An update I've been wanting to work on for a while now is finally coming, the Quality of Life update! This update will mainly focus on fleshing out some of the mid and late game and improving upon the existing systems. The main focus will be the new upgradable farms, housing and storage. But there's also some other nice tidbits, like the new aging and trader systems!
I'm really excited for this update, as it's the first in a while that steers away from working on the defense mechanics.
This is a fairly large patch, and I may break it up into two parts depending on the timeline. A lot of the new features are not that technically-complex, but could take more time than expected.
If you have any requests, be sure to post them in the comments. Let me know what you want, and how you want it to work! You might just find it sneak into the next patch. :)
InDev 29 Road Map
Aging / Lifelong Health System
- Villagers will now age and die. But through providing them a healthy, happy life you can help them live longer.
- Villagers will eventually "retire" and no longer be able to take a job, but when they chat with villagers they will impart their wisdom on them, giving them experience bonuses so they level up faster.
- Having good housing, keeping people well fed, happy and having clinics as well as many other factors will assist in extending villager's age.
Social System
- The chat system will be rewritten, adding a "social" bar, similar to health, hunger and thirst.
- They will no longer chat somewhat randomly to boost happiness, rather, they will chat when their social bar is low. A high social bar will help boost happiness, a low one will make it drop.
Catjeet Traders, Marketplaces and Gold
- New Catjeet traders will visit any village that has a marketplace built.
- Catjeet traders will allow you to buy and sell goods from them, and they will stock a "global" inventory. Meaning if you sell 100 rocks from one village, you can buy the same 100 rocks in another later.
- You will also be able to buy/hire Catjeet workers, who will join your village and become part of your workforce, offering another way to expand your population.
- The Catjeet will deal in gold coins. You can get gold coins either by selling items to the Catjeet, or by mining gold ore, turning it into gold ingots at the forge, and turning the ingots into coins at one of the smithies.
- Gold coins will be an actual resource in the game, so you need to make space to hold your wealth!
- Oh, and Catjeet have tails.
Upgradable Houses
- Houses will now be upgradable and the concept of how housing works will be changed around a bit, encouraging players to build multiple house types depending on their play preferences.
- Rather than tents, shacks and hovels, you will now get to pick between different quality houses. Deciding if you want a low occupancy high quality home (faster energy regeneration and a happiness boost), or high occupancy low quality homes (slow energy regeneration and no happiness boost).
- Most houses will have roughly the same cost and physical space requirements, with some exceptions. The player just decides if they want high occupancy low quality homes, or low occupancy high quality ones.
Upgradable Farms
- Both current farms will be removed from the game.
- The new farm will have a larger build footprint than the original Large Farm, but will have 5 upgrade phases, starting out roughly the same quality as the small farm, and upgrading into something much better than the original large farm.
- Upgrading farms will give you more crop spaces, and possibly faster growth rates.
Upgradable Storage and Storage Management System
- All storage buildings are being replaced with a new buildings. Similar to farms.
- The new buildings can be upgraded 4 times. Starting out slightly worse than the original small storage, and upgrading up to being much better than the original.
- You'll be able to click on each storage building, and enable/disable certain materials from being stored there.
- There will still be resource-specific storage like we have now, as well as a catch all. But the catch all can not store quite as much overall as its resource-specific counterparts.
- A new "Gold storage" building will be added, to accompany the new Catjeet trading system and currency being added to the game.