The Wandering Village News

Dear Onbu Riders,
We just released a major update for The Wandering Village!
This update is all about the villagers, improving their AI and revamping the happiness mechanics in the game.

We visualised the scavengers flying around

Added new buildings

A new food management screen

Turned the game’s UI upside-down

And more :D
Check out the full patch notes here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1121640/view/3976182640090938414

A huge thank you to all our testers and translators, you really helped us a great deal :)
We hope you enjoy this new update and we can't wait to hear what you think!
We’ve already started working on the next update which will introduce a flying trader to the game along with a big rework of the poison mechanics.

Over on our Discord, you can now post your ideas for features/improvements that should be added to The Wandering Village and vote for your favourites. Our team will regularly look at the top 10 highest voted ideas and see if we can include them in future updates of the game.

Thanks for reading and see you all soon,
Stray Fawn Studio

New Features

• Complete overhaul of how villager needs work:
  
  • Villagers productivity will no longer fall below 100%.
    
  • Instead, villagers can leave if their needs aren’t met.
    
  • Productivity can still be boosted above 100% if villager happiness is kept above certain thresholds.
    
  • Population level has been removed, so all needs can be worked on from the start of the game.
    
  • Villager demands will increase over time, so make sure to keep them happy.
    
• Massive UI rework:
  
  • The topbar is now centered, with the most important information taking center stage.
    
  • Research, scavenging, Onbu mission and status effect widgets were redesigned. They are now grouped together and always visible at a glance.
    
  • Various UI elements have been re-arranged in a way that brings related information closer together.
    
  • The resource panel can now be filtered by category.
    
  • The tutorial UI was redesigned.
    
  • Many icons were reworked.
    
• The new food management window lets you control which types of food your villagers are allowed to eat, giving you more control over food quality and variety.
  
• The new Gourmet Kitchen allows you to produce high-quality food to make your villagers happy. You want more uses for salt? We hear you!
  
• Festivals held by the Community Plaza and the new Town Square now give a big temporary boost to happiness. They also provide a small passive happiness boost while they are fully staffed.
  
• Scavengers have received a big visual update. They will now take off and land when heading out on and returning from missions.
  

New Buildings

• Gourmet Kitchen - Produces gourmet food from a variety of ingredients
  
• Flophouse - Provides a lot of housing for villagers, if you’re willing to sacrifice some quality and poison resistance
  
• Boarding House - An improved version of the Flophouse
  
• Town Square - Early-game building to boost happiness through festivals
  

Improvements

• Buttons show tooltips for a short time when using the gamepad
  
• Gamepad navigation improvements (ex. grid navigation in resource display and storage buildings, more categories in radial menu, topbar navigation in general)
  
• Added disable all/enable all buttons for storage buildings for easier usage
  
• Added a news panel to the main menu to inform you about new patches and features
  
• Glossary entries with detailed info on the difficulty modes, accessible from the ‘New Game’ menu
  
• The Onbu interaction menu can now be hidden like the building menu
  
• Added icons to indicate whether resources in a building can be stored, removed or both
  
• Workers now prioritize transporting harvested resources into storage if there is free space
  
• Improved Onbu's behavior to choose between sleeping or eating depending on the severity of each need
  
• If world map locations are stacked, multiple clicks toggle through them
  
• Improved prioritization of which food resources to transport to food stands
  
• Added new music and environment sounds for events
  
• New tutorials for food variety and festivals
  
• Added sandbox setting to prevent villagers from leaving when they’re unhappy
  

Balancing

• Berry Gatherer is much less productive at lower efficiency percentage values, but gains a bit of productivity above ~80% efficiency
  
• “Weak Immune System” hostility modifier: effect reduced from +100% to +50%
  
• Infested plants no longer spawn on Onbu’s back when it is heavily poisoned
  
• Research time for all research in the initial tier reduced by 25%
  
• The chance to encounter nomads in the world has been raised significantly, making it a bit easier to get more villagers
  
• Poisonous locations now also lower villager happiness while Onbu crosses them
  
• Population level no longer exists, since it doesn’t serve a purpose anymore with the new happiness system
  
• Decoration capacity now depends on the building type rather than the village level. For example, tents can only be decorated up to a value of 2, thus contributing less to the overall decoration value
  
• Wild mushrooms now grow in patches
  

Visual Improvements

• New shrine visuals
  
• New burned plant visuals
  
• New rain cloud visuals
  
• New icons for potions and medicines
  
• New ground transitions between grass and dirt
  
• When clicking on an object that workers are transporting materials to or interacting with, it now shows the workers' paths
  
• Building radius/area of effect now shows an outline to make it clearer
  

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug where research and worker management windows could not be closed via shortcut
  
• Fixed bug where worker focus could not be broken with key movement
  
• Fixed bug where key bindings were mapped to mouse movement instead of being removed
  
• Fixed bug where Onbu had a stomach ache even though a laxative was given
  
• Fixed a bug where scavenging locations would not be cleared if a worker died during the mission
  
• Fixed bug where Onbu slept in water
  
• Fixed many small UI bugs
  
• Fixed Placebo upgrade for Village Doctor not working properly
  
• Fixed tombstones counting as poisoned workers in tutorial
  
• Fixed Onbu sometimes not eating food on an island when also very tired
  
• Fixed issue where food on islands sometimes didn’t disappear after being eaten
  
• Fixed a bug where workers that died on a scavenging mission could cause issues
  
• Fixed unclickable decision button on world map locations
  

Dear Onbu Riders,

It's that time of the year again: The Steam Awards are coming up!
We would greatly appreciate if you would nominate us for the 'Labor of Love' award ❤️



While we have you here, there is a brand new update available on the Testing branch, starting now :D
This update is all about our little villagers, improving their AI and completely revamping the happiness mechanics in the game. We also added some new buildings and turned the game UI upside-down (hopefully for the better)

Some things, especially the UI, are still work in progress, but we would love to hear your feedback early on, ideally over on our Discord. Controllers are not properly supported in this version (yet!), the tutorial is a bit broken and we're still missing some loca.




Here is how you can access the update:



Thank you very much for checking!
See you on the Discord :D

Cheers & Thanks,
Stray Fawn Studio

PS: The game is currently 25% off during the Steam autumn sale.

Dear Onbu Riders,
You know what day it is today?
It’s The Wandering Village’s first birthday!
I guess that means Onbu is now 1001 years old xD?



In the past year over 1,000,000 players have boarded Onbu and explored the world of The Wandering Village across all platforms.

We’re happy to say that Onbu’s birthday has been celebrated over 5000 times by players, using the new Community Plaza building. That means we CRUSHED our initial goal of 1000 and will be giving away some extra keys on our Discord. Head over to the #giveaway channel and leave a comment there before September 17th to join the raffle for one of 15 Steam/Xbox keys 🙂

If you haven't celebrated Onbu's birthday yet, make sure to check out the recent birthday update:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1121640/view/3668799277515391491

A huge thanks for all your feedback, bug reports, translations, suggestions, fanart and encouraging words in the past year. We’re super happy with how the game is shaping up, but it’s still far from being finished! To see where we’re headed, please check out our recently updated roadmap for the game.

We’re looking forward to the next year with this amazing community!

Cheers & Thanks,
Stray Fawn Studio

Dear Onbu Riders,

I hope you have been enjoying the new birthday update 😀
Later this week, we will present you the winners of our firework competition, which is still running until September 14th on our Discord. We’re amazed by all your creative submissions already, and can’t wait to see what’s more to come!

In the meantime, we have started to work on the next update, planned later this year:
The Villager Update. We are overhauling the way villager happiness works and how it is displayed while trying to also improve villager AI in the process.



We’ve also been working on quite a few other improvements. One of the most significant ones is the improved map generation with which we want to decrease RNG, especially in Novice and Adept difficulty levels, and lower the maximum difficulty in Novice. The new generator will also allow us to preview hundreds of generated worlds in a heartbeat, making it much easier to see whether everything is fair and fun! This involves some bigger changes to the game, and will be coming to the game sometime after the Villager Update.



We speak way too rarely of the game’s music/sound design in these development updates!
All the more reason to do so now, since the game is taking part in the ‘Save & Sound’ Steam event running from September 11 - 21.



Our composer/sound designer NukeTan recorded a behind the scenes video of his creative process. Make sure to tune in and watch it as part of the event on Wednesday at 1PM PDT. To celebrate the occasion, we’re running a 20% discount for our soundtrack and an extra 20% on top for the game’s collectors’ edition which includes our digital artbook.

Thank you for your ongoing support!

Cheers & Thanks,
Stray Fawn Studio