We have just released our patch for the “Shattered Hope” DLC—including some bigger changes as well. Here we will go through them with some brief explanations as to why they have been made. As usual, the full patch notes can be found at the end of this post.
DIFFICULTY REWORKED
We have gone and reduced the DLC’s overall difficulty in many different ways. If you look at the Hope bar for example, you can see that it looks a bit different than before. The “safe zone” where no negative effects can happen is larger and the Hope levels have been adjusted accordingly. This means there are now bigger and clearer changes between the levels, but also much more time before Hope becomes a serious issue. This allows players to divide their attention to other things, without Hope constantly demanding actions by causing Anguish.
We have also done multiple smaller adjustments to balance the difficulty. For example, the negative impact of disasters and catastrophes has been reduced. Positive Hope effects have been added to accepting survivor groups and when gate combat is won without the bandits breaching the gate. Trauma centers now also offer two patient slots, which should alleviate the situations where many colonists are in anguish at once. The negative event results and the cost of feasts have been slightly tweaked to a more balanced direction as well.
Trauma centers now offer two patient slots instead of one.
HOPE AND HAPPINESS CONNECTED
One major rework ties Hope together with Happiness, which was heavily requested by our players. Previously we had a system where Hope would drop daily with no way to counter the nasty effect. Now, the player can counter this effect and even turn it into a positive, just by keeping the colony happy!
This is easier said than done however, and there is a catch. “Challenge” selected in the pregame determines how much Happiness will affect Hope. With harder difficulties, low Happiness also hits the colony harder. This is one of the ways we hope those players who like a bit of difficulty can still challenge themselves. Connecting Happiness and Hope also gives the players a chance to eventually progress into a situation where hope is less demanding when the colonists feel satisfied in the safety of the colony.
The daily Hope effect is now tied to the difficulty level selected in the pregame.
OTHER CHANGES
One of the smaller adjustments we made was to push the start of the DLC’s questline to appear a little earlier in the game. While this change allows the quest to spawn already at day 29, the random nature of the quests can cause it to be slightly delayed. Always remember to check your side quest status when waiting for a specific one—there can only be one side quest active at any given time!
We also want to encourage our players to use the building overtime feature to overcome the new challenges, which is why we added some lunar dust as a reward to the starter event. This allows the players to start boosting production in buildings right away!
The introduction event now encourages the player to start overtiming buildings with some free lunar dust.
If you want to know more details please refer to our patch notes and feel free to ask questions! Once again we thank all of you for your feedback and hope you’ll enjoy the new and improved experience with Surviving the Aftermath ”Shattered Hope”.
General
- Daily decrease of hope now scales with game difficulty.
- Easier difficulties still have almost the same baseline daily hope change, but harder difficulties now have a steeper daily decrease.
- This is a way for us to provide a smoother gameplay experience for those who wish to play with easier settings, but still be able to provide a challenge for the daring.
- Daily decrease of hope is now tied to colony happiness.
- Unhappy colony loses hope faster while the hope for a happy colony increases per day.
- The current daily effect of happiness can be seen in the hope bar tooltip.
- Hope bar now functions more accurately.
- Previously, there was some scaling which made the hope drops seem more drastic than they actually were when the hope bar was close to full.
- Adjusted the thresholds for when anguish is given to colonists accordingly.
Gameplay
- Added hope reward when accepting survivor groups.
- Fixed an issue that caused gate combat to not give hope when defeating bandits directly at the gate.
- Many text changes related to Shattered Hope features.
- Added daily effect text to the hope bar tooltip.
- Added overtime text to the Lunar Dust tooltip.
- Tweaked hope description in the hope bar tooltip.
- Tweaked anguish description in the help menu.
- Tweaked the descriptions of Shattered Hope buildings.
- And other smaller text changes.
Balance Adjustments
- Reduced hope impact of all catastrophes and disasters.
- Reduced catastrophe hope impact by around 30%.
- Reduced pollution cloud and space junk disasters’ hope impact by around 30%.
- Reduced moonfall, rat swarm and overcharge disasters’ hope impact by 50%.
- Adjusted the hope impact of most events.
- Reduced the impact of negative event results by 30%.
- Positive event results mostly unchanged.
- Increased patient slot count in Trauma Center from 1 to 2.
- The Shattered Moon quest can now trigger after day 29, this was day 32 previously.
- Please note that the Shattered Moon quest cannot trigger if you already have another regular quest active.
- Slightly decreased the baseline food and plastic cost of the small feast.
- Added and adjusted hope rewards slightly in multiple quests.
- Slightly increased the negative hope impact when abandoning a quest.
- The initial Shattered Moon event now gives 20 Lunar Dust.
