Update Details (7th April 2018) Deer, Ladder Hatch, AI updates, Claymores, New Buildables, and much more...

It’s been a while since any new animals have been introduced. You will now find wild deer roaming the landscape. The idea being to add greater diversity to the wildlife population, while adding a non-aggressive, elusive and agile animal to hunt.


Unlike the other animals that stay somewhat localized to their territory, deer will traverse the entire world while grazing and dodging predators. They are stealthy and spook easily, so players should be careful while hunting.

They are coded to understand where they’ve previously been and to explore new areas, so you may find one wandering into your backyard or into unexpected areas (so keep an eye out). Their hearing and sight sensitivity differs across easy/medium/hardcore.

Predators will now chase and kill deer. It has been tricky to balance the predator/prey life-cycle, so i’ll be keeping a close eye on how this balance plays out and will make adjustments as necessary.


Because of how quick deer can flee, focus on landing a headshot to ensure a kill. The vanilla 9mm won’t kill on a single hit, but all other weapons (including the bow) will.


Harvesting deer will yield antlers (as well as meat and cloth). Antlers can crafted down with biofuel and ash to create a strong adhesive.

Adhesive is now used in several of the advanced crafting recipes (especially glass structures which now require less scrap).


A new ladder hatch can now be found in the default crafting menu (under wood ceilings). Placed like any normal ceiling, it can be opened and closed to gain access to floors in your base without the need for stairs.

The ladder hatch can also be upgraded to armor-plated using the hammer.



Players can now craft claymores at the workbench. These can be placed around your base perimeter to help deal lots of damage during hunter attacks.

Here are their rules:

• Players that place them will be safe from triggering them.
  
• Teammates of a player who placed them will not trigger them (so don’t forget to add your teammates to the player list in the BCU).
  
• Animals will not trigger them, so there are primarily intended to defend against hunter attacks.
  

They can be moved and/or disassembled, much like buildables. They can also be shot to trigger a detonation, which may come in handy during a fight.



Hunters can also now use claymores. Once their base becomes large enough, they will start placing them to ward off raids (so watch your footing).


I’ve added three new glass roof buildables (compact, slanted and curved). These can be found in the default player crafting menu.

My hope is this will give players a bit more freedom with their base layouts, and lead to some interesting and cool looking designs.


I’ve finally gotten around to adding an inverted variant of the corner stairs, which many players have politely asked for for a long time. While I was at it, I also added armor plated variants for each.



There have been a lot of small improvements to the hunter AI.

• They now use a deeper tree of pathing decisions while travelling large distances across the landscape.
  
• I’ve reworked their swimming behavior. They no longer flip and spin on their back while crossing water. They now smoothly swim across bodies of water. This also means they reach their destination quicker, making them less vulnerable to fire while swimming.
  
• I’ve fixed many of their odd quirks while in combat. Such as; they no longer aim away from their target and spin at the last moment to take shots, instead taking time to aim at their target, allowing players time to react. I’ve slightly reduced their firing frequency to balance these changes.
  
• They now use new pathing to find dry land while in deep water (this is also applied to animal AI).
  

Please note: The hunter AI is very much a work in progress, and I know they still need a lot of work. I have a lot planned for them to make them capable and believable adversaries who are fun to fight. It will take time.


I’ve spent some time trimming out a lot of unnecessary network calls during co-op play. Digging through various systems I managed to find a great deal that were needlessly using up bandwidth. Netcode is something I’ll be continuing to improve as the game evolves. The plan is to soon support dedicated servers for greater stability.


Some players have reported lag spikes during auto-saves. While I investigate the cause of this issue I’ve added the ability to disable auto-save from the options menu (under the gameplay tab). Please note that this does not disable the auto-save on death (in normal and hardcore). If you choose to disable auto-save, please don’t forget to save manually (using F8) and the “Save and Exit” when leaving the game.


Fixed bug that prevented players from picking up items or harvesting animals in shallow water.
Inflicting a headshot now gives the player obvious audio feedback, regardless of distance to the target.
Fixed bug that would cause the camera to get stuck if using co-op text chat while butchering animals.
Added in-game option to toggle windowed mode (found in the graphics option menu).
Animal AI now will now choose to cross bodies of water if they cannot find a dry route to their destination.
Scrap metal now stacks up to 50 (previously 40).
Cougars now do slightly more damage to base structures.
Added some of the new items to the loot tables for hunter bases and locked crates.
Increased the color saturation of grass in the green meadows.
Prevented animals playing out suspicious animations while swimming.
Staggered the workload of the save system to reduce system demand during saves.
Fixed bug where hunters would build their campfires on river surfaces.
Fixed issue of hunters sometimes spawning on the wrong side of the fence. If you currently have hunters outside the fence, you can either reset them, or destroy their base with a BCU cracker.
Placing a second BCU now lights up the BCU build sphere on the original, so it is easier to know when you are linking them.
Fixed audio feedback not playing when upgrading base buildables.


Thanks as always to everyone that’s been supporting the project. It’s great to have you joining the discussion, making suggestions and reporting issues. It feels pretty amazing to be working on the project full-time now. I’m excited for the future and to truly start shaping and expanding the game.

If you haven’t already, please join myself and other players on the Discord server, and on the Steam forums. Please let me know if you experience any issues with the update. I’m sure there will be balancing tweaks needed.

Have an awesome weekend.
CG


Discord invite: https://discord.gg/zyy4jQs