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matti_ifs

First Lieutenant
Iceflake Studio Dev
Aug 5, 2019
252
97

Changelog - “Free Update 1” - 4th of January 022​

Version number​

Steam / Epic / Paradox Plaza: 1.21.3.1473

General​

  • Added Demolish and Repair modes to the game.
    • These modes allow you to set buildings to be Demolished or Repaired faster.
    • With a keyboard and mouse these can be accessed by selecting the button from the bottom left corner and then selecting each building you wish to either Demolish or Repair.
    • With a controller these can be accessed by pressing the button that controls the camera and then pressing the respective buttons visible on the screen.
    • The modes are exited the same way as you would cancel placing a building.
  • Gate Combat now gives you rewards if you win the combat.
    • Resources will be given both from winning the actual Gate Combat and from winning the combat if the bandits breach the Gate.
  • Added a new tech to all ideologies to the game that allows you to upgrade your Metal Auto-Extractor to a Magnetic Separator.
    • This building is used to produce Rare Metals from underground metal deposits around the colony.
    • After upgrading to the Magnetic Separator you can choose from the building’s info panel which resources you want it to produce, Rare Metals and Metal or Metal and Junk.
  • New difficulty setting has been added to the game.
    • You can now choose Very Hard settings in the pregame selections.
    • These selections include:
      • More difficult catastrophes that occur more frequently.
      • A dryer colony with smaller and fewer deposits around it.
      • Limited starting resources and colonists.
      • Limited water and energy production values.
  • The Twitch integration has been worked on and it should now be working without issues.
    • Enabling this will allow the viewers in your chat to vote which option they would choose in an event or a quest but you as the player can still make the choice.
    • Your viewers can also vote on which catastrophe will be occurring next - you as the player cannot change the outcome of the vote but instead will have to experience the catastrophe chosen by the voters.

Gameplay​

  • Fixed an issue with the notification for the Main Quest storyline that caused it to show misleading information.
    • Previously this notification would tell you to go to the Bunker’s construction zone despite the quest being in a state where you should wait until you have gathered more knowledge.
    • The notification should now show the current task correctly.
  • The colonists working as Guards and the Specialists should now prioritize targets for combat better.
    • This change should now make them automatically change target during combat if for example there are new targets closer to them or if they are moving towards the target and the target moves.
    • The Guards and Specialists will still follow the command given by the player with the highest priority.
  • Guards and Specialists will now also react to hostiles from a greater distance.
  • Fishing buildings can no longer be placed too close to each other.
    • This change affects the Fishing Pier, Fishing Hut and the Aqua Farm.
    • These buildings will now need to be placed further away from each other.
    • The area that prevents placement of another fishing building is shown when the building is placed.
  • Fixed an issue that caused the Epic exclusive flag to not show in the Epic version of the game.
  • Fixed an issue that would cause the Main Quest to become stuck if a side quest was also active at the same time with certain steps.
    • This fix will sadly not repair previous saves with this issue but it will prevent the same issue from occurring again.
  • Added a button to the building info panel that allows you to duplicate the building.
  • New hotkeys have been added to the game to be used when a building or a construction zone is selected.
    • The following buttons have been added with the default hotkeys shown here:
      • Pause the building or construction zone - P
      • Repair the building - Comma
      • Upgrade the building - Period
      • Duplicate the building - V
      • Destroy the building or cancel the construction zone - Del
  • Specialists should now start scouting and combat with bandits in a blocked sector with queued movement.
    • Previously they would stop at the edge of the sector and they would have to be commanded to do the action again.
  • The Main quest will no longer advance if the player builds a regular outpost to the desert biome.
    • The game now checks that the outpost is an Engineer outpost before allowing the quest to advance.
  • Colonists will now take resources into the buildings that produce resources instead of dropping them off to the corner of the building.
  • Fixed an issue that would cause the game saves to be broken in certain situations.
    • This issue was caused by a conflict with the building references so this issue would only happen in very specific situations..
  • The Help Menu will now show the header and the button prompts in the correct language instead of English.
  • Fixed an issue in the game that caused colonists to remain stuck due to trying to find a new path and failing.
  • The Transport Outpost no longer shows the status of a convoy if nothing is being transported.
  • Housing buildings will now show the work areas for buildings that generate heat.
    • This should help with placing housing buildings in areas that are already heated.
  • Colonists should no longer get the “slept on the ground” happiness penalty when they are sleeping in Crowded Tents or Crowded Emergency Shelters.
  • Changed an attack from the bandits into an attack by rats that occurred in the colony.
    • Previously it would be bandits that attacked from the woods behind your colony.
    • Now the attackers will be rats instead.
    • You should no longer experience any bandit attacks from the woods, only from the gate.
  • Fixed an issue that caused the Heavy Tarps tech to show the Improved Tenement as a building the tech affects.
    • This should have shown the Crowded Tent instead.
  • Fixed an issue that caused the game to center to the old position of the Campsite or its upgrades if the building was demolished and built again somewhere else.
  • Fixed an issue that caused the Specialist to slide instead of running to their queued task on the World Map.
  • The Energy overlay is now shown when the Lightning Rod or Tower is being placed.
  • Fixed issues with the New Eden and the Bread and Circuses achievements that prevented them from being unlocked normally.
  • The panel for Bandits on the World Map now shows the correct health for individual bandits and group health.
    • The amounts were previously in the wrong positions.
  • The Survival Skills tech now also affects the Fishing Pier and the Fishing Hut.
  • The floater on top of animal carcasses should now be positioned on top of the carcass.

Graphics​

  • Several buildings have been reworked and now look different than before.
    • The following buildings have been reworked: Mechanic Shop, Tailor and its upgrade Grand Tailor, General Storage, Forester, Maintenance Depot, Mill, Outhouse and its upgrade Toilet, Recycler and its upgrade Advanced Recycler, Cemetery, Trapper and its upgrade Hunting Cabin.
  • Icons used to indicate conditions of a colonist have been updated.
  • Fixed an issue that caused the World Map roads to not be visible.
  • The colonist info shown in the Statistics has been updated to look visually similar to the colonist info panel shown when a colonist is selected in the colony.
  • Updated the building thumbnails in the Build Menu to visually match their 3D models.
  • Adjusted the visual look of the Fertility Overlay.
  • The Carrot, Soy and Wheat crop textures no longer have white borders around their leaves.

Balance Adjustments​

  • The amount of deposits in the colony have been balanced.
    • There are now similar amounts of individual deposits in each difficulty option.
    • The difference between difficulties is now more visible in the amount of resources in each deposit.
  • The amounts of Rubble in Concrete deposits and Debris in Metal deposits have been increased.
  • The Cookhouse and the Mess Hall now use more resources to create meals but they produce the meals faster.
  • Soybeans now take more time to grow in the fields.
  • Decreased the amount of Peanuts harvested from fully grown fields slightly.
  • The Large Solar Panel now produces more energy.
  • The Water Well’s work area has been enlarged.
  • Changed the resources needed to build Happiness buildings.
    • More advanced Happiness buildings now also cost more resources but they also produce more happiness to the colony.
  • The amounts of Prestige points needed to unlock different decorations have also been increased.
  • All three levels of Weapons are now worth less Silver when being traded.
  • The size of the Work Area of the Maintenance Depot can now be enlarged even more than before.
  • The cost of the level 1 tool in the Grand Toolshop now matches the cost in the regular Toolshop.
  • The rate at which societies now update their offerings has been slowed down.
  • Societies will also now offer slightly less currency for all resources.
  • Most food resources are also now worth less Silver when being traded to other societies.
  • The animal carcasses can now be harvested for less meat.
    • This affects all wild animals in the colony.
 
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I'm going to have to experiment with all of these, but ...

You slowed Peanut and Soybean production AND increased the amount of veggies per Meal? Are you TRYING to starve us out? (Edited now that I'm finally in game: HOLY [expletive deleted]! You DOUBLED the meat/veggies per Mixed Meal?!? Are you out of your minds!?! I knew they were too good, but isn't this overkill?)

You gave us a way to produce Rare Metals locally but it means cutting your Junk production, which means making a lot fewer Parts and thus Sturdy Tools? I'm dubious that this is a good trade-off.

Less meat per wild animal carcass is potentially going to REALLY hurt during the very early turns.

And I'm going to have to see just how much import potential I lost when you cut the price other colonies pay for guns. That could end up really hurting medical supplies during the mid-game. (Edited now that I've checked: Am I remembering the old numbers right? Did you seriously cut the sale price for Assault Rifles by 75% to 80%?)
 
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Will applying this update require starting a new game?
No need, your old saves should work without issues. If this is needed, we will always make sure that it is the first thing visible on the patch notes! :) And of course we are doing our best to ensure that old saves will always work!

@InfamousBrad Heya! Indeed a lot of changes here - any and all feedback is of course very much appreciated. While these changes might seem really drastic, we are doing these based on the player feedback we have received since the release and we have done our best to try and make these changes so that they would make the game a bit more difficult but in no way impossible but instead ensure that the game does not get too easy at a specific point - for example, a lot of our players have reported that after a while the food production is in no way an issue and instead they have thousands of units of food - so some of these changes were made to try and balance the food production itself.

Again - any and all feedback is very much appreciated, so please do let us know how you feel these changes have affected the game! :)
 
@Joanna_ifs, Okay, here's some specific feedback, after spending most of the day trying to rebalance my food supply. (Don't worry, I had plenty of podcasts to listen to.) Literally just my food supply took up my whole time, everything else was mostly cosmetic. Colony population fluctuating between 300 and 330, difficulty 75%, Survival ideology.
  1. One Fishing Hut (which I admit was too good) got replaced by 2 Hunters cabins and either 4 Fishing Huts or 2 Aqua Farms. (I tried adding Ranches to the mix. They made things worse, not better.) The transition sucked, but once I got it done, that's not so bad.

  2. Interestingly, while my food supply was completely out of balance, I got desperate enough to throw up 3 Insect Farms growing Mealworms and converted one of my Mess Halls to Insect Meals ... and very nearly fed the whole colony off of that. A couple of more Insect farms and 4-5 mess halls and I absolutely could have done it, at a way lower resource cost and on way less land than what I ended up with. But ... every single colonist dropped to 75% nutrition at best, and never got better. I have no idea what the long-term consequences of that would have been. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why going from 4-dot yield 1-dot growth to 3-dot yield and 3-dot growth had the effect of almost quadrupling my food output. Either way, the mess halls were using 8 food and 2 wood -- is the 3rd ingredient still that much of a drag on production?

  3. Trying to balance Greenhouses (or fields, or to a lesser extent, mess halls) off of Production Limits was really frustrating, because they all start simultaneously and therefore produce nothing for long spans of time then huge amounts at once. Making for VERY bursty, and heard to measure, production and consumption. With endless fiddling (and despite some back of envelope calculations that were wildly wrong and I don't know what my mistake was), I got it balanced at 15 soybean greenhouses, 13 flax greenhouses, and 1 herb greenhouse, to fuel 6 mess halls and 2 medicine labs.

  4. Logging Camps scaled evenly with Mess Halls: one Logging Camp per 2 Mess Halls, rounded up. As soon as I added the 5th mess hall, I needed the 3rd logging camp. It's amazing how little difference the Boosted Burners made. Not for the first time, I really wish you'd make Mess Halls run on electricity instead of firewood.
(Can we have a discussion, by the way, about the over-the-top resource costs of Medicine and Iodine Pills? Because that was also straining the heck out of my food production.)

That's one greenhouse per 10 people. That seems reasonable to you? Is that how many you ended up with in your internal testing?
 
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As Joanna said, these changes are meant to challenge the players especially later in the game, where we've received a ton of feedback about it becoming too easy and boring. Late game food was too easy to produce in vast quantities, trading weapons meant you had silver to buy anything you wanted and so on. Some of the changes are rather drastic as you correctly pointed out, but small increments wouldn't have made a significant difference. We realize it will get some adjustment to get used to, so do give them some time. But again, thank you for your comments - your replies are very in-depth and contain a good reasoning why you like or dislike the things you write about.

1. Fishing huts were too easily exploited even on a small lake, which was never the intention. Glad you're diversifying!
2. The colonists now work much more efficiently with more "complex" productions but it does indeed slow down the production. We're still tweaking the final yields and production cycle timing to create a good curve from early game "easy to produce, doesn't give a lot" food to the better and more complex ones in the late game.
4. Energy-based Mess Halls could be a building upgrade, a new building or something else, we'll keep that in mind.
 
On the aesthetic changes, almost purely subjective, from worst to best:
  1. Seriously hate the cemetery change, because it makes it harder to tell when it's about to fill up.
  2. Actively disliked the new repair depot, it's boring compared to the old one with that had its own lighting and that cute little red toolbox.
  3. Sort of grudgingly got used to the general storage change. (It fills the space better, but the old one had character, looked more like something that had been dragged out of a ruin.
  4. Can't really tell the difference with the trapper/hunter cabin.
  5. Or the recyclers.
  6. Am indifferent to the machine shop change, I like both designs equally well.
  7. Sort-of liked the forester changes.
  8. Loved the tailor/grand tailor shop changes, with their gorgeous display windows. The originals looked like a place that just sold fabric.
Didn't check the toilets, outhouses, or mill, since I'd already outleveled the first two and don't use the third.
 
Consoles just got 1.04 update, I'm assuming this is the equivalent? I can't access the magnetic separator, and the game has un-researched conveyor belts? It will also not allow me to relselect the research and it seems to have fused them together. Is this a problem with ideology getting in the way?
Thank you so much for adding a way to farm rare metals in colony! I scoured the wastland an only had 3 rare metal depots. This change is most celebrated! (now if only I can access them)

Great changes all around I think. I knew guns were gonna take a price hit, happy I drained all the silver from my neighbors before they started asking why they buy them for so much.
Also fishing nerf makes sense, fishing was way too imbalanced, I no longer feel like an idiot for trying other food options.
I miss the old general storage, I really liked using a shipping container as a heavily sealed storage capsule, but I'll get used to it.
A request: Could we get something to sink our excess reasearch into? Maybe Repeatable researches or just trade it for silver? On that note can we get something to sink our extra silver into? The other societies produce so little, I buy up eveything they have and still make a profit.
Thanks for everything! You guys rock!
 

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That's my bad, the tech nodes are overlapping each other with the ideology tech (Conveyor Belts) and rare metals. So yes, your ideology "gets in the way" quite literally. This'll be fixed in the next update.
 
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That's my bad, the tech nodes are overlapping each other with the ideology tech (Conveyor Belts) and rare metals. So yes, your ideology "gets in the way" quite literally. This'll be fixed in the next update.
Awesome, thanks for the reply! That's what I get for putting industry before my people, they just flat out refuse to build me that shiny new building! I'll jot this down as a simple workers strike. Hopefully it will blow over soon so I can build them a new arcade. That should take their mind off things.
 
C'est ma faute, les nœuds technologiques se chevauchent avec la technologie idéologique (bandes transporteuses) et les métaux rares. Alors oui, votre idéologie « gêne » littéralement. Ce sera corrigé dans la prochaine mise à jour.

That's my bad, the tech nodes are overlapping each other with the ideology tech (Conveyor Belts) and rare metals. So yes, your ideology "gets in the way" quite literally. This'll be fixed in the next update.
The tech tree is very slow on xbox one s. The game is starting to become fluid, I send you lots of courage to finalize this fluidity perfectly.