Clockwork Empires December Update: The Ghastly Tale of Amon Chalkbracket’s ELDRITCH TRANSFORMATION

It is the time of UPDATES. The game has transformed into v34, filled with new features and horrible Fun to discover!

CE_december_update_illustration_small

This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player via Steam!

That’s not all: for your enjoyment we have a short, educational video about Current Issues faced by Colonial Science:

We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress report!

(Don’t own the game? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)

Want to hear about all sorts of updates via email plus receive silly images from development? Sign up for the newsletter here.

MacOS and Linux users:

OS X users: There are still some graphical issues on various Macs, but it should run fine! Please let us know if you are having graphical issues, and (if so) what version of OS X you are running on, and which video card.

Linux Users: We are still working on Linux support, which (as always) is waiting on us to fix a million references in the code base to case-sensitive filenames, as well as setting up the build machine to correctly dispatch Linux builds of the game (which have to be built with a special, hacked-together compiler) to Steam. Your patience continues to be appreciated.

Patch Notes:


Clockwork Empires rev 34 changelog

“The Ghastly Tale of Amon Chalkbracket’s ELDRITCH TRANSFORMATION”

Big features:

  • Naturalists will now explore, study nature, and find weird artifacts!
  • Added Laboratories and Scientists to study weird artifacts & do Science!
  • (Coincidentally) your colonists might transform into (more) monsters if certain conditions are met. Mysterious!
  • Buildings and Modules can be dismantled: Build, dismantle, then rebuild your colony to be more perfect!
  • Favours: use your prestige in the Empire to call in supplies, skilled workers, or if you have no prestige: extra criminals! Hooray for Extra Criminals!

Engine

  • FIXED: OS X Lua errors.
  • FIXED: Some heap corruption (this was actually horrible)
  • FIXED: pathfinding stall
  • FIXED: some pathfinding issues with buildings with no doors
  • FIXED: crash after loading the game and having somebody turn into a skeleton if that person did not have hair; other hair-related crashes

Nature/World

  • Extended a game day/night cycle from 6 to 8 minutes total
  • Day/night ratio is now 3:1 rather than 5:1
  • Made night slightly lighter (so you can see better)
  • Added flax plants as valid crop to both biomes
  • New hematite node texture
  • Removed the horrible grass lump from a lower dimension
  • Naturalists may discover that random rocks are actually an ore node

Animals

  • Animals will now eat crops & applicable food items
  • Animal hunger tracking overhauled
  • Colonists will shoo bad animals away from crops & applicable food items
  • Ground fowl will create nests
  • Animals flee from danger more effectively
  • Added eating animation for foxes

Characters

  • FIXED: Listening to a sermon caused colonists’ bodies to explode
  • Made lots more jobs uninterruptible for gossiping (may pull back on this a bit depending on how it works)
  • Fixed up “return to civilization” job (with some back-end to detect civ at start position)
  • Converted food to roughly require 1 unit per day per colonist rather than baseless nutritional value system; changed descriptions of foods to reflect this
  • Balance: whether it is night or not now affects a lot of character jobs & behaviors
  • Further overhauling of sleeping/hunger & related activities rebalanced
  • Job made to dump undesirable corpses outside of “civilization” area
  • FIXED: Session boolean values (e.g. “isNight”) were not being weighted correctly with negative weights
  • FIXED: Chapels/vicars work again
  • Colonists will forage for food if starving
  • Foraging is now its own job category

Military/Combat

  • FIXED: “wield firearm” requirement wasn’t fulfilling, subtly messing up everything to do with using firearms under many conditions
  • Gunfire, explosions, and combat will now wake people up
  • Sleep being interrupted will create a negative memory
  • Military training now gives a bonus to all damage dealt
  • Hunters now target the closest animal and shouldn’t switch targets randomly anymore
  • Added melee version of frontier justice job for military
  • Added a faster item drop triggered when enemy is nearby
  • Fleeing/fighting requires no item in hand (uses faster item drop)
  • FIXED: People running away forever to the edge of the map
  • Bullet system converted to military supply system
  • Soldiers will do more damage if their NCO has appropriate traits
  • Soldiers will do more damage if they have appropriate traits

Eldritch Stuff / Monsters

  • FIXED: fishpeople can be butchered through left-click orders
  • Resized fishy idol (it was too big!)
  • Successful cultist murder will increase cultist_power
  • Added some random hidden artifacts to the map
  • Colonists will occasionally turn into fishpeople and run into the sea

Buildings/Workshops/Jobs/Zones

  • FIXED: “Make planks” job order scripterror
  • Added bolts of cloth to starting loadout; beds now require cloth
  • “Burial” job balanced slightly to be less appealing, especially if the corpse is far away. Won’t be done by military (to fix NCO death/burial/replacement cycle)
  • Added “confession” job (for Vicar to take confessions from sad people)
  • Added Textiles Workshop & jobs
  • Added Spinning Mule to Textile Workshop
  • New hematite commodity model/texture
  • Cancelling a building now removes the building footprint
  • FIXED: ghostly images of church models do not show up at the correct height in the module creator
  • Added new zone control panel stuff; farm controls upgraded
  • Added some naturalism jobs; Naturalists will study nature
  • Exploration beacon more responsive
  • Added Laboratory beacon
  • Added “Macroscope” module to Laboratory to use for studying things
  • Workcrew can be assigned to Laboratory
  • Added Scientist class
  • Added Laboratory Assistant class
  • Paintings now have descriptions based on the memories and important life events of the painter
  • Modules can now be dismantled
  • Buildings can now be dismantled

Events

  • Bandits: reduced chance to spawn armoured bandits (50% rather than 100%)
  • Bandits will now prioritize better commodities (especially hard liquor) (Thanks Samut. Again.)
  • Balance: bandits won’t attack on day 1, can only attack with minimum numbers on day 2; increased bandit timer.
  • Balance: bandits given less desire to shoot fleeing targets, more desire to shoot military targets
  • Added airdrop crate & animation (supply drops will now use crates)
  • Supply drop now tells you how many items you received
  • Random immigration now tells you the job class of immigrants received
  • Added Favours! Get them from the Empire depending upon your prestige.

UI/UX

  • correctly hooked up pumpkin pie icon
  • flax straw now has an icon (plus some other tools & commodities)
  • Added a bunch of icons for buildings & modules, fixed lots of icons for buildings & modules
  • Reduced character memories display to 8 from 10 (it overflowed the window)
  • Colonists button rolled into Population Counter widget
  • FIXED: work crew menu dramatically slows the game down

Visual Effects

  • Dust particles thickened (this is important)

 

Did you update your video drivers yet? Update your video drivers. We mean it!

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13 Comments

13 Responses to “Clockwork Empires December Update: The Ghastly Tale of Amon Chalkbracket’s ELDRITCH TRANSFORMATION”

  1. Mr147 says:

    WOOHOO! This is getting better and better! keep it up guys =3

    { reply }
  2. Maurizio says:

    The trailer on the transformation of the naturalist is fantastic, the style of the drawings of the posters is very nice, bravo David!Ideas keep it up, Hello.

    { reply }
    • AdminDavid Baumgart says:

      Thanks! I will note for the record that Marlon Wiebe ( http://mwiebe.com/ ) was our wonderful video-maker and the illustration was a collaboration between myself and our character artist Joseph Nejat.

      { reply }
  3. oldbronzepaw says:

    So, when will the Miskatonic University appear? Is there one in Greater Cogsland?

    { reply }
  4. Sapphire Crook says:

    I was always wondering what those colonies were missing. Criminals. Its always criminals.
    From South America to Australia, colonies are the [best] place to keep the maddest (and thus most productive) menaces of society!

    Watch as you’ll have more butchered meat than you can eat and more rustic ruined houses than you can throw a stone at!

    { reply }
  5. lucretia says:

    Inglese

    Italiano

    Someone can tell me what means this error message: FSM drop_item being disabled, I came out with version 34, maybe it means that the file is too large to be saved?

    { reply }
  6. KKC says:

    Any chance you would release high resolution versions of the update posters? They’d make for some great desktop wallpapers!

    { reply }
    • Maurizio says:

      Yes, it would be a nice idea, I find that they are small oper of ate, the style reminds me of the drawings of 50 years of movie posters, kidnap me, magic, very nice especially the people in the background that threatens the poor turned naturalist, like an old movie about werewolves

      { reply }
  7. Maurizio says:

    Yes, it would be a nice idea, I find that they are small oper of ate, the style reminds me of the drawings of 50 years of movie posters, kidnap me, magic, very nice especially the people in the background that threatens the poor turned naturalist, like an old movie about werewolves

    { reply }
  8. Mike H says:

    “FIXED: Listening to a sermon caused colonists’ bodies to explode”. tee hee.

    Happy Christmas to all at GG!

    I had a wonderful day playing CE on my work Mac.
    Bravo – keep it up. Very excited!

    { reply }
  9. paul says:

    hahahahah,marry fishman,wonderfull!!!!!

    { reply }

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