Greetings fellow gods,

It's been a while since we had an update, and I heard some of you grew hungry. While it's still not the time for the Conquest major update (re-scheduled for March in the Roadmap, since today you'll be able to participate in region battles as a mercenary.

That's right, you can now save all those poor elves harassed from every direction by joining their defense. Or make a quick buck by joining whoever has the advantage.

Additionally, some of you will be happy to see the request for building recipe categories has also been fulfilled. It should make it easier to manage the long list of available recipes.

Here's the full changelog for today's update:

Added

- NPC battles are now simulated during region exploration.
- It's now possible to join town battles as a mercenary group on the side of attackers or defenders.
- During battles, moving army units outside the visibility cone are marked with exclamation signs and are always heard in the distance.
- Party member's exclamation markers are now green, while neutral characters are marked as grey.
- Unemployed NPCs in towns can now help clean up bodies and blood.
- Moving military groups are now visible on the world map during play.
- Added categories to building recipes in the building menu.
- A few new clothes for portraits.

Changed

- One more zoom out level.
- Rebalanced some military units of civilized races.
- Improved clashing swords animation on the world map.
- Disbanded companies were removed from the list in the Knowledge Screen.
- The cheat command "mapregen" has been disabled in controlled settlements to prevent custom maps from breaking.

Fixed

- Fixed race descriptions going out of screen bounds in Character Creator after changing the font settings.
- Caught Chick now correctly turns into a Chick in one turn.
- Reindeers no longer wear orc shoes.
- Fixed an issue where NPCs would sometimes attack already dead opponents.
- The number of available Mycelium Weaver buildings is now equal to the number of Mycelium resources in the world tiles.
- Fixed an issue where a companion would cancel the command to attack.
- Fixed display of stat point gains on Skill Screen milestones list.

Hotfix v0.8.16.1

- Fixed NPCs sometimes get stacked when tracking the player character.
- Fixed ability amplifier tooltip descriptions.
- Fixed battle reward when siding with defenders.

With the introduction of NPC battles, we have everything we need for Liches, Necromancy, and the creation of our state faction to conquer and control the world. There is still a lot of work ahead, and until all 3 of these features are ready for the major update, we'll continue with an irregular update schedule and try to return to weeklies after v0.9.

I hope you're enjoying 2025 so far and have fun battling,

Artur