As you may expect, we've been busy preparing the next big patch of Heard of the Story! Releasing sometime in February, it will include a lot of new content and major performance improvements!
With players building bigger and bigger towns, the visual uniqueness of villagers is something that has become very important, and so we've invested a lot of time into designing and creating an assortment of clothes, hair styles, and facial hair styles for you and your villagers to wear! To go along with this, there will be a more detailed customisation screen at the beginning of the game, as well as a separate 'equipment' inventory section so that these items no longer take up regular inventory space. Of course, these items will all be craftable in a new Tailor building. Below are some of the concepts we brainstormed before starting development on the new appearances.
So far, the villager AI centered around using a graph-based database. For various reasons, this turned out to be a bad decision for performance. In this update, we completely refactored out the database, which has led to insanely faster AI performance, between 100-10,000x. In particular, this has a huge impact on large worlds. Previously, a town spanning 50 villagers would start to appear sluggish for conversations, new buildings, villager immigration, and overall, raised new issues and bugs. Now, those delays will be simply completely gone! This opens up the opportunity for much larger worlds than previously possible, with towns potentially having hundreds of roaming villagers - the upper limits of which we are still testing!
One of the most requested buildings from an earlier Discord poll - the Cattle Barn - is also coming in the 0.9 patch. With it, will come the first round of animals in the game - 🐮🐄! To construct the building, you'll need to attract some cute little cows which you'll be able to find roaming in the forests surrounding your town. Feed them with some hay, or even some of the bread you bake, and they'll return the favour by providing you with milk, which you'll be able to use to make cheese and butter! Thanks for sharing what you want to see and helping shape the game!
So those are the main new things coming! We're looking forward to seeing you try the new update when it's ready!