Update #9.5 | Coin Bartering

01 Aug 2023Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

Greetings medievalists!

August’s mini update, officially titled “Coin Bartering” (0.15.4) is now live on Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG. All those fixes and improvements from the experimental branch are now stable, tested, and present in this update! We call this one a “mini-update” because it doesn’t have new features, rather a much needed overhaul of existing ones.

But first, for an optimal user experience, we suggest that you:

Disable Mods if you have them

Please note: if you are using unofficial mods you might experience crashes or even an inability to start the game. If this occurs, turn the mods off before starting the game. If the problem persists, be sure to delete all of the folders in the steamapps\common\Going Medieval and then verify the game files.

Now, onto the update:

Look at this update as a couple of smaller QoL improvements that will in no way revolutionize the way you play the game, but it might give you “hey, this is a cool moment”. We’ll categorize them and try to explain the general idea behind some of the choices made. Let’s get to it.

Animal Protectors

A lot of players reported that it's frustrating that foxes and polecats would just simply go into your settlement and kill small animals. So we added a few things:

Pet dogs/wolves/bears (while awake) now protect animals in their proximity. Regular domesticated animals will not perform this function.
Torches, braziers, and production buildings (while the flame is on) also protect animals around them. NOTE: they’ll protect them, even through walls.
Settlers (while awake) also protect small animals.

The protection works as follows:
When the small animal enters the proximity zone (emitted by the stuff we mentioned above), they'll get protected. During that time in that area, they’ll not be attacked by predators.

Leaving the proximity will still have them protected for the next 2.5 hours
If the small animal is targeted by a predator and that small animal goes back to the protector's range, the predator will back off immediately.

Some things to note:

Animals that come with traders can't be targeted by wild animals
Animals that come with traders will never sleep
Animals returning with the caravan if returning at night will be protected from predators for some time
Animals returning with caravans will not fall asleep in the next 8 hours
Animals purchased from merchants will not fall asleep for the next 8 hours

Now let’s talk wound tending and healing QoL!

Healing v2

We haven't touched wounds and wound tending since the Early Access launch, so we wanted to add a set of changes to make everything a bit more QoL-fy :)

Patient Job

The Patient job type is now added to the JOB panel. This job just makes settlers go to beds and wait for their wounds to be tended. So it's basically like convalescence but if convalescence is not active or is a low priority that settler will continue doing other stuff. This solves the issue of wanting your settlers to be tended but you don't want them to convalesce so they can get stuff done :)

Self Tend

Players can turn this on in the MANAGE panel. It's self-explanatory - settlers can tend their own wounds. If they choose to do so, they’ll get a bit less XP for that and the tend quality will have a low quality.
NOTE: If you turn off the Tend job in the jobs panel, this will disable self-tend as well.

Healing Kit in pouch

Settlers will carry healing kits in pouches now (only healing kit items - not herbs, tallow or honey) and use them when tending instead of going to get healing kits somewhere far.

Jobs have different priority depending on hour type

Some of you reported that it doesn't make sense that wounded settlers would not convalesce while in leisure/any hour type. Well, in the old system, “rest” was considered a job and jobs get low priorities in these hour types. It was… a messy system. But check it now!

We now have the option to forcefully set priorities and also enable jobs per hour type.

Carry wounded’s goal: settlers will carry wounded even if they don't have a tend job turned on and in leisure/any hour. This makes them a bit more natural at acting and saving their friends even if they are in leisure mode.
Tend wounds will have higher priority than, let's say, needing to play backgammon, because community. BUT, they’ll still be willing to ignore the call if the player turned off tend job for that settler.

Main takeaway here’s are:

Patient/Convalescence Job - These jobs have a pretty high priority in leisure/any hours and are forcefully enabled even if the player disables them in the jobs panel.
This way the jobs panel is 100% efficient only in Work hours.

Now let’s talk wounds...

Wounds v2

Wounds can now be categorized 3x different ways:

First category will not trigger the settler need to be tended. This is used for wounds like bruises that can't be tended with medicine and time will heal itself.
Second category is used for wounds like scratches. They need to be tended sure, but the settlers do not need to lay down in order for that wound to pass.
Third category is Minimum Wound Severity. Like before, as time goes by wounds lose severity and are weaker in their effects. But now, let's say the settler breaks a leg. They will need tending and rest for a few days but then when the wound heals 90% it will hit the minimum severity threshold and will still be there with some small effects on walk speed etc, but will heal on its own over time with no need for further tending or rest.

Wounds can now be tended anywhere! Settlers can tend to other settlers anywhere, no need for them to be in a bed. Just two small notes here:

NOTE 1: The settlers still prioritize taking them to a bed and then tend them. Also the tend wound anywhere only works if the settler that is being tended has fainted and is laying bleeding on the ground and there are no beds available to tend.
NOTE 2: Player can right click priorities tend on any settler anywhere and that should work without a bed for the patient to be in.

Now let’s talk more fun stuff:

Coin Bartering

We added gold coins as resources to the game

Yes, at the end of the 14th century, 95% of the global population perished due to rampant plague. While the pure survivor and willingness to persevere at any cost were on the minds of those folks, you just know that at one point someone would try to reintroduce familiar monetary systems, because the current value can be deemed to abstract at some crucial points.

Coins are in the game!

Coins can not be produced, only acquired through trading
Coins always have a value of 1 and never change when bartering like other resources do.
Almost all Merchants have some amount of coin
Coins appear at the top of the bartering list when merchants arrive (if the player and merchants have no coins then it will not appear)
Coins can be smelted into gold ingots (if you want to do that)

This basically means that all wealth has been rebalanced. Everything is a bit less valuable now. But all other wealth parameters (attack size and strength, influence, room impressiveness, expectation etc) have been scaled down accordingly. This is done so we can keep the simple rule of 1 gold coin being 1 wealth/value equal. We’ll see how and if the system will continue to expand but this seems like a good starting place. Maybe you’ll want to keep your wealth only through value which you can easily manipulate? Maybe you like your dungeons filled with coins because that’s how old school you are? Maybe, down the development, certain quests will only be done via the old good coin deed. Now, now, we’re not promising anything here nor anytime soon - just leaving your imagination to potential scenarios.

Birds

This is 100% a visual thing and has nothing to do with gameplay. NOTE: Environmental effects need to be turned on in the graphical options for birds to be visible.

Birds sometimes fly over the map - depending on the time of year and time of day, also their type and direction change with time of year.
Birds sometimes fly out of trees and bushes when settlers start chopping them down. This is random and just happens sometimes (also dependent on the time of day and year).
Birds should not appear at night. This can sometimes happen if they appear 1s before sundown and fly over when the night has started.
Crows will sometimes fly around carcasses of humans and larger animals after a while.
Only for piles that are not in the home area (this is about 10x grid spaces around a player's building) and that are not under the roof.
Crows will sometimes spawn as they eat the carcasses (has no gameplay effect).
Will fly off when a settler is nearby or when animals haul the carcass away.
If a flock of crows appear while the settler is in the proximity of the pile the crows will not fly away until the settler a) picks up the pile, b) exits the proximity and enters again.

And let’s end this mini update with building cosmetics

We have new Paintings and Tapestry variations. We added 3x new variations to paintings and 2x new tapestry variations.

You might even recognize some of them as certain designs are inspired by modern memes and situations here and there.

We also updated the portrait art for various factions:

Now all factions have unique portraits except mountain bandits, looters, river bandits, Ravagers, and Society of Fellows. This will be changed in the later updates.

Bugs and fixes.

Fixed the issue where unconscious settlers would sometimes spawn in the middle of a voxel, essentially making them stuck in torment.
Fixed the issue where sometimes wild Foxes would sleep in pens, and they feed from inside pens during the day even though other sources of food are available on the map
Fixed the issue where Wild polecats would sleep in stockpiles in the settlement on voxels on which there is something deposited already.
Fixed the issue where If a caravan returns at night, the animals in the caravan will immediately fall asleep. This would lead to small animals like chickens being killed by predators.
Fixed issue where shelves would drop stockpiled items when building floors below them.
Fixed several text issues
Fixed huge stuttering with late game settlements that had a large amount of piles.

Known issues

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.
If your settlers are experiencing weird animations with some actions, be sure to cap the game's FPS in the game's options. Cap it to 60fps. If the issue persists, cap it at 30.

That would be all for the official update notes. New patches and improvements will be deployed accordingly. In the meantime, feel free to post your experience regarding the new update on Steam discussions. If you want more dynamic/direct communication - head over to our Discord server. Even though we might not reply, we are reading everything.

Foxy Voxel