Going International: Community Test

Good day, Newsbearers!

How are your presses rolling?

We’re excited to invite you to participate in a Community Test for the "Going International" update! This is a great opportunity to get early access to the new features, help us fine-tune the game, and shape the future of News Tower. We want to ensure everything runs smoothly, feels great to play, and truly enhances your experience.

Key Additions

International News: Europe

Your tower now has the world at its fingertips! Europe has been introduced as a key region for international stories, with the years 1931 to 1935. To support this expansion, you can hire a dedicated telegrapher to relay news from across the continent with precision.
Additionally, new traits have been added to your employee roster, enhancing their ability to tackle the challenges of international journalism.

Pneumatic Tubes

This high-speed transport solution ensures reports and other production items can move swiftly between floors, regardless of distance. With this upgrade, your tower’s workflow will be smoother than ever, allowing you to place critical workstations wherever you see fit.

Dumbwaiter

The dumbwaiter optimises resource management by facilitating the seamless transfer of coal, paper, food, lawsuits and more between floors.

Improvements

Revamped transportation AI

This overhaul ensures that your employees make smarter, more dynamic decisions to keep your operations running smoothly. This upgrade was essential to fully integrate the pneumatic tubes and dumbwaiter into your tower’s logistics, enabling your employees to cooperate, improving the efficiency of transport across all floors.

Employee List is now revamped to Staff Board: The Staff Board makes employee management easier than ever. You can toggle jobs and skills, view the number of employees assigned to each role, and sort traits and skills efficiently. Expanded employee cards now provide detailed information at a glance.

New Employee Traits

We’ve added a variety of traits tailored to automatic desks and foreign news. These include:

• Policy Hawk: Adds one Quality Star to a Legislative Report.
• Market Maven: Adds one Quality Star to a Stock Index.
• Locker Room Insider: 50% chance of adding an Insider tag to Baseball Results.
• Bloodhound: 50% chance of adding an Evidence tag to a Court Report.
• Anointed Pen: Experience gained from working on Obituaries increased by 10%
• Astrologist: Task speed on Horoscopes increased by 25% but has a 50% chance of adding a Lie.
• Psychic: 25% chance of adding a Forecast tag to Horoscopes and 25% chance of unlocking the next story file within news.
• Parisian Socialite: 25% faster reporting times for stories that take place in Paris.
• Berlin Observer: 25% faster reporting times for stories that take place in Berlin.
• London Insider: 25% faster reporting times for stories that take place in London.
• Kremlin Confidant: 25% faster reporting times for stories that take place in Moscow and Leningrad.
• Roman Consul: 25% faster reporting times for stories that take place in Rome.
• Continental Connector: Increases research speed by 20% for all foreign news.
• Polyglot: Opens up Language Barrier locks in news.
• Diplomat: Opens up Diplomatic Route locks in news.

Tutors across 1931

To ensure players don’t miss out on important mechanics, we’ve introduced tutors across the 1931 timeline. These guides highlight key features, such as the Europe radio tower, dumbwaiter, pneumatic tubes, advertising systems, graphics processing chains, and the rush button.

How to Join the Community Test

Ready to jump in? Here’s how to access the Community Test Build on Steam:

• Open the Steam client.
• Click on the "Library" tab.
• Right-click on "News Tower" and select "Properties".
• Click on the "Betas" tab.
• In the "Beta participation" field, select "community_test".
• Click on the "Close" button.
• The game will now be updated to the "community_test" branch.

Share Your Feedback

Join the Community Test Build channels on our Discord server to share your thoughts, report bugs, and discuss your experiences with other players and the dev team.

Your input is invaluable in making the "Going International" update the best it can be. We can’t wait to see what innovative layouts you come up with and how you adapt to the new systems.

Maybe we're repeating this a lot, but thank you! Thank you for being part of the News Tower community and for helping us shape the game’s future. You're an amazing lot.



Let’s make headlines together!