Alpha Patch 0.0.9 is live!
We’re still improving colonists, including their relationships and interactions with each other.
We also implemented a few more quality of life improvements.
(By the way, while testing this build, I fixed an issue with mountable objects, like beds and chairs not saving their rotation. It’s fixed now, but the chairs that I placed while creating the station save are still broken)
New Crop Visuals
Victor updated the crop sprites. They’re now brighter with more clearly defined outlines.
Potatoes are no longer grown in bags
Vent Animations
Victor also made an animation for the wall vent being opened / closed.
The player shouldn’t have to click on an object to figure out basic states like: being online, powered, or actively producing something.
There is nothing to clever say about this. It’s a vent cover.
Floor Underhangs
Floors now have an “underhang”. It makes them feel less flat, and improves the visual appearance of the station.
Floors finally feel like they belong in the 3D world
Chef Changes
The chef will now automatically cook food dishes using available ingredients. You can still select individual recipes if you want to specify exactly which dishes your chef makes.
This change should eliminate some micromanagement. Our intent is for the chef to worry about the dish selection—not the player.
Feed everyone tomato soup. For every meal. Forever
Item Queue Priority
You can now adjust the item priority (both input and output) of hopefully all machines. This allows the player to control which machines get stocked first.
Maybe you really want your Bio-Tank restocked so that you can grow more colonists, but your colonists think it’s more important to keep the Nanobot builders loaded with metal.
This didn’t need to be a gif
Food Recycler
You can now select which resources the food recycler will use. This allows the player to grow a crop exclusively for biomass, like tomatoes.
In general, we like the biomass cycle: crops grow food -> food is recycled into biomass > colonists are grown with biomass.
But it became difficult to stockpile foods when your colonists would diligently load anything edible into a food recycler.
Appreciate your chef by melting their tasty spaghetti into biomass
Memories and Responses
I improved the back-end implementation of memories, morale modifiers, and speech bubble selection.
Memories are now based around a “source memory event”
A source memory event example would be “Dave is dead”. If both Ted and Bill see dead Dave, they won’t receive an additional secondhand memory when someone talks about Dave’s body. Additionally, a colonist who learns about dead Dave through conversation will not receive an additional memory when they see Dave’s body, because they already knew about Dave being dead, so the information isn’t new.
Morale modifiers from conversation are now based around the source memory event, regardless of how a colonist acquires a memory. Previously, the morale modifier was based around the relationship that the listener has with the talker.
Similarly, the selected speech bubbles are now determined based on listener relationship to the colonist involved in the source memory.
Patch Notes
What is New
[Graphic] Crops have new visuals
[Graphic] Created more thought bubbles
[Graphic] Wall vents now have animations when opened and closed
[Graphic] Adjusted the looks for a few corner paint pieces
[Graphic] Added an underhang to flooors
[Graphic] Minor UI changes
Food recycler now has an item filter for accepted food to recycle.
Chefs now automatically create recipes, based on available resources.
Machines now have an increase/decrease priority button. Use it to stock a machine sooner or later.
Second-hand memories morale modifiers are now based on the relationship to the colonist in the source memory
Second-hand memories now have different text than their first-hand source memory.
Response speech bubbles are now automatically determined based on relationship to the colonist in the source memory.
Bug Fixes
Fixed various issues with some objects not being saved correctly
Unpowered farms can no longer be used to grow crops (and crops will receive periodic damage while unpowered)
Fixed a bug where room color would instantly change when rooms were merged
The food recycler output hatch no longer visually moves when going from 0 food to 1 food.
Colonists will no longer modify their relationship values when seeing a dead colonist.
Fixed a bug with window tabs behaving strangely
Fixed some issues with Object Attributes and selecting the correct item when multiple items had the same attribute
Next Week / Patch
This week (for next patch) we’re working on a fighting system. The goal is to get colonists to a point where they can use weapons and murder their enemies.
Depending on how quickly that gets done, I’d like to implement a vandalism system and the socialize need.
The overall goal is to get colonists to a point where they do “bad things” when their morale is low.
Thanks for reading
- Tyler
