Hello, everyone! I've been watching your lets plays, reading your bug reports, listening to your suggestions [strike]and reading your personal mail[/strike] - erm, I mean: here's a collection of balance-related tweaks made in response to your feedback: [quote]NOTE: Many of these changes may not show up for you until you start a new game.[/quote]

Balance Changes

• Food & Water - Even the hardcore survivalists agreed these were punishing. So at normal difficulty you can now survive while drinking only once every three days & eating only once every week. Many new water sources have been placed in the game to make finding water easier, and you can now drink from lakes. The Civilization bonus you get from following paths and staying in populated areas is more potent so eating / drinking isn't a concern until you're in the Wild. (Note: In the future you'll be able to reverse these changes using custom difficulty settings.)
• Temperature - This system has been overhauled. Temperatures are milder in general and more consistent with climates. Structure interiors are always comfortably warm and cave temperatures are now suitable for shelter. Clothing can no longer cause you to overheat.
• Clothing - Shirts, pants, boots & gloves have been added to the game, and more varieties are incoming. You'll start the game with a basic set of clothing and you can craft more.
• Crafting - You no longer need to select blueprints before crafting. Several items have been reworked to be less expensive to craft (like the Canteen). You now start the game knowing how to refine metal and I've placed forges in the University area for public use. Charcoal is dropped by nearly all burnable items.
• Money - It's a lot more scarce. Purses contain considerably less money than before. Luminite no longer respawns indefinitely. Your cash is automatically converted to base currency when buying things.
• Animals - You're far more likely to find leather on dead animals. Many creatures are easier to kill in general. You can shear sheep for wool, pluck chickens for feathers and milk cows.
• Reputation - Damaging another person's goods will cause reputation loss. The rep system will play a bigger role now that money is more scarce.
• Paths - Several more arterial paths have been laid down in the South. More are coming.

Major bugs I'm still working on:

• The post-prologue crash is still happening for some of you. I'm still seeing more success cases with every build, and your reports have helped me pinpoint the exact cause, so thank you for that. I'll keep at it.
• Darkness Issue - The game is unplayably dark on a handful of machines. I'm frankly mystified by this one. I've made no real progress in figuring out the root cause. Hopefully the new brightness settings will help in the meantime.
• Disappearing buildings - the cause is known so now it's a matter of fixing the problem without causing more bugs in the process. I'm still seeking / interviewing programmers who can focus solely on this issue while I handle everything else. (Feel free to email me at frontiers.game@gmail.com if you're interested.)
• That one bug you really hoped I'd fix in the next update because it's way more important than balancing hunger, and besides how hard can it be to fix anyway? Yeah, that one's still in there. But seriously: don't assume that time spent on balance means bug [x] is getting forgotten or ignored. I know it sounds weird but that's not really how it works. A lot of these bugs have to get fixed a little bit at a time so the fixing doesn't break everything else. It's a [strike]living nightmare[/strike] long and difficult process. (Just kidding it's not so bad.)