Alpha 18 unstable test build is released

Started by Tynan, October 24, 2017, 01:45:47 AM

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Tynan

RimWorld Alpha 18 unstable version is now available on the 'unstable' branch in Steam.

This version is unstable. There will be bugs, imbalances, and other annoyances. It won't be as good as the final build. Your game may get ruined by something really dumb. The game will update with no warning and anything can break or change. Please only test if you're willing to put up with that!

To use the build: In Steam, click RimWorld -> Properties - > Betas tab -> select 'unstable' branch. Restart Steam if necessary.

To report feedback: I love to hear play stories, balance feedback, and so on. Please feel free to post feedback in this thread, or make another thread. I can't reply to everything but I do read everything and take notes. The most useful feedback reports what happened in the game, and is based on longer experiences. Suggestions are cool, but stories and bug reports are really the best!

Please only post feedback specific to things that are new in A18; long-standing issues, suggestions and discussions should not be posted here please.

To report bugs: A bug is when the game isn't working as designed. If you find a bug, please report it in the Bugs forum, following the instructions in the How To Report A Bug thread. Much appreciated - public bug reports are essential!

Compatibility: Saved games from vanilla Alpha 17 should still be loadable, though some things may change. It'd be great if players could report any bugs with loading A17 maps. Complex mods won't be usable. Very simple mods may still load.

Announcement: I'm not trying to spread the news wide because the game is still unstable; I'd rather get some dedicated test time from the dedicated players here first! So of course it's fine to talk about it, but I won't be spamming all the PR channels with this. I will be spamming them when the alpha is actually done.

Video makers: I won't stop anyone from making videos of Alpha 18 in its unstable form, though I'd prefer you didn't. The experience may not be up to the standards of the public builds, because it hasn't had that level of testing, and I don't want people getting the wrong impression.

-----

Rough features list:

-New swamp biomes: Swamp biomes are hard to move through due to choking vegetation, and hard to build in due to swampy terrain. Many new plants were added to fill out these and other biomes.
----Tropical swamp
----Temperate swamp
----Cold bog

-New incidents:
----Meteorite impact. A meteorite impacts, leaving a lump of mineable ore.
----Aurora. A beautiful aurora lights up the night sky, improving mood.
----Tornado
----Peace talks quest
----World refugee quest
----Prisoner rescue quest

-Storyful combat:
----A major rework of melee combat, and a new way to report all combat interactions. Storyful combat generates a combat log that reports each blow, miss, swipe, block and fall in the combat. During or after a fight, you can review the combat log to see what happened, to generate a richer story.

-Various research has been split up
----Gun research is now broken into several stages, so making advanced guns like assault rifles takes more research than making simple revolvers
----Melee weapon research is now broken into several stages

-New furniture
----Bedroll: Portable bed
----Dresser: Passively improves room
----Endtable: Passive improves room
----Various new table sizes

-New quest reward special items:
----Psychic emanator
----Vanometric power cell
----Infinite chemreactor
----Techprof subpersona core
----Healer mechanite superdose
----Resurrector mechanite superdose
----Orbital bombardment targeter
----Orbital power beam targeter

-Tribal content upgrade:
----Ikwa melee weapon
----War mask
----Tribal headdress
----Recurve bow
----Tribal hunter
----Tribal heavy archer
----Tribal berserker

-New world site components (used in various situations):
----Sleeping mechanoids
----Animal ambush
----Enemy ambush

-New mental breaks:
----Insulting spree. Randomly go around and insult people.
----Targeted insulting spree. Follow around a specific other colonist, insulting them repeatedly.
----Tantrum. Go around randomly smashing furniture, buildings, and damageable items.
----Bedroom tantrum. Go to your own room and randomly smash furniture, buildings, and damageable items.
----Targeted tantrum. Go to destroy a single, specific, randomly-chosen, valuable item or building.
----Sadistic rage. Melee attack prisoners for a while. Fists only. Only occurs when there are prisoners to attack. Does not attack downed prisoners.
----Corpse obsession. Dig up a corpse and drop it on a meeting spot table or in a random high-traffic area. The mental break then ends.
----Catatonic. Collapse on the spot into a downed state with a psychological breakdown. Recover some days later. This can be implemented by a "catatonic breakdown" hediff.
----Jailbreaker. Colonist goes to a random prisoner (who is capable of prison breaking), and upon doing a special "spark jailbreak" action with them, induces an immediate prison break in that prisoner.
----Slaughterer. Slaughter random colony animal(s) periodically.
----Murderous rage. Hunt down a specific colonist or prisoner (randomly chosen) and attempt to kill them by melee attack. Uses melee weapon or fists, as equipped. Keep attacking until the target is dead.
----Run wild. The pawn basically starts acting like an animal. You can tame him to try to get him to rejoin.

-New mental inspirations. Basically reverse mental breaks - these give temporary bonuses to colonists in high moods.
----Work frenzy (1 day): Global work speed 2.5x
----Go frenzy (1 day): Walk speed 1.5x
----Shoot frenzy (3 days): Shooting hit chance improved as though the pawn is 10 skill levels higher.
----Inspired trade
----Inspired recruitment
----Inspired surgery
----Inspired art

-World features like lakes, mountain ranges, and bays are now detected and named. Names are displayed in the world view.
-Caves now form sometimes in mountainous maps. Inside there are special cave plants. There can also be dormant insect hives.
-Many new tale types were added. So, the game will record many new types of events, and colonists can make art about them. Art descriptions should be much more diverse.
-Crop blights now appear and spread over time instead of instantly destroying crops
-Spaceship is now bigger and has one more component, the sensor cluster
-Spaceship quest ending phase: When going to the hidden space ship to finish the game, the game does not end instantly on arrival. The map generates with the ship intact. To take off, first you must power up the ship, which takes some days, during which you must survive raids.
-Space ship construction now requires advanced components, which have their own tech tree and production method
-Split pistol into revolver and autopistol
-Boomalopes can be milked for chemfuel
-Added chemfuel generator, which generates electricity from chemfuel
-Artillery works differently now. There is one type of mortar, which can fire any type of shell, with each shell creating a different effect. The shells are explosive, incendiary, firefoam, and antigrain (a special high-tech warhead).
-Seasonal latitudes: Seasons now more reasonably adjust depending on latitude. Instead of flipping at the equator, there is a seasonless crossover zone.
-Redesigned alert letter types and sounds to be more specific.
-Pawns can now be banished. This is analogous to abandoning pawns in caravans.
-Technical: The save file now contains the actual contents of the planet map, instead of just the seed to generate it. This speed up loading, makes forward compatibility possible, and makes it technically possible to modify the world map during play.
-Many many tunings, bugfixes, and redesigns.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog


lighthoof

Daaaamn!
Anti-breakes, blight rework an combat log sound fun AF )

{insert_name_here}

HYPEHYPEHYPEHYPEHYPEHYPEHYPEHYPEHYPEHYPEHYPEHYPEHYPEHYPE

Hooray for swamp biomes! Definitely going to try that out soon.
These new events look cool! Meteroite impacts and tornadoes sound interesting.
A combat log! Awesome!
These new quest reward items sound damn OP and super fun.
Nice to see new tribal stuff too!
Hooray! New ways for my colonists to go insane!
Mental inspirations? Interesting...

I specifically like the new mental breaks, blight improvements, changes to the ship world quest, named world features, swamp biomes, season changes...

So I basically like everything about this update. Thanks for so much awesome content!

I'd better binge-play Rimworld now until my A17 colony dies so I can get stuck straight into trying out all the awesome new features in Alpha 18!

Hessra

Oh shit, it's happening. Thanks for all the hard-work dudes !

{insert_name_here}

Oh by the way:

Quote from: Tynan on October 24, 2017, 01:45:47 AM
Announcement: I'm not trying to spread the news wide because the game is still unstable; I'd rather get some dedicated test time from the dedicated players here first! So of course it's fine to talk about it, but I won't be spamming all the PR channels with this. I will be spamming them when the alpha is actually done.

Sorry but I just sent messages out to two steam discussions and the announcement you made on the "Backstory in game" and "Pirate King" DLCs. Then I read this. Sorry, I'll try to not help the news spread like wildfire anymore.

ShadowTani

#6
Only problem I noticed with A17 saves so far is that any workbench projects will be frozen (pawn will be working on it infinitely without making progress), and that the geography and town locations will be significantly different (a caravan I sent to a nearby town about 5 days away prior to A18 is now on their way to a town somewhere else entirely, 17 days away, lol). All issues is easily fixed by canceling and/or restarting these tasks however.

I'll be starting a fresh A18 game once I get the time tomorrow though. As always, thank you for your work. :3

Edit1: Oh dear, the caravans location is also way off, they are days away from the main base, going to be hard to keep that starvation train afloat, lol.

Edit2: Figured out there's an option while in dev. mode to instantly transfer a caravan to a location, so for those not aware that's an option to resolve any caravan issues from A17 saves. It's not cheating when you're resolving a compatibility issue. ;3

BTW, I'm just reporting this to make people aware what to expect if they try to continue from an old save, obviously not expecting any fix, that's unnecessary.

Daimonin

Quote----Resurrector mechanite superdose

Is that... does that... that sounds like... a way to resurrect a dead pawn? Probably under some rather strict conditions (Or just super duper rare?)

Im really excited to see those new quests myself. More reasons to leave the base are always good.

notfood

#8
One thing I noticed from the get go. Mouse scroll zooming is way too slow compared to A17. It's really annoying.

Edit: It may be Linux only issue.

More details: Affects the overworld as well.

G7300

If "Shrek's Swamp" isn't a possible name, I am going to be annoyed...

Wanderer_joins

Tribal run, here i am :-) I love the new tribal items/ weapons/ apparels

A first thing i noticed is untrained colony animals are much more aggressive vs enemy animals (manhunter), and i guess enemies. Combined with the melee combat overhaul, my 3 cats crushed a manhunter packs of does (revenge), with a bit of help and healing in between.

And the names of some regions... https://imgur.com/a/HajP9

Yoshida Keiji

If I'm picking your brain right, I think you want players to experience stories. Correct? Then as a Lost Tribe exclusive player, I would like to get a "Virgin" planet. Maybe not entirely but,... all region names are already given. I think it would be more awesome if names are given by the factions "after" encountering said regions and naming them accordingly based on their colony experiences.

Personally, I would love to start at a Virgin region and as I send out caravans to either trade or expand into 5 outposts total, be able to "name" them based on "my" story.

fluxfaraday

Quote-Storyful combat:
... Storyful combat generates a combat log that reports each blow, miss, swipe, block and fall in the combat.

This is super cool.  One time I was playing Dwarf Fortress.  I had half my (low level) town building a bridge when a Minotaur wandered onto the island they were on.  I couldn't save them, so I left them to be killed, and they were.  Except for one dwarf.  That fight went on and on and on.  Finally something seemed absurd, the dwarf should have died ages ago, so I pulled up the combat log and discovered that the Minotaur had picked up and equipped a sock and was beating the dwarf with it.  A sock!  Socks don't do much more than bruise, even when wielded by a Minotaur.  I can't remember if I managed to save the dwarf, but the sock wielding Minotaur will be remembered.

Daimonin

Quote from: Wanderer_joins on October 24, 2017, 05:37:24 AM
And the names of some regions... https://imgur.com/a/HajP9

Oooh nice screenshot. Is it just me or do those rivers look a hell of a lot better too?

Agamidae

I have a lake called Small Ocean. Is it a bug or a feature?
https://imgur.com/7yewuu2