Greetings medievalists!
Let’s continue the water discussion: First, we’ll talk about how it will affect buildings.
Water will not be able to pass through walls, floors and roofs. Now, since these elements have variations (like rounded walls), it may appear as water should pass through, but keep in mind that variations are just cosmetic and don’t change anything regarding their functionality. Certain types of these construction elements will allow water to pass through, like: grated floors, wicker, barn and grated floors.
Things that don't block water (above) & things that block water (below)
Open doors will let water in, regardless of door type. Open windows, on the other hand, will let water in but only a certain amount, resulting in shallow water on the other side (e.g. room).
When it comes to production buildings, being in water will stop their production. Yes, even shallow water will stop production, so be careful with your experiments. How can you remove water from such places? Dig holes, place barriers, because, if you don’t do so - water is there to stay.
With water comes wetness, so even if you get rid of it, the marks and effects will stay for a short period of time. Water affecting the temperature will be evident during summer, as it will emit coldness.
Upon hearing news about the water, many of you mentioned drawbridges as a must-have thing. We agree, but they will come a bit later, as we still have to work on them.
We’re aware that many of you suggested introducing watermills. That’s a nice idea, but we’ve thought about its incorporation and, from our perspective, it would increase the production chain side of the game. Put bluntly: if you imagine a gameplay spectrum with Factorio on one side (as a representative of production heavy games) and Sims on the other (as a representative of life simulation games), we want to lean more to the Sims side. It would look cool, we admit, but we want to make them a smart integration to the rest of the systems. Since we’ve already planned this update carefully, we decided that watermills are not a priority at the moment, nor are fountains. We’ll definitely notify you once we get back to them.
Another thing we want to mention that is not happening is Ice voxel. We know what you think, once the winter comes, your nearby river/lake should freeze. Freezing lakes should be walkable and mined and extracted into ice blocks which you would use for cooling down your storages/rooms. It’s a wonderful and realistic idea! But our recently introduced depth levels pose an issue: if we allow water freezing, that means every level should be turned into an ice block. That would result in 3 different levels of walkable surfaces within one voxel. The thing is, our technology and gameplay is not set up to support that. Without going too much into logistics and potential code issues, our hard surfaces are all positioned as one voxel. That’s why we’re unable to introduce things like half-walls - they would offer only aesthetics but not functionality, and we already have nice alternatives for them (merlons).
Just to clarify - we’re not saying this is impossible. We’re saying that given our available technology, we’ve chosen to focus our priorities elsewhere. So yeah, our core setup opted us out of this feature.
Alrighty, that is enough talk about water and hard surfaces. Next time we’ll talk about how water affects all living things - humans, animals and even plants. There is a lot to say in that area. See ya in two weeks!
Stay Medieval,
Foxy Voxel