Dear Pioneers,

Highlights

• Major notification system improvements including a history
• Persistent top bar configuration
• Quick access to road construction mode

• Threatened state to protect civilians
• Combat luck balancing

• The first beginner guidance videos have been added
• Many UI enhancements for beginners

Improvements

UI

• Three different default top bar setups to toggle between
• Top bar setups and changes are now persistent between game sessions
• Each top bar setup can be reset back to default
• The full commodity tooltip including history will now already appear when hovering over a commodity in the top bar drop-down interface. This allows to check all information without the need to enable the commodity for the top bar display.
• The numbers in all the drop-down interfaces are now updated while the drop-down is open.
• All items of a category can be enabled or disabled with a single click.
• The top bar layout is only updated once after the configuration changes of a category are finished to avoid misplaced clicks while configuring the top bar.
• Improved the way the top bar distributes the columns between the categories.
• The overall amount of hungry miners is now shown in the top bar.
• The icons for idle units are now changed to clearly relate them to the unit type they belong to.

• A notification history is now available by a toggle button. Any notification since game start is still accessible on request later
• New notifications get a brief visual highlight to get more attention
• The readability of notification icons and text has been improved by an additional outline
• The mouse-over feedback of notifications has been enhanced [list]
• The current notification itself is clearly highlighted
• If there is a location related to the notification, it is highlighted in the minimap
• If there is a related object in the game world, it is highlighted in world view
• Notifications reflect their lifetime with a small progress bar until they fade out and move to the history.
• An additional context tooltip explains the functionality of the mouse buttons clicks on notifications

• Buildings without a road connection now show an alert flag at their connection point
• Clicking on the connection point instantly switches to road construction mode with the building entrance already defined as the first waypoint.

• If a building cannot be placed at the current position, the reason(s) are displayed directly at the mouse pointer
• For farm fields, the terrain type and the plants which grow best on it are displayed directly at the mouse pointer

• Target locations can now be set on the minimap as well as in the game world. This is valid for Focus, Attack, Claim and Patrol points.
• The nutrition and comfort values of individual meal ingredients are now shown in the meal tooltips of taverns, residences and mines.
• All valid ingredients for nutrition and comfort meals are now shown in the meal type tooltips of the tavern.
• When toggling between light settings with Ctrl+L, the name of the setting is now shown for a brief time on screen.
• The construction menu now shows the name of the category currently chosen.
• Hints are shown during the loading screen.
• When an enemy camp is selected all units belonging to it are highlighted.
• When placing a market stall or tavern table, related buildings are highlighted.
• The game language can be changed directly in the pre-game menu via the small globe in the lower right corner.
• The icons of building categories and the icons of some buildings in the construction menu have been improved.
• When hovering over an objective related to a building type, the corresponding build menu category and building type are highlighted in the construction menu to ensure it is easy to find

Gameplay

• All buildings and landscape piles will now switch to a “threatened” state while hostile enemies are nearby [list]
• A building under “threat” will display that state in the world and in the selection

• This will also help to avoid civilians sacrificing themselves to werewolves

• The chances of winning or losing a combat fight have been adjusted [list]
• Whenever a combat unit of a player won or lost a fight, the chance of winning or losing the next fight for that player is adjusted accordingly to neutralize luck or bad luck within the span of several consecutive encounters.
• This also means that reloading a game state to run a combat sequence multiple times will not lead to remarkably different results any longer.

• Improved movement of units outside the road network to reduce blocking issues in some busy situations
• Optimized road layout around obstacles

Other topics

• Procedural map generation improvements: [list]
• Lakes are much better integrated into the landscape
• More natural shapes of coastlines and cliffs
• More naturally shaped transition zones between terrain types

• Softer shadows and no more flickering

Fixes

• Fixed: Sometimes the Explorer would not take the last Ration after the Explorer building was disabled and re-enabled again.
• Fixed: The market stall road connection had a minor visual glitch.
• Fixed: Several very rare crashes were fixed.
• Fixed: Dead Scavs were vanishing immediately when their base got destroyed. That is no longer the case.
• Fixed: Under some very rare circumstances builders were not finishing a construction job.
• Fixed: Underground and surface deposits will no longer spawn under water.
• Fixed: When a deposit is claimed into the player’s territory while a gathering building was paused, the new deposit would not be harvested sometimes after re-enabling the gatherer. This is fixed now.
• Fixed: The construction support grid cells are no longer shown on the territory of other factions.
• Fixed: When buildings of a merged faction got demolished, sometimes white spots of unexplored territory remained. This is no longer the case.
• Fixed: Very rarely the game got stuck in multiplayer ping mode.
• Fixed: Once all 9 nutritious meals were prepared in the tavern, the list of products disappeared.
• Fixed: Rarely a Scav claimer got stuck in an endless loop.
• Fixed: Some buildings such as the Construction Camp had a comfort meal history shown even though their inhabitants do not consume meals.
• Fixed: Improved line break behavior in objective list for objectives with large numbers
• Fixed: “Recruit X unit” objectives now only count recruited units.

Known Issues

• Cliff texture sometimes has bad transition with regular stone ground texture.
• Flags that mark buildings as "threatened" are not waving.
• Commodities lying on the ground do not show the "threatened" state.