AVWW Post-Release 1.112-1.113 "Collect Yer Incineration Bonus" Released!

This one is actually our first release candidate for 1.2, meaning that if there's nothing majorly wrong with it then this will be the 1.2 official version on Monday and we'll then continue working on 1.3 instead.

However, insane people that we are, we actually added three substantial new features in this version anyhow.

The Incinerator!
People have wanted this for as long as I can remember; and with the new levels-based spells this is more important than ever.  Inventory clutter can really become a problem if you play for very long, and you don't want to just litter the ground with all your now-useless spells.

A lot of people then tend to hoard, although my favorite tales are of people using the interiors of warp gates for trash dumps since at least those are out of sight.  And others were doing things like dumping them in mission instances, so that they would truly disappear when the mission instance disappeared.  Clever!

But the incinerator actually makes it rewarding to get rid of old stuff.  You get a token 100 consciousness shards for each spellgem that you discard, regardless of level; although stuff that is of a higher rarity gives you more shards.  This way, not only does your inventory stay clean, but you also get another little boost in shards.

Citybuilding: Placement Matters!
One common theme that started coming up a lot last night and this morning was that players wanted more strategy to where to place their buildings on the world map.  If all potential positions are equally valuable aside from the fact that the citybuilding structures prevent missions from spawning on their tiles, then there's not much depth there.

Such a simple idea to give each building type a bonus based on certain region types -- thanks to several players for suggesting that!  It really does add a surprising amount to even my personal enjoyment of building on the world map.

Citybuilding: Unique NPC Attributes By Time Period
This one was the brainchild of BenMiff, a player who has created probably close to half of the room templates in the game at this point (he keeps giving us batches of 100 at a time, goodness).

The idea with this one is that if the NPCs vary by time period (such as robots not needing food, or ice age characters getting a bonus from profession buildings, etc), then there's incentives to rescue specific kinds of NPCs depending on what your personal goals are.

That's really neat to me, and fits with what we were already doing on the player-character side: now we've just applied that to the NPC side, too.  Of course the NPCs already had some inherent dispatch-related qualities based on their temperament, profession, and so forth; but those things varied regardless of where you picked up the NPC, so there was never an incentive to explore certain regions for specific kinds of NPCs.  Now there is, and that again adds a surprising amount for me personally.


For now we're in major-bugfix/balance-only mode until Tuesday or Wednesday next week, and then we'll be fully committing to work on 1.3, which will be the next evolution of the game.  Enjoy!

UPDATE: 1.113 is now out to fix an issue with two of the time-period-specific bonuses.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.