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Patch v1.9.0: Better Late Than Never!

Hi there Governor,

Glad to see you again! Who expected a huge patch after this 3-year snooze? Well, I certainly didn't, but it was long overdue and the game, and you, deserve it.

I'm not saying it's the last patch, but I will be spending most of my time on the next game, One More Airport. It's an Airport Simulation game that features various scenarios and sandbox-mode. Wishlist the game now if you're interested, to help me gain further traction on the Steam store!

Why now?!

Honestly, it's already a vague memory, but after developing, releasing it back in May 2022, supporting it with patches and bringing it to Switch, it's safe to say I needed a break. It was a ton of fun... but man it was exhausting as well! And during that break the time never came for me to return to the game. Then you forget a bit how the code works and it gets even more daunting to get back to it... you may know the feeling 🤷‍♂️

In the meantime I'd started work on my next game, the one I told you about three years ago, One More Airport. And the more I built it, the more my mind kept drifting back to One More Island. It took me a while to find my footing in the old code again, but once I did-and started digging back through your reviews and all the Community discussions- there were still so many great ideas in there for One More Island!

Thank you all for that input! That was really the thing that got me motivated again to make some impactful gameplay changes, add a ton of quality-of-life features, and squash some bugs in the meantime. I’m not saying this will be the last patch for One More Island, but I will be spending more of my time on One More Airport from here. Either way,  your continued feedback will keep inspiring possible future updates, both here and in One More Airport!

Feedback?

Before we jump into the patch notes: you are welcome to provide feedback on our Discord server or through Steam Community discussions. The biggest changes in this patch directly came from YOUR FEEDBACK, so once again, thank you!

Gameplay

  • Reduced 'optional goods' consumption and allowed disabling it entirely Tier 2–4 optional goods consumption lowered to 75% of original. The Market panel can now switch optional goods off island-wide per worker tier; disabled goods are not reserved, consumed, or paid research for. Removes the incentive to deliberately cap islands at a low tier.

  • Removed 'Zone tiering' upkeep trap for zones with no functional benefit at higher tiers, closing the "overtier into unsustainable upkeep" trap. Existing saves tier down automatically, swapping higher-tier furniture for lower-tier where a zone would otherwise be invalid.

  • Cliffs and water now enclose animal farms — no fence needed along terrain no animal can cross. Bridged tiles still need fencing; terrain does not count toward the stone-tier decay bonus.

  • Withered crops are cleared automatically (finally!) A withered plant now counts down 7 days and queues its own deconstruct; the tooltip and selection panel show the days remaining. The manual "Remove withered crops" button still works.

  • Workers head to market sooner, less of those annoying notifications! A worker now abandons a long-running job to restock 7 days before starving (was 3), while the starvation alert still fires at 3 days. Far fewer "starving" warnings where the player never actually needed to step in.

  • Zones built entirely in brick degrade half as fast.

  • Made end-game research more affordable. 'Deep mining 2' and 'Trained carriers 3' now cost Tier III goods instead of Tier IV, to make them more attractive to use.

Quality of life

  • Starvation alerts now name the cause. The starving alert/toast reports the live market-failure reason (en route, missing goods, or no market zone), matching the character tooltip, so "starving beside a full market" is diagnosable.

  • Trade route guidance. The trade-route detail view now shows slot matching (half-preview of the expected good, an error when a slot is loaded but never unloaded, a suggestion when double-loaded), an inadequate-ship-size warning, and a harbour exclamation when the harbour zone is missing or inadequate.

  • Haul-jobs panel. Input crates, market stalls, and stockpiles now show the haul jobs currently targeting them, so in-progress logistics are visible. This also makes it much clearer that researching Smart Logistics 1 & 2, will unlock parallel haul jobs, a much-needed feature for islands with a large population.

  • Stockpile preview of selected goods. Empty stockpiles now also show what type of goods they're designated to hold, through a 40% opacity inventory icon, so it's directly visible at a glance without having to select it.

  • Stockpile copy-paste now works better. It was already possible to Copy/Paste a stockpile's good type and ship/request settings with CTRL+Right-click and CTRL+Left-click, but it was finnicky to select the correct thing if there was inventory on top of it. The Copy/Paste now also works when clicking the inventory on top of the stockpile.

  • Eyedropper build mode added, with a Q hotkey. In Eyedropper mode you can click on an existing zone or furniture, to directly start building another one of those. You can also find the eyedropper in the menu on the bottom left.

  • Eyedropper copies stockpile settings. Eyedroppering a stockpile carries its type and settings onto newly placed stockpiles. This makes it very easy to duplicate stockpiles including their config.

  • Hotkey discoverability for Unzone and Remove objects. Unzone and Remove Objects now advertise their U and Del shortcuts in the menu description.

  • Automatic path creation can be turned off. Worker-made paths for well-travelled routes can now be disabled in Game settings. This means you won't have to deal with those 'organic' paths if you don't want to ;-)

  • Fishing rods and piers auto-position over water. Similar to a Mine snapping onto an ore deposit, piers and fishing rods now snap to a shore-tile, making it much easier to place them.

  • Sortable columns in the Trade routes panel, the ledger, the zones overview, and the ships list.

  • Islands can be renamed! Welcome to "the Silver Knips" or whatever your creativity can come up with!

  • Ledger goods filter. You can now view all production and consumption information for a type of goods across your islands.

  • Bulk hire workers. You won't need a mouse anytime soon, because we're reducing clicks. Instead of clicking once-per-worker, you can now hire them 5 at a time.

  • Save games can be deleted. As one of the reviewers correctly pointed out, "what year are we living in, that I can't delete a save game?!". You were right. Now you can :)

Bug fixes

  • Upgraded workers no longer starve ~3 days before their first market run after a promotion. They actually get somewhat of a 'free lunch' by giving them an extra reserve on some types of goods. Sssh, don't tell the Queen!

  • Trade routes now flag a harbour that has become invalid.

  • "Harbor removed" notifications now jump the camera to the location.

  • Inventory reservations can now decrease. Previously a lowered reservation was discarded, locking goods away from other jobs.

  • Re-prioritised jobs no longer jump the queue ahead of older jobs in the same priority lane.

  • Cancelling a blueprint no longer cancels an unrelated blueprint sharing the same deconstruct job.

  • Research and jobs with zero work now report 100% instead of NaN.

  • Job priority now propagates along prerequisites. Prioritising a blueprint blocked behind a deconstruct now also prioritises the deconstruct; a prerequisite is never less urgent than the jobs waiting on it.

  • Ship-only stockpiles no longer accept worker deliveries after a reload. This was a weird one. Couldn't have figured it out without AI, haha!

  • Withered-plant save bug: a tutorial-instant-withered plant no longer revives on load.

  • Sawmill tutorial step no longer misleads when a Minor Sawmill is already built: it now clearly flags that a regular Sawmill is needed and reroutes the build button so the wrong one can't be placed.

  • Taxes no longer leak between games played in one session. This was a very obscure bug to reproduce, where a static variable set during a Tier IV session, carried over when loading a Tier II session and then upgrading to Tier III. But the Queen will no longer be as unreasonable as she was before!

  • Rotated/mirrored islands no longer generate one tile off from their water margins (new worlds only; saves unaffected).

  • Fixed island bounds collapsing to column 0, which misdirected camera framing and "jump to island".

  • Zone outline no longer flickers when you drag a new zone over an existing zone of a different type.

  • Deconstructed fence gates now merge back into the pasture from either side.

  • The first save slot no longer appears permanently selected.

  • Remove floor / Remove objects / Cancel job no longer switch to the underground pipe view, which happened if the previous operation was either constructing or deconstructing pipes.

  • Deconstructing a zone's foundation now correctly invalidates the zone.

  • Fire-fighting jobs now survive save/load. It was already difficult enough without the jobs suddenly being forgotten...

  • Stockpile advanced-settings callbacks now unsubscribe correctly, covering a minor memory leak.

  • Language selector now shows each language in its own name as it was intended.

  • Fixed crash when workers fetch from inventories that all lack a pickup location.

  • Fixed minimap crash at the north/east edge of a 550-tile world.

  • Fixed divide-by-zero in world generation when a climate has no islands, resulting in an unplayable world.

  • Fixed control-lockout after using Trade map. This happened when a player made a change inside a trade route, then hit Escape (which would surface a confirmation dialog), hit Escape again, then saved/discarded the route, and then hit Escape to close the Trade map. Yes, exactly. Good luck finding that one, but we found it after some player feedback!

  • Restored confirmation-messages when removing harbors from a route, or deleting routes altogether.

Visual

  • Workers now bob their head while walking. A small change, but it makes the world feel a bit more alive.

  • Workers use a market stall matching their tier instead of the oldest stall on the island (falling back to the next-best if none matches).

  • Workers 'starving' has now been reworded. Although the Queen didn't mind the peasants dying, players already remarked plenty of times that starvation over missing a basic shirt was a bit weird. Now that we're showing this more clearly in player notifications (so you know WHY workers are 'starving'), we decided to reword it to 'threatening to leave'. This was a meme a player generated in the past. It won't happen again, but still good 😂

Other

  • Terrain rendering performance gain: Terrain rendering rebuilt on Tilemaps instead of one GameObject per tile — removes a pool of up to ~9,000 objects at max zoom.

  • Zone editing is far cheaper — a large farm edit drops from ~800,000 tile comparisons to a few thousand.

  • Walk speed no longer depends on framerate — movement carries overshoot across tile boundaries instead of discarding it. This is one you may actually notice if you're on older hardware, on higher gamespeeds, or simply have a huge colony of workers. If a worker would progress 10% of a tile every frame, and it was already on 95%, it would cap at 100% for that frame. Now with the change it will jump 5% onto the next tile, meaning that movement will look smoother, but more importantly, more distance will be covered in the same time.

  • Performance gains from code optimization on hot paths (pathfinder, worker upkeep, markets, harbours).

  • Tons and I mean tons of localization fixes. Chinese benefits the most, but each language had at least 30 modifications to the translations, mostly due to terms being outdated compared to English. Thank you AI for helping to find the inconsistencies between English and the other languages.

Build and release context

Steam update times within 24 hours of this post. Matching dates do not confirm which build it describes.

  • Build 24733566 · public branch

    Steam updated · First observed

  • Build 24733566 · beta branch

    Steam updated · First observed

  • Build 24733566 · alpha branch

    Steam updated · First observed