A Clockwork Empires update has been discovered somewhere entirely unexpected! 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

• starting loadouts!
• first implementation of character desires and personal property
• Very Serious economic balancing in-action
• started implementation of overworld
• UI overhaul rollout

The Engine

• moved occupancy, occupancy border, and a few other spatial maps to new unrolled pool linked list class (memory and speed improvements)
• optimized all tests for detecting hostile agents and whether or not a character should raise an alarm or not
• FIXED: save game won’t crash if you have more than eight thousand jobs (you should probably not have this many jobs)

Human Characters

• characters now have desires
• characters now have a record of their personal property
• characters can now claim modules for their use (this is the start of the personal property system, though right now it’s still Communism; i.e. people will sleep in any bed, even a claimed one.)
• mood penalties for characters going hungry have been increased.
• mood penalties for background inter-character behavior have been decreased.
• characters now forget negative memories of hunger if they eat, depending on how hungry they still are.
• characters now appropriately forget memories due to drinking alcohol. Low concentrations remove less important memories, higher concentrations remove increasingly more important memories. (This will likely need balancing.)
• added more names have been added to what will surely one day be the official unofficial Dickensian character generator
• added “Prisoner” character type
• all characters gained by prestige favours are now temporary and will depart after a certain number of days.
• workers will wander near their overseer if idle during the day
• cultists in a cult that worships a specific type of horror may now worship that horror if they see one
• cultists in a fish cult will not hassle fishpeople because it goes against their religious beliefs
• romantically inclined people will occasionally cry over graves.
• optimized all tests for detecting hostile agents and whether or not a character should raise an alarm or not
• balance: naturalist will prioritize mineralogical surveys & survey search range increased
• balance: made colonists made less enthusiastic about Fishpeople hassling outside of civilization
• FIXED: characters would stop animating when their model was changed due to skill
• FIXED: some broken job requirements that locked maddened colonists into certain behaviour loops
• FIXED: Naturalist will no longer avoid workshop duty if assigned to a workshop
• FIXED: fishpeople hassling requires being in civilization
• FIXED: sleeping people can no longer object to your policies
• FIXED: characters will not make friends with themselves, either
• FIXED: Colonists intending to hug fishpeople will no longer hug normal people. Just fishpeople.
• FIXED: starvation icon not disappearing after people stop starving
• FIXED: cultists who worship fishpeople will no longer flee from fishpeople (in non-hostile circumstances)
• FIXED: favour naturalists should always properly do naturalist jobs. Always!

Combat & Military

• soldiers without weapons and sufficient morale will use a knife or sabre or whatever they’re holding to fight in melee combat
• balance: foreign troops stand up to combat better now
• balance: lowered morale threshold for player soldiers to retreat (requires more negative morale to trigger retreat jobs)
• FIXED: sabre used incorrect attack animation due to typo

Non-Human Characters (Animals, Monsters, Vehicles)

• bandits now walk from edge of map to set up camp rather than teleporting in
• bandit camp size now corresponds to number of bandits in gang
• bandit stealing logic made less dumb
• performed animal job cleanup pass (should eliminate some instances of… weird behavior)
• fishpeople will react (with alarm) to their friends receiving beatings/execution from colonists
• fishpeople may become more aggressive if they find a fishperson corpse
• neutral military scouts will now do survey action
• groups doing attack/plunder missions will perform “search area” if they can’t find a target for attack/plunder
• balance: Obeliskians made tougher
• balance: made fishpeople slightly less enthusiastic about destroying your crops
• balance: made humanoid combatants less enthusiastic about shooting fleeing targets
• FIXED: various issues with agents carrying out missions freezing in place temporarily (mostly.)
• FIXED: dead bandits can no longer be harvested by fishpeople for infinite longpork
• FIXED: scripterror created by foreigner corpses
• FIXED: various issues with despawned characters
• FIXED: people’s heads popping off when you conscripted them into the colonial militia

Buildings & Building Creation

• increased materials range on gabions
• workshop missing overseer can now be given a reason other than “death”
• added Naturalist’s Office (assign an overseer here to create a Naturalist)
• balance: made mineshafts slightly cheaper (requires iron ingots rather than iron plates)
• FIXED: broken modules should no longer be usable in workshops

Economy & Logistics

• cleanup of stockpile handling code performed; prevents duplicate entries being put in the stockpile list
• stockpile handling code optimization performed: do an early out from the job handling code once one goods job has been successfully evaluated
• balance: musket is now cheaper
• balance: pistol -> revolver upgrade is now cheaper
• balance: landmine crafting output tripled
• balance: food will no longer count towards The Empire’s opinion of your economic progress. (This will affect the rate at which you recieve overseers and the system has been rebalanced accordingly)
• FIXED: when bandits/foreign soldiers/fishpeople drop weapons, they will be added to your commodities list

Biomes & Terrain

• coconut palms will provide some lumber when removed
• player can now directly order a mineralogical survey
• animal herds appropriate to biome will randomly show up from edge of map
• Giant Beetles will now, confoundingly, explode into smaller beetles when killed
• balance: removed a ton of surface nodes, put in a bunch of hidden ore that requires surveying & underground mining

Events, Metagame, The Overworld

• hooked up generated world to embark screen (hack! this will be done better in future)
• added various selectable game-start loadouts to the starting screen
• added “Ravenous Herd” event
• added “Foreign Invasion” event
• added major bandit attack event
• added tooltips to bandit event dialogs
• bandit gang selection for bandit attack event improved
• the Ministry Investigation event has had some text clarifications and an alternate outcome added depending on character traits.
• the Empire will now deliver population milestone rewards to an airship mast, if you have one.
• added new event: A lower-class character may discover they are a member of the nobility.
• “Call Favour” event will no longer appear if you can’t afford any favours
• balance, prestige favours: prisoner favour now comes with a manager to oversee the prisoners.
• balance, prestige favours: artisan favour now comes with high starting skills.
• balance, prestige favours: most commodity-granting favours removed
• balance, prestige favours: food favour now grants food amount based on current population
• balance: Lower-class and middle-class immigration are now separate events. Lower-class will continue to be sent by the empire every few days. Middle-class overseers will come when you reach commodity production milestones.
• balance: all starting guns are now pistols
• balance: radar favour made to be more consistently useful
• balance: bandits give gifts less often
• balance: bandit, fishpeople, foreign attacks should no longer show up so early
• balance: lowered chance of receiving aristocrats during immigration
• balance: added 3 pistols to all loadouts that start with supplies
• balance: the overseer allocation system will continue giving you additional characters after you have hit the overseer cap if some of your overseers have died. (Note: Temporary overseers are tracked separately, so you can’t game this for freebies.)
• FIXED: scripterror when Upper Class Sympathy event fired
• FIXED: first character in your list will not always be the person upset about illegal goods (and various other events will now also pick a character at random correctly)
• FIXED: characters will no longer discover they are distant relatives of themselves

UI/UX

• added option to disable tutorials to loadout screen
• Bandits/Fishpeople/Foreigners now have proper tooltips which describe their state as neutral, hostile, or friendly
• polished the ui a bit in many different places
• removed the bit of the tutorial that said you must shoot fishpeople
• mineralogical survey results will create an alert
• did more UI tweaks to reign in some wandering elements that thought just because we rewrote the UI system they could take a break
• adjusted work crew window scroll speed
• clicking character portraits once again pulls up the character info panel.
• reworked tooltip alignment and sizing to be more standardized.
• FIXED: slowdown in work crews panel when colony has a high population
• FIXED: temptools no longer show up in commodity window
• FIXED: flax to cloth said it took more flax than it did
• FIXED: various typos
• FIXED: gabion deconstruction now displays a progress bar
• FIXED: right-clicking to create a shortcut on Steam now actually creates a shortcut with the correct icon
• FIXED: about 20 instances of “receive” are now spelled correctly
• FIXED: scrollbar rendering
• FIXED: gear for clicking on individual objects sometimes appears in the wrong place
• FIXED: some objects cannot be interacted with after save/load
• FIXED: issues with stockpile UI
• FIXED: issues with office UI
• FIXED: issues with scrollable list boxes.
• FIXED: ore tutorial won’t fire when you mine clay (which is not an ore!)
• FIXED: scrollbars use art for scrollbars!
• FIXED: various issues with scrollbar sizing

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