One thing I've been feeling in my playthroughs is there isn't a lot of strategy to the mining system - you generally just plonk down a mine in your base and you've got everything you need. This patch aims to make it more interesting by making the mineral deposits much more scarce and having a lot of them owned by friendly NPC settlements. You have a dialog option to buy (or sometimes acquire by force) rights to use their mines.

There are still patches of mineral deposits in the world outside of NPCs bases, so look out for the rocks with ore in them. You can also use the geological maps to find them. However, the world map and geological map items always felt overpowered to me as well, so I've split them into 4 quadrants - you need to collect 4 maps with different quadrants to see the whole world. (This only applies to the Large map size though btw).

In case it's a bit too scarce now, there are sliders in the world creation screen to make ore more common. Also btw this system only applies to newly started games, old savegames will continue to use their old geological map.

Here's the full changelist:

• Made rich mineral deposits much more scarce and often owned by an NPC settlement - added mines to the settlements, and dialogue to negotiate mining rights
  
• Various crafting tweaks - get less wood from trees, less minerals from 'poor' mines, can make arrows from steel as well as flint, iron ore and steel weigh less
  
• Tweaks to the envy formula to make it slightly less likely NPCs will start fighting purely over gifts. Also when you give people gifts they will comment if others are getting jealous.
  
• When feuding, characters will say the things they're angry about
  
• Your community members will warn you as a group of raiders or zombies is approaching
  
• Split world maps and geological maps into 4 quadrants, so you have to collect all 4 to see the whole area (on the Large map size only)
  
• Fix for chef not fetching rabbits from traps if they're far away
  
• Fix for being able to pour stew out of other community's pots without them detecting that you are stealing from them
  
• Fix for characters sometimes getting into a loop of continually exchanging items with each other
  
• Fix for characters sometimes getting into a loop of continually jumping over a tree stump
  

What's this publicbeta thing?

v126 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".