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The epic conclusion to the UFD expansion is here, bringing with it a major new map, 100 new items, and Cogmind's 10th unique ending!
The above is just one area in which the general "pressure" across normal floors is evolving. Aside from a bug fix related to spotting that should likely result in somewhat lower alert buildup overall, more directly you'll also see (if you have a way to see it :P) that alert decay is now applied gradually instead of in large chunks at greater intervals, resulting in a natural and smooth process but with the same ultimate effect as before.
For the detail-oriented player, scoresheets now also include a complete breakdown of all sources of alert/influence increase and decrease across a run. See the boxed section in this sample excerpt below:
Drone repairs now drain the integrity of corresponding bays upon repair. The process is all automated and uses the best options available at the time, including inventory-based bays; the costs are also fairly lenient at the moment due to the lack of drone stat changes, so doesn't really have much impact on normal drone use, just getting that mechanic in there now.
You can now reverse the comparison between two items' info--there's a nifty [REVERSE] button to click, or hit the 'r' key:
For some extra audiovisual reinforcement when a part is forcefully removed by some mechanic, there's new animation and SFX for that:
It's generally pretty obvious when it happens, and hard to forget, but now there's also a persistent HUD border animation to go along with being stuck in non-beam-type stasis effects:
When Terrain Scanners or other non-direct intel methods discover machine locations, they're added to your intel marker records as normal, rather than just being visible on the map:
For those of you who would like all known Heavy/Behemoth/Sentry guard positions to be autocommented on your map, there are separate settings for each of these in the user/advanced.cfg file (and the manual has more information about their behavior):
The new advanced dynamicPathDistanceTime option shows you the exact amount of time required to reach a given destination given your current speed while manually highlighting a path to a destination:
Here's a fun one--now you can see just how many kills and damage have been dealt out by your favorite Botcube, NPC ally, or random Hunter follower who just seems to be casually murdering all comers:
It's now possible to see the actual amount of integrity supplies remaining in your allied Mechanic to provide repairs--not that many people ever hit this limit (and no it's not some new restrictive limit so don't expect it to become a problem, it's always been there!), but a select few RIF-heads do indeed run into this (shown here with its context help copied from the manual):
Use any of the normal directional keys to control the evolution UI (arrows/vi/numpad), not just letters or mouse:
Among its new data entries the scoresheet includes multiple bigger new sections, including some pretty cool ones like a breakdown of all the infowar used across the run (17 types total! although this sample only shows 6 of them):
Like the Fabrication list we now also have a list of every repair performed and the item's original state:
And now we'll know just how many spare parts of each type people are carrying through their runs (extra replacement parts in inventory at a given time), and how many of those went completely unused/discarded later:
I'm sure these sections will provide some very interesting aggregate data to share later in the usual places!
A really important QoL update that I don't have an image for is actually a fix to a new bug introduced in Beta 14 while getting rid of the old issue of a combat AI sometimes hopping over another in an attempt to reach Cogmind (even around a corner or without flight capabilities). So that original issue was fixed, but in the process apparently introduced another unwanted behavior where groups of bots might block each other, and individuals rerouting as a result could sometimes even temporarily split up roaming patrols that were supposed to be working together. If you noticed more lone combat bots wandering around in Beta 14, that was likely the reason and the latest behavior updates should resolve that now.
Concussive RPG explosions now push items away from the source:
For those of you who know what ECA is, there's a convenient reminder of your current level directly in the HUD, which will also update in real time so you can see the effect your actions are having on it:
Any PSU Rigger lovers out there? Of course there are! Well, you also now have the option to use your improvised proximity explosives as time bombs instead:
It's now possible to output the entire combat log as messages are generated, for any external realtime monitoring and processing needs (advanced.cfg: combatLogStreaming):
Cogmind's 11th annual review
THE UFD HAS ARRIVED. A whole new faction introducing new robot classes, mechanics, and a huge collection of lore and dialogue across many dozens of new encounters. This expansion includes 83 new items for you to find, salvage, steal, fabricate, or piece together, most featuring new mechanics and thereby further enhancing your existing build ideas or enabling a range of fresh alternatives.
In a general departure from other potential allied factions, you'll find there are often some items found locally which you must be hostile to obtain, though some of these are incredibly rewarding in and of themselves (alongside some potential drawbacks later, for being hostile). The overall balance and considerations regarding these particular items will be changing somewhat in Beta 15, so don't worry about those too much yet, although patrons testing out the prerelease have been more than happy to murder everyone to get everything that they want xD (it's not exactly easy, but if well-prepared yeah you can do it...)
Another new feature sure to be of use for mouse users is the ability to swap pairs of attached and inventory parts back and forth by clicking on the ticks to the left of attached parts, which are there to indicate you are still in possession of whatever part was in that slot before:
As you can see, once the cursor is held over the tick/button for a moment, it will also pop up all the names of existing valid pairs.
We now have a dedicated indicator in the part info window (as well as corresponding context help if you click on it, as usual) for those which are destroyed on removal, the term for which is FRAGILE. Originally this behavior was specific to certain part types, Processors and by extension Hackware, but over the years for balance reasons this behavior has been extended to a number of other special parts, so we ideally need to know which those are before attaching them, mainly for those of you encountering them for the first time. Sample:
The main HUD also has a few siutuational updates such as reflecting corruption immunity status if applicable, and a change in the RIF button to include the number of abilities known (adds useful information to screenshots!):
That button doesn't normally display in keyboard mode, which accesses RIF info via the spacebar menu, but in order to display the RIF ability count it will now report the same information as non-interactive text.
Beta 13 and its new modal UI layouts were made possible in part through a combination of being able to hide the inventory and even shrink the parts list by removing type headers to keep the inventory visible through a greater number of depths. But some players reportedly really liked having no part type headers at all, even when removing them was not necessary to save space, so by request I've added a new advanced.cfg feature "alwaysCondenseSlotTypeHeaders" to always hide those regardless of slot count. For example this is what it would look like upon just starting a new run with the initial 7 slots:
Another new option (itemLabelIntegrityPercent) implemented by request replaces raw integrity values displayed alongside map item labels with percent integrity values:
Personally I don't think this is as useful raw numbers, since the general integrity percent is already reflected in the label color, but some apparently prefer it regardless. Try it out if you're in that boat!
That's the path shown when moving the cursor around (although above brightened by holding Ctrl-Alt, which is how you could always highlight the path for better temporary visibility). Keyboard players normally won't see it, but can also now display a path to their examine/targeting cursor by holding Ctrl-Alt (and technically path there via the spacebar menu!).
They've also got some new complementary abilities to facilitate pathing, such as pushing smaller/regular-sized bots out of the way, as in this demo:
This and related changes do, however, mean that hostile multitile robots are going to be that much scarier if they discover your presence, so look out for that! Finally proper nightmarish Behemoth encounters :D
You can go meet this fellow today. Play nice :)
(animation by Maiker, depicting a particular special type of bot you may know about)
I promised this expansion would be added to the development queue once we reached 800 Steam reviews, based on the same premise as the Merchants Guild, which I write about below and actually came in an earlier announcement, but in terms of long-term development organization it's better to build this particular expansion first.
They will become a significant overarching mechanic, albeit mainly a potential threat to players who challenge the status quo in Complex 0b10. If you prove you're not some regular Derelict by repeatedly causing more trouble across multiple maps, or even just being more problematic for the Complex in other ways, you may end up with one of these guys hunting you, and they are not your normal enemy. Almost all of them will have special abilities beyond anything possessed by current robots, including new unique AI and behaviors that will add new dimensions of challenge.
To accommodate this change, all layouts have undergone a few modifications as well, including moving the transient HOSTILES button over to the regular message log side (this makes room for another likely button to appear next to ZOOM in a future version), and reordering the top-center console buttons in general (LAIC -> AILC), meaning their F-key hotkeys have also been shifted to maintain the same order, if you're using those.
As usual, keyboard access (-/=) automatically opens this history as well.
Not long after that, while the spreadsheets were hot I couldn't help also taking a preliminary look at player preferences regarding our major new interface features in Beta 13 (map zooming and upscaled UI layouts). I posted usage graphs and analysis of the figures here
Of course anyone on a smaller 720~800px display can also use these new fonts, though it's too bad the Deck has such a low resolution and isn't at least just 10 pixels taller, which would put it in range of a nice font/tile size increase across the board!
For more historical info and graphs, you can also check out my annual reviews
So yeah, in summary, price going up next month, and fun new releases coming, too, but... those not quite next month :P. They won't take forever, though--we'll be seeing somewhat faster releases down the line!
A pair of awesome meme videos also dropped recently, including one titled "The Cogmind Beta 13 Experience" by Youngster (not very spoilery, but fun and nicely done!) and another dubbed "Cogmind Slander" by u/dogawesome, which is a good summary of a lot of Cogmind experiences, and in that sense it contains a lot of spoilers, but probably makes relatively little sense to anyone who hasn't actually played, or moreover played a lot. There's a huge number of lore and content references in there though, for those who can relate ;)
We later used a hidden spoiler area to switch to 100% stealth for the remainder of the run (okay, except for the times our friends murdered everyone...)
We've got some new bots capable of taking advantage of the relatively new capability of moving through so-called "twisted machinery," and since they appear so early in the world, at the time you may not have weapons strong enough to actually hit or hurt them (or realize you need to use them) while they're hiding in said machinery, but you also can't see it since they're obscuring it... so now we've got cause to blink them in this particular situation:
The blinking effect doesn't start until a few seconds after they've come into sight or entered your current map view, in case there is other more important status info you need to know, like whether they've spotted you or not, but otherwise they'll keep doing that while it's relevant.
A number of other message types can appear there as well, including perhaps most importantly any time you prelearn data about future maps! Also applies to hacking feedback effects, and this new look was also extended to our original advanced.cfg botnet notice.
That was the first quick patch--but there's more! This second one went out today.
While most mouse users scroll the inventory with the wheel, those buttons at the bottom/top of a larger inventory technically also scroll the contents, but in the past only did so one at a time. Those now serve as near page-wise scrolling buttons, which may be more convenient for those who actually want to use them:
For a while now it's bugged me that there seemed to be some issue with completely resetting the subcategory part label system, and sure enough there was! Pressing Escape will now truly and completely reset it, which not many probably noticed before, but there'd be a short duration during which it could affect whether pure keyboard players could access the extended combat log with the '-' key after having recently used the categorical labels. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, it's the fact that you can specify that you only want to see map labels for certain types of parts by cycling through them, for example only power sources, or propulsion, or matter, etc., instead of everything, which after a big battle can obviously get a little cramped!
(You get these via Tab/Shift-Tab or -/= while showing item labels.)
WARNING: Upscaled and zoomable Cogmind has landed :D
That particular image happens to be 1440p, but if you fullscreen it on another resolution (for example 1080p) you'll ultimately get the same effect. (Many layout images in this announcement can be opened to their much larger form.)
And yep, if you want to you can also even zoom the map in a modal layout, resulting in this (another 1080p sample, here using one of several new fonts: Tamsyn):
Of course, as you can see reducing the number of rows in our terminal also meant shrinking our map view, to which the answer is our third UI layout option: "Modal," in order to see more map by hiding some windows (1080p below, see also 1440p
Also whenever you want it there's "Modal" zoomed, if you must :)
That should give you a pretty good overview of the new sizing options possible in Beta 13, and you'll also find yet more new font styles to choose from, including some typefaces at sizes they were not previously available at. Support is included all the way up to 5K resolutions.
On restart, this change also resets your font and calculates a new optimal map size for you, so if you were using an alternative font set you may need to select it again, and some of the styles may be different. Everyone loading up Beta 13 for the first time will automatically find themselves in the Semi-modal layout, our new default.
However, this change doesn't occur until you have evolved enough part slots that the UI space is needed, and there is a lot of QoL to make your modal inventory experience as effortless as possible. For example many actions with even just the potential to require inventory interaction will automatically open and close it for you, such as grabbing a part to drag-dop it with the mouse:
The example above also shows further interactions after manually using the new INVENTORY button, and you can choose to open the inventory and leave it open while doing other things if you like, such as consecutive manipulation of a group of nearby parts. The GIF upload gets kinda messed up a bit at the bottom for some reason, but you can also see that any time an item is added to the inventory, even while it's closed there is a new indicator down there to show the addition.
Note: Keyboard players can use the 'i' key to toggle the inventory. How convenient!
If you end up not liking that feature and would prefer your inventory instead simply disappear earlier, there is an advanced.cfg option to toggle this behavior ("condenseSlotTypeHeaders").
There are advanced.cfg options if you want to adjust the number of messages, or how long each remains visible.
Because zooming reduces how far ahead you, the player, can see, you now also have the option to manually designate a new view centerpoint, useful if you're more interested in a particular direction. Mouse users hold the right mouse button to do this, while keyboard players can use 's' ('s'et centerpoint) in examine mode. To restore the centering behavior to normal, just do the same at your own location.
Keyboard centerpoint demo taking advantage of cursor jumping:
Because doing this via keyboard is somewhat less convenient, in keyboard mode there are also algorithmic approaches that will automatically adjust the centerpoint depending on movement direction and the surroundings, like so:
This behavior normally only applies if zoomed in while using the Non-modal UI layout (which has a larger map to begin with) and there are multiple algorithms to choose from (or deactivate completely, but I've found that once you get used to it the default algorithm can be pretty useful). You can also temporarily set a manual centerpoint to override it. These features and more related options are covered in detail in the manual's new section on "Map Zooming" under "Accessibility."
There are offscreen markers for newly-spotted-but-not-yet-labeled items:
There are offscreen markers for sensor data (GIF's not uploading right but you get the idea):
And where it's important, the map view will automatically shift to show offscreen events of importance, like a new threat:
Autoshifting will respond to Watcher reporting, Operator spotting, Heavy active sensor sources, special machine pings... basically the kinds of things you will almost certainly want to see. A lot of this behavior can also be customized via advanced.cfg.
For a range of visual samples and explanations of what you can find in the new combat log, see SITREP #51.
The world map was rebuilt to animate instantly on being opened rather than tracing your route!
The Plasma Cutter has a completely different use now, instead for safely cutting up explosive machines, or making it through almost any blast door given enough time.
I discovered that simulated debris from destruction out of sight and not nearby you was only working in ASCII mode, not tiles, leading to somewhat cleaner environments in the latter case even where a previous battle took place. Here's a comparison before and after the fix, showing what a room looks like after a battle between some derelicts and 0b10 forces also destroyed a nearby machine:
Obviously if there happen to be any Workers nearby they'll clean it up anyway, but still, it should be there until then! (or it's a map with no Serfs, or they're all far away or whatever)
This was to regain the keys m/i for easy keyboard access to zooming (after also moving the original 'z' intel to 'm'ap intel) and modal inventory, our new UI features. Most people purely rely on type sort anyway, the largest inventories have shrunk since Beta 11, and the mass/integrity info can be relatively easily obtained and parsed by switching to the appropriate visualization mode anyway.
And adding a new item to your inventory automatically sorts the list, scrolls to the new item's position, and highlights it for a moment:
(The original behavior was to always scroll to the end of your inventory list and put it there.)
Once your score is uploaded (if you have opted in), the game over screen will also show the leaderboards URL for those who may not be aware of it. (As usual the full scoresheet still includes direct URLs to your online scoresheet data as well, at the end.)
While using Refit at a Repair Station is usually going to be an easier option if that's your goal, in the interest of fun environmental interactions, destroyed Repair Stations may now randomly spill some of their backup parts:
Matter salvage is now capable of merging when it drops! See how this Recycler's destruction simply grows the original matter pile below it:
Similarly, matter spilled on top of a collection of parts and matter will sometimes attempt to instead combine with nearby existing matter. Across larger battlefields this can result in somewhat more concentrated matter and a little extra room for salvageable components that might otherwise be pushed further away, or crushed outright due to floor space being taken up by excessive matter. This had became somewhat more common given the newer ability of kinetic cannon strikes to blast usable matter off targets (even though that effect was already capable of matter merging).
Many of the new items I described or alluded to
Early this month
A mix of message log (left) and combat log (right):
Above the map are the familiar buttons for interacting with what is normally visible in those consoles:
See below for some additional sample screenshots from the Modal UI layout (open images to full size if necessary).
Late game (not zoomed, 1080p):
The same scene as above, but in 1440p and using one of several new fonts added to Beta 13 (Tamsyn):
If you want to see the Modal layout in action, earlier this week I streamed a run making use of it, actually the conclusion to my last stream that began with the other/Semi-modal layout:
-
I recently finished my Adventures in Map Zooming
Before we get to that, another important notice: Since last week's introduction of a new fully-upscaled UI layout, I also had the opportunity to stream that layout and demonstrate it in action while talking about its various features:
That’s low-hanging fruit, though. We’re going to need much more powerful QoL...
Non-mouse players can similarly set a manual centerpoint via keyboard, which is still fairly fast if you're familiar with jumping the examine cursor:
Keyboard players can also take advantage of several types of algorithms for automatically adjusting their centerpoint while zoomed, trying to shift the view without any manual input in order to keep interesting features visible (it seems weird and takes some getting used to, but at least in the non-modal UI layout it works as a pretty nice supplementary feature):
Threats appear on a dark red background, while non-hostile robots use dark-green. As usual, the colors used are different if colorblind mode is active.
Dark offscreen sensor data markers with a low-frequency blink out effect:
Indicators are great, but still not quite enough. After all, what do you generally want to do when a new threat comes into view? A quick visual check! What exactly are they, what’s their status, do they have company, what’s the surrounding environment like... These can be important questions to answer before making your next decision, and by default Cogmind already pauses for a moment in these situations in order to let the player have a moment to take it in (and avoid accidentally wasting valuable turns), so why not also use that opportunity to automatically shift the view over to spot the threat?
Another autoshifting example, in this case simultaneously spotting enemies down two different corridors and shifting to put them all in view:
The full article
There you have it, anyone planning to stick with the original 60-row UI layout and combining that with map zooming will likely be making heavy use of many of these features, which will also come in handy even when not zoomed in if using a new modal layout.
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