Greetings, medievalists!
The new update (0.28.15) is now live on the experimental branch. It is compatible with the old saves. Once it is properly tested, we will push it live in the official update! Here are the notes for what awaits you in this version:
Tutorial
We’d like for Going Medieval to appeal to beginner and veteran players. While the experienced folk already understand the mechanics of a city/colony building sim, we would often receive messages from people new to the genre how they’d like to try the game but are overwhelmed by the game’s options. We agree. The old tutorial was functional but left a lot to be desired.
Now, in the main menu you can start a Tutorial on a temporary map with step by step instructions when it comes to basic actions - how to build stuff, how to use orders, how to prepare your settlement. It will be enough for you to jump in the new game, where additional tips will appear throughout the gameplay, if you choose to do so.
New Starting Conditions
We’ve overhauled starting conditions and gave additional control when it comes to gameplay options. Difficulty as you knew it doesn’t exist anymore as the rhythm of the game is now influenced by gameplay settings. Four default scenarios present in the game are the result of our set adjustments that will work for different types of players. They are:
A New Life - A default new player experience. You want to have opponents, but also a nice tempo when it comes to colony expansion.
Peaceful - Chill scenario that is just going for the constructing experience, without any combat.
Lone Wolf - You are an experienced player and want a harsher start.
Pioneer - Fight is in your blood. This will test your combat skills.
Of course, you can customize any of these as you see fit or even make a brand new scenario. Here are some new options that you can control (that you couldn’t before):
Event Strength Escalator - Event strength changes over time. Select how you would like for the event strength to escalate.
Additional events that you can control now are: Runaway, Cellar flooded, Animal infestation in the cellar, New settler, Merchant visit, Rare goods merchant visit, Prisoner merchant visit, Visitor, Visitor with a particular role, Small animal event, Large animal event and Bear visit - Each one has a bar that represents the weighted value of the chance the event has of being triggered. The larger the base value, the more this event will happen. Remember that if every event has the highest weighted value, then they all have an equal chance of triggering. Weightings are further influenced by other systems in the game: like faction friendliness, time of year, map type, amount of settlers, etc.
And worry not, you can adjust these factors within your existing saves by going into Options > Game > Edit Difficulty.
And yes, if you’ve been playing on peaceful difficulty but wanted to test your settlement with raids, you can do that now by dabbling with these options now. Have fun!
Global Stats & Grand Objectives
Influence is taken out of the game and region map and replaced with global stats. Global stats are these global counters that are increased and decreased by your actions. These stats are hidden until you reach a certain threshold. Right now we only have two:
Intellectual Renown - This stat will increase by leveling your librarian and holding study group events (more on those later).
Trading Renown - This stat will increase by leveling your broker and performing barters.
More will be implemented over the course of the development.
When a stat reaches 100% you can accept a grand objective (related to that stat). Right now, these are:
New University - After some time, you’ll encounter a traveling scholar that will show you the location of a Grand Research Desk - ancient table used for writing treaties. After you bring it to your settlement, you will want to place it in Fellows’ Library - new room type unlocked by accepting this grand objective. It is somewhat similar to a regular library, but it will need more space, more books and book related objects. Use a settler to write Influential Treaties - great compendium of the distilled knowledge. Once that is done, go to the region map and turn your settlement into a New University. Congratulations, you “finished” the game.
Charter Fair - Build enough Merchant Stall, Market Cross, Treasury, level up your Broker, acquire a lot of gold coins and after some time a broker from a neutral/friendly faction will come to offer you a big trade deal - either in weapons, furniture or cloth. After you accept it, you’ll get a trade agreement location on the region map. Send caravan to that location with the things you agreed on and accept the offer. Congratulations! You are ready to become the Center of Trade and “finish” the game. To celebrate this, 4-5 merchants will appear in your settlement along with some bystanders and offer you goods!
Once you lock on a grand objective, you will not be able to pursue others, so be sure to save before that and experiment with every scenario.
New Rooms, Roles and Events
In order to complete objectives mentioned above, you’ll need to assign roles to your settlers, put new rooms within your settlement and partake in different events.
Rooms
Training Room - By placing training equipment in this room, it becomes a space settlers can visit to boost their training speed.
Treasury - This room type gives no benefits but it can look slick if you decorate it appropriately. Nice power move and a place for your broker (more on that role below).
Fellows’ Library - Bigger version of the library unlocked by accepting New University objective. Essential for completing it.
Roles
Librarian - A person with a solid intelligence is good for this role. Their presence in the library enhances the speed of all researchers studying there.
Sergeant-at-arms - Needs to know a little bit about melee and ranged combat. When this role reports to the training room, all settlers there gain bonus XP.
Broker - Settler with a nice speechcraft is suitable for this role. Settlers make better trade with merchants when the broker is present.
Events
Study Group - By selecting Scholars’ Lectern within the library, you are able to organize study group event. Throw in a Librarian and a textbook(more on them below) to get the best out of it. Attending the study group buffs settlers in a skill detailed in the chosen textbook.
Martial Training - By selecting Sergeant's Podium within the training room, you’ll be able to organize martial training event. Choose who will train what, have enough targets and dummies, and a sergeant to provide a boost. Attending martial training buffs settlers in the weapon skill selected.
Speaking of events, let’s talk about the things that can happen on your map.
New Animal events
Previously we had just aggressive wolves event where a pack of ferocious wolves would appear and start attacking everything around them.
Now, almost all animals can be a part of aggressive animal events. Violent deer? Why not? Rabid dogs? Be careful. Angry polecats? Sure.
Their objectives may vary but they are threats one way or the other. A pack of aggressive rabbits will target your plants, while one beat will provide a challenge to several of your settlers.
A special shoutout deserves the rat infestation event where a bunch of aggressive rats spawn in your basement. This can happen if you have a room that is surrounded by soil (even one voxel) and has food in it on stockpiles/shelves. This infestation is dealt with by simply killing all the rats, and you can stop it from happening by having a layer of walls in those storage rooms. OG players remember the rat-pocalipse - solved, but never forgotten.
Cellar Flooding
Underground rooms surrounded by soil may flood from time to time, especially on marsh maps. This can happen more often in spring and autumn due to rain and “underground waters”. You can combat this by building a layer of walls around the underground rooms or making a drainage system with mesh floors.
Manage 2.0 Panel
We redesigned the manage panel for easier look and use. Here are the important notes:
Manage weapons, shields, headgear, apparel and armor sections are grouped in two categories where you'll be able to manage all of them - Manage Apparel and Manage Weapon.
The drop weapon button is removed from this panel. You can still perform that action by selecting a settler, but it is removed from the manage tab to keep the tab itself as clear as possible.
A copy/paste function to manage presets has been implemented. You are able to apply one preset to all settlers with the paste all function.
Settlers can now change clothes automatically based on seasons. By selecting the edit of apparel profile, you can choose what type of clothes/armor should be wearable in what time of year.
Force Un-equip implemented as an option for clothes and weapons - With force un-equip checkbox turned on, they’ll instantly drop things that don’t have a checkmark. This will hopefully give you better control, especially when it comes to yearly overrides.
Redone Production Options
The production “edit” button has been redone. Now you can determine, per production, which settler will do the production or use the skill slider to forbid certain settlers from producing. This is especially good when you want to level some newbie in smithing so you assign them to just dismantle stuff, while the swordmaking station is reserved for the smithing chads of the settlement.
Depending on the building type, the customization options may vary. Choose material, food type, healthpoint of a material or even freshness, in addition to the specific settler and/or their skill.
Stockpile Control
You asked and we listened - we added a checkmark within the stockpile/shelves panels that says “Allow usage in production”. Unchecking it will make sure that settlers ignore resources on these storage for production purposes. This solves the age-old problem where settlers would use up all the barley for the production of beer and food and wouldn't leave any for sowing. With this option you can make a special shelf for barley, make it not used for production, and always have a nice reserve of seed.
New Corpses Logic
As you know, before, when a person died they would drop all items on the ground, like in the hit 2000 game Nox. We changed this and now all items are kept within carcasses. Makes everything a bit cleaner.
You can order other settlers to strip the carcass and this will drop all the items the body had on it. No one will automatically haul, let's say, swords from the carcass, until you strip the body first.
When producing with a carcass (pyre, butcher), the carcass will be automatically stripped.
Hovering on the carcass will show you what items it has, their quality and hitpoints.
By selecting a carcass, you can see more details about each item.
New Things
New structures
Rally point (Strategic Structures 1 in the Research window, appears in the Warfare category) - small flag that you use to determine which settler will be tied to it and upon using its call function, draft those settlers and order them to get to the rally point.
Large Bell (Strategic Structures 2 in the Research window, appears in the Warfare category) - essentially a manager of rally points. Choose which rally point to activate depending on the scenario and by activating it, all those rally points will be drafted at the same time.
War Table (Strategic Structures 2 in the Research window, appears in the Furniture category) - Needed for leveling the Sergeant-at-arms role.
Large Drawbridge (Defensive Structures 4 in the Research window, appears in the Base category) - a movable bridge that can be used defensively to keep enemies out. Clear items and livestock from its path when lowering to avoid destruction.
Scholars’ Lectern (Library Structures 1 in the Research window, appears in the Leisure category) - organize Study group events with it in your library.
Ornate Bookshelf (Library Structures 2 in the Research window, appears in the Furniture category) - used to store valuable textbooks.
Planetarium (Library Structures 3 in the Research window, appears in the Misc category) - Needed for leveling the Librarian role.
Sergeant’s Podium (Combat Training Equipment in the Research window, appears in the Leisure category) - organize martial training events here within your training room.
Altar Shelf (Religious Structures 3 in the Research window, appears in the Furniture category) - a fitting spot to place a relic.
War Chest (Merchant Structures 1 in the Research window, appears in the Furniture category) - a bigger and stronger box for storing your coins. Needed for leveling the Broker role.
Scales (Merchant Structures 2 in the Research window, appears in the Misc category). Needed for leveling the Broker role.
Market Cross (Merchant Structures 3 in the Research window, appears in the Misc category) - A perfect building for an aspiring market. Essential for Charter Fair grand objective.
Grand Research Table - Rare object, found outside of your settlement. Essential for New University grand objective.
Coin Mint - Rare object. Turns gold ingot into gold coins. This structure can’t be constructed, but can be found in loot stashes. Merchants, too, can have it sometimes.
Skittles (Entertainment 1 in the Research window, appears in the Leisure category) - new entertainment building where settlers roll a heavy leather ball at nine wooden pins. Can be played by two persons.
Shovelboard (Entertainment 2 in the Research window, appears in the Leisure category) - new entertainment building where one settler slides a groat down the board to score.
Quoits (Entertainment 3 in the Research window, appears in the Leisure category) - new entertainment building where settlers are tossing hoops. It was very popular in taverns. Played by one person.
Note for entertainment buildings: We’ve changed how the entertainment goal works. Now, settlers will get bored with them and can even get negative mood buffs when there is only one type of entertainment available. These negative mood buffs are available only when the settlers have medium or higher expectations (so it won't happen in the first couple of days).
New Flora
We’ve added three new bush fruit types, which are similar to the redcurrant one already in the game. They add a bit of variety in resource types and some map types might not have some berry type. You will not be blocked if a berry type does not exist on a certain map type.
Blackthorn bush - gives Sloe
Blamber bush - gives Blackberry
Gooseberry bush - gives Gooseberry
We also added more tree types:
Walnut tree - gives Walnut
Damson tree - gives Damson
Quince tree - gives Quince
Mulberry tree - gives Mulberry
Other than walnuts, which can be used for making oil, other fruits are very similar to apples in functionality.
New Items
Textbooks - 14 unique books (one for each skill) that the player finds or purchases. The librarian can use them in Study group events to teach other settlers and give them XP for that specific skill from the textbook.
Influential Treaties - Rare item that you get from Grand Research Table. Essential for completing the New University grand objective.
Sloe - Alternative to redcurrants. Can be used as primary, secondary, alcohol ingredient, seed or eaten raw.
Blackberry - Alternative to redcurrants. Can be used as primary, secondary, alcohol ingredient, seed or eaten raw.
Gooseberry - Alternative to redcurrants. Can be used as primary, secondary, alcohol ingredient, seed or eaten raw.
Walnut - Alternative to apples. Can be used as a secondary ingredient, oil source or eaten raw.
Damson - Alternative to apples. Can be used as primary, secondary, alcohol ingredient, or eaten raw.
Quince - Alternative to apples. Can be used as primary, secondary, alcohol ingredient, or eaten raw.
Mulberry - Alternative to apples. Can be used as primary, secondary, alcohol ingredient, or eaten raw.
Boiled egg - Made by using egg for a simple meal.
Compote - Made by using Redcurrant, gooseberry, blackberry, mulberry or sloe.
Gruel - Made by using barley for a simple meal.
Grilled Fish - Made by using trout or pike for a simple meal.
Grilled Mushrooms - Made by using mushrooms for a simple meal.
Lavish Vegetable Dish - Lavish meal made out of vegetables.
Lavish Meat Roast - Lavish meal made out of regular meat and any other ingredients.
Lavish Human Roast - Lavish meal made out of human meat and any other ingredients.
Honey-glazed vegetables - Lavish meal made by using vegetables and honey.
Fruit Pudding - Lavish meal made by using fruit and pudding.
Fruit Pie - Lavish meal made by using Redcurrant, gooseberry, blackberry, mulberry or sloe and Barley.
Meat Pie - Lavish meal made by using meat and Barley.
Various other meals like - Scones, Pottage, Lavish Seafood Treat, Cheese and Fruit Platter, Sweetmeat, Lavish Fruit Course - experiment, try various combinations and have fun!
Quality Of Life Improvements
Malnutrition has been added to the game. Settlers no longer start losing HP when starving. Starvation leads to malnutrition, and severe malnutrition leads to HP loss. Stages of malnutrition will make settlers /enemies/NPCs slower in work, they’ll heal slower, and take in less XP.
Meal preparation has been overhauled - Now at a campfire, the player prepares a simple meal with less mood modifiers and less nutritious than lavish meals. Lavish meals are now a whole category of meals and need primary and secondary cooking ingredients to be made. Lavish meals can be prepared at the stove structures just like before, but meal type will be influenced by resources. only that they now have different meals depending on resources. Because of this, some existing resources are turned into secondary cooking materials (like honey and milk). Speaking of honey…
Skeps have been overhauled - They need plants around them to thrive. Every plant gives +3% speed of production, while another skep in the range will give -30% making the player place skeps nicely and strategically around the map and not 25 next to each other and steamroll honey. Speed of production will also be influenced by phase of the plant, so don’t expect dead flora to contribute to it.
Clothing from dead people is considered tainted and gives negative mood modifiers to the majority of settlers when they have it equipped. Tainted clothing is 0.1 value. You can filter out tainted clothing in stockpiles and recycling materials easily. Again, this just affects clothes and not armors and weapons.
The sowing period slider now appears upon crop selection. It allows you to choose custom times for sowing of those crops.
Deconstructing, uninstalling and relocating buildings now has priority over production when a settler is actively using a production building.
When you mark something with an order tool (like chop/cut/hunt/deconstruct etc) the icon now has an animation when it appears, making it a bit more visible
Holding right click now does not dismiss building placement/orders, so it's harder to accidentally dismiss what you are doing when moving the camera.
Selecting any of the orders in the bottom right corner will automatically close building panels that are opened in the bottom left corner.
Added plus marker to structures that have variations in the additional menu
New reaction icons and thought bubbles have been added to settlers. Now, each need has a different icon for reacting to stuff. It should be more useful than the bunch of red and green emojis. We are still polishing up this one a bit.
Paste all and paste selected are now active in the jobs and schedule menu.
Randomized settlers that the game presents at the start in the settler creation screen will always have maximum group creation points unless you choose to perform advanced customisation.
The right-click prioritize menu now appears over the info panels, windows and UI overall.
The news panel has a fancy appearance now.
Cut order is now reserved just for plants.
New gameplay tips have been added for various systems. They now pop up according to the action you are taking instead of popping up on a timer like before.
Advanced character creation has been changed: The pricing of all backstories and perks has been rebalanced, the point amount that you have is lower, the game will try to randomise with all points possible when randomising the whole character, and it is a bit clearer now what you gain from backstores/perks etc and what are the manually added skill points.
The research panel has been redone.
Almanac now has room, player-triggered events, Skillbook and Roles entries.
Almanac items now have "Unlocked with research" links which open the Research panel and show research nodes. If the Research table is not built yet, a note will be displayed. Overall, Almanac has a bunch of hyperlinks in it so getting necessary info should be much easier.
Heat Map and Aesthetic map can now have keyboard shortcuts.
Rearranged the orders in the lower right corner. It used to be: Chop | Cut | Deconstruct | Cancel | Fish Urgent Haul | Harvest | Mine | Hunt | Allow Now it’s: Chop | Cut | Fish | Deconstruct | Cancel Harvest | Mine | Hunt | Urgent Haul | Allow
Added tooltip messages for fuel consumers that they can ignite arrows.
The required skill to use every weapon is found in the Almanac.
Tutorial videos have been updated.
Clicking on the "Caravan is at destination" warning message if the game is paused will open the region map
The loading screen has a neat loading bar now that shows the loading progress. It also shows you the last few historical entries that occurred during your last playthrough.
We also did some balance changes:
Minimum Animal Handling skill level to train/tame animals is 5.
Animals that should be harder to train in real life need even more skill to train (10-15lvl).
Animals that haul now have slightly longer cooldown between hauling.
Cut speed and construction speed are a bit slower on the maximum level.
Fail chance for construction &, cut harvest is higher in lower levels but becomes 0 around lvl 12.
Settler doesn't need a private chamber for a Bard Lvl 1. This makes it easier to surface roles in early-mid game.
Some voxels take a bit longer to mine now.
Changed the amount of points for generating settlers from 170 to 90. Settlers were a bit overpowered, honestly.
Merchants have a bigger chance of appearing with gold coins.
Settlements have a larger amount of coins to trade with.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
Fixed several crash occurrences.
Fixed the issue where blueprints would end up stuck in the air when placing them.
Fixed the issue where some settlers were playing entertainment structures forever.
Fixed the issue that allowed settlers to mine under floors.
Fixed the issue where settlers would not construct certain reachable walls, despite having enough resources.
Fixed the issue where some shadows would disappear during the use of Screenshot Mode.
Fixed the issue where the bow would not disappear from a settler when dropping it or equipping another weapon.
Fixed the issue where moving the cursor around during the pause menu would show tooltips inside the game. This occurred when doing a manual save inside the pause menu, right after the save process finished.
Fixed the issue that allowed you the use of game controls (camera movement, game speed, etc.) in the bug reporter window due to having at least one mod active.
Fixed the issue where settlers wouldn’t build blueprints that were placed and then the game was saved & loaded.
Fixed the issue where If you dig 3 voxels and put a stair in their place, the stairs would be detected as a spare room.
Fixed the issue where changing background customization all the time constantly added to the creation points.
Fixed the issue where rugs couldn’t be placed in front of gates and vice versa.
Fixed the issue where selecting multiple different wild plants would show only the first type selected in the info tab window in the bottom right corner.
Fixed the issue where double clicking on a painting would select only paintings of the same quality and not all paintings.
Fixed the issue that prevented the alternative button for Orbit camera from working, regardless of which button you try to assign.
Fixed the issue where armor would lose texture on a settler if they dropped their clothing during. The same issue worked vice-versa on clothing.
Fixed the issue where Historical Records would not count settlers sent out with a caravan.
Fixed the issue that allowed a settler to become friend with themselves by self-tending. We are all about the ‘loving yourself' mantra, but this is silly.
Fixed the issue where upon receiving a new settler, job priority tooltips in the Job tab would not update properly.
Fixed the issue where the settlers' job preferences would be displayed outside of their tooltip in the Summary screen.
Fixed the issue that prevented socketable buildings from being constructed above stairs on dirt voxels.
Fixed the issue where settlers with hauling turned off would still haul resources in certain cases.
Fixed the issue where resource piles would end up floating in the air in some cases.
Fixed the issue that prevented “base yield when ripe” info from appearing upon crop selection.
Fixed the issue with prices being wrong when you visit a settlement that allowed you to exploit and earn gold by selling and buying back for cheaper. Shoutout to our subreddit for notifying us about it.
Fixed the issue that forced settlers to tame animals from behind. :|
Fixed the issue where some bows wouldn’t bend during their shooting attack animation.
Fixed the issue where items in chests would lose hitpoints if those chests were located outside.
Fixed the issue where clicking on a settler portrait would make the camera jump to that settler. This is expected behavior with single selection.
Fixed the issue where a visitor would appear with no food to barter with.
Fixed the issue that prevented you from digging a voxel in a 1x1 hole accessible only by ladders.
Fixed various minor text issues and appearances.
Known issues
Settlers flee when hunting wild aggressive animals thus making them useless against them because they would run away before firing a shot.
The martial training event has a praying animation when settlers are attending the event.
Some event portrait images will be the sad cat graphics as they are placeholder and will be replaced.
If your settlers are experiencing weird animations with some actions, be sure to turn off V-sync and cap the game's FPS in the game's options. Cap it to 60fps. If the issue persists, cap it at 30.
Some items are missing icons and localization values.
Player-triggered events don't have sound effects.
Settlers will not refuel torches if there is no floor/ground beneath them.
Settlers will not choose the closest production building (if there are more of the same type), but the one that has a production set first in the global list of productions.
That’ll be all for the update notes. New patches and improvements will be deployed accordingly. As always, use F10 and/or the experimental bug subforum for reporting experimental issues. If you want more dynamic/direct communication - head over to our Discord server. Even though we might not reply, we are reading everything. Thank you!
DISCLAIMERS:
⚠️ We decided to keep Dev version of the game on the experimental branch, and that means that a Dev log with red text will appear from time to time. This will help us get more info from your side when crashes and bug reports occur.
⚠️ Also, at the moment, the experimental and the main branch are very different. You should not play saves from the experimental branch on the main one as it can cause various bugs - please avoid doing this.
Foxy Voxel