Welcome, skyfarer!
The nights are drawing in, and Team FBG are drawing the blinds and lighting our candles for the last push to complete SUNLESS SKIES. Today’s update and the Commander update on the 19th of December are the last ones before we launch, on 31st January.
In this release we’ve got a new opening experience for you, a revamp of New Winchester, and the remaining Survival elements. Also a note about save games - please read closely to avoid disappointment!
Start at the very beginning
Something we especially hoped to improve on from SUNLESS SEA was the abrupt nature of the game’s opening, which contributed to a lot of players feeling lost and confused (not in a fun way), and giving up on the game before it even got started.
In SUNLESS SKIES, you now begin with a morsel of story and a lightly tutorial opening. It will hopefully ease you into the game, introduce elements at a reasonable pace and in an appropriate order, and provide some key context for the setting. (The full tutorial with tips will follow in the launch build; we have to create it last, when everything else is in place.)
You still start in the New Winchester segment, but now your initial position is explained by the opening story: you’ve just emerged from the Blue Kingdom's transit relay, and your current captain is dying as a result of what happened there.
New New Winchester
The New Winchester segment is the same size as before, but the city of New Winchester itself is now much bigger – it sprawls across most of the segment, and Company House and Victory Hall now have their own platforms, where you can turn in port reports.
A thousand deaths in the skies
The occasional injuries, the infections, the endless arguments over whose turn it is to do the dishes: in isolation these things are insignificant.
What happens in the skies, when you’ve lost crew but your engine hungers and your nightmares worsen? Probably nothing good.
We’ve introduced a host of difficult decisions for your Captains. The crew are lax, exhausted. Would extra rations bolster them - if you can spare some? Or should you crack the whip, use fear to get things running as they should? Repair your ailing engine yourself?
These choices will appear periodically when your Crew is less than the Safe Manning Number for your locomotive (check this under Possessions > Your Train).
Save files
From the Commander release onwards, we will not support saves from any versions of the game older than the Survival release.
Play with the Survival build at least once - before 19 December, when Commander is released - to ensure save compatibility at launch!
We recommend you start a new save so you can check out the opening and various updated stories.
Note: we hoped to have player weapons in this release, but we’ve had to move them. You can expect rocket launchers, mines and some very special, unique weapons that can be claimed from your enemies. Sorry to keep you waiting: they’ll be worth it!
For the full patch notes, check the Failbetter forums or the Steam forums for Sunless Skies.
SKYFARER
Did you see that we released a companion pen and paper RPG for SUNLESS SKIES? It’s called SKYFARER, and it’s free, and reports are that people are enjoying it very much! (It also works well as a system for SUNLESS SEA, we’re told.)
Download the SKYFARER book, story supplement and digital character sheet
There’s a Sky Story competition to win fabulous prizes including a deluxe SKYFARER set which comes with custom Correspondence tokens. Simply tweet us a story from one of your play sessions. Here are all of the details, and terms, etc on the FBG blog.
JOIN OUR STREAM
We’ll be going live with @kjr_kisuke for the launch at 4pm GMT! Come and take a look at the new game opening and see what awaits in New New Winchester!
Follow kjr_kisuke on Twitch to be notified when we go live.