That's right! New major update 0.12.17 has arrived and brings many new features for you to enjoy! From the traveling salesmen, the Inn and travelers visiting, to hunting, new weather effects, temperature simulation, fighting and more. You can even look forward to some spooky additions - plant pumpkins on your farms and place Jack-o-Lanterns 🎃 to make your village more mysterious!👻

This update marks the first major milestone in our Roadmap. The main goal for us here was to bring more life into the settlement and make the world more dynamic. We also took many of your suggestions on board and added many improvements, quality of life features and actively hunted down all the bugs you have been reporting so big thank you to everyone who contributed.

If you want to share your thoughts with us, you can visit the Steam forums or join our Discord community, where we sometimes also recruit new players to our closed beta, so by joining you may get early access to new builds!

With the world update delivered, we will now focus on a small hotfix patch in the following days in case something critical would come up, but otherwise we are well on our way for the update #2 - The Nobility and Clergy, which will add a new social classes and spiritual needs to your villagers.

Developer Livestream

In the meantime, you can join us on our Twitch for another developer livestream, where we will celebrate the release together! Schedule your time for this Sunday 31st at 8PM CEST!

Finally, here is a new trailer showcasing the new features as well as detailed changelog for you to explore!

New Features

• New Zone: The Inn.
• Attract visitors who will come to your settlement and may decide to stay here permanently!
• Villagers will purchase meals, beers or beds at the inn and regularly socialize there.
• New Zone: Caravan Marketplace.
• Build caravan storages and storefronts to attract traveling salesmen.
• Caravans react to the demand of the settlement and a portion of their offering is tailored to the needs of the specific settlement.
• Caravans attempt to purchase cheap resources on the local markets, thus creating an opportunity for import and export economies.
• New Zone: Hunting Area.
• Attract new families of hunters and assign them the hunting area.
• Place hideouts, forest feeders, and traps to hunt wild animals.
• New Wild Animals and Herd Behavior.
• Animals now spawn regularly in herds and move through the map in search of food.
• Carnivores like bears, boars, and wolves will hunt other animals for food. They may even attack villagers if they get desperate!
• Domesticated animals are sold by caravans.
• Cows, chickens, and sheep no longer spawn on the map. Instead, villagers will purchase them from traveling salesmen.
• New Pets - Cats and Dogs.
• Villagers have now a small chance to appear with a pet - a cat or dog.
• Pets will follow their owners around and can protect them in a fight.
• Added new stats for strength, dexterity, and intelligence
• Strength that dictates their attack power and health.
• Dexterity that dictates their defense, and attack speed.
• Intelligence, which impacts their social interactions.
• Added new fighting system.
• Villagers and animals can now fight each other.
• Most fights between villagers end with fainting.
• Fainted villagers are dragged to the bed by their family relatives to recover.
• Villagers can wear equipment and tools.
• Each piece of equipment has a durability loss over time, or when used.
• When villagers wear tools, the time of work-related activities is reduced.
• The game tracks the reputation of the player.
• Reputation is updated daily based on relationships with other families.
• The relationship is driven by the actions of the player and villagers' average happiness, which is most impacted by their average mood.
• Villagers build relationships, date, and request to marry.
• They greet each other in proximity or when sitting at the same table, progressing their relationship either in a positive or negative direction (indicated by emojis over their head).
• When villagers have mutual special interests and if relationships increase well enough, they may form a romantic relationship.
• Villagers that are in love can go on a date from time to time and have a chance to request a permission to marry.
• Individual families maintain relationships with each other.
• The family relationship is updated daily and it translates into personal interactions of villagers.
• Temperature is simulated.
• Simulation is driven by a global temperature that changes through the year and is impacted by insolation (walls, rooftops) and heat sources (fireplace, candles).
• A new heatmap overlay has been added to observe the temperature on the map.
• Villagers need to keep themselves warm. During cold days, they will burn firewood in fireplaces and actively surround them to heat up.
• Clothes now impact their resistance to cold temperatures and naked villagers will freeze more easily.
• New weather effects.
• Weather effects of rain, storm, and snow are randomly triggered depending on the season.
• Walls and structures deteriorate over time.
• Villagers will perform activities to repair them.
• Public structures are maintained by the ruling family.
• Beauty values are simulated.
• Values are driven by terrain type, structures, and walls and their quality and cost.
• Better / more expensive structures provide more beauty. Trash piles on the ground also decrease beauty.
• A new beauty overlay has been added to observe the beauty levels on the map.
• Soil quality is simulated.
• The quality is impacted by terrain type, distance to the source of water, and the presence of crops, plants, and trees.
• Soil regenerates over time if it is not used and rain speeds up regeneration.
• Soil quality impacts the speed of growth of plants and their chance of getting sick before harvesting.
• Players can maintain the percentage of soil being left to regenerate in the priority menu of the farm.
• A new soil quality overlay has been added to observe the quality of the soil on the map.
• New Market Price List UI
• A new screen that lists current prices of all goods and animals, as well as their change from a previous day.

Other Improvements

• New tooltips have been added to animals and crops in the priority window of zones.
• When villagers eat at a table, there is a visual indication of the meal on the table.
• The tutorial scenario has been expanded with new quests that teach the new game mechanics like heat, marketplace, and the inn.
• The tutorial book has been expanded with information about new features, such as caravans and the inn.
• The sound system has been improved, making the sound levels more balanced and adding better transitions.
• The in-game HUD has been redesigned. It now contains a middle section for action buttons and a right bottom section for toggling overlays.
• Most UI screens have been redesigned, particularly to display fonts bigger and make them easier to read.
• Homosexual couples can now adopt children.
• Art for existing animals has been updated.
• Added Grass Field floor type that can be used to cover the dirt.
• When setting fees or salary on a zone, players now can enter the value as gold, silver, and copper coins separately.
• The ruling family will now build structures covered by a zone if that zone has no family assigned.
• An option to force villagers to ignore building blueprints in a zone has been added.
• The cursor tooltip now also shows the size of the placed zones.
• Increased priority of building over planting and harvesting.
• The inventory screen now lists also personal gold of villagers and separately lists taxed resources in the ownership of a zone/family/person.
• When a family starts to run out of money, a "Family is Low on Money" notification is triggered.
• Renamed Blacksmithery to Forge and Bowmaker to Bowyer.
• Zone tooltips now list a recommended build size as a guiding point for new players.
• Different walking speeds on varying terrain - villagers now walk faster on cobblestone paths and slower in forest or sand.
• Cats and dogs can be pet by clicking on them.
• Accept New Family UI now shows which animals they would arrive with. It also lists zones they can be assigned to with their profession.
• Families in the tutorial should now cook meals regardless of their stock to complete the quest faster even if the player donated them a lot of food.
• The tutorial now starts with a bigger fishing family to make building the Inn easier.
• Added new "Clear All Notifications" button.
• Storefronts now also list ground resources being sold.

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug that caused the "Married in" mark in the family book to appear incorrectly.
• Fixed incorrect meat yields from animals when butchered.
• Fixed bug that sorted items in the Royal Tax screen incorrectly.
• Fixed bug that displayed incorrect text for the king when the player completed all taxes fully.
• Fixed bugs with the cursor tooltip displaying size dimensions and costs.
• Fixed bug where built chairs appear under the floor blueprint.
• Fixed bug where you can't close inventory screen with a cross button.
• Fixed bug that Ground Storage did not list all resources if by chance villagers stored multiple types there.