Version/1.1.2647

This update has improvements affecting the base game and the Royalty expansion, though since Royalty is much less mature (3 months vs 6 years), it’s what got major focus on the content side. This update is the add-on we promised back on March 2.

The big theme of this update was opening up new play paths so you can take on the game’s world in whatever way you like, and the game will respond in a way that’s sensible. This means you can be tribal, outlander, pro-Empire, anti-Empire, neutral Empire, use psycasters or not, use drugs or not, use ranching or not, and so on. See below for the writeup on major changes, and the change log.

Beyond this, there’s more stuff in progress, and I’m looking forward to letting you all know about it when the time is right.

Thanks to everyone that helped test and give feedback! Please keep it coming.

-Ty

Compatibility

This update is still on version 1.1, because it should be compatible with savegames and mods. For Steam users, if for any reason you have trouble, you can set your Steam beta branch to ‘version-1.1.2624’ to keep playing on the previous version.

Psyfocus and Meditation

Psyfocus is a new long-term resource on psycasters. Fictionally, it’s a sort of mental structuring that a psycaster can build up. Each psycast consumes a bit of it. It also very slowly ticks down over time. Higher levels of psyfocus allow you to use higher level psycasts, but the psyfocus also ticks down a bit faster at higher levels. This means that you can easily maintain your lower-level psycasters at low levels, but high-level psycasts will need a bit more investment to maintain their power.

There’s no downside to letting psyfocus exhaust, aside from losing the ability to use psycasts. So if you have a psycaster whose powers you don’t want to invest in any more, you can just stop any time and reactivate them later.

Psyfocus is primarily built up by meditation. You can place meditation spots on the ground and assign them to colonists, though if you don’t they’ll try to find an optimal spot themselves anyway. There’s a new entry in the scheduling tab which allows assigning them to meditation time.

The most basic kind of meditation is simply to meditate without any kind of aid at all. Pawns will do this in caravans, in prison, or in hospital, but in normal situations they’ll meditate using meditation focus objects to gain psyfocus faster. With a focus object, the psycaster meditates near the object and focuses on it to gain extra psyfocus during meditation.

Where it gets interesting is that not anyone can use any focus object. They can only use an object if it matches one of their focus types. A person’s focus types are specific to them, based on their childhood backstory, traits, and titles. Psychic meditation is a personal/cultural activity which is done differently in different traditions, and people do it according to their own tradition and preferences. It means that different people will act differently, which centers their characterization – it’s always a goal with RimWorld’s design to make characterization matter.

There are currently five focus types, listed below. The information below all means that the Empire no longer needs to have laws against psychic powers – so they don’t. If you want to be tribal psychics drawing power from the anima tree, while being friendly with the Empire, you can. The Empire also no longer tries to prevent anyone from using bladelink weapons (renamed to persona weapons), again, simply because it wasn’t worth restricting players this way. Such weapons are still very hard to get, so if you get one, use it.

Dignified

This can be used by psycasters with Empire royal titles. They meditate on meditation thrones, and gain more focus for more grand and dignified thronerooms. This is part of a shift in emphasis for the Empire, somewhat away from the pampered noble image, and more towards the quasi-religious psychic order aspect that they’ve always had. You’ll note that this kind of meditation is a direct replacement for the old ‘authority’ need that your titled pawns would have. Now, instead of sitting on the throne to boost their own ego, they do it to meditate and regain psyfocus. The throneroom is a social gathering place, but it is also a meditation temple expressing deep traditions of an honor-bound culture.

Natural

This focus type is used by those with tribal childhood backstories – whether you started as a tribal faction, or simply recruited someone with a tribal backstory. Natural meditation foci all need to be in nature – they lose their power if there are artifical structures too close by. The concept here is that they want to go away from people and do a psychic practice by communing with the stillness and eternity of the natural world.

The most important meditation focus for the natural focus is the anima tree. One of these unique trees spawns on every map with a biome where it’s at all feasible. The tree glows with bioluminescent micro-organisms and has a connection with the surrounding psychic field. Anima trees are powerful foci for building up psyfocus, but also serve another purpose – they can actually upgrade your psycasters. When meditated to, the anima tree slowly develops anima grass around its base. Once enough is grown, you can send someone to link with the tree through a tribal ritual and gain a new level of psylink. This gives a reason to have lots of people meditate to the tree sometimes – possibly even the whole tribe – to grow the grass faster. Anima trees are not vulnerable to toxic fallout and animal will respect them and not eat them (except the jerk alphabeavers). If it’s destroyed, a new one will spawn some time later.

Besides anima trees, you can also build nature shrines or acquire ancient animus stones and place them in nature to meditate to them. These won’t give new psylink levels like the tree, but it can be useful if you’re on an ice sheet and there is no tree, or you feel you want a meditation focus in a specific spot (though they still lose power if too close to artificial buildings). Raiders won’t see or attack the hidden nature shrines and animus stone.

Morbid

This focus type is used by those with certain traits like psychopath, cannibal, or blood lust. They draw psyfocus by meditating on death. To that end, graves and sarcophagi are a meditation focus for them. This kind of meditation is more powerful with a corpse inside the grave, and even more powerful if the corpse is related to the meditator.

Minimal

This focus type is used by ascetics. They want the absolute minimum, so they meditate to blank walls. It’s a powerful type of meditation, but only ascetics can use it, and they can’t use some other types.

Artistic

This type of meditation is usable by most people. The psycaster will meditate to art. Higher-quality art builds psyfocus faster. This kind of focus object is very accessible, but not quite as powerful as other methods.

Gaining psylink

The way psycasts become usable has changed slightly. Previously it was from the psychic amplifier. You would collect these little items and stick them on your head. Having more of them unlocked higher levels of psycasts. This was somewhat limiting since it locked the progression of psychic powers to this one specific object.

Now the psychic amplifier is changed to an object called a psylink neuroformer. It upgrades a property on the brain called psylink. Psylink is an organic property of the brain which can be built in other ways too, like the anima tree linking described above.

Psylink neuroformers are still given for new royal titles, but we also did some work tightening how often they’ll be seen as quest rewards to ensure that it’s possible to develop psycasters consistently even if you’re not doing royal title progression. This is connected to the new reward choices (described below).

With different meditation types and different ways of gaining psylink, the overall goal is that players should have distinct but co-equal pathways to develop psycasters depending on which play path they want to go down – whether they want to climb the royal title progression, play as neutral tribals, or fight as outlanders against the empire.

Other Changes

The rest of the changes can be expressed more concisely in the below change log.

Quests

• Quests now offer three reward options for the player to choose between. These three reward options are always distinct from each other. They are displayed in a condensed pictorial layout instead of text, making for easy reading and selection. Player can still set reward preferences to prevent rewards like goodwill or royal favor from being offered, if desired.
• We condensed and focused a ton of quest texts for better readability.
• Texts for Empire quests have been adjusted to de-emphasize the pampered aspect somewhat. The nobles should be a lot more straightforward to match the new dignified meditation. They’re more honor-bound than pampered.
• All quests have been deeply reviewed and tuned to give good reward and challenge balances at all stages of the game in all situations.

Psychic mechanics

• Psychic entropy was renamed to neural heat. This distinguishes it from psyfocus better, and expresses the context of a short-term measure that quickly dissipates, but can ‘burn’ you if pushed too high. It doesn’t represent physical heat of the brain; it’s an expression reflecting the same psychic phenomenon as before.
• Psychic hangover removed. Since we now have psyfocus as a long-term cost for psycasts, there’s no need for psychic hangover. (Its original purpose was to remove from the player the micromanagement burden of casting psycasts like Focus over and over on workers, which would have been a good strategy without it).
• Neural heat overload is no longer dangerous and can often be a good strategy. It won’t burn anyone’s brain, though it may still knock your psycaster into a coma for a few days and in some cases can burn out a psylink level. It’s a good strategy in difficult situations. I’d like to see more players pushing the boundaries of neural heat limits. Overall this powers up psycasters by making it much more viable to push out a lot of psycasts at once.

New psycasts

• New psycast – Neural heat dump: Reduces caster neural heat to zero instantly, but puts the allied target into a psychic shock coma for a day. This replaces entropy link.
• New psycast – Waterskip: Drops some water at the target point, extinguishing nearby fires.
• New psycast – Flashstorm: Generates a small flashstorm at the target point, which will drop lighting bolts from time to time.
• New psycast – Bullet shield: Creates a circular skipgate field which will absorb shots in or out around a targeted point, for a short time. Great for retreats or advances.

Hosting quest improvements

• You can now sometimes gain goodwill sometimes by keeping the guests’ mood extra high.
• Threats configuration totally redesigned. There are new fewer individual threats, with more variation in their pacing and scale. For example, rather than four normal mech clusters in a row, which gets monotonous, you might get two double cluster or one triple-size cluster, providing challenges outside what normal play offers.
• Lodgers now generally have lodger conditions like being unwilling to work, or requiring mood to be kept up, or a disease. This reduces the cases where the lodger is rewarding you for the chance to work for you. More difficult conditions offer bigger rewards.
• Helpers brought to fight for you now start with an ‘on duty’ mood bonus thought.
• Added blood rot disease to support hosting quests.
• Added paralytic abasia disease to support hosting quests.

Drugs

• Drugs output a lot more stats on their info card, including high gain per dose, high fall per day, high duration per dose, psyfocus gain per dose, tolerance gain per dose, tolerance fall per day, random overdose chance, minimum tolerance for addiction, addiction chance per dose, addiction recovery time, addict need fill per dose, addict need fall rate, addict need cost per day, addict need dose interval, safe dose interval. This should help make drugs my viable by giving players information to reason about costs and benefits.
• You can now make pawns keep drugs in inventory even if they’re not scheduled to take it. Good for combat drugs.
• Drug taking is faster and the pawn won’t move when they do it. Good for combat drugs.
• Wake-up and go-juice rebalanced. Now instead of being safe for some interval but then absolutely suicidal to take, the risk and consequences of addiction are lower but the safe dose interval is removed.
• Go-juice instantly gives psyfocus when taken by psycasters.
• Wake-up speeds psyfocus gain from meditation when taken by psycasters.
• Addiction is now rolled before tolerance build-up, making more drugs like yayo more viable and making the drug stats output easier to understand.
• Addicts now take their drug automatically at 10% need instead of 30% (which is too early and wasteful). Chemicals restore 90% to their need instead of 100% for more consistent math.
• Drug tolerances are visible at all severity levels instead of being hidden at low tolerance.

Miscellaneous content

• Added new sound effects for: Mech serums, neurotrainers, psytrainers, condition causers, quest accepted, succeded, failed, concluded, techprint applied, shuttle idle, shuttle board and disembark.
• Added prestige recon armor, prestige marine armor, and prestige cataphract armor. These gold-enhanced power armors enhance psychic abilities and are needed to satisfy noble apparel requirements.
• Psyfocus gear renamed to eltex.
• Cleanly slaughtering your tame animals now gives 50% bonus meat. This powers up the previously-underused ranching.
• When manhunters attack the colony en masse, they now come with the rabies-like scaria disease. Fictionally, this gives a reason why manhunters are attacking, but its design purpose is to flatten out the reward level for manhunter attacks between different difficulty levels. At each difficulty level, a percentage of animals killed with scaria will become unbutcherable on death; this percentage is tuned inversely from the animal count at each difficulty such that higher difficulties now get the same resource reward as lower difficulties. Scaria can also be cured quite easily if you down an animal with it, which makes it possible to make them into pets or meat for slaughter if you are ready to trade medicine for food.
• Smelting slag is much faster to reduce clutter.
• Random decrees for nobles are removed.
• Mech clusters drop less slag and more steel to compensate.
• Mech cluster central problem causer buildings drop some special reward resources when destroyed.
• Filth like blood, dirt, rubble, etc now expires after a long time. This should reduce clutter buildup in long games.
• Added new smoke shells and smoke IED.
• Royal aid can now be targeted on a position instead of just dropping on the caller. So you can tell them to drop on top of a mech cluster, into enemies, etc – anywhere in line of sight of the caller, within a certain radius.
• Monuments can now be rotated while placing.
• Monument generation was reworked to prevent monuments from having big empty spaces inside and increase the value density. This should make monuments more compact and easier to place.
• UI: Follow the master while drafted/hunting now appears on the animal’s training tab as well as the main animals tab.
• Renamed bladelink to persona weapons.
• Added colorblind-friendly point labels for history charts, visible on mouseover.
• Difficulty settings were renamed with more flavor and to better indicate what they really mean. Descriptions were condensed and clarified, and coded to appear instantly on mouseover so they can’t be missed.
• Updated player-created names.

Small miscellaneous

• Increased eltex staff market value from 1000 to 2000.
• Quest rewards now give more goodwill if the faction is hostile.
• Tuned various trees’ harvest work and yield towards a standard of about 30 harvest work per yield.
• Renamed and rewrote difficulty settings (tuning was not changed).
• Mortars now have a visible progress bar while cooling down.
• Removed psychic silencer implant since it no longer has any purpose. The deserter quest now gives an additional psylink neuroformer.
• Cleaned up how pawn hunger rate is fed back through stats. Gourmand trait now directly affects hunger rate. Hunger rate multiplier stat is not used anywhere anymore (but was not removed for compatibility).
• Increase range of manhunter pulse psycast by 10.
• Stripping neutral or allied pawns now causes goodwill loss.
• Now only quest asker lodger can issue decrees.
• Improved melee DPS and armor penetration stat texts.
• Shuttles now avoid landing near mechanoid cluster proximity activators.
• Added various loading tips.
• Reduce call cataphracts royal favor cost if used before cooldown from 12 to 8 favor.
• Psycasts tuning: Painblock entropy cost reduced from 10 to 8. Stun range increased from 20 to 25. Blinding pulse range increased from 20 to 25. Entropy dump range increased from 15 to 25. Vertigo pulse range increased from 20 to 25. Skip range and radius increased from 25 to 28. Wallraise range increased from 20 to 25. Smokepop range increased from 20 to 25. Focus range increased from 25 to 28. Berserk range increased from 15 to 20. Invisibility range increased from 15 to 20. Waterskip range increased from 20 to 25. Bullet shield range increased from 20 to 25.
• Reduce work for cremating a corpse from 5 seconds to 3 seconds.
• Relabel the ‘restrict’ main tab to ‘schedule’ since that’s its main function.
• Only allow stone floor (tiles and flagstone) in monuments.
• Made sure empire never gives royal favor reward if hostile.
• Change psychic entropy fall rate to be measured per second instead of per 30 seconds.
• Rebalance bandit camp quest to have better rewards and less challenge, and add more name content to it.
• Removed the self-destruct outcome from the journey ship endgame. Quest now only ends if reactor is destroyed or tile is deliberately abandoned.
• High tooltip displays severity percentage in tooltip.
• High label displays hours remaining. Addiction label displays severity percent. Addiction tooltip displays the need it creates.

Technical

• Implemented quest rewards debug output table which helps analyze maximum, minimum, and average quest rewards for quests at different points levels.
• Implemented TKey system. This is a system which will allow us to tag XML text with TKeys, which translators can then use to address the text. This saves translators from having to work with long, overly-complex paths to modify text, and allows us to restructure our XML without breaking translations. We have added TKeys to QuestScriptDefs and TipSetDefs so far.
• Create full debug output for tuning drugs.
• Swapped XML-like format for colored text tags to use different symbols.
• Hospitality quests now fail if asker faction becomes hostile.

Fixes

• Fix: Manhunter animals don’t leave properly after 1-2 days.
• Fix: Can’t use gender symbols in “FinalStraw” translation.
• Fix: Persona core request text incorrect grammar.
• Fix: Pawn lend quest always uses plural form of ‘have’, regardless of pawn count.
• Fix: Reduce resistance job report string shows ‘attempting to recruit xy’ instead of reducing resistance.
• Fix: Ingredient radius slider handle becoming invisible at unlimited radius.
• Fix: Penoxycyline blocks diseases longer than it should.
• Fix: DeepDrill optimization breaks map seeds (regression).
• Fix: When deep resources are exhausted, the message notifying the player states incorrect next base resource.
• Fix: Sometimes when deep resource is exhausted the drill is not properly forbidden.
• Fix: Colonist who is away on a quest formed bond with animal.
• Fix: Mechanoids assembled by a mech assembler have high ages. Pawns created by Spawners now have their age set to minimum age for last life stage, so it works correctly for insects as well.
• Fix: You can teleport pawns onto unwalkable terrain.
• Fix: Wedding guests sometimes don’t stay for ceremony after party and don’t get “Attended wedding” bonus.
• Fix: Able to remove implants on pawns without repercussions.
• Fix: Monument construction quests from permanent enemies sometimes talk about goodwill change on destruction, even though goodwill can’t change.
• Fix: Potential null ref for pawns with no Rest need.
• Fix: Bad grammar on hospitality letter with single lodger.
• Fix: Gray UI color from ‘none’ label when there are no traits affects first skill items in CharacterCard.
• Fix: Improperly colored time strings in some cases.
• Fix: Translation key CannotGiveToPackAnimal missing ‘cannot’.
• Fix: Can build stone doors on bridges.
• Fix: CataphractArmor research project in the base game; should be in Royalty.
• Fix: GetStatValue overload causing patching issues in some mods.
• Fix: Lag when sapping raiders are being hit by bullets.
• Fix: Hosted quest prisoners can be placed in cryptosleep caskets.
• Fix: Error if PatchOperationConditional didn’t match and doesn’t have nomatch path.
• Fix: Translation files cleaner stripped away (*Name)(/Name) tags on keyed translations.
• Fix: Dormant mech assemblers not reporting next mech they’re gonna assemble.
• Fix: PsychicHarmonizer description typo.
• Fix: If the pawn goes from safe to brain roasting entropy in 1 psycast, I think he will skip over the overloaded Message.
• Fix: Wallraise can be cast to invalid positions by queuing cast commands.
• Fix: berserk/berserk pulse abilities can be cast on pawn in mental state to interrupt it.
• Fix: Quests that end before they are accepted because of faction hostility display “This quest was completed”
• Fix: Spelling error in psychic insanity lance sound folder name.
• Fix: Psychic effects on dead bodies don’t disappear.
• Fix: Pawns with chemical interest/fascination adhere to drug policy allowForJoy when they should not.
• Fix: Shooting skill disabled by hunting work type.
• Fix: Incapable of violent shows shooting skill.
• Many other smaller fixes and typo fixes.