Riamus

Not sure about the snake, but the chicken is in the most recent or almost most recent screenshot of the updated animals. It's partially hidden, but there's two there... one alive and one dead for whatever reason.

The trailer looks good.

Update for the next release... Scale Height Map can now be used on specific biomes. Depending on how you do your settings, you can get some pretty interesting transitions between biomes. In this example, I scaled snow and wasteland up a lot and so I got these cliffs. Not exactly what you want on your actual map but it shows what you can do. With less scaling, you can still get specific biomes to be raised higher than others or lower mountains in specific biomes. Below are 2 more examples, where I used separate Scale Height Map commands for each biome, with them scaling the biome up most for the highest biome and less for each lower biome. I also increased the smoothing for the biome transition area. The effect you get is a slight change in elevation between biomes. With a bit of adjustment, this has potential to make for some interesting maps. Icons will now appear next to your selected command and any related commands. In this screenshot, I have a heightmap command selected, so all heightmap commands show the mountain icon next to them. This makes it easy to find all related commands. Different commands have different icons. New command: Create Single Town. This new command lets you create a town in a specific location. It is not a replacement for using a Mask Map but gives you an alternate way to place towns in specific locations. Mask Maps let you specify where towns can be placed and they will be placed only within the bounds of the mask. This command lets you specify a starting point for the town and it will then generate a town in that area but the town is not confined to a specific location the way it would be with Mask Maps. You can select the town type that you want to place with this command. New parameter for Create Towns allows you to balance the number of each tile variant you have on your map. Tile variants are tiles that share the same district and the same tile type. For example, if you have 5 tiles for the Residential district that are Corner tiles, this parameter will attempt to place an equal number of each of those 5 variants on your map. If unchecked, this is entirely random, making it possible to have a lot of one variant and none of another variant. Prior versions were random (i.e. unchecked). This will likely help those of you who are using custom tiles. It won't make much difference if you're only using vanilla tiles as there are not usually any variants to choose from, though it sounds like that may change in 1.0/A22. New parameters weight_outskirt and weight_center for the Town Property List allow you to have more or less of specific districts in the center or outskirt area of your town. For example, if you have 3 districts (commercial, downtown, industrial) in the center of your town, you would normally get about the same number of tiles for each district. If you choose to weight the downtown district at twice the others, you will see about twice the downtown tiles in your town than the other districts. These are in addition to the new items I mentioned above. And stamps are almost ready for initial testing, so we are getting closer to having them ready. There are also some new things that are being looked at that may or may not appear in the next release. These include creating plateaus, placing rivers along the transition area between biomes, so each biome is separated by a river, and automatically filling any basins (depressions) on your map with water, regardless of what elevation it is at on your map, if it meats certain criteria. So there are a lot of things to look forward to in the next release and the following releases.

Slight correction... faatal said that they'll try to prevent a broken save between versions but that changes might not make that possible. At least, unless I misunderstand what he said about it. Question: Before 1.0 is released, will someone go through the POI XML and remove all the unused stuff? Things like AllowedTownships and Zoning and stuff like that? Having stuff from old versions that's no longer used just makes the XML more confusing for anyone trying to make their own POI and thinking that some parameter will do something when it doesn't. I know it's a minor thing but it would be nice.

And yet if they said simply, "We're going to call it 1.0" and didn't include any explanation at all, then everyone (including probably you), would be complaining about that. They aren't going to tell us the details about private business decisions between them and Sony or Microsoft. So they either tell us absolutely nothing (pitchforks come out) or tell us a half truth like they did (still pitchforks, but fewer). There isn't a perfect option for them when they aren't going to tell you the specific details. And there's no reason they should have to either. Besides, I thought it was pretty clear that this move was almost guaranteed to be due to Microsoft or Sony, so they let you read between the lines to find out the (likely) truth as it was. That's enough. As SylenThunder mentioned, this was responded to earlier. In short, they are planning on trying to keep you from needing to start new games with these updates but cannot guarantee it won't be required. They will try to make the saves at least possible to load. Mods should work similar to saves and probably are less likely to break. The biggest thing that may break are POI if they change blocks again in any of the releases. That being said, I would not expect the bandit release to work properly without starting a new game. It changes too much for that, imo.

I've done that but wouldn't say that I like it. 😁 Besides, A21 drops aren't ever all that good, so not worth it.

I agree with you on this. It is one thing to have integration that can only happen rarely that can tip the balance for good or bad without it breaking the game. It is something else entirely to be able to trigger practically non-stop hordes and stuff like that just to troll the streamer. I don't find that fun to watch at all. The Dev stream where they showed off the integrations leading up to A21 was not at all enjoyable to watch for me. I rarely watch anyone play a game anyhow. I never saw the appeal. I normally only so that if I'm considering buying the game and a steam of it happens to be available so I can get an idea what the game is really like compared to what the advertisement videos of the game show. Twitch for me is mainly just for things like live AD&D campaigns with pretty well known actors/actresses and voice actors. Those can be a lot of fun.

Fair enough. Most are in-have transactions intended to get you to buy something while playing when you are invested in whatever you are doing. Price is small enough for each item to make it seem cheap so you will buy one, then another, and another, until as you said, they pay many times the cost of the game itself. And yes, I would agree that if they sold a single outfit as a DLC, I would probably consider it a microtransaction even if sold outside of the game. Either way, calling a cosmetic DLC a microtransaction is nothing more than sensationalism intended to get a rise out of people.

Why is everyone saying there are microtransactions? A microtransaction is when single items or single item sets or something along those lines are sold. It is like in modern Assassin's Creed have, where you can buy skins for your horse, for your armor, for your weapons, etc. These are purchased one skin or skin set at a time. Those are microtransaction. A pack of multiple outfits isn't a microtransaction. Now, I don't think they said how many outfits you would get in the DLC but I would think at least 5 sets and probably cost to 10. That is a cosmetic DLC, not a microtransaction. Not only that, but microtransactions are conducted within a game. A DLC is purchased outside of a game. Now, if you want to say you don't like cosmetic DLC as well as microtransactions, I'm with you. I don't like either and I certainly won't pay money for cosmetic items unless maybe if it is a really big pack for a really low price. But let's not sensationalize things. Call it what it is... A cosmetic DLC.

To expand on what ZZTong asked, POI that have keys or buttons need to be on each person's computer for the keys to work. They are not server side only. It is also a good idea to have any custom POI on each person's computer because you can't see them at a distance if that aren't on your computer.

Ease of access is one thing... when it matters. Having to make one change in settings isn't difficult. Better to be secure in this instance than save someone from making a change to settings one time per save. As I said, the difference between users who forget to make this change is significant... potentially getting stuff messed up in one way or another (destroyed, stolen, etc.) versus having to exit the game to change the setting and then load the game back up. In the end, yes, end users are responsible for making sure they do things, but that doesn't mean developers can't make security a priority. Especially when it doesn't have any significant impact on users.

With 1.0 coming out and plans to finish everything in under 2 years, I'm wondering if there has been any discussion about improving the POI Editor and World Editor? The World Editor lacks the ability to do anything besides mess with POI placements. It would be a huge improvement to be able to save changes to the world that you make in it. And the POI Editor has numerous bugs and many of the controls are either confusing or hard to use or simply undocumented. In short, it's clunky. It was okay to be left in that state while in early access while the game itself was being worked on, but now that things are coming to fruition, it seems like it's a good time to get these updated to be more useful. I'm sure even TFP POI designers would appreciate better editors and I know the rest of us would as well. So... any chance they'll be updated and improved? Maybe not for 1.0, but at least somewhat soon? Please.

Well, you're definitely out of luck for armor considering they are redoing armor. And I doubt they will consider changing weapons when the game is leaving early access in around a month. I do agree that some weapon progressions could be a bit better. Many of the lowest tier weapons could be more cheaply made weapons and probably make more sense. But in the end, they want around 3 tiers of things and what they have fits into that and works.

Although I agree about this, I would say that even if most people play multiplayer and pay attention to the settings, it would make sense to have default settings set to not show online. After all, if you forget to turn that off and someone joins and messes stuff up on purpose, that isn't good. Yet if you forget to turn it on when you want multiplayer, the worst you have to deal with is exiting the game and turning it on. Given the difference in results if you forget, I think it is better to hide the online status by default. I also think it would be good to be able to change that setting while playing the game and not only when starting it. I don't see any reason you should have to exit the game just to change if it shows online. Some other settings for the save could also be allowed to be changed within the game as well, imo.

A possible way to make this work with RWG is to have it check the edge of the POI to see if water is touching the edge anywhere. If so, it attempts to place the POI where the water on the POI connects to the water on the map. Granted, that info isn't in the XML. Still tricky, but it would be a good way to handle it, I think.

You can also set number of players to one and no one can join, though making the game unlisted is better.

Oh, and another POI type that would be great would be ones with docks and a way for them to spawn in places where they stick out into the water. To be clear, I'm not talking about including water in the POI for the dock like on the wedding POI. I'm talking about a dock POI that can spawn next to a river or a lake or the sea, with the dock sticking into the water. More cave or mine POI that spawn well in random locations. A large bus station that is open concept rather than dungeon style would be nice. Maybe another field hospital or two. You would expect to see them all around with this kind of epidemic. Perhaps even some POI that include some special lighting or fog effects or other ambient effects. No cable POI do this but you can see it in and custom POI and it looks really good. Hide some lights and add some fog and you get some really interesting effects. Of course, you need it to look like it belongs, so that is the trick. And there are of course performance concerns with those things, but if you keep it small, like in only one part of the POI, it should be fine.

Here are some ideas: Art gallery to show off the new pictures and paintings. Museum - not sure that we have stuff that could go into one, though. Zoo - this has been discussed before. Lighthouse - are there any in Arizona? Aquarium - since there aren't any fish or stuff, they can be shown to be broken and water all over the floor/etc. Aviary - fill it with a bunch of vultures!

Not being someone who uses Intel and not entirely up to speed on some of the details, I'll point out what has been mentioned in the past that might help explain what is probably your issue with that CPU. The CPU uses a number of "efficient" cores. These cores aren't great. If any part of the game ends up running on those cores, you're going to run into lower performance issues. A CPU without those cores will often run better even if it's not as good. Note that upgrading your video card for this game is unlikely to provide you much of any benefit over your current card for this particular game.

That's a good simplified explanation of multithreading. I like it. People often think that multithreading is some easy thing to do that works in every situation and automatically speeds things up. That just isn't the case. And even games that have multithreading usually only have it for very specific things and not for the game as a whole. In a game, you often have many different things all working in an interconnected way and trying to pull a piece out and run it separately and then intertwine it back in and still get some kind of performance increase rather than a loss isn't always possible. It works best when you have some part that is entirely, or at least almost entirely, separate from everything else that can be done in its own thread without affecting other things. There are places where this is an option but there are many more places where it isn't a good option. A very simple and basic example that might help people to visualize the issue... Let's say AI is on one thread and building/destruction of blocks are on a different thread. The AI sees that it can walk a zombie forward without anything in the way. Someone builds a wall at the same time that would prevent the zombie from going forward. The AI thread doesn't know about that wall because the two processes are in different threads and so still tells the zombie to go forward. Now, there are ways to integrate threads and provide some interaction/updates to them, but the more things you do to tie the threads together, the less benefit you can get from them being separate threads. Also, to be clear, that example is NOT how they are doing things and isn't what I'd suggest as a good way to do things. It is just a very simple and basic example about why something would be a challenge. So you don't need to tell me that it's not how someone would do multithreading because I know it isn't.

Yeah, if you don't want to scavenge past a few days, you'll need dew collectors. I normally don't switch over to building until I'm a few weeks into the game when I have plenty of resources to build large bases without having to worry about going out to grab more stuff. By then, I've gotten so much water that it's not an issue. But if you do stop scavenging early, look at getting a few dew collectors built (the number depends entirely on how much crafting of stuff that needs water that you are doing - drinking and eating aren't an issue). Once done, you can get the water you need without even having to take time to go to a lake for it. Just regularly grab the water from the collectors at your base and you are all set. Just keep in mind that dew collectors, while running, generate "heat" like other workstations and so can lead to more screamers showing up while you are there. You can avoid that by placing your dew collectors away from your base so they aren't in an active chunk except when you go to collect the water. But that removes the benefit of not having to go anywhere to get the water.

Many games have free DLC. It's something that is technically separate from the vanilla experience that a user can add or not add depending on preference.

I believe there is at least one in the the mods forum. Try a search for jars or maybe water in that forum and you can probably find one. I'd point out that the lack of jars is really only very apparent when you've played the game with them and expect them to be there. Getting water is not difficult even without the jars once you get used to it. At least as long as you're scavenging. You'll find plenty of murky water everywhere. You can also drink directly from water sources and either use the helmet mod to make it safe or use drinks to deal with the dysentery. If you feel the need, you can set up one or more dew collectors to get water, though for 1-2 people in a game who scavenge regularly, we find there's no need. If you're constantly crafting stuff that needs water, you might need the dew collectors to have enough water but for cooking, drinking, and light crafting, you really don't need them for a 1-2 player game.

Lots of topics about this with pages of comments for and against if you take a look. They won't be bringing the jars back. They decided to remove jars and cans so they are like any other empty container (not there anymore).

Moving the mods to another folder will not break anything as long as the folder is detected by the game. The default appdata location should be fine unless you've set your User Date Folder location to somewhere else. I'd recommend creating a new game to verify your mods are loaded before loading an existing save because if something isn't working with your mods and you load into an existing save, you may break the save. The location you have your mods/saves/etc. really doesn't matter. They recommend not using the game folder mainly because Microsoft doesn't want you to use it. I have all of that on a separate drive rather than in appdata because my C drive is not large. You can tell if a mod has a problem by looking at the log file after loading the game. Near the top, you'll see the information where it's loading the mods and it'll say whether it was successful or if there were any problems for each mod. Of course, this doesn't mean the mod works correctly. The mod could have something wrong with it still. But it does mean the mod is loaded. For example, if the mod adds a new craftable item to the game but they forgot to add a recipe to the mod, the mod will load fine but you won't be able to craft the item. But that's not really what you were asking. Note: I will add that certain things expect your mods in a specific place. I think at least one of the overhaul mods needs things to be in a specific location and I think at least one of the mod managers requires it as well. But for pretty much anything else, as long as they are in your User Data Folder location (default being in appdata) or else in the game directory, they'll work.