The Dwarves of Glistenveld News

Fellow Dwarves! A new exciting technology 'Runestones' as well as manned ballistas, and a myriad of bug-fixes come with this year's Easter patch!

[h3]🐰 Easter Mode 🐰[/h3]
In Easter Mode, you will experience the following changes to the game:

1. Atmosphere - The environment has a different look and feel.
   
2. Mobbits - Mobbits are larger than normal, and provide more meat!
   
3. Easter Eggs - You will find easter eggs sprawled about everywhere, even hidden in the walls! You can harvest easter eggs using the gather instruction, and they can be stored on tables similar to meals. How many can you find? (Find out at the bottom of the Stats window)
   

[h3]The big stuff:[/h3]

1. Runestones - Runestones are a new unlockable building that, when placed, can be marked with one of four effects: Forging, Growth, Resistance and Warding. Forging speeds up forges and can reduce the amount of ore required for smelting. Growth creates moisture which speeds up mushroom & sapling growth, and can also trigger the power-slider combat ability. Resistance reduces incoming damage dealt to your dwarves and buildings. Warding prevents undead creatures like Draugr from reawakening. As Runestones are used they will charge up energy which will eventually release and spawn an elemental!
   
2. Elementals - In this patch elementals only appear in caverns mode or as a result of Runestones charging, but they will feature more in future patches. Each runestone triggers the respective elemental: Fire, Water, Rock & Wind. Each elemental has its own special ability unlocked when it reaches level 2.
   
3. Manned Ballistas - This one is a game-changer in our opinion! Now when you select an engineer or warrior to interact with a ballista, they will 'man' it and remain in position. Then whenever enemies come close, your unit will automatically rotate the ballista around and fire at them! Your dwarves are smart enough not to fire at allies in the way, but sometimes their shots might not meet their mark. Their accuracy is determined by combat level, so if you use a high level warrior, fewer shots will miss.
   
4. Spiders - Rebalanced and redesigned some behaviours. Level 1 spiders can no longer lay eggs. Spiders will now only flee if their hitpoints are very low, which means harder-hitting dwarves have greater chance of defeating them without having to chase. Higher level spiders will flee sooner. When a spider mother is attacked, it calls for help. If it then dies, all nearby spiders will flee from battle for a while.
   
5. AI Territory - Allies in caverns mode will now avoid building, mining or gathering resources near your buildings, based on a new territory system. This system is hidden but essentially each building is given a weight based on its type and distance, and nearby buildings are counted up to determine whose territory a particular hex belongs to.
   
6. Draugr Heads - Draugr can be a thorn in the side, especially in caverns mode. Well, now you can roll their heads around and move them out of your way! No, you can't play footie with them, but you can hide them in the closet!
   

The small stuff:

1. Schematics & Barrels - You can now obtain these resources using the gather instruction, rather than having to select a dwarf and interact with them manually.
   
2. Call for reinforcements - This button used to be hidden away in the escape menu, since it only applied in the campaign and would only be used rarely. Now the dwarf button in the instruction panel on the bottom left opens up a sub-menu which provides the dwarf-list, by-laws (if it is unlocked) and call for reinforcements. To maintain previous UX click patterns, you can double click the dwarf button to open up the dwarf-list without having to move your mouse into the new menu.
   
3. Build Wall - If items are in the way of a wall instruction, a pickup instruction will now be automatically assigned and executed before the wall is built.
   
4. Engineers - Fixed some behaviour where they refused to build a building that they clearly had access to without putting it back in storage first or trying to build a new one. This may still occur under certain circumstances, further testing is necessary to confirm this.
   
5. Repair - Increased engineer's priority of repair instructions.
   
6. Guide - Updated with a new look & feel. More entries have been added and some have been rewritten for clarity.
   
7. Various other fixes including ambient SFX panning, some voice lines not triggering, removing random dwarf complaints from the dialog history.
   

We've also been hard at work on Chapter 3 assets and content, some of which we cannot reveal yet, but we will continue to trickle in updates regarding Chapter 3 in future patches & blog posts!
That's all for now, stay safe out there, and Happy Easter!

Fellow Dwarves! Glistenveld is getting wintery as Christmas Mode is enabled (until Jan. 7th)!


[h3]🎄Christmas Mode🎄[/h3]
In Christmas Mode, you will experience the following changes to the game:

1. Atmosphere - The place is looking wintery with a change of colour palette and mist!
   
2. Christmas Roots - Roots have now been decorated with Christmas lights! Unfortunately there are no blink patterns you can change...
   
3. Presents - Random presents will appear in each map, some buried in cave walls to be mined out, others in water to be fished for and some just laying around! Each contains one of six small random gifts!
   
4. Chests - Chests are now decorated as 'locked' presents!
   
5. Snowprints - All units will leave prints in the frosty dirt, giving you insight into their habits!
   

[h3]The big stuff:[/h3]

1. Configure Farming Plots - With a Farming Plot selected, you can now configure what the plot will choose to harvest by toggling each item on/off, like mushrooms, roots, etc.
   
2. Instruction Assignment UI - Revamped this UI. Before it had a secondary panel which looked unintuitive. Now you can assign workers, see who is currently working on the job and prioritise them immediately in the same panel! This panel is now sorted by distance, so you can see who is nearest/farthest from the job.
   
3. Minecarts - You can now choose whether minecarts prefer traveling right or left at a Y junction! Also fixed an issue where clicking 'drop items' with a minecart selected wouldn't drop items properly if they took up too many tiles.
   
4. Mining / Harvesting FX - New 'breakage' particles appear whenever your units mine cave walls or rocks, or harvest mushrooms, roots etc.
   

The small stuff:

1. Fishing - You can now tell a forager to fish a specific location by right clicking the water, or tell them to prioritise a fishing instruction.
   
2. Picking up items - Unlike most other actions, there was no pop-up menu when you right clicked a pile of items on the ground. Now units will still default to picking up, but you can tell them just to move, or to pick up specific items instead.
   
3. Mining cave walls - Similar to picking up items, right clicking cave walls will now present a pop-up menu if there is something else that can be done besides mining. All actions should now have the same consistent behaviour.
   
4. Building Walls - Fixed an issue where you could build normal buildings over the top of certain entities, but not walls.
   
5. Map Table - Selecting an object to find in the minimap would render all buildings you owned, sometimes obstructing areas of the minimap.
   
6. Accomplishment counters - When you mine gems or harvest wood, a little stat number appears showing you how many you've collected in this map!
   
7. Unit Portrait - Clicking a unit or object's portrait multiple times will now cycle through units or objects of that type.
   
8. Hit Effects - Reworked the maths for hit effects like bleed, poison and splash damage. Before they were tied to individual hit cards, which meant the chance reduced as units leveled up in combat (and gained new cards). This is no longer the case. A bleed effect with 33% chance will now always hit one every 3 attacks.
   
9. Battle Lines - Warriors should no longer claim the same battle-line tile at the same time.
   
10. Various other improvements, including new selection SFX & when a storage is selected, clicking on the item button will now open that item in the guide.
    

That's all for now, stay safe out there!

Fellow Dwarves! We've worked out how to utilise a Map Table! Dwarves can now catalogue their sightings on the minimap for you!


[h3]The big stuff:[/h3]

1. Map Table - A new tech that unlocks the Map Table. Once placed, this building reveals friendly and enemy units moving around in the minimap. More importantly however, it also enables you to mark (within the radius of the table) any visible occurrences of a chosen resource or object! Build multiple around the map to make the most of this feature!
   
2. Minimap - In some maps this wasn't centred or maximised, and clicking wouldn't always centre the camera correctly. This should now be working in all cases.
   
3. Fleeing from battle - Units fleeing from battle would sometimes get stuck due to another friendly unit also being in battle. If they are desperate and need to rest or are low health, they will now be able to scoot past that unit anyway!
   
4. Green mushrooms - Any class can now destroy green mushrooms. The gather button however will be disabled unless you have the Farming II tech.
   
5. Objectives List - Fixed a number of rendering issues regarding this UI, including the description not updating. Also, objectives that are not within a group/category will now appear above groups/categories to avoid confusion.
   

The small stuff:

1. Game-speed controls - Right-clicking the cog in the bottom-right corner will now 'toggle' the speed, instead of always setting to fast-forward.
   
2. Caverns mode - Waterfalls now spawn at the source of (almost) every long river with flowing water. Also fixed a bug where Redhammer's meet encounter might not always finish.
   
3. Feedback form - Fixed the jank in the feedback form input field. This should now function more like a proper multi-line text field.
   
4. 'Send Home' - The send home option when an ally dwarf is in your base is now also a button when that dwarf is selected. You no longer need to right click them.
   
5. Skirmish Mode - Fixed a bug involving getting stuck on the select spawn-location screen, sorry about that! This screen should also no longer have any visual artifacts.
   
6. Guide - Added more sections to the guide, including bones and old stone structures. Some tips were also added to saplings to improve yield when farming.
   
7. Carroots - AI teams and farming plots will no longer automatically harvest the roots of carroots, but you can still use the gather instruction to do it yourself.
   
8. Performance - Improved some performance where some UIs were rebuilding when they didn't need to.
   
9. Big-picture UI - Simplified the indicator of how many dwarves you can spawn. It now just tells you the dwarf count you have and the dwarf count you can reach. More details are given when hovering over, as usual.
   
10. Dynamic Tutorials - Fixed various bugs & added a camera tutorial. We're working on making these the official tutorials and are hoping to remove the 'Tutorial Adventure'. This will mean you will see new tutorials pop up every now and then, but you can still remove them by pressing the X button beside them.
    

That's all for now, stay safe out there!

Oct 21: Hot-fix for getting stuck in some cases when opening the tech-tree in the world map.
Oct 17: Hot-fix for linux builds not being able to run the game. Should be working now!

Fellow Dwarves, it's here! We've been working tirelessly to deliver this update, and now proudly present the long-awaited: Chapter 2!

As mentioned in our previous announcement, the release of Chapter 2 unlocks the next 6 levels of the Campaign, which take you to the mysterious underground Ruins of Heckler! A new region unlocks for Skirmish Mode, as well as a myriad of final improvements to the user interface, AI, quality of life and performance! For more details see the patch notes below.

Also, if you want a summary of everything that's changed since The Dwarves of Glistenveld first released in Early Access, we wrote about that in our previous announcement: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/805520/view/7132068756348695686

Now without further ado, let's look at what's changed since the last patch:


[h3]The big stuff:[/h3]

1. Campaign: Chapter 2 - You now have access to Chapter 2 of the campaign, featuring the defence of My Fort and 5 new unique maps!
   
2. Skirmish mode: Ruins region - A new region is unlocked for skirmish mode, taking you amidst some abandoned ruins. Mind your step, you never know what you might reawaken in those old tombs!
   
3. Caverns mode - Caverns mode is now a bit more guided early on and polished. Your first objectives now have markers pointing to the nearest spring, roots and mushrooms, and some intermediary objectives now appear to help you to find your second spring and schematic!
   
4. In-game tutorial improvements - A new button now appears next to objective-list tutorials that allow you to ignore/skip them. You can always reset the tutorials in the options menu if you want to revisit them. New tutorials have been added and some wording has been revised to try to better explain the mechanics of the game. We'll be adding to these in future patches to explain some of the later mechanics such as the farming techs.
   
5. Game-speed control - You can now right-click the cog in the bottom-right to fast-forward as an alternative to holding down the left button or space-bar.
   
6. Smooth camera panning - The camera now 'moves' rather than snaps to focus on units or locations, for example during dialog. This can be toggled in the options menu, for those of you who might get motion sickness from this change.
   
7. UI & general performance - Hovering over UI buttons should no longer feel laggy/jittery, and panning the camera should appear smoother (for best results, you can try switching off the FPS cap). Also a small performance boost for cave-ins and reduced the occasional lag spikes. There will still be some reduced FPS as a game is first loaded since some elements are still being generated.
   
8. Crash fixes - Fixed 2 independent causes of game freezes, both of which seemed to have obscure conditions. Hopefully they're the only ones!
   

The small stuff:

1. Low-health behaviour - You can now set your dwarves to persevere / flee when low health from their selection UI. Originally this was only adjustable after unlocking the By-laws tech.
   
2. Stone-chipper Ability - The miner's level 5 ability Heavy-hauler has been replaced by the new ability Stone-chipper, which grants bonus stone when mining cave walls. Heavy-hauler's effect was very similar to Rock-tosser, meanwhile stone would sometimes be in short supply.
   
3. New passive buffs - Sound-asleep and Well-fed are two new buffs that your dwarves can have. Sound-asleep speeds up regeneration and applies if you have at least one bed per dwarf. Well-fed further increases movement speed as long as your dwarf's hunger bar is completely full!
   
4. Buff / debuff FX - Visual particles now appear when your dwarves are experiencing certain buffs or debuffs, such as exhaustion, hunger or the two listed above.
   
5. Frenzied dwarves - The dwarf-list now shows any dwarves you have that have become frenzied along with their last known locations.
   
6. More responsive dwarves - While a dwarf was selected, they wouldn't carry out any actions for a few seconds to give the player time to give manual orders if they wanted to. This was an unintuitive behaviour however, and has been limited to specifically move and pick-up actions.
   
7. Class descriptions - The class-change UI now shows descriptions of what each class can do.
   
8. Doors - When setting to team-only, doors will have a distinguished outline around them making it more obvious what their setting is.
   
9. Blood trails - When a unit is low on health, they leave a subtle trail of blood behind them as they move around. You can use this to your advantage for example to follow an injured goblin back to their base.
   
10. Stubborn trait - Stubborn dwarves that reach level 10 will be able to finally switch class. Note however that if they reach level 3 in another class they will remain in that class until they reach level 10 again.
    
11. New ability icons - Similar to the level 2 abilities, the level 5 abilities now have upgraded icons when you reach tier 2 and 3 of that ability.
    
12. One-button mode improvements - Clicking and dragging while an instruction was selected would place multiple of that instruction, but this did not match the normal behaviour of one-button mode. Instead, dragging now pans the camera as it should do, and a new button was added to toggle dragging instructions.
    
13. Cracks indicating cave-ins - Cracks have been made more obvious to make it easier to tell when a wall is going to cave-in, and fixed an issue of them sometimes not appearing.
    
14. Skirmish mode: Objectives - Skirmish mode now has some starter objectives to help remind players what is needed to build their initial base!
    
15. Skirmish mode: Ordered teams - When you choose camps of different sizes, the larger camps will spawn further away from you, and the smaller camps closer by. This should create more of a build-up as you progress through the map and should feel less unfair.
    
16. Fishing - Fixed an issue where fishing in shallow water would never yield fish, since the fish couldn't swim to shallower waters. They can now.
    
17. Equipment - There is now an option specifically to drop the equipped item in storage, instead of having to set to 'None'.
    
18. UI positioning - Class change and interaction UI will no longer be hidden under the selection UI at the bottom of the screen.
    
19. More & improved tooltips - Made some tooltips more understandable and added tooltips to more buttons.
    
20. Various bug fixes - Fixed various issues including mobbits' flee behaviour, dwarves getting stuck instead of moving out of the way, and streamlined the sound-system to exclusively use OpenAL.
    

This release also coincides with halloween mode, which appears this time of year to help get you in the spooky mood! If you choose to enable Halloween Mode, you will also experience the following changes to the game:
[h3]Halloween Mode[/h3]

1. Atmosphere - The atmosphere of the game is more dramatic with fog and a change in colour palette!
   
2. Pumpkins - You will find random pumpkins in each level. You can harvest these to get a tasty pumpkin stew, which dwarves treat as equipable meals!
   
3. Webs - You will find random webs that stick to units and slow them down, or feed the spiders!
   
4. Bats - When you start a new skirmish mode game, you'll find a few more bats roaming the tunnels!
   
5. Bubbling waters - Water has turned greenish and bubbles.
   
6. Green blood - Units and creatures flash green when injured, instead of red.
   

[h2]So what's next?[/h2]
Onward to Chapter 3! Does this mean we're done with working on Chapter 2? While we need to keep moving forward with the content we produce, we will continue to refine and improve as we go along. Sharing your feedback and experience will help guide us with any revisions that need to be made to existing content!

We'll also be working on the learning and on-boarding experience of the game, and trying to better streamline it. We're going to continue working on visibility and create an internal plan for producing Chapter 3's content and release in good time.

That's all for this update. As always, feel free to give us your thoughts and feedback, we read it all even if we don't reply! Until next time, stay safe out there, and we hope you enjoy the new chapter!