The Guild 3 News

Build number: 627026

Hello Guild fans,

The team had a lot to do with the groundworks for the features and the new content of patch EA 0.9.15 and for the coming patch (we will shine some light on what is planned next in the coming dev diaries). Nonetheless, we’ve achieved a lot of cool stuff that you now have the chance to play yourself. As always, we appreciate your feedback and your bug reports.

Please note: The game does not display/load save games from outdated patch versions as they have become incompatible due to the rework of core systems.

New features: We implemented a player party formed of three of your characters, the brand new rogue profession smuggler, a rostrum where you can speak to the people in your city and implemented 16 new actions (including the actions of the smuggler).
Content & Balancing: Besides the translation of all current texts in the game, we continued to work on the AI and on balancing. Customers of service providers like the inn or the herb hut will from now on consume specific items if you have them available in your storage. Diseases have been reworked and they will occur again. And we reworked the structure, pictures and content of the ingame help to make some topics clearer for you.
Bug fixes: We have fixed more than 30 major bugs, including crash bug fixes and issues with the pathfinding, plus more than 50 minor issues.


Please support us and take the time to give reviews. Thank you very much!
If you have the time, we would appreciate it if you could fill out a short survey regarding the changes we made in patch EA 0.9.15: Link to the survey
Please note: we do not collect any personal information other than your feedback - you will remain completely anonymous. This survey will end the day we release the next patch.

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- with patch EA 0.9.15, we implemented a player party consisting of up to three main characters, mandatorily including the family's leader (your Avatar) and up to two more adult family members (left hand and right hand) of your choice. These three characters are displayed underneath the dynasty panel in the upper left corner of the HUD and you can perform more actions with them than with the rest of your family. The new player party replaces the former Avatar-spouse-heir group.
-- you can dismiss or promote the left and the right hand, but be aware that dismissed characters will be disappointed with your decision
- new rogue profession: the Smuggler. This new profession is a hybrid of a typical rogue profession and a service provider. While on one hand your employees smuggle rum and other valuable goods, other workers try to lure citizens into your business, which officially is a rum den. People drink your rum and while you earn money through that, the main reason for serving rum is because it loosens the tongue of the revellers and there is a chance that you hear some information that makes your smuggling more profitable.
-- three new smuggling actions which target the port and/or the arsenal of the city
-- a new action to lure people into the rum den, plus the chance of getting some information for better smuggling opportunities when people have a drink in the rum den
-- the smuggler has been added as a start profession of the career game mode
- new buildable city decoration: the Rostrum. You will be able to perform a number of actions on your rostrum, like holding speeches, playing music or giving a public banquet to lift the popularity of your dynasty.
- customers of service providers (barber, inn, herb hut, hospital, apothecary and the new rum den) will from now on consume goods out of the building's storage. So if your inn has some beverages and/or food on stock, you will earn more money.
-- the herb hut will no longer be able to treat leprosy and the plague, because only the hospital has the knowledge and the medicine for that
-- we added the new medicine item 'herb bandage' to the herb hut
-- we added the new medicine item 'fever syrup' to the hospital
-- we added a new action that characters with the diseases leprosy or plague can use to visit a hospital
-- especially the barber and the inn should no longer be crowded with customers directly after the game started, so the owner has more time to prepare for customers
-- please note: customers will consume specific items when they use one of the building's services (please see the description of the service action to know which items you should hold in stock). The extra payment for the consumption is currently a fixed price.
- there is a new action with which you can promote your businesses - your character will move in front of the building and praise it, and as long as the character is doing so, the business will get a 'customer satisfaction' buff if it has a front store or the workers get a 'motivation' buff if the business does not have a front store
- added a new action with which you can throw a few coins into a well and pray for a bit of luck. Luck influences your chances (a tiny bit) when playing dice, on far trade trips and journeys or when starting a romance. You can also get a bit of luck when you equip a hares paw or a lucky stone
- many of you asked for a contrary action to the 'Greet someone' action. Now you have the new action 'Laugh at someone' - it's your own fault if you try that one out ;-)
- we added a new action that enables you to tear off pamphlets from one of your buildings that an opponent of yours has placed there
- NPCs can sit on stools and benches and before patch EA 0.9.15 your characters weren't able to do that as well. That has changed now, just click RMB on a bench in case you feel like resting :-)


- instead of fading out the landscape in the distance, the horizon is now hidden by thickening fog. We think that this looks much more natural and, above all, more atmospheric. Let us know what you think about it.
- the range of actions the AI can use has been increased greatly - we will continue to enhance and balance the AI with every new update of the game
-- please note: some of our testers gave us the feedback, that the AI seems to be a bit weaker with our latest changes. If you notice the same, then please give us feedback on this. Thank you :-)
- all current texts in the game are fully translated into English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian, Korean, Chinese and Japanese
- we have balanced the diseases and poisons in the game and from now on diseases happen more often again - however, to not let everyone die in the blink of an eye they are still not an every-day-event.
-- there are two new events for NPCs: one can cause an accident that lowers the HP of the respective character and the other causes the (natural) poison 'Anthony's fire' that needs the character heading for an apothecary to be cured
- for AI characters, distances have more impact on finding valid targets for actions - it can still happen, but in most cases AI characters (and NPCs) should not run very very long ways if they eg want to greet someone or sit on a bench
- with patch EA 0.9.15, we increase the possible number of children per dynasty for a bit again
- we added a new functionality that allows our designers to set storage rules for specific items per building - especially items that are needed for the services of a building have a higher default stock limit now
- we revised the structure of the ingame help to enhance the general readability. We reworked texts, bolded headlines and replaced and added many images in the ingame help to make the topics more understandable. Especially the production should be better explained now
- NPCs should shop in the the front stores and marketplaces in their own village or city district more often than in the ones outside their neighborhood; this also makes your relationship with the NPCs and the customer satisfaction of your business more important if you want people to shop in your front store
- the action to fake evidence against your opponents is now additionally sending out a message to the victim
- more dialogues have been added
- several action icons have been added to the game
- the item 'Cream cake' can now be presented as a gift to someone else - as its description already stated


- fixed a bug that could lead to a crash of the game when the dynastic trade menu was opened
- fixed a bug that would lead to a crash of the game when an AI controlled character tried to perform a post-combat action (e.g. break bones) on an already dead character
- fixed a bug that could lead to a crash of the game when the player left a running game to the main menu
- fixed a bug in the pathfinding that caused characters to gather in a point on a street, preventing them from walking away until the game was saved and loaded again
- fixed an issue that caused a lot of network traffic in multiplayer games every ingame hour
- fixed a bug that allowed players to hire family members as workers in their storage barns and warehouses
- buildings which were already placed on the map when a new game started got their specific base effects and buffs (like productivity bonus) twice
- fixed a bug that allowed characters to target burning or closed service providers in case they wanted to use a service the building offered
- fixed a bug that prevented the item painkiller to cure leprosy and the item wonder cure to cure the plague; now both items have a chance to cure these diseases
- fixed several bugs in the evaluation process of the AI for targets of actions
- fixed a bug that would cause a change of relationship of the target character of an action to be shown above the source character
- fixed a bug that led workers to inherit the buffs of the building they were sent to, even if that building was not their employing business - so thieves could get the buffs of the building they were breaking in. From now on, the workers always inherit the buffs of the employing building
- fixed a bug in multiplayer where equipped items such as torches could remain on the ground after a character has died
- fixed a bug in multiplayer where the horses of supply transporters could remain standing around at far trade markets after the transporters had finished their route
- a sabotage action against a building that caused a damage over time - e.g. a fire - hadn't sent a notification to the owner
- fixed a bug where members of the players family hired in a business could not be fired when a trial was pending
- several issues with political powers have been fixed
- several issues in the maps have been fixed
- the orchardist hut, preacher hut and city preacher hut lacked fire effects/particles when burning
- fixed a bug that would allow the actions 'ambush' and 'find evidence' to take place outside of usable streets
- fixed a bug where the dice table of an inn was still available when the business had been closed through the 'audit the books' action
- loading screens and the guild logo are now resizing properly and are not being cut off anymore
- the rostrum and the statue can now be seen and filtered by the the “Other Building” category in the area map; rostrum and the statue are now listed in the “Other owned buildings” category in the building quick access list
- the extinguish fire animation displayed the torch and the bucket at the same time
- a number of issues with the displayed texts of trade opportunities have been fixed
- it was possible to enter the statue with a character
- fixed a number of bugs with existing dialogues
- fixed a number of issues with the multiplayer lobby
- fixed a number of issues with models and animations
- fixed a number of issues with localized texts


- the economical balancing of especially the windmill, the hospital, the tailor shop and the thieves hideout wasn't finalized for this patch - we are already working on it for the next larger patch
- many diseases do only have a minor impact on your character’s health to avoid entire families being wiped out by diseases. We will step by step tune the disease values for the next patches to avoid mass-dyings.
- the newly localized texts might contain some errors as they still need to go through our localization QA


The game does not display/load save games from outdated patch versions as they have become incompatible due to the rework of core systems.
If you are experiencing difficulties with loading and saving the game, you may attempt to delete all files from the folder “%userprofile%\Saved Games\Guild3” (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\Saved Games\Guild3).
Multiplayer: If you have a restrictive firewall then you may have to manually open the following outgoing ports to be able to play in multiplayer: 61111 TCP & UDP, 36895 TCP & UDP, 36975 TCP & UDP. You can find this information in the FAQs Multiplayer on our webpage as well!
It is quite possible that some problems that you have in your game are caused by missing or corrupted files. In this case, the following might help: right-click on "The Guild 3" in your Steam library, then Properties - LOCAL FILES - VERIFY INTEGRITY OF GAME FILES...
If you still have issues afterwards, then we recommend uninstalling the game and then manually delete the folder “%localappdata%\Guild3” (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Guild3). Then re-install the game.
Crash dumps for bug reports can be found in “%localappdata%\Guild3\sentry\reports” (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Guild3\sentry\reports) per default.
Join our official Discord server where you can meet us (that is, when we take a break from developing games) and other players to chat about the game.

Hello everybody,

In this DevDiary we want to tell you how things are going with the upcoming patch EA 0.9.15 and when you can expect it to be released. We also want to give you a little insight into the development processes - we have already talked about this in detail before, but for a better understanding we want to give a brief introduction to the topic again:

In the development of The Guild 3 we use a so-called version management system, which you can imagine as a kind of database: every single file - every image, every script, every text file, every sound file and every single file with source code - is sorted there. If someone from the team wants to edit a file, then they have to check it out of (“remove it from”) the version management system in order to prevent others from editing it at the same time and thus prevent simultaneous, possibly conflicting changes.
When they have finished editing the file, a short function test is carried out. Then the file is checked in again and stored in place of the old version. However, the system saves the older version of the file as a revision so that it can always be reverted to earlier versions if something went wrong. You can think of it as a pile of files.

The top level of our version management system consists of the so-called streams. We currently only use two streams: Mainline and Stabilizing. All new developments are made in Mainline. As soon as a version is fully developed, it is moved from Mainline to Stabilizing, where it is “stabilized”, in other words: intensive testing, bug fixes and balancing. Development of the next version will then begin in Mainline.

Patch EA 0.9.15 is now in the Stabilizing stream, where we are fixing bugs with the new features and continue to balance the game. We assume that the patch will have to stay in Stabilizing until at least the end of August before we can put the package together and give it to the final test. If we get the green light from there, it can go live in early September.

The patch will not only include bug fixes and balancing, it also contains the player party of three characters, the new rogue profession ‘Smuggler’ and a rostrum from which you can speak to the citizens. Also included is that customers of businesses providing services have the opportunity to consume items out of the storage of the business. The patch will include some more interesting things, of course :-)

And now to some of your questions from Discord, the forums and those that we received via PM or email:

Q: When will I finally be able to play the game entirely in my native language?
A: The upcoming patch EA 0.9.15 will have all current texts in the game fully translated into English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. We will likely add more text in the coming patches that will not immediately be localized into all named languages.

Q: Are you going to add the option to play on dedicated servers?
A: To explain: A dedicated server is a computer that hosts the game world but does not participate in the game itself. So it continues even after all participating players have left the game - unless you stop it. Our multiplayer system always requires a host who takes part in the game as a player. When the host leaves the game, the role of the host is transferred to one of the clients. So the answer is no.

Q: What does a higher or lower level of difficulty actually do in the game?
A: The level of difficulty in The Guild 3 affects several elements of the game. If you play on "easy", then your costs for some actions will be lower, the chances of success for some actions will be higher, the wage costs of your employees will be lower and you will start with more coins. The AI, on the other hand, has higher costs for the same actions, the chances of success for the same actions are lower, the wage costs for employees are higher and it has less start-up capital. And on top of that, the AI will have slower thinking processes and assign tasks to its characters slower as well. So while you get a lot of advantages, AI has disadvantages and the AI dynasties will develop more slowly. If, on the other hand, you play on "hard" or even on "impossible", then you have the disadvantages and the AI gets advantages. We are not completely satisfied with the levels of difficulty yet and will continue to work on them.

Q: The in-game performance suddenly drops and I have only a few FPS left. What can I do?
A: Of course, several problems can trigger this behavior. But it definitely makes sense to check your settings in the game's options. The “ultra” shadow quality is currently only recommended for graphics cards with at least 8GB RAM. If you have less memory, you should definitely switch to “high” or lower. You can raise the performance further by deactivating the “water reflections” or reducing the “resolution” in the game by making the window for the game smaller or by setting a lower resolution in “full screen mode” or “full screen window mode”.

Q: A while ago it was possible to send you my name so that it would be used for a character in the game, but unfortunately I can't find my name anywhere...
A: Since the game randomly assigns the names to characters, it can sometimes take a while before you can find your names above one of the characters. In any case, please make sure that “Add EA Names” is enabled in the options under “Game”.

Q: Will the campaign ‘Your name in game’ happen again during the EA? I would love to find my name in the game.
A: We are considering starting the campaign again in a few weeks.

Hello everybody,

In DevDiary #19 in June we talked about the new rogue profession "Smuggler", the new 3 characters player party and that we plan to have all texts translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. In this DevDiary you will learn about some of our plans for the coming patch EA 0.9.15 and we answer some of the questions you addressed in Discord and in the forums.

Luck and bad luck! For those of you who haven't noticed: yes, you can find it in The Guild 3. For example, put on a lucky stone or a hare's paw and you'll be a little lucky. Luck has rarely been taken into account so far, mainly in dice games in the inn and a few other actions. Incidentally, your bad luck got bigger when you lost at the dice game. With EA 0.9.15 luck (and bad luck) will be taken into account on more occasions, for example when you are starting a romance or when traveling long-distance. And there will also be a new action with which you will be able to get a little more luck (or bad luck) for a short time.

Many of you have been waiting for customers of the inn to consume drinks and meals and the customers of the barber to consume soap for a long time. And they will do that in the coming patch! While the basic income for services will be lower, the overall income can even be higher than in previous versions. The same applies to the hospital, apothecary and herb hut: the patients consume medicine when they are being treated.

Another innovation will be the “rostrum”. As soon as you have achieved a high title and have the necessary amount of coins, you will be able to erect a rostrum in the city and boast about your achievements, juggle, play music and win believers, of course with greater chances of success than if you simply do this on the street. In addition, we have given the “banquet”, which you can produce in your mansion, a further possibility of usage: From now on, you can not only give a family feast in your mansion, but also a small city festival from your rostrum.

And now to some of your questions from Discord and the forums that we want to answer for you here. We know there are a lot more and we will try to answer them bit by bit.

Q: Can we have a setting to play with 0 opponent dynasties for people who just wanna chill and roleplay in the game?
A: Yes, this will be possible. We are considering it for one of our future updates.

Q: Is it intentional having the ability to marry NPCs who carry a lot of items in inventory, and be able to sell said valuables after marriage?
A: This is something we have been discussing internally a lot for a while. The reason why NPCs carry items is that robbers and thieves can... ehm... earn money with their... ehm... job. So NPCs have to carry items they purchase in front stores or at the market. And some players are waiting to marry until the future spouse has some dowry.
In the future NPCs will alter their inventory more often. Please tell us what you think of that in the comments.

Q: My transporters spend too much money on backpacks and/or carts without me telling them. When will you change that?
A: We already have a solution for this! You can go to the “Game” section of the ingame Options and uncheck the “Automatically equip transporters”.

Q: Can we please have the option to auto-leveling of our characters? Especially in longer game sessions this becomes really annoying.
A: You can go to the “Game” section of the ingame Options and check the “Automatically level up workers”

Q: The game starts with loud sounds in the start video although I have turned Music and SFX volume down...
A: Since version EA 0.9.14 you can adjust or turn off the video volume in the “Sound” section of the ingame Options.

Q: Why does my storage always run full? Why is the game ignoring my storage limits?
A: You set a maximum limit for a product but it seems as if the limit is ignored and the storage runs slowly full. As an end result, your production comes to a complete stop because there is no space in your storage left any more.
The main culprit of the described problem is - not in all but in many - cases a too small number of transporters.
Why? The transporters are the masters of the storage rules. They pick up all the products which exceed the maximum limit and sell them to the markets. They are the only ones who balance out the limit in your businesses. If your workers are faster in producing than the transporter picking up items and selling them, your storage will overflow. Thus, it is highly important to always keep an eye on the workers/transporter ratio of your businesses. Some businesses will need more transporters and less workers and some less transporters and more workers to reach a good balance.
With hotfix patch EA 0.9.14.1 we fixed a problem in some of the businesses like the herb hut or the orchardist. Those businesses will gather many plants or fruit in a very short time. So far, they had only one transporter and their storage ran easily full over time. With the hotfix, you can unlock a second transporter in the building add-ons in the respective buildings. This should even out problems with transportation times and clogged storages in these buildings. Please let us know if you still experience problems with clogged storages.

Q: Why does my transporter run all over the map to sell an item?
A: Our market prices are driven by the system of demand and supply. When the amount of an item in one market is too high, prices for this item will drop for this specific market. Thus, selling the same item to the same market every time will lead to prices below the production costs and the business will not be profitable anymore and as a consequence go bankrupt. Because of that, transporters need to travel to other markets even if they are further away from the business to keep it profitable. In case the transporters can't keep up with the workers due to the longer distances, it might be a good idea to either hire an additional transporter or to construct a warehouse/storage building close to your affected businesses to serve as a strong and reliable supply hub for your businesses.
Please take into account that transporters who travel far might run more frequently into an ambush. Unconscious transporters or transporters who are waiting for treatment might also have a severe impact on the execution of your storage rules. To solve that problem, you can either hire more transporters, equip your transporters with some nice and shiny weapons, hire a henchman for them, find the culprits and get “creative” :-)

Build number: 624452

Hello everyone!

We’ve watched the crash reports after the update EA 0.9.14 closely and made out some major issues that caused crashes and two bugs with storage rules and/or transporters. We decided to investigate and to provide you with the hotfix patch in order to solve the mentioned issues before our next larger patch.

This hotfix patch includes the following bug fixes and changes:
- Fixed a bug where the game crashed on load after the main residence was switched
- Fixed a crash where the game crashed after clicking on a dialogue with an NPC
- Fixed a crash where an AI family without an appointed heir had a new child
- Fixed a couple more errors that could potentially lead to a crash
- Transporters - numbers: added a second transporter to the Herb Hut, Fishing Hut, Potter, Orchardist and Windmill that can be unlocked in the building's add-ons
- Transporters - supply: fixed a flaw where markets or businesses at which only few required items were available were considered more attractive than stops where a full item order was available

Please note: saved games from EA 0.9.14 will work with this patch. The additional transporters will however only be available in newly created saved games.

Known Issue
- Some business buildings might make more money after the recent changes. We will balance this out in one of our future patches.

Thanks for your patience and stay tuned for the new DevDiary next week!

Hello everybody,

As you know, we want to launch patch EA 0.9.15 in August. I would like to spoil today a few things we are doing for the update.

First of all, we continue to work on AI and on balancing. Your feedback so far has already given us some valuable input. Please don't stop giving us more feedback on these points. Thanks!

With patch EA 0.9.15 we will update our in-game tutorial wiki. The tutorial wiki should then contain the information and explanations about the recent feature updates and the style and visibility of the texts, as well as the images in the wiki, will also be improved.

In the patch notes of EA 0.9.13 in March this year we hinted that we work on a new rogue profession. And yes, that's true! This new profession is the "Smuggler".
Officially the smuggler manages a smeary rum den no one really wants to visit. So the smuggler has to send out their workers to lure in citizens. Once in, they drink and some of them might talk. The main reason for the smuggler to serve rum to the revellers is to get information about opportunities to smuggle goods, so that they can send out their workers to get their hands on valuable goods. The smuggler may even be lucky and get possession of some exotic wares. Smuggling can be very profitable and dangerous alike, keep that in mind.

Now, let me tell you something about another of our core features of the next patch. Before I’ll go into the details, I'll let the cat out of the bag: with EA 0.9.15 you will get a real player party with 3 characters!
The first and most important character of your party is and remains the head of your family / your Avatar but additionally the game features now also a “left hand” and a “right hand” of the leader.
The left and right hands can be replaced anytime by the player, although the characters won't really like it if you throw them out of your party. Your avatar will not just give up his or her position unless the character dies or leaves for the monastery. As before, the heir will then take over the leader's position of your dynasty.
The members of your party can use more actions and artifacts than your other family members. The party is displayed prominently in the HUD. You have access to the 3 characters at any time and you can always see what they are doing or what is happening to them.

We are all very excited to see what you think of it!

Finally, I would like to mention again that with patch EA 0.9.15 almost all texts will be translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. Texts that come into the game after the patch will at least for a while be in English and German only. We will take care of translating them later.

In DevDiary #20 next month I'll talk a bit about another cool feature and about some of the new actions in patch EA 0.9.15 :-)