Folklands News

The day is finally here, where you all get to try our cozy settlement builder with charming little citizens and endless possibilities. In Folklands - available right now in Early Access - you’ll guide a growing village, nurture your folks, harvest resources and manage production to help your settlement thrive and expand. Build at your own pace, experiment with new structures, and discover creative ways to support your villagers.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2282890/Folklands/

[h2]Key Features:[/h2]

• Build and Manage Your Settlement: Establish a flourishing community by constructing homes, managing resources, and ensuring the well-being of your citizens.
  
• Dynamic Production Chains: Harvest raw materials and refine them into processed goods. Create complex production lines to meet the evolving needs of your settlement.
  
• Trade and Diplomacy: Engage in trade with neighboring factions or other players, establish trade routes to acquire scarce resources and enhance your economy.
  
• Challenges and Events: Navigate various challenges as your settlement expands, managing resources effectively to combat new and demanding threats
  
• Procedurally Generated Worlds: Each playthrough offers a unique experience with landscapes that require adaptive strategies for settlement growth and happiness.
  
• Single and Multiplayer Modes: Enjoy a solo building experience or collaborate with friends in multiplayer mode.
  

📽️ Check out our release trailer below to see Folklands in action!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]What's next?[/h2]

The Early Access launch is only the beginning - our initial platform for what we want to build. With hours of gameplay already available, your feedback will directly influence future updates, new features, and improvements. We’re dedicated to regular updates and gameplay expansion based on the input from the community.

In addition, we've prepared a roadmap for the planned future updates leading up to the full release later. While not limited to the features outlined in the graphic below, this will give you a taste of what’s already planned.



We'll share more details about the roadmap in a separate announcement, and would love your feedback on the roadmap as well, helping us shape the direction of the game!

📌 If you enjoy your experience in the game, please consider leaving an honest review. Your support helps us make Folklands the best it can be and will also help other players discover the game.

Thank you for joining us on this exciting journey. We can’t wait to hear what you think!
– Bromantic Games & Light Up Games

Hi everyone!

We're thrilled to announce that Folklands, our relaxing, peaceful settlement builder, officially launches in Early Access on March 24, 2025!

To celebrate, we've just released a brand-new trailer giving you a fresh look at gameplay and what you'll experience on launch day:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Here's what you'll find in Early Access:[/h3]
Relaxing Settlement-Building:
Build your dream community, manage resources, and keep your villagers safe, happy, and thriving.

Procedurally Generated Worlds:
Each playthrough is unique, offering new opportunities and surprises every time.

Single & Multiplayer Modes:
Build solo or team up with friends to create your settlements together.

[h3]Your Feedback Shapes the Future![/h3]
Throughout Early Access, your input will directly influence how Folklands evolves. We're looking forward to your suggestions as we introduce more buildings, new resources, improved graphics, expanded mechanics, and much more!

See you in Folklands on March 24th!

Thank you to everyone who's reporting issues on the current playtest! We're gathering lots of feedback via Discord, and are working hard to make sure the playtest is running smoothly for everyone!

We've identified and fixed several bugs in the initial playtest build. For more information, see the full changelog below:


* Added an option to choose between exclusive and borderless fullscreen mode
* Added an option to specify which screen the game starts on
* Added resource tooltips to storage picker slots


* Slightly increased the walk speed of villagers
* Slightly decreased the resource harvest time for basic resources
* Noticeably reduced the frequency of the Rutai stone wall quest


* Fixed an edge case where a villager could reserve the last berry forever
* Fixed several issues with pathfinding over bridges
* Fixed several issues with pathfinding over resource deposits
* Fixed a case where two buildings would lock off each others entrances if built with a path running through one of their entrances
* Fixed several cases where villagers would report getting stuck
* Fixed some untranslated texts
* Fixed a case where you could store more than the allowed number of resources in a storage building by simply typing it
* Fixed a bug that could cause the game to seem soft-locked if starting the game without Steam running
* Resized bread so it is no longer enormous

Hey everyone, it's time for a new update! We’ve got some exciting updates coming your way as we get ready to release our new and updated demo close to the Early Access release in Q1 2025. We wanted to take a moment to chat about what’s in store and what you can expect in the upcoming updates.

[h2]What is Folklands?[/h2]
A basic question, but one that is easily overlooked - what is Folklands about, and how does it differ from many of the other games out there? At its core, Folklands is a settlement building game trying to stick closely to a well-established formula - but it’s still a bit different from other games in the same genre. While we’re not reinventing the wheel, we’ve set out to blend what we feel is the best parts of classic city-builders like Caesar, Age of Empires, Transport Tycoon, Settlers, and Anno with modern features and mechanics that today’s city-building games have to offer.

We’ve always loved the nostalgia of these games - not just for the gameplay, but for that special feeling they gave you; the satisfaction of building something from the ground up and seeing your people thrive. With Folklands, we’re aiming to recreate that feeling while at the same time focusing more on the folks in your settlement - their happiness, their desires and how it affects the flow of your settlement.



[h2]The Heart of Folklands: Your Folks[/h2]
The real challenge in Folklands isn’t military conquest but rather keeping your people happy as you grow your settlement. You’ll need to balance the needs of the common folk with the demands of the upper classes, manage your economy, and make sure your city is thriving in every way. Want to impress the nobles? You’ll need guards. Too many guards? That will annoy the commoners! Also, guards are expensive! And while placing that toolmaker smack in the middle of your settlement would be perfect for distribution, doings so could stunt growth as higher class folks don't want to live in cramped industrial areas.

It’s all about finding that sweet spot where your people are content - with luxuries, leisure, and even the occasional kingdom that comes knocking at your door for “peaceful” assistance. What’s the harm in denying them a few bags of grain?

[h2]New Challenges on the Horizon[/h2]
Keeping your folks happy is only part of the equation, and some players want more challenges. As we work through the EA period, expect to see optional challenges like floods, earthquakes, crop failures, pests, raiders, and more. The world of Folklands won’t always be kind, and you’ll need to adapt to survive. These random events will keep you on your toes, but with clever planning and management, you can weather any storm (literally).

[h2]Bring a Friend, or Seven![/h2]
From the very start of Folklands, multiplayer has been a core part of the functionality. As three brothers who love to play games together, we knew it was important to design the game so that we could play even with our different schedules -and we wanted the same flexibility for you. Whether you’re playing solo, with one friend, or a whole group, you can easily jump in or out of the game whenever you want. No need to worry if life gets in the way: if someone needs to step away for work, family, or anything else, the game can continue running with the settlement progressing in their absence.



If all players go offline, no worries! Just save the game and pick it up again when you’re ready to return. Folklands lets you play at your own pace, with your settlement always growing, no matter who’s around.

[h2]Looking Ahead[/h2]
As we’re getting closer and closer to the Early Access release, we're getting more and more excited to see the towns, villages, and kingdoms you’ll create in Folklands. Your feedback has been invaluable so far, and we can’t wait to keep building upon this with the feedback you'll provide as you get to play the early access version. As always, you can follow the development of Folklands on our Discord channel, where we sometimes stream live and chat along with the players.

We’re looking forward to seeing you all in the world of Folklands very soon! ✨

Hello, everyone!

In today’s devlog, we’re diving deeper into our decision to make the switch to the Godot game engine, and why it’s been a crucial move for the game’s future. We'll also have a look at how the updated graphics are coming along!

[h2]Moving to Godot[/h2]
As we talked about in our previous update we took at step back to really review the feedback and suggestions from our community and players after releasing an updated demo last fall. During this review we uncovered several limitations with the original game engine we were using which would have been very hard - if not impossible to overcome. After investigating our options and looking for the option that would give us maximum re-use of the code and functionality we had worked on so far, we made the difficult but ultimately worthwhile decision to port the game to Godot. Porting everything to Godot promised a more robust engine, better performance and most importantly allowing us to expand and build the game in ways we had previously been limited.

So, what has this rewrite / port given us?

Performance & framerate: Despite all our efforts to optimize the game within our old engine, there were still significant performance bottlenecks that caused the game to struggle - not only on lower-end systems, but we were not able to take proper advantage of more performant hardware either. While the demo looked and felt polished (when it ran well), the performance wasn’t up to our standards. With Godot, however, the game runs at a smooth 60+ fps on decent hardware with very little optimization, and even on lower-end systems, we're getting stable and usable framerates — an improvement we’re really excited about!

Memory Usage: The demo was notoriously memory-hungry, requiring over 4GB of RAM just to start and play. As a result of this we had to scale back on animations and image quality in the demo just to ensure it ran smoothly. With Godot we’ve reduced memory usage by over 75% with the same content - already a massive improvement in efficiency.

Animations & Building Quality: One of the biggest compromises in the previous engine was the quality of animations, especially for characters. Because of memory constraints and increased load times we had to lower image quality just to make things run properly. With Godot, we’ve more than doubled the quality of each animation without any performance loss, and load times are snappier than ever. As we continue to work on and expand the game, we’re excited to introduce new character professions, which will come with more complex animations. The power of Godot is allowing us to make what we want and add it to the game with no issues so far.

[h2]Sneak Peek of New Buildings and Characters:[/h2]
That's a lot of technical talk, but we're excited and hope you are too! Of course we’ve also got a sneak peek of some exciting new additions to the game!

Check out these concept drawings of some of our new buildings and an introduction to the new "Baker" character who will be wandering around town. (Keep in mind, this is still an early version, so expect plenty of changes as we continue to refine things along the way to the final release.)



That’s all for now, folks! We’re thrilled with the progress we’ve made so far, and we can’t wait to share more with you in the coming months.

Until next time!