Great stuff, so happy I own this, thank you. Keep it up and Happy Holidays

Super solid purchase for me, keep up the great job with the patches!

"Added “Arachnophobia” setting, which replaces spiders with less realistic spiders."

Made my day
keep up the great work ! This game is an uncut gem and totally underrated in my opinion.
Happy Holidays

The spice- uh, water must flow.

from without trying i dislike the new level up system! I hate it when games take away from me to think about how to level up a character to my specific needs and automatically build them up in a fixed path where i can only put in some light finishing touches!

Its what i hated most on Diablo 3 for example if i compare its corsette with the freedom i have in diablo 2.

I understand that companies want games to be more friendly for casual and kid players. But that is no excuse to completely take away the freedom for us veterans!

Please make the old system available to us 30+ year olds Hardcore RPG veterans via a menu checkbox with a hotfix or a future update!

The "Arachnophobia Mode" is just too cute :D

But I agree on the "dumb down" of leveling up.
I'd love some sort of "Checkbox" if they should spend their stat points automatically or not.

But other than that thanks for the update, made me come back playing another round! :)

With the update round finding of the dwarves is totally broken. Vertical Lifts are not getting used at all .... I am afraid you broke the game for me. Does it make sense to start a new mountain?

Nice - looking forward to the idle dwarf fix. So many dead high level dwarves.... they stood there til they died.

Update: Just don't build elevators it seems. It starts with a couple dwarfs just standing on top of each other on the elevator. Then a couple more. You recruit new ones, but eventually when you only have a couple running around with a small to medium sized base about mid game, you cant sell enough stuff to keep replacing them, and eventually they all just go idle on the elevator platforms.

Update 2: After 2 more play throughs
If I dont build elevators dwarves dont get stuck as much. They still can get stuck on a scaffold if it is not even with the tunnel they are entering it from (at least going down)
Can you add something to check for pathing issues for cart and elevators - or some sort of indication why a dwarf cant get to a certain place - or both?
Specifically - I have gone through the trouble to flatten a wide tunnel and build a rail with a station at each end and a cart. But then the dwarves dont use it at all? Like it is not connected. I have other rail systems that work on the same map - but this long one does not, and I cant find a break in the rails, there is a cart, station at each end, etc.
I have dwarves that get to a place on the map using scaffolds - which then are "stranded" - it would be good to see what part of the path they cant navigate. Especially since they got their in the first place....
The ledger and sales work wonderfully. Money is no longer a tedious issue.
However storage rooms dont seem to accumulate things until you say very specifically which things can go in there. Is that by design? Prices next to the items in the ledger would be great. Also the ability to sell some of the things, or sell all above a certain number.
Dwarves that have ladles and rakes - don't fight back against monsters. They should at least fight with their picks or hammers. Even if it is less effective.
The maintain craft is the best addition to the game so far. It stops working sometimes, and you have to poke it to get it going again. Either by turning it off, or adjusting the quantities.
At some point hopefully you will add a way to choose what material the items, tools and weapons you craft are made of. More than once I have had dwarves make axe heads out of silver/gold etc to complete a quest. And I cant get them to make my own dwarves a better pick head short of building another Foundry/Smithy to deal only with more rare materials.
Great work devs! Really enjoying the game. And appreciate the rapid pace of the updates.

Thanks devs! Absolutely amazing update and in such rapid succession.Great change to add the dwarf auto upgrades as well which was so painful before with 20 dwarves running around.If there is an option for the more hardcore RPG focused people down the line then happy days but I think now it's almost perfect so thanks again!

The reason I think it was important to shift that focus was because of how much complexity I see coming to the other aspects of the game such as automation, advanced crafting, fluid dynamics, inter dwarf relationships and combat mechanics further down the road.Speaking of which, the fluids update is looking great already and I can't wait to try it out and probably accidentally drown my town.You rule devs!

Hi everyone, thanks for the kind words!

First of all, we are aware of the elevator bug and already have a fix on the experimental branch. (You can switch to this in Steam). We'll get it out ASAP.

Originally posted by RicWalker:

...i dislike the new level up system!

Originally posted by Thunderbuddy - #Nemo:

... But I agree on the "dumb down" of leveling up.
I'd love some sort of "Checkbox" if they should spend their stat points automatically or not.

Hopefully you'll be more OK with it when you start playing. :) The problem with it was... It worked fine in the early game, when you have, say, less than ten dwarves. But people have colonies with 50+ dwarves, and then it just doesn't work, because it's too much levelling up going on, and you're not really able to make reasonable choices anyway.

The exact nature of the auto-levelling up mechanic is something we could change though, and we're definitely listening to feedback regarding that.

Originally posted by Srekel:

Hopefully you'll be more OK with it when you start playing. :) The problem with it was... It worked fine in the early game, when you have, say, less than ten dwarves. But people have colonies with 50+ dwarves, and then it just doesn't work, because it's too much levelling up going on, and you're not really able to make reasonable choices anyway.

The exact nature of the auto-levelling up mechanic is something we could change though, and we're definitely listening to feedback regarding that.

Yeah, I'd be interested in how many dwarves they were playing with in a colony. By the time I've got enough exploration points to be getting level 5 techs the colony has gotten so big that 15-20 dwarves are the minimum and I'd basically given up levelling up.

I'd hire a new dwarf, come back in 15-20 minutes and dump the 100 or so stat points into his abilities and then ignore them the rest of the game. Once it starts costing more than a level up just to increase the stat point once, there's almost no noticeable difference to the dwarf's ability. So for me it wasn't worth wasting time even going through randomly dumping points into things rather than carefully crafting my guys. :(

Then again the new skill selection I don't much bother with anything but the extra sight, extra experience, extra movement skills. After that I just sweep though once an hour of playing and top them up.

Then again, I'm almost at tier 5 in the current map, and of my 15 dwarves only one has a non-grandfathered item: an iron cooking ladle.

Maybe I just don't care about my little guys provided they're not randomly dying? :P

Originally posted by Doxl:

"Added “Arachnophobia” setting, which replaces spiders with less realistic spiders."

Made my day
keep up the great work ! This game is an uncut gem and totally underrated in my opinion.
Happy Holidays :cozyjunimogreen:

I agree, am gonna play with arachnophobia on just for funsies :D such a good art

I like the new skill system. But there needs to be more options. LIke the ability to choose a set of skills we would want to prioritize per guy.

But the dwarves getting stuck on elevator is really annoying. Yes, I can do the save and load trick to quickly (but temporary) fix the issue but it seems it is getting worse. Can't there be a check every minute to see if the guy moved and if he hasn't auto rest him?

And I assume the elevator issue is the one where they won't take the elevator and the game says they are stranded. I had 7 guys take the elevator down and then say they were stranded.

Originally posted by Darke:

Originally posted by Srekel:

Hopefully you'll be more OK with it when you start playing. :) The problem with it was... It worked fine in the early game, when you have, say, less than ten dwarves. But people have colonies with 50+ dwarves, and then it just doesn't work, because it's too much levelling up going on, and you're not really able to make reasonable choices anyway.

The exact nature of the auto-levelling up mechanic is something we could change though, and we're definitely listening to feedback regarding that.

Yeah, I'd be interested in how many dwarves they were playing with in a colony. By the time I've got enough exploration points to be getting level 5 techs the colony has gotten so big that 15-20 dwarves are the minimum and I'd basically given up levelling up.

I'd hire a new dwarf, come back in 15-20 minutes and dump the 100 or so stat points into his abilities and then ignore them the rest of the game. Once it starts costing more than a level up just to increase the stat point once, there's almost no noticeable difference to the dwarf's ability. So for me it wasn't worth wasting time even going through randomly dumping points into things rather than carefully crafting my guys. :(

Then again the new skill selection I don't much bother with anything but the extra sight, extra experience, extra movement skills. After that I just sweep though once an hour of playing and top them up.

Then again, I'm almost at tier 5 in the current map, and of my 15 dwarves only one has a non-grandfathered item: an iron cooking ladle.

Maybe I just don't care about my little guys provided they're not randomly dying? :P

you are doing it wrong then, new items increase their skill proficiency by a LOT so they dig faster, create faster, build faster. I can manage with 10-12 dwarves I have T5 or T6 techs and enemy force in overworld is at like 4 or 5 which is nearly the end.

Originally posted by W4RP!G CZ:

you are doing it wrong then, new items increase their skill proficiency by a LOT so they dig faster, create faster, build faster. I can manage with 10-12 dwarves I have T5 or T6 techs and enemy force in overworld is at like 4 or 5 which is nearly the end.

The new items don't make the dwarves run any faster, and that's the slowest part of a large colony for me, which is why I don't bother with them unless necessary.

Digging time is almost nothing when you're trying to build a 500+ tall elevator. Grandfathered pickaxes can dig the four tiles per elevator rail in about the time for someone to bring an elevator from the forge to the elevator at the top of the shaft. By the time you've got an elevator more than about 20 rails tall, travel time for parts completely overwhelms any other part of the process like digging or building.

And people only bring parts one-by-one so there's no benefit to the carry-more items either.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2317611534

So you can imagine how long this took to build these pair of elevators, and they're still nowhere near finished.

I've started dozens of maps, and experimented with a bunch of different ways to optimize the build out process. One was building forge+quarry at regular intervals down so that I can manufacture rails closer to their usage point; but again it doesn't reduce the travel time enough that anything but the 'free' equipment does anything.

In any event, the volume of the dwarves is far more valuable then the skill of the dwarves. Once I hit 20 dwarves I've experimented with just hiring a ton of disposable dwarves and just flagging them as carry+build, and it improves build time more than anything else I've tried so far.

Another build-time improvement I've noticed is to build a scaffolding staircase beside the elevator; I used to just remove my old scaffolding and build the elevator out to replace it, but it had so many weird failure cases with AI, odd placements and other stuff, that it was much more optimal to build down the scaffold then follow it with the elevator later. I didn't have to micromanage all the time.

An unrelated-to-building benefit of volume of dwarves is that wolf/slime dens are much less lethal; if you've only half a dozen dwarves in the same area they'll swarm the slimes and den and they'll be lucky to get more than one wave of slimes out before the source is destroyed.