In this small update, I'm adding a Pickles food item and a bunch of various small changes and fixes. Most of these are fixes and adjustments since the previous update post.
Pickles
The main addition is the new Pickles food item:
First off, I've added a new produce food item - Cucumber:
These are basically identical to carrots and tomatoes, but introduce some more variety. Now, I didn't actually want Pickles to only require Cucumbers. In fact, I wanted Pickles to be made from more than 2 veggies, which just seemed a bit too simple. So they actually need all three veggies and the new Cucumber is the third.
I've also added a new farm building - Paddy Farm, which is for semi-aquatic crops. The new crop for now is Sugarcane:
Currently, paddies don't require any special tiles or preparation. This would have been one of the things included with the future level generation. For now, they act pretty much like regular Farms or Gardeners.
Sugarcane isn't used directly, but is used to produce Sugar at the new Sugar Mill:
Glassblower can now make Glass Jars ("Glass" in now called "Glass Pane"):
This means there is now a secondary use for the Glassblower, so they aren't totally useless after the monument.
From Sugar and Water, you can make Vinegar with a Glass Jar:
And finally, with Vinegar and all three veggies, you can make Pickles:
Pickles (and cucumbers) are residential food items. Pickles can be sold at the Grocery Shop. They also last significantly longer than "raw" veggies and longer than other prepared foods.
So, yes, this is a long and involved production chain, which I think is cool for endgame food items. Here are just the minimum required buildings for it:
In the future, I want this to serve as a trade item. It's difficult to produce, takes a lot of resources and is in some ways inefficient when you can just "feed" people raw vegetables. So its value would be in being able to trade it and acquire some resource you cannot otherwise. Pickles also theoretically won't spoil, although I haven't added any proper food spoiling mechanics (yet).
Infolines
One big decision I made is to remove textual descriptions from all items, buildings, etc. where this description simply describes what the entity does as part of its "recipe line" or (internally-called) "infoline". For example, Plank describes how it's made at a Saw Horse at the Sawmill. And Sawmill describes how it makes Planks via Saw Horse. And Saw Horse describes how it makes Plank at Sawmill. This is a lot to write, maintain, and read. And it is also very much redundant to the infolines that can visually and consistently show this using the same design language. For example, Flour item would only show these infolines without any description:
It feels like something is missing, but there really is nothing else to say about Flour. I could add some flavor text about Medieval flour use or something. But there is nothing gameplay-related to write here - no information I actually need to convey.
So Instead of text, I make sure to show infolines wherever it is useful to know about the entity in question. This mostly means most of the selection/toggle/etc. buttons now have a tooltip with an infoline now:
It should also be noted that any potential translation work would be much easier when every single entity doesn't need to have 3 redundant sentences translated. I would generally want to rely as much as possible on non-textual ways to present information - icons, symbols, recognizable layouts, etc.
One non-obvious difficulty is to choose which infoline needs to be shown here. After all, I can show how Flour is used or how Flour is made. So infolines have some priorities - for example, how to produce something is almost always what they show. (I should note that this is all extremely finicky to implement - in order to make it look simple and clean, it requires an inversely complex and messy implementation.)
I made a lot of small changes to Micropedia, but among them is having lists use the infolines instead of text:
I also added a few more infoline types to show some important information and to have entities show something where they otherwise didn't: For example, resident capacity:
Or knowledge production:
Various
Shops now can toggle their sold items:
There's a few scenarios when this could be useful. None were critical before, but now I'm considering when you wouldn't want to sell veggies that are used for pickling.
Future plans
I am still working on the new level generator and related changes. That remains the main goal for now. Unfortunately, it's a huge task that integrates with every part of the game, which basically means I've not posted any updates for a while to the point where people are concerned.
So the plan is now to split the work between smaller updates and the future level generation update. I will try to make separate earlier updates for some changes I planned together with level generation. On one hand, this means I'll likely post more smaller updates instead of disappearing for half a year. Bu-u-ut on the other hand, this means level generation update will take longer as I package and expand updates that would otherwise be too small or too broken to publish on their own. In the end, it's roughly the same amount of content, just differently spaced-out.
I personally wanted to just get the big update out of the way. But I think I should just accept that it just never works out that way. I think I have a tendency to always want to add just a bit more stuff. And then it's suddenly 3 months later and I'm still adding "just one more thing". It's the developer's equivalent of "just one more turn". And it always feels like any updates are not large enough anyway, this one included.
I think for now I will just get a few small updates out. I'll try to mix some new content with some mechanics additions. But I'll also try to work in the direction of level generation. Which is very broad and very vague but basically means "anything related to tiles, terrain and layout". So I will probably do some mining rework features next. I've been forever meaning to change the "3 mines can support the whole village" into something more involved mid-to-late game.
Full changelog
Changes
• Add Cucumber item produced at Gardener
• Add Paddy Farm with Paddy Plot buildings
• Add Sugarcane item grown from Sugarcane at Paddy Farm
• Add Sugar Mill with Sugar Press, Syrup Mixer and Sugar Dryer buildings
• Add Sugar item produced at the Sugar Mill from Sugarcane
• Rename Glass to Glass Pane
• Add Glass Jar produced at Glassblower, which can now choose production for Glass Kiln
• Add Vinegar Brewer with Alcohol Vat and Fermentation Vat buildings
• Add Vinegar item production at the Vinegar Brewer from Sugar, Glass Jar (and Water)
• Add Pickler with Packing Table and Pickling Box
• Add Pickles item produced at Pickler with Carrot, Tomato, Cucumber and Vinegar
• Add a new construction menu tab "Food processing" and move various buildings there from the "Food" tab, add most new ones here
• Cucumbers and Pickles are now Reserve items. Cucumbers provide the same amount as other Produce, but Pickles last much longer
• Items can now have distribution values for Shop target deliveries, i.e. veggies shared between Pickler and Produce Shop
• Add Pickling tech that requires Brewing and Glassblowing
• Produce Shop now sells Cucumbers
• Grocery Shop now sells Pickles
• Add "Pickling" goal to make Pickles
• Shops can now toggle/disable the items that they sell
• Rearrange tech tree slightly to accommodate the new tech and dependency arrow layout
• Food tooltip now shows "processing" food counts for those as inputs, i.e. Pickler
• Starting Food Stockpiles will now randomly pick two of the three available from Carrot, Tomato and Cucumber
• Gardening goal now requires any Produce items instead of specific items
• Remove most description texts from items, buildings, props, etc. that repeat what the icon- and label-based lines explain, i.e. "recipe lines"
• Many tooltips will now show the primary/significant "recipe line" for related entity
• Micropedia will now show the primary/significant "recipe line" instead of a description when listing various entities
• Various Micropedia changes - layout, details, relations, etc.
• Achievement panel to fit more items to account for new food items
• Add Scholar and Library "recipe lines" for Knowledge production
• Add House resident amount "recipe line"
• Adjust names for grass tiles, i.e. Thick Grassland and others
• Change some tooltip labels for bonus-affected values to use clearer wording "faster"/"slower" rather than ambiguous "rate"
• Add various new concepts for Micropedia - Produce, Crop, Aquatic Crop, Felled Tree, Building Material, Produce, Storage
• Various sprite and UI layout fixes
• Some tutorial text improvements; make sprites more readable and pronounced, add some detail; adjust timing to switch steps faster
• Split first construction Lumberjack tutorial into step-by-step parts and allow returning to previous step
• Distribution panel to auto-size based on resolution to fit all the entries; otherwise show scrollable area
• Shops can now have up to 10 dedicated sellers (worker slots) that will serve houses in 24 tile "radius"
• Constructing Shops or Residences will show in-range or out-of-range basket icons and range indicator
• Constructing Taverns will show Residence influence icons (like already shown vice versa)
• Change Tavern's "work range" label to "service range" for clarity
• Change Residence "influence range" label to "neighbour range" for clarity
• Constructing Scholar will also show out-of-range knoweldge-observable icons
• Crop growth tooltips to show potential stage speed variation % (e.g. seasonal growth speed)
• Residence reserve item tooltips to show item/delivery demand/priority
• Instead of random villagers starving, homeless villagers will starve first followed by villagers with no food reserves in their residences
• Shops will warn when there are no Residences in range if worker slots are enabled
• Add operation and auxiliary building range indicator/label to building inspection HUD window
• Add timer to achievements in achievement progress window that need it (currently, Happy Place)
Fixes
• Fix building workers swapping tasks with other workers for auxiliary tasks (including when it may be more efficient, but not intuitive/logical)
• Reduce delay between a building worker finishing a task and the follow-up task being available
• Add missing tooltips for entities in lists in Micropedia
• Fix "recipe line" prop entity position and vertical offset
• "Recipe lines" would show locked props
• Outside delivery toggle button not being green when selected
• Possible error/crash in some pausing interactions
• Fix some very long tooltips going off-screen
• Fix some singular/plural spelling/grammar issues
• Remove some redundant font assets from build
• Fix Export Station error when choosing shipment items while it's being constructed
• Forester attempting to choose tiles with incompatible objects and then failing to plant at all
• Forester placing saplings without removing existing object(s) in tiles with incompatible objects
• Forester not attempting to preserve felled trees when considering what props to remove
• Selection HUD for Quarry overlapping self-delivery toggles with efficiency display
• Export Station over- or not delivering items in second and later "slots" based on the first slot
• Export Station reporting shipment items source issue incorrectly with several selected items
• Changing or removing Export Station's items in second and later "slots" would incorrectly record available space for items
• Fix issue where a tile would disappear due to construction work attempting to prepare a tile that then transitioned (e.g. dirt regrowing or moss decaying), subsequently causing any interaction with that tile (location) to fail, including saving the game
• Some tasks not counted for task counter totals
• Removing a shipment item "slot" from Export Station could lead to delivery of incorrect number of items and broken inspection display under certain circumstances
• UI elements reacting to default navigation events (arrows, enter, escape) and conflicting with custom actions; in particular, technology unlock screen would open repeat purchase confirmation dialogues, each able to spend knowledge
• Fix Export Station sometimes not delivering items on "full only" setting when there are multiple items and/on targets
• Fix exceptions on moving the mouse outside the playable area when constructing certain buildings
• Charcoal Burner not observable by Scholar
• Not showing meaningless residence empty reserve consumption info in tooltip
• Crop growth tooltips showing stage time and progress without accounting for possible variation (e.g. seasonal growth speed)
• Fix Mead brewing goal appearing before Beekeeping is unlocked
• Villager's carried item occasionally improperly offset
• Reword various incorrect and imprecise descriptions
• Delivery markers for Houses will appear nearer to actual delivery location to avoid overlapping sentiment info icon
• Fix periodically-updatable tooltips not updating upon moving between different elements
• Residences not deducting score from Housing need with no other nearby residences
• Planting Birch Sapling would not count towards "Trees Planted" goal
• Top overview food tooltip not showing the correct consumption number
• Villagers will resume starving and consuming Food when they have no immediate access to food (i.e. houses with no food reserves or homeless)
• Micropedia infoline elements (like building icon and label) to have proper interaction/mouseover area for clicks and tooltips
• Buildings with worker item delivery (Export, Large Storage) would not deliver items when the target building's capacity is close to full and would cancel pending incoming tasks at other times
• Fix Charcoal not being producable with only Fishing unlocked
• Herbalist would continue infinitely crafting Medicine even when the output is full
• Fix Monument construction achievement not triggering
• Fix achievement window not tracking achievements previously unlocked in Steam
• Balanced Diet achievement not working
• Balanced Diet achievement not including Cooked Fish
• Populous achievement not working
• Fix achievement individual sentiment checkmarks not lighting up
• Happy Place achievement not working because it requires unattainable Awesome Sentiment
Balancing
• Charcoal Burner now produces 3 Charcoal per Log
• Residence (House) reserves will last ~30% longer
• Increase Shop building space for each item from 24 to 48
• Change Tavern operation range from 8 to 12, which is the same as "amenity" range for Residences
• Farm Crops (Wheat, Barley, Hemp) now grow about 30% faster
• Crop growth is further normalized across Seasons (i.e. growth slows down or catches up to match the season), making crops ready roughly at the start of Autumn
• Crops decay 50% slower allowing them to survive into Winter
• Crops won't instantly decay in the first half of Winter allowing more time for harvest
• Potato now follows similar growth rules as crops
• Wasted Dirt tile repairing is about 50% faster in total and twice as fast late Winter
• Adjust Residence reserve demand to prioritize houses with fewer items
• Starving villagers will consume Food at a rate comparable to the rate of villagers in houses with food reserves
• Villagers will die quicker upon reaching the point of starvation
• Villagers have a small chance of dying (5%) when forced to consume a random item due to not having immediate access to food (i.e. houses with no food reserves or homeless)
• Residences require 2 neighbours (other residences) for +1 Housing need bonus down from 5
Rudy
Snowy Ash Games