It is time once more for the monthly update to Clockwork Empires! We are now at v32, or as we like to call it, Midnight Defense at Skullswamp Arsenal.

This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player via Steam!

We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress report! … unfortunately our web guy is lost somewhere in Vegas so the latest version isn’t online yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as we find him. (Once it’s up it will provide a look into the high-level status of the project in excruciating detail. There are also pictures of cute animals.) Update: We found him! It’s all working now!

(Don’t own the game yet? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)

MacOS and Linux users: MacOS and Linux compatible versions of the game will be released before the end of October; we shall inform you post-haste when they are available via Steam!

Patch Notes:

Clockwork Empires v32 update: “Midnight Defence of Skullswamp Arsenal”

Major Gameplay Changes

Added a new building module placement system (and re-enabled renovation)

Added player control over which workcrew works in a workshop

Stew can be cooked without having to intently watch the boiling pot!

Added an ammunition system (and landmines!)

Improved combat AI

That’s just a taste, we fully expect through playing the game you’ll discover a lot of little things that make playing the game easier (and at the same time, perhaps, rather more challenging as well).

Characters

FIXED: buried corpses will no longer upset people

FIXED: consume_food hooked up properly

FIXED: colonists will no longer have conversations with cultist murderers

Made upsetting things in general slightly more maddening

spruced up death descriptions

FIXED: people fleeing from dead murderers

hunting requires bullets; hunters will acquire & use bullets; civilians will drop bullets when not hunting

bullet amount now displayed in civilian text paragraph

cleaned up glitches on pickup and drop ammo animations

FIXED food memories weren’t working correctly

balance: made alarm range almost exactly flee range (so you don’t get people running from fishpeople without raising alarm)

balance: a first friend is easy to make, every subsequent friends requires double the positive interactions for friendship

items held by characters are dropped when they die

FIXED carried bodies are dropped when people are killed

characters create alarm waypoint via “Raise Alarm” job when a “hostile_entity” is nearby. There’s only ever one alarm beacon per hostile_entity ever.

made “Eat Food” more important to hungry people (by a lot)

Military/Combat

Conscription button now says “conscript unit” or “retire unit” and shows appropriate image depending on context.

assembling Gabions no longer requires a shovel (so soldiers will not drop their weapons to assemble gabions)

balance: Assembling Gabions will never be prioritized over fighting

Soldiers will now run to pick up their weapon in all cases

“Military Training” will encourage soldiers to value fighting more

Gabions and crops now have hitpoints

FIXED: ai_damage was double inherited, leading to all kinds of problems (notably, doubled damage in combat)

added an ammunition system ammo crates hold 100 bullets, remaining bullets displayed in tooltip characters can hold up to 20 bullets, bullets held displayed in info panel bullets are needed to fire guns soldiers without bullets are more likely to flee civilians will not automatically collect bullets added alerts for not having bullets

FIXED: corpses can no longer set off landmines

“assemble gabion” job will choose closest logs

some soldier jobs now better modified by health/bullets/morale/civilization proximity

soldiers slightly more into pulling bullets from bullet crates that have already been opened

bullets now drop off dead people if said people have any bullets

FIXED: crate of ammunition was tagged as “pistol” for some reason

landmines now trigger properly on hostile entities

landmines will detonate if enemy is in adjacent tiles

balance: shrapnel does very little damage to objects

created “respond to alarm” job that summons soldiers toward “alarm waypoint”

added tooltip to gabion

health is now a factor in whether soldiers choose to fight or flee

made soldiers less likely to attack things on their own (to avoid the ‘one guy hunting down fishpeople across the whole map’ thing)

made soldiers weighted more to fighting near civilization (see above)

added melee attack jobs for soldiers

overhauled counterattacking (including for civilians)

overhauled weighting of most combat jobs (flee vs. shoot vs. melee vs. counterattack)

added Jezail rifle

made starting military supplies random

FIXED combat jobs not interrupting “Respond to Alarm” properly

FIXED landmine scriptErrors

rebalanced combat job utility values

dead things now don’t take damage

Buildings/Agriculture/Economy

workcrews can be assigned to workshops manually

some jobs now only require being initiated by a worker (kitchen jobs in particular; so stew doesn’t require someone intently staring at it to cook)

FIXED: coconut curry now properly requires chillies

FIXED: can no longer cook fishperson steak out of fishperson steak; requires raw fishperson meat.

balance: sugar can now be eaten raw

FIXED: several variations on crop errors when attempting to harvest spoiled/corrupted crops

FIXED: animals are no longer attracted to human civilization

FIXED: chance to plant evil crops was out of whack with intended

Farming job utilities more or less equalized

Misc. chair/table improvements

Beds now have restfulness bonus (applied every 3 seconds while sleeping); in short, better bed = less sleep needed.

FIXED: cooking and recooking longpork tag error

added ability to flatten terrain & flatten terrain job

added Iron Charcoal Kiln / Iron Ceramics Kiln

added Brick Charcoal Kiln / Brick Ceramics Kiln

added Stone Smelting Crucible

added Stone Charcoal Kiln / Stone Ceramics Kiln

added gibs to gabions

added pfx and sfx for destroying crops, gabions

balance: change some crop growth times

removed extra “raw_food” tag on wheat flour

changed industrial_kiln to charcoal_kiln

FIXED: spoiled crops tooltip now says crops are spoiled

added “Make Landmine” job to arsenal

various foliage textures cleaned up

added low-tech brewing vat (w/ unique animations)

gunpowder production moved to Arsenal from Chemist

Terrain Flattening implemented

new module placement prototype implemented (new workflow for placing blueprints then modules; can filter modules by categories)

some decor content reactivated (now that we have filters)

you can place windows on buildings!

FIXED: window model alignment

FIXED: various decor alignment

Cults

FIXED: cult_power variable typo meant cults were powerless

FIXED: eldritch transformation cannot be interrupted

Cultists can build stone OR wood shrines

shrinebuilding & transformation gives notification

people will run away from murderers

shrines are now randomly rotated

balance: cultist murderers get automatic Frontier Justice

balance: cultist murder requires madness

balance: cultist murder requires having built a shrine

balance: shrine building requires madness

balance: shrine building reduces shrine counter (so we don’t all just build shrines all the time)

balance: death of a cultist will reduce cult_power (Frontier Justice!)

balance: reduced madness requirement for some cultist acts

a log ticker entry is now created when a cultist murder begins murdering

cultists have to go to a shrine, pray, and summon a dagger before performing murder (it’s now a two stage process)

cultists will now try to use a dagger to murder (rather than an axe)

balance: cultist murder requires more murder points

balance: eldritch transformation will drain cult power

shrines now for real actually get rotated randomly! (seriously!)

improved Eldritch Transformation effects

“Eldritch Transformation” may no longer interrupt itself

Animals

Giant Beetles are now “armoured”.

balance: reduced Giant Beetle hitpoints

added more animals to biomes (as in, a greater number of the existing animal types now spawn)

FIXED animals no longer double-inherit ai_damage (now effectively have 2x hitpoints from before)

certain herd herbivores will rampage if attacked (aurochs, giant beetle)

large animals will slowly regen health

player can give orders to hunt particular animals & this will display icon

FIXED: butchering animals and fishpeople can be ordered by click & drag

added rampage and herd rampage ability to certain herd animals (aurochs, giant beetle)

herbivores will graze again

adjusted herbivore wandering

Fishpeople

Cleaned up Fishpeople butchering/eating humans

FIXED: butchering fishpeople at all

Fishpeople get mad when their people are killed (unless they’re raiders, which are fair game)

Fishpeople can destroy gabions

Alerts generated when fishpeople destroy crops or gabions

Reduced absurdly high search range for the Fishpeople’s “Butcher Human Corpse” and “Eat Human Flesh”

Made it slightly more likely for fishpeople to get butchered, especially by morbid colonists

fishpeople attack event reports raider # in log

balance: a fishperson will only attack walls a limited number of times (so they breach walls rather than get stuck doing demolition duty)

balance: added randomness to fishpeople choosing to attack objects so they’re less singleminded about property destruction

balance: slightly lowered fishperson health

made landmine explosions quite scary to fishpeople in a large radius

Events

added landmines to weapon supply drop

size of supply drops now based on prestige

immigration event gives more feedback via text log

balance: every weapon drop is guaranteed to have one crate of ammunition

World Objects

FIXED: stumps from chopped trees can be cleared properly now.

foragesource visuals now more consistent

FIXED clear_object scriptErrors

removed spam from tree

UI

fixed typos in tutorial

updated tutorial slightly

tutorial now pauses the game when tutorial messages appear

added more unique module icons

added some new icons (landmine, special_category, airdrop crate, negative prestige, sulphur lump)

FIXED: Extra windows properly dismissed on game start/load

FIXED: Command icons now not doubled on new game/load game

FIXED: Un-disabled main menu buttons on returning to main menu

module category filters added

cleaned up some UX for module placement

Save/Load

save games now properly saves rally points (and other beacons)

save games now properly saves filters

save games now properly saves fog of war

save games now properly restores tooltips

saving will now create notifications in text log

various other fixes to save/load

Engine/Scripting