Elves have come to Noberia from far away lands, bringing the custom of Marriage with them.
Can you find the perfect partners for your people?
Elves!
A patient Race - Elves live twice as long as Humans and Orcs, but take their time maturing - progressing at half the rate of the other Races.
Elves don't mind Humans, but can be at odds with the Orcs!
Elves have increased potential in Hunting and Crafting, though their smaller frame limits their potential in Melee.
Updated Characters!
To ensure the adoption of Marriage across the lands, the Gods have blessed the other Mortal Races with new faces, haircuts, and finally... Ears!
Enjoy new Human and Orc faces with many more variation and much more detail than before!
Attraction!
Now that the Mortals are more beautiful, they've discovered that they're now Attracted to one another!
Browse the new Attraction tab on the Character Sheet to see what each Mortal is into.
Mortals have a broad range of preferences - taking Gender, Age, Race, and even wealth into account when sizing up a potential partner.
Gifts!
The Mortals have discovered that they can grow and harvest Flowers, making Bouquets for gifts to maximize their chances.
Daily gifts can help that friendship blossom into true Love!
Use the additional details on the expanded Relationship tab to see just why two Mortals love one-another or why they aren't getting along.
Marriage!
Build and decorate the new Wedding Arch to arrange a Wedding between two of your Mortals.
Marry an Enamored pair of Mortals to transform their shared Love into Loyalty or arrange a one-sided Marriage to keep an important Noble happy!
Interactions with a Mortal's partner have increased effects on that Mortal - treat your Mortal's partners well to keep them happy.
Leverage Double Beds and shared Lodgings to simplify housing for your growing Kingdom!
Marriages last until one of the partners dies, so make sure you make the right call when choosing a Mortal's partner!
Expanded Intro Details and Options!
This was the perfect time to increase the information shared during the Intro and we've coupled that with the introduction of per-Mortal Reroll support.
We plan to do more with the Intro as we move further into EA, but this should help those of you looking for that perfect group from the start.
Other Surprises
Beyond Elves, we've also added Innate abilities to the other Races - Orcs have higher potential in Melee and Mining, but lower in Hunting; Humans have increased Building and Farming but aren't as capable in Foraging.
In addition, we introduced Skirts and Blouses - a slightly nicer variant of Tunics and Leggings that can roll brighter colors - perfect for a Wedding!
The Experimental Beta included Top Hats and Veils - but we've expanded both to include a wider array of colors.
Finally - we've introduced new Breach Music - fitting music for a fitting end for a Kingdom.
Other Changes
Leverage the new Caps Visibility toggle to let those luscious locks loose.
We retuned Depth of Field to better accommodate close-ups of your new faces.
We rebalanced Kingdom Size preference - more Mortals than ever will prefer Medium or Large Kingdoms.
Finally, we optimized startup time! Even with the added burden of the new Character Art, the game should load faster and use less memory than ever before!
Saves
These changes necessitated changes to the save game format, so this update retires 0.25 saves.
We've spun up a retired_0_25 set of Steam Betas so that you can continue your 0.25 saves there or go back and visit them whenever you want.
Full Changelist
Noble Fates 0.26.0.13 The Love and Elves Update Surprise: Elves! Elves have arrived from distant lands Elves live twice as long as Humans and Orcs Elves progress half as fast as Humans and Orcs Elves and Orcs trend towards a dislike of one another Elves prefer Wild Animal Meat over Mortal Meat
Updated Character Art Orcs and Humans have had their visuals updated to bring them closer to our 2d art Enjoy many more variations and much more detail than before! Increase thickness of Orcs slightly
Attraction Each Mortal has a list of traits that they prefer in a partner They have a broad range of preferences - including Gender, Age, Race, and even Wealth! Use the new Attraction tab to keep track of their preferences and potential suitors
Gifts Have a Mortal give another mortal a Bouquet to improve that Mortal's opinion of them Give Bouquets on successive days for increased strength and duration of the buff Surprise: Track the Gift Schedule on the Attraction Tooltip Surprise: Watch for Hearts as an indication of Interest! Craft Bouquets from Flowers at the Crafting Table
Marriage Arrange weddings between your Nobles Build a Wedding Arch and decorate it with flowers to Hold a Wedding Make the perfect match to maximize resulting Esteem boosts Or leverage a one-sided pairing to show an important Noble that you prioritize them Interactions with a Mortal's partner have increased effects on their Esteem A Mortal's Lodging Need and Wants can be satisfied by their Partner's Belongings A Marriage ends if one of the Partners dies
Intro Improve lighting during the Intro Add Kingdom Size Preference Add Attraction Preferences Add "Replace" button to replace an individual Mortal from the starting group Fix bug preventing the Pause Menu during Intro
Double Beds Married Mortals can share a bed Leverage increased Prestige from two new Bed variants
Flowers Flowers may now be harvested and used in Bouquets and Wedding Arches Flowers produce seeds and may be grown in farms
Top Hat and Veil These new costume hats make great Wedding attire Surprise: Increased color ranges
Surprise: Blouse and Skirt Fancier versions of Tunics and Pants that make great Wedding attire
Surpise: Innate Abilities Elves have increased potential in Ranged and Crafting, decreased in Melee Orcs have increased potential in Melee and Mining, decreased in Ranged Humans have increased potential in Building and Farming, decreased in Foraging
Surprise: New Breach Music Enjoy a tasty new track when tackling a Breach!
Caps Add Visibility setting for Caps Only affects Caps that hide Hair
Optimization Optimize Front End loading, reduce duration by 1/3 Optimize Memory Usage when loading the Front End Increase Character Rendering performance Remove unused Key Art to reduce Disk Size
UI New Main Menu Scene New Loading Screen Improve Escape Behavior
Visitors Decrease good-will from visitors about satisfied needs by 50%
Envoys Fix bug that could allow Envoy members to join a Raid without warning
Wanderers Decrease wanderer counts Fix bug that could allow Wanderers to join a Raid without warning
Full Screen Conversations Open a Mortal's Eyes when speaking in Full-Screen Conversations Fix bug that prevented opening the Pause Menu
AI Ruler Principles Improve Genocide based Principles Add Elf based Principles
Depth of Field Return near Depth of Field when zoomed in
Cornucopia Resolve issue that caused a Crash when saving during a Cornucopia Feast Mortals now prefer to Feast near the Cornucopia
Raids Only warn about catapults when there's actually a catapult
Enlisted Hotkeys Only toggle Melee/Ranged/Defend/Push when Enlisted
Sleeping Taking Prestige into account when deciding where to sleep Nobles will now sleep in a specific Bed when ordered
Rabid Animals Renamed Rabid Animals for clarity Fixed bug that prevented some animals from becoming Rabid Fixed bug that would fail to trigger combat music from Rabid Animals
Kingdom Size Preference Increase the likelihood of Medium and Large Kingdom Size Preferences
Prop Rendering Fix High-Low Gradient on Structural Props Improve High-Low Gradient on Shelves, Throne and Beds
Blood Improve Blood Rendering
Transporting Wounded Now takes into account bed ownership Prevent Downed Animals from being placed in Cells
Fire Arrows Decrease likelihood of Mortals carrying Fire Arrows for Trade
Mods Add support for clearing lists with $clear Add support for Character Cosmetic Sets (See Original Humans and Orcs) Character Types now support Bone Scaling NOTE: Mods that depend on the old Character Art need the Original Character Cosmetics Mod
Sale
To celebrate the release, the game is on sale for it's biggest discount to date.
What's new in Main?
We've been working exclusively on this update for the last two weeks - this section is taking this crier off.
Community Content
dpahfl built a Crypt to a fallen Ruler!
Darkfire finished off a Castle just before the Update!
Scott (senses) was on top of the world in Experimental!
Lord Kay built a sweet little Nook!
Mods
If you'd like to play with the original Orc and Human models, subscribe to these two mods and enable them in-game!
Join the Official Discord to participate in Development!
Thanks for reading and thanks for playing! The Noble Fates Team
Creepy Eyes? Oh... Um... Well.... Now that you mention it...
In all seriousness - we took a step back and examined the new Mortal art based on your feedback and realized pretty quickly that we were leaning too far into creep town.
We played with some different treatments, and landed on hybrid Irises/Pupils that vary as much as all of the other features.
We like our Mortals to be that right mix of goofy, serious, and cute - with just a dash of creepy.
Interestingly, we think this actually brings them closer to the tone of the 2d art as well.
Anyway, thanks again for your feedback!
Exciting surprises in store for when the update releases on Monday at 10a PST!
See you then!
Kingdom-Crier #10: Love and Marriage! Updated Characters!
It's that time again! Welcome to Kingdom Crier #10.
It's our pleasure to announce the next Feature Update:
Love and Marriage!
Noble Fates Feature Update #3
A new custom has arrived on the lands of Noberia - Marriage!
Play match maker and see if you can arrange the perfect Marriages for your people.
Updated Characters!
To ensure the Marriage of the masses, the Gods have blessed the Mortals with new faces, haircuts, and finally... Ears!
With the help of our talented 3D artist, David Hagemann, we've brought the 3D character art inline with the amazing 2D art that Kobold Art has been producing for the game.
Enjoy new Human and Orc faces with many more variation and much more detail than before!
Attraction!
Now that the Mortals are more beautiful, they've discovered that they're now Attracted to one another!
Browse the new Attraction tab on the Character Sheet to see what each Mortal is into. Find them a perfect match and they'll remember it.
Gifts
In order to maximize their chances, the Mortals have discovered that they can grow and harvest Flowers, turning them into Bouquets that they can gift to each other for boosts to their relationship.
Daily gifts can help that friendship turn into true love!
Use the additional details on the Relationship tab to see just why two Mortals love one-another or why they aren't getting along.
Marriage!
Build and decorate the new Marriage Arch to arrange a Wedding between two of your Mortals.
Marry a pair of Enamored Mortals to transform their true Love into Loyalty or arrange a one-sided Marriage to keep an important Noble happy!
Interactions with a Mortal's partner have increased effects on that Mortal - treat your Mortal's partners well to keep them happy.
Marriages last until one of the partners dies, so make sure you make the right call when choosing a Mortal's partner!
Expanded Intro Options!
This was the perfect time to increase the information shared during the Intro and we've coupled that with the introduction of per-Mortal Reroll support.
We plan to do more with the Intro as we move further into EA, but this should help those of you looking for that perfect group from the start.
Release Date
The update will launch on 6/13 at 10a PST.
Surprises
As with the other Feature Updates, there are additional surprises in store for launch day - so there will be new stuff for you even if you join the Experimental Beta!
I wonder where this custom of Marriage originated from?
Saves
These changes necessitated changes to the save game format, so this update will retire 0.25 saves.
We'll spin up a retired_0_25 set of Steam Betas so that you can continue your 0.25 saves there or go back and visit them whenever you want.
Experimental Beta
We're dusting off the Experimental Beta branch to put the update through its paces before releasing it more broadly. Saves from the new Experimental Beta will carry over when the full update releases.
You can participate by switching to the Experimental Beta on Steam. Expect issues - but know that we appreciate you helping pave the way for a smooth launch!
What's new in Main?
We've been working almost exclusively on this update, but there have been a few important fixes worth calling out:
Your Mortals should no longer fight as a result of unintentional friendly fire! Wild animals can fight back once again!
Community Content
KSGvsHead's underground base has us mesmerized!
Scott (senses) is working on a great castle!
CheeseCake built a lovely cottage!
Content Mods
KarmaDrak put together KRanching with the help of krisvirtus! Enjoy expanded ranching duties including egg and wool harvesting!
Thanks for reading and thanks for playing! The Noble Fates Team
Noble Fates 0.25.0.50 Released!
Hotfix Crash Fixes Fix for crash when Hauling Items
Friendly Fire Your mortals should no longer fight as a result of non-controlled friendly fire Disable aggro from accidental hits from non-controlled characters Disable aggro from controlled characters during combat Repeated attacks on one of your Nobles from a controlled character makes them Upset
Wild Animals Fix Aggression - wild animals can now fight back once again
As you know, we've been focused on performance for the last two weeks. Here's a rundown of what we were able to accomplish.
Patch #1: Rendering
As we detailed in the last Crier, the Render Thread was a central source of performance problems for medium to large size bases - often doubling the length of time of the Main Thread. This was primarily due to the interaction between Unity's approach to parallel rendering and our use of common materials which increased the per-object type draw call count.
At the end of the day, Unity can handle around 2k draw calls if you still want to hit 30fps on an average machine. We had several things at play that caused these numbers to balloon for us - although we used instancing to draw the instances of a given object together, each separate material type/color on an object would generate a separate draw call for them. In addition, stacked items on the ground would generate one for each stack size.
The optimization here combined these per material and per mesh by doing a little bit of baking work on startup. This means that we can draw hundreds of stacks of a given item type of various sizes with one draw call now! In addition, we were able to flip some optimization flags on our textures to save system memory at the same time - so there should be less pressure on that precious RAM.
Patch #2: Animals
This one is kind of funny. Once Render Thread pressure was dialed back a bit, we switched focus back to the Main Thread, where it was clear that we were spending too much time updating characters. In some of the worst saves, this would add up to 100ms or more!
Whenever a visiting party with animals was disbanded, their animals would be turned loose in the local area. Animals in Noble Fates hadn't yet evolved the ability to die of old age or starve and without any predators this meant they'd just kind of stick around forever.
We've introduced two things to help address this. First, animal migration. When the local population of a given animal type is too high, a subset of the wild animals of that type will move on to greener pastures. They'll make their way to the edge of the map and find a new home with less local contention. Second, animals can now starve. Beyond increasing the reality of the simulation - at least once we get it dialed in - this should help introduce a bit more ebb and flow in the local wildlife population as well as increasing the difficulty of maintaining large ranches.
This was primarily an issue in late-game saves, where we've seen as many as 1000(!) animals when there should be less than 100.
Patch #3: Characters
Characters continued to stick out as expensive once we resolved the animal population issues, so we turned our attention to the simulation. There are a number of complex queries that characters run.
They would examine all of the kingdom's items when evaluating their equipment, all props when looking for a warm fire to sit by, and everything on the map when deciding what to eat or drink. This runs fine at small scale bases - and can even hold up for mid-scale bases on good machines, but once you've got a few thousand items laying around or a few thousand props, these become very expensive.
To reduce this strain, we introduced additional constraints on the queries that can be performed, using additional information like item type, prop type, or region to greatly reduce the search space when making these decisions.
We also found and fixed a nasty bug that caused slowdown when placing props - it should be smoother than ever now!
Noble Fates 0.25.0.49 Patch Notes Crash Fixes Fix for crash related to perception
Performance Improve Prop Placing Performance Improve Item performance Amortize Update Cost Improve Prop performance Improve Search Cost Improve Character performance Amortize Update Cost Reduce cost of Finding a Spot to Relax Reduce cost of Finding a Prop to Attack Reduce cost of Searching for Food Reduce cost of Searching for Materials Reduce cost of Searching for Training Dummy Reduce cost of Evaluating Equipment Paused Reduce unnecessary work when Paused
Research Fix bug that caused characters to idle instead of Researching Dependencies
Combat Improve AI behavior when switching targets Fix bug that caused Imps to hold aggro on people leaving the map
Relaxing Improve seat usage near Heat Sources
Portraits Update Portraits as needed occasionally when Live Portraits are disabled
Animals Double food received from grazing
Results
The Rendering pass provided the biggest bump, raising our Average framerate 30% across our tests. This is most noticeable during pause, slow, and 1x gameplay. Next, the Character pass raised the average framerate by 25% across a variety of mid to late games. This is most noticeable at 1x and above, but especially at 10x speeds. Finally, the Animal patch helped late-games a fair bit - providing a 21% boost across the board - but it was generally all or nothing showing up as no gain if you didn't have an animal population problem, and up to a 100% gain if you did!
Overall, framerate increased an average of 86% across our tests - raising the average late-game frame rate from under 15fps to 28fps. Not bad!
The Future
Things are in a decent spot for now - especially relative to where we started - so we're shifting focus back to the next Feature Update. There are a number of optimizations remaining that we plan to do - those animated portraits are expensive, culling stuff on other layers would be a big win, and there's more to do with the simulation.
Some of these are small enough that we can pick them up as smaller patches, and it's likely that we do one or two more of these Performance specific sprints in the future.
What's new in Main?
We've been focused almost exclusively on performance, but a few other changes snuck in:
We resolved an issue that prevented variation in Combat rate! We added support for other animal product types - check out KRanching!
Community Corner
Scott (senses) captured some great interior shots!
Join the Official Discord to participate in Development!
Thanks for reading and thanks for playing! The Noble Fates Team
Noble Fates 0.25.0.49 Released!
Performance Patch #3 Crash Fixes Fix for crash related to perception
Performance Improve Prop Placing Performance Improve Item performance Amortize Update Cost Improve Prop performance Improve Search Cost Improve Character performance Amortize Update Cost Reduce cost of Finding a Spot to Relax Reduce cost of Finding a Prop to Attack Reduce cost of Searching for Food Reduce cost of Searching for Materials Reduce cost of Searching for Training Dummy Reduce cost of Evaluating Equipment Paused Reduce unnecessary work when Paused
Research Fix bug that caused characters to idle instead of Researching Dependencies
Combat Improve AI behavior when switching targets Fix bug that caused Imps to hold aggro on people leaving the map
Relaxing Improve seat usage near Heat Sources
Portraits Update Portraits as needed occasionally when Live Portraits are disabled
Animals Double food received from grazing
Noble Fates 0.25.0.48 Released!
Hotfix `Crash Fix Fix for crash caused by character optimizations
Noble Fates 0.25.0.47 Released!
Hotfix Crash Fix Fix for crash caused by Breaches Fix for crash when Kingdom dies when Sealing
Refueling Don't try to refuel unowned props
Population Management Only introduce new animals when actually low
Noble Fates 0.25.0.46 Released!
Performance Patch #2 Animals Wild animals will migrate when the local animal population is too high Help with late game performance, abandoned pets, and Grass contention Animals may now starve to Death - losing up to 6 health per day
Performance The introduction of a wild Animal population cap can double framerate in late games
Starvation Mortals now starve twice as fast (up to 6 health per day)
