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)

Clockwork Empires is available now on Steam Early Access

Click to Read: Clockwork Empires November Update Changelog

Big features:

• Bandits attacks!
• Chapels and Vicars
• The Rendering Overhaul Of Doom (for MacOS & Linux)
• Workshops can be given standing orders to maintain a player-defined number of products in the colony at all times.
• Adorable Foxes! (Ravenous Land Dragons!)

Engine

• enormous rewrite of the entire renderer for MacOS & Linux
• rewrite of all shaders
• improved rendering performance
• FIXED: stockpile serialization (save/load)
• FIXED: game now lets you know if the starting scripts are broken
• FIXED: crash when a camera target is deleted
• FIXED: crash writing empty string to console
• FIXED: pathfinding stall
• FIXED: memory leaks

Characters

• FIXED: drop tool / drink beverage loop (yes, again)
• added Vicar dispatch event
• added Vicar replacement event
• added upper class arrival/death alerts & prestige gains/losses
• ALL lower class characters made grubbier
• characters made slightly smarter about running away
• character will return to civilization if they find themselves not in civilization
• characters will flee toward civilization if an enemy is nearby (but not too near) and character is not in civilization
• FIXED: colonists will no longer gossip with colonists tagged with “frontier justice”
• added more names for characters
• balance: eldritch transformation made slightly more difficult to ‘achieve’
• FIXED: colonists no longer walk really, really far to butcher things (unless ordered to do so by player)
• FIXED: colonists no longer hunt animals really, really far away (unless ordered to do so by player)
• added more names for workcrews
• FIXED: various scripterrors in the friend-making process
• balance: turned one starting labourer into an overseer
• balance: adjusted class rations of immigration slightly
• FIXED: Murderers would run away from other murderers rather than murdering them.
• added alerts for various cases of death due to murder, being marked for justice but getting murdered by cultists instead, and being marked for justice but being killed by something else entirely.
• cleaned up emotion animation jobs for characters (hooked up a couple more animations, have them attempt an emotion icon if it’s been a while since an icon has been displayed)
• FIXED: jobs not being taken if you have a workshop assignment (regardless of whether or not the assignment is being done)
• FIXED: two work parties can compete for the same assignment, causing one of them to never take a new assignment
• FIXED: jobs are now correctly deleted from a very large internal table when they are aborted
• MOB JUSTICE! (civilians may join in on Frontier Justice if they have certain traits.)
• added some more randomness to flee from target position
• balance: decreased effect of hunger on “eat food” (as it would easily exceed “run away from murderous fishpeople”)
• balance: re-weighted “experience terror” job
• balance: re-weighted emotion animations to base utility on emotionalAnimationTimer
• added “feel madness” emotion animation job
• added a “felt madness” memory (for the “feel madness” job)
• made immigration event give more game log info
• added some Upper Class character behaviours
• added snubbing

Animals

• New animals: Land Dragon, Giant Snail, Antipodean Vomiting Fox
• added pack hunting behaviour for carnivores
• added more sophisticated fleeing
• FIXED: snail walked? backwards
• carnivores can “butcher” corpses and eat meat
• re-added beetle steaks
• balance: added some more animal spawns near gamestart (for hunting)
• FIXED: removed unnecessary sqrt() from Proximity Query code for aurochs
• animals can now interrupt their jobs at 1s intervals (thus act smarter)
• added some new animal behaviours, mostly involving running away from stuff

Eldritch Things

• Fishpeople can use urchin grenades (and they explode properly)
• Fishpeople given simple personality archetypes to affect behaviours
• Fishpeople with leadership qualities can rally raiding parties over various issues
• gray fishpeople made more silver
• cleaned up interrupts & job utilities on fishpeople jobs (they were all over the place)
• balance: lowered Obeliskian hitpoints to 2/3rds previous value
• fishpeople can now interrupt jobs at 1s intervals (thus act smarter)
• added additional error-checking to fishperson_butcher.fsm
• FIXED: scriptError when fishperson attempts to shoot target that’s already dead
• FIXED: Obeliskians use correct “run” animation
• made fishperson try to get slightly closer to target before using fishgun
• added landmine emote to fishpeople when they become scared of landmines

Combat

• added an affliction system – everything can now be hurt in a variety of terrible ways!
• FIXED: fishpeople freezing up on ranged attacks
• added AoE attack to blunderbuss
• added Bandits & Bandit attack event
• Bandits will spawn in camps
• some Bandits have armour
• Bandits will steal your stuff. So mean!
• added bandit camps you can forage for supplies
• you can yield to bandits and let them take your stuff w/o a fight
• balance: reduced fishpeople attack frequency & size
• balance: made characters more willing to fight if in civilization
• balance: made all combatants less interested in attacking fleeing enemies
• soldiers will fight harder near their squad rally point, will retreat to rally points (if available)
• balance: landmines made more damaging
• explosive commodities will now explode when damaged
• incidentally, commodities can be destroyed by damage (we’ll see how horribly this pans out)
• added ability for hunters to shoot hostiles in combat (eg. Fishpeople)
• balance: adjusted civilian melee attacking (so they actually do it ever)
• added NCO replacement event if you have no NCOs
• balance: did a bunch of combat job rebalancing and fixes (Thanks Samut, you’re a madman! In the best way.)
• balance: increased utility of picking up bullets (soldiers would do literally anything but pick up bullets if there was anything else to do)
• lowered search range for bullets (so people don’t wander into bandit camps to find bullets)

Terrain

• FIXED: spawning of swamp forests (giant horsetail, bamboo)
• overhauled giant horsetail model
• FIXED: oreNode job cancellation doesn’t shut off orenode forever
• improved water shader
• new lingonberry & saskatoonberry models
• overhauled hematite nodes
• terrain: added some grass to the temperate beach
• grass now knows that it is a plant

Buildings/Workshops/Zones

• Workshops can now have ‘standing orders’ to maintain a given amount of a product in the colony
• added Chapel building (building a chapel will trigger a Vicar dispatch event)
• added a set of Chapel modules to construct
• Kitchens can make pumpkin pie
• added carpets
• FIXED the thing where landmines/logs wouldn’t count down in commodity stats when placing landmines/gabions
• added ability to remove landmines & dismantle gabions
• FIXED: crash when a module is interrupted at preciselythe last second of construction (this somehow managed to affect three people)
• added lots of pies & piemaking jobs
• FIXED: potential errors in harvest.fsm
• smelting, distilling, and ceramics jobs now use the queued processing thing (eg. smelting ore can be intiated and left to run w/o a worker present)
• FIXED: crash when aborting jobs

UI

• increased size of workshop panel
• added various controls to workshop job queue (standing order, etc.)
• FIXED: colonists killed by fishpeople creating alert that says they were killed by murderers
• FIXED: upper class door resource cost tooltip
• added icons for chapel modules
• added icons for lots of decor modules
• added icon for pumpkin pie (yum)
• FIXED: checked that every ticker icon was valid – fixed some broken ones
• X-to-cancel assignment now (mostly) works in the jobs menu
• FIXED: combo box now has correct behaviour in workshop menu
• added icon to hover over frontier justiced colonists

Our first major monthly Steam patch is now live!

A short list of the more sizeable changes since version 30 includes: 
– A new (quite deadly) jungle environment
– A tutorial
– Significant changes to cultists and cult behaviors (now actually dangerous)
– Many new character behavior updates
– Improvements to military controls
– Significant stability improvements

The full patch notes may be found here

Learn more about the game at http://www.clockworkempires.com/

Grab your copy of Clockwork Empires on Steam Early Access at http://store.steampowered.com/app/224740