Progress Update - Conflict
Greetings! I have been making great progress over the past few weeks on conflict. The first step was to add a banish command. This is long requested, and was necessary for conflict, to be able to tidy up any elderly stragglers if you take over an AI tribe for example. So this now
Greetings!
I have been making great progress over the past few weeks on conflict.
The first step was to add a banish command. This is long requested, and was necessary for conflict, to be able to tidy up any elderly stragglers if you take over an AI tribe for example. So this now works, you can banish your own sapiens, and you can attempt to banish sapiens from other tribes too. You can now also recruit from ai tribes, and other tribes in multiplayer too.
And it's not just a simple "always succeeds" situation anymore. When you recruit or banish (except when banishing your own sapiens, which always succeeds), there is a displayed difficulty dependent on their relationship to you, their tribe type and their loyalty to their tribes. This can be offset by the traits and diplomacy skill level of your sapien. If recruitment/banishment fails, you can usually just try again, but it can have some impact on your reputation with the other tribe. It's all working really nicely, and opens up a lot of doors for interesting gameplay.
Next, it was time to fix food raids, which have been broken for a long time now. They did work back when the game first launched on early access, but we needed a way to fight back, without that they were actually just kind of annoying. So when they stopped working I didn't fix them, the "food raiders" would just run in and run out again without taking anything or causing any trouble.
But that is no longer the case, they now come and steal your food, and you can attempt to banish them. Banishing is unlikely to succeed though, and you can also now attack them too.
The first form of combat I have been working on is simple hand-to-hand fist fights. I haven't added the animations yet, so they just kick dirt at each other, but everything under the hood is coming together, and I'm starting to see some pretty entertaining encounters. I've been fighting off endless attacks (for testing purposes) from food raiders. Notifications are working, elders/pregnant sapiens/children are handled correctly, and those who are assigned to the hand to hand combat role attack. When sapiens are attacked, they go through a fight or flight response kind of check, where they might fight back too. So you risk injuring your sapiens when you attack, they might attack back.
There are still a bunch of loose ends to tidy up, spear combat is only half way there so far, I need new animations and sound effects, new types of raids, and there are lots of little things to balance and improve, but it's already pretty fun.
The first conflict update will only be a start, it'll be coming to the unstable branch in the next few weeks, and remember that there will be a peaceful setting, all conflict will be optional!
-Dave
With the release of the Sapiens 0.5 multiplayer update, a lot of the previous roadmap is now complete. Your feedback has helped to lead the direction of the game, and I have a few new features I want to add, so it’s time for a complete new roadmap!
This roadmap covers all of the features I intend to add before the 1.0 release. There are many more features I’d like to add beyond that too, but this is a good set of launch features that can be achieved in a reasonable timeframe.
VR is the only removal from the original roadmap, all other omissions either have been implemented, are still planned, or have been replaced by other equivalent features. The VR market has changed substantially in recent years, and my goals and priorities for Sapiens have changed a bit, but I do still genuinely want to support VR one day.
These updates will mostly be going out in much smaller bite-sized releases from now on, and if you want to keep a close eye on development and help test new features as they are developed, please do join us on the 
Once you have met an AI tribe, you can then trade with them, or complete a variety of optional quests. Trading uses a "favor" currency, where you gain favor by providing resources that they need, or for completing quests. You can use this favor to ask them to deliver resources in return, and the more favor you have with a given tribe, the better they will treat you.
Given that AI tribes will sometimes be some distance away, 0.5 also introduces sleds, which are a movable storage area. You can set them up like any other storage area, and use them to deliver larger quantities of items directly, or as part of a transfer route.
As well as AI tribes, there are a large number of other features and improvements. Here's a few of the bigger ones:
- We have a new notification list, so you can go back and look at what happened if you missed something
- There is now an option to auto-assign roles. If no sapien is available to complete a task, it can automatically reassign someone else
- New tool racks, shelves, and smaller and larger storage areas
- Much improved tribe selection and less restrictive map zooming, so it's a lot easier to find the right tribe and location to start.
And there is still more to come! One great thing about working on interactions with AI tribes is that most of that work was also required for multiplayer. So in 0.5, I'll be shipping experimental multiplayer support, and it's shaping up really nicely. You will have simple options for managing whether you share resources with other players, so you will be able to work together to build a large village and pool resources, or build up separate villages and trade (and later, fight) with each other, or some combination of both.
The 0.5 update won't have any conflict yet, but it's planned for 0.6, along with the full release of multiplayer. I am expecting to release 0.5 early next year.
Keep in mind that the features I've mentioned here and these screenshots are a work in progress, there will still be changes before the update is released. If you would like to keep up to date with progress, you can 
Just after that was done, we got hit by a cyclone in New Zealand. It was a significant disaster, and we lost power for a week. But once I was able to work again, I started adding new building materials. It has always been my plan to give different building materials different strengths and weaknesses, and I'll be working more on that soon, but first I wanted to add stone block structures to the game. Stone blocks were historically a widely used early building material, and Sapiens felt like it would really benefit from having them.
So you will now be able to chisel out stone blocks directly from the ground, and use them to build walls and columns, and craft tiles which can be used in floors and roofs. I also added new rock types, with the addition of granite, marble, and lapis lazuli, as well as sandstone in a variety of colors.
Historically the first chisels were made out of hard rock, but rock chisels could mostly only be used on soft rocks like sandstone and limestone, so that's what I have done in Sapiens too. However there needed to be a way to chisel granite and hard rocks too, and so I decided it was time to add bronze to the game.
You'll first need to mine copper and tin ores from the ground. Then at a kiln you can learn the new blacksmithing skill, and combine the ores to smelt bronze in a crucible. Once you have bronze ingots, you can then smith them into new tools and weapons. There are bronze variants of all of the existing tools, which will work faster and last longer. And of course you can craft bronze chisels which will unlock the ability to build with hard stone blocks.
With the addition of bronze and the new rock types, I needed to do a lot of work on the look of the game, adding more detail and realism to the textures, and improving support for metallic materials. So we now have shiny metals and bump-mapping on the terrain and objects too, which really helps to make the world feel more alive.
I still have quite a lot more planned for this update, so keep an eye out for an announcement here when it's nearly ready. And keep in mind that the features I've mentioned here and these screenshots are a work in progress, there will still be changes before they are released in a few weeks time.
If you want to keep a closer eye on progress, please