It’s been a little while since our last dev diary - this one’s also going to be a bit short since we’ve been focusing on stabilizing 4.0 as much as we can.
The 4.0.17 and 18 updates we released yesterday is a pretty massive one with some impactful fixes. I'm pleased with the amount of things we got into it.
Here are the release notes: [/p]
4.0.17 and .18 Release Notes
[p]Improvement[/p]- [p]The Hive Fallen Empire ships are now available for Biological Ship Empires if you progress down the Cosmogenesis Crisis Path.[/p][/*]
- [p]Changes to ecumenopoleis, ring-, nanite-, hive-, and machine worlds:[/p][list]
- [p]District specialisations now visually swap to the appropriate art and district names for easier differentiation.[/p][/*]
- [p]Secondary districts now have double the jobs of the primary districts.[/p][/*]
- [p]4.0.18: Reverted all fallen empire building limitations from 4.0[/p][/*]
- [p]Wilderness Empires no longer have to consolidate 2500 biomass on a planet to build a Grand Archive[/p][/*]
- [p]Secondary districts on hive worlds and machine worlds should now support targeted research specialisations[/p][/*]
- [p]Wilderness empires now start with a Heartgrove specialisation instead of a Threadway specialisation[/p][/*]
- [p]The event A Complete Collection will now only take one pop, avoiding depopulating entire planets.[/p][/*]
- [p]AI empires will be more likely to declare a Cosmogenesis empire a crisis as they develop more Infinity Theses[/p][/*]
- [p]The Synaptic Lathe will now ask for a refill if it drops below 50 pops instead of letting itself drop all the way to 0.[/p][list]
- [p]The Lathe had a "stable state" hack that stopped the purge below 40(00) pops to prevent it from decolonizing before - this has been removed as it should no longer be necessary. Burn those pops if you want science.[/p][/*]
- [p]Fixed Wilderness issues[/p][list]
- [p]It should no longer implode randomly.[/p][/*]
- [p]Balanced effects for Innate Design with Wilderness.[/p][/*]
- [p]Turned Wilderness enforcers into Immunosymbionts to differentiate them from soldier Tamersymbionts.[/p][/*]
- [p]The Wilderness Subterranean Cache building can now be placed in urban and trade district specializations[/p][/*]
- [p]The Synaptic Lathe now correctly purges pops and produces science. (Special thanks to /u/Little_Elia for investigating. We fixed some of it differently than you did, but your post helped in identifying the issues.)[/p][/*]
- [p]Pops will correctly process in or out of Neural Chip state if they are moved to or from the Lathe. (They will not be visible in the Neural Chip job until the monthly tick passes.)[/p][/*]
- [p]The Synaptic Lathe purge should once again benefit from things that modify purge speed.[/p][/*]
- [p]The Synaptic Lathe will now ask for a refill if it drops below 50 pops instead of letting itself drop all the way to 0. (The Lathe had a "stable state" hack that stopped the purge below 40 pops to prevent it from decolonizing before - this has been removed as it should no longer be necessary. Burn those pops if you want science.)[/p][/*]
- [p]Fixed how Synaptic Lathe is being displayed in the sector view.[/p][/*]
- [p]The "Save As New Design" popup now updates the Save button immediately when you edit the name.[/p][/*]
- [p]Fixed ship designer not updating the design name when you change it to the currently saved name.[/p][/*]
- [p]Improve Buildings tooltips modifiers handling[/p][/*]
- [p]Colony naming will now more often use custom names for the default value (colonizing Mars will propose Mars as the default colony name)[/p][/*]
- [p]Fixed some planetary modifier icons that were low resolution[/p][/*]
- [p]Fixed some modifiers not appearing in the empire size tooltip.[/p][/*]
- [p]Reduced mil power recalculations done by outliner fleet entry[/p][/*]
- [p]Reduced habitability recalculations done by pop growth/decline[/p][/*]
- [p]Reduced amount of times planet view tries to update pop group clothing[/p][/*]
- [p]Fixed crash in accepting peace due to deal containing transfer of non existing starbase[/p][/*]
- [p]Fixed cross OS issue with randomized ethics in pop assembly leading to NUM_POP_GROUPS OOS (this is a big one)[/p][/*]
- [p]Fixed mismatch in synchronized/unsynchronized nemesis handling in the voidworms AI that might lead to OOS when becoming a crisis.[/p][/*]
- [p]Six more Out of Sync fixes[/p][/*]
- [p]Adds swap_type and swap_type_weight for districts to District Specializations.[/p][/*]
- [p]District Specializations now belong to sets, and Zone Slots can now include or exclude entire zone sets[/p][/*]
- [p]Migrated zone slots:zone relationships to zone_sets in place of using inline scripts[/p][/*]
- [p]Added can_change_category to pop categories.[/p][/*]
- [p]Changed various effects using pop amount/size to allow 0[/p][/*]
- [p]Added ship_uses_corvette_reactors and ship_uses_destroyer_reactors scripted triggers[/p][/*]
- [p]Added planet_is_habitat_equivalent, planet_is_ecu_equivalent, and planet_is_ring_world_equivalent scripted triggers which are used to determine the job numbers for district specialisations instead of checking the planet classes directly.[/p][/*]
- [p]Updated scripted triggers for districts[/p][/*]
- [p]Updated scripted triggers for zones[/p][/*]
- [p]Updated inline scripts for some research district weights[/p][/*]
- [p]Updated events for zone assignment upon a planet becoming a hive, machine or nanite world[/p][/*]
- [p]Removed unneeded script for ecus transformations since industrial districts no longer exist[/p][p][/p][/*]
[/p][p]Code:[/p][p]
You can then reference these in the zone_slots:
[/p][p]Code:[/p][p]
The intent is for this to make the creation of District Specializations a bit less error-prone, and make it easier for multiple mods to add more without interfering as much with each other.[/p]
Wilderness Open Beta
[p]We’ve seen a lot of erratic behavior with Wilderness empires, especially when your Biomass totals on a planet get too low, where sometimes jobs would go unworked, and you aren’t always able to influence it in any way.We’re going to update the beta branch on Steam today to test some experimental quality-of-life changes we’ve made to Wilderness. Some of them are impactful and different enough that we want to get some more eyes on them and get feedback before we consider moving them into the release build.
In the Wilderness Beta, jobs are actually worked automatically, using your primary species for traits. After all, you are the empire. This replaces the massive Workforce bonus that Wilderness pops received, and makes it behave closer to the intended design of the origin. This change intends to make Wilderness generally more robust against bugs and less prone to economic crashes when creating buildings that consume most of their Biomass.
Biomass should still chill “unemployed” like before, but the jobs will use 0 pops instead of 1. This should resolve any of those edge-case issues when many of your jobs wouldn’t be producing.[/p][p][img src="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/9703436/0041463c31f84fc7cc157de73a860a86506f33cd.png"][/img][/p][p]Bad planet![/p][p]As part of this, we’ve enabled the workforce sliders for Wilderness jobs like other Empires have. This should give you more control over your economy, so you can disable certain jobs if you’re running a deficit or otherwise optimize your economy by only working the jobs that you need.[/p][p][img src="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/9703436/4dc14df0c874da17bf167233e5ac1362949f0427.png"][/img][/p][p]Much better.[/p][p]
We recognize that this makes your Biomass species less important overall. You’ll probably want to optimize them for growth rather than production since they won’t be working the jobs anymore, so we wanted to put this up in an open beta to get your thoughts.
The Open Beta branch will also include the experimental fast save transfer that we’re currently expecting to go live after we can add a toggle to disable it if it’s causing save transfer issues.[/p]
Wilderness Open Beta Release Notes
[p]Feature[/p]- [p]Experimental changes to Wilderness:[/p][list]
- [p]To prevent issues with biomass not being available on planets due to construction, all Wilderness jobs are now automatically worked without requiring biomass. These jobs are worked by your primary species.[/p][/*]
- [p]Jobs for Wilderness are now also properly represented instead of being worked by a single pop with massive workforce bonuses, you now see exactly how the job is worked, and the sliders are also now usable to customize how much of each job will be worked.[/p][/*]
- [p]These changes are intended to prevent situations where some jobs would go unworked, make Wilderness less bug-prone, and are intended to give you more control over your economy in deficit situations. Please provide feedback![/p][/*]
- [p]Fixed ringworlds colonized by gestalt empires having a mysterious city district that shouldn't exist.[/p][/*]
What’s Next?
[p]4.0.19 is tentatively scheduled for next week, with more bugfixes and optimizations.Today I'll be looking at purging, but if there’s one other bug you could demand we fix in it, what would it be?
Since next week is Midsommar week,our next dev diary will be on June 26th. See you then.[/p]
