Hello! I am very excited to release this latest update to Spiritlands. In the last update the game got a big shake as settlements were added- transforming the way you play. This update is one half of the utilisation of that new mechanic and adds more significance to walls, tile flooring, and the preservaton of natural tiles, as well as where you choose to begin.
Happiness is a settlement-specific value that can be viewed by right-clicking the Town Hall or completely zooming out. The value is from 0-100 and provides production effects from -40 to +40% to all production. It is generated through settlement natural tiles, ruins (particularly explored ones), the diamonds/flowers you have, and by building barracks, walls, and any of the THREE NEW BUILDINGS.
The emergency services, schools, and waste management centres all provide a 10 point boost to happiness. I will be asking if people want more to be used from these buildings after the next update.
Big changes:
- Happiness as talked about above. There are also happy/sad particle effects to show you what affects happiness which way even more.
- 11 new building icons in the tile UI are added including 3 categories. Some of the icons won't be usable yet.
- New school, waste management, and emergency services happiness buildings.
- The Faith extra time ability has now been changed to a 2x production boost for 30 seconds per spend/click.
- A lot more uses of the helper. She can now also be toggled on and off easily. She will also store un-closed messages, so if you quickly get a few, you won't miss a thing.
- Disabled research and missions- they are just too pointless until their update (two from now).
- Every settlement can have a maximum of 5 explorers per Town Hall level. This stops the endless assignment of explorers from being possible.
Smaller changes:
- Tile requirements are now all vertical and have a visible expand button for pulling out the requirements.
- The Profile panel now includes tiny icons for happiness, power, water, food, housing, and coal. When a settlement disaster is happening, the correct icon will be red when looking at the settlement.
- A new option is in the settings menu- you can turn off the automatic jumping to settlements. This occurs if you are at one settlement, but another e.g. runs out of coal. That way you won't miss that happening and face a big problem when you do.
- New original main menu music again by Brian Fairbanks.
- All small window event notifications are related to the settlement you are looking at.
- Secret settlements- the old 15 buildings before being attacked is settlement specific. Settlements with at least 10 buildings can be attacked. Also the more camps you can see (up to 6)- the more frequently you will be attacked.
- Some small graphical additions.
- You can no longer upgrade settlements to overlap enemy camps- you must destroy them first.
- Saves now display the total population that you have across all settlements.
- You can now place sandstone on ocean tiles.
- Campfires are now cheaper at 150 wood.
- Brought back the- press 'R' and selected tile will rotate hidden trick-- works on all tiles.
- Wall costs are significantly reduced- meaning they should be purchasable early-game.
- Double the number of bones found in ruins (as they are used in building schools).
- You now find keys in ruins to help you open golden chests.
- Colonies use up the resources you trade with them 3x faster.
- Homes cost less skins to upgrade.
- Food stored no longer goes below 0- this is because if you have multiple settlements and one runs out of food and you don't notice- you won't have to recover masses of food.
- Less explorers needed to explore ruins.
- Lowered the coal rate from homes costs slightly- to 0.3.
- Tile flooring can be placed outside of settlements but at costs to the capital.
Patch:
- On leaving game and restarting- main UI is no longer visible.
- Increased edge of world so the camera can always overlay settlements on right side.
- Clicking next page on the market quickly overlaying buttons improperly no longer happens.
- Building homes no longer removes the visual element of the pre-existing flooring.
- Light being created even without the resources to build a farm- fixed.
- Some text issues with words poking outside of boxes.
- The initial zoom level is slightly further back, and the layer scaling issue (pre-first zoom) is fixed.
- Stopped free walls, paths, and tile decors.
- Stopped trying to build walls without the correct resources from destroying paths.
- Added atmospheric sounds for the colonies too.
- Explored ruins are also removed when settlements are destroyed.
- Slightly lowered defence military atmospheric sound volume and spaced it out by 10 seconds.
- Fixed some statistics.
- Statistics menu is now above tile requirements pullout-- has its own close button.
- Removed the ability to move boats outside of a settlement.
- Lots of attack and defence fixing.
- Enemy camps overlapping colonies are destroyed better.
- Renamed the population achievements to 25 and 50 pop so they will work again.
Coming up
The next update is power and water- that means 2 more buildings (but a few appearance variations for the windfarms). Currently I plan on making it so that the power and water requirements affect happiness- but I might expand on that.
I am also looking into adding a new panel that will organise a periodic set of resources from one settlement to another. That way you can create resource specific (mostly) settlements- such as ports.
Question:
Should changing resource collection change from clicks to putting a symbol over a tile to start autocollection- the same with building healing, and you can quickly reselect the tile or drag it to a new place?
Please let you know your thoughts! Months in and on the edge of the final month of development. Have your say!
Kenthria- @ Tall Story Studios
Forum: https://www.tallstorystudios.com/forum/spiritlands
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