UnReal World News

Nominations for Steam Awards 2021 has started together with Autumn Sale, so get involved now.



Labor of Love, that's the category that suits UnReal World the best.
First released in 1992 the game now sports 29 years of development with 140,000 lines of code - and counting.
UnReal World has two Guinness Gamer's World Records due to being...well...a labor of love - and it's made by two-man team deep in the Finnish wilderness...

Sami (UnReal World creator) coding in the woods. Well, actually the development mostly takes place indoors but you get the picture, right.

Now did you actually have another title in mind that suits the category better?
Be that as it may, this is our two cents suggestion for a true Labor of Love nominee.

A small bugfix patch has been released to address the following issues:

- fixed: some faulty animal snow penalty calculations

On few occasions the fatigue rate of animals moving in the deep snow wasn't calculated right. This could result either in animals tiring too easily, or too little.

- fixed: distributing offered traded items among foreign traders wasn't always working

You might still end up in "can't carry" trade situation, even though the trading party would have capacity to carry the offered goods. Hopefully this is fixed for good now.

- fixed: Crash/shutdown related character data loss on Windows systems

On Windows system crash or computer power loss might result in character corruption which at its worst erased character data to the extent of making them unrecoverable.
This issue has been now addressed with extra safety measures and internal backups which hopefully prevent the worst case data losses for good. Should you experience Windows crash the game now tries to recover character data automatically from internal backup files upon loading the character again. You may still loose some moments or few map loads in the character's life but the game hopefully goes on more reliably.

- fixed: UrW mobile controller not working on some systems

That's all folks! Happy adventures!
ːurw_sageː ːurw_fireː

Once again we are taking part in the ongoing Halloween Kekri Sale with the pleasing numbers and haunting imagery. So let the new adventurers be respected with the discount, and the ancestral spirits with our special Kekri costumes and customs...

Kekri is an ancient Finnish harvest festival celebrated in the fall when the annual agricultural activities were all accomplished and the harvest collected. Kekri meant the end of the crop year, which was a big turning point. It was the time when the souls and spirits of the dead wandered around and visited the living. The ancestors were respected and welcomed. Sauna was heated up for them, and meal prepared too. The living celebrated accordingly, and so do we.


Kekri time included tradition of Kekripukki (Kekri goat) figure. People would dress up as horned creatures, wearing furs or coats upside down, and went around in their disguises and were offered food and drink.
So, what does a decent developer of tradition rich game do to follow the tradition?
Yes. He dresses up as Kekripukki.

Well, hello there, any foods or drinks to offer? Some purchases will do as well.


Again this year the we have launched a special Kekri-themed game title screen for duration of this sale & festivity period. The theme screen becomes live shortly after this annoucement, so allow the game to update and enter UnReal World for more haunting imagery.



We wish you happy Kekri time - or happy Halloween if that suits you better.
All in all, now just celebrate and participate in the festivities at this special time of the year.

:urw_sage::urw_fire::urw_tree:

UnReal World version 3.70 has reached the stable stage and is now released and live.
Your game will auto-update and characters from the previous version are compatible with the new version.

If you were playing 3.70 beta versions, you should know that there's also new content added since the last beta. And if you weren't playing beta versions at all, then prepare to discover a lot.
You'll find changelogs later in this post, but first a little look at the key features with a few screenshots.



The key features of version 3.70 version deal with the moon and the moonlight, fibre processing with new textilecraft skill, snow penalty for all the creatures and snow crust, lots of new character portraits, tying equipment adjustments and additions, crafting fishing rods and hooks and usage of baits, option for metric units, and so on. The list of additions and fixes is long and you can find the full changelog at the bottom of this post.

Trudging through the deep snow the escaping elk tires itself easily while the hunter gliding with skis on snow crust travels easily.

There are lots of new character portraits added, and also an option to ask whereabouts of village water supply.

The autumn nights are already dark, but during full moon there's enough light for example to go fishing - with self-made fishing rod and hooks, that is.

Textilecraft in action. We have a new batch of harvested nettles retting in the water, and prepare to spin some yarn from earlier extracted nettle fibres.



First, here's changelog since the latest 3.70 beta version.
New content to be aware for those who have already been playing the beta versions.

3.70 (stable) changelog - new content since 3.70-beta 3

- added: whole lotta new portraits, and specific portait categories for old men and sages

A good bunch of new portraits have been added for kids, female and male characters. There are also two new portrait categories specifically for old men and sages. Portraits in these categories are exclusive for those type of NPCs and can't be associated with other NPCs nor chosen as a player character portrait.
MIGRATION NOTICE: NPCs generated in the previous versions continue to appear with their previously generated portraits.

- added: bowstrings as a separate functional part of a bow

Bowstrings are now featured as a craftable item of their own. Bowstrings wear out in use and thus need to be replaced every now and then. Crafting any bow now requires also a bowstring item, so you need to have a bowstring ready in order to make a functional bow.

* crafting a bowstring

Bowstrings can be crafted from [M]ake-menu under [W]eapons category. Bowstrings are made out of multiple strands of yarn twisted together, but also thin cordage can be used for a makeshift bowstring. Upon crafting a bowstring you can select the material, yarn or cord, to be used.
It's faster to make a bowstring from a cord and the required length is also far lesser, but bowstrings made out of cords are also always of lesser quality. Your textilecraft skill determines the success of making a bowstring. Due to item usage complexity bowstring crafting is hard-coded and not to be found in editable diy_*.txt file.

* bowstring breakage and replacement

Good quality bowstring can last up to thousand of shots or so. The lower the quality the faster the bowstring is prone to break. When the bowstring breaks a message is displayed and the bow gets described as "bow with no string". Naturally you can't shoot with such a bow anymore until a new bowstring is added.
You can check out condition of a bowstring in strung bows with

First a little reminder, then a little peek into the future features -- and into nearby woods as well where the creator can be spotted crafting UnReal World gear for real.




There hasn't been serious showstoppers with 3.70 beta, so there's also no reason why you shouldn't opt-into that very beta-branch. If you aren't exploring the far north with version 3.70beta already, just take a look at here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/351700/view/2980802142084765582




With the beta-version rolling so smoothly we've been relieved enough to also continue working on the few features that didn't quite make their way into first beta releases. So when the stable version comes, it's won't only stabilize the newly added goodies but also adds some new stuff to explore. For example craftable, breakable bowstrings as a separate functional part of a bow.
Yes, that's where the textilecraft additions will bring us now.

Bowstrings will be featured as a craftable item of their own, and they wear out in use and thus need to be replaced every now and then. Bowstrings are made out of multiple strands of yarn twisted together, but also thin cordage can be used for a makeshift bowstring. It's faster to make a bowstring from a cord and the required length is also far lesser, but bowstrings made out of cords are also always of lesser quality.
Good quality bowstring can last up to thousand of shots or so. The lower the quality the faster the bowstring is prone to break. When the bowstring breaks a message is displayed and the bow gets described as "bow with no string". Naturally you can't shoot with such a bow anymore until a new bowstring is added.




Another bow related addition is a spruce quick-bow - a new type of craftable bow. Spruce quick-bow is the most simple and quick to make type of a bow. It's made out of a single branch that is cut from a standing spruce tree. It goes without saying that this type of bow is not a high performance weapon, but it is efficient enough for hunting squirrels and other small game. This type of bow is strongly based in history, specifically that of the Saami hunters, and it is a fascinating method to make a bow quickly out in the wilderness. You can see Sami (UnReal World creator) crafting a spruce quick-bow in the woods in this video (on his traditional archery related YouTube channel):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYR91okTjlM
Heh. It's surely different to craft these things with lines of codes in the digital realm than with an axe in the northern wilderness, but it's nice to master the both ways :)

And there's even more features still pending to be added for the stable release. Stay tuned.