The BIG Early Access Update 4 – Research, Humans, and Guests Overhaul

It’s update time again for Mars Attracts, and this time we have a big one for you!

This latest update makes significant changes to how research works, how humans and guests behave, as well as making tweaks to the elements of the game that players were struggling with. You can check out all of the details on the changes we’ve made below.

To mark the occasion, Mars Attracts is now available at a 20% discount for the Steam Summer Sale.

Research Overhaul

Players have told us that research in Mars Attracts was a little too complex to perform, while not offering enough meaningful choice.

To address this we have significantly overhauled how research works. We have removed the need for three separate Observation Posts for biology, physics and chemistry experiments, as this ended up being needlessly confusing. Now a single Observation Post is all that is required to perform any kind of experiment on your captive humans.

We have also added six new experiments to the game, allowing you to inflict even more gruesome misery on your humans in the name of science.

And if you’re feeling extra cruel, you can now select which humans you want to perform your experiments on, meaning you can better judge the impact of your actions and make plans accordingly. Or relentlessly torture a single individual if you want, we won’t judge…

To give experiments an added punch, humans now have a chance of death from every experiment performed, with the chance of death affected by the severity of the experiment and a character’s traits.

We have also made changes to how you spend your research points, with a number of new changes to the research tree, adding more items and balancing the required points for certain unlocks. The full research tree is still a work in progress, with some late game items labelled as coming soon – these will be added in a future update.

Human Behaviour Overhaul

Humans are the star attraction in Mars Attracts, and with our latest update we have given humans a number of new characteristics to make managing them more fun.

We have given our humans a lot more potential traits to give them more individual personalities – including things like “more likely to attack guests when escaping”, “randomly destroys underground cables” and “tries to talk to Martians”.

Rather than going straight to an escape, unhappy humans may now throw a tantrum, leading to them thrashing their enclosure, starting fights, or even fighting back against the Martians.

Even happy humans will now react in disgust to Martian scientists, porters and janitors inside their enclosure, meaning that staff disguises are needed to keep your humans totally oblivious to the predicament they find themselves in.

When a human does decide to escape, there is now a short delay to allow the player a chance to solve that human’s issues before they break loose, or simply get their security team ready to hand out a beat down.

Between all of these changes humans should now be a much more diverse bunch. Keeping them docile may still be a challenge, but hopefully it is now a fairer and more satisfying one.

Of course, if things do end up going bad, we’ve added one more highly requested feature.

Yup, that’s right, Martian death rays now dissolve humans into a grisly pile of bones.

Guest Behaviour Overhaul

As with humans, we’ve added a number of new features to guests to make them more unique and give the player more control over how they’re managed.

We have added visual variation to guests to make your park feel more alive with teeming masses of individuals. You may even notice that some Martians wear a special hat to let you know which human exhibit is their favourite. Martians are funny like that.

Guest happiness has received a similar overhaul to humans, making their overall happiness better reflective of how well their individual needs are satisfied. Those needs themselves have received additional clarification to explain how they each work, and certain needs like Culture and Cruelty now come from more sources to ensure that a balanced park can give your guests everything they want to see.

If you do decide to build big, guests will now move throughout a large park more effectively, to avoid the situation where some players noticed guest clustering near the entrance while the rest of their park went unappreciated.

Other Balancing Tweaks

Many mission objectives across all of the currently playable maps have been adjusted to work with the above changes, and we have also revised a number of objectives that players felt were unfair or just tedious to complete.

Special Character approval missions in particular have had a number of their objectives simplified or reduced in challenge. Additionally, it is now easier to track a special character visiting your park in order to keep an eye on how these missions are progressing.

We have also addressed issues that were causing players difficulty reaching a five star park rating and fixed some late game steam achievements that weren’t triggering correctly.

Other Fixes

In addition to these major changes, we have addressed player feedback with a number of smaller fixes, including:

• Added a selection of more subdued music tracks for greater variety

• Added more tooltips to provide greater information to the player

• Added a “cheaper” modifier for expeditions

• Fixed an issue that prevented players applying decor upgrades to some buildings

• Fixed a number of issues causing guests and staff members to become stuck in place

• Fixed an issue where guests froze when the park exit was blocked, and an issue where the guest could think a park exit was blocked, even when it was still accessible

• Fixed a number of issues with the enclosure expansion and reduction tools not forming the correct shapes, and an issue where humans sometimes escaped accidentally from a resized enclosure

• Fixed an issue where deleting an enclosure window could cause walls to be demolished, and an issue where deleting windows redrew an enclosure’s footprint

• Fixed an issue where control changes weren’t being saved

• Fixed an issue where players could take out more than the maximum loan limit

• Fixed an issue where scientists were randomly unassigned from their research posts on load

• Fixed a number of missions where the correct reward was not being received on completion

• Fixed an issue where vomiting could cause a guest’s animations to glitch

• Fixed an issue where power and water connections were not working correctly on load, or where power and water capacity was being calculated incorrectly on load

• Fixed an issue where human cleanliness levels were not being calculated correctly

Well, that’s about it for our latest patch. Like we said, this was a big one, with lots of interconnected systems that had lots of unexpected effects on each other!

If any of these fixes aren’t working correctly, or you still have issues that have not been addressed, please let us know. You can always chat directly to us over on our very friendly Discord!

We still have lots more features we want to add to Mars Attracts before we hit 1.0 release, so please stay tuned for more news on that coming soon.

Love,

Paul & the Outlier team