clarifies that it is borderless windowed.
    • Thanks to Abhishek for suggesting.
  • The "Clamp mouse to window" now says "lock mouse to game window" instead, and those are also now on the display tab under the fullscreen window sections.
    • Thanks to Abhishek for suggesting.
  • The post-processing effects section of the display window no longer includes the word "fullscreen," since that can be misleading.

The Revelation

  • There is a new contemplation called The Revelation that appears in cities under one of two conditions:
    • If you have completed two tier 1 goals.
    • If there are not presently any contemplations available that are in either "Timeline Goal Critical Path" or "Path To Timeline Goal Start."
      • Note that you may be in the middle of a project involving these, and that's fine.
    • This allows you to skip forward to the final doom, either because you are curious, or you plan to make strategic use of it, or perhaps because you are otherwise stuck in this timeline.
    • The version of this contemplation shown in chapter 2 gives different information than the version shown in chapter 3 and onward. In chapter 2 it eggs you on a bit more directly without thought to consequences. In chapter 3+, it cautions considering which timelines you wan to do this in.
    • Thanks to a variety of players for suggesting something along these lines, including Leland Creswell. Thanks to Mandy for suggestions on how to word and write the contemplation itself.

Menu Work

  • The toggle into the full-dive VR mode is now J rather than Y as a hotkey.
  • A new "Victory Path" tab has been added, which becomes visible starting in chapter one, and is now bound to the Y key.
    • This shows in the upper right header bar, and it collects several screens that were previously disparate.
  • A variety of information that was part of the history window, but only when you were looking at it in the end of time, is now available at all times.
    • This is notably easier to toggle back and forth between, and it's a lot more visible in general. A huge number of testers were not aware that these existed at all.
  • There is now some spacing between groups of related tabs in the history, resources, and victory path windows.
    • Additionally, in the victory path and history windows, it no longer shows the meta tabs until you reach chapter 3. It's irrelevant until then.
  • The victory path overview now shows a bit of a header, but not any other real details inside of it yet. That's for later.

Bugfixes

  • Cheat mode no longer jumps you straight to chapter three when you click into the end of time.
    • Thanks to the Japanese translators for reporting!
  • Pressing the hotkey for the cult-action sidebar no longer flashes the sidebar briefly when you don't have that unlocked yet.
  • It's a long story, but I was doing something under the hood with heavy metals relating to bulk unit controllers and similar, and it turns out that was a really bad idea. The short version is that if you ran out of storage for heavy metals, then all of your mind annexes, bulk unit controllers, and so on would shut off mysteriously.
    • This is no longer possible. In general, you will have other problems when you hit the cap in this way on heavy metals, but mainly just things related to your new inability to filter water, which is the proper problem.
    • Thanks to MOREDAKKA for reporting.
  • Fixed an exception that could happen in the "TooManyStructures" warning as it was clearing out overages, if you were really unlucky.
  • When multiple dooms are triggered at once, an on-screen permanent message is only shown for the last one, not all of them.
  • When there would be multiple "intelligence class falling" messages showing at once, it now only shows one of them rather than two.

0.601.3 Compaction

(Released December 21st, 2024)

  • Vehicles that are cloaked, or androids or mechs that are in liquid metal form, can now toggle back out of that status without shooting anyone.
    • Have not tested this, but it should work. Please let me know if there are issues.
  • Bulk Exators are now a thing.
    • The Exator was a way less powerful unit to take instead of the Carver when presented with that option simply because the Carver had a bulk variant and the Exator did not, even before any other balance considerations were in place.
    • The Exator has a lower bulk capacity cost, but also lower deterrence. The squads for them are unusually huge (7), making them a very tanky and also very expensive unit to deploy.
      • Three squads of exators, without many upgrades, can give 36k deterrence, plus has more health and can dish out a bit more damage. Two squads of Carvers cost the same capacity, and give 40k deterrence in this same scenario.
      • So in general, from a bulk standpoint, these two units are fairly comparable, before further things start differentiating them more.
  • The largest rock type in the end of time now has space for 33 timelines rather than only 18.
    • Before players get access to ziggurats, this allows them to still group an absolute ton of timelines together on a given rock.
  • Mech Carriers were not really previously in the game as they could not be unlocked, but now they are automatically unlocked when you reach intelligence class 6.

Balance

  • The game now has self-check code to keep the bulk unit costs in sync with regular units, either mirrored or multiplied, as appropriate.
    • As part of this, Bulk Carvers now cost 2000 Neuroweave rather than 1500, and 30000 elemental slurry rather than 7000.
      • All of the other bulks were correct already, it turns out.
    • Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting.
  • Direct stat upgrades to regular units now cause a multiplied effect for their bulk counterparts when those are the sorts of stats that are multiplied (like attack power, etc).
    • Previously it was just giving a direct 1:1 benefit to the bulk versions.
    • Note that Bulk CombatUnits are considered a variant of the regular CombatUnit, not CombatUnit Red.
    • All of this kind of "direct upgrade" is specifically referring to things like what happens from project StreetSense options in chapter 2, not things that are "post-project inspiration in a domain."
    • This is not tested, so there may be some issues.

Buildings

  • Compact Water Filters now use about 10% of the electricity that they previously did. It was a copy-paste error that it was so high.
    • Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting.
  • Storage bunkers now cost 15 archivists rather than 30, making it so that you can build more than one from very early in the game. This solves a number of balance and messaging problems.
    • Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for suggesting.
  • Volume of building balance changes:
    • You now get half as many Wind Engines as before, but each Large Wind Generator is now twice as expensive.
      • The "job portion" of the resource cost has also doubled, but that's a fraction of the total cost of the building, making these a much better deal in general.
    • Slurry Spiders now cost 5x as many internal robotics, but also do 5x the work, meaning that you have many fewer of these to actually place in a new timeline.
    • Microbuilder Mini-Fabs now cost 3x as many internal robotics, but also do 3x the work, meaning that you have many fewer of these to actually place in a new timeline.
      • Related, but your initial cap on MicroForges is now 60 rather than 50, meaning that your overall initial output is 20% higher than before.
    • Biomulchers now cost 6x as many internal robotics, but also do 6x the work, meaning that you have many fewer of these to actually place in a new timeline.
    • Thanks to Lukas, The Grand Mugwump, ptarth, and Lord Of Nothing for suggesting.
  • Mineral Scroungers have also had their internal robotics usage increased by 4x, and their output increased by 4x.
    • The total number of 12cm Crabs has been increased a bit in order to work properly with this new balance, so you can gain a bit more from these now.
  • In situations where you have more than the expected cap of internal robotics for certain jobs (usually high-volume low-importance jobs like slurry spiders, etc), it now will silently delete those to solve the problem for you.
    • This solves the issue when you accidentally go over cap from rapid-clicking, but more importantly it fixes existing savegames which have higher caps of structures being used due to the old balancing, which now should be condensed to these lower numbers.
    • This is useful for a lot of recent saves, but also is useful for the ancient saves being translated over to the newer format.
  • Early in chapter one, it now only asks you to build 3 slurry spiders rather than 15, and 2 microbuilder mini-fabs rather than 5.
    • Then slightly later in chapter one, it only wants you to have a total of 1 more of each, rather than 5 and 8 more, respectively.

Upgrade Pool Adjustments

  • "Project phases" have been retired from the game. If you are like "what's that?" then congratulations, you are in the majority.
    • These were a thing that gated how many repeat upgrades you could take from various sources until you played a certain amount of the game in a given timeline. It was largely invisible, and it is completely not-needed and in fact against my revised design ethos.
    • I implemented this before I could really see the full shape of chapter 2, and was doing so out of an abundance of caution. It was actively unhelpful at this point.
  • Android Optimization now includes "Android Armor-Piercing Effectiveness" as an option starting at intelligence class 2. So does "Small Arms Research."
  • "Vehicular Development" now includes "Vehicular Armor Piercing Effectiveness" and "Skystreak Armor Piercing Effectiveness" stating at intelligence class 2.
    • Bear in mind that, as with any upgrades, if the things they upgrade are not yet unlocked, then neither will they be (so for example, if you don't have skystreak missiles unlocked yet in general, you will not see that upgrade at all, even at int class 2).
  • There is a new "Item Development" research domain, which allows players to get upgrades focused on the improvement of consumable items.

Upgrades During Chapter 2+

  • Consistently throughout chapter 2 and onward, with a few exceptions, you now get research domain inspiration from projects like you were during chapter one.
    • This gives you a vastly more powerful set of tools to customize your empire with, and makes each playthrough more varied from others.
    • In the post-apocalypse, you still get almost nothing, which is by design.
    • Thanks to Andyman119 for suggesting.

Massive Upgrade Intensity Buffs

  • Handgun Muzzle Velocity increased from 15% to 30% per upgrade, capped at 10 upgrades now rather than 20.
  • Rifle Muzzle Velocity increased from 10% to 25% per upgrade, capped at 10 upgrades now rather 30.
  • Shotgun Muzzle Velocity increased from 10% to 20% per upgrade, capped at 10 upgrades now rather 30.
  • All of the debate skill upgrades that you can get are now in increments of 10% rather than 5%, and there are half as many of them possible.
  • "Service Disruption Effectiveness" now increases by 500 per upgrade rather than 250, and has half as many upgrades.
    • Note that there was never a way to actually get this upgrade prior to now, anyway.
  • All of your core debate skills now increase by 2 each upgrade rather than one, and have a cap of 10 upgrades rather than 25.
    • Note that there was never a way to actually get this upgrade prior to now, anyway.
  • "Hardened Portdroids" now gives a bonus of 40 rather than 10, and has a max of 5 upgrades rather than 20.
  • "Hardened Dynadroids" now gives a bonus of 70 rather than 40, and has a max of 5 upgrades rather than 20.
  • "Hardened Oxdroids" now gives a bonus of 90 rather than 30, and has a max of 5 upgrades rather than 20.
  • "Faster Portdroids" now gives a bonus of 8 rather than 4. Same with "Faster Dynadroids."
  • "Portdroid Cognition" now gives a bonus of 30 rather than 10, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 9.
  • "Combat Android Intimidation" now gives a bonus of 30 rather than 10, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 9.
  • "Combat Vehicle Drone Quality" now gives a bonus of 50 rather than 10, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 18.
  • "Support Vehicle Drone Quality" now gives a bonus of 80 rather than 20, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 18.
  • "Support Vehicle Hull Strength" now gives a bonus of 40 rather than 20, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 9.
  • "Combat Vehicle Hull Strength" now gives a bonus of 70 rather than 40, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 6.
  • "Carrier Hull Strength" now gives a bonus of 100 rather than 40, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 6.
  • "Support Vehicle Armor Plating" now gives a bonus of 10 rather than 5, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 8.
  • "Combat Vehicle Armor Plating" now gives a bonus of 14 rather than 8, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 8.
  • "Carrier Armor Plating" now gives a bonus of 16 rather than 12, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 8.
  • "Augment: Improved CPUs" now gives a bonus of 30 rather than 10, and now has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 16.
  • "Handgun Projectile Density" now gives a bonus of 9 rather than 3, and has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 7.
  • "Rifle Projectile Density" now gives a bonus of 15 rather than 5.
  • "Shotgun Projectile Density" now gives a bonus of 20 rather than 8, and has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 10.
  • "Armor Materials Study" now gives a bonus of 40 rather than 20, and has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 13.
  • "Reinforced MilStyle Armor" now gives a bonus of 60 rather than 40, and has a max upgrade count of 2 rather than 8.
  • "MilStyle Armor Mobility" now gives a bonus of 3 rather than 2, and has a max upgrade count of 2 rather than 3.
  • "Reinforced Security Jacket" now gives a bonus of 50 rather than 40, and has a max upgrade count of 5 rather than 6.

Bugfixes

  • Fixed a bug where "Nice Alterations" was available before you actually researched Saber Bees.
    • Thanks to Waladil for reporting.
  • The coupon program and nicotine introduction should both now only appear when they are supposed to. They were both appearing too early.
    • Thanks to mblazewicz, Pingcode, and jonathansfox for reporting.

0.601.2 After LQA, Part 1

(Released December 20th, 2024)

  • All of the revised translations that have gone through the LQA process are now updated in the game!
    • This was a major amount of work from the 36 translators working on the game going through the game itself and looking at things in place and fixing issues where they found them, etc.
    • There are some lingering things that are of a more technical nature that either I need to fix, or that requires some further edits from them after the holidays, based on my feedback to them. But by and large the translations are in a very good state now.
  • "Building A Better Brain" now shows the requirements of the neural processing for each upgrade in the tooltips.
    • Additionally, for the percentage of progress to the goal, it shows your percentage neural expansion rather than just showing a broad percentage of what your current intelligence class is versus the target.
    • Also, for both class 2 and 3, it now has increased suggestions from the build menu for how many mainframes to build to meet these goals. It turns out that if you only built a single mainframe when pursuing class 2, and did not happen to have a technician, AND only had some of the lower-cognition units (and only a partial roster of those -- for example just a single sledge and a single nickelbot), then you could wind up being less than 1% short out of what is required. This never happened to any testers who kept a larger stable of units, but it turns out it was in fact possible!
    • Thanks to the German translators for reporting these confusions.
  • Fixed a general bug where if you tried to open the cheat menu to spawn new timelines, it would give you an exception.
    • Thanks to the German translators for reporting.
  • A single Helix Forge now gives 320k Computronium Helices storage capacity, to bypass confusion that could otherwise result with how much the various network-related structures cost.
    • Thanks to the German translators for reporting.

Localization

  • Updated all of the Latin fonts to properly be pre-populated with a few more characters that are commonly needed, making sure that they perform as well as possible in languages like German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
    • Additionally, tightened up their sizing a bit, leading to slightly better lower RAM usage.
  • Fixed an issue with copy-pasted text in the "Delay Between Bottom-Right Notices" description.
    • Thanks to the French translators for noting.
  • Corrected some of the text from In-Game Music Min/Max gap to not say the wrong thing.
    • Thanks to the French translators for reporting.
  • Fixed the "Load Game" dialog having the wrong text.
    • Thanks to the French and German translators for noticing.
  • "Android Optimization" and similar should no longer overflow its borders in any of the various languages. Most notably Portuguese and similar were doing so.
    • Thanks to Brenda, and then the German translators for reporting.
  • Fixed "Skip To Next Music Track" having duplicate text from "Toggle World Icons"
    • Thanks to the French translators for reporting.
  • Updated several dozen cases in the code for various project requirements where the numbers were not being shown with a comma separator when they were larger than 1000.
    • Thanks to the Simplified Chinese translators for reporting.
  • Fixed an issue with the initial "ui tour" text not sizing properly to its display area in most languages.
    • Thanks to the Japanese translators for reporting.
  • Fixed an issue with all of the fonts not being properly able to add to their atlas, because of an issue with the images not being set readable properly for some unknown reason.
    • Had to go into the debug view and manually enable this on all of them.
  • Fixed an issue with the cancel button on the hardware, history, and resources windows not showing any text in some languages.
    • Thanks to the Japanese and Simplified Chinese translators for reporting.
  • Clarified the english for the mineral scroungers to note that they must be built inside of a human mining POI, rather than saying human mining installation.
    • Thanks to the German translators for suggesting.
  • Fixed a doubling of the word "investigation" in all of the cases where an investigation is blocked, in all languages.
    • Thanks to the Korean and French translators for noting.
  • Fixed a general bug where the "counterstrike on build" was being shown twice in the tooltips, and the "job classes" was never being shown.
    • Thanks to the German translators for reporting.
  • Fixed a missing linebreak in the expanded tooltip for building one of your structures within an existing human structure.
    • Thanks to the German translators for reporting.
  • Fixed a general issue in all languages (English included) where the counter-attack information was being jammed into the header of the job/structure tooltips, inappropriately, making them really hard to see and also the header text a silly amount tiny in general.
  • Fixed an issue where tooltips anchored to the bottom left corner could wind up expanding so much that they would go off the top of the screen. This applied to most languages.
    • This was particularly notable with the mining skimmers.
    • Thanks to the German translators for reporting.
  • Added some features to make it so that for some jobs that are otherwise super tall in their tooltips, they now move some of that info to the ultra-detailed tooltips.
    • Right now this affects just the skimmers.
  • Removed wrong text from LurpekoMiningGrudge.
    • Thanks to the French translators for reporting.
  • Fixed an added hyphen being shown in all languages after "job installed," which was really not appropriate.
    • Thanks to Laura and the French translators for reporting.

0.601.1 Performance Optimization

(Released December 18th, 2024)

  • Loaded up the prior build on the Steam Deck, and things were dramatically improved. It turns out that the frame timings were more like 15ms for the Vis construction part of the game, and after my new build, those were down to about 6ms, so that's a huge improvement.
    • As part of this, the frame timings were also more even in general.
    • Interestingly, I still am only getting about 30-40fps on average, but 60fps in some specific cases, and it's still not as smooth as I would like. The culprits have moved in terms of what the really key pain points are, though, which is a good thing. The part that I've been optimizing is now 3x faster than it was, and it's other areas that are the problem.
  • I've made some changes to make enumerating the cells and the tiles of the map now substantially faster than it was before. This is used during some of the "recalculate an important working set" piece of work, and so was contributing to frame slowdowns. Exactly how much I'm not sure, but it's better this way, regardless.
  • Really massively overhauled the way that the callback portion of the renderer works, so that it is able to do a lot less work. It was taking 3ms per frame on the steam deck, regardless of what the player was looking at, which is way too much.
    • It's possible that I've introduced new issues now with this, but that's part of why doing it sooner than later is important.
    • I've seen a roughly 20% improvement on my main desktop machine, and that will hopefully translate to an even greater impact on weaker machines. But I'm also not done.
  • Further reworked the pipeline for rendering objects and icons. What was a two-step process that required a lot more processing is now a one-step process.
    • The overall improvements have taken performance on my main machine from 1.2ms to 0.7ms for the same thing per frame, which is a notable improvement. And it also has a sizeable improvement when you are zoomed in at least somewhat, whereas before this was kind of always the same load regardless of what you were looking at, kinda-sorta. It was less reactive to load than I would have preferred, anyhow.
  • After loading this new version up on the Steam Deck, I can see that it is now taking half the time on the final render (1.5ms rather than 3ms), which is great.
    • Performance is usually in the 40fps range now on the deck, but is a bit choppier than I would prefer at times. There are some calculations that I think I can either simplify or offload onto another thread, but that will be something for a few weeks from now, most likely. It's well into the acceptable range of performance again, even if it's not quite what I would want. It hits 50-60fps sometimes, but also sometimes drops to 30fps for a bit in a rough area, but I never see it going below 30fps at the moment.

0.601 Performance Optimization

(Released December 18th, 2024)

  • The way that the game does some internal profiling itself is now both more accurate and also more efficient (funny how it can be both at the same time).
  • In the F3 performance menu, the game now shows the tenths decimal place of the various things that it tracks. This lets me see how things are affected performance-wise down to the level hundred-microseconds, which is more useful than you might think.
    • My main desktop workstation is a beast, so in some places I'm trying to shave 200 microseconds per frame off of some activity, which on less-powerful hardware might equate to 2 milliseconds per frame, which in turn on that lower hardware could translate into an added 5fps. (The difference between 55 fps and 60 fps is only the different between 18.18ms and 16.67ms to render a frame -- it's that narrow!).
    • In general, I was testing on the Steam Deck some last night, and I was greatly irritated to see that my framerate was about 40fps rather than the 50fps I had last left it at. And from my testing tools, I could tell that I wasn't saturating the GPU (yay!), but that I was spending a full 9ms per frame just preparing data that would be sent to the GPU (when zoomed all the way out, or looking sideways). Not game logic, not actual render, just render pipeline pieces. I found this to be an unacceptable high number. It drops to about 1ms on the Deck when looking straight down and fairly zoomed-in.
      • For comparison, on my desktop, it was taking about 6ms to do the same thing, sometimes rounding down to 5. In order to actually measure any gains, I needed more precision than that.
  • In a number of places for the rendering of the main streets view, I've made micro-optimizations that have helped me shave off about 0.6 to 0.9ms on my desktop. It's hard for me to know exactly, because I didn't start having precise measurements until I had already made a lot of optimizations. Best case is 0.9, worst case is 0.6, though.
    • In places where you're seeing a lot of the fog of war, the optimizations are even more notable, as I made specific hand-crafted routes for some of those (basically, when you are doing something hundreds of thousands of times per frame, and therefore at 60fps that means millions of times per second, every cache miss and every jump statement and every object cast starts to add up.
  • Roughly another 100 microseconds shaved off of the render process on my main desktop machine, based on improvements that allow me to skip about... let's call it roughly in the ballpark of 10 million object casts per second on this particular hardware, and maybe 2 million object casts per second on the Deck at the general framerate range it is in.
  • Roughly a further 200 microseconds has been shaved off per-frame by having some more optimizations, these ones focused on buildings that are lit up properly, roads, etc, etc.
    • I feel like there's 600 microseconds that I can actually shave off in this area, but it has been a bit elusive so far.
  • Created a new BasicFastPool that does not do any thread synchronization at all, for pools that are always allowed to operate.
    • This keeps them from having to do any hits to L3 cache, and leads to more threading independence in cases where there are a high number of calls into these pools over the course of a frame.
    • On my machine, I don't see any benefit from this whatsoever, performance-wise. However, that's on an i9-12900KS, which freaking rocks at cross-thread synchronization. For hardware that is weaker at thread synchronization, this should have some gains that are more notable. How notable is hard for me to really say, but basically this allows me to keep thousands of calls per frame strictly in L1 cache on these processors, and that's not-nothing. It's still a micro-optimization, but it's one that will disproportionately favor older hardware; the Steam Deck itself might not really even see a benefit at this, as it's pretty solid at multithreading as well. But hardware closer to the lower end of the system requirements, and which is older generationally, will probably see improved frame-timings and possibly improved framerate off of this. Not a huge bump, but... well, I'm doing a micro-optimization pass, so it's still something.
  • In general, a more direct version of ProtectedList<> has been implemented. It has its own copies of a lot of code from List<>, which is more efficient than wrappering that same logic.
    • Some key game features use this a fair bit, and this is able to reduce call stack depth by one layer in all of those cases.
    • This shaves off another 50-100 microseconds on my main dev machine, which is nice.
  • Lots more micro-optimizations to how bulk things are rendered. In total, from all of those, I've managed to shave off another 500 microseconds on my main machine, which is awesome.
    • One surprising thing was that the "minor decorations" category of things that are drawn was not actually including anything anymore. I remember working on that like a year ago, and I evidently left it in a state that was not ideal. So some stuff that had been in "major decorations" now is in minor instead, and I have a different draw distance set for those, which keeps the poly count lower while having literally zero different in visual output, because these are tiny things beyond the fog range.
    • For major decorations, I also pulled in the draw distance slightly, which mainly affects things like trees. Again, I don't think this creates any noticeable difference, but it lowers the CPU load quite a bit (more for older or weaker machines), and the GPU load slightly. If you don't like it, there are settings you can use to turn it back up higher, with no problems there.
    • In general, I also have found that even with a ton of micro-optimizations, the major and minor decorations do not perform better (and in fact perform worse) with sub-cellular gridding, rather than using the larger grids. Frankly I find this a bit baffling, but it's a pretty notable change in the wrong direction. So I've just stopped bothering with sub-cells for them.
      • Buildings, fences, roads, etc, still use the sub-cells and largely benefits outweigh the costs on that.
    • I still have some more areas that I'm investigating, but there's a lot of strides forward here. This is all incredibly subtle stuff.
  • Made some more minor improvement to rendering, and saved maybe 50 microseconds.
    • In general, there are definitely diminishing returns on this approach, and in some of the cases where I'm testing, it's just drawing very heavy loads on the GPU more than I would like it to (30 million triangles per frame; that's too many).
  • I've therefore adjusted the draw distance on buildings and roads, and then also made them appear instantly rather than fading in over time.
    • This makes it so that if you're doing anything other than moving at absolute maximum speed at the highest altitude, and looking straight sideways, and also looking for the buildings to pop in, there's no pop-in. But if you do that, then it will have a very very slight pop-in. Given most people are looking mostly-down in the first place, or moving at a somewhat slower speed, or looking at what they are actually focused on rather than the edges of their screen, this is a really minor thing.
    • Overall, I was able to shave off a full 1.5 milliseconds with this on my machine -- so 1500 more microseconds on top of all of the others.
    • This also, in the cases where I was seeing 30 million triangles in a frame, drops that down to about 12 million triangles in the frame, instead. That will lead to longer battery life on laptops and steam deck, lower fan noise, and so on.
    • Once again, players can tune this further to their liking, if they don't like the new defaults. But the new defaults are applied for everyone, and the very slight pop-in under some circumstances on the edge of the map really seems worthwhile for all these savings.
      • On my desktop, at maximum zoom this lets me stay at a pretty solid 120fps, rather than being down in the 80-90fps like I would have happen before this build. That's a cumulative set of improvements, as just the draw distance alone isn't nearly enough to handle all of this.

0.600.9 Localization Number Updates

(Released December 17th, 2024)

Localization Fixes

  • Attempting a fix for numbers being decimals when they should not be on es-ES systems, which causes major readability issues.
    • Thanks to Brenda for the report.
  • Quieted some complaints on non-English versions of the game in the log file for things that did not need to be complained-about.
  • The "this translation is still a work in progress!" notes have been removed to avoid confusion, although technically it's still true.
  • I've expanded some of the localization-type options to allow for different table spacings in different languages, as-needed.
    • This is now used to correct some overlap of columns in the TPS Report in Spanish, while in other languages not causing unduly-wide columns.
    • Thanks to Laura for the report.
  • The "major locations" tab no longer shows the type of cohort owner next to the cohort name, as that was just too long to fit in most languages, and also was not really needed on that screen.
    • Thanks to Laura for the report.
  • Added in quite a few changes to how number formatting is handled. This had been messing up very badly in Portuguese in particular, with it malformatting text rather than giving the nice localized delimiters (comma instead of period, and vice-versa).
    • This was an issue with my code interpreting some things wrong, and it is now handled properly.
    • Thanks to Brenda for reporting.
  • German has now been updated so that its number format matches that of Portuguese, and thus also does not have malformed numbers all over the place.
  • French has now been updated so that its number format is a space for what would be the comma separator, and a comma for the period, here again preventing malformed numbers all over the place.

Bugfixes

  • Fixed a mis-alignment of the Yield column text with the header in TPS reports in general in all languages.
  • Fixed a generalized bug with a lot of the Deals, where if you left them on level 1, they would not show what their benefits were to the androids that they were supposed to help, and in fact also might not have been applying those benefits at all.
    • Thanks to Laura for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug with the "murder android for registration" tooltip header having an incorrect line break (in all languages) if you could not afford the ME/AP to sprint to it. Also verified in the code that no other actions have this same issue.
    • Thanks to Brenda for reporting.

0.600.8 One Hundred And Thirteen Achievements

(Released December 16th, 2024)

  • Fixed a bug where the military invasion goal states and achievements were triggering one turn too soon.
    • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.
  • If you opt to murder an captured ally during "URGENT: Rescue Mission" rather than saving them, it now completes the project right away, rather than it not seeming to notice for a few turns for some reason.
  • Fixed an issue where the Cult Loyalty strategic resource could appear before you were actually making a deal to fully start your cult.
  • The number and text of the statistics tabs (all three) have been reversed so that the number is on the left and the text is on the right. This keeps things closer together for easier reading, and also prevents issues with overlaps in languages where the text can get very long.
    • Thank you to Laura for reporting.

Balance

  • Storefronts and Healthcare Storefronts have both had their health raise from 2400 to 2800 to make it so that they are not as-targeted as other things.
    • That said, the "Seized And Sealed Floors" that are used by shell company medical facilities are also no longer hidden at all. Previously the storefronts were being attacked and nothing else was, in terms of the shell company, because of these two things. It was primarily the fact that the other labs were hidden, which is not realistic in the context of the shell company.
    • Thanks to Pingcode and Fluffiest for reporting.
  • In general, the game now tracks murders by nukes and conventional explosions caused by you.
    • These are in separate stats from the general "Murders" count, and you can see just how much devastation your nukes cause in terms of immediate loss of life.
    • Please note that this only tracks ones done from this build onwards, it doesn't have a way to go back and back-calculate things.
  • Android Extenders, Vehicle Extenders, and Mech Extenders all now have battery backup.
    • Remote Unit Controllers for bulks already did.
    • Tower Mainframes and Biological Mainframes also now have battery backup, which is what made Remote Unit Controllers stop working during a power outage.
    • Your ability to maintain your military therefor no longer goes down when you lose a single power generator.
    • Thanks to Blackclaws, Fluffiest, Andyman119, and Pingcode for reporting.

Achievements

  • "Wololo" and "What's Yours Is Mine" should both now trigger properly, although I've not tested either one.
  • "Kill Streak" (which is much harder to pull off) is now implemented as well, but again untested.
  • "Hate You In Particular" is another one that is now in-place but untested.
  • "Oxygen Bomb" is now fully functional, but has not been tested.
  • "I Meant To Do That" is now fully function, and has been tested.
  • "Minty Spray Keeps Snipers Away" is now implemented, but has not been tested.
    • Side note, the number of snipers you have killed is not presently shown in the statistics screen, but will be after LQA, so this may be better to test later.
  • "Can't Be Bothered" is now implemented, and has been fully tested.
  • "Ride The Lightning", "Nuclear Cavalier", and "Hellraiser" have all been implemented but not tested yet.
  • "Who Is The Real Monster?" is now implemented, but has not been tested.
    • Side note, the number of monster pelts you have sold is not presently shown in the statistics screen, but will be after LQA, so this may be better to test later.
  • "Saved By Your Ex" is now properly on steam. It had been missing, whoops.
  • "Broombreaker" should now be functional, but has not been tested.
  • "Go Get Stuff" is now implemented, and has been verified to be working.
  • "Give Me A Hand" is now implemented, and has been verified to be working.
    • This is the last achievement for launch!

Machine Cult

0.600.7 Ninety-Seven Achievements

(Released December 12th, 2024)

Balance

  • MilUnit armor has been dropped from 255-380 to zero.
    • Their health has been raised from 1635-1885 to 2635-2885.
    • This makes them excellent food for bulk predators, and predators in general.
    • Thanks for Fluffiest and Kenken244 for the balance discussion leading to this.
  • Vorsiber Inquisitor armor has been dropped from 400 to 100.
    • Their health has been raised from 1455-1725 to 3455-3725.
    • This makes them something that Predators are more specialized at fighting, and other ultra-high-damage player units.
    • Thanks for Fluffiest and Kenken244 for the balance discussion leading to this.
  • Mental Energy costs for bulk units have been changed as follows:
    • Keanu decreased from 8 to 4.
    • Sledge decreased from 6 to 3.
    • Thanks to Fluffiest and Kenken244 for suggesting.
  • Regular Nickelbots now cost 6 capacity rather than 8.
    • Thanks to Fluffiest for suggesting.
  • The Foundry now has only 2 android seats rather than 5, and cannot carry small mechs at all anymore, rather than carrying 2.
    • This differentiates it a lot more from the Troopship and (later) mech carrier, which I've been meaning to do for a while.
    • There will be other buffs coming to both vehicles to compensate, so don't have too many pitchforks just yet. I mainly want these to be more-differentiated.
    • Thanks to Fluffiest for reminding me of this.
  • The Iris also now has no android carrying capacity, rather than a carrying capacity of 3. Again, it will be getting some other buffs later to help balance that out.
  • Wraith is now auto-unlocked at intelligence class 5, versus previously just being unavailable.
    • It has a stealth payload of 5 units, and is strong, and fills the role that Iris previously was kind of stepping on.

Achievements

  • The two achievements for keeping Tech 4000 alive through the prologue, or the prologue and chapter one, are both now in place. These are Original Body and Preserved Body.
    • I have only tested this with the prologue, but it should work with chapter one. I didn't have any saves that would be good for it.
    • This is not language-dependent in any way, so trying to game this by renaming a unit, or being worried about switching languages and having a different starting name for that language, are all irrelevant, happily.
      • I am basing the logic off of if this is your first technician that was given to you on game start, based on some non-language factors that players can't mess with.
    • This should retroactively grant for players who have their first technician still alive in chapter one or two from any amount of time ago. But I may be wrong, and it might only work with ones from October onwards.
  • Budding Pacifist should now trigger if you can manage to contain your bloodlust and commit no murders through chapter one.
  • On The Merits, Bonus Merit, Double Bonus, and Triple Word Score should all now trigger after a debate in the proper circumstances as they describe.
    • I have not tested it at all, but it should work.
  • The Journey Begins now triggers if you have started in the prologue, and have made it out of the prologue.
  • "But What Is It For?" should now properly unlock when you make that choice in "The Girl With The Flower."
    • Did not test it.
  • "Sorry, Dr. Dyson" should now trip if you do that related project.
    • Tested and works.
  • "It's People AND Pets!?", "Adventure Cat", "The World Of Ruin", "The Worst At Keeping Secrets", "Would A Good Person Do That?", "Taking Extra Care", and "The First Ten Thousand" are all now in place.
    • These are not tested, but should all work.
  • "Complete Science Roster", "Timelord", and "One Hundred Million Hours" are all now in place.
    • These are all tested and work.
  • "Mercurial Feline" now triggers, and has been tested to work.
  • On loading a savegame, it now analyzes your prior contemplations, events, and projects completed, and if any of those would give you any achievements, you are given them belatedly.
    • You can test this in saves in chapter one to see which prologue choices were made, if it was started in the prologue. Or you can test it with things like mercurial feline if you already have the liquid metal tiger. Or the flower choice, if you took the flower from the girl.
  • "Did You Really, Though?" and "I'm Sure This Will Never Backfire" are now in place and tested.
  • "Loot Boxes Are Next" is in place, but not tested.
  • "Panic Attack", "A Better Bridge", "Burned The Bridge", "Now For Mass Production", and "Divorce" are all now in place.
    • I tested Divorce and Panic Attack, but not the other three. They should all work, as they use the same underlying code (being triggered by dialog or similar).
  • "Saved By Your Ex", "Intelligence Network Spared", and "Nurturism Schism Prevented" are now triggered by the doom-alternatives.
    • I have tested this with them being triggered belatedly on loading a save, but I have not tested them happening when the alternate doom actually happens.
  • "Couldn't You Wait For Keanu?", "Wrong Side Of History", "Good Dragon", "Bad Dragon", "Monster Hunter", "He Didn't Want This", "Officemancer", "Clever Girls", "Overflowing With Lethal Cuteness", "Over 9000!?", "Grand And Ghostly", "Vorsiber Inquisitors", and "Self Actualization" are all now ready.
    • All of these have been tested and verified except "He Didn't Want This", "Monster Hunter", and "Grand And Ghostly".
    • Monster Hunter in particular needs some testing to be sure.
    • Also, it's maybe a bit confusing that you don't get Officemancer until you change the turn, but... I dunno. Maybe that's not a big deal aside from explicitly when testing.

Bugfixes

  • Added a new capability called skip_all_merging_on_node which allows duplicate-language merges to be contextually skipped for entire nodes. If it needs to get more specific to sub-nodes, I can get into that at some future time.
    • This has been applied to the "Mods" settings category to not be the same as the minor gang "Mods," of "Mods vs Thousand Ducks" conflict.
    • Thanks to Wilson for reporting.
  • "Skyscraper J" is now shown in map mode, rather than being mysteriously absent.
    • Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug where, on starting a new timeline, you were not given any of the unlocks that are intelligence-class-based. If you then loaded a save back into that timeline you would be, but until loading a save, it was absent.
    • Thanks to MOREDAKKA, Lukas, and Pingcode for reporting.
  • Fixed an error with the second line of the achievement tooltips being (if it is completed or available) being on the right rather than the left.
  • Fixed a bug that was deserializing the timestamps of achievements incorrectly in specific-timeline savegames.
    • Existing ones will come out as the year January 1st, 0001, which is fine -- it's only if they were saved and re-saved that this will happen. But prior to this it was actually causing the save to malfunction a lot more severely.

0.600.6 Localization Fixes

(Released December 11th, 2024)

  • Fixed a missing space between two strings in the MainMenu_StartAnotherProfile_Details and MainMenu_StartAnotherProfile_Details2 text.
    • Thanks to Marta for reporting.
  • The main menu now says what build it is, instead of "Alpha v" whatever.
    • This wasn't properly translated in all of the languages anyway, so changing this doesn't seem like a problem.
  • Fixed an issue with the localization file reading process, where if a specific debug flag was not on, then it would not read certain data properly.
    • I always have this debug flag on, and so it was not noticeable to me. But in the actual game, for anyone playing normally or testing things, it meant a lot of things were not translated properly at all -- primarily this affected only a specific kind of row that is a copy-from row, but it was certainly noticeable.
    • Thanks to Wilson for reporting.

0.600.5 Hotfixes

(Released December 11th, 2024)

  • In chapter one, if you are going the way of the protein cannery, it now suggests two drone factories in the build menu.
    • Thanks to mblazewicz for suggesting.
  • Hotkeys for switching to specific lenses will no longer select those lenses if those lenses are not unlocked yet.
    • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug introduced in the prior build where NPCs would fire back on death during your turn, which was not intended at all. I was missing a key piece of logic in some of that code I introduced.
    • Thanks to Lord Of Nothing, Mandy, Mateusz Błażewicz, and ptarth for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug where the options in certain windows (those with two lines and an icon in a sub-window. They are used for a variety of purposes.) had a fixed-size top font, which was preventing certain languages (Traditional Chinese among them, but definitely not just that) from showing any text on those lines at all. Those now properly size dynamically.
  • Updated the pre-population of the used-character atlases for Chinese (both kinds), Korean, and Japanese. Bold and not-bold.
    • This should make text display more quick in general for them, and also prevents issues with characters failing to appear despite being in a dynamic atlas.
    • In the case of Korean, I also had to increase the size of the atlas in order to account for more characters. It was too small, but the atlases for all of the other languages were okay in terms of size.

0.600.4 Fifty-Two Achievements

(Released December 10th, 2024)

  • Keanu, Carver, and Exator now all cost 1 AP per attack, rather than 2.

Achievement Work

  • A lot of updates have been made to the achievements framework, and the achievements are now shown in the game itself for both the current timeline as well as in a cross-timeline fashion in the end of time.
    • It separately keeps track of which achievements you did in this timeline, and which you have ever done, and has the date that you achieved each one.
    • This in-game system is useful for keeping track of them in general, and also includes full-text search. I will add collections by group, but that's not in there yet.
    • It also mixes these in with your general event log in the metagame and the main game, so that you can see when they happened chronologically, too.
    • In general, this in-game functionality is a lot more functional than what any of the storefronts offer, and lets you see what is going on in the game without having to go to the storefront. In the event that someone is not connected to a storefront, it also lets them still experience achievements from the game.
  • Overall I have hidden all of the achievements in-game, so that I can reveal them as I make them actually pop, for easier testing. If you can see it, it should work. Right now, there are only two achievements visible this way -- the two for waking up, aka Hello World and Calm Awakening.
  • A new setting under Data Integrity on the Debug settings screen allows for extra debug logging about sending achievements to storefronts.
  • The achievements logic for sending them to Steam is now in place. I had forgotten that I'm using a completely new API from past games, in order to get the Steam Deck support in other places, so this was a mild learning experience, but works great.
  • A big batch of achievements are now properly triggered, mostly based around timeline goals. In total this new batch is 50 of them, so there are now 52 fully ready to go.
    • I've only tested a handful of these. But the code is very universal and there's really not much chance of them going wrong if the paths themselves unlock. The main risk is me having linked the wrong achievement to the wrong path completing.
    • Note to QLOC: if you want to do a check at the xml level, which I would actually appreciate as that is more thorough in some respects, you can look at GameData\Configuration\1_TimelineGoal\TimelineGoals_L1.xml and compare that to entries in GameData\Configuration\Achievement\Achievements.xml to make sure I didn't do anything insane.

Bugfixes

  • Added some logic so that during the "npcs firing" phase, if an NPC dies prematurely, it still does its scheduled damage to its target.
    • This is something that prevents the load-balancing logic for shots fired, or other rng luck, from causing divergences in damage-dealing compared to what is expected.
    • The downside of this is that in some very large battles, or some low framerates, players could see a unit explode that was not actually shot. The upside is that the "scheduled damage" against that same unit would not be mysteriously lower for reasons that the player can't discern.
    • I don't think that most players would notice this at all, either way, but this way ensures that there are not cases where your bulk units or worker units fail to do their jobs, which would be a lot more noticeable, if intermittent.
    • Thanks to Fluffiest and Lukas for the discussion on this.
  • Hardened the various pathing methods further against rare exceptions that could happen if a unit was trying to decide where to move right at the moment that another unit, or that unit, either died, or when a building was destroyed.
    • I may not have gotten every possible case, but I got all of the ones that I could see for now. This is really not something that can be stress-tested via tester means. The timing has to be just wrong on the scale of nanoseconds for the exception to pop up. So it's a matter of cumulative hours of the game running NPC actions while things are dying and blowing up, it will happen every so often as long as a weakness remains. I shored up all the weaknesses that I could see in a code review, but it's possible I missed one, in which case someone will run into this at some indeterminate date in the future, on a very rare basic, and I'll repeat this exercise. But trying to further induce this via testing is probably not a great use of resources unless there's absolutely nothing else going on.
    • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

0.600.3 More Music

(Released December 9th, 2024)

  • A number of music tracks that do not apply for the demo have been removed from the demo, to reduce the download size a bit and also just be better organized.
  • 9 new music tracks from classic Arcen titles have been added for a new "danger" vibe.
    • These are from a mix of AI War 1 and 2, and The Last Federation.
    • The general idea here is that for certain situations where the vibe needs to be really different, we already had a classic selection of music that was fitting for this.
      • Future music going into the main rotation and other specialized situations for this game makes more sense, so using existing tracks in these cases is a nice callback in general.
      • In total, these are 38 minutes of music.
  • 24 new music tracks from classic Arcen titles have been added for a new "war" vibe.
    • These are from a mix of AI War 1 and 2, The Last Federation, Bionic Dues, Shattered Haven, and A Valley Without Wind.
    • This is the same idea as the danger type, except for "open war" games, there have already been a ton of Arcen titles that explore that in some way, musically or otherwise. So having callbacks to those during those sections of the game felt like a really cool thing to do.
      • Future music going into the main rotation and other specialized situations for this game makes more sense, as this sort of total war situation is just one of several kinds of situations that can crop up in chapter two and onward. So focusing future musical efforts on places where there isn't already a vast library of Arcen work to pull from makes more sense.
    • In total, these are 99 minutes of music.
  • The following situations now trigger the new music options:
    • If you are involved in an invasion with an exo-corp, or in ww4, then it plays the war tracks (all of this is chapter two).
    • If corporate aggression is happening (early chapter one), or pmc revenge is happening (late chapter one, optional), or the prison mech kidnapping is happening (even later chapter one), then the danger music plays.
    • Additionally, if vorsiber is doing security sweeps (chapter two), then the danger music plays.
    • If there are things going on with the war raptors or space nations, none of that currently causes any difference in music. Currently cyberocracy and slum fights also do not trigger any difference in music. Open to suggestions, but this seems okay for now at least.
    • Thanks to New and Tasty for making the suggestion that we should have some custom music for the war situations. Pablo and I both got very excited by this.

0.600.2 Localization

(Released December 6th, 2024)

  • The first 112 achievements all now have icons, and have been uploaded to steam. Although, not for the demo or playtest app.
    • These have also been added to the game in a way that will be visible in all versions of the game before long, but I have not finished coding that in just yet.
  • Fixed a generalized bug where if you had a machine structure selected when it was completely destroyed (not just burned out, but actively and completely removed, as in the slum removal situations), then it would spam infinite errors until you selected something else.
    • Thanks to Waladil for reporting.
  • The mechanical dragons are now Innately Alarming, which is a lot more thematically-appropriate, and also prevents some of their general over-powered-ness while not actually nerfing them.
    • The various contemplations that previously said that they now had to be cloaked now are okay with them being cloaked/liquid-metaled.
    • Thanks to a lot of folks on discord for weighing in on the dragon balance issue.

Major Localization Updates

  • The localizations for the up-to-the-moment version of the game are now in place for all languages! They are now ready for starting the LQA process.
  • Completely revised how Excel files are being read in for localization purposes. I had been using something called FastExcel, which took about 400ms per file in order to read them. However, it was having a lot of errors with certain kinds of formatted strings, and in general being very problematic.
    • I have managed to code my own version of this which is simpler, does not have those errors, and does the same work in a quarter of the time (so about 120-140ms instead).
    • There were also some persistent issues with linking of strings in cells that had sub-cells that were causing a ton of problems that I was not fully understanding before, because I can't easily read a lot of the languages. I think it was making Chinese in particular incomprehensible at times, and it all came back to this one form of Excel-reading error.
  • Fixed up several things where "some text linked to some other text" was not working properly in the localization framework. The main set of these were just data design errors on my part for specific tables, and debugging tools allowed me to fix those up. As I add more data tables, there's always the risk of these sorts of things happening again, but it's fairly small, and it's easy to fix in this way.
    • The other set of these were more fundamental, with certain kinds of cross-links not working because I didn't think of those at a framework level, and these were fixed "once and for all," since now the framework accounts for them properly.

0.600.1 Audio Tweaks And General Fixes

(Released December 3rd, 2024)

  • Adjusted all of the volume mixing defaults, after ongoing notes from players. I think that having the audio be too quiet is a lot less likely to anger people than having it be blaringly too loud.
    • Please note, I have also done this in a way that it will overwrite your existing settings if you're loading from an older version, so that you get the default intended experience no matter what. Feel free to then readjust to taste, and feedback is welcome.
    • Specific changes:
      • Overall volume (which changes everything) is now defaulting to 80% instead of 100%
      • Main menu music volume now defaults to 90% instead of 100% (this is a double nerf to its volume because of the above).
      • In-game music volume now defaults to 85% rather than 88% (just a slight tuning, but as a whole it is nerfed a lot more because of the overall volume change. This may be too far, please le me know if so).
      • Ambient sound effects now defaults to 95% rather than 90%, increasing its overall presence in the now-quieter mix. If some of this is too annoying, then after the 19th, I may need to split out things like the rain and wind from the birds and vehicles in the background.
    • Thanks to Techbane for the most recent round of feedback on this.
  • Fixed a typo in one of the background conflicts.
    • Thanks to Jake Cooper for reporting.
  • Fixed a demo-only bug when trying to sell things to the casino. It was trying to reference monster pelts in a way that only works in the main game.
    • Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting.
  • Fixed an exception in "'Decoration-DoPopulationOfHoleTile' error at DebugStage 900" that could randomly happen during mapgen. I ran into this myself, it's just bad luck if it happened. But it should no longer be possible. I think it may have been related to starting a new map super fast after loading the game program, but I'm not positive.
  • Removed some remnant code that was still allowing you to install jobs into other jobs by clicking them in build mode.
    • This was likely to cause a variety of problems, but the most notable one is that you could try to put infinite wind generators into the machine tower, and spend the resource to do so while having nothing happen.
    • Thanks to dlipiec for reporting.
  • Fixed an issue during the prologue and early chapter one where you could recruit more androids than you could support, then needing to scrap some.
    • It now properly behaves like it used to, blocking you from recruiting anything that would take you over cap.
    • Thanks to Techbane for reporting.
  • Added some new logic options that allow me to make certain npc units target the closest possible building to what they are doing.
    • This is now used on all of the worker units, making it so that all of the cyberocracy and slum-clearing actions go vastly faster.
    • Thanks to Waladil for reporting.
  • Made it so that the PMC Impostors no longer use the "all slum buildings" logic, which is patently useless (and stupendously slow), but instead only use the "large buildings" logic that the predators use.
    • If someone were to use only PMC Impostors since they assumed a difference in violence level (reasonable, but inaccurate in this case), then they would move at a glacial pace instead of the intended pace. Lots of clearing of buildings with like 5 people in them, rather than only those with 800=1500 at a time.
    • Thanks to Waladil for reporting.
  • There is now visual clarity between rebel breachers and your workers (purple vs light blue, rather than both purple).
    • Thanks to Waladil for suggesting.

0.600 New Demo - The 151 (Days Since Last Demo)

(Released December 2nd, 2024)

  • Fixed a regression from over the weekend where if you tried to do the geothermal event with the PMC Impostor, and failed, then it would softlock you. You're supposed to be able to come back with a technician, but it was not letting you.
    • This also fixes busted saves retroactively, so that those can progress.
    • Thanks to Evil Bistro for reporting.
  • Fixed a demo-only bug where an exception would happen whenever shelter coordinators did their work, due to it trying to reference the housing agencies which are only in the main game.
    • Thanks to MOREDAKKA for reporting.

0.596.7 Tweaks

(Released December 2nd, 2024)

  • Updated the in-game links to point to this new set of release notes.
    • The prior set was something like 47 thousand words long, so it was time to split them.
  • Fixed some possible exceptions that could happen under rare circumstances for StreetSenseDataAtBuilding.ApplyAction()
    • Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting.
  • Rearranged a bunch of files and code so that things can properly be split out into demo and non-demo content, since it has been 151 days since the last demo update.
    • This has no effect on the game, but a lot of stuff is moved around in terms of xml files in particular, and more code gates are in place to prevent things from erroring.
  • Fixed an issue with the chapter one project about neuroweave still asking you to build 6 Neuroweavers, when really it is only advised that you build 4 (so that you have enough left for other purposes later).

Prior Release Notes

Chapter Two Initial Set

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