Greetings, Creators!

 

We hope you’ve been enjoying the first snow of the season! Well, unless you’re in the southern hemisphere, where thermometers are getting close to bursting. In which case, good luck! As usual, we’ve been keeping the furnace burning over at Crytivo to pump out more great content and bug fixes. So many of you in our beloved community have played a huge role in this process, and we’re all enormously grateful for your contributions through feedback and bug reports. Be sure to join us on Twitter, Facebook, and (most importantly) Discord to stay in touch and chat with the community.

Now, let’s get down to business!

 Watch Patch Review Vlog

 

Crime System

This is a big one! We’ve been putting a lot of work into this system, and it’s finally ready to poke its head out of the door for the first time. The law and order system will have multiple research paths, which greatly impact how you deal with crime. As your civilization evolves, you will need to decide which route to take. Please remember that large systems like these are still a work in progress and will continue to improve over time (expect bugs!).

Criminals are separated into two categories: Thugs and Dangerous Criminals. Every criminal starts out as a Thug and will slowly level up to become a Dangerous Criminal if not caught in time. Thugs are often responsible for small crimes, like petty theft or minor vandalism. Dangerous Criminals will take far more radical action to make things work their way, like stealing more goods, dealing greater damage to property, and even setting buildings on fire.

We have plans to add more elements/actions to this system at a later date, so please give us feedback and suggestions on what you’d like to see.

Law Enforcers

To keep the crime rate under control, Nuggets will need to construct Police Stations around the civilization. Law Enforcers will patrol these areas and look for any suspicious activity. If they find anything strange, Enforcers will apprehend suspected criminals and bring them back to facilities where they will be detained until proven innocent or guilty.

There are two entirely different approaches to dealing with criminals in your civilization, and you’ll need to decide between them as you go.

 

Prison

 

Prisons have 4 cells for prisoners to be held temporarily until a full investigation has been conducted. After a certain amount of time, Nuggets can either be proven innocent and walk free or proven guilty and executed. Guilty Nuggets will be sent to the electric chair. Brutal, right? Well, Nuggets can’t really experience pain (research ongoing), so it’s mostly just a fun and exciting way to bid farewell. However, it’s important to keep in mind that electricity usage might skyrockets for a small while during use, so ensure you have some excess power to maintain the lightshow.







 

Rehabilitation Center

If you’ve never really had the stomach for fried Nuggets, then perhaps you should consider the alternative option. Rehabilitation Centers offer a far more peaceful -- albeit less effective -- solution to the crime problem. They only have two rooms to detain suspected criminals at any given time. An investigation is still conducted, but it’s less accurate and has a greater chance of releasing criminals back into society. Nuggets who are found guilty will be referred to a Therapist and spun in a type of centrifuge to put their brains back into a more friendly position, according to Nugget studies. We take no responsibility for what may come as a result of this.

 

Fire Station

Nuggets quickly realized that their love of playing with fire required an effective way of extinguishing the flames later. Firefighters will make short work of any unintended infernos around your city, so ensure there’s enough coverage and you’ll never have to worry about those accidental blazes ever again.



 

Parks

A new method of beautification has been added for your enjoyment. You can unlock various Parks by completing side quests, which all come with chirpy birds and benches for the bums of your citizens. The smell of freshly cut grass and excellent mood lighting provided by torches at night will improve the lives of Nuggets by at least a few percent.

 

We’ve rolled a few Parks into the game with this update, but more decoration-type stuff is on the way. Let us know what you’d like to see next!

 

Movie Theaters

Nuggets have enjoyed sitting around candle TVs since the Stone Age, but they’ve never been particularly fond of the picture quality or local dimming solutions offered on these early models. With the invention of electricity, films have taken the world by storm. Nuggets around the globe have been buzzing about the magic of cinema. Movie Theaters have quickly become major attractions for the public.

 

Decals

One of our major design goals with The Universim has always been to make everything feel “organic”. Our amazing art team and engineers have done a phenomenal job so far, and the new decal system pushes things even further. This ensures that buildings will blend into the surrounding environment far more naturally. You won’t be able to tell the difference between real life or the game anymore. Go ahead and try.

 

Tesla Changes

Based on your feedback, the Tesla quest has been completely redesigned. We have made over 30 changes to the quest and it should be far more enjoyable now. Let us know your thoughts!

Performance Changes

You’ve likely noticed some significant performance gains with the last few patches, and we’ve worked even more magic to bring you more of those sweet, sweet frames, especially toward late game. We know how important performance is, so we have dedicated quite a bit of time to performance R&D. Stability has been improved once again and we’ve boosted performance by around 20%. There’s more to come!

• The physics system configuration has been optimized and the number of simultaneously active colliders and rigid bodies reduced.
• Late-game saves (containing a lot of buildings and Nuggets) now load up to 15% faster, with far less memory allocation.
• The camera-mounted light used during night-time has been optimized to reduce overhead related to shadow casting.
• Fixed: Having a large number of buildings caused a severe drop in frame rate due to unnecessary animations playing.
• Fixed: Loading a game that contains dead animals caused those animals to spawn at the center of the planet, resulting in unnecessary physics simulation and a reduced frame rate.

 

Other Changes

 

• Crime System
• Police Station + Enforcers
• Prison, Guards, and Prisoners
• Rehabilitation Center + Therapists and Patients
• Oil Tower + Oil Miners
• Criminals (criminal actions: stealing, vandalism, arson)
• Local influence on temperature
• Firefighters
• Parks
• House interiors
• Exile Orators increase crime level
• Exile Villages have become even more dangerous! Enemy Orators are able to create chaos in your civilization and temporarily increase the crime in your city. It is up to you to stop them before things descend into anarchy.
• Extra worker slot perk for the Fire Station building
• Extended lifespan for Nuggets
• Redesigned Tesla Quest
• Christmas stuff

 

Bug Fixes

 

• Fixed an NRE with the “look at” AI action
• Fixed a bug in Fishing Nugget AI
• Fixed an NRE that could occur when Exiles started throwing spears
• Fixed an NRE caused by shocking a Nugget navigating along “local path”
• Fixed a bug that saw children spawning endlessly
• Fixed a bug where canceling the Epicenter upgrade caused the game to break
• Fixed a bug with status icons bleeding into UI
• Fire no longer spreads across water
• Fixed a bug where hitting the Battery with lightning caused it to be destroyed (Tesla quest)
• Fixed a bug where using Trickle Effect to extinguish a fire caused the cloud sound to play on repeat
• Fixed a bug in Creator Mode that required players to place Medieval buildings from the start
• Fixed missing localization for a Nugget running in a small kinetic wheel
• Fixed an AI bug that saw Nuggets stop eating/drinking when converting to Exiles.
• Fixed an issue where water overlapped with fire
• Fixed an issue where Nuggets would randomly lose their accessories
• Fixed an NRE on load due to a missing config file
• Fixed an NRE on load due to a misplaced construction site

 

General balance changes / Improvements

 

• Multiple languages were updated. Languages that do not yet have an appropriate translation will have an English translation instead of .
• Farm Food Rebalanced:

The initial Bloodydiarrhea Fruit harvest provided the same amount of food as other fruits that had not been discovered yet.
In order to provide a little more incentive for players to search for a better source of food, Bloodydiarrhea Fruit output has been decreased.
Bloodydiarrhea Fruit output was changed from 3-8 to 1-5
Since the Farm was almost an infinite source of food, all crops have been tweaked and the overall amount of food production has decreased.
The output from other fruit types has been decreased from 3-8 to 2-7.
With the introduction of the Rehabilitation Center and an increased usage of herbs, the amount of herbs that Farms can produce was increased from 1-8 to 3-10.

• Bunker Happiness decrease was changed from -20 to -10
• Missing Medieval buildings were added to Creator Mode
• New Information about the Crime System has been added to the wiki
• Added new news messages for the Crime System

 

Art

 

• Building foliage material/shader
• Oil Tower building + oil resource
• Prison building 3D model with cell interiors and execution room
• Police Station building 3D model with cells
• Rehabilitation Center 3D model with interiors and animations
• Pre-Modern Movie Theater 3D model
• Fire Station 3D model
• New accessories for: Firefighters,Police Officers (Enforcers), Prisoners, Patients
• Law enforcement-related animations
• Firefighter animations showcasing fire extinguishing progress
• Christmas decorations
• Parks and Props 3D models -- 3 variants
• Stone Age Hut interiors
• Pre-Medieval Reservoir LOD groups fixed
• Stone Age and Pre-Medieval building decals
• Foliage added to Engineers Hut and Eatery
• Fixed missing texture for tree stumps
• Oil resource stockpile model added
• Fixed gas stockpile textures (previously missing)
• Added decals to Parks
• Fire Station interior

 

UI Design

 

• Residential Buildings Panel updated -- added a “see interior” button and a do not disturb label when Nuggets are mating
• Quest window: small visual tweaks
• Main UI optimization
• Construction Menu: added icons for Rehabilitation Center and Prison
• Prison Panel implementation
• Rehabilitation Panel implementation
• Police Station Panel implementation
• Fire Station Panel implementation
• Parks Panel implementation
• MainUI update: added crime indicator and tooltip
• Nugget List Panel update: removed Happiness and added believer/non believer icons
• Oil Tower Panel implementation
• Implemented oil resource in all resource windows and updated warehouse
• Engineers Hut, Fire Station, Movie Theater, Oil Tower, Parks, Police Station, Rehabilitation Center, and Water Pump now have proper cloud renders in the Construction Menu
• Construction Menu Happiness has a new icon
• Added Construction Menu icons for Oil Tower, Movie Theater, and Police station
• Added status icons for: going to Fire Station, going to put out a fire, going to Oil Tower, going to arrest, going to Police Station, patrolling, going to Prison, going to Rehabilitation Center

 

Miscellaneous
 

• Fire now increases the temperature of nodes
• Improved Nugget shock and awe state
• Pathfinding layers: now Nuggets actively avoid fires and wild animals and do not ignore areas where buildings have been destroyed anymore
• Improved how the wind speed affects trees

Known Issues:

We made quite a few changes to localization in this patch. Previously, it was common to encounter a lot of "missing translation" error messages in various places when using a language other than English. We have introduced a solution to mitigate this issue going forward. However, we have just identified a strange bug where our changes were not applied to the Spanish (Latin American) language. We're working on a fix right now. All other languages should have the changes in place. If any translations are legitimately missing, the text will be displayed in the original English instead of the well-known "missing translation" message. If you would like to help and contribute to the translation progress of your language, you can do so here.

The team has done an incredible job to implement all of this in such a short time. We hope you love all of the new features! We’re so grateful to have your support, and your friendly encouragement fuels us to work even harder every day. Keep the feedback coming! We review every one of them, positive or negative. Remember to share your awesome ideas and suggestions with us and the community, too.

Keep spreading the word of The Universim and be sure to follow us on our major social channels. Discord is the new home for the community, so join us there is you haven’t already! Lastly, for all Crytivo news and promotions, subscribe to our newsletter right here.

 

Stay awesome!

With love,
Crytivo Crew