ALPHA 44: THE MEMORY OF INFINITE TERROR OF MALIGN VASTNESS

I was going to let it slide this time.

 

A quickie 'what's new' summary is incredibly helpful for me, since I try to start my videos with, uh, a quick summary of what's new. But more generally, it's not always apparent what's changed between stable releases, and it's a bit confusing for those of us who have been keeping up with the Experimental branch.

 

I'd have thought the merging of brewery and Kitchen would have made the list of 'Major Changes' with a explicit mention!

 

Has been a rather interesting update looking back at the full list, and can understand wanting to draw attention more to the main development hoggers for the month over things that maybe took a couple of hours rather than days.

From the players perspective it's often easy to forget how much is actually added into a single major revision update when it's slowly added in through experimentals, as you can kind of get comfortable with some changes and forget they're still technically 'new and only just released today' by the time the main branch update rolls out.

Downside is, discerning the extent of the changes to some of the undocumented changes, such as madness/cult goings on and changes to those systems.

Knowing how that behaviour stood as of 43C/D/E and then seeing hints of changes to that behaviour for the actual major revision release, often makes me wonder if MORE changes have been sneaked in quietly since then that are going undocumented to avoid spoilers or ruining surprises, or if the hints are referring to the changes I'm already familiar with from the experimentals. lol


Edit: By the way, absolutely love the art piece for the update, especially the detail included into the smoke. Definitely conveys a very specific suggestion!

And also somewhat resembles the kind of horrors Google's DeepDream sees when it sleeps. Like this output from a simple two colour gradient.

 

are cultists stronger now? I won't feel excited until cultists can start being a threat again.

 

Pleeeeease bring cults back soon. I'm having serious cult withdrawal symptoms. I'm also hoping you'll get madness to last much longer, as now it just drains so fast on its own. There's never a need for alcohol. But I get it, it's a process.

 

The key question is, has the initial 43x experimental happenings where colonists forming a cult literally NEVER happened no matter how much prolonged madness you had going on in your colony, changed since then and the release of 44?

Or are the changes quietly hinted at in the 44 change notes the early 43x experimental changes that made insanity much easier to gain, but where nothing would ever really come of it, effectively meaning there are no cults in the game at present?

Having cult impact on a colony dialled down is one thing. Having them non-existent and impossible for colonists to ever form even when you have 4 colonists with max insanity for 2-3 days running is something else altogether.

There's some mixed signals between the two quoted posts regarding if cults being impossible to form in colonies no matter how insane everyone gets, is actually intended for now as part of the balancing work due to happen, or if we should actually be seeing cults form but their behaviours reduced.... as I've not seen a single cult form in over a month and a dozen or so colonies... to quote a example I posted to Nicholas on the Steam forums when someone was asking "where the crazy is?":

At no point did anyone even attempt to initiate forming a cult, and that's a pretty extreme fringe example colony that was intentionally pushed to the brink of utter madness to try force it to happen.

So is that the outcome you guys are expecting at the moment? Or is that more dialled back than even you guys had intended?

Yes please!

 

I've dissected countless fish corpses and accumulated much madness, but it drains away so fast, and they refuse to start cults.

 

Dissecting and science are generally late in a colony for me... like in excess of 6 hours into a session as I don't rush build as part of my natural play style I tend to only push for large colony infrastructure when testing something very specific...(Edit: And to test something specific there needs to be clear indications of what to point attention towards)

Otherwise I take my time and slowly build up as I would if the game as released, so I can better get a feel for any problems or suggestions of how everything is interacting with each other when adopting different approaches to the slower pace.

I also start a new colony with each build release to make sure there's no problems from saves from old versions.

Result is I rarely ever get to a colony with science going on long term before the next experimental rolls out and I start a new colony.

But if cult behaviour is now much more deeply tied to science, will give it a poke. Though that it's possible to NEVER see any implication of severe and prolonged insanity spread across 4 or more colonists for days at a time unless you dive into science should probably trigger quite a few red flags.

 

I had someone eat their best friend and study an eldritch artifact, and they went back to being quite normal very quickly.

 

I played for a short while tonight and really enjoyed some of the new features. The stockpile overhaul makes a huge difference and now it seems like I don't need large stockpiles anymore since everything is efficiently stacked. Having buildings greyed out if you are missing materials is also very useful. It'd be great if this applied to modules too!

Only thing I saw that might be considered weird is that the tooltips for bunkhouses say Lowerclass Bunkhouse twice in the header area. For workshops the top field is for the workcrew name and the bottom field is the actual workshop type and that doesn't apply to bunkhouses. Might not be that big of a deal if bunkhouses can be renamed in the future, but just a minor UI thing I noticed.

 

I would love to see more cults. I'd want them to be more mysterious and secretive though. If I don't want cults, or think my colony wouldn't survive, the previous way I would just frontier justice them down and be done with it since I knew who was in the cult