Going Medieval News

Greetings medievalists!

The new major update titled “Animal Trading” is now live on Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG. All those fixes and improvements from the experimental branch are now stable, tested, and present in this update! These include: the option to trade animals, food pouches, signs, and various other tweaks and improvements.

But first, for an optimal user experience, we suggest that you:

[h3]Disable Mods if you have them[/h3]
Please note: if you are using unofficial mods (especially those related to crops) you might experience crashes or even an inability to start the game. If you do, turn the mods off before starting the game. If the problem persists, be sure to delete all of the folders in the steamapps\common\Going Medieval and then verify the game files.

Now, onto the update - we’ll separate them into different segments:

[h3]ANIMALS[/h3]
Animal Trading
You can finally trade animals with other settlements/merchants.

Trading with merchants:

• Every once in a while, a merchant will appear, accompanied by some animals that they can trade.
  
• Both domestic animals and pets can be traded from your side. The animals you get from merchants will be domesticated.
  
• Merchants can have animals that are not for trading (their own pets).
  
• Animal type (domesticated/pet) will not influence barter value - you will not get a better value if you use pets for bartering.
  
• Animals can be taken with settlers in caravans. In that case, they (animals) will not need food for a caravan trip. Also, some animals will increase the carrying capacity of the caravan.
  
• Animals that are locked away will appear gray in the trading menu.
  

We wanted to emphasize each animal type more especially to make having pets for combat fun. We had to be careful not to make animals overpowered when retaliating.
Depending on the type (domestic, wild, pet), animals have different stats:

• Pets deal more damage, heal faster and bleed less from wounds.
  
• Domestic animals bleed less from wounds but don’t deal more damage.
  
• Wild aggressive animals deal more damage than regular wild animals.
  

[h3]FOOD[/h3]
Food consumption and nutrition adjusted
Here are the notable changes:

• When hungry, settlers will look for food with the most nutritional value.
  
• Depending on their hunger state and location in relation to chairs, settlers might want to sit while eating.
  
• Sitting in a chair with no table will give different mood effectors, as opposed to a chair & table.
  
• Settlers will look to sit and eat in the great hall first, then a room, then under a roof, then outside. Of course, their search will depend on their location in relation to the aforementioned places. If there is no such place nearby, they’ll stand and eat.
  
• We rebalanced the amount of nutrition that the settler gets from meals and raw food (before a meal would bring around 85-100 nutrition, now it is set to about 80-90 while raw food has been lowered from 25-40 to 10-15 nutrition).
  
• Due to the rebalance of nutrition the amount of dropped meat and raw resources from plants has increased by 20-40%. Because of this, the amount of raw food for cooking meals has doubled (for meals, packaged meals, and lavish meals).
  
• Since the consumption of raw food offers low nutrition, settlers will eat multiple piles of it (if the food of better quality is not present) to satisfy their hunger.
  

Settlers have food pouches now
These function as a small storage space attached to them, where settlers can store food for later. This should solve the problem of settlers abandoning their work and traversing major distances to get to their settlement, just to eat something. Some things to note, settlers will only store:

• Food enabled in their Manage panel.
  
• Food in the meal category (so no raw foods, only packaged, lavish, stew, etc).
  
• Food that is on shelves and or stockpiles.
  

Other things to note about the pouch:

• When a settler gets hungry, they’ll primarily eat the food from the pouch. Refilling their pouches is a new goal we’ve added to settlers.
  
• Settlers will prioritize refilling their pouches during a non-working schedule.
  
• You can order settlers to consume food from their pouches within the settler’s inventory. If you do that, settlers will not search for chairs or random spots, etc - they’ll eat where they stand. This will happen even if settlers are drafted.
  
• Settlers can store 1x from the food pile in the pouch,
  
• Food stored in those pouches will rot/decay. If it reaches 0 hp, it will disappear from the settler's pouch. If it reaches 0% freshness, it will turn into a pile of rot and the settlers will drop it on the ground. The only meal that will drop as rot will be roasted meat, but the chances for that happening are close to none. You have to put the meat that is already close to rotting in the pouch and hope that the settler doesn't eat it.
  

Think of the pouch as a personal pile that is one-time use, easy to refill, and near your settler.

[h3]HAUL[/h3]
Hauling logic has been recalculated - You’ve probably experienced situations where a bunch of animals in your settlement, along with settlers, were hauling stuff all the time. That created situations where settlers would stand still for 3-10 seconds while they calculated what to do next. Our quickfix up until now was to limit the number of animals that can haul per their species - they did not haul as frequently, and would have a big cooldown until the next haul goal. While there is no need for that anymore, we think some balancing is in order. So, the animals will haul faster now, but some are still nerfed when it comes to their frequency.

Added hauling priority for the resource type - All of the resources have a haul priority located in the Resources.json file. The setup at the moment is that items and resources have the highest hauling priority. Fret not - the stockpile/shelves priority is still valid and will not clash with this priority. These items will be hauled to the closest/highest priority free stockpile.

Multi-pile haul is implemented - If a settler picks a small pile during their haul goal, they’ll look for the piles of the same type nearby and pick as many as they can (and if they were not reserved by another settler). This prevents scenarios where settlers would go back and forth just to pick a bunch of small piles of the same type. Note: This will not occur if the hauled piles are dedicated for production.

Overweight hauling - Settlers and animals can now haul singular piles over 60kg, but in doing so will slow down.

[h3]BUILDING[/h3]
New building type: Signs - These wooden constructs do not add anything to the game, except give a bit of personality to your settlement.

• You can place them on the ground or attach them to a wall
  
• There are 4 different shapes in total and you can put a symbol on them and choose a color for that symbol.
  
• Messages can be left on signs. Typing in a message will show as a tooltip when hovered over the sign.
  

Quality of life improvements

• Optimized the game a bit and improved performance mid to late game.
  
• Animal number control during animal events has been modified as well. Now animal events will be rare as you have more of the same animal. Domesticated dogs will stop appearing when you have around 10x dogs.
  
• Animals now have type info when clicking on them (to clear the confusion for players about why pets can't be in pens).
  
• Animals in the “Animal” panel can now be sorted by species, type, age, etc.
  
• Added ‘mark/clear all’ for hunting, taming, training, hauling, and battling (basically, any tickable/markable thing in the Animal panel). This way you can mark all of the animals to be hunted or clear of all hunt orders etc.
  
• Tooltips and hover effects are added to the Animal panel.
  
• Animals should not spawn on 'islands' they cannot get off from.
  
• Players will not be able to use hay/fodder/seeds as nutritional elements for settlers on caravan anymore. That was silly.
  
• Harvest and cut markers are hidden on crop fields. Now the field itself determines when the crop should be harvested/cut and the orders of the player will override this in all cases.
  
• Auto equip and drop item changed: now settlers will not drop forbidden items but will only auto equip things that are on stockpiles.
  
• Added BBT message when a piece of equipment is destroyed on the settler (ex settlers have a shield, the shield gets hit and gets destroyed).
  
• NPC characters will leave at once if you attack them.
  
• Deconstruct order will cancel uninstall order.
  
• Uninstall or move order will cancel deconstruct order.
  
• Cider is removed from the game. With the introduction of fermentation, we decided that you’ll get Fruit Juice from the fermentation of fruits. That fermenting pile will turn into a rough wine after some time. Since any fruit can be used for this process, it also means all of them will turn into rough wine.
  
• Text for raid appearing is now translated into all languages.
  
• Additional text has been added that explains that animals don't waste food when in caravans.
  

Bugs and fixes

• Fixed the issue that caused drafted settlers to ignore orders.
  
• Fixed the issue that caused settlers to ignore animals that they didn’t manage to kill the first time.
  
• Fixed the issue that prevented a merchant event from ending upon save/load, if that merchant turned aggressive in the meantime.
  

Known issues

• In some cases, settlers will stop while hauling from one stockpile to another (or shelf to shelf) - this does not break the game but looks weird and annoying.
  
• Settlers will sometimes refuse to harvest ripe fields. solved with save/load
  
• Several messages are still in English for all of the languages.
  
• If your settlers are experiencing weird animations with some of the actions, be sure to cap the game's FPS in the game's options. Cap it to 60fps. If the issue persists, cap it to 30fps.
  

Thank you for your patience, people. Feel free to post your experience regarding the new update on Steam discussions. If you want more dynamic/direct communication - head over to our Discord server. Even though we might not reply, we are reading everything.

Foxy Voxel

Follow us on Twitter: @going_medieval
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See the trailer for the game here: https://youtu.be/GuHfL2kf8tM

Greetings medievalists!

Sometimes you just need cosmetic features that don’t impact your game in any significant way but add a little bit of flavor. That’s where signs come in.



Signs are a part of the Misc category. They are wooden constructions that can be placed on the ground or attached to a wall. Upon their constructions, you’ll be able to change their shape, add a symbol to it and give it a color.

Also, you’ll be able to leave a message on them. Those messages will be shown when you select a sign or hover on it via mouse cursor.



From the development side, this helps us mark different parts. Also, it’s useful when it comes to leaving notes, when we need to test certain systems. You too can use them, to give us a note when reporting bugs.

This is already on the experimental branch if you want to test it. This also means that if everything goes well (as it is), you can expect official update very soon. It will contain everything from this and the previous two Medieval Monday Talks.

Also, a bonus: You are probably aware that we were on a vacation for almost a month. On our Discord server we have these challenges where we give them a theme and they present screenshots that fit that theme. Winner's creation gets to be promoted on Going Medieval Twitter account, so that's nice. However, during our absence we requested a bigger theme, something that will take weeks to complete. The theme was Medieval City and the winner would be featured in a YouTube video made by us that showcases the winning settlement in more details. This is the result:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

You folks are constantly surprising us with your creations and you are the reason why working on Going Medieval is such a joy. Stay excellent and see ya next time with the official release of Update 5!

Foxy Voxel

Greetings medievalists!

We understand that the animals you encounter are not necessarily the ones you want to keep. And since we have a perfectly functional merchant/trading system - why not make the most of it?

Trading animals will finally be a thing. That’s right - merchants will come to your settlement accompanied by different animals which you’ll be able to buy. This will work both ways - if you have any animals you want to get rid off, use this opportunity and trade for something that works better for your settlement.



You will also be able to send animals on caravan travels. If you do that, the caravan carrying size will increase in relation to the carrying capacity of those animals.

While we’re on the subject of animals - we want to introduce three new ones that the community requested: Cats, Donkeys and Pheasants. However… Our technical artist wanted to test his skateboarding skills during the weekend, but that didn’t go so well. So the introduction of new animals will have to be postponed - they’ll appear in Update 5, but later, in one of the patches. Here is what you need to know about them:



Cats - You know cats. You know how they roll. Let’s say that with them, any rat problems will be short-lived.

Donkeys - Donkeys are intelligent animals. They haul more frequently than the rest of the animals and have a big hauling capacity. Naturally, this makes them ideal for caravans. They’ll always come as domesticated and should be relatively easy to train.

Pheasants - Getting to chickens might take some time, so why not try these wild animals? They’ll lay eggs all over the woods. Sure, they don’t lay eggs as frequently as chickens, but they are valuable assets in the early game. Taming pheasants will have medium difficulty and training them will be very hard, but why would you do that? - they can’t attack or haul.

All animals are going to give you meat upon slaughtering. (Please don’t slaughter cats.)

That would be all for this week's MMT. Expect another one next week!

Also, more news about Update #5 and when it's going live on the experimental branch coming soon. Sooner than you think. Seriously.

Foxy Voxel

Greetings medievalists!

We’re back from vacation and ready for new challenges! Thank you for your support during our absence. The team talked about future plans and ideas and how we want to approach them. You know how previous updates were huge content-wise, but occurred every 3-4 months? We want to try something different this time - we want to make smaller updates that will occur (hopefully) every month. Here is one of the things you can expect in Update #5:

Food consumption received some changes. We’ll talk about it in more detail once the update is released. For now, what you need to know is that this will affect their behavior during all of the hunger phases and how they calculate food intake and pick food piles, based on quality/quantity. This should prevent situations where settlers would frequently abandon work just to satisfy their nutrition.

This system will also take into account the location of chairs and where and when settlers will sit after picking up a meal. Sitting in a chair with no table will give a different mood effector than when sitting at a table to eat.



Settlers will have food pouches. A food pouch is a sort of storage where the settler can store food for later. You know that situation where you send your settler somewhere far away to do something, but they have to return after some time because they were hungry? Food pouches should solve such problems!

However, settlers will only store:

• Foods enabled in their manage panel
  
• Foods in the meal category (so no raw foods, but only packaged, lavish, stew, etc)
  
• Food that is on shelves and or stockpiles
  

When a settler gets hungry, they’ll primarily eat the food from the pouch. Refilling their pouches is a new goal we’ve added to settlers. They’ll try to prioritize refilling their pouches during a non-working schedule.

You will be able to order settlers to consume food from their pouches within the settler’s inventory. If you do that, settlers will not search for chairs or random spots, etc - they’ll eat where they stand. This will happen even if settlers are drafted.

Food stored in those pouches will rot/decay. If it reaches 0 hp, it will disappear from the settler's pouch. If it reaches 0% freshness, it will turn into a pile of rot and the settlers will drop it on the ground.

And that would be everything for this week’s Medieval Monday Talk. But we are not stopping here. See ya next week with another Monday Talk in which we’ll discuss more animal content. Maybe even… new animals?

Thank you for your time!

Foxy Voxel

We are active on TikTok: @going.medieval
Follow us on Twitter: going_medieval
Our Facebook page: Foxy Voxel

Greetings, folks!

It’s been a busy year, right? Before we tackle new features, we decided that now is the perfect time to go on the holiday break... Our eight-person team has been working on Going Medieval constantly, and after talking among ourselves, we figured that August seems like a perfect time for everyone to go on a well-deserved rest. Improving Going Medieval is important but taking care of mental and physical health is crucial, too.

Starting today, we’ll be offline until the 29th of August. If you have any issues with the game, you can submit them by using the F10 button or send a mail to [email protected], and we’ll check it once we return. However, it is also worth noting that we have a super helpful community here on Steam and Discord - if you are not sure how something works or if you think it’s a bug, the folks there will help you figure it out and maybe provide instructions on how to circumvent the issue. We also have a fandom page where you can get more info on things like mood, perks, quality map seeds, and other fun stuff.

On our Discord, we have a challenge with the theme “Medieval city”, where people can submit their epic creations on what they deem a worthy medieval town. Once we’re back, we’ll pick a winner and dedicate one full video showcasing that settlement, so join our Discord and start making epic stuff (the deadline is August 29th, 10 AM CEST).

We hope that you are having fun playing Going Medieval. Thank you for supporting the game and having patience. Finally, from all of us here - we hope you have a wonderful summer holiday. Avoid longer sun exposures, be sure to take frequent naps, and enjoy the latest update for our game. Also, check the last patch notes for bug fixes and known issues.

Foxy Voxel