New Version 18.10.01

Hi all, we just pushed a new version 18.10.01. This version is (hopefully) compatible with previous saves, but your mileage may vary with older saves at this point. As usual we made some bug fixes and added a couple of new features. This is the last version before feature freeze. What that means is from now on we will not be adding new features until well after release, and instead will be focusing on critical bugfixes and balance tweaks (and a bit of tutorial cleanup).

Hell

If you dig deep enough, you will now encounter hell. Pray your dwarfs don’t end up there accidentally! There are also now more caves, and the number of creatures in caves is now controlled by the game’s difficulty setting.

Trade Improvements

We reversed the order of the trade screen (so the player is now on the left), and added a helpful balance beam to show you how the trade is going. We also simplified the “good trade” logic, so that traders now accept any profit over $1.00. We hope this makes things simpler.

Changes

• Tutorials: more images for tutorials. Images now displayed on tutorial popups.
• Tutorials: do not close the existing tutorial when a new tutorial gets triggered.
• Bug: Fix floor preview art not drawing while placing floors.
• Feature: Hell.
• Balance: Demons and the undead now get along just fine.
• Bug: Fix crash caused by demons trying to dig.
• Feature: Redesign trade screen and add graphical balance to show you how it’s going. Traders now accept $1.00 of profit.
• Bug: Fix troll map icon.
• Bug: Fix incorrect use of balloon port making hiring unusable.
• Balance: increase amount of food available at the beginning of the game.
• Bug: Fix spawning underground while on glaciers or in the middle of the sea.
• Bug: fix artwork drawing incorrectly over the minimap.
• Bug: Fix many path planning issues associated with loading a new game or the path planner getting bogged down.
• Bug: Remove greedy path planner entirely as it was just not working correctly. Dwarfs now revert to standing around waiting for paths.
• Debugging: improved debugging tools for path planning. Pushing “Draw Paths” will be more informative now as dwarfs will tell you when their path planning is failing.
• Balance: make digging less expensive. Dwarfs now dig more often when they can’t find paths.
• Bug: Fix rare crashes caused by gamblers dying or getting sent on adventures.
• Performance: remove optimal task assignment and use dumb task assignment for combat. This should dramatically speed up larger combat scenarios.
• Performance: break up update of components into chunks of 4096. This means that as the number of creatures increases the CPU will not get bogged down as much, but movement within the game will start to slow down (particularly physics). Camera and mouse motion will remain unaffected.
• Bug: fix caves sometimes spawning at the edge of the world or with openings to the surface.
• Feature: reveal hidden terrain while in walk mode.
• Feature: Implement auto-gathering. Dwarfs will now gather any resource near them if their backpack is empty.
• Balance: assign all tasks “Medium” priority. This prevents task starvation.