Alpha 11 dev-2477

Embark!
When starting a new game, you can now see portraits and roll attributes for your hearthlings. (Mouse over the attributes to see a description.) You can also give your hearthlings new names and purchase inital starting equipment.

Crates
Carpenters can now craft crates to store and organize your items. Crates come in two sizes and function much like mobile stockpiles. This means you can move them to where they are needed. For example, you can load up a crate with wood and then move it near a construction site. Or, put a food crate in your dining hall!

Backpacks for All
All hearthlings are now equipped with a backpack that can hold up to four items. This makes them much more efficient at restocking items as well as other tasks. You can see the contents of their backpack on the character sheet.

Preview of the Cook
The cook profession has been enabled. There are only two recipes at the moment, but we will be adding many more later. Uncooked food now spoils after a few days, so don’t overproduce it! Prepared food lasts longer but will also eventually spoil.

Attributes
Hearthling attributes now have more of an impact on the game. Over time, we’ll continue to add more effects. An example of some of the effects currently in the game:
 * Diligence increases crafting speed.
 * Curiosity increases experience gain when crafting new items.
 * Inventiveness increases chance of crafting fine items.
 * Muscle increases weapon damage.
 * Stamina determines duration of hearthling sleep.
 * Courage determines change to flee in combat.
 * Compassion affects maximum number of trapper pets and improves sheep wool production and reproduction rates.

Performance

 * Improved/fixed stuttering when you have a large number of items in the world.
 * Improved lua garbage collection behavior. This should help with memory issues on slower systems.
 * Increased rendering engine performance while reducing cpu usage.

Other Changes

 * You can now specify the seed used to generate the world so you can replay a map.
 * The fog of war has been lifted when selecting your starting location.
 * Portraits added to the unit info pane in the bottm left corner. Clicking on the portait brings up the character sheet.
 * Added many tooltips to the character sheet and building designer.
 * Show armor and weapon bonuses on the character sheet.
 * Hearthlings can now pick up and place items on multiple levels instead of just at foot level.
 * Hearthlings no longer pop up when placing large furniture.
 * Hearthlings no longer build ladders when they can reach the item from ground level.
 * Removing ladders now shows the undeploy icon.
 * When moving items, their initial facing is preserved.
 * Clicking units in the party window will now select and zoom to them.
 * When buying and selling items, the reticle no longer obscures the quantity.
 * Hearthlings now sleep in the center of the bed.
 * Enemies no longer gain experience and level up.
 * Incompatible saves can no longer be loaded.
 * Game speed hotkeys have been moved to ~, 1, 2.
 * The debug console hotkey is now ctrl-shift-c.

Crash Bugs

 * Fixed crash when taking screenshot for saving. If you are running old Intel video drivers or Parallels for the Mac, you will now see a blank screenshot, but should be able to save.
 * Fixed crash due to lua coroutine (multi-threading) bugs.
 * Fixed crash sending too much data from the server to the client.
 * Fixed crash on older Intel video drivers.

Other Bugs Fixed

 * Manually extended auto-placed ladders can now be removed.
 * Renaming structures no longer causes the camera to move.
 * Fixed hearthlings floating on top of chairs while eating.
 * Fixed issues when saving/loading the game while a hearthling is sleeping.
 * Fixed hearthlings sleeping twice in a night.
 * Fixed error in the scaffolding manager.
 * Fixed error when placing items in buildings.
 * Fixed bug trying to restore destroyed items on game load.
 * Fixed save/load issues with farms.
 * Fixed error with shepherd looking for more sheep.
 * You can now save the game before placing the banner.
 * Rotating an item while placing it now correctly rotates its collision shape.
 * Crafter workbenches now have the correct collision shape.
 * Fix camera zooming away when focusing on carried item.
 * Fixed lots of small UI issues.