MAJOR UPDATE #1 | Player XP, traits, game modes, Twitch Extension and more...

Dear Pioneers,

We hope all has been well for you. At Supercube, we are super proud to release the first major update for The Pioneers. According to the roadmap announcement, this is the first game changing patch from a serie of six that will lead us to the 1.0 release

Let's have a quick overview of what is new here

Difficulty settings

Game setup now has options to adjust the mission's difficulty. Play with different parameters or use a preset to fit your skills and overall challenge. Just note that harder games lead to higher scores

Player XP

The end-game score has been changed to include the missions difficulty. You should now see a larger spread of scores between different players and runs. The score is also converted into player XP, to progress through player levels. For each level you gain, you unlock a unique reward that will offer you to replay the game in a different setting

Game modes

Based on your player XP, you will unlock new game modes to choose from. At the moment, we have implemented two modes, but this system is going to evolve in the future to offer a lot of new scenarios and challenges. Here are the modes available now:

Survivor mode

enjoy the vanilla experience of the game with only... one survivor.

Apocalypse mode

start the game with an active volcano...

Traits

Based on your player XP, you will also unlock personality traits to customize your characters. Before launching a mission, you can add positive and negative traits to your selected survivors. For each positive trait you must have a negative trait, but you can have more negative traits than positive overall. :)

Characters

You now have to unlock characters through the progression system if you want to select them at the beginning of a mission

Twitch Extension

We are very excited about the beta version of The Pioneers Twitch Extension (Chat Revenge). We hope you will enjoy it as much as we had fun to design it. Do not hesitate to ping your favorite streamer to try it.

How does it work?

In this game mode, you can influence the environment to ruin your streamers life and prevent them from achieving their survival goal

Community votes

Each round lasts between 6 and 12 minutes. During this phase of the game, you can vote for the penalty you want to inflict on your streamer among the 6 random disasters proposed, using the interface of the extension. You can change your mind, but only your last vote is taken into account. The votes of the whole chat are counted and sorted by popularity at the top of the streamers screen

Subs/bits

During each round, you can increase the difficulty of the game by using subs or bits. Each contribution raises the difficulty and triggers more penalties among those chosen by the community

End of each round

At the end of the round, all the penalties are activated and the streamer faces the disasters that the chat has chosen. The added difficulty from bits will expire, and a new round of suffering begins

Note

If the difficulty level maxes out, extra subs/bits roll over into increasing the difficulty of the next round. Of course, subs and bits work as usual and only go to the streamer

OTHER CHANGES (v 0.36.01)

Gameplay

• Since many of you asked us to rework the end-game, seismic activity and heat system have been balanced to avoid soft-locking situations. You will now have more occasions to explore the map, even if the seismic activity has raised to a very difficult point

• Reworked EVA cooling module. It slows heat increase instead of cancel it

• Added new possible spawn points for radioisotopes

• Added new possible spawn points for crew life pods

UI

• Added station inventory button in the left HUD

Graphics

• Added a burn shader effect when a character walks in sulfur lakes

• Added a transparency shader effect on characters

Balancing

• Increased fruit farm cost (from 7 carbon nanotubes to 15 carbon nanotubes and 2 electronic parts)

Bug fixes

• Fixed character XP system that was sometimes buggy

• Fixed panic attacks that could be canceled if mental health is higher than zero

All the team thank your for your support and hope you will enjoy those additions. Do not hesitate to join us on Discord and share your feedback!

To celebrate this update, we are participating in the spring sales and offering a 15% discount for one week.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1734390/The_Pioneers_Surviving_Desolation/