Heard of the Story? News

This is a small patch which introduces over 100+ new lines of trading dialogue! What villagers say will now be influenced by your offer and their personality at each step of the trading (introduction, accepting, cancelling, and other events). This makes the whole trading experience more personal, unique, and fun! Additionally, the currently equipped items not being highlighted in the villager's inventory when trading is now fixed.

[h2]⚖️ Trading[/h2]


You can now trade with villagers to accomplish your goals! With this new mechanic, you will have to cooperate with your town to meet your needs. You'll have to make friends with the right people, learn who's skilled at what, and ultimately, strike them a bargain. Villagers will offer you a mix of their best wares as well as a random selection of the items they own. Making the wrong offer can have consequences, beware!

Not only can you trade with villagers, but they can also trade amongst themselves. If a villager requires an item for a specific goal but doesn't yet have the skill to make it, they will go ask someone who can.

[h2]⛏️ Mine[/h2]


This patch features a new 'mine' building which allows you to much more easily replenish your stores of minerals. With this new utility, you'll also have a chance to tap into the rarer gold and silver deposits hidden within the depths of the earth.

The distribution of ore is constant for now, this means that every mine will have the same probability of ores. However, in a future update, the plan is to make the yield chances change depending on the type of ground the mine is placed on, which you'll have to survey to learn about.

[h2]💍 Whitesmithing[/h2]
To make use of your newfound silver and gold, there is now a new crafting discipline dedicated to crafting precious accessories.

There are three sets of accessories you can learn to make:
- Aeolian Memory
- Rising Grace
- Glimmering Dream

Along with the bronze and iron pauldron, It is now also possible to craft a gold variant.

[h2]🪓 Tool Changes & Durability[/h2]
All stone and iron tools have received a visual and logical refresh. Some tools will now have an internal use count and will break if it has reached it's limit. Different tools have different durabilities, and iron tools will last longer.

[h2]🐛 Bug fixes & Improvements[/h2]
- Vegetation now respawn. Rocks and iron also respawn
- Balanced crafting progression significantly
- Crucial early game skills will now be unlocked first
- Probabilities to learn certain skills have been increases
- Probabilities to learn skills will no longer be added together but be treated separately. This will drastically balance early-to-late game progression
- Fixed villagers getting stuck in conversations
- Fixed being able to interact with villagers half-way across the map if they get stuck in your interaction cone
- Fixed anvil having a low priority interaction order
- Fixed being able to press the inventory button during conversations which led to issues
- Fixed villagers crafting items they didn’t have the skills for when trying to complete their goal
- Villagers now try to acquire the tool they need to complete their goals

Since it's been some time since the last update, I thought it would be fun to talk about some of the developments that are coming soon! The next patch (V0.8) will aim to fundamentally transform the importance of villagers by introducing trading.

These developments have been guided by your votes over on the Discord where you have selected Markets as the most wanted feature! At a high-level, the described feature consists of three pieces: trading, merchants, and marketplaces. The 'trading' part will come in this patch!

This mechanic will drive a gameplay change that can be conceptually split into two parts: the demand and the supply. Right now, it's fairly easy to learn how to craft most items in the game, which creates less incentive for cooperation. In this update:
- the difficulty of learning recipes will increase,
- and tools will now have a durability.
This will create a regular need to get your hands on these items, manifesting a more consistent and realistic form of demand for both you, and villagers.

The second part, is the supply to fit this new demand. With the ability to trade, you will have to cooperate with villagers to meet your needs. You'll have to make friends with the right people, learn who's skilled at what, and ultimately, strike them a bargain.

Since this change will drive demand for more resources, it will also feature a new Mine building. This will enable you to regularly extract minerals, as well as craft new items to make use of them. Likewise, the organic vegetation (excluding trees) in the game will now re-grow with every passing night.

All in all, I'm very excited for the new kinship and deepening of emergent civilisation this update will unlock!

This patch features a whole range of optimisations targeting the performance of villager AI. As the number of experiences, knowledge, and other details about a villager grows, it takes longer for them to think it all through. In the late game, this was especially noticable when you start having 30-50+ villagers and play for many hours. This update drastically speeds up the slowest parts of this thinking, resulting in much much faster conversation responses, quests, and overall responsiveness in this late-game.

There are still some things to be aware of for these large towns. For instance, when a new villager would like to join your village, it can take some time to properly generate all their details and fit them into the existing large data store. Likewise, when you first load a large save, it can take some time for all villagers to decide what they are doing (since this happens all at once right now). However, in both cases, after these situations pass, the villager AI performance tends to return back to normal performance.

Of course, there is still a lot of potential for improvement, and I definitely have ideas for even further optimisations. These will definitely come in the future too!

PS: We are also working on other exciting things behind-the-scenes - stay tuned!

Running the database under-the-hood was sometimes inconsistently handled where if a game crashed or was forcibly closed, the database would be left running which could cause future game starts to fail. Fixing this involved some refactoring but overall a much safer approach to both starting and stopping the database, making sure this, and other related issues to database starting should be fixed.

Furthermore, complete logging to the database and all related AI components has been added. This will allow for much easier and faster debugging of any future issues!

Although these are fairly behind-the-scenes changes you probably won’t notice, I’m quite happy about them as they represent a big step forward in improving the overall stability of the game!

• You can now press CAPS LOCK to permanently toggle running
  
• Changed some metal objects to be shiny (such as the pauldrons)
  

• Fixed being able to craft signposts and braziers outside their required buildings
  
• Fixed villagers talking about relationships with themselves
  
• Fixed some typos
  
• Fixed cancelling a story continuing to play the story music
  
• Fixed gold pauldron not appearing in-game
  

Though some players have requested that the skill system be improved and streamlined, the next big update should completely avert these issues through a brand new mechanic - more on that soon. Therefore, the current skill system will remain as it is for now.