This is actually a huge update, but you probably won't notice it. There's this thing I estimated to finish in 5 days, but it took 3 weeks instead. There is not much exciting about it, but it had to be done for years.
I know most players didn't read my bug reporting instruction and don't know why those mysterious white lines appear in their towns, so I'll explain a bit. The game fundamentally relies on pathfinding: every action takes place on a specific location. So before anything can be done some citizen must take a walk from wherever he/she is (which can be at home, on the previous job site, on the way to the bench or whatever) to that specific point. It may sound simple but in Ostriv it isn't. Since the player is not forced to "build dirt roads" connecting everything, anything can be built anywhere and anyone can be anywhere at that moment. And that includes cases like this:
There is no right way to walk to that platform and obviously the pathfinding system fails in this case, which it indicates by displaying a white line from the start to the end of the path we were trying to find. Citizens were either teleported or became stuck in place when this happened.
I added these lines as a temporary debug tool to see all possible path blocking cases, but the final solution was delayed for so long they've become a meme in the community. But 2025 is the year we're getting rid of them once and for all.
I needed to cover all possible situations and prevent the player from blocking entrances. So I tested different solutions but the only one covering all cases was to calculate the path from the spawn node on the edge of the map to every entrance of every building (some have more than one, like rowhouses or benches). It was also required to simulate all buildings currently being constructed as finished ones, so when they finish they won't block anything and won't be blocked themselves.
So now each time when you place a building, the game will briefly enter verification mode for that building and than switch to construction or a fail state.
In this case you will need to choose another location for this building. If you click on a failed building you can see which are the entrances it is blocking:
And then there are trees, which normally don't even have navigational nodes unless someone is trying to chop them down. Previously the foresters could go for a tree which is blocked in-between buildings or fences. Now the game should handle such cases with dignity. You won't be able to manually mark a tree for chopping if it's inaccessible:
Also when routinely chopping down nearby trees, the foresters will skip those with no path to them:
The same should apply to thatchery workers who are looking for nearby reeds.
Ok, now you may say you have seen those lines when the path is clearly not blocked. Yes, there were some actual pathfinding bugs which are now (hopefully) fixed in this update, but also the navigation mesh is not exactly in sync with the visuals. This is done to stop your people from skipping through the buildings corners or walking trough very thin cracks between buildings. Now with the new verification process all the cases related to this should be covered as well.
I'm not disabling the white lines just yet, so we can find any stray edge cases I may have missed, so please send reports if you see any. Also if you have blocked buildings in your previous saves, you may need to unblock them (demolish the blocking buildings) before you can build anything. Further blocking should then be prevented by the new system.
Now to the stuff you really care about. Due to my previously mentioned miscalculation, Alpha 6 is now unfortunately delaying into around mid or late February. As a consolation, take a peek at this nice new building coming in Alpha 6, which is probably not a bakery:
Meanwhile the full list of stuff in the current update:
Added/changed:
- Added a complex system to prevent navigational issues
- Increased font size in population/economy pop-ups
- Added some tips in vacant taverns and barber surgeries
- Increased font size in building placement tooltips
- Edited some help pages
- Added a help page for shoemaker's workshop
- Tailors and Shoemakers will now use threads as a raw material
- Slightly optimized node graph rebuild after demolishing buildings
- Added a tip to prioritize clay pit construction in the game start
- Increased maximum logs per forestry from 18 to 20
- Starting camp storage now has 10 fishing nets
Fixed:
- Crash related to carpentry
- White lines around forestry in recent updates
- Hay spoilage on dryers during winter didn't record in stats
- Windmill didn't have construction graph in properties
- Some boat orders being stuck
- A weird crash in a very weird case
- "Family out of water" notifications could be too dramatic sometimes
- Fishing nets appeared from nowhere
- A random crash when loading the game after using some overlays
- Minor UI corrections