Hearthlands News

As you may have noticed Hearthlands was released from EA a couple of days ago thus (now officially) bringing this 3 year journey to conclusion. This is how you make games god dammit, no Kickstarter, no nothing:) I don't recommend trying this at home.

As I've said before, this is not the end though:) Also, there's probably gonna be a long post soon-ish, once I finish writing it (need more time!).


This is a quick update focused on either preventing rare launch issues or telling you what's wrong and how to fix it.

Most problems so far have been related to outdated or wrong graphics card drivers.

If you're still having issues, please contact me at [email protected]. Make sure you include log.txt file from the game folder and your system specs.

The game now requires C++ Redistributable Package (on Windows), which should be installed automatically by Steam (99.9% of you already have it).

I also added 'Keep Playing' button in campaign missions. Thank you for the suggestion!



Hearthlands soundtrack is now available in higher quality on SoundCloud:

https://soundcloud.com/sergeysergio/sets/hearthlands-ost

Thank you for your support!

As you may have noticed Hearthlands was released from EA a couple of days ago thus (now officially) bringing this 3 year journey to conclusion. This is how you make games god dammit, no Kickstarter, no nothing:) I don't recommend trying this at home.

As I've said before, this is not the end though:) Also, there's probably gonna be a long post soon-ish, once I finish writing it (need more time!).


This is a quick update focused on either preventing rare launch issues or telling you what's wrong and how to fix it.

Most problems so far have been related to outdated or wrong graphics card drivers.

If you're still having issues, please contact me at [email protected]. Make sure you include log.txt file from the game folder and your system specs.

The game now requires C++ Redistributable Package (on Windows), which should be installed automatically by Steam (99.9% of you already have it).

I also added 'Keep Playing' button in campaign missions. Thank you for the suggestion!



Hearthlands soundtrack is now available in higher quality on SoundCloud:

https://soundcloud.com/sergeysergio/sets/hearthlands-ost

Thank you for your support!

Campaign mode!

There are 12 missions, which help you understand more about how the game works. First few missions are quite easy, last few are rather challenging. First mission picks up (complexity wise) roughly were tutorial ended. As you go through missions, more buildings become available and the overall difficulty increases. Each mission has several steps you need to complete much like the tutorial, but it is not as limiting and they're more like guidelines.



Campaign is currently English-only. I'll make an update when translations become available.

Big change: grain, turnips, cotton and apples can now be planted (and therefore harvested) at any point regardless of the month. This means your growers don't have to wait before they can start planting crops. This is not very realistic, but makes the game much smoother. The numbers are still the same: each grower is able to efficiently plant and harvest 24 grain/turnip/cotton plots or apple trees per year.

The same goes for grapes and hops. As soon as you build grape plots, they start growing.



City reputation calculation has changed and recovers much faster now.

Migrants and merchants now have a high chance to evade monster attacks.

Only one squad at a time can throw a revolt.

Another big change: overall difficulty has been reworked. There are many small changes all over the place, but in general: very easy became much easier while very hard stayed almost as hard.

Forester's lodge no longer has to be adjacent to a road to function.

Blizzard spell used to be very OP. It now functions according to its description.



Watchmen became better against monsters, but cost coins to train. Two watch towers should be able to deal with one sewer entrance.

Rivals will no longer attack you if your army is away. Not very realistic, but it used to be annoying.

Ambient sounds now stop properly when you return to main menu.

A number of other changes, which I forgot to write down.

Savefiles from the previous version are compatible with 1.1.0.



Thank you for your support!

Campaign mode!

There are 12 missions, which help you understand more about how the game works. First few missions are quite easy, last few are rather challenging. First mission picks up (complexity wise) roughly were tutorial ended. As you go through missions, more buildings become available and the overall difficulty increases. Each mission has several steps you need to complete much like the tutorial, but it is not as limiting and they're more like guidelines.



Campaign is currently English-only. I'll make an update when translations become available.

Big change: grain, turnips, cotton and apples can now be planted (and therefore harvested) at any point regardless of the month. This means your growers don't have to wait before they can start planting crops. This is not very realistic, but makes the game much smoother. The numbers are still the same: each grower is able to efficiently plant and harvest 24 grain/turnip/cotton plots or apple trees per year.

The same goes for grapes and hops. As soon as you build grape plots, they start growing.



City reputation calculation has changed and recovers much faster now.

Migrants and merchants now have a high chance to evade monster attacks.

Only one squad at a time can throw a revolt.

Another big change: overall difficulty has been reworked. There are many small changes all over the place, but in general: very easy became much easier while very hard stayed almost as hard.

Forester's lodge no longer has to be adjacent to a road to function.

Blizzard spell used to be very OP. It now functions according to its description.



Watchmen became better against monsters, but cost coins to train. Two watch towers should be able to deal with one sewer entrance.

Rivals will no longer attack you if your army is away. Not very realistic, but it used to be annoying.

Ambient sounds now stop properly when you return to main menu.

A number of other changes, which I forgot to write down.

Savefiles from the previous version are compatible with 1.1.0.



Thank you for your support!

No, this is not a typo. We're now in 1.0.0. Yay!




What does it mean?

The development process won't change. There are still some things to do (improvements, suggestions, heroes). It is mostly just a numbers change. We're also are going to start transitioning from Early Access to Released status on Steam.


Why now?

It was about the time. I've said before that the version numbers basically represent the percentage of completeness and now it is the time to call it 100. It doesn't mean we won't go above 100 percent. This is not a revolutionary, but an evolutionary update. As Sid Meier once said "A game is never completed, but sometimes you just have to release it". I may be imagining this quote, since I couldn't actually find it anywhere, so don't quote me on quoting him. Luckily, we now have the ability to continue completing the game even further, even after it's been completed.


Why not a year ago?

I've been postponing the official release, because I didn't (and I still don't) know how it is going to affect the perception of the game and sales. Hopefully, many people who don't buy Early Access games will now take a look at Hearthlands.

This is going to be a very scary time for me, since Hearthlands is the main source of my income and the biggest thing I've done so far. I really want it to do well. There were many ups and downs since the development started in May 2014 and I'd like to thank everybody who gave the game a chance, contributed to the project, provided their feedback, and/or helped to spread the word. You guys made this rollercoaster an enjoyable ride.

It will always be subjective, but I think the game has quite enough to offer. It is very easy to lose interest to a game when you know everything about it and spent countless hours playing, testing and developing it, but Hearthlands still manages to make me forget what time it is. In preparation to this update, I decided to build a 20K population city, which took three days staying up almost until morning. And I was playing with passive rivals and infinite money. There are things to improve (and I'll keep improving things), but I'm happy with the way the game turned out.

Also, we ended up doing more than was initially planned, which is good, because if I knew how much there was to do (and still is), it could have scared me away, and Hearthlands would have stayed as another idea I never went for.


Also

Hearthlands is now available on GOG! https://www.gog.com/game/hearthlands This is basically a dream come true for me, since the game I've always wanted to play/make is now available to everybody on Steam, Humble and GOG. GOG also requested that the game was officially released and I took this as a sign.


So, what's new?

- Trade is now automated by default. In order to start trading you need to build a marketplace and enable a trade route in the trade menu. Marketplaces will automatically accept items you want to sell and merchant will drop off items you want to buy in any of your marketplaces. To enable manual control you can click the marketplace and uncheck "Auto" checkbox.




- You can now specify trade limits in the trade menu. "Sell when over" setting means that you will only sell items when you have over the specified amount in stock. "Buy up to" means that you will only buy items until you have the specified amount in stock. Currently each trade route has a separate limit, which is something to improve later (?).




- Employment menu now shows the total number of buildings you have when you mouse over the industry.




- Picking colors for your shield is now easier.

- You can now restart the game from the game menu (works with games started in 1.0.0 and after).

- Fancy road under a roadblock is now rendered properly.

- Clerics have been nerfed a bit.

- War pig riders now have regeneration.

- Resource distribution algorithm has been improved once more.

- Stuttering issues introduced in the last update have been (hopefully) fixed. There are ideas have to improve things further in the next update.

- All trees (not just pines) now provide twice as many logs, so you only need half as many woodcutter's lodges. Wood consumption was indeed ridiculous; it is fixed now.

- A new song has been added! I would like to thank Seth Cruse for this beautiful contribution. It is almost as good as what we wrote (it is better). Also there could have been bugs in sound engine, which are now fixed.

- Savegames from earlier versions are compatible with 1.0.0.


If the game doesn't work

The game (regardless of version) may not work for you if you have an Nvidia GPU and use 378.49 driver. You can see your driver version if you go to Nvidia Control Panel > Help > System Info. Minecraft is also affected by this, which is probably why Nvidia did a good thing and released a hotfix. You can download the fix and learn more about the issue here:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3164453/hardware/nvidia-releases-hot-fix-after-game-ready-driver-breaks-minecraft.html


To fix the stuttering issue I've decided to build a 20K population city, and it is monstrous. Here are some screenshots:










As you can see, there are several districts: pillow/clothes/eggs district, medicine district, two furniture districts, bread district, boots and wurst district, beer district and the main district. I decided to go with a district system to optimize the resource-flow.

The idea is: let's say you have furniture production district. It has woodcutter's lodges (half as many!), sawmills and carpenter's shops. It inputs nothing and outputs furniture. The district is connected to the main city only though a storage yard, that accepts only furniture. The storage yard is used as a gateway to prevent peddlers from going into the district to get some furniture.




Instead, there is a storage yard (several of them, just in case) in the middle of the city and it "gets" the furniture. There's almost always some furniture in there, so the peddlers don't have to travel too far to get some.




If peddler's tent had direct access to the carpenter's shops, it would send a guy every time a new load of furniture is produced, and the guy would have to travel all that distance to pick up just one load of furniture. Instead, peddlers go to a nearby storage yard, where they can pick up four loads at once.

This, I believe, is an efficient way to micromanage the resource flow in big cities.


TL;DR

1. This is an improvements update, it's not the last one, but it marks the end of the Early Access stage.

2. The game is now available on GOG! https://www.gog.com/game/hearthlands

3. There's an issue with Nvidia driver 378.49, preventing the game from running. Download the fix here: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3164453/hardware/nvidia-releases-hot-fix-after-game-ready-driver-breaks-minecraft.html

4. Look how big my city is.


Thank you for your support!