ALPHA 49B ALPHA 49B: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE/TUNDRA/ALPINES/FRESHWATER LAKE

Oh yes, time to play some more.

Hmm trade food is now like quality food huh, interesting tradeoff there...

 

"We've got some neat stuff in the pipe to come."

I'm 99% sure that means conduits are being worked on. So excited!

 

Turrrrrrtles.

Loving the new embark and area map generation stuff so far. Really solid change.

A few visual tile chunk problems in one or two places, but sod that, it's purely cosmetic.

First area map created already put forward how much of a change it can be and introducing kinds of regions that simply didn't exist before:

 

I'm going to repost what I wrote elsewhere:

I've been trying to build a viable colony deep in an exclusively desert biome. The lack of trees has affected my development profoundly - I am now extremely stingy with wood, given that the only timber I have is the dwindling pile of 40 logs I brought with me, and I am consequently expanding very slowly, to the extend that I'm considering refusing colonists (and would like a way to refuse Overseers). I'd like to grow my own bamboo so I can use it for construction, but my hopes for a Laboratory are remote, since the Lab requires expensive resources like lacquered planks and glass. I'm going to try establishing a Trade Depot early and trading corn for vital supplies. This particular biome also borders the ocean (although I haven't located it yet), which probably explains why I'm still encountering fishpeople.

*edit* Oh thank God, I've stumbled across a stand of Joshua Trees (bottom right in the screenshot). Trying to run a colony without unlimited access to timber is brutal.

 

Clicking on the "?" icon in the farm window (for maize fields at least) yields the help pop-up for the Foreign Office, not for Farms.

I've only gone through once thus far and haven't gotten all that far yet, but I had a 5 man bandit raid without any sort of warning that it was coming (I had received a pop-up that they had set up camp nearby, but never one that they were attacking me), followed immediately by a 5 man fishperson raiding party, which on Day 7 just entirely overpowered what military I'd been able to scrabble together. As I said, only once through so far, so maybe I got hit with some profoundly unfortunate RNG, but that was flat out brutal.

 

With a Foreign office, you should be able to summon the Novorus special trader ("raw material trader"?) who carries a lot of logs and stone (with some variance of course)

You shouldn't be able to trade corn though...

 

As I hadn't fired up the game since R49 I don't know when this change happened exactly, but I'm finding with the event notifications appearing small and to the far bottom left I'm constantly not noticing them at all.

And I keep going to left-click them to get the expanded explanation... except for some notifications that automatically dismisses the notification and the new 'cleaner' event window doesn't track the events the notifications relate to with the idea being everything is accessed by limited time duration tooltips on the notification icons. Which means I'll never know what I was trying to be told has happened in my colony... but even more annoying, sometimes left-click is actually necessary to open up a expanded explanation.

So now something as simple as 'Find out what that notification is about' requires stopping what I'm doing just to find out what rule applies to this specific type of notification and if I need to be left clicking on it to find out more, or just hovering over it to read a tooltip.

The notification behaviour really needs to be consistent, not swapping and changing its rules because of attempts to try cram all the available types of messages into the one system, but make sure the player doesn't automatically dismiss important stuff.... maybe important notifications appears one side and are left clicked to open, others appear on the other side and are 'hover over to read'.... or maybe incorporate some kind of message/notification window for actual decision events are stored and drop them out of the notification system completely, which come to think of it I vaguely recall there being mention of once... so if that's the plan and this is just a stop gap, fair enough.

And secondly, regardless to if the inconsistent rules are a temporary measure or not, the event window really should be tracking and reporting all events, at least then it could provide a easier to notice prod to check the hidden off to the corner area for any new notifications.

 

Traders have some weird behaviour now (aside from being aquatic).

My first group turned up, traded and went away as they are supposed to. The second group however arrived with no trade goods at all, stole most of my pistols (in what looked like a suspicious nocturnal ceremony) and then refused to leave. I had a second group of traders pop while the first group were still malingering but they stayed at the edge of the map and refused to move (while being underwater).


I have also had a bandit camp spawn virtually in my town


I have had some instances of invisible food in my stock pile (basic stew). Aside from that I haven't noticed anything particular odd.

I have never seen the big Obesilkians activate before. I no longer have a colony.

 

I made a thing!

 

The new biomes are wonderful, the maps feel far more organic now and exploring is a joy,

One thing I've noticed when starting a bunch of new games just to see biomes: Good Cog, the chance of landing in the middle of a bunch of hills/plateaus/cliffs/steppes (whatever you want to call them) is incredibly high, making it a bit tricky to squeeze a decent-sized colony between them without doing some major excavation work.

I'm curious if there's going to be any gameplay advantages to these hills? I mean, if you can manage to build military defenses on top of one, could you get some kind of tactical high ground bonus?

 

I'm seeing half-second walk-in-place lags again on this version; previously when these have been reported I haven't noticed them much, as my system's reasonably powered.

Also, is it possible that reassigning a worker between crews can lead to permanently locked goods if they were carrying something? Asking because there's a set of logs in my carpentry workshop that the work crew has ignored ever since it was built, preferring to grab others from the other side of the colony.

 

Since it was built? It might be that bug where items used in building construction (or even modules) are not removed when they are "used".

You should be able to trade it though

 

Loving the Alpine biome - The cows look right at home.

 

I started three games last night where I landed in the middle of box canyons, which was quite frustrating.