Monday - a good day as any for an update! Welcome to Update #68 where we've put some extra focus on cleaning up the relationships, backstories and story tags that define your characters and recruits. We're heading into new and exciting territory with the story system and the Casting Director and it was important to take this minute to correct any last issues in the foundation before rolling forward.

This update does not include the new lighting engine (a visual-only improvement to the look of the game). We said in Update #67 that it was "next update" but there always seems to be one more technical hurdle. It will come very soon, but we wanted to get this RPing quality update out to everyone.

If you're enjoying the pace of improvements and steady progress the game is making during Early Access we hope that you will leave a review. Nothing is more important to a small indie developer that having you help us share the game, so we appreciate it!

Must Feed Casting Director!

The Casting Director is the heart of our proc-gen story system. The Director is in charge of picking what new stories to spin into your cyberpunk world and who should fill the available seats in those storylines. It does this by looking at the cast of characters, mercs, recruits and contacts that are within the game.

Starting Character Relationship Fixes

The first big set of updates all come to your starting characters. These characters rolled out of new game with strong backstories and a set of contacts they know. But that data was poorly represented and shown in the roster or the contact screen.

With Update #68, we've retagged everything. This is for both old games and new games. If you load up your previous save, we've done some adjustments to correct the tagging and display for relationships to be bi-direction and to include additional data about why the relationship exists, at the very least helpful pointers back to the backstory.

This also sets up new games very nice, but you don't need to start a new game here.

Recruit Backstories, Relationships and Contacts

In the same vein, the backstories, contacts and tags assigned to the recruits you can find in the game have been less than correctly represented.

First, there was a bug that 33% of the time, a recruit could pick the wrong faction and backstory and you'd basically end up with a recruit in your safehouse who did not match the dialog at all. This is now fixed.

Second, the new contacts that were being created by recruiting all look like Dr. Ashe… oops. This is currently fixed only for new recruits but we're working on how to resolve this in older saves as well.

Third, the backstory Trait, personality tagging, relationship tags with the new contacts, Contact Traits and Tags were all just lacking. Some of it was there but it wasn't as fully-fledged and rich as the Casting Director would like it to be. For new recruits, you'll find a much better set of RPing tagging and data is included after you've met and discussed with the recruit.

New Traits

We're in a cycle of constantly adding new Traits for characters and contacts. We kind of aim to add one or two every time we work on a new recruit, contact or story character. With this update, we've added both Bull-Built (heavy focus on Strength and HP) and Bril (adding Willpower and bonus % to all XP gained!).

Sec AI Avoids Repeat Reboot

While it may have been a boon to see the Sec AI pick something less than optimal, it could also be unfairly difficult or annoying if the Sec AI rebooted security devices twice in a row. Especially if you just spent your turn undoing the reboot … only to have it re-rebooted!

The Sec AI will no longer pick Reboot Devices back to back for Security Escalations. We're continuing to work on adding new options for the Sec AI and improving the sequencing and rule set for what options are available, so please post any F10 bugs, oddities or suggestions you might have.

APU Spiking

We fixed a bug where spiking the APU in a matrix host could result in a Security Escalation at Lvl 0. This bug could basically make the act of spiking the APU a punishment and is now resolved, thankfully.

Now the math behind the rules have been improved. The APU reduces your Sec Tally by 10 points and can gain you one "free Escalation". That is, if you're at Sec Level 2 and the Tally is 4/10 then spiking the APU will take you back to Sec Level 1, Tally 4/10. But when you pass into Sec Level 2, the APU has been corrupted and that Escalation is skipped. We need better representation of this in the visuals, but it has a demonstrable powerful effect now at any Sec Level.

v1.4.47 - 4/1/2024

- Fixed all relationships for starting characters with their contacts (retroactively); bidirectional with details
- Added new Traits Bull-Built (Strength and HP), Bril (Willpower and extra XP)
- Improved Tags and Traits for all recruits and their known contacts (new recruits only)
- Fixed issues where recruits could end up from the wrong faction, without Traits or contacts connections
- Prevented Security AI from unfairly rebooting jammed security devices 2 Turns in a row
- Fixed Matrix bug where spiking the APU could result in a Security Escalation "Level 0" incorrectly
- Fixed tattoo and facial hair shading which had become too light