Preview: Summer Update 2024

Hello everyone!

Summer is here, and we’ll soon be heading out for our vacations. Before that, we’re still going to release an update which includes the Permadeath and Ironman game modes and a long list of smaller changes and improvements. This Summer Update is planned for release in a couple of weeks, and the update is already available in the Unstable version.

Permadeath & Ironman

Originally planned for the Blood in the Water update, these two game modes offer optional extra difficulty through limited respawning. In a nutshell, Permadeath means that the death of any character is permanent – your character will not respawn, but you can continue playing with a different character.

Ironman goes further and removes all respawning options, so every death is permanent. Ironman is intended for players who want to try a “ridiculously hard” mode and see how far they can get: once dead, you can only spectate, and hope that the rest of the crew will make it.

Ironman is pretty straightforward, but let’s take a closer look at how Permadeath works.

When your character dies, they stay dead, along with all their XP and talents. You will have to acquire a new character to respawn and continue playing. This can happen in two ways: you can wait to hire a new character for yourself from the next non-hostile outpost, or take control of a bot to resume playing right away. Either way, the new character you acquire is your character from then on, and you will not get your old dead character back at any point.

Once all bots have been used up, there will be no more respawning until you hire more characters. This means you will need to have the money to hire more characters, and access to an outpost with an HR Manager, which means particularly late-game areas will probably need some planning on Permadeath mode. We’re looking forward to hearing how this mode plays out for you in longer campaigns!

Finally, to make your expiry a more impactful experience, we’re introducing an improved death prompt. Besides adding some visual flair to dying, it tells you about the skill loss caused by your death and the respawning options available to you at that time. While the new death prompt is being added together with the Permadeath mode, it’s not dependent on which game mode you’re playing, so expect to see this post mortem popup whenever you die from now on!

Other changes

The Summer Update will also include many smaller improvements, fixes and additions. Below are some of our favorites.

Voice and text chat will now attract monsters! If you are trying to be sneaky and avoid danger, you will need to communicate quietly and carefully. Remember, sounds carry far in the water. (Don’t worry, though, the random chatter of bots will not alert enemies.)

Besides added danger, the changelog includes several quality-of-life additions, such as:

• Give items to other players by dragging and dropping.
• A ‘universal’ salary slider for the crew. Makes it easy to assign one salary % to the entire crew with one click of a button, rather than setting it one-by-one on crewmembers.
• Shorter outpost hallways and ladders to avoid very long ones from being generated.
• Turret auto-operate settings of custom subs now transfer to new turrets when you upgrade your sub’s weapons. Auto-operate settings can also be enabled/disabled via wiring during gameplay.
• Carrying turret ammo with one hand (which results in a 20% movement speed reduction but is still much handier than before).

Wrecks get a new mission type where your crew is tasked with eliminating a Thalamus infestation. Beacon stations also get some added variety: there are now multiple beacon stations where you can encounter bandits, and their gear also progresses as you get further into a campaign.

To modders: The bandit improvements to beacon stations were done using the Layer system, which we added in the previous update (to update a system we used to call Groups). Now we’ve made further improvements to Layers, and modders can make full use of them, too. Use Layers to group items together for easily applying/disabling custom items (decorative items as well as operable devices) and enemy spawnpoints for submarines, stations and wrecks.

We’ve made various balance and level generation improvements for this update:

• Multiple balance changes to handheld weapons, for example improvements to the grenade launcher and scrap cannon.
• Outposts now always offer at least one bot of each job your crew does not have, so you won’t be stuck without an electrician after an unfortunate encounter with a thresher swarm.
• Slightly more variation to the biomes, by for example tweaking level generation and fixing a visual issue where certain plants would not show up at all.

The update also fixes a potential softlock that could happen if you accidentally started a round in a level that’s too deep for the sub. The crush depth warnings on the campaign map now take the start/end position of the level into account, and the sub doesn’t take depth damage in the first minute of the round, giving you a chance to return if you end up in a level that’s too deep.

Finally, there’s a long list of bot AI fixes and improvements, like bots not taking off their diving suits while climbing, and no longer cancelling looping orders while outside of the sub. (more in the changelog)

As always, there are many smaller fixes and improvements coming that are not listed here, so stay tuned for the update and the full changelog in a little under two weeks. We hope you will enjoy the update and wish everyone a great summer!