Sapiens News

With this update your tribes will now function much more efficiently, and if they still don't quite do what you want, you now have a lot more control by prioritizing orders.

New in 0.4.2:
AI and fixes:
- You can now prioritize any order at any time. Sapiens will tend to choose prioritized orders to complete first.
- You can then deprioritize orders again to restore them to the default prioritization level
- Different plan types are now prioritized differently by default, so idle sapiens are much more likely to choose a recruit or hunt order than a store order.
- The outputs of prioritized orders retain the prioritization, so if you prioritize a gather order on an apple tree, then the store orders for the apples will also be prioritized
- If you manually assign sapiens to an order, they will drop everything and are much more likely to continue to work on that order.
- Sapiens are now a lot more likely to continue a single task to completion. Hunting in particular is much improved.
- Taking a required tool to an order site now requires the order's role, instead of the general labor role. This improves efficiency as that sapien can then complete the order, and it stops tools getting stuck lying around waiting for the right sapien.
- Telling a sapien to stop, or manually assigning a sapien to an order now causes them to drop what they were carrying
- More Fixes, optimizations, and UI improvements

Balancing:
- More visitor tribes in the early stages of the game
- Visiting sapiens tend to stay longer
- Crucibles now degrade when used
- Reduced quantity of manure produced, as it was excessive and degraded performance
- Reduced quantity of sapien vocals when time is fast forwarded

0.4.1 is a minor bug fix update, mostly fixing issues relating to AI around compost bins, but with some important other fixes too.

- Fixes issues with sapiens getting stuck delivering to compost bins
- Fixes issues when restricting the use of rotten resources in the resources panel to disable composting
- Sapiens will now carry and deliver multiple items in one load to compost bins
- Compost now degrades after a year, as it was building up indefinitely and causing problems
- Improvements to AI prioritization
- Fixes issues when running on Linux under Proton
- The hammer now degrades when blacksmithing
- Sapiens no longer get hungrier while sleeping, which helps avoid having sick or injured sapiens starve and leave

Though this update does contain some AI improvements, I'm working on another update with some more major improvements to the priority system and AI too, so you can expect 0.4.2 soon.

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/