Today Clockwork Empires receives its first major Content Drop called “Conscript Steelcog versus THE MURDERCULT”. This update is a massive one and the first of its kind since the game launched on Steam Early Access. You may say: ‘But we received other updates before’, which is true but this is more than the usual regular updates – this one is – BIG! You can expect the larger updates to become available monthly.
Murder is the name of the game! Players can now mark someone for for Frontier Justice if they are starting up murder cults. Also, as part of the murder feature, colonists can now engage in cults and cult behavior – including planting crops that will also begin acting accordingly to the dark arts by, well, exploding and/or overtaking the rest of your farm as “Malfeasant Clawbulb” crops.
Also, there are new monsters, more feelings among your colonists and fish people now have morale and can use weapons. Because we need FISHPEOPLE to able to be even more awesome!
Check out the full lists of enhancements below and hit up the game’s Steam Store page here for even more details and of course, to buy the game!
Engine/Rendering
· First pass at almost-zero draw overhead (AZDO) pass
· We did lots of texture resizing and texture cleanup to reduce memory footprint of game
· Save/load implemented
· Save/load stability improved
· unicode username support (for users with non-English characters in their windows username)
· performance improvements
· fixed many crashes
· FIXED: Save crash when saving a game after a character has been buried
· FIXED: Save crash when creating a job with a triple dependency
· fixed yet more crashes
· some really weird rendering errors fixed
Biomes/Terrain
· added new tropical embark position
· can select tropical embark position on embark map
· added a ton of new content for tropical biomes
· biome generators modified for tropical biome creation
Characters
· FIXED: crash when attempting to drop a body
· FIXED: corpse dropping errors
· FIXED: crash caused by going into infinite loop of trying to drop temporary tools
· FIXED: crash with overseer jobs being deleted
· fixed up some memory icons (incl. temp fix for frontier justice memory icon)
· added Military Training trait (and a couple others, for fun)
· FIXED: sleeping is not 10x as fast as intended
· immigration event pulls from a limited set of colonist types (rather than ANY valid)
· Colonists now given from 1-3 traits. (Lower classes get one only. Military characters always get military training .)
· Added a significant number of new memories for citizens to experience.
· Some traits now have physical effects
· Added militia footsoldier & NCO uniforms
· Soldiers now start with weapons
· FIXED: afflictions and damage assignment bugs
· Colonists can form friendships
· Making friends makes people happy
· FIXED: freezing in place when approached by fishpeople
· made eating raw food less desirable
· Can now form militias via militia button & assign civilians to military squads as militia
· “sacrificial dagger” is now a valid weapon
· Possessive pronouns now correctly added to character memory descriptions
· Axe murder re-added
· Cultists will now build creepy little shrines
· Cultists can turn into REDACTED
· a starving colony will receive one food bailout from the Colonial Ministry
· FIXED: workcrew job category filter toggles (though more categories need to be added; some jobs are awkwardly categorized eg. foraging/farming)
· combat tasks now prioritized over hunting /unless/ character is “Big Game Hunter”
· FIXED: memories not being removed
Combat/Military
· civilian workcrews can be conscripted to transform into a militia squad
· civilian labourers can be moved to a military squad to become militia soldiers
· militia soldiers are less good at combat, civilians w/o certain traits become upset when conscripted
· rally points can be set per military squad
· Military loadouts (as in, soldiers try to keep a gun handy)
Fishpeople
· Fishpeople now have morale & will run when they ve had enough
· Fishpeople morale affected by combat & seeing death
· Fishpeople now have weapons, including guns
· Adjusted quality/quantity of fishpeople attacks slightly toward quality
· Fishpeople attack spawns slightly fewer fishpeople (now that they have weapons)
· FIXED: fishpeople now have gibs
· FIXED: various issues with attack_melee and fishpeople using melee weapons
· FIXED: fishpeople weapons not added to player commodity list on spawn
· fishpeople made more aggressive in tropical biome
REDACTED
· REDACTED now have “armoured” tag and more hitpoints
Animals
· FIXED herbivore run animations
· FIXED: people no longer think that killing animals is murder
· Aurochs is no longed tagged “dodo”
· Added “Giant Beetle” to tropical biome, can be hunted & butchered
· Added “Junglefowl” to tropical biome, can be hunted & butchered
· FIXED: “Junglefowl” no longer shoots out giant gibs
· FIXED: hunting animals should no longer trigger combat music
UI/UX
· Alerts can be put on job requirements when job requirements fail, with snooze timers.
· Click & drag rectangle performance improved
· Work Crew job filters fixed
· some sounds added to main menu
· some sounds added to click & drag order creation
· FIXED some missing commodity icons
· Icon displayed on receiving affliction should no longer stack if character receives lots of damage in a short period
· spoiled crops now generates alert
· lacking guns for military will generate alert
· character info window expanded slightly
· sounds added to some UI buttons
· sounds added when giving orders via click & drag
Buildings/Zones
· Gabions can be built and work! Build gabions!
· adjusted utility of gabion construction (no longer higher than basic military duties)
· Added fieldstone foundation textures to a bunch of low-tier buildings
· Turned off make stone bricks job (stone blocks will be treated separately from bricks)
· Short wander added to end of dropping item in stockpile (to stop people from stockpiling themselves)
· First pass on adding particle effects to modules (this is really cool – ovens make smoke, etc.)
· added low-end “stone oven” module
· balance: food cooking time halved
· FIXED: issues with graveyards
· improvements to chairs/table placement
· one work crew will now work together to construct all modules in the building
· improved minor trim textures on procedural buildings
· FIXED: workers no longer attempt to make coconut curry directly from coconut palm tree
· new food commodities added: preserved orange cup fungus, preserved white cup fungus, sugar loaf, molasses, rum, chicha, moonshine, maize, maize stew, coconuts, coconut curry, chillies, etc?
Natural Objects
· Clay and Sand are now mined with a shovel rather than a pickaxe
· Doubled berrybush exhaustion chance
· Stone outcrop spawning increased
· Made starting colony biome more consistently temperate (to distinguish from tropics)
· clearables now can require varying amounts of work to clear (grass is easy to clear, shrubs less easy)
· added foraegable Coconut Palm to tropical biomes
· added more fungus varieties for tropical biomes
· improvements to various textures to read better when zoomed out
Farming
· Crops planted/tended by mad cultists will occasionally be Evil
· Evil plants will be removed by non-mad non-cultists
· Removing evil crops is upsetting
· added sfx to till soil job
· People farming will now sow seeds in addition to hoeing the fields
· Added new agricultural crops: sugarcane, chilli peppers, redid maize
· Some more crops rescaled (I heard you like big cabbages.)
· improved maize models
· various balance adjustments to make farming more forgiving
· corruption particle effects added to corrupted crops
· FIXED: harvesting corrupted/spoiled crops no longer causes errors
· rebalanced priority of farming jobs
· crops can now be set per-biome, tropical crops only grow in tropical colonies, temperate crops in temperate colonies
· sounds added to tilling soil, for real!
· FIXED: nil index errors
Misc.
· made curry really good
· Removed some FSM console spam, made other parts actually say what was printing them (so they are now useful console spammers)
· This was a real commit message: “- made steak biome look more appetizing”
