In a couple of days I plan to increase the price of the game slightly -- just a heads-up in case anyone wanted to pick the game up at the current price.
Here's the changelog for update 5 (Feb 22, 2019):
Zones:
- Added zones, a way to organize your base as you expand underground. Zones can be placed by clicking the "Zones" button on the HUD, and click-dragging to draw out the limits of a zone. There is no limit to how big a zone can be or what shape it can be.
- Dwarves that have been assigned to a zone will only do jobs within that zone, with a few exceptions. Dwarves can still do the following jobs even if it's not within their assigned zone:
- - Mining
- - Hauling (this includes hauling items to stockpiles, and hauling construction materials to building sites).
- - Idling (when dwarves are idling, they pick a random nearby spot; this can cause them to wander outside of their zones).
- By default dwarves are not assigned to any zone, meaning they can do jobs anywhere. To assign a dwarf to a zone, you can either open the Jobs panel and use the zone button, or select one or more dwarves and use the "Set Zone" action.
Gameplay:
- Armor should now work properly. Soldiers will automatically equip the best available armor (iron -> frostiron -> flamesteel).
- Added two new mine-able ores that will show up in new games: Frostiron and Flamesteel.
- When dug, dirt blocks will drop dirt, which can be used to create dirt blocks in Structures mode. Farms can be placed on top of both dirt and living greenwood.
- Magma forge should work a bit better now. Certain armors/weapons can only be smithed at a magma forge.
- Added new "Extract Minerals" action on ore blocks. Miners will carefully extract minerals from the block. This action takes much longer than digging, but minerals can be extracted many times before the block runs out of ore.
- Temperature system has been simplified and should hopefully be a bit easier to use. Placing objects like a fireplace will increase the temperature of nearby tiles within a 7-tile radius, regardless of walls. Blue flames will lower the temperature. Placing multiple objects will increment/decrement the temperature further.
- Temperature of underground areas does not change as much with the seasons. The closer you are to the surface, the more seasonal temperature will have an impact.
- Brew barrels should now work as expected. To use a brew barrel, you'll need some raw mushrooms and a cook -- the cook will place mushrooms in the barrel, after which it will start to ferment on its own. Fermenting currently takes about a day. You can obtain additional types of brews by:
- - Placing a brew barrel in a cold area.
- - Placing a brew barrel on top of some iron ore.
- Aside from trading, the brews don't have much use yet.
- All dwarves can level up and earn XP from doing non-generic jobs. For example: farmers will earn XP from tending crops, but not from hauling stuff to stockpiles.
- Having a Wizard is now a requirement for linking portals. Just one wizard is enough.
- The game will now continue running in the background when alt-tabbing out, or when focus is on another window.
Balance:
- Added new mood modifier: "Too many roommates". Dwarves will get this mood modifier if they slept close to lots of other beds (limit is 4 beds). The intention here is to provide some incentive to build smaller separate rooms for sleeping, instead of one massive sleeping hall. If it feels too punishing/tedious, this number might be tweaked a bit.
- Reduced faith orb generation rate.
- Reduced plant growth rate -- crops now take longer to grow without a farmer. Farmers still increase plant growth by the same amount when working in fields.
UI:
- Added typeable item limits to the bills panel. In addition to using the +/- buttons, you can now click on the limit field and type in the limit directly.
- The stockpile list on the left-hand side of the HUD is now grouped into categories, and each category is expandable/collapsible.
- XP bars no longer show up over dwarves' heads. VFX for earning XP are still present.
- Increased scroll speed of UI lists.
Bugfixes:
- Scrolling the mouse scroll wheel should no longer zoom the camera if your mouse is over a UI element.
- Fixed routing bug related to lava -- the shortest path to a goal was sometimes through lava, but dwarves cannot walk through lava ordinarily, so they would get stuck next to lava tiles, wanting to get through but unable to muster up the courage to cross.
- Fixed pathfinding issue where dwarves would take unnecessarily long paths when a shorter path was available. Note: There are still issues here related to portals (dwarves always try to go in a straight line and ignore portals unless they're in the way) and long paths (dwarves will ignore jobs if they're too far away); I hope to fix these soon.
- Fixed bug related to tables -- dwarves would sometimes get stuck in a loop after picking up food and trying to find a nearby table.
- Saplings should now grow as expected after divine favor from god of harvest.
- Fixed issue where milestones for digging were not registering correctly.
- Priests should no longer stack on the same altar. Only one priest can use an altar at a time.
- Fixed bug where soldiers would not equip weapons other than iron swords.