Update #1 | Shelves & Racks

Greetings, medievalists!

Update #1 is now live on Steam, Epic Game Store, and GOG. All those fixes and improvements from the experimental branch are now stable, tested, and present in this update. You can now choose different map sizes, build shacks, racks, and candelabras. Resource piles and stockpiles received a major overhaul, floor temperature has been tweaked! Read about all the exciting new changes here!

Shelves and racks are here! – [Community request]

We actually didn’t plan for this update to come so soon, but after seeing how many of you expressed interest in additional storage options, we simply had to do it.

If you unlock “Preserving Food” in the research tab, you’ll be able to build shelves.

Shelves can store 3 different piles of food, textile, and/or medicine. You can forbid a complete shelf, but also – when using the right-click menu, you will have individual options for all piles on the shelf (the same rules apply on constructions below).

Unlocking “Furniture” in the Research panel will allow you to build things like regular Bookshelves, Wall Bookshelves, and Weapon racks.

Bookshelf – can store up to 4 piles of books (Chronicles, Textbooks, and Thesis).
Wall Bookshelf – the same function as a regular bookshelf, but these can store 3 piles of books and are attached to walls.
Weapon Rack – up to 3 different weapons/shields can be stacked on this rack.

If you go deeper into the research tab, you’ll be able to unlock “Furniture II”. This will unlock things like armor racks and chests.

Armor Rack – can store armor and/or apparel. Choose wisely, since it can store only one head dedicated and one body dedicated item

Chest – can store up to 2 items (from the clothing/hats, armor, and/or weapons category)
Settlers will prioritize resources from shelves when using them for production.

Dev tip: All shelves can be edited in json files, so those players that want to play around with them are free to do so. The type of storage is defined in the Furniture.json, and the content and number of piles is defined in the UniversalStorage.json

Now that we’ve covered shelves and racks – let’s talk about other stockpile updates.

Stockpile Priority

We added a drop-down menu on stockpiles and shelves.

Settlers will always haul resources to the stockpile with the highest priority (this will not change the hauling priority, just the choice of stockpiles) – meaning, settlers will always choose higher priority stockpiles first. Additionally, settlers will move resources from lower to higher priority storage – this also applies to shelves and racks. So, if a rack is set to very high priority, settlers will constantly try to keep that rack stacked.

Copying a stockpile with the copy button (like any other building) will now copy the stockpile settings as well. There are two new buttons (copy and paste settings) for the player to be able to copy the stockpile settings to other stockpiles. You will also be able to copy stockpile settings onto the shelves and racks. However – their limitations will automatically dismiss piles that they can’t support (example: you’ll not be able to copy meat from the stockpile, onto the bookshelf, because the bookshelf doesn’t support meat).

Map sizes

Larger maps are in, but we opted out of adding the large map from the previous experimental branch version (the 320×320 one – however, if you feel brave enough, by now you probably know how to edit map size in the ,json file). We chose to set up the maps as follows:

190×190 (formerly default) Small
220 x220 Medium
250×250 Large

The reasoning behind this is that our settlers are not designed to operate in large areas. Sending them to one end of the map will make them starve while they come back to the food source, etc. This can also happen on other map sizes in some cases but not very likely. This might change in the future and we might start supporting even larger maps officially, but that would require some deeper changes in settler behavior logic.

Trebuchets received some balancing

We’ve made several changes to the trebuchets to make them more interesting, but still – make them a bit threatening (note that trebuchets from the old saves that already spawned on the map, will not be affected by these changes):

Now, trebuchet projectiles will not pass through walls. If the projectile destroys the obstacle on the way (like a floor or something weak), it will pass through (but will cause much less damage afterwards).
Trebuchets target random structures around the map. Before, they would target one point on the map and continue firing on that dot.
Trebuchets now have a 12m impact radius represented by a red circle so they are not very precise anymore so the projectile can land at any point inside this radius.
The firing rate has been slowed down.
Enemies will deplete their ammo and then step out of trebuchets to join the fight.
We’ve also fixed the issue where trebuchets would not disappear after the raid if the player saves/loads.

Resource pile optimization

Many of you reported an FPS drain mid to late game. It took us some time to investigate this, and we discovered that part of the FPS drain was caused by resource piles. Not “present” piles in the game, but rather, how the game handles piles being spawned, counted, recounted, etc. The bigger the number of resources, the bigger memory leaks there were. The most significant FPS drop would come when trebuchets would hit a structure that had a stockpile on the next floor. Having piles fall would result in 1 FPS for some time.

Here are some of the use cases that were affected by this issue:

Allowing or forbidding a large number of piles would lead to an FPS drop
Changing stockpile settings would sometimes result in the stockpile being corrupt, resulting in settlers not wanting to carry resources to it, or carrying the wrong resource to a stockpile
Changing stockpile settings while settlers are carrying piles to it would result in an FPS drop
Marking a bunch of resources within a stockpile would result in a major FPS drop

We have refactored the resource system meaning many of these issues are solved – this is something that we felt had to be addressed before we start adding more systems and features.

All in all, performance should be much better now. We’d like to continue to optimize the game further into Early Access, but we felt like this was a good start.

Temperature balancing

Although this was reported by many as a bug, it was really a balancing issue. The issue was that underground voxels give off negative heat and cool down a room, but placing floors would isolate that cooling and make the room warmer.

This is now solved by adding a small cooling effect on floors. This does, in turn, make rooms colder in the winter months but that’s something that will not make gameplay suffer and it can be mended by heating rooms by adding some heat sources. This is just a temporary solution and will be most likely revisited in the future.

Improved room detection

In the case where one room is above the other – Stairs now create two separate rooms if there are no other gaps between those rooms. If there is only one missing floor tile between the two rooms, it will be considered as one room. Also, rooms are now generally easier to make due to them not having so many constraints. Prior to this update, the kitchen would stop being considered a kitchen if the player placed a campfire in the room. That’s not the case now. Also, text and overlay of rooms will not appear on every load notifying you that rooms are created.

Other notable things worth mentioning

New settler tooltip – When a new settler appears now, hovering over the info about that settler will not show all information. It will show just one highest skill and one random skill as well as perks being shown blurred with a ? over them. This is done intentionally, so players can have a bit of risk when choosing to let settlers come or not.

New decorative buildings – We’ve added candelabras and stone fences. Candelabras are used to illuminate the darkness, so if you are a fan of candles – look no further. Stone fences have been added too – because the community asked for it!

Piles Visuals and Rebalance – Many resources now have different visual pile sizes that correlate to the number of resources on those piles.

Example: the limestone pile now has three versions – 1/3 of the pile is a small pile of rocks, 2/3 of a pile is the same as before, 3/3 is now a larger pile of rocks. This visual change has been made to many piles, but not all. Other resources will get this treatment as we continue updating the game.

Resource pile size has been doubled for almost all of the resources. This is due to players reporting having problems with too much limestone on mountain maps. This means that the piles will take up 50% less space.

Flora & Fauna rebalancing

Plants no longer die at once when the temperature is below the death threshold. Now, they slowly lose HP (randomized a bit) and die when it reaches 0 HP.
Redcurrants take one day longer to grow.
Plants yield more food (except mushrooms) on a lower difficulty and less on hard difficulty.
New plants spawn faster now (a bit faster on large maps and slower on small maps)
New plants no longer spawn just near the same plants. There is a 30% chance they will spawn randomly (this is to combat the problem where the middle of the map becomes increasingly empty after a few years of playing, making all plants grow on the edges of the map).
Animals spawn a bit faster (this is now regulated by difficulty, making them spawn faster on easy and very easy difficulty).

Keyboard Controls – The control scheme is now changed to be more in line with what players are used to in other colony sims. We heard the feedback from the community that they wanted Q and E to be rotating buildings and F to be used for Allow/Forbid.

NOTE: Old saves and already installed games will have the old control scheme until setting controls in the options menu.

NOTE: This will not change your existing control scheme but if you’d like to try it out, just reset the keybindings in the keybinding menu in the options menu.

QOL – additions to the game

Jump to the layer button. We’ve added a button to the selection panel that takes you to the layer that this object is on.
Layer changing edits – layers now have a flash effect on the numbers when changed. We have added a small tip when holding down CTRL showing to the layer what can be done with layer control.
Next settler button. We have added the next settler button (TAB) to quickly select the next settler. It’s located in the header of the selection panel header.
Piles are now hidden when looking at the layer underneath them.
Almanac additions – all resources now have “Produced in:” links that take you to production structures that make that resource.
Photo Mode Camera update – Photo mode has a separate camera now that can be moved around more freely. For the modders amongst you, this can be further modified from AltCameraSettings.json.

Small Changes & Balancing

Smoked meat and pickled vegetables are now in the raw food group instead of meals.
We’ve added the “Medicine” group to the resource panel and all stockpiles.
When the raid includes 4 or more raiders, 20% of them will be archers.
We have added trebuchets to the raid warning message.
We’ve also solved an issue where enemies would leave the map, halfway toward the player’s settlement.
Settlers get hungry a bit slower than before.
Settlers get tired a bit slower than before.
The Almanac has been updated – we’ve added a list of clickable hyperlinks in resource entries leading to the production structures so that it can be easier to see where you can produce what resource.
All icons are now selectable within the Research panel and they lead to the Almanac entry so you can read in more detail about the things that are being unlocked.
Building traps now require higher Construction skill.
Construction pricing and timing received several tweaks.
Lightning strikes will now damage roofs and walls properly.
Terrain-saving optimization.
We’ve optimized how rooms calculate content isolation and other things, making room detection run much smoother.
Graves have snow on them in the winter.
Spirit distillery now emits heat when producing.
Socketable buildings are forbidden from overlapping as there can be only one object per type on gridspace.
Black Bar Text should now appear properly when changing custom heraldry folder.
Particles now orient correctly when workers build roofs.

But, there are also some issues that we are investigating and plan to fix in due time.

There is one more thing we want to address. The success and reception of Going Medieval has proven to us that we are on the right path, that the road we’ve taken is paying off, that the features we are implementing are worth doing, that our community is wonderful, and we don’t plan to stop there.

Going Medieval is here to stay. To celebrate this, we’ve created this awesome trailer:

Whoa, that was a long one! We hope you enjoy experimenting with the new features and continue to let us know if you come across any more bugs or issues.

Remember, we’ll use Mondays to announce new things and what we are working on. It might not happen every Monday, but we’ll try to be as transparent as possible. In the meantime, feel free to post your observations and feedback on Steam discussions. If you want more dynamic/direct communication – head over to our Discord server. Even though we might not reply, we are reading everything. Until next time,

Stay medieval!
Foxy Voxel