A Clockwork Empires update has been discovered scuttling around our freshly cleaned floor! We present for you:

This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player using Windows via Steam! The MacOS build will be delayed for a couple days because our mac hardware blew up. We’ve ordered a new one and shall inform you when the MacOS build is released.

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.)

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Patch Notes for alpha 42:

MAJOR FEATURES

• agriculture update: crop choice is really important now!
• a massively improved Work Crew UI
• added the Barracks to conscript & train military
• and we fixed a million things!

The Engine

• FIXED: crash caused by runaway iterator in AI preference code
• FIXED: infinite loop cancelling assignment jobs
• OPTIMIZATION: fog of war rendering
• FIXED: buried corpses becoming visible after save/load
• FIXED: child jobs in an assignment would not be shown as being done in the jobs window after save and load, despite being done
• FIXED: random crash deleting assignment

Human Characters

• balance: Naturalists will prioritize player-ordered Mineralogical Surveying over player-ordered Exploration Beacons
• colonists will abort hugging more accurately
• added new desires for colonists to desire
• added Prisoner character history backgrounds
• balance: overseer immigration rate has been rebalanced based on player data
• balance: slowed down middle class immigration.
• balance: lower class immigration will give even fewer aristocrats (yes, we realize the contradiction inherent in this statement)
• FIXED: people getting stuck returning to civilization
• FIXED: favour redcoats won’t be demoted to militia anymore
• FIXED: lower-class characters now properly inherit skills from their overseer for purpose of determining length of job time
• FIXED: favour naturalists are now properly counted as temporary characters
• FIXED: job dependencies to get new tools not being filled when a character has a tool, but it is stowed on their back (affects burial, probably some other stalled work crew stuff)
• FIXED: characters now do not abort a raw food eating job to eat cooked food if the cooked food is locked by somebody else, or not owned by the player
• FIXED: people no longer get memories for killing “Unnamed”
• FIXED: temporary characters can no longer leave your colony without unlocking their jobs first (this could cause frozen jobs!)
• FIXED: player-ordered butcher job filters aligned (it’s just “hunting” now)
• FIXED: mundane seed memories for fresh-off-the-airship colonists work correctly now
• FIXED: work crews would occasionally reset all their job filters
• FIXED: corpses thinking they weren’t in the world and thus messing up burial jobs
• FIXED: miners won’t return to stockpiles to drop their imaginary shovel/pickaxe (this will be more thoroughly fixed post 42)
• FIXED: Aristocrats will never get “no workcrew” alert

Scripting System

• character desires can now be fulfilled by having a memory of doing a thing
• FIXED: if a tag can be filled by multiple objects with the same utility, we now pick one at random rather than just the last one. (This mainly shows up in the distribution of where people sleep, as well as other issues which hopefully won’t stick in loops.)
• FIXED: if an object is deleted, don’t let it be used for a job (this should never happen anyway, but did in a save game we received so we’re handling it correctly now)

Combat & Military

• added concept of training to barracks: assigned NCO will order militia soldiers to “get swole” so they become proper redcoats
• added Barracks (assign workcrew to conscript them)
• added military skill to replace “Military Training” trait (more work coming on this)
• removed NCO option from middle class immigration (due to barracks)
• balance: morale threshold tweaks for less scarpering
• FIXED: NCO in military-themed loadout did not have proper military skill
• FIXED: you will not longer see “Her Majesty’s 11st Regiment”
• FIXED: case where soldier would use civilian morale levels to calculate choice to retreat

Non-Human Characters (Animals, Monsters, Vehicles)

• added “Idle Suspiciously” job for foreigners
• FIXED: various issues with bandit gang retreating
• FIXED: non-player ai agents will now correctly delete their carried weapons or items when despawned
• FIXED: non-colonist ai_agents did not interrupt jobs correctly
• FIXED: issues with bandits fleeing back to their camp
• FIXED: bandit gang defeat scripterror
• FIXED: bandit hostility state toggles for ALL bandits on the map whenever a decision is made about them
• FIXED: scripterror caused by vermin
• FIXED: dormant obeliskian hostility toggling
• FIXED: dead things very specifically can’t become hostile now even if they try
• FIXED: bandit scripterrors (due to groups not being removed from global list)
• FIXED: former bandit appeared to re-join colony when dead and buried in grave
• FIXED: Bandits killed while stealing your stuff will no longer leave commodities hanging in mid-air

Buildings & Building Creation

• balance: Naturalist’s office no longer requires iron plates, Laboratory uses copper plates instead of iron
• FIXED: very small, fairly unlikely crash building buildings and then loading them afterwards
• FIXED: kitchen gets stuck on an assignment
• FIXED: gabion deconstruction (and gabion deconstruction progress bar)
• FIXED: logs/bricks recovered from airshipmast & gabions now properly set to owned by player
• FIXED: infinite pickup/drop loop trying to build or repair modules that are inaccessible from the current worker position but NOT with invalid access points
• FIXED: brewery description no longer claims that the brewery is a kitchen
• FIXED: “Flatten Terrain” is now a construction job
• FIXED: unbuilt gabions will no longer create rubble when “destroyed”.
• FIXED: descriptions for metalworks and ceramics are no longer the same, and are now useful.
• FIXED: repairing a module had a lower utility than anything else in the game; this is now fixed
• FIXED: workshop could be broken by cancelling an assignment

Economy & Logistics

• different edible crops now have different growth rates and yields. Try experimenting with them!
• farm growth rates have been completely overhauled. You will have to pay more attention to ramping up you farming as your colony grows, now.
• crops now (usually) output 1 item, dropped immediately to ground
• farm field max dimensions doubled
• stockpile max dimensions limited to 7×7 (in anticipation of stockpile mechanics improvements)
• balance: cooking food no longer gives you 2-for-1 output.
• balance: crops now only grow/spoil during the day (because Samut bugged us about doing this again)
• FIXED: foraging can only be done during the day now
• FIXED: item ownership for lots of items
• FIXED: commodities will only stack with other commodities if they have a common owner (for now)
• FIXED: planks were being calculated at 1/4 their intended economy value
• updated crop descriptions to reflect balance changes

Biomes & Terrain

• balance: foragable plants take longer to regrow
• maize can now be grown in the New Antipodia biome

Events, Metagame, and The Overworld

• ai_agent missions that target civilization will now aim closer to civilization
• FIXED: increased ravenous herd hunger so they dont have to get hungrier before eating your crops
• FIXED: rare scripterror in Fishperson Butchery Crisis
• FIXED: various issues with Bandit attacks not finding their target
• FIXED: favour troops will no longer perform all jobs
• FIXED: airship flyer event no longer fails due to thinking north is south

UI/UX

• added morale & health bars to nametag when a character is in combat
• shift-clicking on a workshop +/- icon increments (decrements) the # of products being produced by 10
• items may now be forbidden and claimed using the click-drag interface; forbidden items turn red
• tooltips now offset to account for cursor size when set to follow the cursor
• overhauled work crew window to remove unnecessary information, increase readability, oppress the lower class (in-progress)
• edited faction and commodity window sizes
• added “mysterious figures” icon to mysterious situations
• assignment beacons now correctly display the work crew name and subtasks
• tooltip over assignment beacon now tells you the name of the job, the work crew doing the job, and the # of tasks remaining in the job
• improved tooltips for workshops
• lower class worker cameos in Work Crew menu will highlight if doing job for the Work Crew’s assignment & display current job in tooltip – weed out idlers!
• the Farm UI now shows descriptions of plants
• conversations and thoughts that are sufficiently important and not just idle gossip will be displayed, regardless of zoom levels
• various typos and incorrect descriptions corrected
• OPTIMIZATION: game does not reload work crew tooltips from disk when regenerating work crew menu
• OPTIMIZATION: only regenerate work crew window elements that actually need regenerating, not the entire window
• FIXED: slowdown in work party menu with > 100 colonists
• FIXED: tutorial for cooking will no longer launch 10 times in certain cases

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