The Wandering Village News

[p]Dear Onbu Riders[/p][p][/p][p]It’s that time of the year again: The Steam awards just went live.
With Wandering Village finally hitting 1.0 this July, we are now eligible for nominations again 🙂
We would greatly appreciate it if you nominate us![/p][p]

[/p][p]We hope you have been enjoying the game and are super happy that we finally managed to take the step out of Early Access after 2.5 years. All in all, we have now been working on The Wandering Village for 5 years! Crazy right? This is by far the biggest project we have ever made. And we’re not done! A big new update is in the works!

This week, our studio is celebrating its 9th birthday.
We are super grateful for all your support. We would have never made it this far without you ❤️[/p][p][/p][p]
[/p][p]Cheers & Thank you very much for your support,[/p][p]Stray Fawn Studio[/p]

Dear Onbu Rider

Thank you all so much for making The Wandering Village’s launch a success! We hope you are having as much fun playing the game as we have working on it ✨
We have been busy listening to your feedback and putting together an update that focuses on improving as many points as possible. We are happy to introduce the Quality of Life update!



If you often find yourself wishing that villagers would clean up after themselves, we have great news: The Hauling Post lets you task villagers with picking resources off the floor and storing them, as well as with moving resources between buildings. Workers get a substantial boost in movement speed and carry capacity, too!



We know that it can be hard to find the correct technology to research next. We have added a search function to the research tree, letting you quickly find what you’re looking for.

In the same spirit, we have improved the user interface in many areas. Unpinned quests and tutorials, for example, are now visible as small icons in the sidebar so you won’t forget them anymore.

We try to make the game more accessible whenever we can, too: If you suffer from Misophonia (or dislike certain sound effects), you can now tweak their volume in the “audio_preferences” file inside your save folder.



Managing your workers is important, and we want to make this as easy as possible. You can now hold down a button (Alt by default) to quickly move employees around.



Farming got a big boost, too. Berry Gatherers can choose where to plant bushes, Farms can help out their neighbours with the harvest, and Aquafarm employees will reliably empty their storage when it’s full. You may also find that compost is a lot more useful now!

There’s a lot more to discover - we haven’t even touched on the new sandbox settings, improved food rationing system, resource bar improvements, the new harvest filters for poisonous plants and parasites, new decorations, countless balancing tweaks, bugfixes and more! If you want to dive in deeper, you can find the detailed patch notes below:

Patchnotes

To celebrate the occasion, The Wandering Village is currently 40% off as part of the Steam Autumn Sale:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121640/The_Wandering_Village/

And we also have new bundles available for a limited time:

The Wandering Village & Fata Deum
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/59587/The_Wandering_Village__Fata_Deum/

The Wandering Village & The King is Watching
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/58741/The_Wandering_Village__The_King_Is_Watching/

Since you all liked the Onbu plushie so much, we’re considering making another one 🎉
We’re currently undecided between a villager or Onbu with a different skin. If you'd like to see another plushie, please let us know in the comments if you would prefer a villager plushie, or Onbu with either the Tahoa, Indigon or Sakura skin.
This is just to check whether there is any interest ❤️

We hope you enjoy the new update, and can’t wait to hear your feedback!

[h3]What's New[/h3]

• The new search bar allows you to quickly find any technology in the research tree!
  
• You can now build the Hauling Post, a rework of the old Worker Post. Workers employed here will pick up stuff from the ground and keep production buildings well stocked. They get a substantial boost to movement speed and carry capacity, too.
  
• Story quests and tutorials can now be collapsed into a compact format instead of disappearing completely. This should eliminate issues where players wouldn't find the quests anymore after unpinning them.
  
• We have added 5 additional sandbox options centered on construction and research, allowing you to tailor the game to your preferred playstyle.
  
• Compost on Farm, Herbalist, Mycologist increases yield instead of growth speed. The 'Crop Fertilizer' upgrade further boosts the yield to +2.
  
• Farm/Herbalist/Mycologist/Aquafarm workers can now also harvest crops from the plots of other buildings of the matching type, allowing you to set up some more efficient large farms.
  
• Hold Alt to bring up the worker management overlay, allowing you to assign/unassign workers and lock/unlock buildings with ease! On gamepad, this mode can be found in the radial menu/tools.
  
• Reworked food rationing from a passive system into an active decision. The food management display now allows to set rationing to Auto (the default behaviour from before the update) or to On/Off. While rationing is active, villagers will go hungry and consume 50% of the food, but get very unhappy in the process. This is useful to push through famines or save up some food for the future.
  
• We've reorganized resources into new categories in the top bar. The new 'Essentials' category contains everything you'll always want to keep an eye on. The other categories are designed to be useful in specific situations (such as when extending your farms or caring for Onbu). The goal is to reduce the need to keep the "All" tab open all the time, and thus reduce clutter on the screen. Let us know what you think!
  
• The harvest tool can now filter poisonous fungi and parasites, making it easier to select them.
  
• Misophonia options: a new 'audio_preferences.json' file will be generated in the game's save data folder, which allows you to tweak the volume of every individual sound effect in the game. This feature is only available on PC/Mac/Linux, since it requires direct access to the save folder and a text editor.
  
• We've added several new medium decorations, inspired by our backers.
  

Balancing

• MaxWorkerCount for Farm with Farmhands upgrade 5 -> 7
  
• Changed Liquid WeedKiller recipe from using Biogas/Bile to using Salt
  
• Buffed Smoking Hut: production time 200s -> 180s, Salt consumption 5 -> 3
  
• Buffed Seawater Collector: ProductionDuration 50s -> 33.3s
  
• Changed Water Evaporator: buff water throughput: 10 -> 15, nerf salt output: 2 -> 1
  
• Changed RockTrumpet: plant/harvest cycle duration 15.5s -> 20s, Stone yield 2 -> 3 (Stone yield/worker/day: 20 -> 27)
  
• Hunger efficiency (how efficiently hunger is reduced by Onbu Food) caps at 20%, so that too many Tapeworms can't make Onbu starve completely
  
• Removed direct Onbu poisoning from Sporemoths, and considerably buff the food output from their eggs (to be a bit better in terms of food/tile/day than Elefleas)
  
• Fixed new villagers arriving twice as fast as intended. Considerably buffed the base arrival speed so the change isn't too drastic
  
• Changed difficulty modifier segments from 5->10->15->20->25->30 to 15->20->25->30 to remove some of the grind, and allow players to experience a harder difficulty initially
  
• Increases resource cost for all food compostation recipes: 3 -> 5
  
• Food compostation now also allows composting wheat and fish
  

Improvements

• The use of Biogas or Bile can now be toggled individually for the Decontaminator and Pest Control
  
• Crops now show a visual effect, and display warning icons in their detail display, when they're either decomposing because of unsuitable climate or growing slower due to parasites
  
• Show missions in Onbu view as soon as related building is unlocked (rather than requiring players to build it first). Highlight missions unlocked by researching the mission-giver building
  
• Extended the "hostility" display in the top bar to show relevant information for any of the three game modes
  
• Hide hostility modifier info completely in Sandbox Mode if no modifiers were picked
  
• The Berry Gatherer now has plots, giving you more control over where the bushes should be planted
  
• Scavenging locations that could hold a special event in store (and thus override the expected rewards) now mention this specifically
  
• When a parasite egg location overlaps with roads, both the egg location and the roads can now be consistently selected
  
• If a construction site or egg-planting location overlaps with objects that have been de-selected for harvest (and thus permanently block the location), a new "construction site blocked" error flag will now show up
  
• Limit Researcher building count to 1, in order to avoid frustration when building multiple ones and not seeing any benefit. This will not affect existing duplicates of research buildings; you merely cannot build more once you have 1 or more.
  
• Abandoned Encampments will now change to Scavenged Encampments after passing them. This should avoid confusion about whether resources were picked up when passing them
  
• Popup when unlocking a new Onbu skin
  
• The intensity of the poison cloud effect has been considerably toned down, to allow players to still see the village while Onbu is in the middle of a cloud
  
• Improved gamepad navigation in the research tree
  
• Don't show housing info for homeless villagers. Show homeless icon instead of completely hiding the housing icon
  
• Show survey-prompt only once per unique survey
  
• Most notification log entries can now be retranslated when switching language
  
• Show effective growth speed of all plants (also in farms), including modifiers from parasites. Previously, only the temperature was factored in, while Rockgrubs/Sandworms were ignored
  
• All resource-tooltips now show the total amount of that resource that's currently in stock
  
• Added a button to the Radio Tower's detail display to open incoming transmissions
  
• Added a setting to reduce the quality of the ground shader, to better support older hardware
  
• Allowed cancelling placement of parasite eggs while their placement location is still occupied (e.g. when placing them overlapping roads)
  
• Improved hostility modifier selection; the 'Reset' button has been changed into a 'Select/Deselect All' button
  
• Proper icon for the Food Compostation unlock, and improvements to some other icons
  
• Keep showing a just-completed tutorial for a short while
  
• Right-Shift now also works to copy buildings
  
• Generally tightened some UI elements, to make sure important information doesn't get cut off when playing on small screens and/or with enlarged UI scale
  
• Improved layout of the hostility-beaten widget and popup
  
• Aquafarm workers will now carry away excess fish and kelp to ensure the plots do not get blocked by resources anymore
  
• Slightly moved back door of Aquafarm so workers will take more sensible paths
  
• Warning and error icons in top bar now have distinct colors and specific ordering to make them more easily identifiable
  
• Added information about food consumption frequency to food management display
  
• Fixed some layout issues
  
• Performance improvements across the board
  
• Opening the radial menu will always open it in the tools tab for faster usage of tools
  

Bugfixes

• Fixed Decontaminator employees burning down fungi on Mycologist plots
  
• Fixed Mycologist harvesting medium poisonous fungi (less yield)
  
• Fixed Mycologist not harvesting burnt poisonous fungi
  
• Fixed arabic localization issues
  
• Fixed 'An acquired taste' being the only sidequest to force its dialogue
  
• Fixed visual help for research zoom on gamepad not flipping correctly on device change
  
• Fixed UI Scale Issue for Pause and Confirmation Display
  
• Fixed: bring back research recommendation stars, and improve system so that eligible parents of next recommended research get starred if the recommended research itself is still out of reach
  
• Fixed tooltips shown even though they are under a panel
  
• Fixed harvest-balloons scaling with their marked plants when they grow
  
• Fixed: switching from keyboard/mouse to gamepad lets you skip hold buttons
  
• Fixed: changing device also clicks buttons
  
• Fixed: controller-lost-popup not on top of everything
  
• Fixed Farms still thinking they have plots after adding and then removing all their plots, leading to some wrong warning flags
  
• Fixed Horn-Command buttons for commands that don't need research not getting highlighted correctly after unlocking the Hornblower
  
• Fixed a rare case where the game could get stuck during camera transitions in story mode
  
• Fixed some UI elements not getting re-translated upon switching language
  
• Fixed some UI scaling issue
  
• Fixed some instances where gamepad navigation could lose focus when switching input device
  
• Fixed some cases where closing a panel using the gamepad would also close the panel underneath
  
• Fixed layout issue with the building counters in the building menu
  
• Fixed issue with mission button highlights, where hovering over one newly unlocked mission would remove the hover-glow from all others that were unlocked by the same research (e.g. all Onbu Pharmacy commands)
  
• Fixed UI getting re-shown for a split second after the story's final cutscene
  
• Fixed linebreak when status widgets in the top bar displayed three-digit numbers
  
• Fixed Energy health damage kicking in too early (90% exhaustion -> 100% exhaustion)
  
• Fixed vegetation often failing to spawn if initial center location for cluster was badly picked (e.g. in a spot that's completely overbuilt already)
  
• Fixed missing tiles in some restricted regions - building areas for Scavenger Hut, Fishery etc. should now perfectly overlap with regular building areas
  
• Fixed being able to uproot roads with poison plants on them
  
• Fixed foodmanagement selects hidden resources with gamepad
  
• Fixed: decoration bar not properly anchored on some housing types (Flophouse, Boarding House, Commune)
  
• Fixed: jumpy loading screen tips
  
• Fixed: main menu not navigatable after deleting the last savefile in start screen
  

Bugfixes

• Fixed exception when Scavenging Trading Display was closed with right-click and then opened again
  
• Fixed scavenging buildings dumping their rewards in the middle of the village instead of storing them