Health and Illness Updates

• Lifestyle can now shorten or lengthen the duration of a cold or flu, with a maximum bonus of -50% duration and a maximum penalty of +25% duration. This amount is rolled randomly along with the duration when you first get sick.

• The common cold now makes you cough far less often, but it does make you sneeze. You can suppress sneezing with antihistamines. Cough syrup already includes antihistamines and is the best medicine for your cold, but if you can't find any, allergy medicine will help too.

• The disease resistant trait, in addition to reducing the chance you get sick at all, now also rolls twice for disease duration and gives you the lower of the two rolls.

• There are now several new sources of lifestyle penalties, as it was previously too easy to keep lifestyle capped with nothing but vitamins and exercise. Wearing filthy clothing, having very low morale, having any body part under 50% HP, eating mutant meat, and being sleep deprived all negatively impact your lifestyle. In general, these penalties are applied only once per day (even if all your body parts are at 1 HP or you're wearing a fully filthy outfit) and are quite small, meaning they will not individually tank your lifestyle, but if you do not take care of yourself, they may add up to substantial penalties.

• Characters who have mutations that make them more tolerant of mutant meat or resistant to infection will be less likely to get lifestyle penalties from mutant meat or injury.

Mutations and Perspiration

• All characters now perspire about 20% less.

• Reduced the amount of hydration lost in hot weather by about 50%. The numbers for water loss were based on the maximum value for someone exercising in the heat (starting at 1 liter/hour), but there were no checks to determine if the character was exercising. The game now starts at 500ml/hour in the heat and as before, increases hydration loss as you get warmer. Note that this hydration loss currently is not based on perspiration or activity level, though that's slated to change.

• Mutants with fur, feathers, chitin, or scales will now sweat significantly less. This is both a blessing and a curse, as perspiration is a very effective way to keep cool. Furry mutants may notice they're having more trouble in the summertime, though Lupine and Ursine do shed their coats to partially help with this.

• Slimy mutants sweat more. Most of them like being wet, so this is pretty much entirely a bonus.

• Feline mutants gain the Heat Tolerant trait.

• Ursine and Bovoid mutants gain the Charger trait. This trait replaces Very Ponderous and gives you the same walk/crouch speed penalty as that one, but removes the run penalty and gives you a slight speed bonus on top of that, so essentially you walk 20% slower than a human but run 5% faster than one. Now you'll show that matador who's boss.

• Ursine mutants lose the Digitigrade Legs trait. I hadn't realized this, but bears are plantigrade like humans. They still gain a move speed bonus to crouching thanks to broad paws, but they now run on two legs like a human. Oh well, you're not 100% bear anyway.

Crossbows and Crafting

• Slightly nerfed the range and damage of the light crossbow.

• Crossbows no longer benefit from the Archer's Form proficiency. This was an error and never intended.

• Reduced the load times for most crossbows. They were pretty excessive.

• Reduced the strength requirements for most crossbows. While the medieval ones can be a pain to draw, it's not a huge full-body workout like with bows.

• Added two new crossbows, the latchet crossbow and the double-string crossbow. The latchet crossbow is a straight improvement over the light crossbow in every way, including load time, range, damage, and accuracy. It is a pretty rare find, but craftable provided you have some fairly high skills (including 4 mechanics) and a book with the recipe. The double-string crossbow is a bit worse than the latchet crossbow (but better than a light crossbow) and has two bows with two strings, allowing you to load it with two bolts. Like a double-barreled shotgun, it has two fire modes: one to fire a single bolt, and one to shoot both at once.

• Added a lot of new items to museums and slightly reduced the likelihood they'll be damaged. This includes blacksmithing and bronze forging tools. The chances are slim, but you may want to check out the selection of artifacts all the same.

• Added horn and bone buttons for tailoring, craftable from antlers and bones respectively.

• Slightly increased the capacity of most quivers. The standard is now 12 arrows for a hip quiver and 24 for a back quiver, though this can vary slightly in some cases.

• Bows and arrows are now crafted singly rather than in 10s. Their work time and material requirements have been adjusted to reflect this.

Electronic Storage

• Backported an overhaul to electronic storage from DDA. Smart phones, memory cards, and laptops found on zombies and in other places are now far more likely to have useful data on them, including ebooks, maps, recipes, and more.

• Smart phones are locked about 85% of the time. It's possible to recover these, though currently the implementation is a little bare bones.

• Media files on phones (essentially lore snippets) do not currently display anything. This is because I need to review the snippets from DDA, delete the ones we don't want, and write a bunch of new ones for TLG. Stay tuned.

Smaller updates and bugfixes

• Grappling hooks can no longer be retrieved from the ground. You can only unhook them if you're up on the roof. They're easier to carry around than stepladders, but a little trickier to use.

• Fixed some segfaulting issues related to vehicles.

• Giant ladybugs are now smaller, but tougher and more effectively armored. They are less resistant to guns as chitin is not really very good at that. Both kinds now have a leap attack (they have wings, after all) and are now afraid of fire. Giant ladybugs will eventually die off so that the next generation can grow up and take their place.

• Removed "famine", the largest variety of locust. It didn't really do anything special and locusts are supposed to be swarms of little guys.

• Fixed an issue where 0 damage attacks could still proc bleeds.

• Cleaned up and standardized calls for trigonometric distances (ie diagonals). This fixes feral humans using improper range calculations for diagonal reach attacks and should improve a lot of NPC and monster behavior in general.

• Fixed an issue where corpses and sometimes monsters were switching to fallback tiles if you stood in a certain spot. This fix unfortunately introduced a rarer but still annoying issue where some very tall sprites can appear to clip through floors, for example if you're in a room that has a tree growing under it. A fix is coming I swear.

• Fixes some issues with EoCs that were affecting performance and may have been causing crashes in some cases, especially with older saves.

• Strangulation via brawling and Crab Claw's strangle attacks now does additional damage and has a chance to slow the target. If you weren't aware, these attacks apply unblockable damage to targets which breathe, have strangleable anatomy, and are your size or smaller. Good for dealing with the odd enemy who is too armored to bonk.

• Scale2x added a fix for ruminants not destroying some plants when grazing on them.

• Stopped books from spawning on steel mill rails.

• Stopped a single cigarette from infinitely hotboxing any interior space.

• Deep water no longer serves as a portal to the underworld if a deep pool is placed above an underground area such as a sewer.

• NPCs can no longer start with the Gradual Mutation trait. This was not set up to work for NPCs and in any case I don't want tons of random mutant NPCs all over the place. Mutants are rare! This should stop cases where you were randomly getting prompted to become a mutant even though you didn't do anything to cause that.

• Removed salt water from swamps. You can still get it from hickory roots or people's houses, and rock salt can still be mined out of the ground.