Update time! Are you ready to start collecting Power Stars?
There were a bunch of new uses for Power Stars in the last update, but unless you managed to start a star bunny slaughterhouse, not a whole lot of ways to get them. But all that is about to change. Toads can now obtain special requests from far-off kingdoms, and by completing them, they will receive either Star Pieces or whole Power Stars. To obtain requests, you must first distribute flyers. This is a three-step process: first, build a Screw Press and process trees into paper scrolls. Then, construct a Requests Office and write out the flyers (this is a ten-step process - automatic, but takes a while to complete). Finally, create a 'Warp Pipe to the Market' and select 'post flyers'. This will produce one or more randomly-picked 'requests' for a certain type of item, usually mass-produced.
To complete a request, first look through the papers (they are stockpiled under finished goods) and decide which ones you want to fulfill. Forbid the others, then select 'sign requests' at the Requests Office. The moment you produce the required number of requested items, your Toads will automatically ship them off through the Pipe and obtain a reward in exchange. (You can forbid the signed papers as well if you change your mind. The signing process is to prevent the Toads from automatically shipping off, say, 50 meat and then starving to death).
There are a huge amount of possible requests and more will likely be made in the future. They are usually pretty straightforward requests for a large amount of a particular item, like, for example 100 crafts, but some requests may be more difficult to acquire (5 sets of Koopa Shell armor, which you'll have to get by killing invaders), less clear (a 'noble furniture set', for example, is a bed, table, chair, chest, cabinet, armor stand, and weapon rack), or reliant on an esoteric game mechanic (has anyone figured out the secret of producing Red Essence yet?) Currently, all rewards are either a Star Piece or a Power Star (also I'm not really sure how balanced it is, practically speaking), but the system allows for more... interesting rewards, which may come into play in future updates.
Toads can now stay underground longer before experiencing dizziness - about 1 month, long enough to do most things that don't involve actually living underground. (For the record, the idea of them getting dizzy underground is not so much that darkness is unhealthy for them, but that it causes them to start reverting back into their mushroom nature.) There is also a subterranean mushroom called a Refreshroom (it was in previous versions, but now it is more prominent and effective) which will guard against this effect - by keeping your Toads on a steady diet of refreshrooms and refreshroom tea (due to the way syndromes work, you must do both for maximum effectiveness) you can all but completely stave off the harmful effects of cave-dwelling. Toads now have a few other odd behavioral effects - they will get a short speed boost when fleeing enemies, but with a small chance of fainting from Shroomshock instead (which will also hide them.) Experiencing too much tragedy too quickly, regardless of current mood (they must go from unaccustomed to tragedy all the way to 'doesn't care about anything anymore' within the space of a single month), can potentially put them into incurable Shroomshock forever (this is very rare though, and probably won't happen unless your fortress is about to collapse anyway.) Refreshrooms can protect against all of these negative effects.
Besides the market pipe, Toads can create multiple other types of warp pipes, each leading to a different environment and allowing them to produce a different resource: the grassland (food), the desert (sand), the water world (water), the forest (wood), the mines (stone), the glacier (ice), and the lava world (magma). All of these can produce their associated product infinitely, although with the exception of the water pipe, they are very slow and less efficient than just collecting the resources through normal methods, unless your map doesn't have access to them at all.
The lava pipe was originally intended as a joke until I tested it and found the result to be both (a) awesome and (b) very un-Toadlike. So I gave it to the Koopas instead. They now have a third use for charged gems: creating magical fire stones which can be used to spawn pools of magma. Above-ground lava moat, no pump stacks required! (Warning: do not use while standing on grass.)
Also Shy Guys now have Kevlardtm. It's not even close to the effectiveness of Bumpty blubber, but it should make Morbidly Obese Guys a little more damage-resistant, as suggested.
One more change: Prankster Comets are now megabeasts. I have no idea what will happen when one of them shows up. They should either operate as expected (vanish from view almost immediately, avoid direct contact with everyone and be effectively uncatchable, and cause crazy things to happen through long-distance interactions) or wipe out your entire fortress in about 30 seconds. Or possibly get in a fight with someone and explode. Or do something completely different. It all depends on how the [MEGABEAST] tag interacts with creature behavior. Someone let me know what happens when one of them shows up.
And finally, Star Bunnies no longer have Power Stars inside them - instead they lay Star Pieces as eggs if you tame them. No more butchering bunnies for stars!
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Topic: Rise of the Mushroom Kingdom: No new update...yet (Read 270823 times)