Sapiens News

This second major update to Sapiens introduces new challenges and game mechanics, tools, weapons and building materials, and your tribe can now enter the bronze age!

[h2]Windstorms[/h2]
Every couple of years or so, you can now expect to experience a windstorm severe weather event. These windstorms can damage buildings, blow things away, extinguish fires, and sapiens can get injured by flying debris. Windstorms are a fun new challenge to plan for and overcome.

[h2]Composting & Mulching[/h2]
Soil quality will now degrade slowly if you harvest many times from the same area. To enrich the soil again, you can now mulch using manure or compost. Manure can be found where animals have been, and compost can now be produced from rotting organic matter in compost bins.

[h2]Stone chiseling[/h2]
A number of new rock types have been added to the game, including granite, marble, sandstone (in a variety of colors) and lapis lazuli. Your sapiens can now chisel stone blocks directly from rock, and use these blocks to build walls, or chisel them into tiles for roofs and floors. Soft rocks like sandstone and limestone can be carved using chisels made out of hard rock, but to craft blocks out of the harder rock types, your sapiens are going to need bronze chisels.

[h2]Bronze[/h2]
Tin and copper ore veins are now scattered around the world. Once you've mined some and crafted a kiln and a crucible, you'll be able to research blacksmithing. With bronze your sapiens can smith chisels to carve hard rock, but they can also now craft a range of more durable and powerful tools and weapons.

[h2]New roof and floor types[/h2]
0.4 Adds a number of new roof pieces to help your sapiens build better houses and villages. With new corner pieces, smaller slopes, and triangular floor pieces too, you'll have a lot more design options than before.

[h2]And more![/h2]
- New option in the radial menu to "Rebuild" using different materials
- You can now limit the quantity of items stored in each storage area
- Improvements to building snapping
- Your sapiens can now dig and mine on steeper slopes
- The camera maximum height limit now rises as you build higher, so you can build as high as you like
- Adds options to change the cursor reticle size and shape
- New autopause feature after you don't interact with the game for a configurable period
- Mud brick structures can now get damaged in the rain if they are left uncovered
- New sound effects and animations
- Much improved controller support
- New keyboard options for camera zooming
- AI fixes and performance improvements
- Many other minor features and bug fixes

Sapiens is progressing nicely and the next big content update "Windstorms" will be ready to launch one week from now. The update is available for testing now on the unstable branch if you'd like to get an early look and help find those last few bugs.

Full release notes are coming, but here's an overview of what's new in 0.4:

[h2]Windstorms[/h2]
Every couple of years or so, you can now expect to experience a windstorm severe weather event. These windstorms can damage buildings, blow things away, extinguish fires, and sapiens can get injured by flying debris. Windstorms are a fun new challenge to plan for and overcome.

[h2]Composting & Mulching[/h2]
Soil quality will now degrade slowly if you harvest many times from the same area. To enrich the soil again, you can now mulch using manure or compost. Manure can be found where animals have been, and compost can now be produced from rotting organic matter in compost bins.

[h2]Stone chiseling[/h2]
A number of new rock types have been added to the game, including granite, marble, sandstone (in a variety of colors) and lapis lazuli. Your sapiens can now chisel stone blocks directly from rock, and use these blocks to build walls, or chisel them into tiles for roofs and floors. Soft rocks like sandstone and limestone can be carved using chisels made out of hard rock, but to craft blocks out of the harder rock types, your sapiens are going to need bronze chisels.

[h2]Bronze[/h2]
Tin and copper ore veins are now scattered around the world. Once you've mined some and crafted a kiln and a crucible, you'll be able to research blacksmithing. With bronze your sapiens can smith chisels to carve hard rock, but they can also now craft a range of more durable and powerful tools and weapons.

[h2]New roof and floor types[/h2]
0.4 Adds a number of new roof pieces to help your sapiens build better houses and villages. With new corner pieces, smaller slopes, and triangular floor pieces too, you'll have a lot more design options than before.

[h2]Much more[/h2]
0.4 is packed with many other smaller features, quality of life improvements and bug fixes. The look has been improved with new detailing textures and more realistic shaders. You can now build as high as you like, as the camera height limit rises when you build. You can mine on steeper slopes, and set a maximum quantity to be stored per storage area. There are new options for the cursor reticle and autopause when you're AFK too, amongst many other tweaks and fixes.

If you would like to try it out now, you can switch to the unstable branch:
- Right click on Sapiens in your library on Steam.
- Select Properties->BETAS and then choose "public-beta-unstable" from the pull-down menu.
- You don't need to enter a code, that's it, Steam will then download the latest beta.

Currently the unstable version is PC only, I'll be sending out the Mac version to the unstable branch early next week.

WARNING: If you join the unstable branch and create or load worlds on that branch, it is dangerous to then move back to the default branch and load those saves again. If you do decide to opt in to the unstable branch, you should back up your worlds regularly.

I hope you enjoy the update!
-Dave

The next Sapiens update is coming along nicely, and I thought it was time to let you all know how things are going.

After taking a bit of a break over Christmas, I started the new year working on a new mechanic for improving soil. So in 0.4 we will now have compost, manure, and mulching, which allow you to improve the soil quality and grow crops faster. To balance this and add realism, as you harvest or clear from the land, the soil quality now slowly reduces too, so eventually you'll need to move your crops to more fertile land, or mulch to put the goodness back in.



Just after that was done, we got hit by a cyclone in New Zealand. It was a significant disaster, and we lost power for a week. But once I was able to work again, I started adding new building materials. It has always been my plan to give different building materials different strengths and weaknesses, and I'll be working more on that soon, but first I wanted to add stone block structures to the game. Stone blocks were historically a widely used early building material, and Sapiens felt like it would really benefit from having them.

So you will now be able to chisel out stone blocks directly from the ground, and use them to build walls and columns, and craft tiles which can be used in floors and roofs. I also added new rock types, with the addition of granite, marble, and lapis lazuli, as well as sandstone in a variety of colors.



Historically the first chisels were made out of hard rock, but rock chisels could mostly only be used on soft rocks like sandstone and limestone, so that's what I have done in Sapiens too. However there needed to be a way to chisel granite and hard rocks too, and so I decided it was time to add bronze to the game.

You'll first need to mine copper and tin ores from the ground. Then at a kiln you can learn the new blacksmithing skill, and combine the ores to smelt bronze in a crucible. Once you have bronze ingots, you can then smith them into new tools and weapons. There are bronze variants of all of the existing tools, which will work faster and last longer. And of course you can craft bronze chisels which will unlock the ability to build with hard stone blocks.

With the addition of bronze and the new rock types, I needed to do a lot of work on the look of the game, adding more detail and realism to the textures, and improving support for metallic materials. So we now have shiny metals and bump-mapping on the terrain and objects too, which really helps to make the world feel more alive.



I still have quite a lot more planned for this update, so keep an eye out for an announcement here when it's nearly ready. And keep in mind that the features I've mentioned here and these screenshots are a work in progress, there will still be changes before they are released in a few weeks time.

If you want to keep a closer eye on progress, please join the Discord where I post much more frequent updates. Thanks for your continued support and patience while I'm working on the update.

- Dave

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1060230/Sapiens/

You can now play Sapiens on your Mac! Sapiens now runs natively and performs great on both Apple silicon and Intel.

Sapiens was always designed to be a cross platform game, which meant it took only a couple of weeks to add support for macOS, and it made a lot of sense to do this now so more people can play. Throughout the early access development, I plan to continue to add support for more platforms, more hardware features, more modding support, and more quality of life improvements and bug fixes. It's really important to keep this work going alongside additional gameplay features and content, like what was released in the recent herbal medicine update.

Have a great holiday season everyone, and I'm looking forward to working on the next big content update in the new year.

- Dave

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1060230/Sapiens/

I want everyone to be able to play Sapiens on as many devices as possible, and a mac port is a good first step. So if you have a mac, you'll soon be able to play it natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon.

You won't need to buy it again if you have already purchased it for Windows, and you will be able to find it listed in the Steam store within the next few weeks.

If you already have a copy for Windows, you can play right now by opting into the mac beta on Steam. This will help me to iron out any remaining issues before a full release within the next few weeks.

To opt in:
- You will need to have purchased Sapiens
- In your Steam Library on a mac, right click on Sapiens, and go to Properties->BETAS
- Enter "macosbeta123" in the access code box, and hit "Check Code"
- If it fails, restart Steam and try again
- You should now be able to switch to the mac beta, and install Sapiens on your mac

Sapiens for macOS requires macOS 10.15 or later, and will need either a dedicated GPU, or an M1/M2 chip to run well.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1060230/Sapiens/