Roguefort 0.29.0 — Patch Notes

Hey everyone,

Thanks to the playtest team for all the Fortress feedback on 0.28.0. This one is nearly all Fortress. Settlers can fight back and be drafted, there's wild game to hunt, the underground is a different place on every level with things worth finding in it, stockpiles are proper named things, and you can lay rail and push mine carts. Fortress has also had a full pass on the Steam Deck. Most of this reaches colonies you begin with Start your colony in 0.29.0, and an older colony keeps the rules it was founded with.

Tim

Fortress fighting9

Settlers answer an attack in their own way. Each settler's card has Fight back, Flee or Ignore, and you can change it whenever you like.
You can draft a settler from their card or with R. A drafted settler stops work and holds, goes where you send them and attacks whatever you set them on, and Undraft sends them back to work.
Raid letters offer Draft everyone, so a colony with no squads can still answer it in one press.
Drafted settlers can attack anything alive. Click wild game or a creature by its lair and it's an Attack order, the same as clicking a raider.
Early raids are real fights now. Raiders are much tougher and hit harder than they did, and a raiding party breaks and runs once half of it is down.
When a raid leaves, the letter and the log say what it took, whether the thief got away or fell, and where any dropped goods are lying.
Boars charging your settlers are called animal attacks and never a raid. Every word about a hostile follows what it actually is.
Animals can't break a wall, a fence or a braced gate. Raiders and a siege's soldiers can, and the log names who did it.
Raiders and deep creatures find their way round the end of a wall instead of standing there for good with a settler in sight.

Fortress hunting and the herd9

Herds of wild game roam a new colony's land. Give a Hunt order and a hunter brings one down for meat.
Meat rots, so there's a butcher's table to cut it, a kitchen to cook it and a drying rack to keep it.
Every animal that dies leaves its carcass where it fell, whether it was game, one of your herd or something that came to attack.
Predators go for the herd animals they can reach. A shut pen keeps them out, and they can't open a door or a gate.
Herd animals run from whatever is biting them, towards the pen or the nearest settler. Each one's card tells you what is hunting it.
Your first goat grazes round the camp from day one, walks to grass and goes through a door to its shelter. Grazing used to wait for a pen.
Hungry herd animals get an alert that says why, and the herd gets a too-hot warning to go with the freezing one.
When a herd animal dies you get one plain sentence, the same one in the log, the herd's record and on its card.
Hungry settlers eat the best food first, meals before forage and raw meat last.

Fortress underground9

Every level of the underground is a new place. Each band of depth has its own rock, caverns and character, and you'll be told when a miner breaks into a cavern.
There are places worth finding down there. Ancient cheese caves, ruins that differ by biome and a dozen smaller finds, fourteen kinds in all, each with its own letter when you uncover it.
What the finds hold is drawn as racks, crates and strongboxes you can open, and half the fallen-in cellars have a cheesemaker's journal by the door.
Waterfalls and lava falls run underground for good, from a spring or a vent down to a pool on the level below.
Chasms are drawn as holes onto the level beneath.
You're warned when a new stair lands beside standing water or magma, before a stair further down lets it pour.
Settlers under the water at the foot of a flooded stair climb to air instead of drowning there, and a crew will swim a flooded stair to reach work, food, goods and bed when there's no dry way round.
Mine is on the bar and the colony card. Mine is for rock and Dig is for soil, and the goals and lessons use the same two words.
Prospect names a seam that already shows farther off.

Fortress stockpiles, rail and carts7

Your goods arrive as stacks on the ground in a ready stockpile, and the first goal is to build a campfire.
Each stockpile is one thing with a name and one set of settings. Click any tile of it to select the whole stockpile, then name it, grow it, shrink it or delete it from its card.
Two stockpiles can be joined into one from either one's settings.
Stockpile outlines stay off the map until you want them. They show with a stockpile tool in hand, with Show stockpiles on, or for the one you've selected or are pointing at. Shift+K flips Show stockpiles.
Workshops and orders list each stockpile once, where they used to have a row for every tile.
You can lay rail like a wall, and it runs up and down stairs. A hauler pushing a mine cart carries four times the load at twice the pace, and takes the cart whenever that's quicker.
Rain and snow refill a pond up to its brim.

Fortress building and rooms8

Timber walls, fences, fence gates and a pen you mark out in one go are in Build from the first minute. The herd walks home to its pen.
Eleven new furnishings each do something. Settlers carry a meal to a table, and there are chairs, a bench, a shelf, a bedside table, a torch, a candle stand and four pieces that make a room nicer.
Rooms tell you how good they are. Its card says what the room is, how it rates, what that does for the people in it and which one or two additions would raise it.
Room cards also say in plain sentences whether it shelters anyone and whether its roof will hold.
Build shows what's locked and what unlocks it, what a plan is short of and where each material comes from. The Build path walks you from a timber hut to mechanisms and rail, with a button on every open step.
Every room you plan gets a door a settler can reach, and the room and pen tools refuse a plan that would wall off your stockpile, well or beds.
Workshop cards list what it makes and what each thing is for, and the building cards have been rewritten to say what each building gives you.
Choosing a locked piece opens its card in Build, so you can see what it needs.

Fortress medical5

Hurt settlers rest in a bed, and a settler who's down is carried to one. A medical bed comes first, then any free bed.
Any bed can be marked Use for patients, there's a Medical bed in Build, and a room of them is an Infirmary.
Patient cards say what to do for them, and a bed's card says who's in it.
Medical beds are only marked when there's one to spare, so one is never somebody's only bed.
The log says a settler treated their own wound, where it used to name them as carer and patient at once.

Fortress time and weather5

New colonies run on a sixteen-minute day, with settlers acting many times in every hour on the clock. Work, walking and fights are paced to match, and the speed dial counts the same steps.
Colonies open in daylight, and the first day is always clear.
Whatever rain or snow your colony is having falls on the map, so calm water looks calm on a sunny day.
Heavy weather dims the map, and a hot spell or Frost shows beside the clock and as a warm or pale cast over the colony.
Fortress ground blends from one biome into the next instead of changing in straight squares, and the inspector names the ground you're looking at.

Fortress orders, goals and alerts11

Cancel orders sits beside Mine on the bar. One box takes back every mark and plan inside it, and Demolish takes back marks too.
Right click steps back once, and with no tool in hand it lists what you can do with that tile.
The card that follows your cursor is a readout that says only what you can do there. It stands beside its tile, takes no clicks and never needs scrolling.
Goals whose plan is waiting on stone or timber put Mine or Fell trees in your hand at the nearest rock or tree.
When every forage bush in reach is behind trees, settlers fell a way through to it.
Each alert's action has its own line under it, like Go to it, Read it or Open Farms, and Next Alert steps through every warning as well as the letters.
Water alerts tell you when your Water target is what's running the colony short, and a new kitchen says why it isn't cooking yet.
Marking an order while paused tells you once, on the tool card, that work starts when you resume.
Arrival supplies are listed on the opening screen, so you can see what your colony brings.
Tab from the map goes straight to a ready plan's Build button, and the arrow keys walk the side panels and the founding screen in far fewer presses than Tab.
Big, deep colonies run at full 8x speed, and the game keeps up better on slower computers.

Fortress on Steam Deck7

The controller reaches everything in Fortress, and it keeps its place when a panel changes, a list reflows or a window closes.
Words and numbers on the colony map are large enough to read on the Deck's screen, and the depth ruler shows "-10" whole.
Alerts, tables and the top bar fit at Large and Extra large text, and the Menu button stays inside the window.
Building cards and tips say Mark where they said Drag, so nobody with a controller is told to do something a controller can't.
Importing a colony on a Deck picks from a list in the game instead of the system's file picker.
Your colony is saved as the Deck goes to sleep.
Leaving a colony on its Paused menu draws the map at a slower rate, which is kinder to the battery.

Co-op1

Adventure co-op holds together better under lag and with three or four players.

Art6

Thirty creatures have new art, from the dungeon roster to raiders, wildlife, butterflies and two roaming bosses.
Thirty-three materials that had no picture of their own have one now, along with the Emmental Mend spell.
The six ships you can ride, from the skiff to the ship of the line, have new hulls.
Amelia's great tree is drawn at its full size again.
The hunt has its own art, with a carcass for each animal, the butcher's table, the drying rack and dried meat. The underground finds have theirs too.
The dead and the sleeping in Fortress are drawn at their true size and never turned on their side.