Oh right! We should probably be posting stuff here too, right, even though the game's not out yet? Do people read these? Leave a comment if you found this! Otherwise we'll assume we're just shouting into the void...
It's been a few months since Next Fest, when we had a demo available for Steam users to try the game out. It was really successful (by our standards)! Thanks so much to all of you who checked out the game. A lot's happened since then. Let's recap it real quick...
July: Stoneworking
The first skill we added after Next Fest was an attempt to rebalance Mining. It was simply way too easy to generate tons of ore as a miner, which led to metals being fairly valueless. So, rather than giving you your mining rewards up-front as you mine, we started giving you Stone Chunks of varying sizes. The larger the chunk, the heavier it is, but also the more likely you are to get anything out of it.
In order to turn these chunks into something usable, we added the Stoneworking skill. This skill uses Intelligence (purely because Mining is Luck/Craft and we didn't want to make it too easy to do both, which would kinda defeat the purpose...) and allows you to do several things:
- Turn stone chunks into the Stone item, which no longer drops as part of Mining. All stone & stone items are made through the potential sacrifice of other rewards! Much like how making quartz vials requires sacrificing Uncut Quartz that might have contained a valuable Quartz Crystal.
- Make stone weapon heads. Wood Armorers can no longer make stone weapons by themselves! They need a stoneworker to help them.
- Make Mortars and Pestles. The Pestling skill came with Herbalism just before Next Fest launched, and in addition to being useful (though not required) for Medicine and Skullduggery, it was also required for a lot of Cooking recipes since you need to grind up ingredients for them.
- Last but certainly not least, firesetting. Firesetting is how you turn chunks into usable mining resources: metals, quartz crystals, gems, etc. Firesetting is sort of like cooking, but the chunks don't automatically "finish" after the time is up: instead, they are "fireset," start glowing, and require you to splash some water on them to crack them.
As previously mentioned, your chance to get anything out of a chunk depends on the chunk's size and your Stoneworking skill. The larger and heavier the chunk, the harder it is to transport, but the more likely you are to get something out of it. Even with maxed-out Stoneworking skill, you still won't get anything out of most chunks you set.
That's because our new philosophy for Mining is "more than you know what to do with." Mining generates tons of chunks of varying sizes, more than you can possibly carry by yourself. It then becomes a logistical puzzle figuring out how to get those chunks to a stoneworker so you can crack them. The more you cooperate, the easier this is. Cooperation is key in Farwoods! Smart miners will bring strong critters along with them to help them ferry the goods. Even more reason to hire a fighter to accompany you!
Fires
As you can see in the GIF above, we also replaced the Campfire item with Firestarting Kits. These kits are much cheaper to make than Campfires were, and once you light them you create a small fire which you can fuel by adding logs and bark. A "Campfire" has less than two hours left to burn; a "Cooking Fire" at least two hours.
Since all cooking recipes take two hours or less to cook, as long as you have a Cooking Fire going when you finish, you can rest assured that the fire won't go out before everything's done cooking (unless someone maliciously puts it out). This eliminates the fire babysitting for cooks and brewers that was a problem for a while. No more wasted food!
September: Containers
This was a big one. A huge update that really fundamentally changed how people played the game, for better or worse. Previously, players had a "weight" limit expressed in our patented Forest Units which progressively slowed them down when they went over their carry weight. However, most people were still running around with very busy inventories. There was no issue going scrounging and coming back with ~200-300 berries in your inventory since they didn't weigh much.
It also made looting somewhat awkward for bandits: your chance of getting anything was low, and your chance of getting something valuable rather than a random scrounge item someone kept in their inventory, even lower. Primarily this update was to make banditry more viable (something we're still balancing), but we also wanted to add furniture containers.
Enter encumbrance. Where your maximum carry weight is based on your Strength, your maximum encumbrance is based on your Prowess and represents the total number of items you can carry in your inventory without being slowed down. This was a small number: 7-10 for most players.
But, we also added containers: bags, coinpurses, quivers, keyrings, chests, display cases, crates, jewelry boxes, mailboxes, delivery boxes, bookcases, and more. And later, parcels, packages, and folders for your paper and mail-related needs. Backpacks and rucksacks were also converted into containers, ones that you can wear, which is important for looting reasons because worn items are much lower-priority to select as loot.
Items which are in containers in your inventory still add to your weight limit, but not your encumbrance limit. So if you wanna carry lots of stuff around, you now need to carry it in bags. Bags which are a single item in your inventory, and can therefore be looted, along with everything in them, by a bandit or pickpocket. Much easier to land a big score!
Containers can't be put in backpacks either, so if you use a keyring, that's vulnerable to looting. Coinpurses too. You can put keys and coins in your backpack for safer keeping if you want (can't be pickpocketed there), but that means you can't put other stuff in them, so if you're carrying around large stacks of items, you might be forced to remove them to make space since they don't stack.
Furniture containers like chests, display cases, etc. addressed upcoming changes we intend to make to burrows. Chiefly, countertops are going to become both climbable and blinkable. "Closets" and "countertop displays" were popular metas for storing and displaying items safely, both free and certain in the knowledge that they couldn't be looted unless someone caught you opening them. This is a big problem from a balance point of view, since it makes it downright impossible to burgle a burrow, especially anything owned by the burrow owner since they don't need door keys to lock doors.
Enter furniture keys! A separate item from door keys, these are used to add locks to furniture containers like chests. All people with access to a locked container need a key, even the burrow owner. This combined with keyrings makes it far more likely that you might be able to lift some keys off someone and smash and grab their burrow before they can get to it.
At the same time, it also keeps stuff pretty secure: if no one with a key to your stuff is online, there's absolutely no way for the containers to be compromised. All burgling requires, at some point, interaction with a player linked to the burrow. You'll never have your stuff broken into just because you weren't there to watch it. As before, risk exposure to burglary increases with faction size. The more people who you give access to stuff for varying reasons, the more potential points of compromise there are for you getting robbed.
Mail!
We were also excited to add mailboxes and delivery boxes for the purposes of encouraging messages in the game. Writing is a skill you need to have to write intelligible letters, so this was always kind of a niche thing. You can stamp papers with wax seals to turn them into letters, but why go to all the trouble if it's a pain in the tail to deliver them anyway?
Mailboxes are why. Put a mailbox up outside your burrow, and anyone who wants to leave a message for you can get it written and drop it off there to await the next time you log in. No longer do you need to catch people online or set up weird delivery systems in your burrow! They can store a lot of papers but nothing else; except later when we added parcels, which can contain both letters and coins. Pay for things by mail! Mail ordering! Shopkeeps no longer need to be around 24/7 if they have a catalog that you can submit payments for.
Delivery boxes work the same as mailboxes, but can store anything that can fit in a chest (to keep them from being used as chests, they have fewer spaces for items and are more expensive to make). This lets you drop stuff off. With the addition of packages, you can package up anything to make it fancy and even add a tag for gifts.
The asynchronous multiplayer aspect of mail really pleases us, not to mention it opens up economic possibilities. Want to make a character who's a postmaster? You could be the one who sets up and organizes the Kalrisian Postal Service! Pay people to deliver letters and packages, or get paid for it. Set up P.O. boxes in your burrow for characters that don't have burrows to rent. Rob mailmen on the road and steal valuable deliveries! It's a system that enriches the game a lot.
New Skins
In addition to the usual balance tweaks and small content expansions (Caltrops and Slingshots, anyone?), we also added new skins for many species and sleeping sprites for every skin:
October - Cooking Expansion
Obviously, our game is heavily inspired by Redwall, and feasting is a hugely important part of Redwall. We want it to be a big part of our game as well, so we took the time this month to add in 5 new scroungeable food items and 14 new cooking and brewing recipes using them (including some intermediary recipes). Here's a sneak peek of some of them from our Patreon:
Flatbread, pizza, cheese, cookies, candy, and more... with the addition of woodnuts, petalnuts, greenstalks, ottertail, and seaweed. This is just the start; we intend to have a rich and diverse list of recipes that would make the Abbey jealous. We also added firemelons as a limited-time scrounging item for October and November, which you could make into firemelon lanterns and firemelon pie.
Spooky Event
In the spirit of the season we threw together a special event for the month of October where the admins (Pica and Ethos) each created a ghost character with a special skin and their own plotline, and started interacting with players. We expanded on this as the month went on, since it was easy and cheap to spend development time on, until our ghosts:
- Didn't prominently display their race
- Were semi-transparent
- Couldn't be tracked
- Could blink silently
- Could disappear in plain sight
- Could enter locked burrows
- Could plunge burrows into darkness
and so on, and we set about stalking players according to the Ghost Rules™ we had decided on for our ghosts. Many spooks and frights ensued, as well as a few epic battles against the individual ghosts, and most people had a good time. At the end of our respective plotlines we rewarded people with rare items, including Ghost Lanterns which unlike the Firemelon Lanterns craftable at the time, didn't go away after October and don't give off any light.
December: Decorations & Gathering Overhaul
At last, we've caught up to this month! We'll try to post updates here semi-monthly from now on... as long as people are actually reading them. But Steam promotes these posts... right? 🙏
At the beginning of the month we put out a small update that added a bunch of content, including new furniture items like dyed wax & candles, padded display cases, folders for storing papers, parcels, packages, string lights, glass-doored bookcases, firelamps, and cushioned stools.
Plus we added some other stuff like hats, and varying sizes of coins for currency. You can also now mount signs on walls, and dye rugs and tapestries two different tones. And we added thirteen new dye colors. 1,200+ possible combinations! You should have no trouble selecting a unique color scheme for any faction you might like to start, now.
As you can see, this greatly improved the ability for players to decorate their burrows and make them look pretty! Compare to the screenshot in the Containers update and you'll see that this test room has come a long way.
The Dragon Gods
With the decorations came a bunch of new lore books, detailing something that our patrons had voted on a few months back: the Imperial Pantheon, nine ancient dragons that were worshiped by the late Kalrisian Empire. Here's an overview of the pantheon:
Il-Tira: the "mother dragon," goddess of fate, prophecy, magic, etc.
Morothi: god of the night, survival, solitude, outlaws, theater, poetry, parley
Silvanus: goddess of the snow, winter, bitterness, jealousy, restlessness, cloth and tailoring, endurance
Dharasi: god of the sun, sand, fire, iron, industry, etc.
Althas: god of the sea, weather, waves, lightning, anger, mercy, guilt
Jyra-Tul: god of death, law, order, balance, wisdom, government, justice, vengeance, music
Cerridwen: goddess of the forests, harvest, bounty, wilderness, woodworking, scrounging, beasts, marriage, friendliness
Elyenne: goddess of the moon, stars, travelers, messengers, mercantilism, commerce, knowledge, research, study, the Common language
Velyra: goddess of love, pleasure, beauty, food, hospitality, new friends, merriment, cooking, truth
There's more demigods and myths to be found in game, and we hope to weave a rich tapestry of mythology for the setting going forward!
Gathering
Finally, at the end of the year, we implemented a long-overdue overhaul for the Scrounging and Herbalism mechanics. Previously scroungers would just go to the "best spots" in an area and sit there spamming the Scrounging skill to fill themselves up on resources, tabbing out for a few minutes whenever they ran out of Mind until it regenerated. This is pretty tedious, and it doesn't exactly encourage use of the entire map. It's boring grinding and even worse, it meant you could scrounge right outside your burrow and duck back inside to safely store anything you got.
No longer! Now, rather than pulling from a scrounging table based on the tile you're sitting on, the server generates scrounging spots and scatters them across the map based on the table for a given tile. This means that in order to scrounge, you have to actually be next to a scrounging spot. However, scrounging spots are not normally visible; you reveal them through scrounging.
You don't need to be able to see a spot to scrounge from it, so characters with high Scrounging can guide characters with low Scrounging along to scrounge from the spots they find, and players can trade tips on good scrounging spots, since they stick around for a while. You're also gently limited in how far you can reveal scrounging spots by your Perception, to try and make it a bit less of a dump stat. Since you have to move around while scrounging a lot now, too, carrying a bunch of weight is more of an issue.
However, spots which have been gathered from also expire faster than those that are untouched, and every time a spot expires, a new one is placed. This means that, over the long term, areas which don't see a lot of scrounger traffic will have more stuff in them than those that do. This combination should reward people for exploring the map, and ensure that every part of a zone is worth checking out, not just the ones that have the best chance of spawning stuff you want on paper.
All told, this system is much more dynamic and just plain more fun, and we're excited to test it out and tweak the balance on it. It also encourages us to expand the alpha map some more, which we always like doing.
2023
So what's left on the to-do list for next year? Oh, man... so much. Three entire skills remain unimplemented: Gardening, Arcanism, and Archaeology, both of which will bring a ton of new content and gameplay loops.
(Picture courtesy of our Patreon; patrons got to see this back in October!)
On top of that, we intend to overhaul several of our systems: the scrounging overhaul just got finished, and next on the list are tracking and smithing, two systems in dire need of rebalancing and fleshing out. We absolutely can't wait to get those done! We also want to overhaul our green and red magic schools, both of which are pretty underwhelming and boring for mages, no matter how powerful they are.
(Again, preview from Patreon; patrons got to see it in October!)
We're also planning on putting out a Year in Review post on itch.io and Tumblr summarizing all the progress made on the game in 2022. We wanna appreciate how far we've come. Speaking of which, the trailer we released for Next Fest is also looking a little dated (it features a mining character, and mining doesn't even work like in the trailer anymore, for one), so we intend to put out a new one for the start of 2023.
Those of you who read this far (or skipped to the end): We aren't available on Steam yet, but you can play the open alpha FOR FREE, RIGHT NOW! Check it out on our website: https://farwoods.net/
And consider joining our Discord: https://discord.gg/kcStdHHuE6
If you did end up finding this page, comment below! That way we know we didn't type up all this for nobody to read...