Alpha 19: Think of the Children!
In which the Rayya’s Children kingdom and the desert biome receive some long-overdue attention.
Welcome to the unstable branch debut of Stonehearth Alpha 19. This release is focused on bringing some much-needed love to the kingdom of Rayya’s Children and their desert biome habitat. In Alpha 17, we introduced the ability to “upgrade” your settlement to Township Status -- provided you can satisfy a challenge provided by a royal herald. This upgrade has been -- until now -- available only for the Ascendancy. With Alpha 19, however, Rayya’s Children matches the Ascendancy in achieving Township awesomeness, in its own unique fashion.
There are (as always!) other notable additions for this release, including the initial steps in new hearthling interactions and our first iteration of a mod manager.
For this first arrival of Alpha 19, we’re going to focus on the big stuff in the release; a more detailed list of features, fixes, and enhancements will follow in the coming weeks.
Greetings, worthy settlement.
Naryal Iskender is in the middle of an expedition to visit notable towns. The next printing of the Iskender Map of Hearth is on the horizon -- and your town can be included on the map... if you meet some requirements. Naryal asks whether you want to be put on the map as a place renowned for its Trading Post, Monkey Shrine, or your Exotic Goods. Build a monument to stake your claim for renown -- and achieve Tier Two illustriousness!
When your settlement attains this exclusive tier you will receive a bounty of new goodness, including:
- advanced building templates
- upgraded and enhanced stores
- new traders
- new tier of background music
Desert Song
Wait -- back up a minute. So it says above that a Rayya’s Children town achieving Tier Two status gets “new background music.” But does that mean… YES. Yes, indeed. Rayya’s Children now has its very own soundtrack, courtesy of Raj Mann (and our very own, albeit mysterious, Doug). And not just for Tier Two -- across the board you’ll hear a rich musical tapestry worthy of this desert kindgom. Enjoy!
We’ll be adding still more to Rayya’s Children in the weeks before Alpha 19 gets its stable release. Including (we hope!) more desert-centric beasties as well as some attractive flora. Stay tuned.
Also, too.
Alpha 19 also boasts the introduction of new features in two important areas.
You’ll notice that some hearthlings, in their downtime, now sport speech bubbles -- this is step one in providing more social interaction for your hearthlings. Please note that -- for now! -- the bubbles are empty. This does not mean that your hearthlings are speechless; rather, we’re still considering exactly what form hearthling discussion ought to take. Your thoughts?
Also making its first appearance: The Stonehearth Mod Manager! This is accessed through the Settings menu on the launch screen. You’ll find the Mods tab as an option on the bottom of the Settings menu. Now, you can put all available mods in your mods folder, and use the Mod Manager to enable or disable the one you want (or don’t want) to use. No more pesky dragging mods in and out of the folder… your Mod Manager does the work for you. Also, if you have a mod that isn’t up-to-date, the Mod Manager will prevent you from loading it -- this helps to avoid problems related to outdated mods.We’re planning more for this feature, but we wanted to get it into your hands as soon as we could. Please let us know what you think!
(IMPORTANT NOTE: The Mod Manager is accessible only from the launch screen settings menu. You cannot access it from the in-game settings menu. This is because you’ll need to restart a game if you’ve made changes to your mod configuration; you can’t change the configuration mid-game.)
Finally, we made significant fixes to AI performance to address some idle/brain dead hearthling behaviors, as well as enhancements to further improve performance in large towns.
Of course, we’ll be adding lots more new features, fixes, and improvements to this release in the coming weeks, so for those of you walking the unstable release path, follow along.
Remember that this is an unstable release! Which means that you may -- nay, you will encounter glitches and the unexpected. Please report any issues in Discourse on Stonehearth.net or in our Steam forums. (Hey, that’s what unstable releases are for!) As with all unstable builds, this is available only on the Steam Latest branch.