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DavyDavy

Community Developer
Paradox Staff
Sep 25, 2019
67
50
Hey there survivors, get ready to hit the saunas! We have a new update for Surviving the Aftermath! Update 5: Sanctuary focuses on catastrophe management, trade, balance changes, new ideologies and tech tree upgrades.


With this update, your game version should be 1.5.0.5857 on PC and 1.5.0.44 on Xbox.

General
  • Anti-catastrophe features added:
    • Lightning Rod defends against the Magnetic Storm by directing lightning bolts within a certain radius to itself. Repair and maintenance are needed to keep the building operational.
    • Sauna improves defense against Fallout and a Pandemic, as well as produces happiness by improving hygiene for colonists.
    • Catastrophe size now scales based on Gatekeeper input.
  • Tech tree improvements:
    • Pregame now has an ideology selection, which customises the tech tree based on the selection.
    • Tech tree has been reduced from five to four branches, but the branches themselves are bigger.
    • Multiple new technologies were added.
  • [Community request] Support for 21:9, 16:10 aspect ratios added. Support for UI scaling will come in the future.
  • [Community request] Added option to navigate back and forth with the pre-game category buttons at the top. With a gamepad, triggers can be used for navigation.
  • [Community request] New building “Lumber Yard” was added to create Planks from trees in the early game.
  • Bartering menu has been reworked, and allows bartering with both resources and currency. Buying seeds, insect eggs, and vehicles is also now possible. Reputation with the society affects pricing of the products.
  • Ladybug Icon has been changed to a blue cockroach icon. Most of the questions were also changed or tweaked, so now would be an ideal time to give feedback!
  • Old trade menu was replaced with a menu that lists all the discovered societies.
  • Top bar will now only show resources inside storages, not the ones on the ground.
  • Silver Coin currency has been introduced for trading.
  • Colony events can now cause damage to buildings.
  • Ingame feedback questions are now presented top center, instead of top right.
  • Paradox Launcher update to 2020.1
  • Read more button added to tutorial dialogs, which shows the longer tutorial content.
Gameplay
  • Crops in fields now properly decay with a delay instead of dying instantly when a crop-destroying catastrophe strikes.
  • Medical buildings now heal all patients concurrently instead of one at a time. Due to this, healing speed has been slowed down and conditions are more damaging when untreated.
  • The building info menu now has quick action for placing a Work Area on a gamepad.

Graphics
  • Colonists now wear props such as hats to add more variation to the character models.
  • Specialist textures were modified to improve their look and differentiate them better from colonists.
  • Moon and stars were added to the night sky and light direction now comes from moons direction during the night.
  • Emergency Shelters, Tenements and Two-Story Houses now have visual variations.
  • World Map Society models were scaled up to differentiate them from normal locations.
  • Bandit models updated in World Map.
  • Gate events now use the new colonist models introduced in the previous update.
  • New UI elements added for game saved information and when catastrophe starts.
  • Colony symbol icons have been retouched to more closely match the Society icons.
Balancing
  • Heat Wave now withers all crops similar to Nuclear Fallout, but slower.
  • Restored Specialist action point renewal to twice per day instead of four.
  • Meal recipes are less efficient and Fields yield slightly smaller crops to prevent late-game overflow of Food.
  • Plank deposits have fewer Planks as Lumber Yard can now be used to supply the demand.
  • More variation added to the furthest World Map areas.
  • Small decrease in Tool and Clothing durability.
  • Colonists now prioritize carrying resources off the ground more.
Modding
  • DoorVisual script added into the Shared library, to allow adding animated doors into buildings.
 
While I'm very happy to see 21:9 finally made it in... Devs, there are more than two widescreen resolutions. Why are the resolution choices so limited? Any way to force a different resolution here. My display is 3840x1600, and playing at a lower resolution makes everything look... bad.
 
While I'm very happy to see 21:9 finally made it in... Devs, there are more than two widescreen resolutions. Why are the resolution choices so limited? Any way to force a different resolution here. My display is 3840x1600, and playing at a lower resolution makes everything look... bad.

As mentioned in the patch notes, UI scaling is coming in the future. At the moment we have to scale the UI by hand for different aspect ratios, and thus chose the most common ones.
 
noticed a bug in the latest version. Groups arriving at the gate no longer show counts of members.
gate group 1.jpg
gate group 2.jpg
 
noticed a bug in the latest version. Groups arriving at the gate no longer show counts of members.
I think this is by design. You aren't getting any survivors, just specialists (unless your survivor count does actually go up?)
 
Yes, that's a one off for that particular arrival I believe. It's happened in previous versions when only a specialist arrives; they are not part of the group count. I've had several groups come since this update and the counts are shown just fine.

Lightning Rod defends against the Magnetic Storm by directing lightning bolts within a certain radius to itself. Repair and maintenance are needed to keep the building operational.
Can the radius of this item PLEASE be made bigger? It covers itself and a few buildings right next to it only, at present. I'd need to build maybe 20 of them to cover everything.
Bartering menu has been reworked, and allows bartering with both resources and currency. Buying seeds, insect eggs, and vehicles is also now possible. Reputation with the society affects pricing of the products.
This is good but fiddly. A button to increase the current good you are wanting to trade away, to the exact value of the good you are asking for, would be great.


Other UI requests/suggestions:

- Continue button on the main game menu to load the latest save
- hover cursor over science points in the top menubar to see what's being researched right now, and how far along it is
- hover cursor over population count there to see how many housing spaces are free
- hover cursor over silver coin count to see what trades are currently in progress
- hover cursor over Happiness icon to see how far you are from going up a level and going down a level
- the alert that a trade has just come in should mention what town it came from and what goods it brought in
 
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Hello!

I apologize in advance for my English.
I also want to clarify right away that I am not a hater - I really like your product, but "I have many but."


At the moment, playing the game is too (TOOOOOOOOO) easy.
Please add the ability to make the game more (MOOOOREEEE) difficult.


The game has a lot of interesting mechanics, but, unfortunately, the gameplay absolutely does not force me to use them.

For example, even at 100% complexity, I have absolutely no problems with water or food - this kills the whole embodiment of the apocalypse. And the water itself is always clean - even if the tin stands right next to the puddle of radioactive waste.
A similar situation with food - endless animals and fish, therefore, why do I need eating insects?
I have no incentive to build a treatment station, except for the sake of freeing up the area for aesthetic reasons - since 2-3 medical tents are more than enough to treat a very, very rare radiation sickness.
The need for a class separation of specialists is also not felt - my scientist without any problems kills bandits, and a soldier is studying an abandoned vigorous station like Einstein.
Ah, well, resources are an abundance, not a deficit - just keep up to get them.


I just want to appreciate every resident and specialist, want to worry when they go to the raid, and feel the realy tragedy if one of them didn’t come back from behind the walls or could not win with the disease inside the colony. But the game doesn’t make me feel at all :(



I apologize again if something is wrong.
Have a nice time of day and good luck in the development of the game - this project is cool:)
Thanks for attention!
 
No need to apologise for anything! We're happy to receive well-though of feedback no matter good or bad. That's what the Early Access is here for, to make the game better!

So far we've concentrated more on bringing in new features and keeping the difficulty level pretty easy on some respects. That'll change in the future. Upcoming features will definitely ramp of the difficulty on their own, but we're going to be looking at all the systems in the game to make them suitably challenging. We got both city buildings and survival game fans in Aftermath, so what's good for one group might not be it for the other. You will see a bigger difficulty difference in various pregame selections, so everyone can customize their experience to their liking.

Thanks for the message!
 
Soooo I've still been sitting at version 1.3 even though it seems like y'all have moved onto version 1.5. My game is on Epic and so far I'm not getting any updates. Any advices? lol Thanks!