From Camp to Town in 3 Easy Steps

This unstable release focuses on the still work-in-progress version of the new Town Progression campaign. Instead of building a shrine or fountain for no obvious reason, this will have you picking from bonuses and making statements about the kind of town you want to build!

Disclaimers!

• It’s not done! We’re excited to get your feedback, and it’s pretty far along, but there are still missing bits and a ton of rough edges.
• Some text is still very placeholder, especially later in the campaign.
• Some content is still missing.
• The balance is probably way off, especially with Daily Updates, Net Worth, and timing of quest encounters.
• The final tier (Shrines) is particularly rough! Don’t worry, it’s on our hit list.
• Rayya’s Children’s version isn’t in at all just yet! Please play Ascendancy if you want to see this stuff!

There are three main phases to the new town progression:

• A few hour after you first settle, you get to make a town founding proclamation that includes naming your town and picking a Banner, which provides a permanent bonus to your town. The available banners are:
  • Banner of Vitality: Plants are more appealing, plants and crops grow faster, and trees provide more wood.
  • Banner of Strength: Mining yields more clay, stone, and ore, and your hearthlings don’t mind cramped spaces.
  • Banner of Cunning: Your roads are faster, your goods sell for more, and merchants have more gold and stuff for sale.
• Around a week after town founding, you’ll be able to complete a quest to earn a Hearth upgrade that will boost your Daily Update value based on a criteria you think your town excels at. Hearth choices are among the following [WIP (Work-In-Progress): The bonuses they give are probably super weak.]:
  • Hearth of Cheer: Complete a quest about being happy and well fed. Get a boost to your Daily Update Net Worth based on the happiness of your hearthlings.
  • Hearth of Glory: Complete a quest showing you’re ready to take on military challenges. Get a Hearth that can spawn groups of enemies at will (and banish them, just in case you’re in over your head). Defeating these groups gives loot and a boost to your Net Worth. [WIP: Currently only has a few, not-balanced groups of enemies!]
  • Hearth of the Makers: Complete a quest showing you’re a respectable trading post. Get a Hearth that boosts your Net Worth by a multiple of your Gold Coins on hand.
• Finally, about a week after you upgrade your Hearth, you’ll be able to build a Shrine, now with fancier visuals and some nice town-wide bonuses, as a capstone to your town, along with a bunch of matching decorations! The shrines may seem familiar to you:
  • Shrine of Fortune: Gives random town-wide buffs. Try your luck! Lots of cute decorations! [WIP: Just the Tonic buffs for now, but we’ll be adding more!]
  • Shrine of Valor: Will give recipes for Legendary Weapons! Lots of noble decorations! [WIP: We haven’t made the Legendary Weapons yet…]
  • Shrine of Masterwork: Gives a craft quality tier above Excellent – Masterwork! It’s four times as valuable and appealing as Excellent, which was already pretty great! Lots of crafty decorations!
  • [WIP: This is still using the old-style Shrine quests. We hope to swap these for something like the Hearth quests!]
  • [WIP: The quest and dialog text here isn’t done.]

With each town upgrade your townsfolk will throw a small party, which will include confetti, fireworks, and visitors at higher tiers.

As you can see, there’s still a lot that’s WIP, especially the Shrine stuff, but we’re looking forward to your feedback!

Other changes

• Added the ability to cancel item placement commands (from the ghost entities).
• Added sorting to the citizens list.
• Added the ability to assign jobs from the character sheet (click on the class).
• Added different styling for non-craftable recipes in the workshop UI.
• Added new level 2 shops, which stock ornate items and town tier-related decorations.
• Removed ornate items from level 1 shops.
• Increased clay drop rate when mining dirt.
• Improved waterfall mechanics.
• Fixed unintended ability to clear and undeploy hearths and banners.
• Fixed a bug in water code that caused the game to freeze.
• Fixed several cases of camera crashing into the ground.
• Fixed the workshop UI showing categories that have no unlocked recipes.
• Fixed the “set_blink true” development console command.
• Fixed a memory leak on the client.
• Fixed dry stones not accelerating the evaporation of puddles.
• Fixed wet stones sometimes leaving the location where they are placed dry.
• Fixed the red flash at the start of animated lights.
• Fixed conversation frequency reduction.
• Fixed missing appeal on small and medium pine trees.

Unstable is still unstable

As usual, saves made on unstable are not guaranteed to work between unstable versions, but saves from different stable alpha versions should work.

Have fun!
Team Stonehearth