Hi everyone,

First of all, I would like to thank everyone that is supporting HYO and for being a huge help to find and report any bugs.

Secondly, I would like to inform you all as to what is next with the development of the game. There are a few things I would like address before looking at player suggestions. Below is a list of things I plan to work on in the next few weeks.

- Rework the map entirely, more islands but smaller ones, some Islands are just too big for nothing.

- Add more life to the map, work on level design, add more buildings and POIs.

- Rework all the caves, rather than have 150 caves, focus on a smaller number of them but a few on each Island. Perhaps some caves have 1 exclusive ore inside. Example: cobalt only caves, or iron only caves. I will designate certain islands to contain certain ores in the caves.

- Re work the quest system and add more quests. One main thing players seem to want is that quests auto complete if something was made before making a quest active. I may not do this for the first few quests because I want it to serve as a mini tutorial for new players and would like them to be able to read the quest and not auto complete without them even knowing what was done.

- Work AI mechanics and behaviors. I want hunters to be smarter, perhaps also build and gather resources. I also want them to attack player bases after a set number of days. This will mean that base defense will start to be a thing. Triggered Horde attacks might be fun also. Furthermore, Guards and other human AI should also be more intelligent, shooting one of them should trigger others to be alarmed for example. I will start a post just for AI behavior and mechanics in a few days/weeks to go over all that more in detail and get player input.

- Lots of balancing needed, cost of recipes, trader costs, craft times etc.

Although I do not want to commit to an exact ETA for the above, I will guess about 4 to 6 weeks. I will also be working on bugs in between all this. Once the above is complete, I really want to start a forum with a list of player suggestions and perhaps have players vote on what should be added and in what order. Basically, some way to have players dictate the evolution of the game. If anyone has any suggestions on how to accomplish this, please let me know.