ALPHA 43: THE TERRIBLE TRUTH NOW AVAILABLE ON STEAM

I'm liking the changes so far.

Question though. Now that reactions to a topic (Being angry about someone talking about the daily grind etc) don't appear to be memories, do they alter the mood bars? If they do it's a small amount so it's hard to track.

Need to put some more hours in but I think starvation is on the cards, farming got alot harder then I was expecting and I started the farm waaaaay too late. Mistakes were made. Cannibalism shall solve them.

 

Since you are revisiting the cooking jobs, Ill throw this idea out there. It might be nice to have a "cook all of this" option.

Ex, I have a bunch of steaks that I *found* in the woods, I can manually tell the kitchen to cook the specific amount, they can keep a minimum, or they automagically cook them all. No-one wants raw steaks lying about, I mean really.

 

I played a few hours for the first time in about two months. It took some getting used to the new offices and managing the labor now that some colonists are temporary, but things mostly made sense and I didn't encounter any crashes or obvious bugs! Although it did seem weird having like 10 overseers and only about 4 laborers spread among the work crews.

 

I've noticed since last couple of builds that when a colonist investigates their family heritage, they ALWAYS find a distant relative, and never have a "bad" result.

This is after upwards of at least 30 investigations, so I don't think it's luck.

 

After playing for a few more hours, I've come to the conclusion that those bugs that destroy crops are awful. Everything has been going smoothly so far except for a massive food shortage...

 

Wheat yield was accidentally bugged, the fix is here:

https://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/wheat.16340/#post-106490

(one line of script, less than 1 kb, was missing)

 

Does that only apply to wheat because I was mainly trying to grow maize? Maybe the new crop balance just makes it more difficult to maintain maize. I did replace the script and play for a little longer but didn't notice any immediate obvious differences.

 

Yes, the bugs are quite voracious (see https://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/herds-of-giant-beetles-decimating-my-colony.16318/). A dodo or an auroch can usually nibble on one crop before my colonists can manage to shoo it away. I have had one small bug eat through almost an entire row (of a maximum sized farm) of pumpkins just today. Of course, he/she came to the pumpkin patch in the evening when everyone was asleep and started munching. But he kept on eating and moved so nimbly that the colonist who tried to "squash vermin" kept missing.

What I did, which may or may not work for your main strategy, was to grow twice as many crops (and cook them) as I actually need. For example, I set up in the first game week 2 farms+2 kitchens (In my last game, I had one maize and one pumpkin farm, but I think it will work if you do maize for both farms as well) where I did 1 farm+1 kitchen before. It's not what I would call an elegant solution, as I usually end up with more food than I need, but I haven't had a massive food shortage even if the bugs come in the evening and currently the colonists don't wake up (Bad news: and you can't make them wake up) (Good news: the bugs don't seem to attack raw and cooked food in the stockpile, just those growing in the farms at the moment of attack).

From what I know, it is only wheat that was affected by the bug.

 

Corn in addition to wheat, please (for those who prefer chicha instead of (or with) beer).

 

Can we get a ruling from Gaslamp WRT whether a beetle should be able to devour an entire field of crops? If part of the CE universe is that even a tiny beetle is that hungry, so be it (although we'll need more ways to deal with them), but if not, there should be some limit on them. Either they only have a small % chance of eating a planted crop each time they try, or after they eat they are full and won't eat again for a while.

 

Whilst part of this doesn't apply so much to the 'wild beetles' you see, and is more regarding the Beetles sourced through the event....

What could work is a (large) Beetle should go for crops when hungry and then pull out again, but when recently fed it then births several regular beetles who are then hungry and will again go for your crops, once fed they will pull out and birth the smallest Beetles.

This kind of puts stages into the whole thing, a half dozen standard Beetles in themselves aren't a major problem. However if you ignore them or fail to stop them filling themselves on your crops, then the problem escalates with each cycle that you fail to stop, until eventually you have quite the Beetle ecological problem on your hands.

And it also shifts the giant beetle event from a "Do or lose everything immediately" event where it seems the typical reaction going on several complaints about military behaviour is for people to fall under the assumption that they need to play C&C/StarCraft against them and as a result half the time end up letting the Beetles gouge themselves on the entire crop due to ending up giving military units so many micro-orders that the military troops never get the opportunity to actually respond to the threat themselves.

So it become something that instead isn't the end of the world if the player tries to RTS combat it up and gets themselves nowhere as a result of interrupting the natural responsive behaviour of colonist. What would instead happen is they would lose a half dozen plants or so for the time being, but will be faced with a larger wave of regular Beetles in the next day or two, and once they're hungry again the giant Beetles.

 

I started a game yesterday to try out an anti-beetle tactic. I completely enclosed one max sized farm with buildings. So far it's working, beetles won't go through the buildings to get to the farm inside. It's still early though, and I haven't had a horde yet. Anyone seen a beetle open a door and go through a building?

 

[QUOTE="Unforked, post: 106518, member: 2th noticed since last couple of builds that when a colonist investigates their family heritage, they ALWAYS find a distant relative, and never have a "bad" result.

This is after upwards of at least 30 investigations, so I don't think it's luck.[/QUOTE]

This has been happening for me as well, thought it was just an odd run of luck.

Ever growing hordes of beetles seem much worse than the current setup. If you don't completely kill the first wave immediately, you'll be boned by an exploding population - seems much more like a binary failure state to me. Assuming you are even half way competent with rallying soldiers, bugs can only destroy a single crop cycle at the moment, which in itself is manageable assuming the colony isn't going to the dogs already

 

Still getting some slowdown at 100 colonists. Seems unrelated to the stockpile this time since I tried deleting them all and the problem was still there.

 

More a general request but it's not really significant enough to make a dedicated thread for, so is there any chance when colonists are calculating pathfinding routes that tiles inside building are assigned additional weight to try discourage colonists just waltzing through factories, workshops, kitchens and chapels lugging dozens of units of construction materials, body parts and corpses as an everyday occurrence?

Colonist A: "Mornin' Fannie!"
Colonist B: "Oh, Mornin' Keith. Time for the daily 8am corpse hauling parade through me kitchen already?"
Colonist A: "Aye, that it is Fannie."
Colonist B: "You know, I's was thinkin' the other day that perhaps you could just walk the 10 feet around me home rather than all tromping through me kitchen every morning with all them dead bodies."
Colonist A: "You what?"
Colonist B: "Well wouldn't you just... walk around, like?"
Colonist A: "You must be blimmin daft Fannie! This is the shortest route through your kitchen! Why would we be walking around yer 'ouse rather than through it every mornin'?!? What you talkin' about?"
Colonist B: "hmmm perhaps you're right. Never mind, was a daft question."

 

Yes. Water too, please.