Ver 1.70: Player Portraits, Post-Game News Show & More

Version 1.70 is out — a major update bundling everything we have been working on since the last release.

The headline feature is auto-generated player portraits: players who used to be silhouettes now get a face, wearing their team's cap and uniform. A new Uniform Editor in the management screen lets you decide how they look. The update also brings a post-game news show, a reworked Quick Scout, autosave, expanded records including batter-vs-pitcher career matchups, a pitching balance pass covering ERA and starter consistency, stronger data protection for Workshop mods, and a batch of reported bug fixes.

Portraits for every player — meet your team face to face

• Faces, hairstyles and builds are assembled from parts, and every player is drawn wearing their team's cap and uniform. Get traded, and the outfit changes too
• Portraits appear wherever players do: the player directory, player details, roster screens and more
• Female players get faces as well
• As before, images you set yourself always take priority, and images bundled with mods are used as-is
• Not a fan of the generated look? Turn off "Generate player portraits" in Settings. Turning it off never removes images: your own and mod images remain, and everyone else returns to the default picture

Team uniform editor — the look belongs to the club

• The management screen gains a Uniform Editor: cap color, uniform style and tint, line color and the cap emblem, all with a live preview
• Changes apply immediately to every generated portrait on your team, and you can change them any time, even mid-season
• Photos you set yourself are never affected
• The CSV editor can edit uniform settings for every team — handy for mod makers too

Post-game news show — relive the game on air

• After your team's games, an anchor recaps the action in a TV-style news show
• Walk-offs, slugfests, pitchers' duels, snapping a losing streak — the show adapts to how the game went
• It quotes the scoring plays as it goes, so you can follow the flow even for games you skipped
• League news now shares the same broadcast tone — and if your roster runs thin, the news will quietly let you know
• You can turn the show off in Settings if it is not your thing

Quick Scout tuned up

• The screen where you tell a scout your wishes and meet candidates has been adjusted
• You can now state a gender preference, and the pool of female names has grown
• Players from Korea, Taiwan and the Netherlands now get names that fit their homeland (national-team players included)

Autosave and save management

• The game now autosaves to a dedicated AUTO slot when you return to the title screen or quit. Your 20 manual slots stay untouched
• "Continue" on the title screen now picks the newest data, autosave included
• Added a delete button to the save/load screen

Richer records and stats

• Batter-vs-pitcher career matchups are now tracked. The batter card during games shows career at-bats, hits, homers and average against the current pitcher
• Players traded mid-season now show their stats split by team, the same way official pro records do
• Box scores now show batting order, positions and how substitutes entered (pinch hitter, pinch runner and so on)
• Fixed the mismatch between "pro year N" and "N years with the club" and unified year displays; foreign players' careers now cut off correctly before their arrival
• Pitchers can now have a three-quarter delivery (appears on newly generated players)

Pitching balance pass

• Fixed qualified pitchers' ERAs being too good across the board. No more walls of sub-1.00 ERAs — league leaders now land at realistic pro levels
• Starters now show day-to-day form. Even aces get shelled sometimes, and a starter who gets caught early comes out early. Blowup starts now happen about as often as in the real game
• Fixed relievers sneaking into AI teams' starting rotations
• Bullpen depth checks now count pitchers who can actually take the mound, excluding the injured
• Home-run rates were recalibrated so league totals stay at realistic levels

Baseball rules audit

• We audited rule-breaking behavior across the sim and fixed 16 issues
• Dropped third strikes, tag-ups, balks, interference and other fine-grained situations now resolve correctly

Data protection with Workshop mods

• Mod players and teams that collide with your data by ID now coexist without breaking either side
• Colliding mods load as separate entries automatically — or choose "Overwrite" to use them as replacements for the same players
• Custom player images can no longer be hijacked by mods, and players no longer get silently swapped for someone else — identity protection is stronger across the board

Other fixes

• Fixed Japanese text placing punctuation at the start of a line
• The roster tab now shows a red warning when your active roster falls below the minimums (relievers and catchers count only players fit to play)
• With auto-roster options ON, shortfalls are now filled automatically (with everything OFF, the game still never touches your roster)
• Pre-game screens for preseason and international games now reference that competition's stats
• Player names on the national-team screen can now be clicked to open their details
• Fixed pitcher game counts appearing doubled in player directory bios
• Fixed record inconsistencies found in play testing, such as the WAR column in data export

We will keep working through your reports and building the game out. Thank you, as always, for the reports and suggestions.