Improved terrain generation and biome system, I think these are easier to demonstrate with pictures:
Desert biome
Snow biome
Jungle biome
Comparison of old and new method. The new method is angle-aware.
It's still a work-in-progress with certain shortcomings, tons of other improvements coming in Release 5.
IMPROVED LANDMARKS
Goblin Forest: Goblin captain, bonfires, foliage growing neatly on the sides of the path.
Improvements to the fog system. Locations can be much more foggy.
Town Generator has new "huge slot" which allows for bigger objects like this tree group to be generated
LEVEL UP
Level up mechanic which boosts max health and stamina. You can get experience by completing quests, killing monsters and eating.
It's very basic but will be expanded later once we have another round of iteration with it.
STEALING
Characters will get aggressive if they notice you stealing from their inventory
(some cottage smokes are in wrong position because we updated the house orientations to line up with the roads)
FIREARMS
Ability to use the blunderbuss, it will be improved with proper aiming later.
NEW ENEMIES
The forgotten folk roam the lands:
Speaking of which, do you like these characters with hands or without hands?
(they're currently without hands as we don't yet have a severance system which could recognize limb hierarchies and it would look silly as the hand floats in air)
NEW MAP SCREEN
This is nowhere near final but a big improvement compared to what it was.
New map screen (the stuff inside the red box doesn't change yet)
Old map screen
MINIMAP
New clearer minimap colors and blue north arrow
Don't worry about the overlapping text clutter in the bottom right. At some point we will replace the text info with proper health/stamina/food/experience bars.
NEW WEAPONS
Wooden shield and steel hammer
DAMAGE FEEDBACK
If characters lose items they will detach from the exact locations, here's a GIF animation of the goblin captain losing his helmet:
Death animations playback properly
Characters can follow other characters
You cannot interact or carry characters which are in aggro mode
(For example: in order to carry goblins you have to sneak from behind and lift them)
Improved screen space reflections, screen space shadows, motion blur and temporal AA. Shader performance should also be better.
Various smaller tweaks.
Almost all of us are now working on the terrain generation so in the next update we should have support for several textures per biome and the biome count will increase from 8 to 16.
Cheers,
Timo