Hello everyone!
2023 is almost over, and what a year it has been: We’ve reached our long-awaited version 1.0, then version 1.1, and now we are closing in on patch version 1.2, still to be released next week before we head out for our Christmas break.
This Winter Patch focuses on quality-of-life changes, fixes and improvements, while we work on more content to come in later updates. There’s some new content coming in this patch as well, though: We’re adding five new talents for the Assistant, and eight new traitor events, including new multi-traitor events.
For our more ambitious naval architects, we have an exciting and long-requested new feature in this patch: Rotatable structures in the submarine editor. This should give you a lot more freedom in what you can create, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with!
In fact, we heard through the ballast flora that one of our long-time Unstable testers had taken a head start with structure rotating while the feature was still being tested, and created this sub before the changes even made it to the stable version:
Another nifty improvement is being able to buy items straight to your inventory from outpost merchants. That means no more waiting for the next round to start to get your things, or rushing to the cargo bay to secure your goods before someone else does. In the long run, this will also likely reduce the number of empty metal crates lying around.
You can still order items delivered to your sub the old-fashioned way if you want to, and you can also turn off this option entirely in the server settings.
With newfound freedom come new responsibilities, or at least more vigilant law enforcement officers: We’ve made outpost security better at catching thieves. They will perform random checks for stolen items in your inventory, see through windowed doors and walls, and notice if you’re visibly carrying or wearing any stolen items. They are particularly likely to search you if your reputation gives them reason to be on the lookout for any unlawful activity.
We’ve also taken a look at how skills are gained, fixed a few bugs and exploits and done an overall balance pass. We’ve aimed for an “easy to learn, hard to master” progression: Higher skill levels will now be slower to reach, while the earlier levels will go by faster than before. Additionally, skill EXP sources have been revised a bit: practical tasks like welding will give more experience, while fabricating will now increase your skills less than before. These changes are fairly minor and should simply mean less grinding to level up your skills.
There are many other smaller improvements coming as well, such as…
- Multiple fixes to lighting issues, such as lights shining through obstacles, turret lights disappearing, and lighting artifacts in rooms with intersecting walls.
- Adjustments to level layouts: made the downward sloping of levels a bit more apparent and added some new verticality to levels.
- Options for hiding and/or reporting inappropriate servers from the server list.
Finally, there’s a long list of bugfixes, and various optimizations including but not limited to:
- Fixed a memory leak when starting a new game session.
- Fixed firing turrets causing performance issues in some situations.
- Optimized labels (especially large labels with scaled down textures caused issues).
- Adjusted culling to hide more items outside camera view.
- Optimized situations where bots idling, looking for paths, caused performance issues particularly while aboard colonies.
Happy holidays!
Once the Winter Patch is released, we will stick around for a little while longer to see if it needs fixing, and generally to wrap up the year. After that, we’ll take a couple of weeks off and be back at our desks in January.
We hope you will enjoy the quality-of-life changes and small additions in the patch next week, and wish you a relaxing holiday season, whichever celebrations that entails in your part of the world.
See you next year!
Sarawut Nakkoed
Hello
Sarawut Nakkoed
Yea