Image Credit: Tynan Sylvester YouTube Channel
What are the Rimworld Update 1.4 Biotech Expansion Key Features And Patch Notes?
Tynan Sylvester, creator of Rimworld and game designer for massive hits such as Bioshock Infinite has just announced the new expansion to his passion project via Twitter.
Tynan has promised an absolute space boatload of new features including gene-modding, new mechs, super mechanoid bosses and so much more. It’s a 14-month period well spent in our opinion.
A release date hasn’t been mentioned yet, but update 1.4 is available now for Steam Branch testers and Biotech should be out in a matter of weeks.
Luckily enough for us, RimWorld has posted a massive key feature and patch notes piece on their Steam RimWorld Events thread. We’ve taken the liberty of putting it below, but here’s the original source alongside the RimWorld update 1.4 public changelog:
See info on the RimWorld Update 1.4 Biotech Expansion key features and full patch notes/changelog below:
Startup performance improvements: We spent months optimizing launch and game loading times. In our tests launching RimWorld and loading savegames are roughly 37% faster! On an example system, that’s a startup time improvement from 33 to 21 seconds. Loading a fresh savegame dropped from 7.9 to 4.6 seconds.
Painting and color customization for walls, floors, furniture, and lights: Give your colony a custom look by painting the walls, floors, and furniture of your settlement any of a huge variety of colors using dye harvested from the tinctoria crop. Install a range of new colored carpets in your colonists’ living spaces. Set the mood with lamps that you can set to any color to create your romantic rouge bedroom or an eerie fluorescent laboratory. We expect screenshots to get even more wild thanks to this.
Styles always available: You can now use all styles of all buildings, items, and floors and visually customize your colony even without Ideology active.
Actually useful shelves that store lots of stuff: Fill your storerooms with shelves, which can now hold up to 3 stacks of most items. (Our testers were very excited with this one!) There is also a 1-tile mini-shelf. Shelves should help to keep your colony tidy and organized, and protect your items.
Two new turret types: We added two new turret types. The foam turret spits firefoam to extinguish nearby blazes. The rocketswarm turret is a defensive launcher – when triggered, it blankets a wide area in a barrage of small missiles. It is excellent against large groups of weaker enemies, but only works when you press the button, for extra drama!
Starting possessions: Depending on backstory, your starting colonists might come with their own possessions! Not only does it make it a bit easier to start with imperfect colonists, it also gives them a personal touch.
Rot stink: Keep rotten corpses and meat away from your colonists. In addition to being disturbing to look at, decomposing tissue now releases rot stink gas. Colonists that are chronically exposed to rot stink may develop the new “lung rot” disease. Keep extra empty graves and garbage dumps available for times when you’re overwhelmed with bodies!
More prisoners to trade, release, and interact with: In addition to all the prisoners you got before, now you’ll get a new class of prisoner who is unwaveringly loyal to their home. They can’t be recruited, but they can be sold, sent home for diplomatic benefits, used for gene extraction or blood farming in Biotech, or used in rituals and enslaved in Ideology. We did it this way because we wanted to make all the uses for prisoners besides recruitment more viable. Adding a new stream of unwaveringly loyal prisoners does that without destroying the population progression balance. They can be disabled in the storyteller settings.
New mod manager UI: Managing your mods is really easy and smooth with the new UI. Mods are now visibly split into active and inactive lists. You can access your mod options directly from the manager screen. You can also save and load mod lists and mass unsubscribe to any outdated or disabled mods. Press CTRL + left click to select multiple mods and drag them around. Also, new art banners!
New mod mismatch window: Mods are now displayed in three columns: added, missing, and shared. You can save your current mod list and load it later on.
New options menu: We’ve organized the options menu into tabs. (Mods get their own tab!) It is much easier to navigate.
Heat overlay: A togglable heat overlay on the map visually shows you how chilly or hot it is indoors and outdoors.
Quest search bar: A search bar in the quests menu to help you sort through all your available, active, and historical quests.
Tile inspector: Shows you the details of a specific tile when you hover over it and press the “alt” key.
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