Homestead Support Papers
This update contains a new type of claim papers, called "Homestead Support Papers", which just like normal settlement papers will spawn in the settlement foundation based on the amount of citizens it has. The special thing about these is that they cannot be used within the influence of a settlement, but only to expand homesteads located outside.
Homestead Support Papers have no use for settlements - the intention is for these papers to be given away, allowing players that prefer to not be part of a town or that are farming outside of a settlement to increase the size of their homestead to a degree only limited by how many of these papers they can acquire. The value for the settlement is the income or reputation they can generate through this mechanic. Homestead support papers work anywhere they can be used, no matter from which settlement they were received. We hope that this new mechanic addresses space problems some of our citizens experienced while preserving the importance of settlements, but we also made other changes that should help with that.
Changes to Annexation
While monitoring the usage of this feature we have noticed that it is still used too often in a way we have not intended, especially to gain new claim papers by gaining new citizens for one's own settlement. In this Update we have changed the default requirements for annexations to cost additional materials depending on the tier of the settlement annexed. The cost will now also depend on the amount of citizens the target has, e.g. the more citizens a town has, the more the annexation will cost.
The most impactful change we made is that annexations now require claim papers to be paid to the target, both for homesteads as well as for lower level settlements, which is supposed to make annexations with the goal to increase the amount of claim papers no longer viable as they are now one of the costs.
For homesteads specifically, a town that wishes to annex it also needs to replace all homestead support papers assigned to that homestead with its own town claim papers. (Additional to the general amount they have to provide already) The homestead support papers will be exchanged with those seamlessly on annexation and be given back to the settlements they originated from. This ensures that homesteads have a way to make their annexation much harder as long as their owners are actively playing and that none of the additional claimed property gets lost when the citizenship changes. The annexation of homesteads whose owners are abandoned is completely free, ensuring that settlements aren't blocked from implementing their plans and projects by abandoned property.
It is now also easily possible to disable annexations on your server completely if you would rather not use this feature.
Changes to Border Control
We have moved the "Border Control" feature from the Embassy Desk to the settlement foundation, making it available earlier. By also making borders open by default and requiring citizens to restrict them if they so desire, they learn the process and are thus able to un-restrict them to accommodate outsiders they wish to allow claiming into their influence (perhaps for a price). This will also make it easier for homesteaders to claim into town influence, with their permission, in order to have enough plots in range to become a citizen. This is also a great way to deal with issues resulting from border disputes between two adjacent towns due to expanding culture.
Release Notes
Avatars
- Fixed: When connecting to a server after having left it with the avatar sleeping, the UI would show the inside of the avatars face and prevent interactions until reconnecting to the server
- Fixed: When entering water while eating, the avatar would lose its hand animations and prevent any interactions until reconnecting to the server
- Fixed: Avatars that had invalid items could lead to the player only seeing a black screen after connection to a server
- Fixed: The avatar's backpack didn't hide when sitting on a chair or mounting a vehicle
Balance
- Changed: Decreased maximum givable reputation by laws of towns from 20 to 10 and for countries from 30 to 20
- Changed: Culture calculation now uses the lower of the artist's / the picture's reputation instead of the sum of both - this can notably reduce existing culture where it was mostly gained by artist instead of picture reputation and hence lead to influence sizes appearing smaller after updating (If this causes trouble on your server, you can increase the "SettlementInfluenceMultiplier" inside Settlements.eco to make up for this change)
- Changed: Increased shelf life of all cooking oils to match the one of Flaxseed Oil
- Changed: Reduced labour cost of seed crafting from 25 to 20
- Changed: Adjusted lumber recipe to require less Flaxseed Oil, it now yields 2 lumber pieces with only the other ingredient costs increased to match
- Fixed: Geology Modern Papers were having a static ingredient cost for glass, it is now dynamic
Civics
- Added: A setting in the immigration policy that allows determining if child settlements can annex each other
- Added: New civic conditions "Is Government Account" and "Matches Settlement"
- Added: New game value "Settlement of Bank Account", allowing to check if the bank account used in a transaction is hosted by any settlements specified
- Fixed: The influence of settlements could be projected at a completely different place than where they actually were when their foundation deed was located around the 0 coordinate wrap border
- Fixed: There was a discrepancy in regard to where homesteads can be placed between the client and the server at the borders of unfounded settlements
- Fixed: It was possible to accept citizens into an unfounded settlement and then move it, keeping the already accepted citizens now no longer within its influence. When a homestead would no longer be covered by the influence when moving a settlement it will now inform the acting player that the homesteads affected by this will lose their citizenship, which they need to confirm.
- Fixed: Editing deeds via the map didn't take into account the setting for if a settlement allows foreign property ownership, enabling non-citizen players that already owned a property in a settlement to continue to expand their deed even when foreign property ownership was disabled since acquiring that property
- Fixed: Foundations with the default "Everyone" permission did not always correctly prevent players from taking claim papers out of it, which is supposed to only be possible by the Mayor with that permission set
- Fixed: It was possible to edit or remove the citizenship demographic of a settlement, leading to the settlement becoming invalid
- Fixed: Removing a citizen from a settlement while it was offline caused a server crash
- Fixed: Trying to remove a citizenship application on a settlement that was assigned as child of another settlement via admin tools lead to a client disconnect, all applications will now be removed when a settlement is assigned to be a child settlement this way
- Fixed: Multiple civic related server crashes that appeared in unforseen edge cases
- Fixed: Trying to place a capitol on a server that has settlements enabled or placing a foundation on a server that has settlements disabled caused a server crash, placing will now correctly provide an error in the UI
- Fixed: With settlements disabled, civic objects wouldn't allow their usage until forceenabled as they were considering themselves to not be within jurisdiction of a settlement
- Fixed: With settlements disabled, civics weren't considered valid and removed themselves after the invalidity timer ran out
- Fixed: With settlements disabled, claiming would sometimes show an error saying the action would not be valid due to not being within a settlements influence
- Fixed: With settlements disabled, when unclaiming the last plot of a deed the server would crash
- Fixed: With settlements disabled, it was not possible to sell claim papers
- Fixed: With settlements disabled, it was not possible to use the treasury
- Improved: Constitutions can no longer become invalid, preventing players from being stuck with an invalid constitution they cannot edit despite valid options to do so would be available
- Improved: Settlements can no longer become invalid due to missing or invalid civics, only by failing their base requirements
- Improved: Settlements will now automatically try to repair invalid entries by resetting them - this can also be done manually by using the new admin command /resettle
- Improved: Invalidity warnings for civic objects are now sent multiple times during the duration of the invalidity timer to make it more likely that players notice them, additionally the default invalidity timer has been increased from 20 to 60 minutes.
- Improved: Invalidity warnings are now only sent to the creator of the civic object and any players that have authorization on the deed the object is located on and could hence actually solve the problem
Interaction
- Fixed: Interacting with a felled log using a soil sampler caused a client disconnect
- Fixed: Interacting while in third person didn't always reliably work due to the interaction origin being tied to the camera, instead of the player
- Fixed: The skid steer was accepting items it is not intended for that when placed by the skidsteer would create a unremovable white square
- Fixed: Grass that had grown on tilled soil couldn't be removed by tilling it again
- Fixed: Claim stakes defaulted to a vehicle deed if that was the last remaining deed
- Fixed: Stone roads did not have a default form selected when using the hammer
- Fixed: Plants highlighted already harvested fruits when hovering them
- Fixed: Objects displayed and set to be available for purchase in the world couldn't be bought due to an authorization issue
- Fixed: When trying to mount a vehicle multiple times quickly or during lag the player could end up driving a vehicle in the passenger seat
- Fixed: When placing blocks in a multiform with the hammer the error message "Not attached to ground" could wrongly appear when the actual problem was the building range being invalid
- Fixed: Mounting a vehicle in first person view would always rotate the camera to face north
- Fixed: Transferring ownership of a deed to a different player, title or demographic caused a client disconnect
- Fixed: The ramp of the barge could be opened despite not being authorized to do so
- Improved: Paintings can now be added to and removed from frames via simple shift + right click
UI
- Added: The game will now show a information message when connection to the authentication servers isn't possible, informing the player about our status page and the support mail
- Added: Notifications for sales made with the "For Sale" feature
- Fixed: Contract acceptance confirmations didn't show the requirements to fulfill the contract
- Fixed: Crafting orders could show a "Halted" hint in their tooltip despite that wasn't the case due to not taking into account upgrades reducing the required amount of ingredients for a recipe
- Fixed: Holding food in ones hands while in third person view and interacting with something could lead to the food additionally appearing on the screen as it would in first person
- Fixed: Draft settlements were showing in the government UI, clogging up the view
- Fixed: The "x" button to remove applicants for citizenship didn't do anything
- Fixed: Hovering over a link in the notification menu could show the tooltip for something the player didn't hover
- Fixed: The settlement picture area wasn't correctly showing in the foundation UI
- Fixed: The password entry dialogue when trying to join a server was not displaying the mouse cursor
- Fixed: Tooltip parts added by mods weren't reliably displayed due to a loading order issue
- Fixed: Settlement influence wasn't shown on the map until turning the setting off and on again
- Fixed: Map settings weren't saving the selection for settlement influence between play sessions
- Improved: The notifications for removed claim papers will now explain why they were removed
- Improved: Reworked the game entry flow, making the entry to the game menu more smooth
Objects / World:
- Fixed: Grass was spreading onto tilled soil
- Fixed: The fishing trawler was catching fish even if it wasn't moving
- Fixed: The ramp of the barge wasn't correctly synced between all players
- Fixed: The settlement crafting table had wrong occupancy values, it now fits its size
- Fixed: The plastic buoy had wrong occupancy, it now fits its size
Miscellaneous
- Fixed: The game was crashing when trying to join a server on old CPUs that do not support SSE 4.2 / AVX 2, we have implemented a workaround for that
- Fixed: An issue with the chat that could lead to a severe decrease of performance
- Fixed: Twitch integration causing connection issues that slowed the game down when enabled
- Fixed: Branch occlusion in third person wasn't working correctly
- Fixed: Shadows were not moving smoothly with the sunlight
- Fixed: Additional causes for rubble teleporting
- Improved: Multiple changes to animal pathfinding to make it more smooth
- Improved: Added a new volume slider for weather sounds
- Improved: Only unclaiming (instead of also claiming) is now restricted by default when a property has residents on it - the option that can be set by the landlord to enable property changes and warn potential residents about this before agreeing to a rental has been adjusted respectively to reflect that
Server & Configs
- Added: A setting that automatically scales influence sizes of settlements with the world size, enabled by default
- Changed: Changing the property owner of a deed via admin commands will no longer turn off objects on that deed like a regular transfer would
- Fixed: Server restarts were resetting the available item count in work orders to 0 until the linked storages were updated, despite items were available to continue crafting
- Fixed: Changing the anonymous voting setting for the basic default election caused an error in the server ui
- Fixed: The server changed the "AFKOccupancyBeforeAFKKick" config value back to 0 when restarting the server, overwriting the configured value in the config file
- Added: "CraftingQueueQuantity" config variable, defining the number of work orders a crafting table can hold at the same time - defaults to 5.
- Added: "ClaimStakesGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumedAndSettlementsDisabled" config variable, defining the number of claim stakes (usable anywhere) granted when reading a skill scroll when settlements are disabled - defaults vary depending on the collaboration setting.
- Added: "ClaimPapersGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumedAndSettlementsDisabled" config variable, defining the number of claim papers (usable anywhere) granted when reading a skill scroll when settlements are disabled - defaults vary depending on the collaboration setting.
- Added: "ClaimStakesGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumedAndSettlementsEnabled" config variable, defining the number of claim stakes (usable anywhere) granted when reading a skill scroll when settlements are enabled - defaults vary depending on the collaboration setting.
- Added: "ClaimPapersGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumedAndSettlementsEnabled" config variable, defining the number of claim papers (usable anywhere) granted when reading a skill scroll when settlements are enabled - defaults vary depending on the collaboration setting.
- Removed: "GiveStakesAndClaimsEvenWhenSettlementsAreEnabled" config variable.
- Removed: "ClaimStakesGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumed" config variable.
- Removed: "ClaimPapersGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumed" config variable.
- Added: "ScaleInfluenceBasedOnWorldSize" config variable, determining if settlement influence scales automatically with world size - defaults to true.
- Added: "MayAnnexSameLevel" config variable, determining if settlements can annex other settlements of the same level - defaults to false.
- Added: "MayAnnexSubSettlements" config variable, determining if settlements can annex other settlements of lower level - defaults to true.
- Added: "HomesteadSupportClaimsPerCitizen" config variable, determining how many homestead support papers are spawned per citizen - defaults to 5, 5, 5.
- Added: "HomesteadSupportClaimsPerAbandonedCitizen" config variable, determining how many homestead support papers are spawned per abandoned citizen - defaults to 3, 3, 3.
- Renamed: "ClaimStakesPerCitizenPastFirst" to "ClaimStakesPerCitizen".
- Renamed: "LandClaimsPerCitizenPastFirst" to "SettlementClaimsPerCitizen".
- Renamed: "LandClaimsPerAbandonedCitizen" to "SettlementClaimsPerAbandonedCitizen".
