Unstable build feedback thread

Started by Tynan, June 16, 2018, 11:10:34 PM

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Tynan

An unstable build of the next version is available on Steam. Today I'm only announcing this for loyal forumgoers only. I'll be progressively publicizing this as the build stabilizes.


Warning:
-This is an unstable build. It will get updated without warning, may randomly break your savegame or become unplayable for periods. Please only test if you're willing to put up with some technical issues. There are some known bugs and we expect to find many more.

On topic:
This thread is for giving feedback and discussing the build as you've played it. Open-ended suggestions go in the suggestions forum, bugs go in the bugs forum. Questions, theorycrafting, and really low-effort posts are likely to get removed.

To access:
-In Steam Library, right click RimWorld -> Properties -> Betas tab -> select the unstable branch. Restart Steam and play.

Streaming:
-I'm not going to enforce it or be mad or anything, but I'd prefer if streamers would hold off streaming until the game is stable. I'd hate for bugs and imbalances to give a bad impression. That said, it's your choice.

Feedback:
-Feedback from play experiences is much much more worthwhile than theorycrafting. Please don't spend time giving a ton of feedback just from reading the changelist.
-I'd love to hear play stories in this thread or any other thread. (Play stories are often more useful than suggestions).
-Please report bugs in the bugs forum using the simple guide How To Report a Bug!
-If you have suggestions, we welcome them. Please post suggestions in the suggestions forum.

Unresolved issues:
-Back compatibility is a bit spotty, some buildings will vanish and you'll get errors here and there. We're still solving some back-compatibility issues. But, unmodded saves from B18 and probably A17 should load.

For translators:
-Extensive improvements have been made to the translation system. Read about them here.
-The "Translation report" button on the main menu will give a detailed text file which lists all the issues to be resolved with the current translation. Use it!
-Some unresolved issues remain: The backstory titles won't match right now. That's okay. We're going to change the game so they match automatically, so you can ignore this problem at the moment.
-I recommend Visual Studio Code for editing translations. It's called "code" but it's great for editing XML too. Just use it to open the translation folder.
-Collaborate on the translations forum.

Feedback request details:

A lot has changed, so it would be really good to get feedback game-wide. But especially on these topics:
General raid difficulty progression, noting that the system probably deploys its points more efficiently now and some high-cost pawn kinds were costed down.
How much wealth various colonies actually have. I'd love to see screenshots of wealth graphs of long games to help balance the "Expectations" thought thresholds.
Profitability of various crafting paths. Art should probably be better.
Ally assistance frequency and usefulness.
The difficulty and interest of the ship ending sequence.
The difficulty of training, maintaining, and using a large amount of animals both for economic and warfighting purposes.
The difficulty/balance of maintaining recreation and the clarity of the system.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Tynan

#1
List of major changes:

-Added bridges. You can build bridges over rivers and non-deep lake/ocean water. Bridges support all but the heaviest structures, can burn, and collapse under damage.
-Added new "Messages" section of the History tab. This section shows the last 200 messages and letters you've received.
-Added low-tech plate armor.
-New scenario: Naked Brutality - Start naked with no items.
-New main tab: Wildlife. Allows easy counting, finding, and designating of wild animals.
-Ship end sequence: Starting up the ship reactor now takes 15 days, during which you will be attacked constantly by desperadoes and mechanoids.
-New raid arrival mode: Multiple groups.
-New raid arrival mode: Enemy pods scattered all over the map.
-Split mechanoid scyther into scyther (close combat specialist) and lancer (fast sniper)
-Split tribal warrior into warrior (mid-range melee) and penitent (poverty melee, similar to drifter)
-Faction relations are now categorized as hostile/neutral/ally instead of just hostile/neutral. Allies will randomly send military aid and will respond to certain special requests.
-You can now offer gifts to improve faction relations by using transport pods, sending caravans, or giving gifts to their traders. Gifts can be silver, items, or slaves. No more magical teleporting silver gifts.
-Visitors of allied factions will now occasionally leave gifts before leaving.
-New buildings:
--Watermill generator: Generate power from moving water.
--Autocannon turret: Heavy medium-range turret.
--Uranium slug turret: Armor-penetrating long-range turret.
--Fabrication bench: Craft advanced components and some advanced tech items.
--Waterproof conduit: Transmit power under water for bases on both sides of a river.
--Butcher spot: Butcher without building a bench, at an efficiency penalty.
--Double sleeping spot: Sleep with your partner, even in crushing poverty.
-New traits:
--Undergrounder: Don't mind never seeing the sky, don't mind being in darkness.
--Great memory: Slower skill decay.
--Tough: Take less damage.
--Gourmand: Eat a lot, random eating binges, cooking skill bonus.
--Sickly: Get sick often.
--Quick sleeper: Take less time to sleep.
-New items:
--Flak pants
--Prosthetic heart
--Bionic spine/heart/stomach
--Archotech eye/arm/leg
--Tornado generator
--Patchleather: Poor-quality leather made from any combination of other leather
-New incident: "Wild man wanders in".
-New terrain: Soft sand - doesn't allow building medium or heavy structures.
-New designators: Mass-forbid and unforbid.
-Infestations now begin with the insects tunneling towards the colony, which gives the player time to respond.
-You can now write job titles for your colonists.
-New type of attack: Kick sand/water in eyes.
-Condensed leathers together into fewer types. Instead of a separate type for each animal, there are categories.
-You can now smooth natural rough rock walls into high-quality walls.
-Trained animal skills and tameness now decay over time. Animals can revert to the wild, depending on their natural wildness.
-Deep drill use will now sometimes cause insect attacks (by tunneling through the ground near the drill, with a warning).
-New edge shader for blueprints looks much nicer and more visible than before.
-Workbench bills can now be assigned to specific colonists.
-Added "Show what will buy" window which shows all items a trader will buy.
-Trees' color now depends on the current season.
-Added tainted-apparel thing filter.
-Increased prisoner recruitment chance and added a resistance which must be reduced to zero before recruitment can begin.
-Animals can now be renamed.
-Animals can now get diseases.
-Added an automatic destroyed building replacement toggle. When active, a destroyed building will leave behind a blueprint and be automatically rebuilt.
-Added translation report tool: Generates a report about the currently-loaded language data stating which translations are missing, which are unnecessary, and lots of other useful information.
-Added translation cleaner tool: Corrects many common problems in translation files and adds/updates English language reference for every string in the game.
-You can mass-toggle various checkboxes and drop-down selections by clicking and dragging the mouse over them.
-Workbench bills can now be copied and pasted.
-Colonists now opportunistically haul items while working if their current target is roughly in the same direction.
-The player can now request AI-core quests from allies.
-It's now possible to craft prosthetic and bionic body parts, grenades, and molotovs.
-It's now possible to mass-cancel all designations with a designator's right-click menu.
-It's now possible to forbid/unforbid all items and rearm all traps with a designator's right-click menu.
-You can now drag and reorder colonists in the colonist bar.
-Social interaction log now has flavorful randomized text instead of the same repeated interaction text every time.
-Mods page now has a search bar so you can easily find one mod in your list of hundreds.
-In some very bad situations, a mysterious Man in Black may arrive. Can he set things right in these parts?
-Armor system reworked into a 3-outcome system with armor penetration. The armor penetration of the weapon is subtracted from the armor value of the armor. This gives an effective armor rating, measured as a percent. We roll a RNG out of 100%. If the result is under half the effective AR, the hit is totally deflected. If the result is over half the effective AR, but under the effective AR, the hit is mitigated - damage is reduced by half and sharp hits are converted to bruise. If the result is over the effective AR, the hit passes the armor and applies normally. As before, armor is applied in sequence from the outside in. AR maxes out at 200%. Default armor penetration is 1.5% per point of damage, but some weapons vary from this.
-Totally reworked how plants grow; they now grow everywhere at once instead of reproducing plant-by-plant. Wild plants after several in-game years should now look more or less as good as at the beginning.
-Long-range mineral scanner can now be tuned to seek specific minerals, and must be worked by a researcher.
-Battles in the Combat tab are now named.
-Items of the same type in the Items tab are now grouped together.
-Items in the Items tab can now be sorted by mass, market value, etc.
-Instead of shooting them, hunters now execute downed creatures with a neck cut (except explosive creatures).
-When placing or selecting work stations where pawns can sit while working, the spot where the pawn goes is indicated by a chair outline so the player realizes that a chair can be built there.
-Removed tornado incident.
-Improved caravaning:
--Redesigned how world movement speed is fed back per-world tile.
--Pack animals now follow colonists to speed up the packing process.
--Added Caravan tab with caravan loading progress.
--Redesigned "Form caravan" window: stats like carried mass, caravan speed, days worth of food, and visibility are now explained better.
--Caravans now automatically forage for food while traveling.
--Added "Remove from caravan" command: remove people or animals from the caravan even if it hasn't left the map yet.
--Added "Load into caravan" right-click option: designate extra items to be picked up by the caravan before leaving.
--Caravan speed now depends on the carried weight.
--Caravan members now slowly gain social recreation when the caravan is not moving.
--Caravan visibility is now explicitly expressed and better explained than the old caravan stealth. This makes small caravans more relevant.
--Quest prompts now give much more information about what kinds of challenges to expect.
--When reforming a caravan, we now list colonists' inventory separately so the player can choose what to take and what to leave.
--Caravans who are not moving now have a lower chance of being attacked.
-Transport pods now have a contents list which allows removing things from the pod.
-Blunt weapons now have a chance to stun the target.
-Joy is renamed to 'recreation'.
-Using deep drills can cause insect attacks.
-Changed deep moving water to chest-deep moving water: walkable but slower than shallow water.
-Turrets are cheaper and more powerful, but now consume steel/uranium for maintenance after firing a lot.
-Character log now integrates log messages from combat and social interactions.
-Deadfall trap redesigned to Spike trap: Much more powerful with a 100% chance to spring on targets, and has armor penetration (depending on what it's made of) but requires resources to replace.
-Insects will now go into an insect-specific "hypothermic slowdown" instead of getting hypothermia and dying on the first winter.
-Alphabeavers incident now only occurs in biomes with sparse plants so they're not meaningless.
-The refugee from the "downed refugee" world quest can be instantly recruited by offering help.
-Removed scyther blade.
-Mechanoids now always die on downed.
-Doing passionate work now affects mood instead of recreation.
-Deep drills now yield stone chunks if no resource is below.
-Firefoam poppers will now pop whenever there's a fire in a 3-cell radius, instead of only when the fire touches them.
-Food poisoning now has three stages it moves through over the course of a day.
-Pawns hit by ranged attacks now stagger the same way as pawns hit by melee attacks. This effect only happens if the weapon's stopping power stat is equal or greater than the target's body size.
-Most crafting benches are now uninstallable and reinstallable.
-Removed shiv since it's basically a low-quality knife.
-It's now possible to craft knives at crafting spots.
-"autostart.rws" is now automatically loaded on start in dev mode, for faster testing.
-Techprof subpersona core now completes current research instead of random research.
-Combined rib body parts into rib cage.
-Reworked the "advanced map options" dialog layout, extreme game-breaking map sizes are now disabled by default and must be enabled in the options.
-Tribal factions can now do sapper raids.
-Added medical care column to the Assign tab.
-Removed shoddy and superior item qualities.
-Rebalanced and refactored quality generation. Masterwork/legendary level items never generate on enemies, traders, bases. Masterwork items are extra hard to craft, and legendary requires an inspiration.
-Removed the distinction between allowed areas and animal areas.
-Wearing new apparel now takes time. Colonists now take off the colliding apparel first (which takes time) before wearing the new one.
-Added minimum crafting skill to various weapon and apparel crafting recipes.
-Removed the requirement to pay fee to initiate the item stash quest.
-Various floors now require research.
-Settling very near another faction base will now cause faction relations loss every quadrum because of anger due to territorial encroachment.
-Fulfilling trade requests now gives goodwill.
-Destroying a faction base of a mutual enemy now gives goodwill.
-All traders are now unwilling to buy tainted apparel and short-life meals.
-Improved animal fleeing behavior
-No human enemies spawn with weapons above industrial tech.
-Charge lance is now craftable and usable by humans.
-Explosive weapons now explode when set on fire.
-Wood-powered fires and coolers no longer vanish when fuel is exhausted; they wait to be refueled.
-Tons of art has been redone and adjusted.
-Many, many other bugfixes, interface and balance adjustments
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Tynan

#2
Reserved.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

animagus_kitty

Quote-Minor starvation (below 25% severity) no longer causes miscarriages

Mis...carriages? What is this 'miscarriage' concept? I seem to have missed that update.

Tynan

Pregnant animals can miscarry since animal breeding was introduced (years ago).
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

animagus_kitty

That makes much more sense. I thought I'd missed a people-breeding update. I guess I haven't had issues with that particular problem, and it had never occurred to me that it was possible to miscarry.

Glad to see you're still working hard :) Always great to see an update.

Pizza Mode

So many things in there I want to try!
If I turn this on and start a new game will my pre-existing saves be at risk?

Robostove

Looks like a lot of great changes, especially glad to see how many of the QoL mods seem to have been integrated into the base game. Thanks Tynan!

Shotgunfrenzy

Wew, now the couple hundred annoying ones screaming where's 1.0 can quieten down a bit.... I hope

Razghul


ShadowTani

Hmm, from an initial glance at the changes it seems the economic game is going to be tougher now. Will be interesting to see how it all plays out. Can't play much this week though unfortunately, but something to look forward for next week then. :3

Quote from: Pizza Mode on June 17, 2018, 12:53:07 AM
So many things in there I want to try!
If I turn this on and start a new game will my pre-existing saves be at risk?

As long as you don't touch your old saves with the new version it shouldn't affect them.

Ser Kitteh

I once made a thread complaining about being unable to wear armor vests over tribalwear, lo and behold that's being fixed. Tynan you beautiful bastard you.

Stollie

Looks like some good changes, I'll play through a bit more and offer more feedback however...

After loading it up to take a look at the caravan forming options. I like the new interface details, very handy info, but to be honest  I was pretty underwhelmed about the caravan forming interface itself. I was kind of expecting something like being able to save templates based on this update having a big overhaul to caravans in general.

One of the common actions I usually do (and I'm sure most others do as well): -

1. Make a caravan with the same guys (good shooting/melee skills), the same amount of food (~5 days worth), some medical supplies + modded items and send them to a nearby event like a item stash, rescue etc.
2. Form a mining crew (with similar supplies) to get resources that are not available on your settlements map anymore.
3. Form a trading caravan with 2 guards my best negotiator and some burden animals.

It's fairly painful having to re-select the same people and same basic stuff every single time for the various scenario's and I often forget to grab something that would go with a caravan of that type every time while I'm adding all the other stuff thats not part of my basic template.

TLDR: I was hoping with this major update to caravan's that templates might actually be a thing to make using them for varius things less painful.

Third_Of_Five


Pizza Mode

Quote from: ShadowTani on June 17, 2018, 01:53:08 AM
As long as you don't touch your old saves with the new version it shouldn't affect them.
Ah thank you, I'll give unstable a shot then