3.9.3 "Caelum" Patch Released

Hello all,

We're proud to release the 3.9.3 "Caelum" Patch promised for mid-October. This patch brings with it a balance pass on subjugation and diplomatic acceptance in-general, as well as other balance changes, bug fixes, UI, AI and modding improvements.

Please find the patch notes below.

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######################## VERSION 3.9.3 ######################
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① Balance
---• AI Empires are more likely to seek a federation if their rivals have federated.
---• Federations (except for Hegemonies) now default to not permitting subject members.
---• Having less than 50 Trust with an empire imposes a -100 Acceptance to them becoming your subject or overlord.
---• Hydroponics Designation on habitats now swaps all jobs on the housing districts for farmers.
---• Increased the importance of being more powerful than your vassal for loyalty purposes.
---• Insulting someone decreases their Trust of you by 5.
---• Rebalanced requirements for diplomatic treaties to require trust.
---• Reduced how excited subjects get about things like shared sensors.
---• Reduced the effect differing war philosophies has on federation acceptance.
---• Removed the ability to trade favors.
---• Replaced all +10% Districts on Habitats from technologies and traditions with +1 District on Habitats
---• Replaced the upgrade habitat decisions with checks for habitat capital level instead.
---• The Intimidation menace perk now allows you to ignore diplomatic requirements for proposing subjugation.
---• The Pharma State civic now provides +1 Medical Worker job to capital buildings.
---• The Unity from Rivals from the Animosity Diplomatic Stance has been reduced to 10 per rival.
---• Trade Designation on habitats now has the housing district swap a clerk for a trader.

② Improvement
---• Research, Energy and Mining District capacity on habitat complexes now have their own planetary features to clearly show the number of districts, current number of orbitals and maximum number of orbitals.
---• The Crisis event chain will now use their bespoke event chain icon.

③ Bugfix
---• Added is_scope_valid checks for anchorages.
---• Fix to hiring events not being dismissed for other players in coop
---• Fixed concept tooltips for starbase components.
---• Fixed issue with nested tooltips and mouse tendency being incorrect when using UI scaling
---• Fixed issue with some portraits being blurry on lower graphics settings due to mip levels being skipped. Disabled the functionality for portraits and related textures.
---• Fixed the Node Culling gateway leading to an unlocalized string.
---• Fixed Tiyanki occasionally not spawning correctly at the start of a Fruitful Partnership playthrough
---• Massive Crater got its 25% pop growth back
---• Restoring the Payback habitat when your homeworld is a moon now grants a minor orbital instead of a major orbital.
---• Rewrote math for calculate tendency between mouse and nested tooltip window. This should fix issue with tooltips below and above mouse cursor behaving somewhat differently.
---• Stopped interactions allowing multiple gaia-seeder buildings on a planet.
---• The bonus provided by Eclipse from Enmity now correctly grants a 2% modifier instead of a 20% modifier.
---• Updated the Eclipse tradition tooltip
---• Updated the massive crater concept tooltip to accurately display the actual deposit.

④ AI
---• Certain AI personalities (Federation Builders, Spiritual Seekers, Migrating Flocks, and Peaceful Traders) are now 25x more likely to select Diplomacy traditions.
---• The AI will no longer request to be subjugated by empires that are equivalent or weaker than them.
---• The AI will no longer request to become the subject or overlord of another empire unless they have 50 Trust with the other party.

⑤ UI
---• The ship viewer's zoom speed is now scaled to the ship's size.
---• Tooltips to select agendas now show the estimated time to launch the agenda, based off of your current agenda progress rate
---• Trust between nations is now visible in the main diplomatic screen.
---• When switching ships in the ship viewer, the zoom distance will now be preserved relative to the ship's size.

⑥ Modding
---• Added documentation for concepts.
---• Added support for more object types in concept tooltips.
---• Fixed gridbox left and top padding not working.
---• Some objects' auto-generated tooltips can now be shown as concept tooltips.
---• Support building concept tooltips without valid scope.
---• Calling non existing events should no longer crash the game.

Please note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed.

If you have an important game going, please back up the save file before trying to load the save in the new version.

If you experience crashing or other issues, first disable all mods and start a new save. If the issue persists, please report it on the Bug Report forums.

Megaquarium: Deep Freeze is out now! (Plus v4.0 update)

The latest expansion for Megaquarium: Deep Freeze, is out now!

I've tried to pull out all the stops on this one. I really hope you enjoy it!

If you're a day-1 buyer, please consider leaving a review on the DLC's store page, once you've had a chance to check it out.

DLCs don't tend to get many reviews and it can be really helpful for prospective players to hear other players' thoughts on them.

One final request: The game has gone through rigorous testing but if you notice any bugs while playing, please let me know via the Steam forums.

New achievements

To celebrate the launch, I've added two new sandbox achievements to the game:

Sandbox Trials - Limited Veteran - In Sandbox mode, have 80 different species of animals in your aquarium using the Limited Supply preset on hard difficulty or higher.

Sandbox Trials - Quick Start Veteran - In Sandbox mode, reach 10,000 Prestige using the Quick Start preset on hard difficulty or higher.

The theme of this pair of achievements is to give veteran players something to reach for in Sandbox mode especially when playing with one or more DLCs. Good luck!

v4.0 Update

The game has also got a significant update alongside the launch of the expansion. For a more in-depth look at some of the new features check out last week's post.

This time around I have a full changelog to share with you (see below). This is of course in addition to all the brand new mechanics and features within Deep Freeze itself!

Thanks and enjoy!

Tim Twice Circled

Changelog

• Feature: You can now toggle each DLC individually during Sandbox setup. Rank up levels will be adjusted accordingly.
• Feature: You can toggle on/off care requirements and equipment breakdowns in Sandbox mode.
• Feature: Added 'Passive Mode' preset to Sandbox. (Same as Creator mode but has care requirements and breakdowns switched off)
• Feature: Basic Divider is now available in base game.
• Feature: You can press Page Up/Page Down to levitate in first person mode. You fall back to earth if you move.
• Feature: Added latin names for every official animal. Hover over the (i) or the animal portrait to find it.
• Feature: U-Shaped tank is now extendable.
• Feature: Every object's rank is now shown within it's description (hover over the (i)).
• Balance: Staff start with 15 skill at level 1 and gain 30% every level.
• Balance: Lemon Shark max size reduced to 75
• Balance: Copperband Butterflyfish now eats Live Mysis.
• Balance: Clownfish now worth +2 Prestige if with an anemone.
• Balance: Prestige reduction for animals with large aquascaping/land requirements
• Balance: Prestige increase for combinations of the following factors: large size, greedy, skill required, live food and expensive food.
• Balance: Starfish moved from Other Inverts to Echinoderms
• Balance: Jellyfish moved from Other Inverts to Jellyfish
• Balance: Leopard Clam moved from Anemones, Gorgonians and Clams to Bivalves.
• Balance: Capped positive prestige from cheap vending machine and gift shop sales to 6 prestige points.
• Balance: Improved flexibility of many sandbox objects to work better when playing on 'limited supply' and 'everything available' presets.
• Balance: You are not offered breeding objectives in sandbox if you cannot currently unlock the 'light' required (if any).
• Balance: U-shaped tank is now unlocked when you start Carbon City level.
• Balance: Large tunnel tank can now support lights.
• UI: Level up staff on the management window and their individual staff window.
• UI: Option to disable staff level up messages.
• UI: Schedule multiple talks at single podium.
• UI: Added 'Not in aquarium' toggle which has the same effect of count=0 in the search.
• UI: Added range highlight on hover.
• UI: New 'enclosed' paperclip icon for messages that have objects inside.
• UI: Search by rank, ecology, science and prestige.
• UI: 'Skill required' icon is now incorporated into the task icon.
• UI: Hide warnings now hides all warnings, even deadly ones.
• UI: Reduce maximum search text.
• UI: Stop control characters in input boxes.
• UI: You can now see if a supplement needs doing today (0/1) or has already been given (1/1).
• UI: Breeding parents are stated on Breeder icon at all times.
• Graphics: Added shoaling/grouping behaviour to many animals across base game and all DLCs.
• Graphics: Reduced water wave in 1st person mode.
• Graphics: Improved animals transition between land and water.
• Graphics: Fixed minor issues with sponge, broom and mic headset animations.
• Fixed bug: You cannot set vending machine and gift shop prices negative.
• Fixed bug: Water continued to ripple when paused via entering menu.
• Fixed bug: Highlight flickers when hovering near the edge of an object.
• Fixed bug: Green Pellet Dispenser was called Greens Pellet Dispenser.
• Fixed bug: Hovering over a zone button in the zone menu and pressing escape caused all the zones to remain shown.
• Fixed bug: You are no longer offered tanks as "aquascaping" for breeding purposes by Emmanuel Tosh.
• Fixed bug: Game froze if you removed the last empty tile within 20 tiles of a guest.
• Fixed bug: Podium contribution to ecology/science income estimate is more accurate.
• Fixed bug: OSX resolution changes made by editing global.data take effect first time now.
• Fixed bug: in some resolutions, the main menu would not return to the centre after it moved to the left at least once.
• Fixed bug: if an animal eats another animal when it's been hungry for at least a day, the health loss is not reset correctly.
• Fixed bug: staff portrait would sometimes be invisible in zoning menu.
• Fixed bug: level file name was shown when first saving after starting a new level.
• Optimisation: Animal ledger was updating even when closed under some circumstances.
• Optimisation: Sped up sandbox objective generation.

v4.0.11 patch

v4.0.11 Changelog

• Fixed bug: mod animals outside level's ranks caused a no progress bug.
• Fixed bug: duck egg appeared underground.
• Fixed bug: Sandbox menu went slightly offscreen on Mac.
• Fixed bug: When Architect's Collection is disabled in sandbox mode, some exclusive objectives would still appear.

v4.0.12 Changelog

• Fixed bug: an animal in the final level could be sold stopping a later objective from being completed.

v4.0.13 Changelog

• Fixed bug: when you pick up polar tank with an emperor penguin egg in it where most AC is connected via compressors.
• Fixed bug: Land animals starting on land did not have the right animation for the first frame after place/load.
• Fixed bug: Prevented addition of custom substrate to kreisel tank.

Night of the living draugar: New blood

Once again this year, the draugar make a terrible comeback in this season of fear and terror! Will you be able to triumph in Draugrheim? Will the southern kingdoms be able to face this unknown threat?

Here is all you need to know about the event.

TEMPORARY GAME MODE

Starting now and for the rest of the month, we welcome you back to our spooky special event where you will be able to engage in battle in the terrifying Draugrheim biome.

In this temporary game mode, you will have to conquer your fears in the land of the living dead and face some terrible (eight-legged) creatures roaming the land of Northgard."

If you feel like some of these new creatures have more legs than you can tolerate, you can activate an arachnophobia mode in the options menu.

NEW TEMPORARY TOWN HALL SKIN

Finish a game of Northgard in the new Draugrheim game mode (if you dare) and earn an exclusive Town Hall skin. You can claim it in Expeditions

This year, the southern kingdoms will also have to face the danger of Draugrheim! You will be able to claim their sinister town hall as well!

Happy spooky season to all of you!
It has been pretty calm in terms of news. We are working hard on the next expansion as well as what's to come for everyone! We'll have more info to share with you in November!

-Shiro Games

5.570 Petawatt
(Released October 20th, 2023)

① General
---• Dire guardian lairs were incorrectly seeded as 'BigGood' and are now 'BigBad'.
------• in some cases lairs were being spawned right next to the human homeworld
---• Fix to at least two cases of 'yikes! jumped from fleet foo to bar'
------• When a drone fleet leader dies, you may see its still living drones jump slightly in position, but this is the lesser evil.
---• Tooltip for a stack in At-Local-Planet or Selection-Info now has the correct number of ships.
------• mostly this just means the strength is shown for the full number
---• Ships that deal attrition damage, no longer do so when there is a ceasefire on their planet.
---• Fix to missing 'take wormhole' order when queuing move to location orders in some circumstances.
---• Show behavior and order line in tooltips on all detail levels.
---• Ships that fire on death were not getting the correct number of stacks (but now do).
---• Necromancer ships which decay now become a stack of equal size instead of a single ship.
---• Already existing wards now spawn with their flagship when the flagship is on a new planet.
---• Fix to hang on startup if exception occurs within one of its tasks.
---• Fixed a bug where autobuilding mobile station-keepers does not put them on FRD automatically.
---• Hover and faction rings should now have the same relative size on all planet sizes.
---• Mapgen logging enabled no longer causes an exception assigning player homeworlds.
---• Regenerators now operate more correctly when more than one is at planet.
------• the one which handles regen is now randomized instead of exhausting a single one
------• one regenerator being below its threshold to operate no longer blocks others from doing so
---• Calculation of the kite/approach/stop distances is now correctly considering the target's radius and bubbleshields.
------• That is, the target itself directly has a bubbleshield. Just being under one, currently still has no impact on this calculation.
------• For very small ranges (ie, melee weapons) this calculation is now adjusted to use different ratios.
---• Ships with systems having a seek_range specified (mostly melee) will now (again) move in to engage targets within that range even when idle (idle as in, not in pursue or attack-move, which it ofc will also seek to targets in).
------• Returning afterwards to the position they were idle at caused issues when i attempted it, so that is still not enabled.
------• The seek range is also now scaled by the same factors as regular range is. The result is somewhat smaller than before, which seems appropriate as it is still quite, quite large.
---• Stop command now also clears frd targets.
---• Attack orders that are from frd are now removed when the target is no longer a valid frd target.
---• In some cases targets were being evaluated as if in range when they were not.
---• Fixed the networked range enhancement (more range per ship of the same type on the planet) which was not working.
---• Fix to NotImplementedException for NewLineIfNeeded.
------• This occurred when C-Clicking to see affected lines for a tech in the sidebar, if detail is medium or higher.
------• Thanks to Nicolas B for reporting.
---• Fix to a whole slew of things that occurred on-ship-death not respecting the number of ships in the stack which died.
------• Resource on death (science, hap, aip, essence, metal, everything), metal loss at planet, infest ships to spawn.
---• Fix to strength counting of TotalThreatProvokingStrength.
------• As a result of this non-player factions such as DZ or Nanos, often seen swarming ai planets, are capable of triggering guard posts to deploy and previously could not.
---• Exogalactic Strikeforces targeting their own Overlord will now self destruct
------• Thanks to Croque for finding this bug.
------• This fix is a bandaid to allow for games that hit this bug to be played out
---• The AI will also no longer inappropriately trigger Shark A/B when killing another AIs command station (ie, civil war).
------• This was the cause of the big clumps of 'Exogalactic Strikeforces' ships targeting non-players.
------• Thanks to Croque for the report and Badger for finding this cause.
---• Ark Empire's starting ship lines show the full ship name instead of the excessively truncated short name.
------• This also applies to Ark Sidekick from Sidekicks mod.
------• This also applies to starting ship lines as chosen in Classic Fusion mod.
---• fix to focus-camera-on-entity code where i adjust the zoom backward if its very close or inside the entity
------• issue was that i needed the actual camera zoom in world units not 0-1
---• fix to ambush post
------• was not actually spawning drones, now it does
------• drones spawn in attacker full
------• drones now die after a time-out rather than self-attrition, since they are allowed to stack, and self-attrition doesn't really work right in that case
---• draw squad orders fixes / improvements
------• now shown (again) for ships selected, not only hovered
------• now shown for hovered in the selection-info
------• now shown for off-planet ships (if selected) if orders terminate or pass through the planet being viewed
------• now shown for npc ships without the debug setting on
------• visualizing seek range now (yellow)

② Mods
⯈ Classic Fusion
---• Fix "missing method exception"
⯈ Radiant Maps
---• Spiral2: Default arm thickness changed from "snake" to "girder". (SirLimbo was right, it looks better this way)
⯈ Radiant Fleets
---• NEW MOD!
---• New fleets for Human Empires: Mobile, Battlestation, and Support
---• New ships for Human Empires, Ark Empires, and Ark Sidekicks
---• New Arks
---• Works without DLC, but some components will be disabled without DLC
---• Lots of References to Ancient Shadows
⯈ Lost Spire Coilbeam
---• NEW MOD!
---• Lost Spire Frigates will now use Coil Beams like their un-Lost bretheren.
⯈ Necromancer is Not Neinzul
---• NEW MOD!
---• With this mod active, Necromancer units will no longer be listed as Neinzul units in the Encyclopedia
⯈ Playable Flenser
---• NEW MOD!
---• Adds a playable version of the Flenser for Human Empires, Ark Empires, and Ark Sidekicks.
---• Some Assembly Required: all versions require some Science and a lot of HaP to reach their full strength.
---• Batteries not included: the version for non-Ark Empires has its standard power draw of a Petawatt.
---• No, it's not balanced, it's just meant to have stuff for you to upgrade.
⯈ Sidekicks
---• Ark Sidekick now again has its own starting arks and starting lines, separate from Ark Empire.
---• Ravagers can no longer be affected by Necromancy
---• Chrysalises should no longer spawn on planets being actively drilled
------• Thanks to Radiant Phoenix for reporting

③ Coders
---• New damage modifier comparison type: comparison_type="NotEquals".
---• When trying to load an override material, it first attempts to load the path as an actual Material before trying to load it as a prefab.
------• So when it is not a Material, this is not worthy of an error, and is therefore no longer shown.
---• New attribute for factions must_defeat.
------• If true then this factions defeat_condition always applies, regardless of galaxy settings.
---• Faction custom fields of type CustomDropdownCoreTableSubset have two new optional attributes.
------• options_show_as="DisplayName" is the default value but can also be "ShortDisplayName"
---------• This defines whether the option's visible name is the row.GetDisplayName or row.GetShortDisplayName.
------• options_sort_by="VisibleName" is the default value but can also be "InternalName"
---------• This defines the order options appear in the dropdown, and is either by their visible name or by their internal name.
------• These only currently apply to fields of type CustomDropdownCoreTableSubset, but logically could apply to CustomDropdownCoreTable or CustomDropdownSurrogateTable if someone requests that in the future.
---• material_override_path="" now works in partial records
---• ships dying do to transform into "$Dying" now actually go through the full expected death sequence instead of instantly despawning
---• entity custom per-sec logic can now implement IGameEntityDamageAdjuster to modify the base damage or base corrosion damage for any system
---• ships with the attribute 'has_custom_move_order_and_no_other_direct_commands_can_be_given_from_player' spawned-on-death no longer receive the spawners orders and behavior, allowing their own starting behavior to be applied
---• new attribute 'dies_after_lifetime_sec' which will start a timer then die automatically
---• you can now use '$Dies' as a squad's TransformsIntoAfterTime to kill it
---• cleaned up the api for setting/clearing the hovered entity
------• it will now properly report said entity when hovered in the selection-info
---• helper entity.RenderPosition returns the interpolated world location in maincameraview space
---• If an object extending ArcenDynamicTableRow now fails to clear itself it will now display an error as well as what type and internal name it is, as well as the potential expansion and mod origin.

5.571 Hotfix
(Released October 20th, 2023)

---• Fix to 'System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: numShips'.
------• Squad.ShipCount was off by one.
---• Error message shown when an override material fails to load now includes the internal name of the entity.
---• Drones (again) disallowed from stacking.
------• this was intended to be an opt-in performance setting but that is not ready yet