We were digging around in the dirt somewhere and discovered –

This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player via Steam!

We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress Report! It contains the voluminous annotated changelog.

(Don’t own the game? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)

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Major Changes

• Enormous UI improvements
• Overhauled Farming system
• The Economy Subtly Grows

UI

• changed main window text ticker to have three sizes, default is middle size
• added confirmation dialog on changing work crew times (will add a “don’t show this again” option later
• reorganized colonist list to be more compact, have a bit more functionality, and be more of a “white pages” for colonists.
• alerts now batched by type to cut down on spam. When targets for zoom are batched into an alert, repeated clicks will cycle through zoom targets
• left click and right clicks swapped on the alerts. this is intentional, and is going to be a little weird for the first bit, sorry!
• alerts corresponding to player choices are now separate from those not. Pop-up events cut back to fall in line with future plans for content.
• alerts now have varying degrees of importance, with pop-out detail windows replacing the huge tooltips which vary in detail and size corresponding to the importance of the alert. more important alerts also have different button art.
• modified work shift box to sync visual refresh with processing of button click
• added more “?” box help windows for various buildings
• cleaned up some building UI styles
• added unique religious doctrine icons
• added skill level and tech modifier display to all workshops’ UI
• tooltips now flip position near screen edges
• moved version number slightly to not cover new UI arrangement
• overhauled basically the entire main UI, the work crew UI, and the factions UI
• added more tutorial definitions
• changed +/- in work crew UI to up/down chevrons
• repositioned and fixed tooltips for main menu alerts
• shorted some UI sounds slightly
• tweaked how portraits are handled in work crew UI (unsatisfied with this, more work to come)
• day/night widget now survives save/load, has reliable day count information on it (finally), shows name of current hour
• collapsed work crews now show working status of MC char by highlighting their name tag button
• expand All / Collapse All button now on work crew UI window. Work crews now start all expanded (since you don’t have enough crews for this to be an issue at – start)
• added correct icon when office is complete to completion ticker message
• FIXED: more flickering tooltip issues
• FIXED: we were showing the wrong background size for expanded farms
• FIXED: “chermistry”
• FIXED: bug where shortening the interior pane of a scrollable window to the point where the scrollbar would disappear would not reset scroll position and instead cause elements to be permanently out of view.
• (added glowing border defs for overseer portraits)
• (redid skill level icons)
• (added ticker toggle button def to ui styles)
• (added support for eventual Shift Status UI in workshops/offices)
• (added new literal button type)
• (added expand/collapse all buttons)
• (added framework for sending scroll data through to scrollable vert boxes from outside the object)
• (buttons now respect padding as if they were container buttons)
• (image buttons “padding” changed to “margin” to fall in line with typical naming conventions)
• (fixed a couple of uninitialized variables doing Fun Things)
• (alerts rewrite as part of ongoing UI organization to make way for Fun.)

Workcrews

• reworked character shift work tests to be less error prone and cut its code footprint significantly
• added floating alert for revolting workcrews

Farming

• overhauled farming system
• revised the farming system, first iteration
• hooked up farms to the new UI system like some kind of cyborg. a plant cyborg.
• FIXED: perennial harvest stage calculation off by one
• FIXED: Fishpeople will not attack ungrown crops
• (added sparse_planting to crops)
• (added coffee icons to commodityIcons.xml)
• (adjusted some colours on new crops)
• (adjusted some stats on new crops)
• (added correct descriptions for new crops)
• (removed unused farming job_times.edb entries)

Overworld

• (Start of overworld work.)

Economy

• added Laquered Planks (made in the chemistry workshop and now required for some high end buildings/modules. You can get laquer from beetles, trade, and (temporarily) laquer trees, which will eventually be moved to another biome.)
• Pub no longer requires brewing devices to build (As you can acquired alcohol via trade now)
• balance: rebalanced costs for a number of buildings.
• balance: partial mining/ore rework (Surface nodes yield less ore and are less common. Removed Stone Charcoal Kiln and added iron requirement to Brick Charcoal Kiln. Mining will now always yield at least some coal. More ores are necessary to make metal bars. More bars necessary to make plates/pipes. Regular stone will occasionally produce ore. More ore added to traders. Added “ore trader mission” to stahlmark foreign office events. Rebalanced costs of all metal-costing modules.)
• balance: Quality Food and Premium Food now produce food at a 1:1 ingredients/output ratio.
• TEST: temp. removed flax and cloth from the game (until they tie into more interesting upcoming things)
• balance: trade values of large number of items updated to reflect reworking of ores/metals
  balance: lower-level kilns/ovens don’t require advanced metal parts to repair
• FIXED: many boxed modules took no time to assemble

Events

• added Foreign Relations Correction event
• added ability to attempt to intimidate bandits w/ trained military
• added a bunch of new foreign office options (3 per non-empire nation)
• all remaining instances of losing/gaining “Prestige” have been converted to faction standing
• when trader arrives at trade depot, an alert will be created
• added variant to Novorus Logging Moratorium to reflect conditions if you initiate it while hostile
• FIXED: various typos
• FIXED: Foreign Invasions will be called off if you manage to switch diplomatic state to non-hostile
• FIXED: possible scripterror in foreign_invasion
• (altered some Stahlmarkian text)

Characters

• colonists will now flee from fire
• increased delay before colonist waiting for service alerts trigger again
• colonists will wait slightly longer before eating food not suited to their social class (the gross food consumed over time is the same)
• balance: did first revision pass on happiness from ALL memories
• balance: confession now takes less time
• FIXED: “sucked up to” memory text
• FIXED: colonists would become stuck in graves forever while trying to bury the dead
• FIXED: construction materials dropped by re-assigned worker would sometimes be frozen in space
• (cleaned up some more memory creation)

Science

• added military science category plus 3 military techs
• lab optimization, take 1 (more data and string processing was being done than necessary; this was greatly optimized to fight the game hitch when using the Laboratory UI.)
• FIXED: scripterror in Laboratory (if points were maxed)
• FIXED: do_science.fsm now won’t scripterror after save/load in certain circumstances

Engine/Scripting

• added fixed-size zones (ie. farms, for new farming system)
• learned some things about finite number sets
• modified config file code to write out changes to the file when a variable is changed rather than on exit to avoid the issue where an unsafe exit would lose changes
• FIXED: a couple of crash bugs
• FIXED, probably: “run-time error” dialog message
• FIXED: selection box not letting you select some objects
• FIXED: some more crashes
• FIXED: even more crashes

Buildings

• miners will now receive building quality memories for the mine they’re working in
• balance: building costs changes using new materials
• FIXED: Pubs can now handle multiple booze vats
• FIXED: building crash
• FIXED: all boxable modules should have tooltips explaining where they can be built now
• FIXED: boxed pipes were used to build barometers and vice versa.
• FIXED: could make windows out of glass bottles
• FIXED: wall shrines’ access point was really far away
• FIXED: building Mineshaft Module crash
• FIXED: barbershop crash

Misc.

• FIXED: burning objects could leave invisible hot spots that ignited stuff forever
• FIXED: Obeliskians would sometimes attack dead humans and dead fishpeople
• FIXED: fishpeople won’t interrupt fleeing people for intimidation
• added “shoot bandits” command to bandits
• clearables now use assignment beacons correctly in all cases
• balance: ALL Obeliskians will start dormant

Want the full annotated changelog? Read it in the Development Report!

Have fun and let us know through our mysterious portal or forum if anything goes wro