Update Details (Alpha 45) - Hunter Fortresses, Indoor Combat, and a LOT more!

Hi all, hope everyone is doing great! This new update is largely focused on bringing greater depth to the hunters and their behavior in the world. As well as expanding on later-game activities and an assortment of other features and fixes.

Hunter Fortresses:

In the later-game hunters will now start constructing giant fortress bases. These monster bases are multiple stories high and heavily defended. They are also prime for looting if you can get inside.

You can see some raw video footage of a lone-wolf fortress raid here:
https://youtu.be/oOX01-P278g
The hunters will eventually start armor-plating the base to secure it, so players will have to use greater force to gain entry.

New Indoor AI System:

Hunters now have an entirely new AI system allowing them to operate and function indoors. This has been a goal since the hunters were first introduced, and by far the most challenging technical aspect of this update.

Typically games use pre-baked navigation meshes to implement pathing for AI controlled NPC’s. This usually requires a predetermined/fixed map layout, and be generated in advance due to costly performance.

Due to the free-form modular building system in the game (where buildings can constantly change shape and grow/shrink over time), using a traditional nav-mesh approach seemed problematic (and possibly why I’ve never seen indoor AI-pathing within dynamic modular structures in an open-world base-building game).

I instead built a custom indoor pathing system, designed to allow hunters to calculate paths at run-time through dynamically-built modular structures. I’ve done a lot of bench-marking and the system has a very low performance impact. It’s still in a prototype phase, so please report any issues.

The implications of this new system (and a key motivation for the approach) is to open the possibility of hunters entering player bases during attacks, which would offer some interesting depth and tactical gameplay when defending your base. This would be something to explore in a future update however.

Hunters now go fishing:

Hunters will now venture away from their camps to fish the lakes on the map. This is actually not just a visual facade. They go through the exact same process that players must; from casting, waiting for bites, striking and reeling in.

They won’t always choose the same fishing spots and sometimes travel large distances to reach water. This can introduce some unexpected, emergent hunters encounters as they travel around the map.

Killing a hunter after he’s caught a fish will mean you can steal his catch and take it home for your own dinner.

Hunters cooking food:

You will now notice hunters sitting by their campfire to rest and cook food.

Kill the hunter and you can steal his dinner for yourself.

New system for hunter base placement:

Due to the large size of the fortresses, the old system for choosing locations for bases was not suitable. The entrances wouldn’t align correctly with the ground, trees would obstruct the structure, terrain would poke through the ground floor, and exploitable nearby ledges would compromise the base security.

There is now new system in place to handle this. There are no preset base locations (and never have been). This is all decided during gameplay and means there will almost never be two bases on separate profiles in the exact same location.

Hunter base operations:

Hunters now have a new system to using the various utilities in their base. Prior to this update, loot would just be spawned in various base items.

• The woodburner gets topped up with fuel and lit.
• Fat is added to the woodburner and rendered down.
• Ores are added to the refinery and refined (drawing power from the main base).
• Power generators are topped up with fuel and set to run when low on power (also put into overdrive if the power-draw is high).
• Meats are cooked on the woodburner.
• Perishable food items are stored in the fridge (and the fridge turned on when food is inside).
• Base lights are switched on/off depending on the time of day.
• Cooked meals can often be found in the oven (no pans however).

AI target switching:

Previously AI (animals and hunters) would only switch targets if they took damage from another player while in combat. This led to some odd moments of AI not responding to player’s right in front of them.

There is now new logic to handle switching targets based on the current scenario. I think this will make a big difference to combat in co-op.

Breaching Charge:

To combat the armor plating of the new fortress bases, players can now craft a Breaching Charge at the workbench to destroy doors during raids.

Rogue Transceiver:

The “Rogue Transceiver” is a new loot item that can be found in hunter base loot chests.

They are single-use items and, when used, will place a beacon on a rogue camp somewhere in the world.

In co-op, all team-mates will also see this beacon. Only one beacon can be placed at a time and will last for 15 minutes (real-world time). If all rogues are killed at that camp by the pursuing team, then the beacon will end and another one can be activated.

New hunter aiming and combat:

There has been a lot of fine tweaking of the hunter combat. Previously their accuracy did not decrease with distance, leading to some frustrating long range shots for the player.

They are now less accurate (which diminishes further with distance), however their movement is more precise and focused. With this and the new target-switching, I hope that this will balance out into no difficulty increase, but you’ll have to let me know your thoughts.

Hunter bases will spawn further out from player bases:

I hadn’t updated this since several map expansions ago, so this should give players a bit more breathing room.

Hunter bases will spawn further out from other hunter bases:

This should give players avenues to sneak past enemy bases, and avoid extreme hot-zones.

Defensive walls handling:

Hunters would previously get stuck if encountering a wide perimeter wall around a player base. I’ve now added handling for this, so that they’ll either try to move around or blow a hole in the wall with force!

Hunters start moving into the world earlier:

Regular hunters will now start moving into the world 2 days after a BCU is placed (previously 3).

Rogues also start moving in much earlier, as they were previously mostly a later game addition.

Hunters drop less food items and more munitions:

Previously hunters would drop a lot of food items. Typically players are able to keep themselves fed through hunting, fishing and farming. Now they instead drop more casings and gunpowder, so players can keep up with the demand for ammo.

Hunter squad-mates will not aggro if their teammate engages in combat far from their base:

This means if you kill a hunter who is fishing (and they are some distance from their base), it will not aggro the whole squad and remain as a stealth kill.

Solar panels power production reduced during storms:

This hopefully creates a better balance between solar and wind power.

Time to unlock crates has been reduced:

Down to 2.5 seconds per unlock.

Time to upgrade buildables to armor-plated has been reduced:

Reduced from 5 seconds to 3.

Reduced predator count in certain hot-zones:

I ran some heatmaps on predator roaming locations and have dialed back a couple of the zones.

Many more item types added to the hunter loot drops:

More than 10 new items added to potentially spawn in hunter loot drops.

Armor plated door:

The wooden door can now be upgraded to armor-plated. The will significantly increase it’s hit-points and make repairs cheaper after attacks.

Hunters will also upgrade their entrance doors to armor-plated (for fortresses only).

Foundation stair railings:

Requested many times by players. Now available under the “railings” craft options, which will snap onto foundation stairs.

Half wall (curved):

Players can now craft curved wall halfs. Wooden variants can be upgraded to armor-plated, and there is also a glass variant option.

I’ll continue to expand on the library of building pieces in future updates.

Toolbelt and clothing item-order restored when picking up death crate:

Players usually have a specific preference for how they position their toolbelt items. It’s always been frustrating to have to manually re-position these items (and re-add clothing items) after picking up your death crate.

Now when ”taking all” on a player’s dropped kit, all toolbelt and clothing items will be restored to the positions they were in when the kit was dropped.

Tool degradation:

The axe and pickaxe will now slowly take damage when used against base items (doors), indicated by the small health-bar on the inventory item.

This is to give greater emphasis on other means of breaking into bases, and decrease the incentive for chopping at doors for long periods of time (especially for fortresses that have several safe-rooms). They can still serve this purpose, but you might want to carry some spares.

They currently won’t take damage while logging and mining, although that may follow shortly.

Hunter dropped kit hud icons:

Many players reported difficulties finding hunter dropped kits after a battle, due to dense foliage. They will now show a faint hud beacon, which should remove this frustration.

New berry plant:

Finally the berry plant has its own distinguishable model. Previously it was confusingly similar to the fiber plants.

Base structure collision with ragdolls?

Previously when a player, hunter or animal was killed while in a base, they would clip through the base structure and fall out. This was very immersion-breaking and is now fixed! I think this makes indoor combat much more satisfying to see bodies slump into corners, or fly-over railings, etc.

Reduction of max health/stamina on death reduced:

Players will now lose less max health and stamina when they die. The new loss is 2/4/6 across easy/normal/hardcore respectively.

Older save-game compatibility?

Older save games will work fine, however the hunters will be reset in the world, meaning they'll need to build-up from scratch.

New Supported Languages:

• Russian
• Turkish
• Dutch

Logs and sticks:

Crafted sticks now yield two sticks per log.

Other notable changes:

• Fixed selected tab not highlighting when accessing the fridge.
• Fixed bug where low-grade rabbit and chicken meat wouldn’t burn.
• Fixed bug where you could accidentally use an inventory item at the end of the butcher animation.
• Added contextual hot-key hint to the use action on item dropdown menus.
• Gameplay now fades to black when exiting the game.
• Now only possible to lose a max of one clothing item when dying (in normal and hardcore).
• Only the bandage issued for free gets destroyed on death (previously a whole stack could get flagged as free).
• Fixed glitchy AI movement (both hunters and animals) through water to now stay level with water surface (while roaming).
• Added damage skins for the bed.
• Added more performant LOD culling for fibers and pickable plants in the world (previously they were being rendered even if very far away).
• New wind animation for medicinal plants.
• Removed glitch where players could deal damage by jumping on another player’s head (some players may miss this… :) ).
• Hunters now no longer use grenades if they’re attacking players who are taking cover in their own base.
• Hunters will now react to grenades exploding new them at a greater range.
• Solar panels and wind turbines can now be placed on glass roofs.
• Many new (lower-poly) LOD models used for base items when viewing at range.
• Medicinal fluid stack size increased to 100.
• Fixed bug where loading a SP save game would load the player as the gender they were when the game was saved (rather than what they have selected in the character menu).
• Fixed glitchy splashing when entering/exiting water while crouched.
• Removed camera bob when rising or lowering in water.
• Fixed exploit of producing mass quantities of biofuel from the woodburner (thanks to a community member for spotting this one).
• Fixed bug with broken leg and bleeding icon occasionally not showing after loading a save.

Thanks for your patience while I worked through this one. I feel the new hunter behavior systems lay a good foundation for some interesting future updates. Also thanks to everyone that helped test the build on the experimental branch, it was a huge help.

Please let me know if you experience any issues with the update.

Hope you have a great weekend,
ColdGames

You can follow the official Twitter @playSubsistence and Facebook page.

Discord invite: https://discord.gg/zyy4jQs

Translation Continued Support Credits

Russian (FRAME)
Turkish (Çağla GURBET, Dogukan Yilmaz)
Dutch (Patrick Oostindjer, Damster_NL)
Spanish (David Lascasas)
Portuguese BR (Thiago Schumacke)
German (Sebastian Künzel, Jazz Jay)
French (Anthony Charrault)
Hungarian (Erb Ármin(Reaper))
Norwegian (Christer Djuvik)
* Please let me know if I missed anyone.