Greetings fellow gods,

In today's update, I bring some utility improvements like filters to declutter the world map, per-race occupations for buildings in our settlements to be able to have different specialists, like dwarf or elven armorsmiths, and animations for settler groups that will also be used for moving armies in the future.

Here's the full changelog:

Added

- Added animations for traveling settler groups during world simulation.
- Added filters to the world map to hide locations, caravans, NPC groups, and settlement names.

Changed

- Improved settlement food consumption to prioritize non-raw food, then food of the highest total nutrition, including the available unit count.
- Added support for different entities per race in player settlement buildings, allowing different workers to access separate recipes and fix their dialogues. The change applies after NPCs get re-assigned to work automatically or manually.
- It's no longer possible to build multiple of the same entities on the same tile.
- Reduced max zoom on the world map.
- Blocked assigning Escape key in KeyMap except for the default cancel actions.
- Frogs no longer have equipment.
- The Jar of Fireflies is now stackable.
- Barley Flour and Bread recipes added to the Agriculture skill.
- Bone Blade and Bone Dagger recipes changed places in Weaponsmithing.
- Changed ingredients in recipes: Bone Warpick, Shiverstone, Shiverstone Ring.
- Changed the Chain ability effect tooltip to include the number of chained targets.
- String of Dried Fish and String of Dried Herbs can now be demolished.
- Added some resistances to Phasewalker.

Fixed

- Fixed an issue that would cause materials to disappear during item upgrade.
- Fixed a bug where crafting was possible without all materials.
- Fixed auto-pickup that sometimes occurred on the multi-item pickup menu.
- Caravan items are locked once the caravan is on the move.
- Removed interactions from the action wheel with unseen enemies.
- Fixed tracking message when no target for tracking is available.
- Fixed Frozen Potion ingredients.
- Fixed Electroshock description.
- Fixed Sugar Farm building.
- Fixed a family choice when changing race on character creation so the race always matches.
- Fixed crash in Armors Datatable.

Hotfix v0.8.12.1

- Fixed rare crash in history simulation.
- Fixed Barley Bread recipe in Agriculture.

About major update v0.9 "War"

As some of you on our [url=https://discord.gg/Y2dwG4c]Discord[/url] may know, I took some time off the internet to recharge, and I was able to refocus a bit more on the upcoming big features - war, necromancy, and liches. I've designed it and estimated it to take about 400 hours of work in total.

Because all 3 are so intertwined and impactful for the game, I will have our Thursday updates on a less regular schedule until everything is done in December or January. We'll still have updates when I feel confident things can go in without too much disturbance, but dealing with wars as something that can potentially be procedurally world-ending, I need to be very careful not to make the game too difficult and unfun.

With that in mind, I can offer a few details for the death lovers who've been asking for raising the dead for almost a year now. Both Liches and Necromancy will be very unique parts of the game. The Liches, for example, will not be accessible as a playable starter race but only available as an "accomplishment" during a playthrough. They will have their settlements in the snow biome and threaten the world.

Necromancy is mostly designed with many completely new mechanics around settlements and armies. Because of how the game is designed, we can make a truly malicious force of evil that spans beyond simple combat abilities - and that will be my goal. It won't be a typical summon or death damage skillset, but an ability that focuses on affecting the entire world.

In other news...

The team grows!

My work continues, and although it's still difficult to return to my productivity from before rainbow lunatics came to destroy me, especially since they continue to write essay reviews with lies to this day, I've been making progress. 

One of the positive things that came out of all this was that, with the extra funds we got from sales, I hired my brother to help with programming. He'll help part-time, but he's already been getting used to the codebase while fixing bugs, and he will start to add some UI/UX features you've all been asking for. Once we get the bugs list and UX better, he will work on modding tools to allow for many more options to modify available functionalities. I would love to have a visual script hooked up to be able to mod in new systems, but that's going to be a challenge, so I don't want to promise it yet. We'll attempt it for sure. 

This will allow me to focus on the design and big features, while hopefully, we will also be able to pick up the improvements to existing features many of you have been asking for very soon. The plan, as described in the Roadmap, still stands, and we'll continue to move towards v0.10, but we'll likely delay the 1.0 release to give ourselves as much time to polish as we need. I very much want to attempt the multi-tile entities and the 5th tier of special locations. A lot is yet ahead.

That will be it for today. A little longer post, but I felt you guys would like to know what's happening with your beloved game since things have been moving a little slower. If you have any questions, let me know below, but I won't share more spoilers about necromancy!

Have fun,
Artur