Once more, a stack of Clockwork Empires updates appears in a neat pile. We present for you:

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

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.)

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Patch Notes:

Major Features

• commodity stacking for maximum logistical efficiency!
• new Fishpeople faction system + interaction events – make friends! make enemies! or just be confusing!
• added a ton of social behaviours for colonists covering everything from hugging to throttling!
• new hunger/tiredness system for colonists with distinct consequences

The Engine

• autosaves are in, set to autosave every 10 minutes.
• autosave now alternates between two files (stability improvement)
• fixed some capitalization issues (linux compatibility)
• removed water vertical motion (for now, ominously)
• FIXED: buffer overflow crash in fog of war
• FIXED: crashes when characters are deleted with emotions
• FIXED: the invisible shadows of stacked objects will render after saving and loading a game
• FIXED: construction costs for buildings do not increment after saving and loading a game
• FIXED: cannot demolish buildings after saving and loading a game
• FIXED: items occasionally turn blue
• FIXED: crash bug when occasionally placing a module with SHIFT-CLICK mode

Human Characters

• added first iteration of a new hunger system aka “the cascading cannibalism decision tree”
• added new sleep system (day 1: sleep in bed, day 2: sleep on floor, day 3: sleep on ground)
• balance: altered calculation of colonists’ willingness to take part in cannibalism
• added new social jobs: “inspect food, inspect body, cower inside building”
• social jobs have been rebalanced. (Many more are planned, as there is still a relatively small number of available options to characters until buildings are constructed & economy started.)
• rewrote all friendship and rivalry-ship code to be stored in C++; added new requirements for checking if somebody is a friend or rival before doing something to them (enables lots of new (anti)social behaviours)
• characters now use walk animations appropriate to their mood
• added several new social jobs that allow characters to interact with each other (slap someone else, hug, etc)
• characters can now punch each other and cause tantrum spirals of punching (and this is almost certainly under- or over-tuned)
• fixed typos in laudanum-themed character history string
• if really hungry, people will attack animals for their meat
• if really hungry and mad/has certain traits, people will attack people for their meat
• frontier justice is now only auto-applied AFTER a murderer hits someone with a weapon, not before
• added terrible memories for very hungry/starving people
• eating raw_meat now requires a higher level of hunger than other raw_foods
• some traits are now restricted to certain social classes
• fixed some cult prefix string typos
• fixed minor typo in a hunger memory
• added “Suck up to superior” job
• added “Cower inside” job
• added “Sleep due to sadness” job
• added “Drink due to sadness” job
• fixed lots of memory icons
• minor fixes to Vicar jobs
• colonists will now drop tools/guns when profession is switched (conscription/deconscription, assignment to laboratory, etc)
• FIXED: labourers whose models changed cannot be selected (that is to say, they can now be selected)
• FIXED: some memories not showing up correctly on bandits who joined your colony
• FIXED some broken cult behaviour
• FIXED: walk_to_nearest_position throwing a script error when the item being walked to is lost or destroyed
• FIXED: minor nerve-stapling bug
• FIXED: an insidious drop_item scripterror
• FIXED: Corpses still wanted to be buried even after they were chopped up & eaten
• FIXED: hunger/tiredness values in gossip topic calculation

Scripting System

• (determinism stuff related to multiplayer, see that section instead)

Combat & Military

• hooked up new ‘unskilled reload’ animation
• fishpeople weapons now properly delete themselves when dropped
• balance: greatly reduced gabion construction time
• FIXED: long reload anim wasn’t properly set on militia
• FIXED: a number of military stalling issues and incorrect behaviours

Non-Human Characters (Animals, Monsters, Vehicles)

• implemented big Fishpeople overhaul + lots of new content for Fishpeople (in-progress)
• official policy toward fishpeople can be set in response to interaction events/crises
• fishpeople now spawn in groups with goals/missions that they will attempt to fulfill (lots of infrastructure done for this)
• fishpeople & colonists can interact in various peaceful ways if policy is friendly (note: this is far from feature complete)
• colonists can attempt to non-violently intimidate fishpeople (and vice versa)
• added fishpeople scout mission/event
• added fishpeople beach patrol mission/event
• added fishpeople friendly envoy mission/event
• added fishpeople property destruction policy event
• added fishpeople hassling crisis event
• added fishpeople vandalism crisis event
• added fishpeople assault crisis event
• fishpeople combat logic improved
• balance: replaced fishpeople in tropics w/ Deathwurms (note: deathwurm attack anim needs tweaking)
• balance: boosted hp and aggressiveness of Deathwurms
• changed armoured hit sound on animals (so it doesn’t sound like metal)

Buildings & Building Creation

• Added deletion of individual models
• Moving a module to an invalid location (say, taking a door and dragging it off into space) will now snap the module back to its original location and parent and not move it.
• FIXED: handful of memory corruption bugs when moving modules
• FIXED: cannot demolish the same house multiple times
• FIXED: script error on building demolition (multiple script errors, really)
• FIXED painting scripterror

Economy & Logistics

• containers and stacking: stacks can now be created, and colonists will attempt to move things into stacks and then organize their stacks in stockpiles. Colonists w ll now also produce stacks of goods as the output of some workshop processes
• stacked commodities now respect stockpile filters
• moved a bunch of container and stack code to C++ from Lua (perfomance should be improved)
• containers and stacks can now be merged by characters
• balance: doubled output for cooked food based on farmed or foraged ingredients
• balance: tripled output for cooked food based on hunted ingredients
• balance: brick-making should actually make a bunch of bricks because wow, did we ever need a lot of them.
• surface mining jobs are now a single job that selects the correct tool rather than two jobs, one for each tool
• rewrote the code for handling jobs in assignments: we now actually store the jobs that are being done on an assignment on the assignment object, rather than just trying to add or subtract them. Consequently, this means that the bookkeeping of such jobs is accurate. The hope is that this fixes the bug where people will get stuck in an assignment, but we’ll see. (At the very least, it should give us more information.)
• FIXED: “remove spoiled crops” now correctly given lower priority than “tend crops”.
• FIXED: crash saving game after aborting a job targeting a stockpile object or container due to item being lost or misplaced

Biomes & Terrain

• Vexing plateaus should no longer cut off player’s colonists from the rest of the world. Usually.

Events, Metagame, and The Overworld

• FIXED: Incredibly generous bandits have been taught how to be greedy and will no longer give you their stuff every 8 seconds
• FIXED error in “bandit wants to join colony”
• Communists are now upset by upper class sympathy
• New Prestige Favor: “Airship overflight”
  Fixed bug with “ominous dreams” event
  fixed typos in Bandit spawn event & tutorial
• FIXED: memory leaks in events
• FIXED: error in upper class sympathy event
• FIXED: errors in ministry investigation event tree
• accepting criminal goods may trigger an investigation
• “Doomed” characters now much more doomed
• added some defensive checks to avoid crashy bandit events if bandits are killed before the dialog is triggered by the player

Multiplayer

• networking: restored engine determinism (with determinism safe script math)
• networking: fixed cross platform world building (Mac and PC)
• networking: fixed maximum message size problem when using Steam
• networking: introduced command buffering to hide networking latency (and allowed clients that were behind to speed up slightly to catch up)

Music & Sound

• day-night music transition will now start when the visual transition starts instead of when it ends
• music now fades out Discovery/Productivity Tracks at night (Battle, Tragedy and Insanity are still things that can happen at night.)

UI/UX

• FIXED: removal of factions from UI now works
• UI: added highlight showing currently displayed faction to Factions Menu
• Options menu is back, but the options which weren’t being used/tested properly have been removed. Currently only allows on/off for music and for autosaves.
• emotes for conversations are back, but are now limited based on zoom level. (We’ll probably put in a keyboard command to disable all of these for screenshots)
• FIXED: size of work crew portraits in work party UI now has no blank space
• FIXED: selection of trees and other static props is now triangle-accurate
• Clicking a module in the module placer mode now brings up a choice: move the module, or delete it. Modules that are built cannot be moved, and can only be deleted.
• added “need_sleep” and “explosion” icons, redrew “propeller” icon.
• selected objects in an assignment beacon now tint blue, highlight
• mood icon now correctly displays character’s mood in character info panel
• added “morale” and “sanity” icons to character info panel
• (deep overhaul of fundamental UI system in-progress)

Have fun and let us know through our mysterious portal or forum if anything goes wrong!