Wasteland 3 Patch 1.4.0 "Appetite for Construction" Now Live

Welcome to the proverbial jungle, baby. We heard you loud and clear and we know what you want. You want to rock and roll all night and part of every day. You want us to crank it up to 11 as you compose your symphonies of destruction during a season in the abyss.

In case you didn't get the memo, the crazy train has left the station and is roaring towards the release of Wasteland 3's first expansion on June 3. We're hungry as all hell for more Wasteland 3, and we got a nasty appetite for construction. As noted in our recent 1.4.0 feature preview articles, the headliners of this concertapalooza are crafting and the animal companion kennel updates. They're followed by a lineup of other headbangin' callouts noted below that are sure to make you not-so-quietly riot from your chairs and sofas.

So come on, feel the noise.

Highlights

New Feature: Crafting

• Players are now able to craft mods, weapons, gear, and mystery items from the crafting menu accessible from the inventory screen. Time to put that scrap to work.
• Crafting recipes can be learned by leveling up some skills, buying them from vendors, searching containers, and discovering mystery crafting recipe ingredients.
• More info available here.

New Feature: Animal Companion Kennel & Improved UI

• A new kennel located just outside Ranger HQ is now available. Animals dismissed in the field or those who were following a Ranger who died will return automatically to the kennel, and from there they can optionally be dismissed back into the wild. You wouldn’t do that though because you’re not a heartless jerk.
• The animal companion type limit has been removed, allowing squads to have multiples of the same type of animal in the squad (1 animal per Ranger still, of course). That’s right, you can now have a whole squad of pissed-off cats scratching cannibal clowns.
• Character portraits now display icons for animal companions. Mousing over (or selecting) the animal icon will display a tooltip with that companion’s current stats.
• More info available here.

New Customization Options

• 12 new chest pieces are now available when creating or customizing your character, with some “job”-themed options like medic and explosives expert. Finally, what you’ve always wanted, to have a work uniform in-game too.

• Polly the Parrot is 100% more inappropriate and packs a walloping Demoralize ability. Do not, for the love of all that is holy, play Polly’s dialog at high volume in proximity to anyone of high moral character.

Gameplay

• Added new safeguards to ensure followers like Provost, Party Pal, clones, etc. won’t disappear if the squad member they’re following dies, gets swapped out, or when swapping them to the other player in co-op.
• In certain situations where enemies surrender to the player, combat should no longer be re-triggered due to multi-shot attacks or damage over time status effects.
• With Permanent Death mode on, the endgame sequence will now give a proper game over screen if your only remaining characters leave the squad during certain story outcomes.
• The Tender Loving Care perk will now properly be removed when the character owning the perk is removed from the squad.
• Fixed a bug where if a character had two equipped weapons granting the same ability (such as alternate fire modes), the ability would not be usable.
• Fixed a bug that would cause Downed or Incapacitated player characters to disappear after leaving Union Station, past interacting with Morningstar.
• Resolved an issue where the downed state timer would advance too quickly if that squadmate had already been revived during that combat.
• Player characters who are Downed on the World Map will be automatically revived when returning to Ranger HQ so you don’t have to manually bring them back.
• Resolved various collision issues with invisible walls in the Bunker near Aspen.
• Fixed an issue for the Jackhammer shotgun with Extended Choke mods that would mess with the targeting cone in aim mode. You might think we’d make a joke here about “jackhammer” and “extended choke”, but you’re wrong. And sick.
• Yellow Snowballs can now correctly apply the Black Thaw STD, making the “Back in the Sack” achievement more achievable. You’re welcome?
• Lucky Crit and Lucky Mega Crit prompts are now properly followed by critical hits as intended. Lucky you.

Balance

• Turning on Difficult Skill Checks was incorrectly providing bonus XP when passing a skill check, making progression and game difficulty much easier as a result. The intention of Difficult Skill Checks is to add difficulty and not to make game progression easier.
• Destroyed loot boxes can no longer be re-looted after saving and then loading the game. I guess you could say trying to re-loot is moot.

UI & Controls

• The squad’s order will now be retained correctly when transitioning between areas or loading a saved game. Glory, glory hallelujah!
• Retraining a character will now show a confirmation animation on their character portrait inside the Mange Squad screen.
• Weapons and armor now list what mods they have installed in their description text. Luckily they won’t list that you’re still not done with your taxes.
• The save/load menus now display information to show if you have Difficult Skill Checks or Permanent Death mode enabled for a given save file.
• Conversations now show a “Click to continue” prompt when using mouse and keyboard, which helps show which ones won’t automatically progress.
• We fixed an issue where Modify Armor would sometimes be displayed as Modify Weapon when armor pieces were right-clicked in the inventory.
• Animal Whisperer's status effects will now no longer disappear after first meeting with .
• Visual feedback improvement made for when Abilities are activated on the Quickbar.
• Item icon sizes should now be consistent between inventory and merchant windows.
• Floating text when Crits are resisted via Crit Resistance has now been added. How much crit would a crit resistance resist if a crit resistance could resist crit?
• The Radio is now properly hidden during vendor encounters on the World Map.
• Fixed an issue in the merchant screen where the “Modify Weapon/Armor” option could sometimes appear on items.
• Made a bunch of additional small UI tweaks that we’re sure the UI designers don’t appreciate us summarizing in this very vague patch note.
• Explosive barrels are now included in both the hostile targeting group and the object targeting group when in Targeting Mode, making it easier to target them on a controller.
• While playing with a controller, there is now a button mapping to quickly open the Map Screen so you can get a bird’s-eye view more quickly.

Art & Audio

• Flamethrowers will no longer lose their sound and visual effect when primary and secondary weapons are swap-toggled. Swap-toggle is a thing we just came up with we think.
• Skipping the cloning sequence dialogue in Ranger HQ no longer causes a sound effect loop.
• There was this weird thing going on where the more items a container had, the louder the sound effects were when you did things with those items. That was weird, so we fixed it. Sometimes weird is good, but this wasn’t one of those times.

Misc

• Taming a Glow Hopper in the Old Survivalist Bunker will no longer cause a crash. I guess you could say, that Glow Hopper is no longer a Show Stopper.
• We had a talk with the Provost and he’s now much more confident about where he wants to be and when he wants to be there. He’s still odd, but by intention.
• Fixed an issue when Irv remained in Downtown Colorado Springs even after being arrested during the Don’t You Be My Neighbor mission. No, that wasn’t another one of his clones roaming free. Or was it? (No, it wasn’t.)
• Fixed a softlock that could occur after an enemy was attacked with a bladed weapon two times in a row. Stabby stabby.
• Players are no longer able to block the elves from leaving the place where the elves are and they'll no longer be trapped in the cutscene. I guess you could say, elves have left the building.
• We resolved an issue for Microsoft Store players who could encounter a crash when a host tried to use the "Invite Friend" button in the Direct Connection lobby.