Alpha 5 is now live, with new content, systems and bug fixes! 🥳 You can download your copy on itch.io now.

If you find any bugs, issues, balance problems or suggestions, please let me know on Discord or by email so we can keep improving the game! Thank you to everyone who have played previous versions and sent in their feedback and ideas. 🙂

Revamped diary engine

The diary engine has had a major overhaul, thanks to a grant from the NZFC Interactive Development fund. Rather than pawns writing diary entries immediately after an event occurs, the event may now become the topic of a future diary entry. As soon as the pawn wants to write a diary entry (generally once a day), they will select the most important topic to write about at that time.

We’ve added in pawn traits, which affect how they deal with different situations. For example, a pawn that loves digging will work faster if they did a lot of digging recently, or a pawn that is afraid of the dark will get slightly sadder if their environment isn’t lit up. For now, each pawn will be assigned a single trait randomly.

There are also four new pawn buffs which impact your pawns’ productivity, happiness, and potential diary entries.

Liquid networks

In Alpha 5, there are three new buildings for creating liquid networks – a way to suck up, transport, and release liquids throughout the world:

• liquid pumps, which are powered buildings, that suck up liquids to put into the network;
• liquid vents, that serve as exits for the liquid network; and
• liquid pipes, which actually transport liquids in the network around (to the nearest vent).

In future updates these networks will tie into other buildings, such as an oxygen generator that will transform water into oxygen and hydrogen.

There is also a new liquid network overlay which shows your liquid network, and where the input and output points of the network are. This layer turns on automatically whenever you’re building liquid network-enabled buildings, or you can press F6 to toggle it:

Pawn quick-access bar

I’ve added a new bar to the top of the screen where you can see all of your pawns, their names, and their current state. You can see if they’re happy, sad, sleeping, or dead… well hopefully not the last one:

And a lot more

There’s also improved pawn AI, new tree art, a new oxygen bar, an improved pause screen, closeable alert bubbles, graphics improvements, and a ton of bug and crash fixes. The full changelog is listed below!

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Release notes for Adaptory 0.7 (Alpha 5)

New Features

• New diary entry engine!
  • When an event happens in the world, or to a pawn, or a particular buff, that may become the topic of a future diary entry
  • As soon as the pawn wants to write a diary entry, they will select the most important topic to write about
  • Pawns use different diary templates based on their mood (happy, neutral, sad)
  • Rewrote most existing diary entries and added 12 new topic categories
  • Pawns no longer immediately write a diary entry at the start of the game
  • Diary entries are now shown in newest-to-oldest order
• Liquid networks!
  • Added liquid pumps, vents, and pipes that can suck up and transport any liquids
  • Liquid pumps require electricity to function
  • Added a liquid network layer that shows points in the network where liquids can enter and exit
  • The liquid network layer can also be accessed with the keyboard shortcut F6
• Added a new top bar for selecting and moving to your pawns
  • The top bar also shows their current mood (happy, sad, dead, etc)
• Updated tree with new art, and changed dimensions to 1x2
• Pawns can now have traits which affect how different buffs and situations affect them, and the diary entries they write
• Selecting a pawn now shows what they’re thinking about – what’s going on, or their next diary entry topic
• Issuing a move command to a sleeping pawn will now wake them up
• When pawns have low oxygen levels, an oxygen bar will now appear below them

Simulation

• Buildings and pawns that are buried or otherwise covered by impassable tiles can no longer emit or absorb nearby elements
• When pawns are low on oxygen, they will now look for the nearest tile that has at least enough oxygen to sustain them, rather than the nearest tile that has any oxygen

Balance

• New pawn buffs
  • in darkness, which normally has no effect
  • slept on floor, which reduces pawn happiness if they recently slept on the floor
  • did lots of digging yesterday, if they spent more than 20% of their time yesterday doing dig errands
  • someone recently died, if any pawn died in the last day
• New pawn traits
  • light-sensitive, which negates the happiness buff from being in bright areas
  • afraid of the dark, which makes pawns unhappy if they’re in the dark
  • loves digging and hates digging, which increase or decrease happiness and pawn speed if they did lots of digging yesterday
• Three additional pockets of water and oxygen are now generated in the world, just below the surface
• Increased the “dangerously low” oxygen level for pawns from 25% to 30%
• Pawns now catch their breath until their oxygen levels are back to 100% (was 25%)
• Reduced the maximum length of the solar flare event by 25%

Internal

• Added current keybindings list to readme.txt, until there’s a proper control panel or configurable key list
• Added “Report on Discord” link to error capture screen
• Added check ✔ to selected items in dropdown menus
• Game actions can now be done while paused – no need to unpause the game to apply changes
• Improved the way that sprites are animated between ticks during a game pause
• Reduced the size of world action buttons so more can fit on the screen at once
• The UI scale range in options is now rounded to the nearest 5%, to improve accessibility – please let me know if this is too big or small!
• Added border around the screen when the game is paused
• Errands that were only accessible by dead pawns are no longer shown as accessible
• Alerts that refer to a fixed-period event are now closeable

Fixes

• Fix dropdown hover not aligning up with dropdown contents
• Fix a (very) rare crash if absorbed or stored mass in an object was nearly zero
• Fix pending building outlines being hidden by doors and other animated buildings
• Fix after applying settings, the menu screen behind the options panel could be dismissed with escape
• Fix a bug where the game world and buttons could be interacted with with an open dialog (e.g. welcome, end of game)
• Fix a crash where trying to build a ladder near the edges of the world
• Fix a rare crash when a game event could be triggered before the UI had finished loading
• Fix reading one pawns’ diary entries would mark ALL pawn diary entries as read
• Fix digging tiles off-screen would sometimes not be displayed correctly until another tile was dug in that same chunk
• Fix a bug where pawns at the bottom of a 1-wide tile refused to do errands unless they had another accessible space next to them
• Fix tile information on hover showing what items are buried, now it shows “(buried item)”
• Fix mouse cursor occasionally getting stuck when clicking a link
• Fix credits dialog close X was not positioned in the header