Major Update 90: Animals, Items, And Foliage

Lots of updates to the game and to the new DLC based off of player feedback.

Enjoy!

If you’ve been playing Kinship today, please take a moment to leave a Steam review for the DLC. I’ve already been reading through the feedback and making changes based on what people are running into, and your reviews are another place for me to see what you think. It also lets Steam know that people are interested in the DLC, which makes it more likely to be shown to more players. And of course, that’d be really helpful!

Update 90 Changelog

Quality Of Life

• Follow My Gaze: When an npc unit (or one of your own bulks or workers, etc) are attacking something, it now says what at the bottom of their tooltip, and also indicates how much and what types of damage or disruption they're going to be doing. I'm not sure why I never did this before.
• Item Organization: In the consumable item lists, you can now right-click items to ignore them, greying them and moving them to the top of the list. They're moved to the top since these open from the bottom and your shortest mouse-movement is to items that are near the bottom. If you ignore an item, it is ignored for all units, not just the one that you did. This does not carry across timelines (same as streetsense ignores, etc, don't).
• Suggested Items: During some projects, the game now suggests consumable items the same way it does structures. So when you're in any sort of consumable items dropdown that can use those kinds of items (animal uplift capture drones or whatever else), it now will show them with a little yellow "suggested" text next to them to draw extra attention to them.

Clarity

• Translation Improvements: General localization updates from the most recent LQA pass.
• Animal Sightings Improved: Pigeons, geese, and giant spiders are now more visible in terms of their icons on the map.
• Double Ring On Bombardment: Units with the Bombardment Protocol feat now show their minimum attack range as an amber ring inside their normal attack range.
• Dog Secrets: There are certain kinds of dogs that are not upliftable because of a secret thing. The game now gives a hint about that in the text when you try to capture them, rather than just refusing in a confusing way. If you have an android try to pet them, then you'll see what is actually going on.
• Redirection Clarity: Attacks that are redirected now say what the attack is being redirected to, and also have extra info in the extended tooltip saying that the shown stats are from the other unit.
• Redirection Arrow: When an attack is to be redirected to some other unit, it now shows an animated pink line to the target, and a circle under them, so that you can easily tell where the redirect is happening to.
• Wait. Who Did I Agree To Nuke?: During the Nuclear Compliance countdown, if you hover that, it now shows the text that you were previously shown as part of the deal that starts the countdown. That way if you forgot the deal terms, you can refer back to this.
• Why Do My Convicts Not Get Therapy!?: When you don't have output room for something, or have power shortages, then that should now appear more clearly on TPS reports relating to output shortfalls, and similarly on the buildings themselves.
• Oops It Died: Once you are able to start tending forests, the visuals for the untended forests make those look a lot smaller and more wilted. The fed forests also look notably more greenish and happy even than they did before. This helps you easily tell the two apart at a glance, while still letting the pre-feeding forests look nice rather than wilted.
• There Are Mods, By The Way: There is now a Mods button on the main menu, which makes it far more obvious that this game has mods, and allows people to jump straight to it.

Balance

• Twin Spiders: There are two kinds of giant spiders that can be out and about. They are both upliftable now, rather than one of the two kinds not being able to be grabbed.
• Flamethrowers Are No Linger Such A Tease: The way that repairs, flamethrower, and a few other things work are now consistent with consumable items and attacks; if your unit's range can reach the edge of the radius of the target, you can now reach that target. Previously it was just measuring from center to center, rather than center to edge.
• Misery Is Slightly Less So: The general pull-in on Misery mode is now less intense on The Fracturing. It now gives you 152 turns rather than 146 to the final doom, which is a bit more generous than International Scrutiny, but still very aggressive. Overall, the two doom sets beyond Vorsiber's Wrath are both much faster than Vorsiber's Wrath and intense in general, but now The Fracturing is eased off a bit.
• International Scrutiny Slightly Relaxed: International Scrutiny has been rebalanced on hard and extreme modes now, too. On hard you now get 328 turns instead of 290, and on extreme out now get 219 turns rather than 177. On Misery, you are getting 147 turns, and normal it's 545.
• The Fracturing Also Slightly Relaxed: The Fracturing has been rebalanced on hard and extreme modes. Hard is now 340, rather than 284, extreme is now 227 rather than 171. Misery is 148, and normal is 565.
• Bulk Melee Against Hardened Targets: Workers and bulks that are melee do damage within their range without moving, by design. That was being blocked by the "ranged immunity" enemy feat. Now your units are not blocked in that way, which means bulk keanus, bulk exators, etc, are a great thing to deploy so long as you don't hand them any handguns. Shoulder-mounted lasers or rockets don't count.
• Handguns Now Never Thought Of As A Sniper Rifle Just Because You're A Crack Shot: Your own bulk/captured units that are in the Deter And Defend mode get 2x the range, as you likely already know. For purposes of Sniper Screen, which blocks units with range more than 50, that treats those kinds of units with a 40% higher cap, aka 70 rather than 50. This makes it so that more modestly-ranged bulks can still hit sniper-screened enemy targets.
• Forest Freedom: The forest tenders no longer have to be connected to your network. They can be placed wherever. This makes coverage easier when your network is small or not overlapping with your forests much.
• Humans Now Only Attack Animals If They Think You Might Be Watching: Enemies will no longer target animals (aside from aggressive ones like raptors and parkour bears) if it's way off from your buildings and network. This keeps animals from dying offscreen in a way that you still were aware of, but lets them keep doing it around you.
• Limti One Jerk Per Turn: Only a single feral/rewilded animal per turn will be targeted by enemies, since it's casual cruelty and something that usually sparks players to either do a quick rescue or attack the enemy to prevent it. With a lot more animals around sometimes, this was getting old fast.
• Now Cold Blooded Murder Isn't The Only Thing That Energizes You: The first time you have an android manually rescue (or pet and rescue) an animal on a turn, that android gets 1 action point restored, and you get two mental energy restored.
• The Prior Balance Was... Extreme On Extreme: Squad Breaker now gives no bonus against squads of 8 or fewer and caps at 5x (was 18x), and difficulty-enlarged squads are measured at their normal size, so Extreme no longer maxes it out.

Performance

• Trees Are Now Lighter On The GPU: Fixed an issue where the draw distance for trees was never being applied. It now applies differently than it used to in general, leading to better visuals while still reducing the intensity on your machine. But if you turned it way down in a prior build in the last year sometime, it may suddenly look different.
• Forests Are Now MUCH Lighter On The GPU: Greatly optimized the new forests so that they both respect the trees draw distance slider in their own way, as well as have enhanced LODs at a distance. They were embarassingly heavy in a way I missed despite spending a lot of time optimizing the forests.

New Mod

• Because It Made Sledge Sad: New mod! Sledge's Animal Rescue is a mod that ships with the game and allows you to automate sledges going out and rescuing feral animals, which has been a request from players for a really long time. Once you have the mod enabled, then in chapter 2+ if you can rescue animals, the sledges can be sent out to automate that.

Bugfixes

• Did You Know? The Number 1 Is In Many Other Numbers: Fixed a logic issue that was causing numerical districts and pois to disallow a lot of valid names, wrongly thinking they were duplicates.
• Reprogrammed The Defective Units: Fixed an issue where your own worker units would target certain wild or feral animals. Also fixed a related issue where those attack lines were red.
• Joint Invaders Less Impatient; Now Wait Their Own Turn: On misery mode, the Joint Invasion doom of International Scrutiny no longer hits before deaths in the black market. That was an error.
• If It's Right But Looks Wrong, It's Still A Problem: In general, on higher difficulty modes, with The Fracturing and International Scrutiny, there are no longer any dooms that look swapped. It was a subtle math thing that was technically correct, but not the helpful kind of technically correct. This keeps it so that Syndicate Crackdown and such no longer looks wrong in some difficulties, for example.
• The War In Question Now Actually Ends: The War's End project was unwinnable when certain background activities were still spawning in lots of units, which was common when it was paired with The Fracturing. It now gates out all of those things that would spawn hostiles so that you can properly wrap up that T3 arc.
• You're No Longer Forced To Train Bears Just Because You House Them: Fixed an issue where if you had Parkour Bears but did not have a means to deploy them (which is a valid choice), then the Mass Uplift project was still requiring you to uplift them, which was impossible unless you did some other contemplations you might not have wanted to.
• It Happpens: Fixed a typo in the ecology T3 goal epilogue text.
• Logical Targeting: If you have a unit of your own selected, and are trying to select or otherwise interact with another unit right next to it, there should no longer be any edge cases where it instead interacts with the already-selected unit.
• Grove Edges Are No Longer Wilted When Next To Only Burned Forest: Fixed an issue where certain tree groves right at the edge of burned areas were not able to be fed properly. This wasn't apparent until the colors and scales of the fed and unfed trees became so different.

Full notes here.

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