Alpha 9 is out! This time we’ve added alcohol, drunkenness, binges, hangovers, multiple sculpture types with generated art based on historical events, personal shields for melee fighters, and dozens of smaller improvements. A full change list is at the end of this post.

If you own the game, you can get Alpha 9 by re-downloading from the link you used before (it is a permanent link and always has the newest version). You should also get an update email from us. Anyone still having trouble should start at this thread.

Also note that this build will not load old savegames or old worlds, so please don’t try to load these in the new version. They’ll probably just crash the game.

4:21 EST: I fixed a bug with forbidding and sculptures just two hours after initial release and hotfixed the build to Alpha9b. If you already got it, please re-download. Alpha 9 saves won’t be affected.

Change list:

Alcohol

Added hops growing, beer brewing, beer drinking, inebriated thoughts and ability impacts

Added special ‘binge’ mental breaks

Added teetotaler and chemical fascination traits

Added hangovers

Tales and art

There are now three tiers of sculpture: small, large, and grand. Grand sculptures are 2×2 cells.

Sculptures now have generated descriptions of what they depict.

Sculptures will depict events that happened earlier in a colony’s life, include: killings, drunkenness,vomiting, landing in drop pods, artwork created, struck ore, person captured, person recruited, animal hunted, surgery done, someone was on fire, someone went psychotic, someone gave up

High-quality weapons have art engraved into them.

All weapons now have quality levels, including guns and bows.

Age

Old characters have gray hair and more fleshed-out old age illnesses.

Old characters tend to spawn with higher skills.

Since people don’t age in cryptosleep, characters now have both chronolotical age and biological age. Even animals and mechanoids have ages.

Dates are now relative to specific years. The game starts in 5500.

New stuff

Personal shields added. These one-person shields block a certain amount of damage from ranged attacks and also prevent shooting out. Great for melee fighters.

Artillery shells are now needed by artillery cannons. Shells on the ground can explode. Siegers will come with shells to use to bombard you. Shells can be crafted at the machining table.

Added deterioration: items left outside for a very long time will deteriorate and eventually crumble away.

Surgery can fail now, sometimes catastrophically. Failure chance is related to the surgeon’s medical skill and the quality of the medicine.

You can now rescue incapacitated neutral people and heal them. Their faction will be appreciative.

Guns now have quality levels which affect accuracy.

Added Heavy SMG

Added psychic foil helmet

Added corn and rice crops.

Vomiting: Some diseases, drunkenness, cryptosleep sickness, and hangovers now cause people to vomit.

People can now get food poisoning. Bad cooks are more likely to accidentally poison meals.

Game now records total real playtime per colony.

Added ‘pause on load game’ option.

Many new sound effects from Alistair Lindsay for UI, work, and combat.

Misc improvements