Heat Update 19 - Early Access Transition, Merchants, Bankers, and Outlaws

We have been working hard on Heat the past few months and put together a large update. Heat will be transitioning out of Early Access with this update, as we have now completed our internal roadmap that we set upon ourselves a year and a half ago when we first released Heat on Steam.

In that time Heat has become much more stable, optimized, and has received many new features, many of which were community suggestions. However, even with the optimizations we gained, Heat is still a graphics heavy game requiring a high-end PC. As it was designed and built from the ground up for high end PCs due to its use of high-quality photo scanned graphics and always online nature. While this has hurt the game’s success in the review department, we have always tried our best to be upfront about it by listing the minimum and recommended system specs on the Steam store page, and by doing our best to optimize as much as we could since release. In hindsight, we would not have gone so heavy on the graphics, as it really limited the number of players that could play. Hardware (GPUs and CPUs) no longer improve as quickly year-over-ear as they once did, and it has become much more expensive to upgrade a PC as the technology improves.

Now that we have left Early Access, we will continue to support the game, and start work on another update. In the next update, we plan on refactoring seasons and weather, adding temperature, making design changes to how these systems work in Homestead vs MP, and introducing new audio effects to many areas for additional audio polish.

This update contains many new features, design changes, audio, and bug fixes.

One of the areas we had yet to flesh out was the towns. With this update, Towns have been given a big upgrade and now are more alive with NPC Merchants throughout Washington, Tombstone, and Sacayo. You can buy and sell to them, and each town has some unique goods for sale in which you can trade between towns for a profit. Merchants sell items you cannot buy from the shipping bin catalogue, and are a convenient way to sell your items when traveling.

Innkeepers have also been added, whereby you can sleep at the Inns in single player, or heal there in multiplayer for a small price. We also added a bank in town which grants you the ability to gain interest on the money you deposit at the bank. However, you can only deposit and withdraw from the bank in person, so you have to visit town in order to do so.

Players can now buy and gift a dowry to any townsfolk in order to buy their affection. Also, the train stations can now be used to fast travel from town to another location along the tracks.

If you decide to become an Outlaw, shooting at townsfolk, you will now receive Heat, and have the law chase you down.

Homestead has also received many improvements based on player feedback. For example, we have added the ability for players to place items in tent or tepee zones, and the ability to fast travel between beds without dropping items. This allows you to explore the world and set up base camps that you can save at and fast travel between.

Base stamina has been largely increased in Homestead, and we implemented some community requested features such as yawning, and giving player visual ques when their stamina is getting very low.

Alongside these features, there are many new server settings, bug fixes, server-side optimizations, and design improvements.

We are taking the servers down and rolling them back up in order to process the update. We will be wiping the servers with this update. Community servers can choose whether they wish to wipe or not.

If you experience a crash, please visit this thread for troubleshooting (sometimes Steam doesn't download the update properly and you need to re-verify your files) - https://steamcommunity.com/app/656240/discussions/0/1777136225016630475/

Here are the changes for Update 19:

• Added Merchants to Sacayo, Tombstone, and Washington. These Merchants may offer better prices than the Shipping Catalogue. - Added Innkeepers to Sacayo, Tombstone, and Washington. The player will sleep until the next morning in Homestead mode, else be healed in multiplayer. - Added Bank Tellers to Tombstone and Washington. The bank offers a safe place to store cash and earn interest. - Added Travel Agents to the Tombstone and Washington train stations. The agent offers fast travel along the track at a weight-based price. - Added the Wedding Dowry item, allowing a player to buy a Townsfolk's affection. - Townsfolk no longer count toward a player's wildlife spawn limits. - Killing townsfolk now gives the offender and nearby allies a Heat Level. - Added daytime ambience to towns.

• Reduced the energy cost of Homestead activities by 40%. - Fixed a daze effect was not appearing when energy in Homestead is below 25, and added yawning sound effects for added warning. - The Homestead file selection menu can now adjust the number of auto-saves that it keeps. - The main menu now pauses the game while open in Homestead mode. - Tents now provide a buildable radius in Homestead mode. - Fast travel between beds is now enabled in Homestead mode. This travel costs in-game time based on movement speed, but does not drop items. - Tents now show a map icon in Homestead mode. - Added 'Save & Exit Game' to Homestead mode, instantly sending your character to the nearest bed to save and exit the game. - The Outlaw in Homestead mode now gains heat levels while in town. - Reduced the price of 'skipping over land' when placing a flag in Homestead mode by 50%.

• Equipped bottles, watering cans, etc... can now be quick-refilled from other containers in your inventory. A prompt will appear when the held bottle is empty. - Fixed the capacity of bottles in item tooltips. - Added a tooltip to show that it is possible to split items that contain other items. (eg. Bottles or Pipes.) - Fixed the whiskey-strength stun that animals got from drinking Milk, Salt Water, and Purified Water. (Also Moonshine is now stronger.) - NPCs can now refill bottles that they are holding when they interact with a Beverage Provisions station or a Watering Trough. - NPCs now have better timing when chain-eating food or bandaging. - The Beverage Provisions station and Watering Trough can now hold un-bottled liquids. - Land that cannot be purchased will show that it is owned by America on the land HUD. - The shipping bin now shows a total of deposited cash while exchanging, instead of the item slots that hold the cash. - Added a defecation status icon, showing when character runs out of patience. - Reduced hunger and thirst by 25% for all characters and creatures. - Creatures and NPCs can now properly spawn near sleeping players. - Fixed the default equip sound. (A sound should play for equipping any item.) - Fixed missing Equip / Placement / Placement Error sound effects for furniture and stations. - Fixed missing Swing audio for Rakes, Hoes, and Shovels.

• Spawned wildlife can now despawn while in range of a player who did not spawn the creature. (eg. This allows a player to leave their friend at home and continue spawning wildlife as they travel.) - Fixed a server-side performance issue when a Gunslinger would try to identify a wild animal's guild. - Fixed melee error spam when a player hits the ground near another player. - Fixed the load / unload speed of large farms. - Fixed the on-screen money counter in Homestead mode. - Fixed the local chat so that it no longer displays "$1" at random. - Added a no-build zone to beds. (Where a character would sleep.) - Local chat fading now stops fading out at 25% opacity. - Reduced local chat range to 50m (164'), down from 100m (328'). - Fixed bounty timeouts, now allowing them to expire after a week. - Added a backup name to bounties, allowing them to display a character name in more situations. - Fixed Multiple Exploits

• Reduced the death time of empty farm plots from 50 hours to 25 hours. - Reduced the death time of dry crops from 50 hours to 25 hours. (Crops still dry out in 25 hours.) - Fixed farm water’s relationship with game time, now accurately operating in game hours when the speed is adjusted. - Seeded plants now die when picked 3 to 12 times, depending on their growth time. - Picked crops no longer revert to empty farm plots. The ground must be tilled again. - Fertilizer, Growmentum, and Soil Soak now linger where a farm plot was recently removed. - Fertilizer bonus is now penalized if the plant is not in-season or properly watered. - Seeds are now sold during the season that they grow the fastest and highest quality. - Sprinklers now accurately increase a crop's water duration by 100%. - Sprinklers now consume water for each hour that they run. - Rainfall is now a full refill per day during a storm, but weaker with less rain. - Fixed the missing sprinkler particles for the host player. (eg. Homestead mode.) - Farms now grow at 50% speed in Homestead mode, up from a guesswork ~25% speed. - Fixed the capacity of the Water Pump and Water Windpump, allowing more than one slot of water. - Increased the output of the Water Windpump to 7 per minute, up from 5, so that it fills in ~12 hours like the others. - The Well, Water Pump, and Water Windpump now produce based on game time. (They are now much faster in Homestead mode.)

• Added NPC party size to the server settings. - Added categorized NPC limits and to the server settings. - Added the "/popupTo" command, similar to the "/popup" command. This version attempts to select player names from the beginning of the message. (eg. /popupTo "Player One" "Player Two" "You guys are the best, don't tell the others.") - Added the "/questionTo" command, similar to the "/question" command. - Added the "/poll" and "/pollTo" commands, opening text input popups for each recipient. The results are displayed to the player who issued the command.

If you took a break, or are coming back after a long period of time, we thought we’d compile some of the important changes made to the game throughout the Early Access Period:

Single Player Homestead mode for Heat. Nurture Grandpas farm back to life.

Animal Farming, Spitting, Fast Travel

Fireworks, Signs, & Farming

Outlaws, Gunslingers, and The Law

You can also find a full list of all 18 Early Access updates here:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/656240/allnews/

We look forward to everyone's feedback on the update. We are very fortunate to have a great community and we thank everyone for your interest in building a great Western Survival Game over the past year and a half! Thanks for all of your suggestions, we feel the game has grown to be much better than it otherwise would have been, and look forward to continuing along this path of improvement.

• Code}{atch