Howdy Folks!

Thanks for all the great feedback so far on the experimental branch. The stressed out update is coming along great and I’m super excited about the new content included. I wanted to go over some of the content currently available in the experimental branch and some of the additional things in development.

Quirks

As mentioned in the previous dev log, I’m re-working the quirk system to allow for far more variety. While all the existing quirks have been migrated to the new quirk system, there are several new quirks that can make colonists a bit more special.

Quirks are will now be visible in the colonist management screen for easier viewing as well.

Stress

Stress effects will no longer add a flat value to stress, but slowly increase stress over time. Keeping stress low is more important with the addition of high stress reactions

Stress Reactions

When stress reaches 100% a colonist will attempt to relieve that stress in various ways. Each colonist will now have one type of stress reaction quirk. Some are easier to deal with than others.

Janitor Job Role

The janitor job role has been added to help cleanup messes that can occur. Both human and work bot colonists are capable of this new job role.

While some colonist stress reactions can lead to spillage, spills can also occur from critically failing certain actions. Water spills will occur from critically failing at cooking, gathering from water traps, feeding the fish and more. Fuel spills will occur when a colonist critically fails at refueling the generator.

Stress Management

Some new stress management objects are in development to help your colonists relieve stress in a better way. More information coming soon.

I’m super excited about the new content in development and would love to hear your thoughts as well. Thanks for all the great feedback so far.

Update 28 Experimental Info | What is the Experimental Branch and how do I access it?

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Howdy Folks!

The Spatial Awareness update added functional rooms and new stress affects. The, in development, Stressed Out update will continue to focus on colonists with a re-work of the quirks system as well as new reactions to high and low stress.

Quirks

The quirk system was originally designed as an extension to colonist attributes and attribute effects. Attribute effects are applied to attributes and modify the attribute values such as hunger rate, max health, max athletics etc..

Quirks were a special type of attribute effect. While this worked, it meant that quirks were limited to only having an affect on attributes and needs. I wanted the ability to have some more interesting and varied quirks, which meant a bit of a re-work to how quirks were defined.

The new quirk system will be a bit more robust and allow for a much wider array of quirk types. While the existing quirks will remain, new quirks are being added that will provide more individuality to colonists.

Examples of some of the possible new quirks:

• Loved/Hated Food – Stress reduction/increase from eating specific food item
• Loved/Hated Job – Stress reduction/increase from performing specific job
• Charming – Chance to add stress reduction to nearby colonists
• Annoying – Chance to add stress increase to nearby colonists
• Light Sleeper – Stress increase from sleeping in a room with other colonists
• Aquaphobia – Won’t cross water tiles

There are more planned quirks and be sure to let me know if you have some fun ideas for new quirks.

The colonist management screen is also getting an update to make quirks more visible.

Stress

While colonists have been able to gain and reduce stress for a while now, there hasn’t been much penalty or reward from it. I’m reviewing the stress system over all to better balance how stress is generated and add reactions to high and low stress.

This means colonists will have negative reactions to high stress as well as some benefits for keeping stress low.

Some new objects in development that will help colonists reduce stress.

While the primary focus is on quirks and stress, there are some various other tweaks, fixes and changes in development. One useful new feature is an eye dropper tool. Holding shift and clicking on placed/constructed objects will allow you to easily place down more of that object for construction.

I’m currently planning to release a testing version of the update to the Experimental Branch on Steam later this week. I look forward to your feedback on the new quirks and stress content.

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Howdy Folks!

Few days late, but happy new year! Thanks for all the great feedback and bug reports. To start off 2021 here is a small patch update to fix a couple of issues.

Survey Time

The Update 27 :: Spatial Awareness survey is now available. I’m trying out of a new survey platform so let me know if there are any issues.

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Release Notes

• Added visual effect to colonists when they level up in a job role
• Minor reduction to cave-in frequency
• Fixed: Grammar error in Tendril Forest description
• Fixed: Deselect All: Gather Plants button shows Deselect All: Mine
• Fixed: Colonists become stuck if mining a tile that contains another object