The Steam Early Access phase for Clockwork Empires continues on this week as the team has released a brand new update to the popular town management game. Included in the update are a number of new features, as well as a huge list of bug fixes.
Major New Features
- Naturalists will now explore, study nature, and find weird artifacts!
- Added Laboratories and Scientists to study weird artifacts / do Science!
- (Coincidentally) your colonists might transform into (more) monsters if certain conditions are met.
- Buildings, Modules, and Zones can be dismantled: Build, dismantle, then rebuild your colony to be more perfect!
In addition, you can now follow the Clockwork Empires team on Instagram and Tumblr, the .gifs are priceless.
As always, you can grab your copy of Clockwork Empires on Steam Early Access. Learn more about the game at www.clockworkempires.com
Click to Read: Clockworks Empire December Update Chanelog
Engine/scripting
- FIXED: OS X Lua errors
- FIXED: Some heap corruption (this was actually horrible)
- FIXED: pathing stall
In English: Things are better and more stable.
Nature/World
- extended a game day/night cycle from 6 to 8 minutes total
- day/night ratio is now 3:1 rather than 5:1
- made night slightly lighter (so you can see better)
- added flax plants as valid crop to both biomes
- new hematite node textures
- removed the horrible grass lump from a lower dimension
- naturalists may discover that random rocks are actually an ore node
Animals
- animals will now eat crops & applicable food items
- animal hunger tracking overhauled
- colonists will shoo bad animals away from crops & applicable food items
- ground fowl will create nests
- animals flee from danger more effectively
- added eating animation for foxes
Characters
- FIXED: listening to a sermon caused colonist’s bodies to explode
- made lots more jobs uninterruptable for gossiping (may pull back on this a bit depending on how it works)
- fixed up “return to civilization” job (w/ some backend to detect civ at start position)
- converted food to roughly require 1 unit per day per colonist rather than referenceless nutrional value system; changed descriptions of food to reflect this
- balance: whether it is night or not now affects a lot of character jobs & behaviours
- further overhauling of sleeping/hunger & related activities rebalanced
- job made to dump undesirable corpses outside of ‘civilization’ area
- FIXED: session boolean values (eg. “isNight”) were not being weighted correctly with negative weights
- FIXED: chapels / vicars work again
- colonists will forage for food if starving
Military/Combat
- FIXED: “wield firearm” requirement wasn’t fulfilling, subtly messing up everything to do with using firearms under many conditions
- gunfire, explosions, and combat will now wake people up
- sleep being interrupted will create a negative memory
- military training now gives a bonus to all damage dealt
- hunters now target the closest animal and shouldn’t switch targets randomly anymore
- added melee version of frontier justice job for military
- added a faster item drop triggered when enemy is nearby
- fleeing/fighting requires no item in hand (uses faster item drop)
- FIXED: people running away forever to the edge of the map
- bullet system converted to military supply system
- soldiers will do more damage if their NCO has appropriate traits
- soldiers will do more damage if they have appropriate traits
Eldritch Stuff / Monsters
- FIXED: fishpeople can be butchered through left-click orders
- resized fishy idol (it was too big!)
- successful cultist murder will increase cultist_power
- added some random hidden artifacts to map
- gave artifacts descriptions
- added chance to find artifacts during normal digging
- Colonists will occasionally turn to fishpeople and run into the sea
Buildings/Workshops/Jobs/Zones
- FIXED: “make planks” job order scripterror
- added bolts of cloth to starting loadout; beds now require cloth
- “Burial” job balanced slightly to be less appealing, especially if the corpse is far away. Won’t be done by military (to fix NCO death/burial/replacement cycle)
- added “confession” job (for Vicar to take confessions from sad people)
- added Textiles Workshop & jobs
- added Spinning Mule to Textile Workshop
- new hematite commodity model/texture
- cancelling a building now removes the building footprint
- building footprints now stored in game spatial dictionary, as well as their platform heights
- FIXED: ghostly images of church modules do not show up at the correct height in the module creator
- Added new zone control panel stuff; farm controls upgraded
- added some naturalism jobs; Naturalists will study nature
- exploration beacon more responsive
- added Laboratory building
- added “Macroscope” module to Laboratory to use for studying things
- Workcrew can be assigned to Laboratory
- added Scientist class
- added Laboratory Assistant class
- paintings now have descriptions based on the memories and important life events of the painter.
- Modules can now be dismantled
- Buildings can now be dismantled
Events
- bandits: reduced change to spawn armoured bandit (50% rather than 100%)
- bandits will now prioritize better commodities (especially hard liquor) (Thanks Samut. Again.)
- balance: bandits won’t attack on day 1, can only attack with min. numbers on day 2 ; increased bandit timer
- balance: Bandits given less desire to shoot fleeing targets, more desire to shoot military targets
- added airdrop crate & animation (supply drops will now use crates)
- supply drop now tells you how many items you received
- random immigration now tells you the job class of immigrants received
- added Favours! get them from the Empire depending upon your prestige
UI/UX
- correctly hooked up pumpkin pie icon
- flax straw now has an icon (plus some other tools & commodities)
- added a bunch of icons for buildings & modules, fixed lots of icons for buildings & modules
- reduced character memories display to 8 from 10 (it overflowed the window)
- Colonists button rolled into Population Counter widget.
Visual Effects
- dust particles thickened (this is important)
