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[h2]😄 Villager Expressiveness[/h2]



[h3]Outbursts[/h3]

When a villager is feeling an emotion, they now have a chance to express that through a small action:

• If they are happy, they can do a little dance
  
• If they are angry, they can rage
  
• If they are feeling sad, they can cry
  

[h3]More complex emotions[/h3]

Sadness is now directly linked to a villager’s personality, amount of social contact, and is also effected by food (happy tummy happy bunny). Meanwhile, anger is a separate emotion based on the current level of irritation from activities. This means villagers can now become happy when you simply catch-up with them - especially ones you are already friends with!

Some subtle details:

• Villagers that don’t like you will become irritated when talking to you
  
• Villagers’ emotional memory of conversations is now based on what happened during the conversation
  
• Added lots of new dialogue surrounding emotions
  
• All feelings are now saved and persisted between gameplay sessions
  

[h2]🗿 Monuments of Achievement[/h2]



To commemorate your hard work, there are now three special monuments you can be inspired to unlock upon fulfilling certain conditions. These are:

• A Monument of Benevolence
  
• A Monument of Craftsmanship
  
• A Monument of Establishment
  

[h2]🥐 Becoming Well-Nourished[/h2]



Before, food was mainly a luxury that provided comfort and happiness to villagers who really liked eating specific treats. However, now, you can eat food to gain an impactful productivity boost to chopping trees, mining rocks, and helping construct buildings. This finally gives the whole culinary section of items and buildings a new and real use!

Different foods give bonuses for different amounts of time. Redcurrants commonly found in forests will give a short-lived effect, but delicious beaked bread will last much longer!

Food here specifically gives a positive bonus, rather than a negative ‘hungry’ status as we want to emphasise that it’s an optional effect, rather than a stressful need you always have to fulfil.

[h2]📜 Work In Progress: Villager Chronicles[/h2]



We have also been working hard on lots of new content, as well as the new villager details page! These will arrive in the next update(s), in the meantime, here is a sneak peak of what our draft of the new book section looks like.

Feel free to give feedback if there’s something you like or don’t like on here! :)

[h2]🦗 Bug fixes and improvements[/h2]

• Allowed the camera to be used on top of the tower. When inside, you can now simply move your mouse to move the camera. You can use A and D to cycle between positions in the tower. Note, sometimes it may appear you can’t take certain positions, this is because a villager is on their way there, and of course, it would be rude to front-run them. So (for now), you will have to wait for your turn for the specific place :). When inside, the toolbar now hides (for nice screenshots).
  
• Changed item icons to have more standardised sizes
  
• Fixed icons moving in your toolbar based on the current camera angle
  
• Improved mastery icon positions in the Townsfolk page
  
• Improved the game selector’s resolution compatibility
  
• Improved the way tree chops are counted, and so also fixed axe hits occasionally not connecting properly and tree falling first
  
• Limited cows to be milked at most twice a day
  
• Fixed long-standing issue with villagers sometimes not hearing what you ask of them (some people thought the villagers were deaf)
  
• Fixed the act of crafting fountains not inspiring any ideas
  
• Fixed not being able to drag and drop from equipment slots for male characters
  

We’ve been working hard on some exciting things which are coming next week, from new villager actions, to some sweet new content! So stay tuned, and in the meantime, here is a small patch to address a few things and add a couple of helpful improvements 🙂

• Added variation to the forms of the rocks you pick up
  
• Added a "save and back to main menu” (upon popular demand)
  
• Changed the hammer cursor to only appear on valid building materials
  
• Fixed long-standing visual glitches when two people contributed to a building at the same time
  
• Fixed villagers only remembering and reacting to conversations with each other, and not the player
  
• Fixed outdated relationship level when villagers are deciding whether to praise you or slag you off in their own conversations
  
• Fixed tools not breaking correctly
  
• Fixed flowers in bush icons moving as you move the camera
  
• Fixed some objects not being thrown properly
  

Thought it would be fun to test the livestream feature on Steam for the first time! So I will be playing through a new world for fun, come check it out if you want to watch, ask questions, or just chill :)

Just a small hot-fix patch to address some issues found in the last update:

• Fixed villagers not wanting to trade some items
  
• Fixed icons of trees, bushes, and hedges slightly flickering when moving the camera
  
• Fixed right-click menu not appearing inside chests
  
• Fixed item order not being retained when dropped items into chests or house storage
  

After the previous content update, this patch has been centered on polishing the building and interaction aspect of the game. For the next update - we’ll return to working on the villager AI! Based on the Discord poll results, the most requested AI features are Villager Chronicles and Unravelling Tales, so we’ll be making a start on the former next week! For now, here are the changes in this patch 🚀

[h2]⛰️ Proper support for building on hilly terrain[/h2]



Previously, building on very hilly terrain was a problem because the bases of the buildings were not low enough. This meant that they could sometimes appear half-floating in certain situations. In this patch, we’ve added much deeper bases for all structures to fully enable these harsher conditions. Each building now also slightly terraforms the terrain so it doesn’t appear half-embedded inside it. Mountain-side towns are something that’s rather unique to this game and we want to fully support!

But not only that, we’ve gone a step beyond and actually offered multiple base types for the bigger buildings to allow extra customisation! A lot of them now support two options: adapting to the current surface, or terraforming the entire building zone for a flatter usuable area.

Additionally, the bakery and smithy also have a 3rd option: platformed terraces. These allow you to have a flat floor and stairs up to the buildings instead. If it’s something you enjoy, we can also make this option available to other buildings too.

[h2]🏡 Building configuration screen[/h2]



Some players found it difficult to tell exactly how a building would look (especially at different angles) when it’s finished. To fix this and support the ability to easily choose between building base options, we’ve added a new configuration screen for the more complex buildings that need it: the workshop, tavern, smithy, bakery, cattle barn, and tailor.

In this new architecture screen, you can:

• Choose between available base types
  
• Rotate the camera to see how a building will look at any angle
  
• Easily reposition and re-rotate to find that exact right fit.
  

[h2]👆 Revamped interactions[/h2]

We’ve improved the item and UI interactions in a few great ways this patch! First, we implemented a drag and drop feature - which also means that items will no longer occasionally re-order themselves in your inventories.

Then, we finally added a toolbar which will allow you to easily switch between different items and tools to more easily focus down your interactions and speed up decoration. To go along with the new toolbar and additional space, we increased the inventory size from 12 -> 17.



Due to this change, we’ve naturally had to alter a number of hotkeys to fit the new interaction paradigm. To summarise, the focus is now on left-click for destructive actions (such as gathering items) and right-click for interactions or destructive actions - plus a few key-binding changes. Overall, it’s a fairly big adjustment to interactions, so we’re open to hearing what you think about it.

Then, we’ve updated the cursor with a custom design which changes depending on whether you are hovering over an item, dragging, or about to contribute it to a building.



As we evolve the game, we are improving in our artistic ability to produce new content. The tooltips and context menus have far fallen behind our current quality threshold. As such, we’ve given them a visual refresh whilst giving more context options to accompany the drag’n’drop functionality.



[h2]🪰 Bug fixes and smaller improvements[/h2]

• Added a scythe hint when trying to cut a field without one
  
• Updated the look of boulders and fixed the hitboxes on them
  
• Updated the look of doors to be more rounded and have a wooden base so they won’t look floating on hilly terrain
  
• Changed tavern, smithy, and bakery to require waiting until the next day to fully open
  
• Finally fixed some items being visible through tooltips and other overlaying UI elements
  
• Updated the look of the settings key configuration menu into a tabbed view in order to be able to hold all the new controls
  
• Fixed a small subset of players potentially having issues starting the game
  
• Fixed some small items being harder to interact with when other items are nearby
  
• Fixed villagers being able to use the mine before while it’s still blocked
  
• Fixed some small UI scaling issues
  
• Fixed being able to clip the camera inside the tavern if you are standing too close to it
  
• Fixed mountain rocks having weird visual appearances when far away
  
• Fixed tutorials sometimes being underneath UI elements