Beta 53B of Clockwork Empires is now on the Experimental Branch on Steam. Major Changes:

• added lights
• Naturalist's office overhauled (not quite done): Naturalists can be set to Scout, Hunt, or Survey Minerals. Related: ore vein distribution on map has been redone.
• colonists with high despair will now cease to work and do despairing things (there are various methods to alleviate this, esp. via Pub and Chapel)
• upkeep costs significantly reduced, various bugs fixed, and "Advanced Workbench" added which can produce upkeep trunks (and other things) en masse

• added ability to attach lights to static props (& tool support for this)
• added lights to a number of existing modules
• you can now build lampposts
• added a first pass at game over screen
• the building commands menu is now split into more subcategories
• added Rogue Artist event
• new module: Advanced Workbench; allows creation of upkeep trunks, bricabrac, boxed modules in bulk
• rewrote a number of building descriptions to make their usage clearer
• Naturalists now can be set to various modes including: Scouting, Hunting, Mineral Surveying
• a Scouting Naturalist can see extremely far, modified by naturalism skill
• a Hunting Naturalist will hunt - and will attempt to find game if none is visible (only Naturalists & crew may hunt now)
• a Mineral Surveying Naturalist surveys minerals in a normal way
• animal butchery now returns stacks of meat, like other resource-exploitation jobs
• removed Cot from Barracks
• updated some icons
• more traders won't show up if some traders are already visiting your colony
• requesting traders via Foreign Office requires that no traders be on the map already
• steppe biome now uses lower hill generator
• camera tutorial now mentions that spacebar pauses the game
• booze commodities are now crates when not being drunk
• Booze Vats now required to increase Pub drink stock capacity
• foreigners who die inside your colony will now automatically receive burial
• despairing colonists will cure themselves using Laudanum distributed from the Pub
• balance: added opium to traders
• balance: further upkeep nerfing (deal with it)
• balance: nerfed upkeep costs EVEN MORE
• balance: animal meat output increased
• balance: killing for the first time gives a harsher emotional impact
• balance: colonists with over 50 despair will start freaking out and cease to work until their despair is under 20 (If possible they will avail themselves of pub/chapel services to speed up recovery)
• FIXED: all instances of gathering materials for construction now require that you own said materials
• FIXED: error in controlling skill for Foreign Office work
• FIXED: you can un-designate trade goods and the green outline will disappear
• FIXED: Public House will no longer be stocked with booze you do not own
• FIXED: added additional check during character damage calc due to scripterror after attempt to damage deleted character
• FIXED: logic error in upkeep job creation causes building with exactly 1 upkeep cost to not perform upkeep correctly
• FIXED (53A): scripterror doing QoL string creation after drinking tea
• FIXED: traders will no longer appear w/o trade goods in their hands
• FIXED 53A: House UI wonkiness corrected
• FIXED 53A: upkeep tooltip displays brought in line with actual upkeep values
• FIXED: uncommon scripterror upon shiftchange for unfinished building when left unfinished for a very long time
• FIXED: trade goods now correctly un-designate
• FIXED: tooltip info persists across save/load
• FIXED: an issue where for initial pause tooltips for characters were broken
• FIXED: Work crew panel now displays the name of a workshop/assigned zone if there is one (instead of "No Assignment")
• FIXED: large, complicated race condition
• FIXED: game locks up suspending or closing a job where a job is being cancelled, but the FSM hasn't picked it up yet
• FIXED: weird crash loading save games where you have a beacon with an interactive object with no message receiver, and no I don't know how this happens either but we handle it now
• FIXED: a bug that was preventing colonists from getting memories sometimes
• FIXED: "you need a barracks" warning firing when you already have a barracks
• FIXED: button bug with mines
• FIXED: mine output bug in deeper stratum
• FIXED: infinite new ore veins in mine
• FIXED: weird occasional scripterror when creating something in a workshop
• FIXED: bug in "Stahlmark Smithing Prowess" event where it failed to track how many iron bars you had made
• FIXED: unified name of all the variables for despair
• FIXED: weird one-off script error with pathfinding not aborting correctly