Sapiens
Update 0.4.2 - AI fixes
New in 0.4.2:
AI and fixes:
- You can now prioritize any order at any time. Sapiens will tend to choose prioritized orders to complete first.
- You can then deprioritize orders again to restore them to the default prioritization level
- Different plan types are now prioritized differently by default, so idle sapiens are much more likely to choose a recruit or hunt order than a store order.
- The outputs of prioritized orders retain the prioritization, so if you prioritize a gather order on an apple tree, then the store orders for the apples will also be prioritized
- If you manually assign sapiens to an order, they will drop everything and are much more likely to continue to work on that order.
- Sapiens are now a lot more likely to continue a single task to completion. Hunting in particular is much improved.
- Taking a required tool to an order site now requires the order's role, instead of the general labor role. This improves efficiency as that sapien can then complete the order, and it stops tools getting stuck lying around waiting for the right sapien.
- Telling a sapien to stop, or manually assigning a sapien to an order now causes them to drop what they were carrying
- More Fixes, optimizations, and UI improvements
Balancing:
- More visitor tribes in the early stages of the game
- Visiting sapiens tend to stay longer
- Crucibles now degrade when used
- Reduced quantity of manure produced, as it was excessive and degraded performance
- Reduced quantity of sapien vocals when time is fast forwarded
Minor Update 0.4.1
- Fixes issues with sapiens getting stuck delivering to compost bins
- Fixes issues when restricting the use of rotten resources in the resources panel to disable composting
- Sapiens will now carry and deliver multiple items in one load to compost bins
- Compost now degrades after a year, as it was building up indefinitely and causing problems
- Improvements to AI prioritization
- Fixes issues when running on Linux under Proton
- The hammer now degrades when blacksmithing
- Sapiens no longer get hungrier while sleeping, which helps avoid having sick or injured sapiens starve and leave
Though this update does contain some AI improvements, I'm working on another update with some more major improvements to the priority system and AI too, so you can expect 0.4.2 soon.
Sapiens - Windstorm Update Out Now!
Windstorms
Every couple of years or so, you can now expect to experience a windstorm severe weather event. These windstorms can damage buildings, blow things away, extinguish fires, and sapiens can get injured by flying debris. Windstorms are a fun new challenge to plan for and overcome.
Composting & Mulching
Soil quality will now degrade slowly if you harvest many times from the same area. To enrich the soil again, you can now mulch using manure or compost. Manure can be found where animals have been, and compost can now be produced from rotting organic matter in compost bins.
Stone chiseling
A number of new rock types have been added to the game, including granite, marble, sandstone (in a variety of colors) and lapis lazuli. Your sapiens can now chisel stone blocks directly from rock, and use these blocks to build walls, or chisel them into tiles for roofs and floors. Soft rocks like sandstone and limestone can be carved using chisels made out of hard rock, but to craft blocks out of the harder rock types, your sapiens are going to need bronze chisels.
Bronze
Tin and copper ore veins are now scattered around the world. Once you've mined some and crafted a kiln and a crucible, you'll be able to research blacksmithing. With bronze your sapiens can smith chisels to carve hard rock, but they can also now craft a range of more durable and powerful tools and weapons.
New roof and floor types
0.4 Adds a number of new roof pieces to help your sapiens build better houses and villages. With new corner pieces, smaller slopes, and triangular floor pieces too, you'll have a lot more design options than before.
And more!
- New option in the radial menu to "Rebuild" using different materials
- You can now limit the quantity of items stored in each storage area
- Improvements to building snapping
- Your sapiens can now dig and mine on steeper slopes
- The camera maximum height limit now rises as you build higher, so you can build as high as you like
- Adds options to change the cursor reticle size and shape
- New autopause feature after you don't interact with the game for a configurable period
- Mud brick structures can now get damaged in the rain if they are left uncovered
- New sound effects and animations
- Much improved controller support
- New keyboard options for camera zooming
- AI fixes and performance improvements
- Many other minor features and bug fixes
0.4 "Windstorms" releases next week!
Full release notes are coming, but here's an overview of what's new in 0.4:
Windstorms
Every couple of years or so, you can now expect to experience a windstorm severe weather event. These windstorms can damage buildings, blow things away, extinguish fires, and sapiens can get injured by flying debris. Windstorms are a fun new challenge to plan for and overcome.
Composting & Mulching
Soil quality will now degrade slowly if you harvest many times from the same area. To enrich the soil again, you can now mulch using manure or compost. Manure can be found where animals have been, and compost can now be produced from rotting organic matter in compost bins.
Stone chiseling
A number of new rock types have been added to the game, including granite, marble, sandstone (in a variety of colors) and lapis lazuli. Your sapiens can now chisel stone blocks directly from rock, and use these blocks to build walls, or chisel them into tiles for roofs and floors. Soft rocks like sandstone and limestone can be carved using chisels made out of hard rock, but to craft blocks out of the harder rock types, your sapiens are going to need bronze chisels.
Bronze
Tin and copper ore veins are now scattered around the world. Once you've mined some and crafted a kiln and a crucible, you'll be able to research blacksmithing. With bronze your sapiens can smith chisels to carve hard rock, but they can also now craft a range of more durable and powerful tools and weapons.
New roof and floor types
0.4 Adds a number of new roof pieces to help your sapiens build better houses and villages. With new corner pieces, smaller slopes, and triangular floor pieces too, you'll have a lot more design options than before.
Much more
0.4 is packed with many other smaller features, quality of life improvements and bug fixes. The look has been improved with new detailing textures and more realistic shaders. You can now build as high as you like, as the camera height limit rises when you build. You can mine on steeper slopes, and set a maximum quantity to be stored per storage area. There are new options for the cursor reticle and autopause when you're AFK too, amongst many other tweaks and fixes.
If you would like to try it out now, you can switch to the unstable branch:
- Right click on Sapiens in your library on Steam.
- Select Properties->BETAS and then choose "public-beta-unstable" from the pull-down menu.
- You don't need to enter a code, that's it, Steam will then download the latest beta.
Currently the unstable version is PC only, I'll be sending out the Mac version to the unstable branch early next week.
WARNING: If you join the unstable branch and create or load worlds on that branch, it is dangerous to then move back to the default branch and load those saves again. If you do decide to opt in to the unstable branch, you should back up your worlds regularly.
I hope you enjoy the update!
-Dave
0.4 Progress Update
After taking a bit of a break over Christmas, I started the new year working on a new mechanic for improving soil. So in 0.4 we will now have compost, manure, and mulching, which allow you to improve the soil quality and grow crops faster. To balance this and add realism, as you harvest or clear from the land, the soil quality now slowly reduces too, so eventually you'll need to move your crops to more fertile land, or mulch to put the goodness back in.
Just after that was done, we got hit by a cyclone in New Zealand. It was a significant disaster, and we lost power for a week. But once I was able to work again, I started adding new building materials. It has always been my plan to give different building materials different strengths and weaknesses, and I'll be working more on that soon, but first I wanted to add stone block structures to the game. Stone blocks were historically a widely used early building material, and Sapiens felt like it would really benefit from having them.
So you will now be able to chisel out stone blocks directly from the ground, and use them to build walls and columns, and craft tiles which can be used in floors and roofs. I also added new rock types, with the addition of granite, marble, and lapis lazuli, as well as sandstone in a variety of colors.
Historically the first chisels were made out of hard rock, but rock chisels could mostly only be used on soft rocks like sandstone and limestone, so that's what I have done in Sapiens too. However there needed to be a way to chisel granite and hard rocks too, and so I decided it was time to add bronze to the game.
You'll first need to mine copper and tin ores from the ground. Then at a kiln you can learn the new blacksmithing skill, and combine the ores to smelt bronze in a crucible. Once you have bronze ingots, you can then smith them into new tools and weapons. There are bronze variants of all of the existing tools, which will work faster and last longer. And of course you can craft bronze chisels which will unlock the ability to build with hard stone blocks.
With the addition of bronze and the new rock types, I needed to do a lot of work on the look of the game, adding more detail and realism to the textures, and improving support for metallic materials. So we now have shiny metals and bump-mapping on the terrain and objects too, which really helps to make the world feel more alive.
I still have quite a lot more planned for this update, so keep an eye out for an announcement here when it's nearly ready. And keep in mind that the features I've mentioned here and these screenshots are a work in progress, there will still be changes before they are released in a few weeks time.
If you want to keep a closer eye on progress, please join the Discord where I post much more frequent updates. Thanks for your continued support and patience while I'm working on the update.
- Dave
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1060230/Sapiens/
Sapiens now available for macOS
Sapiens was always designed to be a cross platform game, which meant it took only a couple of weeks to add support for macOS, and it made a lot of sense to do this now so more people can play. Throughout the early access development, I plan to continue to add support for more platforms, more hardware features, more modding support, and more quality of life improvements and bug fixes. It's really important to keep this work going alongside additional gameplay features and content, like what was released in the recent herbal medicine update.
Have a great holiday season everyone, and I'm looking forward to working on the next big content update in the new year.
- Dave
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1060230/Sapiens/
Sapiens coming to macOS soon, join the open beta now!
You won't need to buy it again if you have already purchased it for Windows, and you will be able to find it listed in the Steam store within the next few weeks.
If you already have a copy for Windows, you can play right now by opting into the mac beta on Steam. This will help me to iron out any remaining issues before a full release within the next few weeks.
To opt in:
- You will need to have purchased Sapiens
- In your Steam Library on a mac, right click on Sapiens, and go to Properties->BETAS
- Enter "macosbeta123" in the access code box, and hit "Check Code"
- If it fails, restart Steam and try again
- You should now be able to switch to the mac beta, and install Sapiens on your mac
Sapiens for macOS requires macOS 10.15 or later, and will need either a dedicated GPU, or an M1/M2 chip to run well.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1060230/Sapiens/
Minor Update 0.3.6
- Adds improved support for modding, and support for the new official "Moa" mod, available via Steam Workshop
- Fixes crashes
- Fixes issues with the notification text when injured while hunting
- Fixes issue where tall aspens could be invisible in winter
- Fixes issue with smoke and fire particles in certain world locations
- Slow motion debug mode is now mapped to ctrl+9 instead of just '9' to avoid accidentally triggering it
- Fixes issues with nomad tribes and migrating mob groups spawning when you are surrounded by water
- Fixes issue where bones were not dropped after eating raw meat
- Fixes issues with mammoth animations when attacking
Sapiens - Herbal Medicine Update!
Herbal Medicine
Viruses are a new threat, which can be introduced by some visiting sapiens, especially if you recruit them. You can help stop the spread by isolating infected sapiens, but this will become a lot easier to manage once you have researched medicine.
You can now allow sapiens to eat raw meat, however there is a high risk of food poisoning, which they can get in other ways too. They can also get burned around fires, so you might want to find some aloe and keep some burn medicine stored.
To create medicine, you'll want to investigate one of the seven new plants. They can be hard to find, so you might need to explore further out.
AI improvements
Sapiens are now more social, with better head movements and conversation flow. They will now run for urgent tasks, like providing medicine, or hunting, and they are better at choosing which task to complete first.
They also now move and behave more naturally, and there are optimizations to help improve performance with large tribes too.
Graphics, Performance and More!
This update features new models, animations, shaders, and textures, so the world feels more vibrant and alive. Despite this, you should see a higher frame rate, with a number of renderer optimizations, and some new options to increase performance further. And there are a bunch of bug fixes and quality of life improvements too.
Full Release Notes:
Herbal Medicine
<*> Adds viruses which can be introduced by visiting sapiens, and spread through your tribe
<*> Adds food poisoning, which can occur if you allow them to eat raw meat, or store raw and cooked meat together
<*> Adds a risk of getting burned while delivering fuel or crafting at kilns or campfires
<*> Injuries can now occur while doing more activities like chopping trees or mining
<*> New medicine skill, research, and craftable items
<*> Adds 6 new plants and the elderberry tree
<*> Adds fired and unfired bowls
<*> Sapiens can now die from starvation or hypothermia, and these systems have been rebalanced
<*> Sapiens will seek fire when they are very cold, and stay there until they warm up
<*> Campfires and kilns now melt the snow near by
<*> Many craftable items must now be researched individually
<*> Adds a new immunity trait
AI improvements
<*> Sapiens now interact with each other more, and talk to each other while seated
<*> Many improvements to the AI with how they prioritize and choose tasks
<*> Sapiens will now run when hunting, and for urgent tasks like treating with medicine
<*> As running makes mammoths easier and safer to hunt, they now take more spears and provide a little less meat
<*> Improved pathfinding, with smoother movements and walking animations
<*> Improves a number of other sapien animations
<*> Mouth movements while talking
<*> Injured and sick sapiens will now go to bed, and their outcomes will be better if they sleep
Graphics and Performance
<*> Significant optimizations in many areas
<*> Many improvements to shaders and rendering quality, including more vibrant colors
<*> Adds new options to toggle bloom and ambient occlusion, and adds a lower quality water option
<*> Improvements to a number of models, especially thatch buildings, which also have a slightly larger window allowing you to fly through
<*> Newly crafted log drums and balafons will now display the correct wood type
Other Changes
<*> Decorative items will no longer go rotten or despawn, until they become usable with "allow use"
<*> You can now dig and fill steeper slopes
<*> New notification text when you move too far from your tribe
<*> Notifications are now color coded
<*> Some status effects like injuries can now be more severe, and are colored red/orange to indicate this
<*> Notifications now stay up when the game is paused
<*> You can now build anything out of split logs to complete the tutorial goal, not just a split log wall
<*> The tech tree has been redesigned to make more sense
<*> Balafon crafting now requires wood working instead of tool assembly
<*> Playing any musical instrument will complete the music tutorial task
<*> Undiscovered items now don't show what they are in the resources panel
Bug Fixes
<*> Named objects will now preserve and display their name when carried and moved around
<*> Fixes bug where bamboo didn't grow back
<*> Fixes issues with selecting paths
<*> Fixes bug with issuing orders in multi-select
<*> Fixes bug where mammoths could become invisible after a successful hunt
<*> Fixes bug where the order of sapiens changed when you changed their role assignments
<*> No longer follows symlinks when deleting worlds
<*> Many other minor fixes
Herbal Medicine Update - Coming Soon!
Viruses are a new threat, which can be introduced by some visiting sapiens, especially if you recruit them. You can help stop the spread by isolating infected sapiens, but this will become a lot easier to manage once you have researched medicine.
You can now allow sapiens to eat raw meat, however there is a high risk of food poisoning, which they can get in other ways too. They can also get burned around fires, so you might want to find some aloe and keep some burn medicine stored.
To create medicine, you'll want to investigate the new plants. They can be hard to find, so you might need to explore further out.
There are also many other significant improvements to the AI, graphics, performance, and a bunch of other new features and fixes too.
The update will go out next week, but if you don't mind helping to find any remaining bugs, you can try it out now on the public-beta-unstable branch. Please keep the feedback and bug reports coming, thank you!
- Dave
Full Release Notes:
Herbal Medicine
<*> Adds viruses which can be introduced by visiting sapiens, and spread through your tribe
<*> Adds food poisoning, which can occur if you allow them to eat raw meat, or store raw and cooked meat together
<*> Adds a risk of getting burned while delivering fuel or crafting at kilns or campfires
<*> Injuries can now occur while doing more activities like chopping trees or mining
<*> New medicine skill, research, and craftable items
<*> Adds 6 new plants and the elderberry tree
<*> Adds fired and unfired bowls
<*> Sapiens can now die from starvation or hypothermia, and these systems have been rebalanced
<*> Sapiens will seek fire when they are very cold, and stay there until they warm up
<*> Campfires and kilns now melt the snow near by
<*> Many craftable items must now be researched individually
<*> Adds a new immunity trait
AI improvements
<*> Sapiens now interact with each other more, and talk to each other while seated
<*> Many improvements to the AI with how they prioritize and choose tasks
<*> Sapiens will now run when hunting, and for urgent tasks like treating with medicine
<*> As running makes mammoths easier and safer to hunt, they now take more spears and provide a little less meat
<*> Improved pathfinding, with smoother movements and walking animations
<*> Improves a number of other sapien animations
<*> Mouth movements while talking
<*> Injured and sick sapiens will now go to bed, and their outcomes will be better if they sleep
Graphics and Performance
<*> Significant optimizations in many areas
<*> Many improvements to shaders and rendering quality, including more vibrant colors
<*> Adds new options to toggle bloom and ambient occlusion, and adds a lower quality water option
<*> Improvements to a number of models, especially thatch buildings, which also have a slightly larger window allowing you to fly through
<*> Newly crafted log drums and balafons will now display the correct wood type
Other Changes
<*> Decorative items will no longer go rotten or despawn, until they become usable with "allow use"
<*> You can now dig and fill steeper slopes
<*> New notification text when you move too far from your tribe
<*> Notifications are now color coded
<*> Some status effects like injuries can now be more severe, and are colored red/orange to indicate this
<*> Notifications now stay up when the game is paused
<*> You can now build anything out of split logs to complete the tutorial goal, not just a split log wall
<*> The tech tree has been redesigned to make more sense
<*> Balafon crafting now requires wood working instead of tool assembly
<*> Playing any musical instrument will complete the music tutorial task
<*> Undiscovered items now don't show what they are in the resources panel
Bug Fixes
<*> Named objects will now preserve and display their name when carried and moved around
<*> Fixes bug where bamboo didn't grow back
<*> Fixes issues with selecting paths
<*> Fixes bug with issuing orders in multi-select
<*> Fixes bug where mammoths could become invisible after a successful hunt
<*> Fixes bug where the order of sapiens changed when you changed their role assignments
<*> No longer follows symlinks when deleting worlds
<*> Many other minor fixes