Flotsam 0.6.0e1

Building Grid
Buildings where you can build at (such as the townheart and walkways) now generate a grid on each of their attachable edges where buildings snap to.
Buildings will now show their grids when building around them.
Grid visibility and Snapping functionality can both be disabled with 2 toggles found in the building menu.
Walkways now display their boundaries.
A visual is added for the propeller blocking buildings on the Townheart.


Building Improvements
Added a collision tolerance. This will reduce edge cases where it looked like you could build somewhere, but couldn't due to a small overlap.
While placing a construction, it will now align next to another construction.
Walkways are now built one segment at a time. You can hold shift or set a shortcut to continuously place walkways.
Walkways now show building buoys when they are placed and ready for construction.
Walkway lines will now look for the closest intersecting building it can hook to. This makes for more natural snapping.
Walkway integrity has been added, this means that walkways are no longer able to be deconstructed when it would cause a part of the town to become disconnected from the Townheart.
Individual walking segments can now be deconstructed.
Reduced the snapping distance when building.
Buildings marked for deconstruction will now display building lines around them.
Producers will no longer wait for their recipes to finish before being deconstructed. This means that drifters will immediately stop working and the construction will be marked for deconstruction.


Misc
Producer recipes can now be cancelled, even if they are currently being produced.
Overhauled the visual of the building radius.


Fixes
Fixed an issue where a walkway could snap further than it's allowed angle if it snapped to another walkway.
Fixed building buttons not starting a new construction when pressed.
Fixed additional electricity grids being made when salvaging a building and cancelling it. This could cause certain buildings to never receive power, such as the research station, and thus not getting worked by drifters.
Fixed floating worker position in the Unbottler.
Fixed drifter name tags not updating correctly after reloading.
Fixed bullet points not displaying in the update notes.


Behind the scenes
We decentralized the building so we can more easily test it in a separate environment.

Hey drifters,

Early Access 0.4.1p3 is now live.
It fixed an issue where certain characters in the non-Roman alphabet would show up as squares. This mainly happened with Chinese, Korean and Japanese characters.

Fixes
Fixed an issue where certain characters in the non-Roman alphabet would show as squares.
Fixed Early Access "Ok" button having the wrong color.

Hey drifters!

This updates sees an overhaul on how your saves are structured and displayed. While all of it is in a new jacket, the save files themselves remain largely unchanged, and should not have any issues being loaded.

Saves
Saves are now stored per town / community in a folder.
If you start your game with the old save file storage, a migration tool will move your saves to the correct folder structure. If there are any communities with the same name, they'll be placed in the same folder. This operation will only move files, not delete them.
Due to the new folder structure, new towns may not have the same name as any saved town.
Added a button to the main menu to continue your latest save.
The load menu now shows all your towns, and the save files related to them.
Instead of showing playtime on a save, a save now displays how many days you've survived instead. Older saves will show 0 days until saved in this version.
Saves now display their size and file name as well.
Added a button to open your save folder in file explorer.
The pause menu now has a load button where you can load up older saves, or a different town.
The pause menu now has a "Save As" button that displays all the saves of your current town. Here you can make a save file, or overwrite an existing save.
The pause menu now has a "Save" button which will overwrite the most recent save of this town.
The save overwrite prompt now warns you which save you're about to overwrite.
Auto-saves are now made at the end of each day, instead of every 10 minutes. A maximum amount can still be set in the options menu, and the oldest auto-save will be overwritten if you exceed the set number.


Changes / Fixes
Updated fonts so they switch colors correctly in different languages.
Fixed save not loading if the resources on a landmark were changed and a drifter was in the process of salvaging it.


Balancing
Reduced fishing time of drifters using the fishing chair.
Slightly reduced drying times for Dried Bottlefish and Dried Unbottled Fish.
Increased amount of starting food.
Polluted drifters now lose all pollution when sleeping through Microbe-Plastics

"Scouting Update" now ready for testing!
Ahoy drifters!

We have another update ready to test for you all: The Scouting Update. (name can change)
This patch brings the first iteration of the scouting feature to Flotsam.
During development we made changes to the world generator and started making some rigorous changes to the pacing of the game.
We wanted to get these changes out to you as soon as possible in order to gather feedback.
As such, the feature is in a very early stage and a bit rough around the edges.

As part of working on the next Major Update (0.4) we revised the pacing of the game, giving workshops a more prominent role in the game. As a result, we've also 'split' the base resources into 'raw' and 'processed'. Where raw resources can only be used as ingredients, while processed resources can be building resources, fuel, etc,..

This comes with a rough first iteration of the scouting. A watchtower will enable you to spot nearby drifter landmarks. Rescuing drifters might provide rumors of nearby rare landmarks.

We invite you all to test this update and give us your feedback.

When bugs occur, provide as much information as possible to help us resolve these faster!
Read here how to submit and track the current bugs in the game.

This patch is still in development and can be tested on the experimental branch to give feedback.

This is how you can enable the experimental branch of Flotsam. This will only work when you're not in a game:
1. Open Steam Library
2. Right click Flotsam
3. Select Properties
4. Go to tab 'Betas' at the top.
5. Select 'Experimental' in the drop-down.

Enjoy the new update!

Change Notes
General
First iteration of the scouting feature:
* New Construction: Watch Tower
* Information regarding landmarks can now be obtained by building the Watch Tower.
* Information regarding landmarks can now be obtained through drifters that join your town.
New construction specific resources (names may change):
* Floaters
* Wooden Planks
* Metal Plate
New Construction: Ropecrafter
New Construction: Small Drying Rack (may be removed later)
Seaweed Patches now spawn in the water.
Screw, Plastic Nets and the Pipe resources have been removed. (may return later)
World Generator Updated


Balancing
Size of the world has been significantly increased.
Overhauled the pacing of the game:
* Workshops are now more prominent in the early game.
* Increased starting fuel amount.
* Altered start amounts of food and water.
* All building costs have been changed to reflect the changes.
* All production times have been scaled down to reflect the changes.
* Number of resources found on Landmarks has been reduced.
* Number of resources in flotsam patches has been reduced.
* Number of flotsam patches spawned has been increased.


Performance
Persistence management has been refactored to reduce lagspikes when the game is saved.
Flotsam inventory has been factored out to avoid unnecessary memory allocations.


Saving/Loading
Experimental: Scouting is currently not persistent

Hi all!

We've fixed an issue where untranslated phrases would show as blank instead of reverting to english.

Patch notes
Fixes
Fixed bug where untranslated phrases would show as blank instead of reverting to english.