Greetings Nobles!

This update brings major additions to your growing kingdom, including the new Stables and Mounts, full Shield Combat and Shield Crafting, expanded Tool Tier crafting, and the introduction of Copper Ore to support early metal progression. We’ve also delivered a wide range of performance optimizations, improved world polish, and refined AI, crafting, and building systems to make your villages smoother and more immersive than ever.

Note on Raids:

We’ve made adjustments to address the excessive raid frequency reported by players. Here’s how raids will behave in this patch:

• Existing Saves: Raids may still occur if they were already queued in your save, but the changes we’ve made should significantly reduce or eliminate raid spam. We’re monitoring reports closely to confirm this fix across different worlds.

• New Saves: Raids are now fully disabled. No raid events will trigger in new worlds until the full bandit camp system is implemented.

This approach allows us to confirm whether the underlying issue still affects older worlds while preventing new players from experiencing repeated or unfair raid attacks. Raids are planned to return once they are properly tied to the upcoming Bandit Camp system, giving players meaningful counterplay by clearing nearby camps.

If you continue to experience frequent raid attacks on an older save, starting a new world will ensure a smooth experience until the full system arrives in the December update.

Thank you for your patience while we refine these features and prepare the proper raid and bandit systems for future patches.

Note on Build Parts:

Several building parts have had their default rotations adjusted to improve placement quality, snapping behavior, and villager interaction reliability. In existing saves, you may notice some furniture or objects appearing rotated—you may need to rotate these manually. New game saves will not be affected by this change.

Note on Character Creator:

We’ve made some underlying updates to the character system in preparation for future content. As a result, characters in existing saves may appear unexpectedly bald. If so, simply revisit the Character Creator and reapply your desired hairstyle.

This note does not apply for bald persons.

Additionally, some clothing pieces may revert to their default clothing after the update. If for some reason you find your Lord or Lady embracing more of the outdoor elements than intended, a quick return to the Character Creator or a Wardrobe, will allow you to select your preferred outfit once again and spare yourself from a wandering breeze.

Stables & Mounts

• Added the Stable building and Saddlehand Workbench, along with a feeding trough

  • Presently you will be granted a horse upon placement of a feeding trough though later we plan to update this through trade as purchasable husbandry.

  • Players can mount and dismount with hotkey X (tooltips to be adjusted as we expand on animal husbandry)

• Introduced first horse with its own animations, movement, AI navigation, and interact logic

• No research is required to build a stable for now, but will be added to the research tree in our broader animal husbandry update

• Developers Note: We are in the process of updating hoof and horse ambient audio which will be patched in next. You may experience bugs and unexpected behavior with the Horse which we will continue to evaluate and polish. To fix any unexpected issues - you can always dismiss your horse in the character panel, and build a new trough to spawn a new one. As soon as we are comfortable with the horse mechanics, we'll be expanding this to purchasable and trades with variety of horses in the long term.

Shield Combat & Crafting

• Added Shield Equipment and a full shield-based combat stance.

• Introduced blocking, shield hit reactions, and defensive timing improvements.

• Sword-and-shield combinations now have unique animations and transitions.

• Shields can now be crafted at the Blacksmith with proper recipes, materials, and UI integration.

• New shield icons, animations, and station interactions added.

• Expanded the Blacksmith crafting loop to support tool progression.

• Added crafting recipes for higher-tier tools, creating the foundation for future advanced tool upgrades.

• Re-enabled tool costs for tool racks and improved tool assignment UI.

• Copper Ore is now added to mines and resource nodes, enabling early-tier metal crafting.

• Updated mine visuals and resource distribution.

• Integrated new resource icons and crafting recipes.

Developers Note: As we roll out more resources, we will be expanding on further crafting recipes including Steel and Masterwork Tiers. As such we are focusing on initial tiered tools and weapons up from basic tools. We have several new weapons planned to release in our upcoming updates. Blacksmith and Foundry will be updated soon.

Major Optimizations

• Reduced virtual texture pool from 3GB → 1.2GB, improving memory stability.

• Optimized HLOD builds and merged mesh performance.

• Removed unnecessary collisions on foliage for smoother traversal.

• Improved lighting, reflection behavior, and streaming performance.

• General crash fixes, navmesh improvements, and AI stability updates.

Additional Improvements

Combat & Weapons

• Faster melee animations and cleaner hit detection.

• Improved damage consistency and stagger behavior. Better bow responsiveness and removed camera drift during firing.

• Raids: We have temporarily disabled raids that were disproportionally scaling and will be replacing them with Bandit camps in a future update.

Buildings & Construction

• Updated Woodcutter’s Lodge prefab and added new lumber stack build parts.

• New support pillars and updated decorative structure icons.

• Improved placement, snapping, and collision for walls, stairs, and gables.

Crafting & Stations

• Added manual fuel toggles for crafting stations.

• Fixed blacksmith crafting loops and resource consumption issues.

• Updated building detail UI to reflect fuel and active work more clearly.

World & Environment

• Added new ore types (including Copper) and refined terrain transitions.

• Updated background foliage and shader performance.

AI & Villagers

• Hunters now properly approach wildlife spawners.

• Builders logically select valid build parts based on available resources.

• Improved pathfinding around wells, walls, and tight village layouts.

UI & UX

• Updated blacksmith UI, radial menus, and resource widgets.

• Fixed crafting menu refresh issues and improved sound cues.

• Reduced texture sizes across UI elements for performance gains.

Voice Acting

• Added multiple new villager voice lines and characters.

• Improved cooldowns and variation to reduce repetitive dialogue.

Known Issues

• Andres may get stuck underneath Farmhouse in Scenario 2: Heart of Gold (Remove build parts to access and replace as a current workaround)

Thank you all for playing Noble Legacy as we continue to develop. We look forward to our next update in December!