This is definitely one of the larger updates so far for Mercury Fallen and I’m very excited to announce that Alpha 0.07 is now available on Itch.IO. Lots of great new features, changes and fixes.

Ailments

Colonists can now contract ailments, that negatively affect colonist attributes in different ways, from performing various jobs . Some ailments are minor and will heal themselves over time, but all can be healed at the MedBay.

MedBay

The doctor job role finally comes in to play by treating patients at the Medi-Bed in the new MedBay room. Doctors will remove Ailments and restore colonist health. Colonists will seek treatment if their health is low and/or have an ailment.

Attribute Visibility

Work Speed and Move Speed attributes are now visible in the colonists info window under Stats. New Quirks added which affect work speed.

UI Improvements

The build window now has a better break down of requirements including power & water requirements.

Colonist management window now has a button on the menu bar at the bottom. The Colonist Management screen can still be toggled by pressing the ‘Tab’ key.

Various Improvements

The crafting stations queue has been fixed so that colonists will now craft the first item they can based on available resources instead of doing nothing if they can’t build the first item in the queue.

Various changes to resource requirements, new Quirks, bug fixes and more. For the full list of changes please see the release notes below.

Release Notes

Features

• New MedBay Floor
• New Medi-Bed
• Added Ailments which are contracted by various actions/events. Ailments that are job action specific are less likely, or won’t happen at all, at higher skill levels of a job. A colonist can have a maximum of 3 ailments at any time and can be removed by getting treated at the Medi-Bed. Some ailments expire naturally over time.
• New notifications added when a colonist contracts an ailment
• Smarts stat now increases job skill experience gain by 10% per level of Smarts
• Added setting for Mouse rotation speed
• Added several more Quirks
• Work Speed now visible in Colonist stats
• Move Speed now visible in Colonist stats
• New Colonists button to main button bar to open management interface
• New object selection sound effect

Changes

• Default mouse rotation speed increased
• Colonists will now stop current action to handle a critical need such as eating/sleeping if the current action can be interrupted. Not all actions are interruptible.
• New colonist animation for Bio-Refiner interaction
• Reduced speed of job level progression for some job roles
• Increased resource requirements for some floors
• Changes to how experience is gained when performing jobs. Job experience earned is better balanced between different types of jobs.
• Changed work speed algorithm for better results at higher levels. Initial work speeds are now a bit slower.
• Power/Water requirements for objects now shown in build window
• Floor icon now shown in build window
• Cloning Chamber now requires MedBay Floor
• Cloning Chamber now requires separate Cloning data recovery
• Increased data recovery times
• Data Recovery window now shows time remaining
• Improved performance of hunger attribute handling
• Updated new game map colors

Fixes

• Fixed colonist path movement to resolve the issue of colonists not reaching their destination when in Hyper speed.
• Fixed issue with Hauling job not earning experience
• Fixed floor geometry so that colonists and objects don’t stick through the floor slightly
• Fix to sleep on floor action to stop colonists from sleeping inside objects
• Object placement now correctly takes any interaction spots into account. This means that you can no longer place objects facing a wall or another object if it overlaps that interaction spot.
• Fixed interaction spots not showing correctly on some objects
• Updated colonist wander behavior to resolve colonists getting stuck in wandering action in some cases
• Colonist now rotate to face a container they are interacting with
• Fixed another instance of a wall corner showing the wrong wall material
• Colonist will more immediately stop performing active job if it’s disabled in the job list
• Colonist will now craft next available item in craft queue if first item isn’t craftable due to missing resources
• Fixed issue with craft queue appearing out of order after removing and re-adding an item.
• Fixed issue with colonist getting stuck if item is removed from a craft queue while attempting to craft that item
• Fixed error that could occur during crop growth and harvesting