Hey everyone, I've added chickens to the game, in the publicbeta branch :) If you start a new map, some of the settlements will have chickens which you can buy, or possibly steal. They're kind of cute, the hens will lay eggs for you which you can boil, or they'll breed if you happen to have a rooster. You can build a chicken coop and a feeding trough and a water bowl, and assign someone to feed them.
The roosters will crow in the mornings.



I realized last weekend that there was a bug introduced in v143 which is causing NPCs to attack you more often than they should do. Basically if anyone gets hurt, they'll start attacking you. This patch fixes that bug. But because I wanted to get the patch out and fix the bug, I haven't finished everything I wanted to do with the chickens yet - I just got them to a playable state. So they're in the game, but they don't serve much purpose yet. That will come.

Besides chickens there's a pretty major change to farming: corn, pumpkins, cucumber and chili peppers aren't plantable but have separate seeds which aren't edible, like the other crops. This just makes it simpler, I hope, because you don't have to tell people not to eat your corn so you can plant it. I also think it will make it simpler for the AI. I'm trying to fix some bugs where the AI communities often starve to death after a couple of winters, this patch has another possible fix for that as well. But I'm not sure it's fixed yet as it's a difficult thing to test. I'll be working some more on that problem in the coming weeks as well.

Loading old savegames will populate your inventory with some of the new seed types. This might be a good time to start a new savegame though, if you're in the publicbeta branch.

Here's the full change list:

• Chickens
  
• Separate seeds for maize, pumpkin, cucumber and chilli pepper
  
• Fix for NPCs often blaming you for injuries where the culprit was actually known to them already (bug introduced in v143)
  
• Fix for NPCs sometimes getting stuck on insides of your gates if you haven't given them permission to enter
  
• Fix for traders not spawning in re-occupied bases
  
• Possible fix for AI communities not having enough food to last the winter
  
• Only add possessive suffix in English and German, and some other spelling and grammar fixes
  
• Marked fetch and loyalty quest items as not destroyable
  
• Characters can always sleep at night if they are in a building, even if they aren't tired
  

What's this publicbeta thing?

v146 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".