Alien - 0.2.6-fork

Game Breaking Changes

None this release.

One thing that DOES change on load, by design: any hive whose banked egg count is over the new ceiling is trimmed down to it, and any egg the hive left floating in mid-air will fall.

New

HARBINGERS AND EMPRESSES CANNOT BE NETTED

• Added the avp_predator:net_immune tag containing harbingers and empresses. A yautja net will no longer hold either of them.

HIVE DENSITY CONTROLS

• minLineageSpacingChunks - how far a brand-new hive NETWORK must be from any existing hive before a wandering queen may found one. Default 0, which is OFF, so nothing changes unless you opt in. 48 is a good starting point if hives are getting too dense on a long-running world.
• surfacePartyVentChunkGap - minimum gap between chunks holding surface vents. Default 1, which lays them out as a CHECKERBOARD: vented chunks touch at the corners but never side by side, so vents cannot carpet an area.
• unloadedBiomassFlatPerSec - a flat biomass rate for hives with nobody nearby, so a young hive is viable on its own rather than depending purely on territory size.

Changes

HIVE ECONOMY

• Unwatched biomass per claimed chunk reduced from 0.5 to 0.1 per second. The new flat rate above keeps small hives viable while stopping a large network compounding away on a server nobody is watching.
• Territory ceiling per lineage lowered from 10000 chunks to 4500. That is eight hives at full empress territory with headroom, so it bounds runaway growth without ever stopping a hive reaching its normal size.
• Banked eggs now have a hard ceiling of 150. Past it a carried egg is still taken from the hauler - it is simply not stored - so a drone is never left holding something it cannot put down. Laying already stops at 100; the gap absorbs eggs already laid or in transit.

DEFENCE

• Workers within 16 blocks of an intruder now down tools and withdraw into the vents instead of fighting or standing around. Workers further away carry on with their jobs.
• Workers only join a fight when the hive is down to fewer than 3 fighting castes.
• Vent defenders that cannot reach their target for 30 seconds now give up and return to the reserve.

Bug Fixes

QUEENS AND EMPRESSES

• The queen's scream now works. It was wired for the empress only, so no sound, no stun, no praetorian summon and no animation ever fired for a queen. Both scream clips were also stretched to match the audio.
• An empress could not be killed. Her recovery from being downed took slightly longer than the window that counted the knockdowns, so the count reset every cycle and she never reached the limit.
• A hive no longer attacks its own downed empress. Three separate mercy rules checked for a queen specifically and she fell straight through all of them.
• An empress now registers as a member of the hive she is sitting in, not only of her lineage. Population counts, the egg-lay anchor and the restock checks could not see her before.
• A chained queen no longer plays her digging animation.
• Fishing rods can no longer drag a seated royal, her ovipositor, or a royal cocoon.

EGGS

• Fixed eggs appearing endlessly under a royal and stacking on one block until the entity cram limit killed them. Four separate causes: the lay point followed a walking royal, the "one at a time" check used a box around that moving point, eggs spawned at her seat height instead of on the hive floor, and the physical egg cap was skipped entirely when no seated royal could be found.
• Restocked eggs now inherit the genes of the royal who laid them. Banked eggs are stored as a count, so a hive restocking from reserve was quietly replacing its bloodline with blanks.
• Host-born xenomorphs now keep their unique genes when banked, instead of being stored as fungible stock.
• Eggs are no longer rooted in mid-air. An egg without a floor under it stays loose, falls, and can be hauled again.
• Captive queens lay from the correct point on their chained sack, and only need that one spot to be free rather than a nine-block column.

HIVE BUILDING AND REPAIR

• Fixed the repair crew causing its own breaches. Repairing re-stamps the structure, and resin turning to air during the stamp registered as fresh damage, so drones repaired the same chunk forever while real holes went untouched.
• Broken resin in corridors and walls is now repaired. Only stamped rooms could be restored before, so tunnels stayed open permanently.
• Raids no longer repeat their final wave forever. Once the last wave is sent and cleared, the raid ends and the survivors go home.
• Boss bars no longer stay on screen after a hive dies.
• Daughter queens are released from their mother hive when they found their own.

PERFORMANCE

• Large reductions in server tick cost: xenomorph AI, terrain classification, target scanning and vent ticking were all measured as far more expensive than intended on a live server. Idle hives in particular cost a fraction of what they did.
• Vents belonging to a dead hive stop ticking entirely and become inert scenery.

Removed

Nothing.