Dev Diary - Free Update #3

Greetings once again, survivors!

With the Lunar New Year celebrations passed, we’re back with a new and quite a hefty update. It includes the already teased new game mode “Scenarios” with two winter-themed experiences along with a ton of other improvements to logistics, statistics and so on. But wait, there’s more! In addition to this new twist on the familiar gameplay, we’re also bringing you Custom Game mode. It allows players to really tweak the experience how they want with dozens of new settings from a very laid-back experience to a pure horror show.

Scenarios allow you to dive into Surviving the Aftermath’s sandbox with new themes and twists on the basic formula, adding more replayability to the game. Some offer a more compact and narrative-driven experience with heavily modified rules while others throw a wrench in the works on how the long-form game plays out. This might mean a permanent weather effect or limiting the tools at your disposal, forcing you to overcome obstacles in new ways. In “Cold Rush” you start with a small colony suffering from a permanent winter storm with no other option than to find a way out. Explore and exploit your surroundings to guide the colonists away from the cold in a way previously unseen in the game. “Eternal Winter” is a more traditional sandbox experience with a never-ending winter storm along with custom rules. Can you survive in an environment where open field farming is no longer an option and the ever-present cold takes a constant toll on your colonists?

You’ve requested the ability to customize your playthrough further, and here it is. The new Custom Game adds dozens of settings you can flip around to tailor the experience to your liking. Disable catastrophes, increase the number of starting specialists and remove death by old age completely for a more chill game. Remove societies, halve food nutrition and disable childbirth to really ramp up the difficulty. You can also adjust map generation even further with more soil settings, amount of terrain features, forest coverage, amount of lakes and more. On PC it’s also possible to remove the population cap completely. Since these settings can drastically change the difficulty level, achievements will be disabled in custom game mode. There’s a lot to experiment with, so give it a go!

On the logistics front, you can now control how goods are distributed around the colony by controlling which storages request and receive various resources. These “storage requests” allow players to move and maintain specific amounts of resources between storages to create independent production areas or distribute food more evenly around the colony map. You can, for example, add a storage request for meals at the food storage next to a metal production site, so your workers don’t need to walk all the way to the colony center to eat. This, with workers living close to their job from the previous update, allows you to spread around the map more efficiently. Carriers will also divide big tasks between more people, so you should see large stacks of resources move faster - provided you have idle colonists available.

The map seed for your generated game world is now visible and customizable. This allows you to save interesting maps to be reused on subsequent playthroughs or shared with the community. Your current map seed is visible in the lower right corner in the pause menu. The first set of numbers refers to the various map parameters while the second set shows your pregame selections in numerical fashion.

In other improvements, the statistics overview page has been completely overhauled. Instead of the massive spreadsheet of already known info, it has several sections with high-level info with more detailed data in the right column. All types of wind turbines are now less effective when placed next to trees to make solar panels a bit more competitive in your colony’s energy production and add a layer of planning required for your wind parks. Specialists will now move and spend their Action Points immediately at the beginning of a new day, if you’ve set a destination for them. This was done to make the multi-turn movement feature clearer when you order them to return to the colony, for example. The full list of balance changes and improvements can be found in the patch notes post, as usual.

And here we are! The new game modes, logistics upgrades and other additions should provide a lot of replayability for Surviving the Aftermath, so we sincerely hope you’ll enjoy them! We’d love to hear in comments what you think of the new scenarios, and what you’d want to see next.

Stay safe, survivors, and play games!

Change notes - “Update #3”
General

• New game modes have been added to the game.
• When starting a new game, you will now be asked to choose from either the original New Game, creating a Custom game or starting a Scenario.
• Creating a Custom game allows you to change various different settings in your game.
• The older pregame settings are still present, as are a lot of new settings such as changing the sizes of deposits, the amount of features in the colony terrain and altering the birth rate in the colony.
• Please note that some settings will not be present on all platforms due to performance limitations.
• Playing the game in a custom mode will disable the ability to unlock any achievements. They can still be unlocked normally by playing the original version of the game.
• We have also added two new Scenarios to the game.
• These scenarios will challenge your skills in surviving.
• The Cold Rush scenario will give you a challenge unlike before where you must find a way to escape the cold within the time given to you!
• The Eternal Winter scenario will not restrict the amount of time you have however as implied by the name, the colony is under constant winter! Can you survive and be able to finish the main quest?
• Note: Due to technical limitations these scenarios will not be available on the Switch. We are working on bringing them to the Switch as well in a future update if possible.
• The ability to select the Map Seed has also been added to the pregame settings for the Normal Game.
• Using a specific Map Seed will allow you to have the exact same colony, world map and pregame settings as in a previous game.
• The Map Seed can be seen in the bottom right corner when the Pause Menu is accessed in game.
• On the PC the seed can also be copied to clipboard by clicking on the button next to it.
• The Map Seed is only visible in new games started after the game has been updated.
• Once you have the Map Seed you wish to apply in your next game, you can edit this in the Summary page of the Pregame Selections when starting the new game.
• The Statistics Menu’s Overview page has been redone.
• We’ve clarified the Overview page of the menu and added in new information to be visible.
• Each section will show more detailed information when hovered over.
• Note that the information shown here will not count what happened in the save before the game was updated.
• For example Techs unlocked will only show what techs you have researched after updating and continuing with your save.
• Added an option to storage buildings that allows you to select a resource that the colonists will bring to that specific storage building.
• You can select this resource from each storage building by selecting the building first and then selecting the slot under the Request resources section.
• After selecting a resource you will be able to select the amount of that resource you want carriers to bring to this storage building.
• This change also added the option to select how many resources you wish buildings such as the Burner to hold in them.

Gameplay

• Specialists on the World Map that have queued movement will now move automatically when their APs are filled.
• Previously they would move only right before their APs would be filled again, causing confusion if they are actually using the queued movement.
• Now if there is a target set for them, the Specialists will immediately move or start action once the APs are filled.
• Wind Turbines are now affected by trees that are close by.
• All Wind Turbines will now show a radius around them when being placed and when selected in the colony.
• All trees within this area will have an effect on the efficiency of the turbine.
• Note that the efficiency of the turbine can change if trees grow or are cut down around it.
• Changed how the carriers can carry resources to construction zones.
• Previously only one colonist could carry a specific type of resource, causing construction zones to wait for resources longer.
• Now multiple carriers can bring the same resource to the construction zone which should allow construction to be faster.
• Snow on the terrain and ground is now shown immediately when saves are loaded instead of requiring the game to be unpaused first.
• Fixed an issue that would cause some sectors to block outposts from being built without any visible reason.
• Children should no longer visually all try to go to the same one school.
• The bug would cause all children to visually try and be at the same school despite being in different schools’ occupants lists.
• Now they should all go to their corresponding schools.
• Colonists should now run inside their homes if they are fleeing instead of running in front of them.
• Fixed an issue that would prevent saving the game after an error happened with broken Solar Panels.
• The game should no longer spawn any events if the Game Over screen has been shown.
• Colonists should no longer run inside resource boxes for a moment before they pick the box up.
• Added a failsafe to the game that prevents quest locations from spawning into unreachable places in the World Map.
• Fixed an issue with the indicator arrows that would cause them to point wrong when playing with specific resolutions.
• Fixed an issue that would cause the game to focus on the notifications instead of rotating the building when the corresponding button was pressed on the controller.
• The Escape button will now cancel building placement even after moving the camera with the mouse while in placement mode.
• Upgrading the campsite should no longer reset the allowed resources that were selected in the previous version of it.
• Fixed an issue that would cause a Specialist to be stuck in the colony until commanded after saving and loading the game.
• Construction zones that have been canceled will now also show a floater similarly to buildings that are being demolished.
• If colonists have nothing to do they should now idle close to their home or workplace instead of close to the Campsite.
• This should now allow your colonists to be in proximity to their workplace and be able to start work faster when they are able to.
• Fixed an issue that would cause several tutorials to show at one time or cause them to become stuck.
• The Building Health Overlay will now show the Repair floaters on top of damaged buildings.
• A limit to how many buildings and how many tiles of road can be built has been added to the game on the Switch.
• This was put in place to ensure the game can still function without issues even after progressing further in the game.

Graphics

• Added new icons for Insect and Plant seeds to the game.
• These should now be easy to differentiate from the actual resource itself, especially when trading with societies.
• Updated the Pregame selection header panel and some button icons.
• Floaters should no longer appear grainy or pale in the game.
• This issue was most visible when playing on the Switch.
• Crops growing on open fields should no longer be invisible.
• This issue was most visible when playing on the Switch.
• Building decals should now always be shown despite having low graphics settings.
• Trees should no longer flicker during catastrophes.
• This behavior was visible especially when playing on consoles.
• Updated images for a few events in the game.

Balance Adjustments

• Switch only: The speed of gathering knowledge for the main quest has been increased by 50%. This adjustment was done to compensate for the smaller World Map that is generated on the Switch due to technical limitations.
• The skills of each starting Specialists have been adjusted to ensure that they all have the best values in their respective skill based on their archetype.
• When a building is demolished, you will now gain back 75% of the construction costs.