March's player feedback update

Let me start off by thanking you for all the feedback that followed the release of chapters 10 & 11! With different people taking vastly different approaches to the same content, it was somewhat of a challenge to define the rough edges. But nothing is as helpful as in-depth thought-sharing of your experience to determine what to improve upon! So let’s get to the changes, I hope you’ll enjoy them!

Player feedback balance adjustments

• Jobs that deal damage on completion (seals, magma, steel) now reduce your active food cooldowns by 10% of your maximum cooldown per completion as well. Providing an additional strategic element to tackle them through food variety. This aims to reduce a commonly reported frustration of "I get worse as I get faster" if properly utilized, without invalidating their place in the balance
• Chapter 8: Catch seal damage per completion was increased by 10%, to keep the initial pressure similar to how it was before, now that the cooldown reduction effect is added. It remains a clear buff for chapters 9+, but is initially fairly minor during chapter 8 (it's never a nerf either)
• Chapter 8: Catch seal now has additional safety logic, causing it to look a little ahead (one food cooldown) to prevent accidental automated deaths to the walrus fight. This should make it require less specific automation setups to comfortably pass at higher skill numbers
• Chapter 10: Mushroom school damage was increased by 12.5%, while required time/experience per completion was increased by 25%. Effectively making it 10% easier (damage per second), but in a way that benefits later stages of the chapter more than earlier stages
• Chapter 10: Added additional flavor text to the first dog exploration, to hint that you might want to explore that part even if you've already obtained the iron stick in chapter 3
• Chapter 11: Reduced the base difficulty of dodge by 20%, and the damage of trip by 12.5%. Aiming to soften the first phase for builds that are very low on agility (one of which is fairly commonly used)
• Chapter 11: The titanstone hut can no longer be finished after returning to the fight
• Added a new game plus perk that matches the fourth funnel

Other changes

• The inventory total food value tooltip now also displays uncooked food (after unlocking cooking for the first time)
• Reworked how food cooldowns internally behave when eating within the dynamic tick-range of 1-100ms, slightly increasing millisecond accuracy behind the scenes and aiming to tackle a rare situation where combat safety calculation could false-positive due to hardware delays or offline progress
• Chapter 10: Food-trade resource automation no longer continues to run food-jobs until it has enough food of that type to trade, but instead only triggers this automation for the very last food-job if total food is insufficient to trade. This way it should no longer interfere with manual min-maxing, while automation still uses the internal functionality
• Chapter 10: Food-trade no longer uses partial food-value food types during trades when it doesn't have enough of those to complete, to prevent wastage through previously getting combined with 1:1 food value trades
• Explorations that deal damage on completion now consume an additional food to reach maximum health, if health decay after completion would otherwise become deadly within one food cooldown. This mostly affects rare situations with low maximum health
• Action tooltips now update instantly when their automation unlock requirement is reduced by completing another action, instead of being somewhat delayed until something else triggered a tooltip update
• Chapter 11: The fourth funnel effect now updates affected tooltips more consistently/faster on completion
• Added additional logic to tackle the chapter 11 health bar element not visually updating during some first completions
• Fixed a bug that could cause low-priority jobs not to trigger, when no manual actions were present in chapter 5. Causing the game to require manual interaction when it shouldn't
• Fixed a bug that could cause combat-stalling logic to overwrite empty-food automation, if the food job was on a lower priority than other stalling options
• Fixed a bug that could cause automated jobs with additional requirements to get stuck in a loop (visual freeze) that required manual intervention, if job automations were prioritized in specific orders
• Fixed some story elements firing their "done this before" story alteration on first completions, after an earlier update changed how that was tracked internally
• Fixed a bug that caused combat-decay increases on completion of explorations (funnels, ch11) to also apply to the very last tick prior to completion, causing them to deal a fractionally higher amount of damage than intended (usually 0.03~3ms of extra combat decay) and in very rare occasions caused the combat safeties to fail
• Similar to the bug-fix above, constructions now consume their in-tick time prior to triggering a completion as well. In this case the same bug was arguably (fractionally) working in your favor for huts
• Fixed a bug in the chapter-completion backup logic for chapters 6, 7 and 8 that caused it to backup too early, causing it to miss one completion in the data. Previously affected backups should also be detected and work again with this update

What's next?

The following update(s) will focus on UI/UX player feedback, as well as quality of life additions. This was originally the intent right after the content update, but there was quite a significant amount of feedback regarding the balance of the new chapters, so I decided to adapt to that first. This update was a slight detour, but I hope it improves your experience throughout the existing content!