It’s finally time. It took one and half months to design and implement what’s probably the biggest gameplay update we’ve ever released. On Wednesday we already did a small pre-Release exclusively for our Discord community and now it’s time to release the Update publicly to the rest of the world – and we made a video to showcase it!
Alpha 6 – The Colonist Update – drills deep into colonist psychology, simulating not only their mood, but also their wishes and expectations, as well as adding more thoughts and mood-based game events like lazy days or vandalism.
All of these requirements need to be addressed if you want your colony to flourish: Newcomers will only join your colony if the expectations of the current inhabitants are fulfilled. Colonists will only work at peak performance if they’re happy with life. And in order to avoid chaos, you’re going to have to keep them in a good mood.
Additionally, we’re including more furniture to design your colony than in any previous update: Dressers, Shelves, Fireplaces, Street Lanterns, Flower Pots, Hedges, Windows, and much more are waiting to be used creatively. This time, the colonists know what’s beautiful or not and Toni is going to get envious if Fritz has a better bedroom than him!
As previously, we’re releasing the update for free so that everyone has an easy opportunity to try Founders’ Fortune. We hope you’ll have a lot of fun with it!
Detailed Changelog
Main new systems
- Colonists have expectations for their living situation
- Good food
- Spacious and comfortable home
- Life satisfaction (fulfilled wishes)
- Confidence in their professional skills
- Expectations influence immigration
- Colonists can own sleeping spots, bedrooms, and entire houses
- Furniture objects have a “beauty” value
- Colonists can be envious of other colonists’ posessions
- Colonist have wishes that can be fulfilled or declined (influences mood and life satisfaction)
- Life satisfaction level
- Life satisfaction rewards: Change your colonists’ traits!
- Colonists can dream and think about their dreams during the day
- Bad conversations influence mood
- 4 different containers for different food types
- Lots of new tutorial messages to make it easier for beginners
- Team overview on the left side includes mood and expectation fulfillment status
- New breakdowns:
- Lazy day: Worker takes a lot of breaks. Increases need for micromanagement temporarily
- Vandalism: Vandal goes to the room of a rich colonist and breaks furniture
Other new Features and Assets
- new Faces and Hairstyles
- Lots of new furniture and construction options:
- Lots of new chairs, benches, and tables
- Big selection of dressers and shelves
- Armchair + Couch
- Lanterns + New Torches
- Flower pots, antique vases, hedges and other green stuff
- Fireplaces, to be built in only the most comfortable colonies
- Windows!
- New Doors
- New Fence
- Dirt path
- Arrow shows forward direction when placing furniture
- Smoke effects for campfire/bakery/kitchen/fireplace
- A little work on performance
- Long forging animation
- Can build floor beneath furniture that’s already built – why not? 😉
- Can eat sitting on a chair, using bowl and spoon!
- Chopped trees leave behind tree stumps
- Furniture selection panel reworked to fit all this stuff
- Marker to show which colonist is selected
- Stop game on important messages because new players are overwhelmed sometimes
- Automatic simulation slowdown when colonists are fighting
- Update notification box in main menu
- Lots of new high quality icons
- Notifications for bad mood
- New UI sounds
- Immigration overview panel in bonfire
- Sleeping spot overiew panel in sleeping bags and beds
- New entries in the help menu
Balancing
- Flu progresses much more slowly
- Food supply is easier + more food in the beginning, but kitchen and bakery need more ingredients
- More cotton, more wood, but furniture is also more expensive
- Attacks are less strong (except in dangerous worlds)
- New game starts out with only 2 colonists, but the next ones come quickly
- No more pink icicles
- Bleeding effect doesn’t stack anymore
- Reworked tech tree (was necessary with all the new stuff)
Bugfixes
- Fences have proper snow
- Fence posts work properly now (was a dirty hack earlier)
- Colonists no longer block wall planning
- Corpses don’t block navigation anymore
- Better navigation in general
- Farmers don’t travel for miles to gather apples
- Snow stops properly when spring comes
- People try harder to avoid food they’re allergic to
- Skybox fix (sometimes the color of reflections was off)
- Fixed bug where player couldn’t control fighting colonists
- Fixed bug where savegames didn’t contain information on what colonists where doing
- Camera shouldn’t make big jumps anymore
- Can’t grab and move the migrant ship anymore (haha, seems like no one found this bug in Alpha 5!)
- Many more
