Stone deposits are now allowed to be blocked (also solves the problem with bridge demolishing and bugged old saves)
Fixed:
Brewery hop kiln cowl turned to the wrong wind direction (yes it's a thing)
Another case of blocked rowhouse
Water navigation was messed up a bit (will stay that way in saves between hotfix 11 and 16)
Альфа 5 патч 9 виправлення 16
Added/changed:
A few performance optimizations
Fixed:
Unfair self-blocking of other building when building a smeltery or fulling mill
Minor UI corrections
A mysterious crash
Double everything on a field built over trees (will stay in old saves unless you rebuild the problem field)
Alpha 5 patch 9 hotfix 15
Added/changed:
Increased threads production speed
Fixed:
A case of unfair self-blocking of customized-form rowhouse
Crash and damaged autosave after placing trading post/dock
Alpha 5 patch 9 hotfix 14
Added/changed:
Increased the time trade wagons will wait to get loaded/unloaded
Fixed:
Fields could block if entrance rotation key used
Alpha 5 patch 9 hotfix 13
Added/changed:
Added some info in Supply options help page
Added a help tip about fishing dock supply options
Fixed:
Unfair blocked fenceless village houses in certain conditions
Had problems with nets supply to fishing docks
Alpha 5 patch 9 hotfix 12
Added/changed:
Added a button in blocked buildings to check again after the removal of obstruction (or updating the game from hotfix 11)
Added lines pointing to blocked buildings when selected
Fixed:
Unfair blocked buildings in old saves
Crash when placing a row of burial plots
Crash when choosing tree type in orchard
A memory leak
Alpha 5 patch 9 hotfix 11
This is actually a huge update, but you probably won't notice it. There's this thing I estimated to finish in 5 days, but it took 3 weeks instead. There is not much exciting about it, but it had to be done for years.
I know most players didn't read my bug reporting instruction and don't know why those mysterious white lines appear in their towns, so I'll explain a bit. The game fundamentally relies on pathfinding: every action takes place on a specific location. So before anything can be done some citizen must take a walk from wherever he/she is (which can be at home, on the previous job site, on the way to the bench or whatever) to that specific point. It may sound simple but in Ostriv it isn't. Since the player is not forced to "build dirt roads" connecting everything, anything can be built anywhere and anyone can be anywhere at that moment. And that includes cases like this:
There is no right way to walk to that platform and obviously the pathfinding system fails in this case, which it indicates by displaying a white line from the start to the end of the path we were trying to find. Citizens were either teleported or became stuck in place when this happened.
I added these lines as a temporary debug tool to see all possible path blocking cases, but the final solution was delayed for so long they've become a meme in the community. But 2025 is the year we're getting rid of them once and for all.
I needed to cover all possible situations and prevent the player from blocking entrances. So I tested different solutions but the only one covering all cases was to calculate the path from the spawn node on the edge of the map to every entrance of every building (some have more than one, like rowhouses or benches). It was also required to simulate all buildings currently being constructed as finished ones, so when they finish they won't block anything and won't be blocked themselves. So now each time when you place a building, the game will briefly enter verification mode for that building and than switch to construction or a fail state.
In this case you will need to choose another location for this building. If you click on a failed building you can see which are the entrances it is blocking:
And then there are trees, which normally don't even have navigational nodes unless someone is trying to chop them down. Previously the foresters could go for a tree which is blocked in-between buildings or fences. Now the game should handle such cases with dignity. You won't be able to manually mark a tree for chopping if it's inaccessible:
Also when routinely chopping down nearby trees, the foresters will skip those with no path to them:
The same should apply to thatchery workers who are looking for nearby reeds.
Ok, now you may say you have seen those lines when the path is clearly not blocked. Yes, there were some actual pathfinding bugs which are now (hopefully) fixed in this update, but also the navigation mesh is not exactly in sync with the visuals. This is done to stop your people from skipping through the buildings corners or walking trough very thin cracks between buildings. Now with the new verification process all the cases related to this should be covered as well.
I'm not disabling the white lines just yet, so we can find any stray edge cases I may have missed, so please send reports if you see any. Also if you have blocked buildings in your previous saves, you may need to unblock them (demolish the blocking buildings) before you can build anything. Further blocking should then be prevented by the new system.
Now to the stuff you really care about. Due to my previously mentioned miscalculation, Alpha 6 is now unfortunately delaying into around mid or late February. As a consolation, take a peek at this nice new building coming in Alpha 6, which is probably not a bakery:
Meanwhile the full list of stuff in the current update:
Added/changed:
Added a complex system to prevent navigational issues
Increased font size in population/economy pop-ups
Added some tips in vacant taverns and barber surgeries
Increased font size in building placement tooltips
Edited some help pages
Added a help page for shoemaker's workshop
Tailors and Shoemakers will now use threads as a raw material
Slightly optimized node graph rebuild after demolishing buildings
Added a tip to prioritize clay pit construction in the game start
Increased maximum logs per forestry from 18 to 20
Starting camp storage now has 10 fishing nets
Fixed:
Crash related to carpentry
White lines around forestry in recent updates
Hay spoilage on dryers during winter didn't record in stats
Windmill didn't have construction graph in properties
Some boat orders being stuck
A weird crash in a very weird case
"Family out of water" notifications could be too dramatic sometimes
Fishing nets appeared from nowhere
A random crash when loading the game after using some overlays
Minor UI corrections
Alpha 5 patch 9 hotfix 10
Fixed:
Hay barracks and stone storages didn't work in the last version
Alpha 5 patch 9 hotfix 9
Added/changed:
Slightly rebalanced how multiple forestries distribute planting jobs between them
Optimized performance on idle cart search
Optimized performance on granary supply to markets
