Greetings medievalists!
The new major update titled “Animal Trading” is now live on Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG. It includes: the option to trade animals, food pouches, signs, and various other tweaks and improvements.
Animal Trading
You can finally trade animals with other settlements/merchants.
Trading with merchants:
- Every once in a while, a merchant will appear, accompanied by some animals that they can trade.
- Both domestic animals and pets can be traded from your side. The animals you get from merchants will be domesticated.
- Merchants can have animals that are not for trading (their own pets).
- Animal type (domesticated/pet) will not influence barter value – you will not get a better value if you use pets for bartering.
- Animals can be taken with settlers in caravans. In that case, they (animals) will not need food for a caravan trip. Also, some animals will increase the carrying capacity of the caravan.
- Animals that are locked away will appear gray in the trading menu.
We wanted to emphasize each animal type more especially to make having pets for combat fun. We had to be careful not to make animals overpowered when retaliating.
Depending on the type (domestic, wild, pet), animals have different stats:
- Pets deal more damage, heal faster and bleed less from wounds.
- Domestic animals bleed less from wounds but don’t deal more damage.
- Wild aggressive animals deal more damage than regular wild animals.
Food
Food consumption and nutrition has been adjusted. Here are the notable changes:
- When hungry, settlers will look for food with the most nutritional value.
- Depending on their hunger state and location in relation to chairs, settlers might want to sit while eating.
- Sitting in a chair with no table will give different mood effectors, as opposed to a chair & table.
- Settlers will look to sit and eat in the great hall first, then a room, then under a roof, then outside. Of course, their search will depend on their location in relation to the aforementioned places. If there is no such place nearby, they’ll stand and eat.
- We rebalanced the amount of nutrition that the settler gets from meals and raw food (before a meal would bring around 85-100 nutrition, now it is set to about 80-90 while raw food has been lowered from 25-40 to 10-15 nutrition).
- Due to the rebalance of nutrition the amount of dropped meat and raw resources from plants has increased by 20-40%. Because of this, the amount of raw food for cooking meals has doubled (for meals, packaged meals, and lavish meals).
- Since the consumption of raw food offers low nutrition, settlers will eat multiple piles of it (if the food of better quality is not present) to satisfy their hunger.
Settlers have food pouches now.
These function as a small storage space attached to them, where settlers can store food for later. This should solve the problem of settlers abandoning their work and traversing major distances to get to their settlement, just to eat something. Some things to note, settlers will only store:
- Food enabled in their Manage panel.
- Food in the meal category (so no raw foods, only packaged, lavish, stew, etc).
- Food that is on shelves and or stockpiles.
Other things to note about the pouch:
- When a settler gets hungry, they’ll primarily eat the food from the pouch. Refilling their pouches is a new goal we’ve added to settlers.
- Settlers will prioritize refilling their pouches during a non-working schedule.
- You can order settlers to consume food from their pouches within the settler’s inventory. If you do that, settlers will not search for chairs or random spots, etc – they’ll eat where they stand. This will happen even if settlers are drafted.
- Settlers can store 1x from the food pile in the pouch,
- Food stored in those pouches will rot/decay. If it reaches 0 hp, it will disappear from the settler’s pouch. If it reaches 0% freshness, it will turn into a pile of rot and the settlers will drop it on the ground. The only meal that will drop as rot will be roasted meat, but the chances for that happening are close to none. You have to put the meat that is already close to rotting in the pouch and hope that the settler doesn’t eat it.
Think of the pouch as a personal pile that is one-time use, easy to refill, and near your settler.
Haul
Hauling logic has been recalculated – You’ve probably experienced situations where a bunch of animals in your settlement, along with settlers, were hauling stuff all the time. That created situations where settlers would stand still for 3-10 seconds while they calculated what to do next. Our quickfix up until now was to limit the number of animals that can haul per their species – they did not haul as frequently, and would have a big cooldown until the next haul goal. While there is no need for that anymore, we think some balancing is in order. So, the animals will haul faster now, but some are still nerfed when it comes to their frequency.
Added hauling priority for the resource type – All of the resources have a haul priority located in the Resources.json file. The setup at the moment is that items and resources have the highest hauling priority. Fret not – the stockpile/shelves priority is still valid and will not clash with this priority. These items will be hauled to the closest/highest priority free stockpile.
Multi-pile haul is implemented – If a settler picks a small pile during their haul goal, they’ll look for the piles of the same type nearby and pick as many as they can (and if they were not reserved by another settler). This prevents scenarios where settlers would go back and forth just to pick a bunch of small piles of the same type. Note: This will not occur if the hauled piles are dedicated for production.
Overweight hauling – Settlers and animals can now haul singular piles over 60kg, but in doing so will slow down.
Building
New building type: Signs – These wooden constructs do not add anything to the game, except give a bit of personality to your settlement.
- You can place them on the ground or attach them to a wall
- There are 4 different shapes in total and you can put a symbol on them and choose a color for that symbol.
- Messages can be left on signs. Typing in a message will show as a tooltip when hovered over the sign.
Quality of life improvements
- Optimized the game a bit and improved performance mid to late game.
- Animal number control during animal events has been modified as well. Now animal events will be rare as you have more of the same animal. Domesticated dogs will stop appearing when you have around 10x dogs.
- Animals now have type info when clicking on them (to clear the confusion for players about why pets can’t be in pens).
- Animals in the “Animal” panel can now be sorted by species, type, age, etc.
- Added ‘mark/clear all’ for hunting, taming, training, hauling, and battling (basically, any tickable/markable thing in the Animal panel). This way you can mark all of the animals to be hunted or clear of all hunt orders etc.
- Tooltips and hover effects are added to the Animal panel.
- Animals should not spawn on ‘islands’ they cannot get off from.
- Players will not be able to use hay/fodder/seeds as nutritional elements for settlers on caravan anymore. That was silly.
- Harvest and cut markers are hidden on crop fields. Now the field itself determines when the crop should be harvested/cut and the orders of the player will override this in all cases.
- Auto equip and drop item changed: now settlers will not drop forbidden items but will only auto equip things that are on stockpiles.
- Added BBT message when a piece of equipment is destroyed on the settler (ex settlers have a shield, the shield gets hit and gets destroyed).
- NPC characters will leave at once if you attack them.
- Deconstruct order will cancel uninstall order.
- Uninstall or move order will cancel deconstruct order.
- Cider is removed from the game. With the introduction of fermentation, we decided that you’ll get Fruit Juice from the fermentation of fruits. That fermenting pile will turn into a rough wine after some time. Since any fruit can be used for this process, it also means all of them will turn into rough wine.
- Text for raid appearing is now translated into all languages.
- Additional text has been added that explains that animals don’t waste food when in caravans.
Thank you for your patience, people. Feel free to post your experience regarding the new update 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.
Stay medieval!