Hey all you wonderful goblins!
A new winter has arrived in Elderstone and it's prettier than ever!
We have been super hard at work and outdid ourselves yet again with the biggest update to the game yet, even bigger than the previous update. All the suggestions and feedback and bugs reports have been taken in an listed and although we obviously can't address every single issue with each update, we certainly are working our way through them. A few key highlights we have added in this new Alpha are a brand new and much improved UI for the goblin stats and moods, these should be much more clear to you now and will help you better understand what affects the goblins’ mood and behaviour.
Goblins now also all have randomised faction attributes known as the WTF levels. These are levels in War, Trade and Faith and influence the goblins stats in various and important ways. High War attribute give a goblins more hit points and damage, while high trade will make the goblin a harder worker and a high faith score will mean more healing and magic if they are assigned to faith jobs such as priest and shaman.
On top of that goblins can now occasionally be born with traits that affect them in either positive or negative ways. These traits include “lazy”, “berserker”, “worker” and some other with more to come.
The big new art upgrade is a new snow shader and particle system. Winter will now look even better with falling snow and the snow slowly collecting on the ground and on all the buildings and rocks and terrain. The goblins also make deep paths in the snow as they wade through it. We worked really hard on making this look nice and still be performant so we hope you enjoy this updated winter look - more improvements like this will come over time.
Some of the smaller but equally important improvements include new loading screen hints to help you, slower day and night to give you more time to prepare for each winter, lots of small balance changes to make the beginning of the game easier and many more small changes.
We have fixed a lot of bugs and goblins behaviour issues and improved performance overall. Of course this is still Alpha and there will always be bugs and issues as we develop the game, every time we add new features or improve something, there is a risk of breaking something else, this is how development works and we will keep doing our best to make sure the bugs are low but also not stop from pushing forward and adding exciting new content and features.
I want to take a moment to thank our amazing community of fans, players and testers, especially the clan on discord who have been invaluable in providing feedback, suggestions and bug reports. Please join us there to help us if you haven't already and make some wicked new friends.
New Features:
- Added Goblin Traits which change a goblins job stats and can affect their moods.
- Random faction levels, the goblins are now born with predispositions to War, Trade or Faith based roles. ( WTF levels xD )
- Update to the Goblin Stats menu to reflect the previous changes and more easily get this information across to the user.
- New path following setup for goblins. Should be less stuck goblins and smoother movement.
- SNOOOOW!!! Snow Drifts during winter + snow particles.
- Added loading screen hints.
- Grass and Post Processing changes to improve framerate.
- Improvements to the Goblins perception and reactions to enemies.
Balance Changes:
- Increased the time of a daynight cycle from 300 to 400 seconds.
- Increased the number of goblins in a warrens and grandhall to 10 and 12 respectively.
- Important notifications will now slow down time to normal speed.
- Scavenger Hut and War Hall now requires Planks.
- Temple now requires logs so you can built it earlier
- Faith Hall now requires Cloth.
- Brewery now produces Ale also (from Berries)
- Council goblins no longer need Meat
- Productive Condition now reduces Laziness, several other small balance changes to conditions.
- Tool needs reduced on goblins by increasing their lifespan.
- Tutorial no longer on by default + Tradehall moved to be last in the chain.
Bug Fixes:
- More rebalancing to the breeding values for goblins, Copperface also now offers Fertility instead of Moneybags as his neutral god power.
- When a goblin successfully burns down a building all rioting goblins gain the catharsis buff.
- Temporarily removed the End of Season report while we give it a revamp.
- Fixed building resources to not change colors.
- Fixed the sleeping icon to not stay present when cycling through goblins.
- Fix for goblins not going all the way up to buildings to interact with them in some cases.
- Updated the Clan Create screen to reflect the new traits and show more of the relevant goblin stats req to select a goblin for your tribe.
- Fixed some news feed text colors.
- Crash fix from loading a save with a Goblin Under Attack notification active.
- Buildings can no longer be placed on inclines.
- Updated collision volumes on some trees which were not blocking building placement correctly.
- Increased the frequency paths/walkways are generated to more likely have the displayed path equal the final result.
- Updated multiple items tick functionality so that building placement while paused works correctly.
- Several updates to sound volumes.
- Fix for a crash from one of the story moment results.
Coming Soon (some not so soon):
- More buildings and resources
- Improved needs and feedback for not fulfilling needs
- More enemies
- More gods
- Region map gameplay with raiding and traiding
- Heroes
- Diplomacy with other races and the gods