Happy Thursday! It's that time again - we've got another solid update live.

Stalker Balancing

Let's start with Stalkers. We've had nearly unanimous feedback that these guys were much too difficult and didn't feel fun in most cases. They've recieved a lot of love these past few weeks, and now spawn much more intelligently based on a combination of factors. Your Genome Point level will now impact how many Stalkers spawn, to the point where in the first few levels they will not spawn at all. They also do less damage, spawn a bit further away from the player, and more… check out the changelog below for the full details.

Game Mode Customization

The next most exciting point this week is new Game Mode customization settings. These allow you to tailor your experience beyond the Permadeath/Non-Permadeath settings we previously implemented. This goes both ways - you can toggle some hardcore settings (like Seekers always being hostile, or no ranged weapons spawning) to other more sublte tweaks, like decreasing the rate at which your Hunger depletes.

Optimization

On the optimization front, we've done a pass through over 1000 textures, reducing the size of the game files on disk by rough 1GB6 with little to no impact on in-game quality. This should reduce memory usage while in game, as well as smoothing out certain types of in game loading and performance. We're still waiting to get confirmation of the Level Streaming bug being fixed on Unity's end, but rest assured that is still very much in the works.

And More!

There's a few more bugs and tweaks in there as well, if you care to read the full log below! We'd love to hear your feedback on all of this, especially the Stalker balancing and Game Mode customization. It would also be cool to hear whether or not you're seeing load time or performance improvements from the optimizations we've done.

As always, let us know your thoughts in the comments and forums!

Features

• Game Mode Customization - added various toggles and scaling modes, which can be selected when starting a New Game. Some settings can drastically increase difficulty, while other can make the game less punishing, such as decreasing Hunger and Thirst decrease rate:
• Always Wanted - Seekers are always aggressive and attack on sight
• Melee Only - Only melee weapons can be found or crafted
• Wounded Effect - Move more slowly when health is low
• Scaling - Enemy Damage
• Scaling - Enemy Toughness (enemy knockback chance)
• Scaling - Hunger and Thirst decrease rate
• Added a light sensor to the AARM, making it easier to determine the light level in an area without placing down a Solar Charger or Hypdroponics

Balance/Improvements

• Optimized Texture Settings across over a thousand textures; size of build on disk has been reduced significantly, and memory usage should be lower and somewhat more stable during gameplay
• Optimized several scripts, which should save some memory
• Huge Balance pass on Stalkers:
• Increased Cloaked sound effect volume
• Increased spawn distance from player by 10m
• Reduced damage from 40 to 20
• Added an alarm that plays before Stalkers begin spawning
• Reduced max Stalkers spawned at any given time to 3
• Stalkers to spawn per night will only increase by 1 if all Stalkers in the current light have been killed
• "Respawn" Deaths (in permadeath, with no cryo core) now reset the Stalker count to 0 (previously the count continued to increase even after death)
• Max stalkers per night is now capped by the players Genome Point level (spent, not earned) divided by 3.5 rounded down. This means that the few first levels NO stalkers will spawn, then gradually increase every few GP levels until reaching an absolute max of 20 stalkers @ GP 70
• "Continue" Deaths (non permadeath, or permadeath w/ cryo core active) - Disables stalkers for the remainder of the current night, cuts number of stalkers to spawn for the next night in half (also rounded down)

Fixes

• Seekers no longer bleed when hit
• Fixed Solar Charger missing its description
• Fixed Solar Charger + and ++ version not providing increased charging rates
• PAMELA vocals now correctly respect Audio Volume settings
• Fixed a bug where loading a game would respawn all Stalkers for the night regardless how many were killed previously
• Fixed a bug where sleeping/loading a game after midnight would not trigger Stalker spawns that night