Subsistence News

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


Edit (hotfix): I needed to release a hotfix (at 6pm PST 10th April) to fix a reported bug that could lead to animals not tiring when giving chase.

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

Ever since the release of co-op, players wishing to host were forced to forward ports to allow their friends to join. This was always a huge pain and resulted in many players not being able to play with their friends.

I’ve implemented a new system that will detect when your Steam friends are playing, and allow you to join them (without the host needing to forward any ports). It’s still early, so I expect there may be some issues. However this should hopefully allow many players who were previously unable to play co-op to now play with their friends.

Players need to be Steam friends to see each others games in the new menu. Players also need to be visible in Steam (so not appearing offline).

Hosts should use the same in-game host menu as before. Once launched, their friends should see them popup in the “Join/Friends” menu, and can join from there.



I’m still yet to implement proper error reporting for when joins fail. As such it’s not always clear why a client would fail to join. Please ensure you set the required amount of open slots when launching the game. There’s also an issue where sometimes it will report that it failed to join, but then go in after anyway. I’ll be working to improve this and add better error messaging.


The existing server list is still in. Players that wish for their games to be publicly listed (so non friends can join) will still need to forward their Steam port (27015). Eventually I plan to add dedicated server support.


Several players mentioned they were unable to play with their core group of friends due to the player cap. I’ve increased the cap to 8.

We should treat this as an experiment to see how the netcode scales with more players, so let me know if you experience issues in games with higher player counts.


I've created an official Discord server for Subsistence players to meet, play and discuss. If you are looking for players to team-up with, please come and join us in the Discord. I haven’t yet set up moderators etc, so will get that ironed out over the coming days. I’ll be on the server fairly often to help troubleshoot and discuss development.

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

• I’ve updated the placeholder wood log image:
  
• I’ve added a glass doorway after a few players mentioned they needed one for the their builds. No glass door yet, but that will come.
  
• Dismantling upgraded walls now returns half the upgrade cost back.
  
• Fixed hammer not functioning correctly for clients of co-op games (previously only the hosts could use it to upgrade walls).
  

The goal of this update is to attempt to make it much easier for friends to play together. This is just an iteration and still needs more work (and I imagine there will still be players experiencing networking issues). If you do, please post on the forum or discord so that myself and other players can help troubleshoot any issues.

Hope you have a great Friday and weekend!
CG

Ever since the release of co-op, players wishing to host were forced to forward ports to allow their friends to join. This was always a huge pain and resulted in many players not being able to play with their friends.

I’ve implemented a new system that will detect when your Steam friends are playing, and allow you to join them (without the host needing to forward any ports). It’s still early, so I expect there may be some issues. However this should hopefully allow many players who were previously unable to play co-op to now play with their friends.

Players need to be Steam friends to see each others games in the new menu. Players also need to be visible in Steam (so not appearing offline).

Hosts should use the same in-game host menu as before. Once launched, their friends should see them popup in the “Join/Friends” menu, and can join from there.



I’m still yet to implement proper error reporting for when joins fail. As such it’s not always clear why a client would fail to join. Please ensure you set the required amount of open slots when launching the game. There’s also an issue where sometimes it will report that it failed to join, but then go in after anyway. I’ll be working to improve this and add better error messaging.


The existing server list is still in. Players that wish for their games to be publicly listed (so non friends can join) will still need to forward their Steam port (27015). Eventually I plan to add dedicated server support.


Several players mentioned they were unable to play with their core group of friends due to the player cap. I’ve increased the cap to 8.

We should treat this as an experiment to see how the netcode scales with more players, so let me know if you experience issues in games with higher player counts.


I've created an official Discord server for Subsistence players to meet, play and discuss. If you are looking for players to team-up with, please come and join us in the Discord. I haven’t yet set up moderators etc, so will get that ironed out over the coming days. I’ll be on the server fairly often to help troubleshoot and discuss development.

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

• I’ve updated the placeholder wood log image:
  
• I’ve added a glass doorway after a few players mentioned they needed one for the their builds. No glass door yet, but that will come.
  
• Dismantling upgraded walls now returns half the upgrade cost back.
  
• Fixed hammer not functioning correctly for clients of co-op games (previously only the hosts could use it to upgrade walls).
  

The goal of this update is to attempt to make it much easier for friends to play together. This is just an iteration and still needs more work (and I imagine there will still be players experiencing networking issues). If you do, please post on the forum or discord so that myself and other players can help troubleshoot any issues.

Hope you have a great Friday and weekend!
CG

Hi guys. It’s been a while since any new base construction options were added. Today’s update introduces an assortment of new glass building pieces, which are now crafted from the default player crafting menu. These pieces will snap onto other wood and metal building pieces.

The glass is fairly tough and will withstand a fair amount of damage. However, just as with all structures, will require repairs to maintain. I’ve added damage skins (cracks) to indicate the health of any piece. The strength sits between that of wood and armor-plated.

I’ve added a subtle distortion to the glass material and a very slight tint. This is to give the sense of enclosure when inside your base looking out. Let me know if you think the effect is too much.

My hope is these new building pieces will open up a ton of possibilities for creative base designs, as well as adding further depth to later-game building. Looking forward to seeing some creations.

The game is configured to understand light passing through the new panels, meaning that glass rooms can be constructed to act as protective greenhouses for plantbeds.



It’s now possible to find sandstone ore nodes beneath the water in the various lakes. They can be harvested with the pickaxe (or axe for less yield) and refined down into glass fragments in the refinery.

The glass fragments can then be crafted down in the workbench to glass panels, which in turn can be used to craft building pieces. Note: Raw glass fragments are required for repairing glass structures.



It’s always bothered me that windows were just empty holes. This lead to otherwise cosy and secure bases to feel cold and exposed.

Players can now craft glass windows for both the flat and curved windowed-wall variants. The new windows are fully animated, allowing for player to quickly open/close them while defending against attacks.

While working on the window animations, I also finally added a animation for the door (which was long overdue).



I’ve never been overly happy with the underwater visuals. The water surface would become opaque once submerged (meaning players were unable to spot potential dangers when surfacing) and the image was fairly static.

I’ve added a ripple/distortion post-process effect and updated the water surface material to handle translucency when submerged. I think it looks way better and more immersive when swimming, but let me know what you think.


New players starting out are offered little guidance on how to make progress, often leading to frustration and repeated deaths. I’ve added some basic ‘getting-started’ tasks to better inform new players during the early game.

For experienced players (or those that want to figure things out on their own), these task lists can be disabled in the options under gameplay.

While building this feature, I implemented a substantial system to track detailed stats on player activities (stats are only stored locally in profile saves). I plan to expose these stats for players to view in a future update.


Having to always right-click on an item to open it’s actions, and then click on the use action can be annoying (especially when in combat or in a hurry). I’ve added a quick-use function that allows players to simply hover the mouse over an item and click their ‘use’ key.

It will attempt to perform the primary ‘use’ action for said item (if the item has one). This will improve and quicken player inventory management.


I’ve updated the hunter bases to incorporate the new glass buildables. I’ve also updated the loot drops in their bases to include many of the new items that were added in the last few updates.

Hunter loot drops, and locked crates have also been updated to include the new items (including a chance of fish oil on hunters).



Finally potassium can be used as a rich fertilizer for plantbeds. This should ease the fertilizer demands for players that choose to refine the ore down.

• Fixed exploit that allowed empty canteens to be pre-heated and then sterilize water when filled.
  
• Fixed exploit that allowed players to build in hunter bases.
  
• Fixed delay on items disappearing from inventory when dropped for clients of co-op games.
  
• Added sound and blood-spurts effect for hitting dead animals/humans with melee weapons.
  

As many of you know, Subsistence has always been a passion project I work on by myself in my spare time, alongside my full-time job. I’ve finally made the decision to leave my employment to focus on the game full-time. I’ve never worked on such a challenging, creative and enjoyable project, and i’m so excited to dedicate myself to its continued development.

It’s been a tough journey to reach this point, and I wouldn’t have got this far without the support and encouragement from such an awesome community, of which I’m deeply grateful. There’s still a long road ahead and tons of work needed, and I’m looking forward to it!

Have a great weekend, and please let me know about any issues with the update.
CG