Heard of the Story? News

As you may expect, we've been busy preparing the next big patch of Heard of the Story! Releasing sometime in February, it will include a lot of new content and major performance improvements!

With players building bigger and bigger towns, the visual uniqueness of villagers is something that has become very important, and so we've invested a lot of time into designing and creating an assortment of clothes, hair styles, and facial hair styles for you and your villagers to wear! To go along with this, there will be a more detailed customisation screen at the beginning of the game, as well as a separate 'equipment' inventory section so that these items no longer take up regular inventory space. Of course, these items will all be craftable in a new Tailor building. Below are some of the concepts we brainstormed before starting development on the new appearances.



So far, the villager AI centered around using a graph-based database. For various reasons, this turned out to be a bad decision for performance. In this update, we completely refactored out the database, which has led to insanely faster AI performance, between 100-10,000x. In particular, this has a huge impact on large worlds. Previously, a town spanning 50 villagers would start to appear sluggish for conversations, new buildings, villager immigration, and overall, raised new issues and bugs. Now, those delays will be simply completely gone! This opens up the opportunity for much larger worlds than previously possible, with towns potentially having hundreds of roaming villagers - the upper limits of which we are still testing!

One of the most requested buildings from an earlier Discord poll - the Cattle Barn - is also coming in the 0.9 patch. With it, will come the first round of animals in the game - 🐮🐄! To construct the building, you'll need to attract some cute little cows which you'll be able to find roaming in the forests surrounding your town. Feed them with some hay, or even some of the bread you bake, and they'll return the favour by providing you with milk, which you'll be able to use to make cheese and butter! Thanks for sharing what you want to see and helping shape the game!

So those are the main new things coming! We're looking forward to seeing you try the new update when it's ready!

- Improved the way personality is interpreted by a villager when they are choosing what to say. Previously, certain speaking styles would be unintentionally much more common than others, now they are more balanced and consistent. Specifically, you’ll see this when villagers are describing their goals, reacting to insults, and responding to other villagers
- Fixed some villager descriptions of goals overflowing
- Fixed some villager personalities getting insulted during trading when they shouldn’t
- Fixed cart item being ‘free’ during trade and also other related issues to the cart
- Fixed being able to see barrels and the cart in mid-air when constructing the mine
- Fixed not being able to craft in the same workspace twice and other related crafting issues
- Fixed a ‘goodbye’ from a previous conversation being able to cause a glitch in a new conversation
- Fixed villagers in the Townsfolk menu strangely wearing only blue clothes
- Fixed mine door having the wrong hint
- Fixed mine windows not lighting up when the building is in use

As always, we are also working on some great new content and improvements for the next big update - stay tuned!

This is primarily a quick patch to address an important issue with the mine:
- Fixed not getting new skill ideas when using the mine

Other bug fixes and improvements:
- Tutorials now auto-complete when you finish the associated tasks which means you no longer have to make them active to tick them off
- The fact a tutorial is active is now indicated with a thicker tutorial tickbox
- Slightly adjusted the icon for the tutorial tickboxes
- Fixed bug where the building and decoration tutorials would be considered complete even if placement was cancelled
- Fixed being able to press the middle mouse button in conversations and building menus to prevent glitches

Finally got around to fixing these long-standing issues:
- Fully fixed villagers getting permanently stuck in your interaction zone if you were nearby when they entered their house
- Fixed sometimes not being able to gather resources because they were locked by other villagers (who then for some reason never ended up gathering them)
- Fixed glitches related to harvesting resources at the same time as other villagers

Other fixes:
- Fixed being able to trade currently equipped tools which led to visual glitches
- Fixed experiences and other information for the action “sit down” being duplicated
- Fixed not being able to pick-up the fountain decoration without restarting
- Fixed villagers not showing all their items for trading if they had less than 12
- Fixed being unable to walk through flax flower decorations

- Nerfed villager-to-villager trading by preventing villagers trading for items they want rather than need. If a villager had no building goal and was particularly motivated, it sometimes led to disruptive behaviour where they would continuously start trades until they’d completely bankrupt themselves
- Fixed villagers requiring a pickaxe to get stones (since some stones are gatherable by hand) and therefore being unable to ever gather stone again if their starting pickaxe was destroyed or traded away
- Fixed pickaxes being equipped when villagers are moving to gather stones by hand
- Fixed villagers sometimes getting perma-stuck gathering mud when they don’t have a shovel
- Fixed house constructions having too short colliders which caused some trouble on hilly terrain
- Fixed some decorations loading in mid-air
- Fixed newly immigrated villagers trying to contribute to already completed buildings
- Fixed newly immigrated villagers trying to use incomplete buildings
- Fixed villagers getting stuck using the tavern or mine under some circumstances