Version 18.02.04 — and some new developments

Hi everybody. I (Matt) just got back from vacation and uploaded some recent changes we made to Steam and itch.io. The new changes fix some critical bugs, and address some usability problems. While I was away, we also started discussing some of the next major steps we will be taking, and new features we want to tackle.

Experimental Features

We’ve also been experimenting with a couple of new features. One is mine-carts. Dwarves will be able to place minecart tracks, and will automatically ride mine carts along the tracks for a speed boost.

The second is equippable dwarf items. At the moment, dwarves are not able to swap out their armor, tools or weapons for other items. We’d like to make it possible to craft and equip certain items. Right now we’re in the early design phases of this feature, and are trying to determine the right amount of complexity that we’re willing to allow. One of our core concerns with this feature is how many new art assets it may require…

Mod Support + Demo

Mod support is coming. We’ve been working on a system which can override most of our game assets with modder-supplied ones. It’s coming along and should be available soon. After we’ve completed the mod system, we will be integrating Steam Workshop into it.

We’re also creating a demo version of the game which disables some of the core features. The demo is currently under review by Valve and we expect it to be on the store page soon.

Changelog

• Fixed common crash that occurred sometimes while building blocks or floors due to race condition introduced in the last update.
• Fixed rare crash while attacking creatures in a trade envoy.
• Fixed common crash caused by opening up employee info and then deselecting a creature.
• Fix serialization issues with Expedition class that were sometimes causing crashes when the game was loaded from a save containing a trade envoy.
• Fix dwarf task loop / freeze caused by cancelling dwarf craft task while he is crafting.
• Fix dwarves shooting up in the air while crafting due to bug in the way their velocity was calculated.
• Correctly calculate bed bounding boxes.
• Fix subtle bug in dwarf priority ordering which was preventing dwarfs from always picking the highest priority tasks.
• Make dwarves prefer to do their own crafting tasks rather than assisting others.
• Lazily spawn cave creatures/plants when they are discovered rather than spawning them at the beginning of the game and merely unhiding them when they are discovered. While fog of war is enabled this should improve memory usage and performance, and should reduce the size of save files.
• Fix bug that was causing caves to spawn in bedrock, exposing undefined voxels underneath.
• Fix bug that was causing wheat to spawn inside dirt.
• Fix the birdsplosion issue by having creatures migrate in and out of the play area if there are too many/few of them.
• Fix some of the game’s sprites being inverted left to right.
• Remove “faults”, “erosion” and “rainfall” from non-debug world generator screen as they are confusing to the player and don’t really provide useful information.
• Minor aesthetic/usability changes to some GUI elements.
• Move employee task filter to employee info widget rather than being its own tab.
• Allow player to switch between selected employees by pushing arrow buttons on top of employee info widget.
• Fix aspect ratio of saved game screenshots.
• Sort save games by date.
• Prevent non-intelligent creatures from gathering meat/bones/corpses of dead dwarves.
• Herbivores no longer randomly attack doors.
• Display game version string on landing page in bottom right corner.
• Quieter native tantrum sound while trading.
• Do not draw small grass sprites when they are above the slice plane (this was sometimes obscuring dwarves underground).