Beta Test for Quality of Life Update 0.6.0 starts now!

Dear Pioneers,

the latest Beta test of our upcoming quality of life update 0.6.0 is out now!

Please tell us what you think on Discord or in our Open Beta discussion forum on Steam.

Thank you for your support and have fun testing our new features!

Features

New Village State: Acquainted

• The new state “Acquainted” is already achieved with 50% faction standing
• The “Acquainted” state already unlocks some trade and gift offers
• The overall amount of trade and gift offers has been increased

Building construction mode: New help grid

In building construction mode, a help grid will now also inform about space available around the current building position. This is very helpful to immediately recognize if there is enough room to build a road along or around the building. Beside that, it helps in general to estimate available space for other planned buildings nearby.

Building construction mode: Snapping to road

In building construction mode, hovering over an existing road or very close to it will snap the entrance direction of the planned building to the road. This means it is still possible to place buildings sideways to roads, but also to snap them to the road directly without the need to rotate the building.

Road construction mode: 90 degree snapping

In road construction mode, new planned roads will snap automatically to 90 and 180 degree angles if the current mouse position is close to those axes. The new planned road segment will snap to existing road segments, previous planned road segments and to existing buildings/construction sites.

• Road snapping can be enabled and disabled with a new button in the road construction menu
• Road snapping can be suppressed by holding CTRL (customizable)

Efficiency statistics: Individual building efficiency display

• For each building with a continuous workflow, an efficiency value is shown
  • Hovering over a building will show the efficiency value in the building tooltip
  • For a selected building, the efficiency value is displayed, too. The tooltip of the value will show the efficiency graph for the last hour. This is very helpful to understand whether the building is operating continuously or not, and at which efficiency level.

• Efficiency values are displayed for the following buildings:
  • 9 different gathering buildings (Woodcutter, Quarry, Copper hut, etc.)
  • 16 different production buildings (Sawmill, Weaponsmith, etc.)
  • Both farm buildings, reflecting successful harvesting
  • Forester, reflecting successful planting of trees
  • Tavern, reflecting successful meal ingredient usage
  • Guard Tower / Garrison, reflecting territory expansion
  • Explorer, reflecting unknown territory exploration

• The efficiency value reflects actual positive results, not if the units are continuously busy. The value of 100% is a best case value, it can be lower for many reasons, depending on the building type. Here are some examples:
  • Longer walk distances (for gathering buildings, farms, territory building, explorer, etc.)
  • Missing input commodities, missing food supply (for mining) or full output piles
  • Weaker ingredients which consume more production time (copper instead of iron)
  • Rotting plants (for farms: more seeding, less harvesting)

Economy enhancement: Commodity redirection by more flexible input piles

• Equipment items in training buildings which are currently not needed for the ordered and scheduled units of that building, will be released and redirected to other locations if they are needed there. This ensures that equipment can be exchanged between e.g. multiple guild houses or multiple military academies to handle the training/recruitment orders.
• Input commodities in buildings which are currently not needed because their recipe has been disabled, will be released and redirected to other locations if they are needed there.

Demolish refund and visualization

• Demolishing a building grants 50% (rounded down) of wood/stone construction materials that were used to construct the building
• Cloth and rope are refunded 100%
• A tooltip shows the amount of commodities refunded
• A simple demolish visualization has been added
• The demolish refund can help to escape deadlock situations (no more softwood beams, no more stone deposits, no more nutrition food for quarries)

New additional lighting setups

• For customized maps you can select between one of several new lighting setups. At the very end of the “Map Setup” section, you will find a new dropdown for “Atmosphere”
• By pressing a hotkey (default: CTRL+L) it’s possible to change the current map lighting setup at any time. The last active lighting setup will be part of the savegame.
• The 4 available lighting setups are:
  • Sunrise
  • Cloudy Daytime (Default)
  • Golden Hour
  • Sunset

• New directional atmospheric fog
  • The fog color reacts when facing the sun
  • Can be deactivated in the settings

Improvements

Gameplay

• When a hunter is selected, nearby animals get highlighted
• Rations and nutrition meals now still look different after being served at mining buildings

Map setup

• The landing party “Beginner” now contains some trade carriers
• Added enemy level “Extremely many” which adds another 50% of enemies
• Added landing party “Extended for co-op”
• This landing party has been created for co-op to allow a faster game start. It has both more units and more commodities. Adding more enemies keeps the overall challenge similar.

Visuals

• Improved reflection on the cliff textures

Misc

• Audio mixing
• Saved games can be deleted from the load and save menus
• Loading the game to the main menu with many saved games is now faster.
• Switched trade UI layout for better readability so that the player is on left side and the NPC side is on right side
• Improvements in the UI layout
• Improvements of the localized texts
• Improved rendering performance through optimized LOD levels for characters
• Optimized VRAM usage with optimized texture compression setup
• “Join Co-op game” button got a tooltip
• Reworked visuals for the thieves
• Improved rendering of distance fog
• Performance improvements on maps with a lot of Pagonians

Fixes

Gameplay

• Fixed: Sometimes the building state “Construction paused” was not removed even though the building got finished
• Fixed: Sometimes a guard tower did not get any reinforcements
• Fixed: When a soldier was living in a residence or cottage, its selection window did not reflect this
• Fixed: A Pagonian bitten by a werewolf would still show “Ready for new orders” when selected
• Fixed: A bitten Pagonian did not have an icon
• Fixed: Building preview got stuck at its current location if cursor hovers any UI while holding right mouse button

Visuals

• Fixed: Sometimes fish was swimming into the ground when close to the shore
• Forester now carries different looking hardwood and softwood saplings
• Fixed: State "not enough to do for all staff members at the moment" stayed active when building was turned off
• The color of porcini and raspberries baskets was too similar, so the white blanket was removed from the porcini basket
• Fixed: Black rabbits suddenly turned red when dead.

Misc

• Fixed: When changing the language, not all text was updated to the new language
• Fixed several crashes
• Fixed: Placed pings in a co-op session persisted in the world after last client left the session