The Occult Inspector asked if there was an update and we said-

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

We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress report!

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Major player-facing additions this month:

• added a new Mine system
• improved Naturalist’s Office
• improved Public House
• added a Training Academy
• lights!
• many UI improvements
• vast & sweeping Upkeep rebalancing
• Game Over stats
• The Larch

Begin the full Beta 54 changelog!

Mining

• Mining interface completely overhauled; depth now unlocks deeper strata which the player may choose from when mining. Different stratum combine with nearby resource points to result in different sets of products when mining. Deep mines may find interesting things.
• added 3 new Mine modules: Dewatering Pump for mines, Ventilation Unit, and Steam Distributor
• rewrote ore vein distribution
• FIXED: button bug with mines
• FIXED: mine output bug in deeper stratum
• FIXED: infinite new ore veins in mine
• FIXED: horrifying infinite loop bug when acquiring 2nd bonus ore vein in mines

Offices

• added new office type: “Training Academy” (your overseers can learn skills here faster than normal)
• overhauled Public House (can select booze type to serve, booze type appearance is preserved when serving, colonists can self-serve, pub given larger effect on memories/QoL)
• Naturalists now can be set to various modes including: Scouting, Hunting, Mineral Surveying
• > a Scouting Naturalist can see extremely far, modified by naturalism skill
• > a Hunting Naturalist will hunt – and will attempt to find game if none is visible (only Naturalists & crew may hunt now)
• > a Mineral Surveying Naturalist surveys minerals in a normal way
• Pubs will serve tea if they are out of everything else
• removed Cot from Barracks
• Naturalist’s Office given better tooltips
• Pub: Booze Vats now required to increase Pub drink stock capacity
• added Bureaucrat’s Desk: These can be built in the foreign office as an upgrade over Standing Desks to speed up your diplomacy point acquisition.
• FIXED: can no longer reset research in lab with fewer points than advertised
• FIXED: various incorrect utility caps in office jobs leading to unexpected behaviour with certain office workcrews
• FIXED: science skill display in Laboratory
• FIXED: header on Laboratory points filled alert
• FIXED: various issues with Foreign Office jobs not being carried out correctly under some circumstances
• FIXED: bug with mining techs
• FIXED: changing research category in Laboratory could mark projects as “already researched”
• FIXED: lab techs displayed “researched” after switching programs
• FIXED: error in controlling skill for Foreign Office work
• FIXED: Public House will no longer be stocked with booze you do not own
• FIXED: “you need a barracks” warning firing when you already have a barracks

Characters

• added unique icons to some of the new traits
• added tech to boost quality of life for outdoor workers
• foreigners who die inside your colony will now automatically receive burial
• despairing colonists will cure themselves using Laudanum distributed from the Pub
• balance: halved the maximum number of characters you can receive from a single immigration wave
• balance: beds now restricted by character social class
• balance: Cots and Lower Class Chairs no longer require upkeep
• balance: killing for the first time gives a harsher emotional impact
• balance: colonists with over 50 despair will start freaking out and cease to work until their despair is under 20 (If possible they will avail themselves of pub/chapel services to speed up recovery)
• FIXED: friendship scripterror
• FIXED: rare resetWeapon scripterror
• FIXED: scripterror in “get swole” if overseer job was changed rapidly and thus anim name was lost
• FIXED: eating fishperson pie is no longer considered cannibalism
• FIXED: added additional check during character damage calc due to scripterror after attempt to damage deleted character
• FIXED: a bug that was preventing colonists from getting memories sometimes
• FIXED: unified name of all the variables for despair
• FIXED: weird one-off script error with pathfinding not aborting correctly
• FIXED: military morale check was backwards
• FIXED: female armoured bandit did not have class-based anim defs leading to very rare errors that would freeze colonists in place forever under certain conditions

• FIXED: military will no longer butcher corpses unless exceptional circumstances prevail

Economy/Workshops

• new module: Advanced Workbench; allows creation of upkeep trunks, bricabrac, boxed modules in bulk
• characters picking up a stack of m things from a stack of n items no longer play their animation m times; they play the animation once and pick up the entire stack, all at once
• minor tag updates to a few commodities/foods
• animal butchery now returns stacks of meat, like other resource-exploitation jobs
• meat from when animals ‘butcher’ a corpse inside civilization will automatically be claimed by player
• added The Larch (to research and then grow for a source of timber)
• Workshop upkeep jobs are now handled by the workshop work crew, if a workshop work crew is available
• booze commodities are now crates when not being drunk
• balance: military modules now require upkeep
• balance: reduced upkeep costs across the board, but especially for low end modules
• balance: further upkeep nerfing (deal with it)
• balance: nerfed upkeep costs EVEN MORE
• balance: animal meat output increased
• balance: failed upkeep now makes work take ~8x as long rather than completely shutting down workshops
• FIXED: not saving/loading workshop module attached to a job between saves would cause production menu to occasionally not update when a job was complete
• FIXED: commodities disappearing from stockpile when two containers are merged (again!)
• FIXED: all instances of gathering materials for construction now require that you own said materials
• FIXED: uncommon scripterror upon shiftchange for unfinished building when left unfinished for a very long time
• FIXED: logic error in upkeep job creation causes building with exactly 1 upkeep cost to not perform upkeep correctly
• FIXED: weird occasional scripterror when creating something in a workshop
• FIXED: some module costs
• FIXED: can no longer hit demolition many times on a building and cause errors
• FIXED: beetles wouldn’t drop lacquer

Trade

• if traders are already in your colony, additional traders will no longer appear until the existing traders have left
• requesting traders via Foreign Office requires that no traders be on the map already
• balance: traders will now always have some repair trunks and basic materials on them
• balance: added opium to traders
• FIXED: you can un-designate trade goods and the green outline will disappear
• FIXED: Boxed rare paintings are now tradable
• FIXED: traders will no longer appear w/o trade goods in their hands
• FIXED: crash when opening trade office menu
• FIXED: trade goods in stacks now correctly un-designate too
• FIXED: subtle errors in Foreign Office to do with missions that involve requesting traders

Events

• added a first pass at game over screen
• added an Occult Inspector event
• added Rogue Artist event
• “singing terrain” event arc effect increased
• Sunny Day now starts during the day (because it’s weird to start this at night)
• made rogue stahlmarkian starting position more random
• event arcs made smarter about pushing information to ticker history
• Novorus Logging Moratorium and Stahlmark Smithing Prowess foreign office events are now tracked using the event arc system
• balance: cultist murderer option now easier to access
• FIXED: more instances of empty-handed traders
• FIXED: alert for angering bandits appearing when no bandit witnessed your desecration of their foul tents
• FIXED: bug in “Stahlmark Smithing Prowess” event where it failed to track how many iron bars you had made
• FIXED: scripterror in rogue artist event
• FIXED: scripterror in Rogue Stahlmarkian if rare conditions occur
• FIXED: broken icon in alert for favour_redcoats
• FIXED: broken fishperson job loop under certain circumstances
• FIXED: math error in disturbance points that made them higher than intended

UI/UX

• the building commands menu is now split into more subcategories
• assignment beacons are now grayed out when their assignments are disabled
• rewrote a number of building descriptions to make their usage more clear
• foreign relation state changes now handled as FYI-style alerts
• tooltips can now be anchored to screen position
• added wrapped text overload constructor to cut down on illusion code lines
• object tooltips now show how many of a thing are owned, show tags
• character tooltips are now anchored to bottom right, and are starting to show useful information
• upgraded some core building icons to be more visually distinct
• camera tutorial now mentions that spacebar pauses the game
• character tooltip info now visible in the work crew screen and the population list UI elements, because we all wanted them there in the first place
• added Quality of Life ratings from 1 to 5 (& more info in the pipe)
• added more functionality to the character tooltip (more to come): Will show more information about why a character is not doing something useful and what to do about it
• Quality of Life attributes for characters are more closely attached to specific emotional states in order to make it easier to provide clear solution steps via the UI for a character’s state
• added a little icon for whether characters are currently on-shift to the tooltip
• population list window has been edited to show more information, the filters have been temporarily removed
• FIXED: title of “aristocratic manor” command no longer says “A”
• FIXED: typography on j and other characters
• FIXED: tooltip info persists across save/load
• FIXED: an issue where for initial pause tooltips for characters were broken
• FIXED: Work crew panel now displays the name of a workshop/assigned zone if there is one (instead of “No Assignment”)
• FIXED: workcrew UI for farms no longer forgets that a work crew is assigned to a farm unless they’re currently farming.
• FIXED: some bad widget deletions causing Bad Things
• FIXED: some memory handling issue with UI elements

Engine & Others

• added ability to attach lights to static props (& tool support for this)
• added lights to a number of existing modules
• you can now build lampposts
• horror corpses can now be destroyed by damage
• steppe biome now uses lower hill generator
• added more terrain softening between alpine clearing and temperate swamp
• added new acceleration code for closest lambda queries (optimization!)
• FIXED: combat music cues should only fire for combat involving your colonists
• FIXED: depressingly complicated scene graph loading bug causing crashing on save games
• FIXED: another, different, save game crash
• FIXED: loading the save game you just saved causes colonists to re-appear twice in the colonists list
• FIXED: large, complicated race condition
• FIXED: game locks up suspending or closing a job where a job is being cancelled, but the FSM hasn’t picked it up yet
• FIXED: weird crash loading save games where you have a beacon with an interactive object with no message receiver, and no I don’t know how this happens either but we handle it now
• FIXED: crash when clicking on module button rapidly

Wish to peruse 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 wrong.