Hi guys. We are officially now on the road to Stonehearth Alpha 6! We’ve put up a release candidate build on the Steam latest branch. Here are instructions for how to access the build in Steam. This is by far our biggest release update, and the whole team is excited to get it into your hands.
To celebrate, here’s a new desktop wallpaper for everyone. Click the image, then right click and save.
Once this build has been adequately tested and debugged, we’ll push it out to everyone. Onward to Alpha 6! Here are the patch notes for this release.
Note: We’re aware of a bug that causes the Candledark mod to break this Alpha. If you installed Candledark, remove it from your mod’s directory before running the alpha.
Stonehearth Alpha 6 Release Notes
This release includes several new major features, as well as some performance enhancements and many bug fixes.
Building templates
The game now includes pre-designed buildings for houses and halls. Access the templates from the new building UI.
- Templates can be rotated before being placed in the world
- Templates can be edited just like normal building after being placed
- Your own custom buildings can be saved as templates
Building improvements
The build system has gone through a major overhaul.
- New slab tool, for building free-form structures
- New stone materials for building parts
- New building parts: double doors, colored roofs, and more
- Workers can now walk through scaffolding
- Streamlined the building designer UI
Job System Overhaul
We have added an RPG-like progression system to citizen jobs, with experience, levels, and new abilities.
- Citizens will now gain experience and level up
- Leveling up provides perks like more hitpoints and job-specific enhancements
- You can now change citizens’ jobs as often as you like
- Several new recipes for the carpenter
- Brightbell and Frostsnap flowers are now plantable by the Farmer
Other Improvements
- Ladders now build down when necessary
- The size is now shown for all boxes dragged out in the world: in the building tool, farms, stockpiles, etc.
- New command to undeploy a placed item, returning it to a stockpile.
- Significant UI revamp of the building UI
- Significant UI revamp of the job promotion UI
- Added job icon to the unit frame. Clicking the icon brings up the citizen’s character sheet
- Clicking a citizen’s name in the unit frame zooms the camera to that citizen
- Show icons for ingredients in the crafting UI
- Audio improvements. Improved the base volume and falloff for location-specific sounds
Bug Fixes
- Significant pathfinder performance improvements
- Massive memory-use optimizations
- Citizens no longer own their own beds, and are much more aggressive about finding a bed to sleep in before giving up
- Fix bug that prevented many buildings from being completed
- Fix multiple crash bugs when destroying an entity
- Fix embedded ladders in the terrain after building a building
- Fixed crash bug affecting Vista computers
- Fixed score calculation, allowing new immigrants again
- Fix for the camera getting stuck in obstacles like trees
- Combatants will no longer try to fight each other if they are on different vertical terrain levels
- Fixes to save/load bugs