• Hostile NPC aggression and combat behavior has had a major fix. Previously, hostile NPCs were basically ignoring threats that were more than a few steps away. Now, they'll engage and pursue enemies whenever they see them.

  • This technically applies to allied NPCs as well, but their existing engagement/follow distance rules will override this behavior where appropriate.

• NPCs are now much more willing to try to reload in combat, though they'll still switch to melee if they don't think they'll be able to get a round in the chamber before their opponent closes to melee. Luckily, they're a bit smarter about guessing when and if that will happen at all.

• Implemented the rudiments of NPCs evaluating the effectiveness of unarmed combat. This does not yet include martial arts, unarmed weapons, or mutations, but it at least doesn't make them assume it's a worthless option.

• Made some micro optimizations to NPC AI, which may result in minor performance improvements.

• The above changes are by no means perfect and may cause some unanticipated behavior, but for the first time since well before TLG was forked, bandits are an actual threat. Be careful!

• When your character is drunk, the message log will now begin to include spleling erors. These are infrequent and mild when buzzed or tipsy, but get pretty bad when you're really hammered. Unfortunately, it is impossible to safely run transformations of this type on non-ASCII text, meaning our Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean friends may not get the full effect.

• Grappling no longer passively drains stamina per turn. Now, you only lose stamina when you drag, throw, or attack a grabbed target, or when the target attempts to resist the grab. The stamina lost during grab break attempts scales according to both combatants' skills, stats, and size. Overall this should result in grappling characters burning less stamina.

• Fixed a number of issues with drug effects and their timers and durations.

• Removed the "depressants" effect from most alcoholic beverages. "Depressants" and "stimulants" are ancient hardcoded effects that oversimplify intoxication and provide a very poor simulation of any kind of drug, and are being phased out.

• Being drunk is less debilitating overall.

• The fatigue from smoking weed is no longer uncapped, so you won't go into a coma from snoking.

• Removed the Hub-01 Ancilla doctor. This character has been on the chopping block for over a year, I just never got around to it before. They trivialized implant installation in the same way Rubik did, and all that really does is bypass mechanics which are there to support the gameplay loop.

• Removed the Refugee Center teamster and the shady trader outside NECC. The teamster had become obsolete as the locations he pointed to no longer exist for the most part, and the shady trader was just a thing related to him that didn't really fit TLG lore.

• Fixed a crash that could occur during the unload action, especially if an NPC was doing it or an autosave/load triggered while unloading.

• Throwing axes now fit in axe ring holsters and other axe-specific containers.

• @SD-5600 submitted yet more fixes to the simplified Chinese translation.

  • @SD-5600 又提交了一些对简体中文翻译的修复。

• @Likeashadow406 submitted several fixes, creating parity among the crafting times for similar types of bolts and arrows, removing batch crafting bonuses from all bolts and arrows, adding steel fragments to the bash results for lockers, and reducing the price of welding and brazing rods/wire.

• Weed is now a pretty good painkiller. It has 4 levels of intensity: stoned, baked, blazed, and zooted.

• The first level (stoned) gives -1 perception and has minimal drawbacks. The penalties for getting higher than that are fairly significant, especially to intelligence and speed. It also makes you get sleepy faster, which might be useful if you need to rest up following an injury. It should be noted that being high also makes you 90% less likely to vomit, so it may be useful for keeping food down when you're sick or you don't have anything good to eat.

• Weed now uses the "vitamin" system, meaning the mg of THC in your body is tracked much like with alcohol or opioids. This allows for much more flexible dosing and will eventually allow for things like tolerance and overdose. This also means that it will take a while for edibles to kick in, so maybe wait an hour before you decide they're "not working."

• Removed the "depressants" effect from weed. These are very old and bad effects that did not do a good job simulating stimulants and depressants at all, and are being phased out as we go. This means you can no longer smoke yourself to death.

• Weed is now addictive. Cannabis addiction is not very serious, but can make it harder to sleep while sober and will proc comparatively minor morale penalties. At higher levels, you will occasionally get nauseous without your smoke.

• Added a Cannabis Addiction background to character creation.

• Added snippets and dreams for cannabis addiction.

• Crack addiction has been folded into cocaine addiction. They're the same substance, just a different delivery method.

• Cleaned up a lot of addiction code.

• Cleaned up several addiction-related snippets.

• Reduced a lot of smoking-related spam.

• Fixed some errors with NSAID timers.

• If you head over to the wiki ( https://cataclysmtlg.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page ) there's a section on the left called Secondary Stats. Click that, and then click on Pain. This page has a full explanation of how pain medication works. To sum it up: Pain medication provides a buff that blocks a numerical amount of pain. This buff is constant and always benefits you whether you get the buff before or after the pain. Not all pain medication can be combined, but you can combine an NSAID, acetaminophen, alcohol, and cannabis for example to get a huge amount of pain relief/prevention. Just be careful not to rely too heavily on it, as most of these sources are unhealthy and/or habit forming!

Happy 420! Remember that marijuana is against the law!!!!

• Alcohol and nicotine no longer proc withdrawals while you are sleeping, though the timer still runs, so you are likely to need a pick me up as soon as you wake up.

• All addictions now have their own timers, rather than using a universal 1 hour timer. The base timer is 2 hours since the drug was last in your system. It is 4 hours for caffeine, 6 hours for alcohol, benzos, sleeping pills, amphetamines, and opioids, and 1 hour for cocaine. The result is that basically all addictions except cocaine should be waaaay less annoying, and if you are hooked on cocaine, I'm sorry but annoying is what you signed up for.

• These timers scale with addiction intensity. You may experience cravings sooner if your addiction is very strong.

• The time scale for shaking off an addiction is now many times longer. A 15 intensity addiction (15 is what you begin with if you select an addiction in your background, it's on the low end of severe) takes about a month of abstinence to cure, losing about a point of intensity every 2 days. If you relapse during this time, this is not reset. That means that provided you don't binge too hard during your relapse, you may be able to quit again and get back on track without a lot of overall time lost toward your recovery, though you will of course have to go through withdrawal again.

• The nonaddictive and addictive traits change this time scale to about 3 and 5 weeks.

• Addictions come on gradually. If you happen to accidentally get hooked on pain pills, for instance, you may be able to get out of it with just a week or so of abstinence, after which you'll be able to use them as before.

• Over-the-counter pain medication (aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, willowbark tea, and wintergreen) has been overhauled.

• Aspirin, naproxen, ibuprofen, and willowbark tea are all NSAIDs. This means they do not stack effectively together.

• Taking one NSAID gives you a flat(ish) reduction to your pain that hovers around -15. This is persistent for the entire duration that any of these drugs are active in your system. It does not matter if you were hurt when you took them, it does not matter if you got hurt after. You have 15 less pain than you otherwise would until they wear off. So think of them as an anti-pain buff, rather than something with removes pain.

• Aspirin and willowbark tea cause slightly increased bleeding. This is a VERY slight effect, which caps out at 15% longer bleed duration. Note that duration and intensity are currently tied together, so it may cause bleeds to be one intensity level higher than they would be in some cases. This effect lasts 5 days.

• Acetaminophen is not an NSAID. It is its own class of drugs. That means you can take it with NSAIDs and you will get the benefits of both. Acetaminophen also reduces pain by up to 15.

• It can take up to 30 minutes for a swallowed pill to enter the bloodstream. Remember that if you vomit before it does so, you don't get the benefits.

• NSAIDs last up to 6 hours once absorbed, acetaminophen lasts up to 5.5 hours.

• All NSAIDs and acetaminophen currently give you their full benefit with one single dose, with the exception of willowbark tea, which requires two for the full effect. "Topping up" after a couple of hours can keep the effect going, but there's no point taking e.g. two ibuprofen at a time instead of one. Expect this to change in the future as the underlying code is improved.

• Wintergreen is very short-acting and mostly topical, so it can stay on the older/simpler system as it's unlikely to have any pertinent drug interactions.

• There are at present no overdose mechanics or drug interactions for any of these medications. That will change in the future.

• Added a couple of title screen tips that help explain how these medications can be used.

• Updated a bunch of tileset stuff with help from @Steady Gaze. This backports many random items from DDA's MSXOtto+, including overlays for different held lights, autoinjectors, generators, and a new tile to differentiate the SWAT zombie from the standard police zombie. SWAT zombies are tougher and have better loot, so keep an eye out for them!

• @SD-5600 submitted several updates to the simplified Chinese translation.

  • @SD-5600 对简体中文翻译提交了多份修改意见。

• @SSZY submitted some updates to the simplified Chinese translation.

  • @SSZY 对简体中文翻译提交了多份修改意见。

• NPCs will now complain more frequently about dirty wounds. If you have their complaints disabled, you're not going to hear anything from them until they're very seriously infected, so make sure you give them antiseptic to clean their own wounds or regularly check up on them after combat.

• Removed the Lifestraw. This item didn't really work like the real things do, and would need to be redone to make it a more reasonable simulation. Moreover, it just sort of negated all the water purification mechanics without any cost or interaction, which is generally grounds for removal of just about anything.

• Fixed the Fruiting EoC related to Plant's Fruiting mutation. This was running checks every second for all characters, and while this was a very cheap check, it's always good to find optimizations.

• The EOD tech profession now spawns with its helmet.

• Attached and makeshift earplugs now properly have their intended flags, and can be worn with helmets and by huge and tiny characters.

• @Steady Gaze removed some unused item variants.

• Backported a fix from DDA for the "switch does not handle case f_null" error you'd get popping up once in a while, especially around apartment buildings.

• In the same vein as yesterday's alcoholism rewrite, now we have a new addiction system for nicotine.

• Nicotine withdrawals happen much the same as alcohol withdrawals. Nicotine withdrawal is far less severe than alcohol, but it lasts up to 96 hours, compared to alcohol's 72.

• Nicotine withdrawal symptoms include pain (headaches), some limb score penalties (generally to things related to fine motor control), a dexterity and intelligence penalty, and a smaller perception penalty.

• Nicotine addicts, in withdrawal or not, will generally become drowsy faster. Smoking regularly will offset this effect, but it may become an issue if you're trying to quit.

• As with alcohol, once the withdrawal phase is concluded, the worst is over. You will still experience cravings and some ill effects, but if you can ride those out without lighting up again, you will eventually get the monkey off your back.

• Morale hits from nicotine cravings are now capped in the same way alcohol's are.

• Fixed an issue that was messing up the withdrawal timer. If you have an existing save, it might take a couple hours before your withdrawals kick in, then it'll be back to normal.

• Alcohol and nicotine no longer give you morale hits in your sleep. You will still dream about them.

• Rebalanced and improved the effects of alcohol withdrawal.

• Added a missing null guard to the consumption menu. This should get rid of some of those UID and item location errors that have been popping up.

• Fixed some random tileset issues regarding fallout ash and laminated glass.

• Currently, the timer for all drugs is that they start being able to cause cravings (not withdrawals) about 2 hours after your last dose. This is not really how this stuff works in real life. For most it would be 4 or 8 hours, and obviously less for cigarettes, so I need to add a way for different substances to run on different timers rather than the global 2 hour one. Addiction timers also probably shouldn't progress in general while you're asleep. All these things will make all of this a lot less obnoxious, which was the biggest drawback of the old system.

• Bonuses for drugs need to come back. These will not be as huge as the old +50 speed from cocaine way back when, but it seems plain enough to me that there are cases where you'd rather have some of this stuff than not, even outside of recreation or addiction. So expect some more of that very soon.

Note: This update reworked and removed a couple of background (profession) IDs, and there's no good way to obsolete these. Existing saves may report an error about invalid profession ID when first loaded, you can safely ignore this and it won't cause any problems.

Addiction was a gigantic mess. Addiction effects were running every single second that you didn't have your substance of choice in your bloodstream, and were spamming the player with huge constant morale debuffs that far exceeded anything else in the game and made it impossible to do pretty much anything. Cartoonish withdrawal effects would run any game into the ground, and constant interruption popups made it all very annoying to deal with. Nothing about it was really engaging and it all added up to make a system where the only reason to ever deal with addiction would be for the free chargen points. You'd just sit there and wait the addiction out and then go about your life as if it never existed. Well that begins to end today!

• Addictions now check for their effects every 5 minutes instead of every second. Only Alcoholism has been fully rewritten as I have to do each one by hand, but this should at least make other addictions a bit less spammy.

• If you are an alcoholic with no alcohol in your system, you will experience periodic cravings, which manifest as a message or dream and a morale hit.

• Cravings for alcohol are now capped by the strength of your addiction. They were previously uncapped, and because they were running so often, they would quickly get to -200 and pretty much stay there forever.

• If you go ~8 hours without a drink, you enter the withdrawal phase.

• The withdrawal phase lasts 24 to 72 hours according to the severity of your addiction, and progresses in stages.

• The first 24 hours will see only mild to moderate withdrawals, depending on how bad your addiction is. These cause flulike symptoms (limb score debuffs, stat debuffs, nausea, pain, dehydration). These withdrawal symptoms come and go randomly.

• While withdrawal symptoms are active, your cravings will be much worse.

• Severe withdrawals begin after 24 hours if your addiction is strong enough. They may be prevented or mitigated with benzodiazepines (valium or xanax, aka prescription/fast-acting sedatives), in which case you'll just get moderate/mild withdrawals instead.

• Severe withdrawals periodically trigger shakes and hallucinations. The abovementioned sedatives will prevent these.

• If you're more than a mild alcoholic, it will be generally harder to fall asleep. This can obviously be offset by drugs or alcohol.

• Being in withdrawal makes it much harder to sleep.

• Taking another drink will stop your withdrawal symptoms immediately and fully reset all associated timers. Remember that alcohol takes up to a half hour to take effect after you drink it.

• If you weather the entire withdrawal phase without taking a drink (this can take up to 80 hours since your last drink), you are detoxed. This means that your physical reliance on alcohol has left the critical phase. You are still an addict and will still have cravings and some ill effects, but you will not experience withdrawals so long as you remain detoxed.

• Detoxed status is lost if you ever take another drink.

• The withdrawal popup warning has been removed, as it didn't work properly and was just running every single second that you didn't have your drug of choice in your system. I will try to slot it in more intelligently downstream of where it was, but it's not appropriate for every drug or every withdrawal effect.

• Selecting an addiction in chargen formerly gave you the strongest possible version of that addiction. This has been changed, you will now only get a 75% strength addiction.

• The timer for getting over an addiction has been turned up a bit.

• Renamed and re-described many of the addictions in the background section.

I am sure this is not perfectly balanced yet, but in playtesting it is soooo much less obnoxious than it was. Much more time can now pass between drinks to maintain an addiction, the effects are far less punishing, and come many times less often. It's also just a better model of how alcohol works in real life.

Hopefully this helps make alcohol into a tool your character might consider using occasionally for its upsides rather than just a mechanic that punishes you for engaging with it. Also you can roleplay as Harrier DuBois!

• Reinforced glass is gone, as it didn't represent anything that exists in real life. Glass with wires in it is weaker than regular glass and does not belong in ultratech labs, it's a fire safety thing that was abandoned in the 1960s when safety glass was invented. All instances of reinforced glass and/or wired glass have been replaced with laminated glass. Laminated glass, AKA tempered glass, is what windshields and modern glass doors are made out of. It is tough, but not as tough as ballistic glass.

• Tempered glass sheets can now be acquired by deconstructing laminated glass walls and doors. You can also get them from uninstalling windshields.

• Reinforced windshields are now made of tempered glass (like a normal windshield) reinforced with steel brackets and slats, similar to how reinforced solar panels work. The recipe for a reinforced tempered glass sheet is autolearned.

• Glass walls and doors in labs are now mostly laminated, meaning they're kind of difficult to break. This may help keep lab critters a bit more contained.

• The teamster at the refugee center has been scooted a few tiles over into the far corner. This should keep him safer from the back bay monsters, though he is by no means immune to getting pulled into the melee and killed.

• Backported a fix from DDA that allows monsters to properly go up stairs, provided those stairs actually line up on the map. Their pathfinding and line of sight still aren't great about this, but they'll now sometimes chase you up out of basements, so beware!

• Fixed some bugs related to dropping items off of ledges. Previously, this was waaaay too destructive. It's still not perfect but should now seem a lot more reasonable.

• @False Ritche submitted a ton of fixes to the Russian translation.

• @UB-13 submitted an update to acid bombs which should allow them to be made with a wider variety of glassware.

• @AtaxisNine submitted new tiles for the slag hulk, frigate fly, writhing root, veiled butterfly, and glowstalk.

• Added a fix for MoM where the pyrokinetic aura was showing invalid tiles. It now looks like fire.

• Fixed a rare issue where acid attacks which destroyed worn sided items (such as wristwatches) could cause a crash.

• Modernized the elbow pads recipe. Elbow and knee pads now both require a book, one rank of tailoring, and are made from spandex and plastic.

There was an error message popping up for people who had a specific mission. This clears that up.

• NPC followers who are hungry will no longer forage as a last resort. This idea might have made sense on paper but it didn't really work out in practice, especially since they would do it if they were at all below their median kcal, to the exclusion of all else.

• The Isherwood faction and everything to do with it has been removed from the game. They have been on the chopping block for a long time. They didn't really fit the lore, they didn't act like there was an apocalypse going on, they lived on what was obviously a gigantic corporate farm but acted like small-time farmers, and they were a huge source of free resources.

  • Note: This may cause error messages when you start your game up for the first time. Press i to ignore them and all will be well.

• Fixed an issue where monster special attacks against other monsters (generally offscreen ones) could rarely crash the game.

• Added a new weight category: Skinny. Skinny can be thought of as equivalent to Obese, but in the other direction: It is the point at which your weight has become a problem in terms of speed, stats, and lifestyle.

  • Moved Underweight to cover what used to be the lower end of Normal. Underweight is like Overweight: It means your weight is not too bad, but may become an issue if it gets too close to the next category.

  • No changes have been made to the stat/lifestyle/speed penalties that kick in at different kcal levels. This is purely a cosmetic/UI change which will better inform you about your character's wellbeing. Previously, a lot of people would sit at the low end of Normal and be confused about the game sending them messages about their stored kcal being too low. Now it should be much more obvious.

• Radiation was dealing too much damage. Now it deals far less, but can still become very very lethal if it gets too high.

  • In testing, I set myself to 1000 radiation (A huge amount, half of the maximum) and over the course of several hours without any bandages or medication, lost about 50% of my HP, during which time I dropped down to 700 radiation. I probably would have died if I kept standing there, but might have survived if I used bandages or especially if I took Prussian Blue. That seems about right to me, insofar as our irradiation effects are a reasonable simulation of acute radiation sickness (they are not, but that's a bigger issue).

• Many forms of tea, coffee, etc. had no shelf life, leading to people brewing massive barrels of the stuff and then just drinking it forever. You know that's not how coffee works. I know you know!

• Rehydration drink can be made with a few more ingredients, and is no longer considered junk food.

• Renamed "forest honey" to "honey". This was one of those cases like "feral pigeon" where technically that is what it's called, but nobody calls it that in daily life, and so the name was more confusing than it ought to be.