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The Wandering Village News

Testing Branch Update - Ocean Biome

Dear Onbu Riders,

It’s finally time to get your Onbu’s feet wet 🌊
The Ocean Update is now live on the Steam testing branch!



Before you dive in, some important infos:

🚫 Please don’t stream or release any videos/gifs of this version on Youtube, Twitch or other socials.
We’re trying to keep a low profile for now, so we can make a big splash for the release of the update this summer!

📙 We would greatly appreciate your help with translations. There is still a lot to do! If you want to help out, please join us on Discord

🐛 Please report bugs and send us feedback using the in-game feedback tool in the top right corner of the screen or chat with us on Discord

Here is how you can access the update:



Please note that builds on the testing branch might screw up your game saves!
So if you want to make sure, better make a backup first. Here's how.

About the Ocean Biome:

Explore the brand-new Ocean biome! Discover remote islands, explore shipwrecks and more. The sea has plenty to offer - but beware, for the waters can be treacherous. Onbu will not be able to rest on open sea, so make sure to prepare for your journey!
Build a fishery to catch fish and gather kelp, or collect and desalinate seawater to keep your crops alive at sea. A total of 4 new buildings have been added.
Extract salt from seawater to cultivate Rock Trumpets, a new type of mushroom that petrifies when fully grown and can be harvested for stone.
Cultivate kelp to produce better food and medicine for Onbu.
Many new scavenging locations to explore.
The sea holds many dangers - giant tapeworms, whirlpools and more!

Full Patch Notes:

New Biome
----------------
- Added the ocean biome

New Resources
----------------
- Saltwater
- Salt
- Fish
- Grilled Fish
- Kelp

New Buildings
----------------
- The Seawater Collector can collect saltwater from the ocean.
- The Evaporator can produce water and salt from sea water, as well as evaporate some other fluids.
- The Fishery can catch fish and gather kelp from the ocean.
- The Aquafarmcan cultivate fish and kelp.

New Events
----------------
- Various different events for the water biome, such as islands, schools of fish and tapeworms.
- New events in other biomes, such as mosquitos that can infect Onbu with the Jungle Flu.

New Features
----------------
- New wandering events that move across the map dynamically, such as rain clouds and whirlpools.

New Locations
----------------
- Shipwreck
- Fort ruins
- Decision events for the new locations, as well as the old Shrine and Poison Forest locations.

Improvements
----------------
- Building upgrades are now much easier to discern in the research tree and have clearer descriptions.
- The Hostility system now needs to be unlocked first by reaching a certain waypoint (it will be unlocked automatically if you have any savefiles that already have hostility modifiers active or that are at day 100 or beyond).
- Unlocking higher hostility limits is now a lot easier - you only need to survive for 500km to unlock the next limit.
- Knowledge rework - existing knowledge points have been tripled, research costs roughly three times as many knowledge, and constructing building upgrades costs a small amount of knowledge.
- UI overhaul for decorations - it's now much easier to see which decorations will affect which houses by how much.
- The way Onbu grows tired of frequent commands has been reworked to make some strategies less exploitable (like repeatedly making Onbu sit to avoid moving on).
- Updated the Elder’s Notebook with all the new things.
- Villagers don't complain about not having decorations on the lowest settlement level anymore.

Balancing
----------------
- Removed Onbu food from berries recipe.
- Added recipes to buildings such as the Kitchen and Onbu Pharmacy to account for the new water biome resources.
- Balanced sizes, cost and values of decoration buildings.
- A certain type of late-game building will now give a considerable decoration boost in a large area!
- Added more polluting buildings.
- Increased Air Well base production speed.
- Made Onbu medicine (Antitoxin, Health Potion) considerably cheaper.

Bugfixes
----------------
- Fixed a bug where the Worker Management Screen could not be scrolled using the mousewheel
- Fixed bug where a lot of unintended click sounds were audible during gameplay
- Fixed a bug where input resource slots were not correctly displayed on production buildings
- Fixed wrong category selection when moving to animal interactions from animal buildings
- Various controller input fixes and improvements

We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback!

Cheers & Thanks for your support,
Stray Fawn Studio

Publishing, Earth Appreciation Sale & Bundle Announcement

Dear Onbu Riders,

We have quite a few pieces of news incoming today!

First, a quick reminder that we’ve launched a new update on the testing branch last week, in case you haven’t seen it yet :)
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1121640/view/6977806583251411043

We are super happy to announce that our studio has started an internal game publishing team in order to support ourselves and other developers with marketing and launching their games. The first game we teamed up with is Earth of Oryn, a super promising city-builder made by Edouard Libion, a solo-dev from Belgium.

Earth of Oryn is an indie city-builder/strategy game set in a medieval world filled with story and heart. Starting from nothing, you must shape your kingdom perfectly to your vision while managing the needs and wants of your people.





If you think the game looks cool we would greatly appreciate it if you could add it to your wishlist ❤️

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1972450/Earth_of_Oryn/


In other news, we helped co-organise a themed a themed Steam sale for Earth Appreciation Day.
This sale showcases both games about nature’s beauty and post-apocalyptic games that show the aftermath of not taking care of it. To celebrate the occasion, The Wandering Village and many other awesome games (such as Frostpunk, ABZU, Rain World and Going Medieval) are on sale.



And lastly, we have teamed up with the folks of Timberborn for a bundle. So if you own either game you can now get a discount for the other or just get both of them together at a discounted price 😀

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/31818/Timberborn_and_The_Wandering_Village/

That is all for today! We hope you are enjoying the new testing branch update and we’re looking forward to hearing from you.

Cheers & Thanks for your support,
Stray Fawn Studio

Testing Branch Update - Hostility Modifiers, Building Upgrades and Decorations

Dear Onbu Riders,
Good news! We have just released a new update on the TESTING BRANCH 🙂

Lots of new stuff in this one 😀
- Hostility modifiers which will challenge even the best players among you!



- Building upgrades which expand the techtree and allow you to adapt in different ways



- Decorations as a new need for your villagers and a way to personalise your settlements



Here is how you can access the update:



Please note that builds on the testing branch might screw up your game saves!
So if you want to make sure, better make a backup first. How to access your save files info.

Here are the patch notes:

New Features
----------------
- Hostility System: before starting a new game, you can pick from a variety of modifiers to make the game more challenging!
- Building Upgrades: you can now unlock upgrades in the research tree (currently for 6 buildings) that you can then apply to your buildings to enhance them in various interesting ways.
- Decorations: place beautiful structures to increase the happiness of villagers inhabiting nearby homes. Decorations can be unlocked in the research tree.
- Onbu Pharmacy: a new building that is used to create medicine for Onbu from a variety of ingredients, offering more interesting choices in how to care for Onbu.
- UI scale slider in the settings


Improvements
----------------
- Mycologists can now cultivate healshroom, a mushroom used for making Onbu medicine more efficiently
- Press shift while hovering over a building to copy the selected building and place a new one
- Amount of villagers that join from settlements now depends on your villagers' happiness
- New decision events for poison forest and shrine locations
- Roads don’t get destroyed by poison plants anymore
- Priority can be set directly while using a tool
- Poison resistance provided by buildings to employees is now shown
- Removed lines on world map between biomes of the same type


Bugfixes
----------------
- Fixed a bug where buildings could be disabled even though it was not allowed
- Fixed bug where the wrong reasons were logged when Onbu rejected a horn command


Balancing
----------------
- Air well now requires one worker by default, increased production speed
- Feeding and sleeping spots can’t appear at the very beginning
- One feeding spot will always appear near the beginning, just in time for Onbu's first hunger
- Novice Difficulty: more starting resources, more Onbu poison resistance, slower toxic plant spread
- Veteran Difficulty: fewer starting resources
- Buffed Liquid Onbu Food: 25% → 35% hunger restoration
- Added inefficient recipe to make Onbu food from berries in an emergency
- Added inefficient recipe to make mushroom stew from mushrooms in an emergency
- Mothertrees don’t spawn anymore. The Tree Nursery now gathers saplings from regular trees instead.
- Reworked the research tree. Added a fourth category, “Farming”, and put a focus on offering more control over the order of research to prioritize items based on current needs.

We’re super curious to hear how you like the new update, so please let us know in the comments or on Discord!

If you’re interested in what kinds of thoughts go into an update like this, check out our latest developer stream on Youtube.

Meanwhile we’re still hard at work on the upcoming water biome.
Things are coming together nicely and we hope we’ll be able to start testing with you soon!



That is all for today. We’re looking forward to hearing from you :)

Cheers & Thanks for your support,
Stray Fawn Studio

Development Update & Outlook

Dear Onbu Riders,
Thank you very much for all your feedback regarding the 0.2 update.
We have since released a couple of small patches to address some of your inputs. Yesterday we launched the 0.2.3 update which introduces a repair tool to better deal with the aftermath of earthquakes. We’ve also recently released The Wandering Village Steam Trading Cards :D

We have some good news to share today:
A new full-time team member has joined our studio this month: Robin.
He's our new game designer with the mission to help improve the game's replayability, balancing, long-term motivation and hopefully make it even more fun in general!

Robin has jumped right in and is currently implementing ‘Hostility Modifiers’ which give players lots of options to make the game harder. Later on, this might be tied to some hard-to-get achievements, like "Beat the game on Veteran with a difficulty score of 10 or above" 🔥



Meanwhile, we are also working on building upgrades as well as a first set of decorations for your villages. With building upgrades, you can invest time and resources to improve individual buildings in to make them more efficient and integral to your production chains. But pick carefully, since upgrades can’t be removed once installed, and some upgrades might work better in certain situations than others.



Decorations allow you to express yourself and your village’s ideals in its design. They’ll help you decorate (the currently rather monotonous) neighborhoods and improve the quality of life for your villagers.



And of course we’re also still happily designing away at the Water Biome update (which we showed a few glimpses of last time):
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1121640/view/3673282587150196260

The Wandering Village has been nominated for the Game Connection Award 🏆
If you have a minute, it would be awesome if you could vote for us!
https://forms.gle/pZ3Lx3dHo5bxNm5v5

And lastly we’ve started a monthly dev stream on Twitch where we show off the latest additions to The Wandering Village and chat about various topics. The next one takes place on March 2nd, please join our Discord if you’d like to get notified: https://discord.gg/thewanderingvillage

That is all for today. We’re looking forward to your feedback!

Cheers & Thanks for your support,
Stray Fawn Studio

PS: Has anybody here gotten all achievements yet :D?

Patchnotes 0.2.3

We just released a new patch, to add a repair tool

Patchnotes 0.2.3

New Features
-------------------
- Added repair tool

Bugfixes
-------------------
- Fixed Strict Diet achievement, where only two instead of three feeds were allowed
- Fixed Berry Good achievement where it was unlocked with the wrong building
- Fixed bug where building could be disabled while a mission was ongoing
- Localization fixes