The Early Access colony building game Clockwork Empires has seen a significant update to add new features, and fix existing problems with the game.
The new update is called “The Bandit Raid on ‘Fightin’ Vicar Zedock Woodburn’s Frontier Chapel Update.” Yeah, I’m not sure either.
The big new feature of the game is the ability to play on Mac and Linux now. Also added are new enemy types, land dragons Vicars, Bandits, new ways to control colonists including standing orders for products so you always have a certain number of resources, and much more.
Check out some screenshots below showing off the new features, along with the full 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
