Update Information:
Hi friends!
Our final upgrade in the Quality of Life series has arrived… presenting: QoL Mk III! As always, we're extremely grateful for all the detailed feedback and intense support you’ve given us. We've got some big improvements for you this time:
First off, we've overhauled the Disease system. Overall, Duplicant sickness is simpler and more frequent, and can be successfully managed with adequate medicine infrastructure and doctoring time. Germs still work pretty much how you remember them, although Duplicants’ sickness has since been streamlined. Dupes no longer have an “immune system”, but instead simply have a chance to get sick each time they encounter germs of different types. Actually being sick is also a much simpler affair: Infected Duplicants will continue performing their duties in the colony, but the side effects from the disease will reduce their efficiency until cured.
Next, we've turned Jobs into Skills. Although we liked the "job" metaphor, it didn't really match the mechanics of the system, so we renamed it to "Skills" and tweaked many of the surrounding features to be more consistent with the idea of awarding new skills to your Duplicants. Morale Expectation is now accumulated per skill earned, so you’ll get to make a meaningful choice between how specialized or general a particular Dupe's skill set will be as your colony grows!
There have also been a bunch of fixes and additions to fill gaps and correct balance issues: The Steam Turbine has had an overhaul (it condenses the steam internally now!), there is a new Ice-E Fan which replaces the Hydro Fan (with an associated Ice Maker for producing ice!) and new structures for moving solid materials around both by Duplicant-power and with conveyor buildings. Additionally, we've added some new overlays, tweaked tool filters, and fixed a whole bunch of bugs and UI issues.
And with this Upgrade now in your hands, we're full steam ahead towards release! Further details can be found in our roadmap, but rest assured we're not done with this game yet, and will continue absorbing your feedback and making the best mad science experiment urine-powered rocket factory colony management game that we can!
There have been some major changes to the game this Upgrade and we can't extend a big enough “Thank You!” to everyone who has given feedback on the testing branch, but we’ll try anyway - Thank You!
What's New and Improved?
Major Disease rebalance
- Sicknesses are more frequent but less deadly
- Immune System removed, germs have direct chance to infect
- New Medical skills and hats
- New Sick Bay and Disease Clinic buildings
- Medicine redesigned
- Food Poisoning and Slime Lung tweaked
- Allergies and Zombie Spore germs and sicknesses added
Jobs/Skills Overhaul
- Jobs system is now the Skills system
- Experience is now gained up front and then spent on Skills
- Skills Screen (formerly Jobs Screen) displays acquired skills per-Dupe
- Morale Expectation is cumulative per skill learned, rather than tiered
- Freely assign a Duplicant's hat from all the hats they've earned
Major Building Changes
- Steam Turbine total rebuild, it now condenses steam internally, and port and power behavior is much more consistent
- New Sporechid flower appears in the Oil biome, and releases harmful germs
- New Skill Scrubber building to reset skill points
- New Ice Maker to create ice from water
- Cooling Fan replaced with Ice-E Fan, the Dupe-powered method of cooling an area
- New Conveyor Shutoff Valve
- New Conveyor Chute
- New Automatic Dispenser
- New Material Overlay screen
New Integrated Mods System
- Publish and download all mods from the Steam Workshop, or install locally in your Documents folder
- Support DLL, worldgen, element, codex, and strings mods
- Translations still supported, with no changes to existing mods necessary
-
In-game menu for enabling and reordering mods
For the full patch notes, please view the full update page!
Spoiler
Change List:
New and Notable Features
Major Disease rebalance
- Sicknesses are more frequent but less deadly
- Immune System removed, germs have direct chance to infect
- New Medical skills and hats
- New Sick Bay and Disease Clinic buildings
- Medicine redesigned
- Food Poisoning and Slime Lung tweaked
- Allergies and Zombie Spore germs and sicknesses added
Jobs/Skills Overhaul
- Jobs system is now the Skills system
- Experience is now gained up front and then spent on Skills
- Skills Screen (formerly Jobs Screen) displays acquired skills per-Dupe
- Morale Expectation is cumulative per skill learned, rather than tiered
- Freely assign a Duplicant's hat from all the hats they've earned
Major Building Changes
- Steam Turbine total rebuild, it now condenses steam internally, and port and power behavior is much more consistent
- New Sporechid flower appears in the Oil biome, and releases harmful germs
- New Skill Scrubber building to reset skill points
- New Ice Maker to create ice from water
- Cooling Fan replaced with Ice-E Fan, the Dupe-powered method of cooling an area
- New Conveyor Shutoff Valve
- New Conveyor Chute
- New Automatic Dispenser
- New Material Overlay screen
New Integrated Mods System
- Publish and download all mods from the Steam Workshop, or install locally in your Documents folder
- Support DLL, worldgen, element, codex, and strings mods
- Translations still supported, with no changes to existing mods necessary
- In-game menu for enabling and reordering mods
Fixes and Improvements
Duplicants and Critters
- Slimelung and Food Poisoning no longer send Dupes to bed
- Separated sicknesses and diseases into two systems
- Added Medicine attribute to Duplicants
- Fixed crash if multiple Dupes interrupt what they are doing to perform the same fetch chore
- Unsuited Dupes walking underwater are no longer limited by distance but will travel more slowly
- Unsuited Dupes will strongly prefer not to walk underwater if possible
- Fixed Duplicants not being able to pass through a door that has no floor
- Fixed Duplicants not being able to jump onto horizontal doors on the cell below
- Added a hat for the Plumbing skill
- Duplicants can correctly move past a locked horizontal door if they have to jump down on to it
- Fix Duplicants getting stuck trying to walk through a locked door if the door is floating
-
Falling Duplicants will land on any surface they would be able to walk on: open doors, Pitcher Pumps, Gantries, etc.
- Critters can now also walk on these surfaces
- Slicksters will hover over these surfaces
- Duplicants no longer get stuck trying to pass through a door with dirt in it
- Squeamish and Care traits are mutually exclusive
- Gastrophobia and Gourmet traits are mutually exclusive
- Critters will now never walk through a door set to "auto" even if a Duplicant is passing through it
- Critters will always be able to walk through a door set to "open"
- Fix crash when applying a visual accessory to a Duplicant (i.e. hat)
- Flying critters won't navigate through water locks
- Added sound effects for Shove Vole being groomed and growing up
- New cough animation for Slime Lung sickness
- Slime Lung coughs once again put Slime Germs into the air
- Added coughing sounds to Slimelung cough
- Puft blinking and tail flapping sounds
- Biohazardous and Germ Resistant traits alter germ susceptibility in the new system
- Rocket Piloting skill enables using the Command Module
- Rocket Navigation skill improves rocket mission durations
- Gassy Moo voice added
- Duplicants will never sneeze while taking medicine
- Added sounds for Gas Grass
Buildings
- Removed Pharma Chamber -- replaced with Disease Clinic
- Solar Panels and Space Scanners have a smaller audible radius
-
Apothecary makes new pills to cure the new sicknesses
- Basic Cure cures Food Poisoning
- Intermediate Cure cures Slime Lung
- Fixed positioning of logic port on doors
- Filters and Buffers now operate on a precise number of ticks rather than scheduled time
- Several buildings and machines now have insulated storage to prevent stored materials from exchanging heat with the world
- Fixed crash when building replacement ladders or poles
- Changed the colour in paintings to match the new colour of the Oxygen Diffuser
- Duplicants will now hold their breath if in an unbreathable area when low on oxygen
- Fixed visual layering of automation memory gate
- Sensors now have correct logic strings
- Fixed bug where Auto-Sweeper stops transferring items from Conveyor Rails
- Duplicants should no longer infinitely eat small amounts
- Increase material cost and construction time of Conveyor Bridge
- Fixed typo in Canister Filler description
-
Deprecated buildings now have a status item indicating that they are obsolete
- Astronaut Training Center has been deprecated
- Hydro Fan has been deprecated
- The old Steam Turbine has been deprecated
- Pharma Chamber has been removed
- Med Bed renamed to “Triage Cot” and is now only used to heal health damage
- Fixed crash when loading a building with recipes queued that have been removed from the game
- Command Module and Tourist Module are better at detecting when a Gantry is added/removed
- Dead batteries will no longer provide power to transformers
- Transformers draw as much power as possible from generators, rather than being limited by the weakest generator
- Fixed Smart Battery description being reversed from the actual behavior
- Drywall placement uses the "small" placement sound
- Steam Turbine can now be tuned up
- Can now rename storage lockers
- Grooming Station and Shearing Station no longer work outside of a Stable
- Ranching attribute increases the duration of the Groomed effect
- Triage Cot now has a slider to determine at what Health duplicants will come to get healed
- Wall Flower Pot uses normal rotation (with "O" key) instead of weird autorotation
Elements and Objects
- Bleachstone sound effects are quieter and cut each other off less often
- Placebo Medicine and Vitamin Chews have been removed
- Buddy Bud artwork no longer low-res looking
- Fixed a bug where materials created inside buildings could sometimes be "stolen" by that same material sitting on the ground in front of the building
- Ore falling onto ground/into water is less loud at fast game speed
- Added sounds to Printer packages
-
Atmo Suits will now store any Dupe "emissions" and release them when the suit is removed
- Dupes who pee or puke in their suit will get a "soiled suit" status
- Suits no longer decrease Bladder gain
- Atmo Suits no longer transfer disease with their contents when unequipped
- Buddy Bud and Bristle Blossom release Floral Scent germs which give non-allergic Dupes a stress benefit
- New medicine artwork
- Always show a progress bar on the Geyser once Analysis has begun
Menus and UI
- Improved Duplicant side panel to group related information together
- Improved ordering of decor plants in the Flower Pot
- Added custom game setting to disable care packages
- Fixed crash where prioritize tool was trying to display priority of a chore that had already been destroyed
- Sliding side screens now consistently handle decimal places
- Fixed crash when using labels on Duplicant portraits
- Returned focus to the game after editing a text box
- Removed 'Enter Text' placeholder string in empty text boxes
- Fixed crash in assignable side screen if an assignable building is selected when user clicks on "new printables" notification and selects something to print
- Adjusted blueprint select screen to better layout accept and reject buttons
- Added UI icons for errands
- Fixed missing hotkey on logic switches
- Added right click, middle mouse and ASDW scroll to the full-screen menus
- Fixed right-click not closing full-screen menus
- Side screen now displays the correct text when selecting a Smart Battery for the first time
- Fixed button spacing to support ‘Disable Autoharvest’ with new fonts
- Updated Russian translations
- Fixed crash on Daily Stress panel on the Duplicant info
- Fixed crash when connecting automation wires to a building
- Fixed crash when clicking critters in the Database
- Tools with a selected filter display that filter on the hovercard
- Wire Bridges can be affected by the Power filter for Deconstruct/Cancel
- Aptitudes are correctly described on the Duplicant
- Always show the "World" custom game setting, to allow mod worlds to be loaded without debug enabled
- Spaceborne Duplicants will now show up in various lists of Duplicants instead of disappearing
- Duplicant hats once again show up in all menus
- "Immune System" HUD element is now "Sick Duplicants"
- Many many strings tweaks and fixes
- Fix crash when the Load Game screen is closed with the "X" and then reopened
- Filter screens (i.e. on storage) no longer scroll back to the top whenever a selection is made
- Objects are actually selected in the order of their mouse hover cards
- Accented latin characters display correctly in Duplicant names
Overlays
- Fixed the automation overlay crashing when hovering over the port of an unconstructed building
- Liquid and Gas Overlays are less loud when many networks are active
- Added state change overlay
- Logic gates now show port information in the automation overlay
- Better formatting and display of logic port hovercards
- Logic input/output descriptors now describe the active/standby behavior in the logic overlay
- Logic ports can be hovered in the overlay to see their behaviour and active state
- Merge temperature and heat flow overlays into one mode
- Removed unnecessary title box around overlay filters widget
- Removed unnecessary padding in overlay legend when certain UI elements were active but empty
- Flipped the input/output icons for plumbing/ventilation overlays the other way around
- Destruct icon shows in the Shipping overlay
- Opening an overlay from the Priority tool will close the Priority tool
Systems
- Added top priority chore type
- Added "Yellow Alert" priority setting
- Renamed emergency priority to Top Priority (!! priority)
- Duplicants only quit their current errand in Yellow Alert if they can actually help with the top priority errands
- Added activation sound for Top Priority
- No more randomly diseased regions in the Jungle biome
- Fixed crash if changing tile temperature with a debug tool
- Fixed crash if an uncategorized material is discovered
- Outer space "chaos" noises will be tamed by base construction, eventually resolving back into normal music
- The Gravitas Facility has its own audio ambience
- Meteor sounds no longer duck ambience if SFX is turned off
- Gas ambient sounds are more dynamic and less monotonous
Backend
- Fixed crash when trying to add an element more than once
- Fixed crash during autosave when an old autosave file cannot be deleted
- Improved crash reporter stack traces
- Verify saved resolution in player preferences file is valid before attempting to apply it
- Always try to set some resolution even when none is detected
- Converted element csv files to yaml files
- Auto flush log writer on crash to gather more data from crashes
- Add option to mute audio when game loses focus
- Fixed bug preventing mod buildings from being added to the 0th category (Base)
-
Fix for white liquid textures on OSX 10.14.4
Final QOL3 Testing Hotfix
- Fix for white liquid textures on OSX 10.14.4
- Fix crash when the Load Game screen is closed with the "X" and then reopened
- Filter screens (i.e. on storage) no longer scroll back to the top whenever a selection is made
- Objects are actually selected in the order of their mouse hover cards
- Accented latin characters display correctly in Duplicant names
- Added sounds for Gas Grass
- Renamed medications
- Added fx and animations to the Sporechid
- Ice Maker drop timing matches the animation
- Fix disease overlay legend "internal germs" in text
- Debug skill unlocking requires Instant Build enabled, not just debug enabled
- Custom Game settings for disease now correctly affect new disease mechanics
- Opening an overlay from the Priority tool will close the Priority tool
- Iron Gut trait provides immunity to Food Poisoning
- Improved tooltip for germ exposure
- Added Sporechid seed artwork
- Added new artwork and names for medicines
- Slight increase to doctoring time
You can join in the Discussion Topic here.
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