Halloween Update

Hey everyone,

Dorfromantik has been in Early Access for seven months already! A lot has happened, we brought in a Community Manager (Hi, I am writing this post!), brought you an all-new game mode in the Creative Mode and worked on a lot of Quality of Life features. As planned we move to the next chapter on our roadmap and bring you the first Content Update 0.3 for Halloween (see here for the full detailed patch notes):

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1455840/view/3076515048862888578

[h2]New Biome - 'Enchanted'[/h2]
We are adding a new biome, 'Enchanted', to the game. You will be able to unlock it permanently by completing the new Landscaper IV Challenge. During the Halloween event, it is unlocked for everyone by default, though! You might also be able to find pumpkins in your villages going forward.




[h2]More Water Tile Variety[/h2]
We have heard you would like Lake Tiles that only occupy parts of a tile, opposed to the currently available water tile that is all water. These Water Tiles currently come in three new additional flavors:

• 3 Water Edges
• 4 Water Edges
• 5 Water Edges

We are thinking about adding a few more Water Tiles to the game in future updates. For example we already found a 2 Water Edge Tile would sometimes be highly appreciated to complete shorelines satisfyingly. Next to adding completely new Water Tiles, we also worked more fundamentally on the water shapes themselves and reworked them to get more diversity in their building structures.




[h2]New Special Tiles[/h2]
Yup. We added more special tiles! Update 0.3 brings a total of six new special tiles including many new animals that will bring to life in your landscape:

• Bears and cubs
• Boars and their kids
• Swans and geese
• Beavers and their dams
• Foxes and fox kits
• Forest and water ruins

Try to unlock them all in Classic Mode and build fantastic vivid worlds in the Creative Mode.



[h2]New Challenges[/h2]
Of course, new Special Tiles also bring new challenges! A total of 6 new challenges, one for every new Special Tile, are added to the game. On top we added a few more levels to already existing Challenges, which give you a total amount of 34 Achievements to unlock!

• Planner - Score [x] perfect placements at once.
  
• Explorer - Connect [x] preplaced tiles in total.
  
• Flag Collector - Complete [x] flag quests in total.
  
• Heavy Weight - Place [x] consecutive tiles without rotating a tile.
  
• Quest Master - Complete [x] quests in total.
  
• Analyst - Collect [x] points with a single tile placement.
  

[h2]Other Additions[/h2]
That is not all, though! We have also added many other small features to improve the gameplay experience in Dorfromantik.

You can now adjust your various camera speeds - Scrolling, Zooming, Rotating - in the Keybinds Menu with ranges from 0.2x to 5x standard speed. We hope this makes traversing larger maps easier, or allows you to record those slow, cinematic shots of your creations!

We now have in-game statistics! these are on a save-by-save basis and include statistics like Playtime and Placed Tiles. These also work for older saves, so now you can finally find out how long you worked on those giant landscapes worth hundreds of thousands of points, and just how many Tiles you placed.


So, November and December will be a bit lighter on game updates. We have mentioned it a couple of times in the past, but the core team is diving into their Master Theses starting next week. They will still be working some hours on Dorfromantik every week, but obviously their priority will be fixing bugs and outside of that, smaller stuff.

We are also prioritizing Controller Support in the upcoming months, so you will be able to hopefully play Dorfromantik on the new Steam Deck by Valve as well as your common game controllers for PC.

We plan to bring you an additional Content Update just in time for Christmas to round off 2021 on a good note. Starting in 2022, as announced in our roadmap, we will work on a final third gamemode, as well as take another look at balancing to make the most polished game experience of Dorfromantik possible for you.

Big thank you to everybody who helped us out by providing their save-games as well as all the participants in our public beta program, all the data has helped us a lot already in identifying a bunch of points of attack and sparked a lot of internal discussions!

Lastly, our Community Manager has been locked away in his laboratory, tinkering with new ideas for Community Challenges, Showcases, and the like. Please look forward to those later this year. There might even be something for all the score-chasing Classic Mode players in there!

From all of us here at Toukana Interactive, we would like to thank you for your support over the last months, wish you a lot of fun with the new update and are excited to see what you create and hopefully share with us!! 💛💛💛