Alpha 17: Building a Bigger and Better Stonehearth!
Welcome to Stonehearth Alpha 17! This release is all about empowering your hearthlings to build more awesome settlements. To do this, we’re introducing the ability for your town to level up, we’re giving you a new class to help create settlement awesomeness, and we’ve made tons of upgrades to the building system itself.
We should note that Alpha 17 is merely Part One of improving the building experience. We’ll be continuing this effort, with both content and functionality, in Alpha 18.
Let’s take a closer look at what’s in this release.
Blood, Sweat, and Tiers
Get on my level.
Your hearthlings have labored mightily to carve an impressive settlement out of the wilderness. They are the envy of their map tile. And yet, they are asking themselves, “Is that all there is?” To which we can now say, “Absolutely not.”
A few days after your hearthlings settle in their new home, you will receive a quest from a royal herald. Create one of three city monuments to commemorate your town's particular strengths and skills, and your settlement will qualify for "Township Status" which will elevate your hearthling-ville to a new tier of impressiveness.Attaining this new tier unlocks advanced building templates, launches upgraded and enhanced stores, and introduces a new tier of background music!
This quest is currently available only for the Ascendancy, other kingdom upgrades to come in future Alphas. What mysteries -- and challenges -- could higher tiers hold for our hearthlings? (Cue foreshadowing music…)
In Stonehearth, all our engineers are civil.
It’s a trap!
Want to make a more awesome city? You’ll need an Engineer! Good thing we’re introducing just that in this Alpha. Engineers provide a whole new dimension to your town’s capabilities.Promoted from a Level One Blacksmith (with the help of a Wrench, crafted by a Level Four Blacksmith), the Engineer creates advanced contraptions and defensive weaponry.
Initially, he can craft two types of ranged weapons and two traps. The Turret and Turnip Shooter (!) will target and fire at enemies; they are limited in the number you can place in your town, based on the level and number of engineers in town. Turrets have a limited lifespan (their ammo depletes after a certain number of uses), but can be repaired by your Engineer.Traps can be set off once and will stun enemies who stumble across them; they deal burst damage, and you can place more of them in your town than the turrets.
In the beginning, Engineers can place 4 traps and 2 turrets; this allowance increases as your Engineer levels up.In future, Engineers will create more epic craftables, but for now the only decorations they can fashion are an iron door and signpost. We will continue to add recipes in future Alphas.
Build castles in the sky. Well, almost.
Build, or build not. There is no try.
We’ve streamlined and updated the building system. Now building functions more smoothly; you should be able to design -- and your hearthlings will complete! -- buildings that previously remained unbuilt. This includes scaffolding being removed completely following a structure’s completion.
We’ve added some messaging to the building process; among other things, commissioning a building will also automatically set your crafters to work producing the needed items for your new structure. And (drum roll) -- beds can now be “owned” by individual hearthlings!
Also: STAIRS!!! Yes, we have added a stairs tool to make your multi-story constructions even more awesome.
The system is not perfect -- not everything may work -- but we think you’ll find it a huge leap forward. Please let us know how it works for you and alert us of problematic templates and saves on our forums here on Steam or at discourse.stonehearth.net.
Building improvements include (but are not limited to):
- When building is complete, display a congratulatory message instead of an empty materials needed box. Do not display the build “Pause” button when building is complete.
- Fix issue with breaking up large floors that lead to unbuildable buildings.
- First step in building template UI update. Default building templates and custom templates are displayed under different tabs in the Building Editor UI. Kingdom-specific templates are listed separately.
- Bed ownership! Beds can now be assigned to individual hearthlings.
- Added stairs tool to Building Editor
- A huge number of scaffolding fixes and improvements! Scaffolding now understands when its structure has completed. Fix a bug with shared scaffolding. Don't place scaffolding in places that will be blocked. And more...
- Have town keep track of buildings that are stuck because their materials do not exist in the world.
- Correctly merge walls with nearby buildings.
- When the “Build” command is given, find all the fixtures needed for the building and add items needed to the relevant crafter queues. Add gameplay setting to enable or disable building auto queue; default is on.
- Disable remove and edit buttons when a building has started construction
- New ahead-of-time scaffolding system: Hearthlings now think hard about scaffolding before they start building, resulting in fewer unbuildable structures. Will not work for buildings that are already in-progress.
- You can now change colors of already placed floor, foundation, and roads in Building Editor
- Added Ctrl+z as a hotkey for Undo in the Building Editor
- Erase tool has been moved to under the Undo tool in Building Editor
- Better implementation of finding another block to teardown. Teardown will now be faster and hearthlings will drop resources at their feet instead of putting it back into storage while tearing down
We’ve also made refinements in other important areas. We’re continuing to polish and improve combat and party behavior, especially around the placing and removal of defense banners. Plus, combat parties now patrol together in formation! Additionally, pathfinding can now handle large numbers of destinations without bogging down the CPU.
As with all new Alpha releases, we’ve also added literally hundreds of changes, additions, fixes, and the like. Go to our website for all the details.