Alpha 10 - The Professionals
The apocalypse may be here, but we are surviving, and fighting back.
And now, we finished crafting Alpha 10, codename - "The Professionals", to help us in our fight!
Alpha 10 is now available on the main branch. These past two months were very busy for us. We grew our team, hired a PR firm, created a new trailer, and through this all, we were working on this latest update - Alpha 10. A lot of work for two guys.
Here s some of what's new in alpha 10 and what we've been up to in the past two months. The full list of changes can be found in our Steam post.
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Survivor Generation
A new survivor generation window will appear before the game starts. You will get a chance to see your survivors, customize them, or re-roll new survivors if you're not happy with what you got.
New Judgment Trailer
Making a trailer that is interesting, captivating, and represents your game well is not an easy task. It took us a while to get everything the way we wanted, but in the end we are very happy with the results. What do you think of our new trailer?
Profession System
Our goal was making survivors more unique, having more effect on your play style. The 7 skill system felt inadequate for the task. All of the survivors had the same skills, and could improve any of them. Traits helped differentiate them a bit, but not enough.
So we scrapped it. Now, every survivor starts with a profession and some skills from that profession. As they perform tasks, they gain experience and earn levels. For every level you can select one of several new skills, depending on the profession.
You can still shape the direction in which your survivor evolves, but they are now more different from each other, adding more variety to the game.
It was a big challenge, designing and implementing this system. Not only did it's code integrate with almost every system in the game, it's effects on the game balance are grand. It took many iterations until we got the balance right, and I'm sure there is still much more we can improve.
Right now there are 4 professions, each has 5 levels, and every level has 2-3 skills, for a total of more than 50 new skills you can choose from. In addition there are tens of possible starting skills. We will be adding more in following updates, more skills, professions and mechanics.
All professions are fully moddable.
New Skills System
In the new system, a survivor either has or doesn't have a skill. Every skill provides bonuses to different stats. Some bonuses require specific weapons to be equipped, so an Occultist, for example, may get great combat bonuses, but only using occult weaponry.
Some crafting and building tasks now require specific skills. For example, to build a guard tower a survivor must have the "Defensive Building" skill. Choose your survivor skills wisely and plan ahead.
These new skills are fully moddable.
Improved world map
The world map is now 4 times bigger, more sparse, with a more interesting layout. The world now has rural areas and cities. Cities are very dense with scavenge opportunities, while rural areas are more likely to have farms and military bases. Explore the map until you find the areas that have what you need.
Scavenge difficulty is no longer as linear as it was. Things still get harder the farther you are from your base, but it's a bit more random, and some locations (like military bases) hold tougher enemies than others (like farms).
We also make sure that resources essential for research are always available in a reasonable distance from the base with enemies of reasonable difficulty.
The world generation algorithm is moddable.
Research materials
Important research subjects now require scavenge-only resources that are used specifically for this purpose. Once you get your hands on these resources you will have to choose how to best spend them, depending on your situation. There should be enough of these to unlock the entire research tree eventually.
New Content
Most of the new content in alpha 10 revolves around the new profession & skill systems. Other than that, there's also a brand new Industrial Area scavenge biome, three new scavenge locations, a new enemy, and a new research subject.
Performance Improvements
Another very important update in alpha 10 is the improved performance and stability. With large colonies, the game could become laggy, and even freeze for a few seconds on some occasions, which would usually result in the operating system closing the game as non-responsive.
All of the performance issues that were reported were resolved, and a few others that we found. There shouldn't be any more performance issues, we've tested with over 50 survivors. If you encounter any, please let us know ASAP.
Additionally, we've improved performance of switching from base to world map, and the UI for sending survivors on missions.
Balancing
There were many balancing changes. Here are a few of the main ones:
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Survivors now eat less often, so they don't have to stop their tasks and go find food so much as before.
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Lots of stat tweaking around accuracy and evasion.
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Custom difficulties now allow to disable base attacks completely, for those who want to focus on building and play in their own pace.
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When a survivor dies you now get their equipment back.
Steam Workshop Support
Support for steam workshop has been added in alpha 10. The workshop itself (on steam) will be in beta for now, but anyone may join the beta program by simply joining this Steam Group. Once joined, you will have access to the workshop page, and be able to upload or download mods. Follow our modding guide to learn how to create and upload mods.
Additionally you can now mod many new aspects of the game: Items, crafting, research, scavenge, enemies, skills, professions, world map generation, and much more. For more information check out the modding guide.
Previous saves and mods
Due to the change in the skills system, we couldn't support older saved games. You will have to start a new game in alpha 10.
Mods from previous alpha versions may or may not work, we have made some changes to the format of our configuration files. The modding wiki has been updated with all the new formats.
