Once more, a Clockwork Empires update appears from a crate that fell from the sky. We present for you:

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

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

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

Want to hear about all sorts of updates via email plus receive silly images from development? Sign up for the newsletter here.

Patch Notes:

Major Features

• The Seven Colonist Start
• Progress Bars
• Factions window
• lots of new events
• Airdrop Signalling Mast to control drop point of supplies & immigrants

The Engine

• added flag to executable that should (hopefully) automatically select NVIDIA cards on Multi GPU (Optimus) laptops
• FIXED: beacon/gabion/etc. placers now show up again

Human Characters

• sight radius is lowered at night
• Naturalists get increased sight radius
• rebalanced idle/wander/gossip weighting
• added more seed memories to characters upon spawn – should make combat morale/behaviour more stable for recent immigrants
• Small grammar fix to memories while sleeping in a bed
• angry citizens may occasionally smash a commodity in anger.
• cultists will attempt to preach The Occult (and spread madness)
• balance: higher class characters are much more persuasive when recruiting characters of lower classes for cults (class-relevant traits ie Communist also apply to this logic)
• added ability to lose a friend (& associated sad memory)
• added concept of rivals/enemies to characters (framework only)
• added various means for cultists to decide to leave their cult
• cleaned up cult leader death & selection (will end cult if no one is maddened enough to lead)
• added more character names
• characters can have origin stories related to their traits and/or class (and added many new possibilities)
• added a floating starvation warning icon to starving characters
• FIXED: starvation floaty icon will not remain over dead people
• added dress version of “freak out” animation
• Naturalists will go to any explore beacons, no matter how far away they are
• colonists can tell what class of bed they are sleeping in, and have different memories depending on the quality of bed relative to their social class
• butchering fishpeople creeps out (most) colonists
• added Vicar job to deprogram cult members
• gossip can no longer be interrupted for more gossip (should fix some of the weird socialization pileups)
• tools can now be despawned in-place via Magical Stowing rather than requiring walking to a drop position and performing full animation
• FIXED: issue in civilization calculation that caused erratic “return to civilization” behaviors
• FIXED: various people getting items stuck in their hands
• FIXED: occasionally grabbing a social job if you had non-social work you could be doing
• FIXED: some nonsense with the job mailbox system
• FIXED: broken nametags (& disappearing nametags on load)
• FIXED: military characters will no longer use specially skilled civilian outfits if overseer has skill
• FIXED: characters assigned uniform via office job should stick to those uniforms correctly
• FIXED: militia NCOs no longer revert to civilian form if they have skills
• colonists will now be slightly happier eating food in chairs rather than standing

Combat & Military

• added an emote when military decides to retreat due to low morale
• added new military idle: Stand at attention
• alarm waypoints will self-delete if no enemies nearby (military should stop responding to alarms after menacing enemy is killed)
• soldiers will grab gun instead of fleeing if both enemy AND weapon is in range and morale is high
• tweaked how reloading animation was set so civilians who have a very long reload time don’t look like they’re idling
• successfully retreating from enemies will make people … well, not happy really, but slightly less upset at least.
• FIXED: militia was confused about what jobs to take in some cases
• FIXED: invisible soldiers
• FIXED: characters ending up with 2, 3, 4 or more guns fused onto their hands
• added morale feedback to character panel (as it pertains to not fleeing from combat)

Non-Human Characters

• FIXED: stuff getting really weird with corpses (particularly fishpeople corpses) after they’re moved to another position
• FIXED: Bandits actually respect truce now!
• FIXED: bandit drop/flee cycle

Economy & Buildings

• added airship signalling mast to control airdrop position (only for supply drop right now)
• flatten terrain job is now in “construction” job category ( & overseers can now take flatten terrain job)
• gabion construction changed to a civilian job
• farming time now correctly uses farming skill
• standalone module construction / deconstruction uses tools & ‘construction’ skill
• FIXED: Improved understanding of who owns what meat.
• Work crew job filters now automatically flipped to “off” when a work crew is assigned to a workshop (except hauling). They can be manually re-enabled to allow work crews to work outside the workshop
• farming: tweaked values for prioritizing the maintenance of existing plants over planting of new ones and removal of dead ones
• FIXED: characters getting stuck in Ghost Modules
• framework for containers, smart objects

Biomes & Terrain

• balance: no (live) fishpeople should appear in (immediate) vicinity of a tropical gamestart
• added clay & stone near-ish to starting spots

Events, Metagame, and the Overworld

• implemented seven dwarves mode ’cause yolo
• balance: reduced starting resources
• added guaranteed muskets at game-start
• all events now have a default choice “timeout” so will eventually proceed whether or not you react to them
• attached all airdrop & immigration events to airdropmast, if player has one active
• “Population Below 5” bailout changed to “Population Below 3” bailout because the previous system encouraged murdering people for free bonus civilians
• Fixed script error in “Bandits Offer Plunder” event
• Clarified effect in flavor text of in “Ominous Dreams” event
• “Colonist finds overlooked supplies” event has ticker text for items recieved and other minor improvements
• Small optimizations in a few events
• redcoats favour NCO now always starts with a pistol
• FIXED: an error in “Research Family Tree” event
• events that give randomized items (plunder, etc) now tell you exactly what you got in the ticker
• added event for bandit to defect to player’s colony
• new event: Hale and Hearty colonist overcomes affliction
• new prestige favour: Food shipment
• new event: Gain rewards for hitting certain population levels
• added event to give 1 prestige a day for surviving
• new event: doing paperwork reveals extra supplies that weren’t recorded!
• new event: commoners feel understood by sympathetic aristocrat
• FIXED: Dead people will no longer send ministry investigators after you. (Or initiate any other events)
• FIXED: non-deleting science crates (+ added fun icons to ticker reports for science crates)
• balance: increased bandit event timers
• FIXED: isDay wasn’t set to true on first day!

Multiplayer

• backend for basic Steam integration (initiating multiplayer, joining a game from friends lists, Steam P2P  communication)
• proper multiplayer initiation
• deterministic network world building
• in-game determinism checking tools
• non-deterministic ‘find nearby location

Music & Sound

• added music cues to events and nightfall

UI/UX

• added framework for cute progress bars for jobs! (first case: tree chopping)
• added progress bars to farming
• added progress bars to construction jobs
• added new Daniel Nametag Zoom System
• FIXED: the contextual module tutorial appearing more than once
• upgraded the old food icon to not be all pixelated (THANKS CHRIS)
• changing around size of Work Crew subpanels for more efficient use of space (in progress)
• FIXED: slowdown in jobs menu with lots of gabion jobs
• UI: workshop button removed from work crew job filters (assignment to workshop implies workshop filter active)
• FIXED: pumpkin and cabbage stew icons! And yellowcup fungus bushel. And fixed some incorrect smelter icons
• removing a farm now closes its control window if it was open
• memories now use specified iconSkin strings (more icons possible for memories; will fix some invisible memories)
• FIXED: laudanum (and other drinks?!) not showing up in commodities window
• tutorial: updated refining tutorial to reference Metalworks as place to refine ore

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