Alpha 17: Building a Bigger and Better Stonehearth!

Welcome to the unstable debut of Stonehearth Alpha 17! This release is all about empowering your hearthlings to build more awesome settlements. To do this, we’re introducing the ability for your town to level up, we’re giving you a new class to help create settlement awesomeness, and we’ve made tons of upgrades to the building system itself.

We should note that Alpha 17 is merely Part One of improving the building experience. We’ll be continuing this effort, with both content and functionality, in Alpha 18.

Remember that this is an unstable release! Which means that you may — nay, you will encounter glitches and the unexpected. Please report any issues in Discourse on Stonehearth.net or in our Steam forums. (Hey, that’s what unstable releases are for!) As with all unstable builds, this is available only on the Steam Latest branch.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s in this release.

Blood, Sweat, and Tiers

Get on my level.

Your hearthlings have labored mightily to carve an impressive settlement out of the wilderness. They are the envy of their map tile. And yet, they are asking themselves, “Is that all there is?” To which we can now say, “Absolutely not.”

A few days after your hearthlings settle in their new home, you will receive a quest from a royal herald. Create one of three city monuments to commemorate your town’s particular strengths and skills, and your settlement will qualify for “Township Status” which will elevate your hearthling-ville to a new tier of impressiveness.

Attaining this new tier unlocks advanced building templates, launches upgraded and enhanced stores, and introduces a new tier of background music! This quest is currently available only for the Ascendancy, more to come in future Alphas.

In Stonehearth, all our engineers are civil.

It’s a trap!

Want to make a more awesome city? You’ll need an Engineer! Good thing we’re introducing just that in this Alpha. Engineers provide a whole new dimension to your town’s capabilities.

Promoted from a Level Two Blacksmith (with the help of a Wrench, crafted by a Level Six Blacksmith), the Engineer creates advanced contraptions and defensive weaponry.

Initially, for defensive weapons, he can craft two types of turrets and two traps. The turrets will target and fire at enemies; they are limited in the number you can place in your town, based on level and number of engineers in town. Turrets have a limited lifespan (they will fall apart after a certain number of uses).

Traps can be set off once and and will stun enemies who stumble across them; they deal burst damage, and you can place more of them in your town than the turrets. In the beginning, Engineers can place 4 traps and 1 turret; this allowance increases as your Engineer levels up.

In future, Engineers will create more epic craftables, but for now the only decorations they can fashion are an iron door and signpost. We will continue to add recipes in the coming weeks. More turret types and AOE towers are also planned along with the ability to automatically replace fallen turrets and spent traps.

Build castles in the sky. Well, almost.

Build, or build not. There is no try.

We’ve streamlined and updated the building system. Now building functions more smoothly; you should be able to design — and your hearthlings will complete! — buildings that previously remained unbuilt. We’ve added some messaging to the building process; among other things, commissioning a building will also automatically set your crafters to work producing the needed items for your new structure. And (drum roll) — beds can now be “owned” by individual hearthlings!

The system is not perfect — not everything may work — but we think you’ll find it a huge leap forward. Please let us know how it works for you.

Improvements include (but are not limited to):

• When building is complete, display a congratulatory message instead of an empty materials needed box. Do not display the build “Pause” button when building is complete.
• Fix issue with breaking up large floors that lead to unbuildable buildings.
• First step in building template UI update. Default building templates and custom templates are displayed under different tabs in the Building Editor UI. Kingdom-specific templates are listed separately.
• Bed ownership! Beds can now be assigned to individual hearthlings.
• A huge number of scaffolding fixes and improvements! Scaffolding now understands when its structure has completed. Fix a bug with shared scaffolding. Don’t place scaffolding in places that will be blocked. And more…
• Have town keep track of buildings that are stuck because their materials do not exist in the world.
• Correctly merge walls with nearby buildings.
• When the “Build” command is given, find all the fixtures needed for the building and add items needed to the relevant crafter queues. Add gameplay setting to enable or disable building auto queue; default is on.
• Turn off building removal option until we implement more effectively.

We’ve also made refinements in other important areas. We’re continuing to polish and improve combat and party behavior, especially around the placing and removal of defense banners. Additionally, pathfinding can now handle large numbers of destinations without bogging down the CPU.

As with all new Alpha releases, we’ve also added literally hundreds of changes, additions, fixes, and the like. We’ll update these notes with a more detailed list in the coming weeks.