After The Collapse 0.7.3: Critter Overload

EsKa

Here is a new massive content update for our 0.7 branch! It’s introducing the ability to tame many of the wild creatures you can encounter in-game. It’s also adding many new ones ranging from chickens to giant scorpions while allowing to exploit your cattle for other things than food production (like shearing for wool, collecting eggs, and so on). As usual, I’m only going over the major new features and changes. There are plenty more modding, UI and balance improvements you can find in the full change-log at the bottom of this very article.

Interactions with cattle

Until now, the only thing you could do with your cattle was to butcher it for food and collect a few additional resources on top depending on the species. Not anymore! Most animals are now small factories on legs. Chicken will drop eggs, your sheep can be sheared for wool, cows will give milk on a regular basis.

The system might look a bit cumbersome with a large animal population, but don’t worry we added a few menus to handle cattle and settlers. We’ll get to those further down.

Grow and tame wild animals

I added a new technology to research: “Animal Care” (located after Medicine). Once completed, most wild creatures will get a chance to drop eggs when defeated. Additionally, you’ll be able to construct two new buildings.

The first building is a simple container for those live eggs. The second building is an Animal Nursery. This is where you can grow those eggs into tamed versions of the defeated foes. Depending on the species, the fully grown creature can be used as cattle or as a pet (or both).

Scorpions, Nests, Events

On top of the new peaceful animals, hostiles scorpions of various sizes and types have been added to the game. You’ll find the smaller and fairly harmless ones in infested houses, caverns and sewers. Much larger and poisonous ones will appear during raid/migration events. Yes, poisonous! This is a new temporary health damaging effect, for which a cure can be researched at a medical station with the remains of a scorpion.

 

Then, we have the Queen Scorpion, a rare, late game, event which we won’t illustrate in this article. She is our first boss-type enemy. She is extremely deadly and has more that one trick up her sleeve. Granted you have the proper tech and you manage to kill her, you’ll receive an egg to make a copy of herself.

Additionally, we’re introducing the concept of nests. Simply put, those will spawn (within limits) creatures while will patrol the location around it. For now, nests can appear in two ways: in a new low probability building, or when removing a very large boulder (5% chance). Nests can be removed by shooting at them or razing them. You can also potentially use them as a fairly manageable hunting ground.

Colony Manager

I’m also introducing the new Colony Manager in this update. It’s a menu replacing the old “faction/communication” menu and which is containing a few handy new features.

You are, of course, still able to discuss with other factions from this menu. But, on top of that, you can now select which jobs settlers can and cannot do based on their skill and the amount of people you want available. You can also use those settings as presets for new arrivals, so you don’t have to review them individually if you don’t want to.

In the same spirit and with the ability to use many tamed animal species as “factories”, the colony manager also allows you to setup what you want to produce for each category in bulk. Making the whole process much easier to manage.

This is only the beginning regarding the Colony Manager, the menus will get standardized, and I will add new features in future updates.

Save Compatibility

This is technically compatible with 0.7.2 save-games. However, some of the main features won’t be active until you start a new game:

  • Existing giant animals won’t spawn eggs no matter if you have the “animal care” tech or not
  • None of the new events will occur (scorpions, queen scorpion, good/bad news)
  • Critter nests won’t spawn

General Notes

This is a very. large. update. Hopefully, it’s as bug free as possible (at least on the “critical” bug level). I’ve tested the version as much as possible, but we’re way past the point where it was still possible to fully play-test all the features and all their combinations. No worries, we’ll tackle any new issue in a timely manner through hot-patches, as usual 🙂

Full Changelog

  • AI: Fauna idles more often, giving a more natural movement pattern
  • AI: Red spiders can attack with both melee and ranged (instead of just ranged)
  • AI: Brawls between survivors are more likely to occur when their mood is low
  • Balance: Moods increase/decrease very slightly faster
  • Balance: Reduced health of wooden fence (250->150, as it was way too sturdy)
  • Balance: Toned down unhappiness for pet and friend’s death a bit
  • Balance: Some low risk raids no longer trigger on very large bases (to avoid cases where 3 tribals would attack a 20 ppl strong base)
  • Balance: Reduced the occurrence of medical traits (one eyed/handed and so on) on settler spawn
  • Balance: Slightly increased bullet speed of most ranged weapons
  • Content: Added Animal Care to tech tree (after medical), unlocks the ability for hostile mobs to drop eggs, the ability to store and grow said eggs as exotic pets
  • Content: New Animal Nursery building (unlocked by animal care) to grow eggs into tamed animals
  • Content: New Egg container building (unlocked by animal care) to store eggs waiting to be grown.
  • Content: Giant scorpions, spiders and crabs can be “adopted” this way, some work as cattle, others as pets
  • Content: Sheep can be sheared to retrieve wool without the need to kill them
  • Content: Added cows who can be milked to make cheese or butchered for food
  • Content: Added chickens who can produce eggs to make omelettes
  • Content: Added new recipes to basic and electric kitchens
  • Content: Cheese gives a temporary “bad breath” trait (lower social)
  • Content: Omelettes and Cooked meals give a temporary “Well fed” trait (small stats boost)
  • Content: New “Golden Scorpion” small and giant mobs (melee, poison damage)
  • Content: New “Black Scorpion” small and giant mobs (melee/ranged poison damage)
  • Content: New “Scorpion Queen” mob, spawn smaller scorpions around her
  • Content: More critter variety in infested buildings
  • Content: Various poison effects (gradually increases sickness and/or decrease health)
  • Content: Scorpions drop poison that can be sold or made into a cure at the medical station
  • Content: New creature nest object can spawn during map generation or during an event. It will generate animals guarding it.
  • Content: Boulders (2×2 rocks) have a 5% chance to uncover a scorpion or spider nest when removed
  • Content: Added a few “mood modifier” events
  • Content: Several new “invasion” events with the new mobs (early, mid, late-game events)
  • Engine: Animals having specific names for males are females (bull/cow) can be named accordingly now
  • Engine: Tamed animals/cattle can be interacted with to produce resources
  • Graphics: Replaced the various “pipe weapon” sprites (and their associated techs) by much better looking ones
  • Modding: Doctors will consider medical traits (missing eye/hand and so on) as things to fix, technically making artificial limbs a possibly moddable feature
  • Modding: Added “FactoryMale” and “FactoryFemale” info to RaceData files (works the same as with clutter, allows settlers to produce stuff from animals)
  • Modding: Added “CoolDownDuration” field to “Factory” info. Used to force the factory to “pause” for this amount of time in between completed recipes
  • Modding: Added the ability to use frame animations for npc (like we have for clutter)
  • Modding: Added ability for clutter to spawn another one on removal (look at data/clutter/pcg_rocklarge)
  • Modding: Added ability for clutter and npc to spawn more npc (look at data/clutter/nest_* files)
  • Modding: Added the ability for specific building to spawn specific npc/mobs instead of the generic ones
  • Modding: Turrets (invisible for now) can be put on NPC (look at npc/mother_scorpion file)
  • Modding: Turrets can specify their own load-out without the need to rely on the equiplist (look at npc/mother_scorpion file)
  • Modding: Added “DropOnDeathChance” and “DropOnDeathTech” to traits (to give a probability and tech requirement for DropOnDeath to occur)
  • Modding: The game will now accept mods with PNG files without the need to convert them to XNB. The option is still given to further optimize the mod (By Alex)
  • ProcGen: Added rare “infested house” building, spawn with spider nests
  • UI: The game log will properly display the cause of death when someone is killed by a health damaging trait (blood loss and so on)
  • UI: Increased game log “memory” from 100 to 200 items
  • UI: New “Colony Management” menu, replacing the “Faction” menu
  • UI: Colony Manager: Job overview / ability to apply job templates to settlers and new arrivals
  • UI: Colony Manager: Radio communication with other factions done from this menu
  • UI: Colony Manager: Ability to set default jobs for your cattle
  • UI: Added a “Stats” menu to the pause screen, showing all steam achievements status (Steam only) (By Alex)
  • Fixed: Some cases where the settler using a factory wouldn’t automatically pickup the output
  • Fixed: Attack job was forcing the agent to turn toward target, even when moving, resulting in jittery animations
  • Fixed: Giant spiders were missing proper animations for melee and ranged combat (we’re about to replace them with something professionally made anyway)
  • Fixed: Right clicking on the artifact slot would open the headgear item info panel instead
  • Fixed: Pressing the previous button when selecting a skin for a furniture wasn’t working as expected
  • Fixed: Robots would count toward the amount of beds required
  • Fixed: Turrets with explosive weapons wouldn’t take weapons “Min Range” into account, and would occasionally blow themselves up
  • Fixed: On slower machines, if you rush toward loading a game, before the initial background game loading is finished, the game might crash
  • Fixed: Settlers would occasionally pick a door as a valid location to work or use some furniture, causing their position to reset every few seconds
  • Fixed: Some cases where clicking a close button would open the menu for whichever item was under the button
  • Fixed: Fissures and cracks on the ground weren’t tagged as “removable”