Playtest fixes — translations, tutorial, Compendium, themes
The first playtest sessions made one thing clear: Oikizo was hard to get into, especially if you don't read French. Players spent long minutes clicking "placement refused" without ever being told why, and parts of the UI still showed raw translation keys. Fair catch. This update is the fix pass.
🌍 Translations
Oikizo ships in 17 languages, but a lot of the interface was only really finished in English and French.
- Untranslated text used to display its raw key (things like ui.governance.level_1). Every string now falls back to English instead.
- Full sweep: panels, seasons and weather, market resources, technologies, loading screens, recipe ingredients, server notifications and the journal all go through the translation layer now.
- The in-game date stayed French ("J4 M1 An1") no matter the language. Fixed.
- Quick language flags at the bottom-left of the main menu (EN, FR, ES, DE, 中文) — no need to dig through the options.
- The in-game language dropdown now shows the language you're actually playing in.
📚 Tutorial
There was a tutorial. Most players never saw it, and it taught things in the wrong order.
- It now reliably starts for a new player, and re-arms on a new solo game.
- Roads come first. Almost every building has to be connected to your Town Hall by a road. The tutorial used to introduce roads last, as a speed bonus — it now teaches the rule as the prerequisite it actually is.
- "Placement refused" tells you why — no road, wrong terrain, missing resources — instead of just refusing.
- The harvesting step actually explains harvesting: trees, rocks and bushes are resources, you paint a zone, your citizens do the rest.
📖 Compendium (new)
A full-screen in-game encyclopedia, opened from the hamburger menu.
- The front page is a clickable "city cycle" diagram: Your City at the center, with eight domains around it — Population, Production, Building, Research, Economy, Society, Threats, Multiplayer.
- Each domain opens a page explaining the system and how it feeds the others.
- Includes a resource and building encyclopedia.
- The tutorial points you to it when it ends.
🎨 Themes
The Classic and Vivid Nature themes were half-broken. If you played on the default Nature theme, you never saw any of this.
- The overlay panel (terrain, fertility, harvest zones...) showed up permanently and unstyled on top of the map.
- Early Access locked buttons weren't greyed out outside Nature — they looked available when they aren't.
- Nature's green accents leaked everywhere: top bar, game bar, tooltips, tutorial notification, loading spinner and progress bar, stats toggle.
- The theme you picked in the main menu didn't carry over to the in-game HUD.
- Options opened by themselves when entering a game.
All of this came straight out of playtest reports. Oikizo is in Early Access and it's still being shaped by what players run into — if something confused you, tell us.