Our first large content update is here. Weirdness allows you to slowly build up a population of weird members of your society. Normal people get unhappy when weird people do their thing, which can harm your village’s growth rate, but weirdness comes with its own advantages. They have access to new clothing and entertainment, which if you can provide them makes people happier in general, and certain weird buildings have uniquely powerful effects. Healing both the body and the mind become possible, in limited quantities, allowing your village to endure hardships others couldn’t. Those cured become weird, but that might be your entire goal, adding another weird villager to your little sub-community.
The game also begins on more complex animals, with the dodocado. It has a life-cycle, with an egg, slow maturation and eventual death by old age. It can be hunted to extinction, or all its eggs poached, but if it is harvested responsibly it can provide useful food and clothing options.
Other than this, the start of some NPC-village improvements are now in, with the villages following set decoration patterns, which they tailor to their available resources. They will plant flowerbeds around roads and statues, and choose the plants and decorations based on what the village has on hand, to make each village match its economic conditions.
Detailed changes:
Gameplay
-New Magic plant: Weird Healer. Makes people weird (which has advantages and disadvantages) if they use it to heal (max one heal per day)
-New Magic plant: Tree of woe. Makes people weird (which has advantages and disadvantages) if they use it to cure dissatisfaction (max one heal per day)
-New Skill: "Sung Stories" allows singers to satisfy social need too, requires base level singing
-New Building: Haunted Harp. Lets you play music to satisfy 'strange compulsion' of weird people and give mood buff. Requires Sung Stories
-New Building: Icecream parlor. Requires a fruit taken from a freezeflower
-New Building: Apothecary. Lets you make potions of pain relief so your injured villagers can be kept happy while they heal up
-New Creature: the Dodocado. Flees when attacked, reproduces by itself but can be hunted to extinction
-You can now remove stress traits by spending a level up (provisional, may be adjusted if it's OP)
-NPC-run villages now have improved road/decoration/flowerbed placement, by connecting individual pattern blocks together based on available and affordable decoration options
-Small improvement to NPC cargo ship AI (higher price-setting)
-Added a policy to make villagers gift cash instead of items
-Added a game option for villagers to book passage on departing cargo ships, leaving an underperforming village for a higher performing one (relative to happiness target, so successful tiny outposts showing promise can grow)
-New Building: Large bonfire. Made by the player or the village, reduces the need for warmth in nearby villagers
-You can set limits on the "distribution" policy to prevent giving resources if all citizens have enough (still can't individually target, to avoid unfairness)
Art
-Mammoth animation complete
-Fixed some graphical positions being a bit offset from their true location
-Workplaces can now have signs to indicate who owns them (can be disabled in game options) (give your cafe/bakery/evil air extractor a cute name)
UI
-Islands names are adjusted in brightness and size to reflect inhabited vs empty
-Max UI scale increased to 200%
Bugfix
-Villagers can't learn the evil trait