Happy Year of the Tiger, survivors!
We’re continuing our free 2022 updates with a celebration of the Lunar New Year. This includes new cosmetic buildings along with a new system, which allows you to change how your colony looks like in a flash! It’s not all tigers and fireworks, though, as we’re including quality-of-life improvements to colony combat, how people choose where they live and more.
Buildings with and without Lunar New Year pack enabled
The Lunar New Year content pack includes a banner stand to display your colony flag (also available as a non-themed version), a tiger flag symbol, a red Double Lantern, a mighty Scrap Tiger statue and a cute Waving Cat statue for you to build. Regular torches and lamps are replaced with Lunar-themed versions for the duration of the event. You might also spot some of the colonists wearing festive hats. And last but not least, the Fireworks Launcher allows you to light up the sky in red and gold to kick off the celebrations! You can unlock all the new decorative buildings in two parts by completing colony milestones for prestige. We’d very much like to see how your colonies are transformed, so maybe post a screenshot here?
Lunar decorations can be toggled on or off at any time from the main menu banner, or from Settings -> General. The event ends at the end of February, but you can restore the Lunar theme via the Settings menu after that date. Please note that you must enable or disable the content pack BEFORE loading a saved game or starting a new one.
New unit highlights in combat
In addition to the more cosmetic aspects of the game, we’ve added several quality-of-life improvements for colony combat. All units that are engaged in combat have color-coded outlines, so you can spot bandits running and rat beetles scurrying around much easier. Guard and specialist hitboxes have also been enlarged to help you select and order them around better. Colonists will now flee from combat by default to save themselves and will retaliate only as a last resort. They will no longer attempt to defeat a sandworm in hand-to-hand combat. Be sure to have guards and specialists around to deal with hostiles, as you’ll be relying on them more than before. Colony alarm happiness penalty has also been drastically reduced so you can call people to safety and increase guard aggression range without a major hit to morale.
Isolated working area
On more peaceful news, colonists will now attempt to automatically move close to their place of work if there’s capacity available, but will never kick current tenants out. When you load up a large colony for the first time, this process might take awhile. This aims to allow players to create specialized production areas further away from the main colony and speed up production.
Other notable changes include storage, which now dump out all resources marked as “blocked”. Previously this only prevented bringing in new items of that type. Incorrect processing cycles in scavenge buildings such as Scrapper and Lumber Yard have been fixed, and workers will now refine the collected resources inside the building before handing them out. Since this increases the total processing times, production output quantities have been slightly increased in several buildings. And as a small but significant change, both transformers’ area of effect has been increased.
Hope you’ll have an awesome Year of the Tiger. Post a screenshot of your Lunar Year themed colony on this thread to celebrate together and stay safe out there! And as a final teaser, the next update will have a new game mode to look forward to!
Fireworks over the colony