Hi everyone. October has come and gone and we’re officially 2 months into Early Access! Big thanks to our Discord community for helping us test new devbranch builds and reporting all those damn bugs. If you want to try out the latest devbranch builds, just go to your Steam Library, Right-Click on Buoyancy and select Properties. Then click the BETAS tab and select the devbranch in the drop-down menu.

The devbranch build is updated at least once a week, though usually more frequently, and it has new features we’re working on. It can be buggy so we recommended starting a new city.

Policies Menu

Zomawia

City Actions

I’ve made some City Actions that do various stuff that should also address some of the feature requests by community. These actions have their own cooldowns, are instantly activated, and mostly instantly effected.

Extreme Population Control: Kill off 30-40% of your population.

Mass Quarantine: Banish any sick villagers from your city.

Celebrate Life: Use up your Beer and increase birthrates for the next 2 days.

Work Overtime: Villagers walk faster and carry more resources but gain more Hunger and don’t receive Happiness gains for delivering resources.

Trade Caravan: Dump your resources into a boat with some villagers and hope for a good trade. Results may vary.

Signal Flare: Get the attention of any boats in the area, Trader or Pirate.

Ride the Storm: Erect a tall lightning rod upon your Town Center that will absorb lightning strikes from destroying your buildings. Absorbed strikes may deflect on a building causing a fire and/or give a villager electroshock therapy.

Hot Air Balloon: Launch a balloon from your Town Center to scout out far away resources, cities, rafts, or trade posts.

As we add more features and systems into the game, more Actions will be available to work with them.

City Actions

Lightning Rod deploment

Flying Trade Caravan

Signal Flare

Prisons and Prison Management

I created a Prison building that is now required to take any prisoners.

Prisoners kept in a Prison will row for your city, freeing up transportation. Prisoners have to eat and the player can select which foods to replenish food stocks. Prisoners can also reproduce in the prison. These new prisoners can be imprisoned, recruited, or eaten. The trade value of Prisoners has been buffed as well.

Doing heinous acts towards the prisoners reduces their Morale. If Morale drops too low Prisoners will have a chance to do a Prison Break that will set fires and attack your population. During a Prison Break the player has to send military (or the entire town) to detain or kill the rioters.

Prisons can be managed from the Policy menu and by also clicking on them.

Prison Management Menu

Finally the City Laws. These are all Laws you enact with separate cooldowns for each Law. More to come but so far we have:

Corpse Handling: Choose how your dead villagers are disposed of (Throw them overboard, Use as Greenhouse Fertilizer, or Eat them)

City Encounter Behavior:

Friendly behavior nets you better trade, but disables your Towers for 30 seconds if you invade another City.

Hostile makes any city interaction go to immediate invasion and also disables the enemies towers for 30 seconds.

Neutral is default gameplay behavior.

Sick Villagers: Immediately Banish any sick villagers or give a prompt for further instruction (Send your doctors, Let them try to heal naturally, Banish Them).

Friendly Fire: Control how stupid and reckless your Junk Cannon operators are. They will try not to fire if there are friendlies in the target area. Or make them Reckless shooting any hostiles while disregarding friendly fire and also having quicker reload times. Or just leave it as default.

City Laws – still a WIP

Pollution Rework

Shawn

The Pollution mechanic has gone under some reworking. Pollution now spawns under the building that produces it and is localized to that area. Some numbers have been tweaked for balance and we have a new building, the Filter Station, in the works to combat pollution.

Filter Station

The Filter Station is a new building that will be used to reduce pollution in a given radius around the building. The effectiveness is dispersed between all pollution pools within its area of effect. We’re waiting on assets and further balancing before we place it in the game but it will be available soon.

Building Concepts

Kevin

For this past month I’ve been thinking up new concepts for the buildings and redesigned the look of the motor again since the last one didn’t sit right with me

Motor

Medicine Hut

Filter Station

Prison

And also concepts for the new Prison and Filter Station. What do people think of spikes?

In-game Calendar and Holidays

Shawn

A new calendar system has been added. A year or “Era” lasts for 100 in-game days before the next one begins. The calendar days are also different than the number of days survived and each game starts you on a different calendar day. So a player can survive for 110 days but be on the 10th day of the calendar. The calendar system is still being expanded on but the basics are in.

Holidays are events that happen once in an Era and gives some bonuses to the villagers; such as villagers receive a bonus to Happiness and Happiness gains during the “New Era” holiday while they will gain bonuses to Nourishment gains during the “Day of Contentment”.

More holidays are planned to be added based on achievements that players make such as winning their first battle against another city or achieving an Age of Prosperity. Holidays will also be closely related to lore currently being developed.

Recycler Building

Elliott

This is the finished render for the Recycler redesign. The old building design was very rough, looking very unsatisfactory for what we want. After fixing the old Recycler building, now it’s time for some work on the next building.





Sickness Overhaul

Zomawia

I reworked the Sickness system to support new features. The system now has multiple Symptoms and different Outcomes. The original system was basically two symptoms (Walk Slow) and one outcome (DIE!). The new system is modular allowing custom disease types that can trigger depending on gameplay.

A disease can have one or more Symptom

Slowpoke : The villager walks slow.

: The villager walks slow. Frenzy : The villager walks extremely fast.

: The villager walks extremely fast. Sickly : The villager loses Nourishment slowly.

: The villager loses Nourishment slowly. Madness : The villager goes insane and stops working while other nearby villagers are scared (lose Happiness).

: The villager goes insane and stops working while other nearby villagers are scared (lose Happiness). No Symptoms: Nothing detrimental yet…

After a Symptom duration is over, the villager has a chance to infect any nearby villager, and then goes to the Outcome stage. Only one outcome can happen.

Faint : The villager passes out for awhile and then awakens losing Happiness.

: The villager passes out for awhile and then awakens losing Happiness. Die : Uhh they die.

: Uhh they die. Puke : The villager loses Nourishment and gains some Hunger.

: The villager loses Nourishment and gains some Hunger. Self-Healed : The villager recovers from the sickness with no ill effects.

: The villager recovers from the sickness with no ill effects. CRAZY: Cannibal cities eating too many brains can develop Mad Villager Syndrome (MVS) that turns villagers into mindless killing machines attacking anyone nearby.

MVS is a series of crossover fighting games developed and published by Capcom, featuring characters from their own video game franchises and comic book series published by Marvel Comics.

Of course this presents new challenges and the player can now decide how to deal with sickness when it occurs. Players can choose to Banish, Send Doctors, or Let the villagers try to heal. Idle sick villagers will also try to walk to the nearest Medicine Hut (if available). In the case of MVS, those villagers can’t be healed and you must fight back with your military or villagers. Subtle hints will be given to help the player react accordingly.

LOD Optimization

Elliott

Platforms have all been given a performance update to help people with potatoes. All platforms contain twice the amount of LOD’s. This includes building platforms, bridges, and construction platforms.