In our September roadmap, we said our next big update would be the Farming Update, and it is out now!
Here's a look at some of the major features. Full patch notes here.
Fertilizer
Your goblins can discover fertilizer. This means they can store garbage and other suitable items in middens, where it will decompose into compost.
For fields you've marked for fertilizing, they'll spread garbage or compost over them in a new farming phase called mucking. This will restore the fertility of the tiles, allowing you to farm the same land year after year.
Clay Farming
Researching metal digging tools will let your goblins start farming the more fertile clay lands of the forest.
Combined with fertilizers, clay farming allows you to build large villages with populations of over a hundred goblins. You can also unlock Improved Farming to make farming operations faster, so that larger fields are easier to maintain. We've also made lots of small tweaks to farming to make bigger camps more sustainable.
New Stock Manager Features
To help you manage a large camp with diverse production chains, we've introduced new features in the Stock Manager. It still works the same as it used to, but toggling advanced controls will reveal the new options.
The "Reserve" control is used to keep some of that resource back from further production steps. For example, if you order 20 fresh fish in the Stock Manager, and build a smoker and order 20 smoked fish, your goblins will keep smoking fish until there are 20 smoked fish. If you raise the Reserve of fresh fish to 10, the goblins will try to maintain a store of 10 fresh fish and smoke the rest.
If you select an item, the advanced controls will also open the controls for the recipes for making that item. You can enable or disable individual recipes, or choose the "Always produce if materials available" option. In the example in the image above, I've told my goblins to always produce compost from hay. This means that all available hay will be taken to middens. If I set a reserve for hay, they would keep that reserve back in storage and send the rest to the middens.
Some uses for the new stock manager controls include keeping back rye seeds for planting, and setting things like wolf meat or bird meat to always be produced when corpses are available. You can even set smoked wolf meat to always be produced, in which case wolf corpses will be automatically butchered and smoked whenever they are available.
New Shaman Spells
The Farming Update also comes with new spells for your shaman. They can now level the ground and change the direction of the wind. More importantly, the shaman can now put the spirits around the camp to work.
The two Conscript Spirit spells make the spirits haul items around the camp, easing the workload on your goblins.
New Structure: Windmill
To make life even easier for the little blue guys, we've also introduced our very first engine! The windmill is just that: a wind-powered mill for grinding grain into flour. We hope to introduce many more engines in the future.
Oh, and did I say blue guys? The Farming Update also brings the much-requested option to customize your goblins' appearance.
As industrious creatures, goblins can find a use for everything.
All this and much more is the Farming Update! Happy camping to everyone: read the full patch notes to the Farming Update here, and stay tuned: and we'll be back with more new features soon.