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Build 0.1.15657, February 6  

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Paul Tozour
 Paul Tozour
Reputable Member
Joined: 1 year  ago
Posts: 270
07/02/2017 1:04 am  
Hi everyone!  It's been a while since our last update, so we wanted to give you a new build with some of the many fixes and improvements we've been working on in that time.

We've been busy on some very big new features for Aven Colony.  One of the biggest ones isn't even in today's build, and hasn't even been announced!  Keep your eyes peeled -- we'll have a big announcement in the next 3-4 weeks.

Also, if you missed our announcement about our partnership with Team17 to bring Aven Colony to Xbox and PS4, click on the link to find out more!

This update brings a ton of improvements and polish to Aven Colony, including a new "boosts" system, a new system for worker prioritization, new enhancers, big improvements to overlays, changes that make the Energy Battery vastly more useful and easier to use, and much, much more.
 

New features:

  • The "Social Policies" pane in the Colony Control Panel has been renamed to "Powers & Policies," since in addition to social policies it now handles much more.
  • Completely overhauled the mechanics for Energy Batteries.  These are no longer micro-managed individually.  Here's how it works now:
  • When the colony has excess power, any Energy Batteries automatically accumulate the excess power (dividing it between themselves) until they are full.
  • When a power zone doesn't have enough power, you can go to the "Powers & Policies" pane and turn on "Battery Power" to spend the accumulated power from all batteries.
  • The rate of drain in this mode depends on how many Energy Batteries you have, their total power stored, and how large the power deficit is that they're trying to compensate for.
  • When in this mode, the electricity indicator will show a small green battery icon instead of the grey lightning bolt.
  • New "colony boosts"!  A tier-2 Research Center can now research 4 powerful now temporary "boosts" for your colony:
  • Drone Boost: construction drones build/repair/upgrade much faster while active
  • Plasma Boost: Plasma Turrets fire much faster while active
  • Scrubber Boost: Scrubber drones scrub Creep much faster while active
  • Filtration Boost: Intake Fans and Air Intakes are significantly more effective while active
  • Once researched, these can be enabled in the Powers & Policies panel
  • All four of these boosts rapidly drain Energy Batteries while used, so only use them while you truly need them!
  • We've eliminated the concept of "closing job slots" in favor of a much more robust priority system: you simply set the worker priority of a building to "Low," "Normal," "High," or "Full"
  • There's a new "briefcase" icon to the left of the colonist icon rack for each building that you can click on to set the building's priority
  • "Low" priority buildings will attempt to have as few workers as possible beyond the minimum of 2 -- unless they can't find other jobs
  • "High" worker priority buildings will attempt to have more workers than they would at "Normal" priority, and will try to take workers from lower-priority buildings to achieve this
  • "Full" worker priority buildings will attempt to have the maximum number of workers at any given time
  • The briefcase icons are also visible in the "Employment" overlay, allowing you to quickly view the priority of all buildings in the colony
  • New enhancers!
  • Many of the enhancers have been renamed (e.g., "Cerulean Glow" instead of "Mind Mold") and have been changed into energy bars / drinks
  • Beer, sake, and vodka have been removed and 3 new enhancers have been added in their place
  • A new Dispensary ("Dr. Dan's Dispensary") has been added that automatically distributes enhancers to the surrounding area, and also shows their effects
  • You can also toggle off (or on again) for any enhancer for any individual Dispensary
  • This gives you an easy way to influence different parts of a colony
  • Improved overlays:
  • Air quality overlay: added "up" and "down" rate-of-change indicators to show which buildings are significantly raising or lowering air quality
  • Commute overlay: now shows an icon (red triangle with '!') for any buildings not connected to tunnels
  • Employment overlay: now shows worker priorities (briefcase icon) for each building that employs workers
  • Improved the legend popup on the left side of the screen for the Air Quality, Commute, and Employment overlays
  • Improved colors on the Crime overlay
  • By popular demand, added the ability to have local production at Mills and Chemical Plants, not shared with other such buildings (this is a check box on the manufacturing sub-panel)
  • Alien artifacts, when researched, are now activated via the Powers & Policies panel, and have a very long cooldown (usually 1-2 sols), and we now show a progress bar for each artifact in the Powers & Policies panel
  • Added new data types to the Stats pane of the Colony Control Panel: "Colonists Starving" and "Colonists Dehydrated"
  • Research: added hierarchical dividers and icons for items on the research pane
  • Manufacturing: added icons for items in the manufacturing / conversion list
  • Notifications related to referendums now show Kalandra, and include buttons for "Stats" and "Morale" (which take you to the respective panels of the Colony Control Panel)
  • We now support key remapping!  See the new tab off of the Options menu.  Note that keys can only be remapped from the main menu, not in-game
  • Player rank is now persistent, and the main menu should show the correct badge for each rank
  • Some mission objectives now include a "Stats" button that will open the Stats pane and show data values relevant to that objective
  • Some notifications also now include a smaller "Stats" button that will open the Stats pane and show data values relevant to that objective
  • Solar panels now ramp power generation up and down gradually over the fall->winter and winter->spring transitions, making a bit easier to handle power issues with large colonies
  • New voice-overs for the Retail Center
  • Added another indicator to the aggregate morale popup in the Colony Control Panel showing the percentage of colonists properly fed & hydrated (read: not starving or dying of thirst) at any moment
  • The end-game "Stats" header when you lose a game now properly states the reason for defeat: referendum lost, all citizens died, or mission timer expired
  • Overhauled the Trade Contracts list so that each trade contract states who you're trading with, indicates whether it's permanent or one-shot, and shows the progress bar at all times, even when empty
  • Added green "sorting" arrows to 3 of the Colony Control Panel panes: Colony Inventory, Colonist List, and Buildings List.  The functionality existed in the December build to sort these by clicking on the headers, but it wasn't obvious at all that this existed.  The lists also now should remain sorted as the data changes in each list

 

Tuning / tweaking / design changes:

  • Tweaked mission rewards -- most mission objectives now grant roughly 10% more resources in the very early game and 10% less in the late game
  • Removed "antibiotics" and "antivirals" from Hospitals
  • Colonist icons now flash purple when they are unhappy and red when they are injured
  • Major improvements to creep spore & plague spore spawning; they now have many many more spawn points on every map and more intelligently seek toward the colony
  • Creep spores & plague spores now occur more often in the mid and late game, and they have a chance to occur more than once per sol, in each of spring, fall, and summer
  • Hyla's Crescent: now count air filters as well as intakes for the "build 2 intakes" objective
  • Hyla's Crescent: iron deposits now have more iron and are more consistent in their quantities
  • Hyla's Crescent: added more iron deposits in the back area to make it more viable as a destination to build out to
  • Azara Falls: tweaked the objective indicating that you need to extend the colony outward in order to grow food
  • Hugely toned down the time scaling for visor dust in desert maps to much more slowly than the actual game speed to be easier on the eyes
  • Added more Zorium to deposits: Zorium deposits now have 9500 zorium by default
  • Zorium plants now reduce air quality by roughly 10% less and consume Zorium 12% more slowly
  • Tier 1 Zorium Plant is slightly cheaper
  • Tier 2 Zorium Plant is now slightly more expensive but produces a max of 504 power instead of 468
  • All missions now grant, at some point during the mission, a trade contract to trade 200 of one type of food for 20 Zorium.  This is enough to keep a Zorium Generator poking along in "Low Burn Mode"
  • Research Center: changed costs from T1=64 and T2=90 nanites to T1=58 and T2=94 nanites (now that a Tier-2 is required to research colony boosts)
  • New "Megastructures" category in the build palette for the Stadium and Earth History Center
  • The aggregate panel "info" sub-panel of the Colony Control Panel now states the number of jobs filled, jobs unfilled, and number of unemployed colonists
  • Corn Syrup now also requires Water as an ingredient, and you can now manufacture 20 Corn Syrup from 10 Corn and 10 Water; this gives you a good way to generate lots of unhealthy food for your colonists quickly and cheaply if you have enough Corn and Water
  • Power-generating structures that also use workers (Zorium plants, Geothermals) now update their workers much more quickly, including an immediate tick, when the power zone is starved of power
  • Improved line rendering in the Stats panel of the Colony Control Panel
  • Updated the scout rover to scout the area at the beginning of most (not all) missions
  • Clinics, Research Centers, and Retail Centers now can have up to 21 workers each (was 20)
  • The game will default to starting in borderless fullscreen for anybody who hasn't already overriden the default resolution
  • "Creep infection" text on infected buildings is now stated in terms of the more understandable start = 1%, end = 100% instead of the other way around
  • New icons for "Resupply Pod Available," "Resupply Pod Landed," and "Artifact Acquired"
  • Made industrial sounds and Farm sprinkler sounds quieter and less annoying
  • Lots of tweaks to several of the SHIPE calls to make them snappier
  • Fixed the drone station force field to no longer rotate with the laser
  • Slightly reduced morale at 250 colonists at medium & large colony sizes
  • Improved "Lightning Tower Hit" notification: now tells you if batteries are full vs. you having none
  • The Drone Auto-Repair policy no longer requires a referendum victory
  • The Water Rationing policy no longer requires a referendum victory
  • Various CPU and GPU optimizations

 

Bug fixes:

  • Re-enabled the "Resolution Quality" graphics option, now that a bug in UE4 has been fixed related to this option
  • Added the correct mission-specific loading screens appear when loading a save game (from the main menu
  • Fixed audio attenuation to work properly for a ton of different sounds
  • Fixed a bug where shard storm notifications would not invalidate properly
  • Implemented the correct meshes Quinoa, Watermelon, Broccoli plants for farms
  • Fixed a bug where some crops in Greenhouses were shown as banana plants
  • Fixed bug where foliage wasn't being removed when loading a save where the game had been won or lost
  • Fixed bug where achieving victory during a NON-victory SHIPE call could allow the game to continue indefinitely w/ no victory
  • Fixed a bug where only one protester could leave a protest at a time PER BUILDING instead of per-corner, which caused large protests to wind down much more slowly than they should
  • Fixed a bug where the 'water' overlay could remain on after placing a Water Pump
  • Fixed animation issues when selecting or deselecting a Mini-Storage building
  • Fixed the greyed icon for the "Defense" build palette submenu being incorrect when game was paused
  • Farm: fixed bug where the sprinkler sound was audible during placement
  • Fixed a bug where "Building lost power" notifications could sometimes flash for 0.1 seconds and then suddenly disappear again
  • The research pane now updates properly if you have it open while upgrading a tier 1 Research Center to tier 2
  • Adjusted Tutorial 2 to no longer refer to "closing off job slots" and teach the player how to set worker priorities instead
  • Fixed various issues with door placement between tunnels, modules, and buildings
  • Fixed the police drone radius not appearing when you hit "Show Radius"
  • Resupply Pods: fixed bug which made parachute reappear on landed drop pod
  • Resupply Pods: fixed bug which would keep progress text visible when it shouldn't be
  • Fixed some longstanding issues with pathfinding that caused issues for colonist movement, Commute morale calculation, and more
  • Added some safeguards that should help fix a few rare cases of the main menu background video not playing
  • Fixed bug where simply clicking on a critical, game-pausing notification to reopen it would pause the game again
  • Tons of other small bug fixes

 

Optimizations:

  • Lots of little CPU and GPU optimizations; many more still to come

 

Paul Tozour & the Mothership Entertainment team
Edited: 6 months  ago

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CosmicCowboy
 CosmicCowboy
Active Member
Joined: 9 months  ago
Posts: 6
08/02/2017 7:02 am  

Very nice! Thanks!


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aven_colonist
 aven_colonist
New Member
Joined: 9 months  ago
Posts: 2
08/02/2017 7:10 pm  

Sounds like a ton of work,

ty vm. Seems like you have tackled many issues players
have pointed to during hte last months. Can't wait to test
the new build.


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LadyAquanine735
 LadyAquanine735
Trusted Member
Joined: 8 months  ago
Posts: 99
12/02/2017 2:38 am  

Thank you very much for updating :D.  I was worried the project had been scrapped or something.  Turns out, you were just working overtime ;).  Can't wait to try these new updates.


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