Happy Halloween, everyone!
We hope you have already prepared plenty of treats and costumes for Halloween. The spookiest time of year is almost upon us and, today, we would like to present you with some exciting changes. These changes are related to the Halloween holiday in addition to the actual game. With that said, this patch is a bit unusual regarding content.
This patch contains some things that were set to be released in one big combat patch (one that is happily on the way). We are finishing some things and are excited to enter the polishing stage within the next couple of weeks. For now, let’s concentrate on the new thrills you’ll find in this newest patch.
First and foremost, as many of you have noticed, our Halloween event has returned to The Universim! In launching the game, you will be greeted by our Skull Moon. Once you have entered the game, you will have your choice of a regular planet (for players who wish to forgo the Halloween event and its various challenges) or the Halloween Planet by clicking the pumpkin checkbox. This action will switch all of the planet sizes to the Halloween Planet.
The Kraken
Playing on the Halloween Planet will allow you to encounter the Kraken. This evil creature can arise from deep waters and will spawn unusual zombies. These zombies will attack your civilization from time to time until you destroy the source of their creation.
Mysterious Portals
Demonic Nuggets will invade your world during Halloween! You may recall a mysterious portal being opened for brief periods of time. Well, now you will uncover the cause behind it as a protector of your civilization. Closing the portal will provide you (and your Nuggets) with a handsome reward. Close the portal by destroying it. Your military Nuggets may be able to assist you.
Witches
Witches will appear during nighttime! You may see them flying and cackling through the sky. After all, Halloween is their holiday as well!
Blood Rain
You may encounter a phenomenon of red clouds appearing over your planet. Hopefully, your Nuggets won’t be frightened by some kind of red rain.
Ghosts
They’re back! Ghosts are here to roam your planet but, this time, these are friendly spirits that will appear after the death of your Nuggets.
Halloween Planet
This time around, our Halloween Planet didn’t change much from the previous year. However, we’ve added some new resources to the game as well as tree variations.
Now, let's talk about some of the content that is not related to Halloween but that you’ll be able to enjoy in this patch.
Snapping Tool
We have received plenty of feedback on implementing a snapping tool to The Universim. Well, we are pleased to tell you that the tool is finally here! You can now adjust and place your buildings as precisely as possible. The snapping tool will be available once you select a building that you would like to place.
You will see in the left hand corner some instructions on how to use them and what buttons will activate snapping buildings. This tool will have 3 different modes:
- Mixed. Buildings will attempt to snap to the road or a building based on the distance to them.
- Snapping to buildings. This mode will completely ignore roads and will snap a building as close as possible to another building, allowing you to align structures together.
- Snapping to roads. Perhaps you would like to align your buildings to the road, if so, switch to this mode.
Machine Guns for Defense Towers
As we’ve developed more and more military content for the game, we decided to be a bit more practical with the use of the rockets. Now, when defense towers will be shooting flying objects or heavy armory objects, they will be shooting rockets. Otherwise - instead of shooting poor wolves with rockets - they will be using machine guns. Machine guns will be as effective as rockets, just without a big splash.
News Messages
We added additional options to the settings within News Messages which will allow you to turn off all messages except critical ones or adjust current news messages and showcase only selected messages. The options that we’ve added are:
- Family Messages (messages that indicate that Nuggets formed a new family)
- Believer Messages (messages that indicate any believer interaction)
- Seasons Messages (messages that indicate the change of seasons)
Warehouse Disable All
Another request from the community was to disable the acceptance of resources within the warehouse. Now, within the warehouse panel, you will be able to find a Disable All button which will disable the acceptance of all resources within that particular warehouse. From that point, you can enable any resources that you would like to accept by manually selecting them. You can also revert the change by clicking on the same button and enabling the acceptance of all resources.
Save/Load Error Handler
We’ve reworked and added a new error handler which will fire up when the error occurs within the game when a save is pending. Recently, we’ve encountered an error which erases or does not save certain data to the save files, causing the corruption of those saves. This new system will detect that activity by checking if the save file has all the needed data in order to load. An error message will be produced if something is missing. If you encounter that error, please let us know. There is no way for us to track it right now, unless someone will be able to trigger it.
Other Improvements
- When Discovery Points (DP) are used to discover a perk, the price of DP will be hidden afterwards for this perk
- Incorrect DP icon was changed to the correct one in order to be consistent with the rest of the game’s DP icon
- Minister of Space was missing a lock icon on the slot
- Added icon to the finishing hut when there is no fish to catch or gut
- Reworked the interaction of Nuggets with the Colonization Rocket and Trade Rocket Now, the prioritization system will be as follows: Nugget should be educated, adult, have no partner, and be between 2-12 years old. This Nugget will be prioritized for the Colonization or Trade Rocket. If none of these Nuggets are found, the system will instead prioritize Nuggets within the same category, but older until age 54-74. Once all Nuggets are exhausted, the system will prioritize Nuggets who are adults, have an education, have a partner, but are still young. After that, the system will continue checking for Nuggets within the same category but who are older. Following that category, the system will then begin to board Nuggets who are educated adults with no partner. Lastly, if none of the Nuggets are within the categories above, the system will select any Nugget that is left. This prioritization should ensure that you will get the best Nuggets that will be sent for the colonization of a new planet as well as for trading
- Nuclear Plant received assign all button
- Consistent Nugget interaction within any building. You can now interact with a Nugget inside the residential building or any other building. Previously, you were not able to use Creator Powers on a Nugget within certain buildings
- Cosmodrome resources were rearranged. This arrangement was according to the resources observed on the bottom panel (where all resources are located) for better readability and consistency
- Added a tooltip and a popup panel for the auto constructed buildings such as Temples and Black Markets
- Arrested/Imprisoned Nuggets will be immediately removed from their occupations
- Selecting Unobtanium Extractor building will highlight Unobtanium plates which should help to identify placement sites more easily
- Added deselected effect to the eras buttons located on the left hand side of the screen. Located above construction and the Creator Powers buttons in order to distinguish the era you are currently in
- Warehouse received a button to disable all
Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue where the Spaceport didn’t allow for adding up to max supply and only allowed increments of 10. In other words, if you had space for 2 more resources, clicking ‘add 10,’ would not fill the rocket to the max. It would just ignore that interaction. Now, it will add those 2 missing resources that it can actually fit
- Fixed an issue where Tesla Parts could have been dragged outside the screen if the movement speed of the camera was too fast
- Fixed an issue where the Unobtanium extractor didn’t function properly when the player was on another planet
- Fixed an issue where a shader for the raincloud didn’t appear at certain angles
- Fixed an issue where sending food via Spaceport caused a rounding error and therefore displaying a very large number
- Town Hall didn’t kick Nuggets out of the building when it was turned off
- Localization error was happening when Nuggets were returning from expedition
- Fixed an error within the Spaceport that was breaking the game when the player was sending resources
- Fixed a scaling issue with the button located within the vertical consumption layout which was increasing the on/off button scale but it was never returning to normal
- Fixed an issue where some sections of land didn’t have roads. This system was tweaked quite a bit. Some issues might still happen, but they should be rare
- Fixed an issue where the simulation system was not correctly working with drones and allowed the creation of an unlimited amount of drones while being on the other planet
- Loading a planet could sometimes produce an error which was breaking the save file
- Fixed an issue where the player was not able to fly to the location of the Nugget who died due to the Sarlacc
- Fixed an issue where a mystery box could not be picked up from the crater
- Fixed an issue where the Unobtanium extractor would burn despite using rain cloud on it
- Fixed an issue where the Nugget creation screen was incorrectly displayed when UI Scaling was set to MAX
Besides everything we have done above, we are also working full speed ahead on the next Large Update that will be coming out shortly! Our estimation time is around 2-2.5 weeks. This update will introduce new buildings and a combat system. Some things we had covered last week and, currently, we are at a stage where we can polish our combat system. After polishing, the update will have to go through QA. Once we get approval from QA, we will post new patch notes with its release!
While some of our team focused on the combat system, the rest of the team was hard at work racing toward the finish line. All major systems are officially in place from a technical standpoint. Our outstanding list of tasks consists of new tutorials, cinematic shots, a credit screen, and final scene. Of course, we’ll be polishing and rebalancing existing systems in order to improve gameplay during the later stages of the game.
We sincerely hope that you will enjoy these new changes and are looking forward to our combat patch! We are extremely excited to show it to you. As always, if you enjoy what we are doing, make sure to leave a Steam review and join our Discord. If you happen to find an issue, join our Discord and let us know. Our magical team of programmers will do their best to exterminate every bug that we, and our community, will find. Lastly, enjoy Halloween and have a great time with your friends and family.
Sincerely,
The Crytivo Crew