Update 8 on the beta branch / full patch notes

Update 8 for Atomic Society is now available to try on the beta branch, featuring the new family system!

The family system unlocks at year 3. Citizens will award you the new post apocalyptic mansion structure to dominate the skyline of your settlement. Once constructed, it lets you tackle the new challenge of finding a life partner (or three) and raising an heir as your town expands.

Survival and setting laws suddenly seem more impactful when they can have serious consequences for your loved ones. Spouses and kids can and will commit the same social issues as anybody else, which also creates some very darkly amusing stories of life in a post apocalyptic town (don't exile your wife).

Apart from a new building and goal, and changes to scavenging that improve map differences, this version also comes with many bug fixes for all the serious issues players have told us about. Thanks to everyone who took the time to let us know about a bug, we couldn’t have found them all on our own.

To access the beta branch and the new update on Steam, here's all you need to do.

1. Right click Atomic Society in your steam library and select properties.
2. Select the betas tab and from the drop down menu select "beta - Public beta branch".
3. You do not need to enter a code for this public beta. Just close the window and in your library Atomic Society will automatically update to the beta version.
4. You can now play the Atomic Society Beta (or switch back to the main version anytime)!

Please do let us know if you discover anything serious or have feedback. We're running a beta to be safe and we may be able to tweak it in the coming week. We've tried to catch everything but being just 3 people it's hard to say for certain. We'll update the main branch of the game as soon as everything looks solid.

(And it sure does feel good to have an update out again…)

Update 8 - Family - Patch Notes (Beta)

​All the features are now available on the beta branch.

New Content and Improvements:
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• New Feature – Leader’s Mansion & Family After your town has survived 3 years, your people will award you the Leader’s Mansion structure. Building this impressive new structure lets you tackle a new goal – to have a life partner and pass on your unique genetic code to an heir. After choosing who to be with, you can see your spouse (you have up to 3 if that suits you) getting up to mischief in town as you play, and worry about whether or not your children will survive (or be murderers – family members can commit the same traits as ordinary citizens). You can choose to make your family immune from arrest, or let them be locked up like regular criminals but this makes people harder to convert. Laws you set will impact who you can be with in the first place.
  
  
• The Scavenger’s Hut now passively harvests lumber from any nearby trees at a slow rate. This change makes the placement of the Scavenger’s Hut a lot more strategic. You must now consider how close it is to ruins while trying to get the most from any nearby trees. This change also means forest maps play differently to desert and snow maps.
  
  
• In response to player feedback, the bonus Raider Story Event can now be enabled or disabled whenever you start a new game for those who just want to build in peace (though you still need guard towers to make people feel safe). However, because the Raiders are now optional, their impact has been scaled up (it varies by difficulty) making the Story Event a lot more damaging if you do switch it on. We have also changed the wording around the Raiders to make it clear they're simply a text-based story event.
  
  
• The Town Leader will now automatically keep salvaging after finding a bag upgrade, until that new bag is full.
  
  
• A new guitar-based song (“Safe”) has been added to the soundtrack. This song will play after all the in-game goals have been completed.
  
  
• The Canteen building is now upgradeable with electricity, allowing more people to visit it simultaneously.
  
  
• Added a new “ultra” graphical preset that has increased shadow distance and resolution. You can switch to it in video options.
  
  
• Several new sound effects added for various actions.
  
  
• Countless UI tweaks implemented. To list a few: buildings with an radius effect (AoE) now display icons on the ground to help players understand what the effect does. The Town Hall stats screen has been made a lot more readable. The Courthouse and Trader UI has been improved. A quick way to access the menu button has been added to the top left. Extra shortcut buttons have been added to the main panel. Almost every menu has had a little touch-up.
  
  
• Several new alert messages added. These will explain what certain features do, or alert you to problems in the town that players were previously overlooking.
  
  
• Several text improvements and adjustments. For example, the opening story now implies the (super-speedy) Town Leader may not necessarily be an ordinary human being but created to rebuild society for the humans - which is interesting when it comes to raising an heir. New game tips have also been added to cover new features and hazards players often fall into. The tutorial has been streamlined and refined. Building descriptions have been made clearer, etc.

Bug Fixes:

This version comes with many important bug fixes…

• Fixed: A bug that could cause saving to freeze permanently on certain maps with certain ruins. Thanks to our players for finding this and sending us the vital game info to solve it! We are monitoring this one on the beta branch to make sure it's fixed for everyone, but hopefully we've found the cause.
  
  
• Fixed: A bug that let the player try and save while saving, or delete a save while saving thus causing the save process to break.
  
  
• Fixed: A bug where guard tower workers would stop collecting weapons if one of them lost their job while coming back with weapons.
  
  
• Fixed: A bug that meant upgraded guard towers were not protecting structures in the extra radius.
  
  
• Fixed: A bug that could sometimes cause your Town Leader or engineers to teleport across the map if you were following them with the camera as a building was converted.
  
  
• Fixed: The Research Center can no longer be destroyed by raiders or collapse due to lack of repairs in order to prevent a rare and unrepeatable bug where researching could get stuck (you can still manually blow it up).
  
  
• Fixed: A very rare memory leak that could cause the game to crash when loading a saved game under specific circumstances.
  
  
• Fixed: A bug that was letting citizen builders leave work whenever they wanted, thus making them frustratingly ineffective even if they were even slightly unhappy.
  
  
• Fixed: A bug that could sometimes cause the repair building icon to get stuck on the screen if the building collapsed.
  
  
• Fixed: Fixed a bug that caused several sound effects to be unaffected by the volume slider.
  
  
• Fixed: A bug where Enforcers could get confused if Raiders changed a law while they were working on it. Also improved the Enforcer code in general to make them more reliable.
  
  
• Fixed: A bug that caused the food and drink statistics on the Town Hall stats menu to be linked, showing identical numbers. They now show accurate numbers.
  
  
• Fixed: A bug where the leader could get stuck behind the fence after helping to build the Research Center and only moved out by using mouse clicks.
  
  
• Fixed: We’ve reduced the size of the output_log file the game creates while you’re playing to save on hard drive space (and make it easier to email to us if needed).
  
  
• Fixed: A cosmetic bug where construction areas were rotated at a different angle to the way the player had put the building down.
  
  
• Fixed: A few alert messages were spamming the player too frequently (like a Courthouse Lacks Workers, etc). These will appear less often.

Balance Changes:
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Here are the latest balance changes in response to player feedback…
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• The beginning of the game has been re-balanced to make the initial citizens survive longer, letting new players get their bearings before people drop dead. This change does not affect hard mode.
  
  
• The canteen has been made a little less thirsty for lumber to encourage players to use it.
  
  
• Guard towers now only need 2 workers so players have more staff to spare.
  
  
• Wind turbines have been re-balanced so that you can only build 1 per 100 citizens, to avoid people exploiting them batteries for trade.
  
  
• The Luxury Tower now takes longer to research, meaning the other houses are suddenly more useful.
  
  
• Citizens are twice as likely to belong to your belief system passively (without needing conversion) so you can spend less time torturing or educating in the Info Station. This should result seeing more convictions in the early game.
  
  
• Tundra is now shrouded in fog of a nuclear winter, making it harder to scavenge as you can’t see as far ahead.
  
  
• As mentioned, if this story event is enabled, the “Raiders have arrived” alert now appears when you hit 200 citizens, not 250. Their chances to kill, destroy, or damage buildings have been slightly increased. The Raiders can still be completely neutralised by upgraded guard towers.

Quick Update On Development

Anybody who read the last recent dev blog will know we've had a real battle on our hands with this version and went down some development dead-ends that really slowed us down.

This version was supposed to have a "star" feature of a visible path system but we just couldn't iron out the technical hassles. When I last wrote we were at a crossroads about what to do. In the end, even though it was 80% complete, we made the painful choice to scrap 6 months of hard and costly work in order to get this update finished and save the company.

This update is not quite as full as I'd like therefore, but at least we're back on track, and Update 8 does noticeably improve the game.

We've done some serious analysis of where we've been going wrong on a production and design level this month, with thanks to some wonderful advice from a more experienced indie dev. The passion and excitement is back as never before. We're going to go for broke addressing the remaining player complaints and requests in a practical and timely manner from now on as we head the Early Access finishing line.

We're here to shape the game with our players and no review or forum post will be left unattended. Last week I studied and catalogued every single review (including all the bad ones, needed a beer after that!) and all recent forum posts to find out what essential areas we still need to look at. We're now designing practical solutions that can fit into the game and are doable, given we're a first time, no budget part-time team. I'll have a lot more to say about this new focus (and our restored love of making this game) in the next dev blog, including a totally refreshed Early Access roadmap to show people how we intend to finish this game… and maybe save our sanity and company in the process.

Thanks to everyone who tries the beta and for all the supportive players who have helped us keep going. Making games is never easy but it didn't need to be as hard as we were making it. Hope you enjoy the new update. You won't have to wait as long for the next one.

Keep In Touch

Any questions, ideas, suggestions please make a post on the Steam forum. I'll read all comments down below of course. Alternatively you can contact me below. Always happy to chat with players who are interested in the game, though bear in mind I have a day job, but I'll get back to you.

Good luck raising a family in the apocalypse!

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