Stonehearth
Malley and Angelo will be streaming on Twitch in 5 minutes!
Alpha 24.6 Now on Steam Unstable
Why embark once when you can do it twice?
The main feature in this unstable release is the new Re-embarkation system. About a week after you finish the town progression quest line, you will get the option of selecting up to 3 of your hearthlings to leave the town and found a new settlement elsewhere.
The hearthlings departing your town can also take up to 10 items with them, including bags of gold or a shred of the current town’s banner, which will carry its town bonus over with you.
Once the new adventurers have departed, you will be able to select them when starting a new town, from the same screen where you select your initial characters.
Additionally, as part of this change, we have reduced the number of hearthlings you start with to 5, as 7 makes it hard to treat and remember your people as individuals, rather than as a group of units to do your bidding.
Other changes
Have fun!
Team Stonehearth
Desktop Tuesday: Steam Workshop
We have Steam Workshop Support on our Steam Latest/Unstable branch, and we've uploaded a bunch of mods to help you test it out.
Find the full DT here:
http://www.stonehearth.net/dt-steam-workshop/
Alpha 24.5.1 now on Steam Unstable
Hotfix for A24.5
This small hotfix release addresses a few particularly severe errors:
Game on!
Team Stonehearth
Steam Workshop Launches!
One of the core promises of Stonehearth when we first imagined it was that the game would be moddable so that your imagination could expand your hearthlings' world -- and that your creations could be shared easily with other members of the Stonehearth community.
Today, Team Stonehearth is pleased to announce the launch of our Steam Workshop! Now you have a one-stop shop to find and share community-created content: mods, decor, campaigns, biomes, and more. Building templates are not part of this initial version, but they will be soon (to complement the launch of the new builder).
Our Steam Workshop can be found through the Stonehearth Community Hub here on Steam.
From the beginning, we've seen absolutely incredible content contributed by the community -- from mods that add new features to spectacular biomes to new items for your settlements -- even localization into multiple languages. It's long been a goal of ours to have a centralized location for all this community-created content, and for quite a while we anticipated creating our own modding and content hub on stonehearth.net. But as we investigated both the development and maintenance effort needed as well as taking a closer look at what Steam has to offer, we came to the conclusion that Steam Workshop does, in fact, offer most of the functionality we want. And enabling Steam Workshop is something that many of our players ask for frequently. So here you go! Shoutouts go to Angelo, Linda, Morgan, and Ana for getting Workshop into your hands.
Steam Workshop will also be an important component when we launch multiplayer (not long now!). Using Workshop and the game's new mod manager, you'll be able to ensure that you and your online play companions all have the same mods and community content so that there aren't any weird disparities between your game and your friends'.
But wait! There's moar! (Isn't there always?) If you're a modder -- or thinking about being one! -- you'll definitely want to check out our awesome new modding guide prepared by Ana (Relyss). It's linked in our Workshop or you can find it directly here. And Morgan has created a "teaching mod" featuring the insidious Hush (you'll just have to play it to see) -- you can get this mod in Workshop as "The Dark Grove."
We're launching our Workshop in "beta" mode -- meaning we're testing it out, and we'd appreciate your feedback. What works for you? What doesn't? What's missing? As always, your input helps us make the Stonehearth experience the best it can be.
Enjoy!
Alpha 24.5 Now on Steam Unstable
Steam Workshop Support
In this push to unstable we’ve added support for Steam Workshop mods. Everyone can now upload their own mods, and subscribe to existing mods to automatically get all the latest updates. See the full announcement here.
Little Fixes and Improvements
Have fun!
Team Stonehearth
Desktop Tuesday: Advanced Builder Topics
Find it here: http://www.stonehearth.net/dt-advanced-builder-topics/
Alpha 24.4 Now on Steam Unstable
Weathering the storm
The main feature of this unstable release is the new Weather system. When you update your game, you’ll notice three new icons under the sun: a weather forecast showing the weather for today, tomorrow, and the day after.
Most weather focuses on creating a mood by subtly altering the visuals and audio around your town: the atmosphere, sky, sunrises and sunsets, and ambient sounds.
More severe weather types have gameplay effects, like influencing plant growth, making unsheltered citizens and animals hot or cold, destroying trees by lightning, or crops by sandstorms.
There are 9 weather types currently enabled - see if you can spot them all!
For more details, head over to this week’s Desktop Tuesday.
Clearing up the atmosphere
Last year, we did some experiments with in-game atmospherics, in service of some lighting experiments. In this release, we port a number of those atmospheric changes over, plus update waterfalls to their original, flat appearance from early concept art.
Progress marches on
We are wrapping up our work on the new Town Progression campaigns, and while there are still a few things missing here and there, what you see in this release is pretty close to our vision for the feature. Changes in this version include:
Traders and exotic pets
Tired of getting same old traders? Tired of having thousands of gold pieces lying around and nothing to spend them on? To complement the new tier progression quest, this alpha introduces three tiers of traders with thematically cohesive inventories. A very special late-game trader introduces a number of exotic (and expensive) pets, including ones originally designed during the Kickstarter campaign. As promised, Kickstarter backers will additionally receive the ability to embark with these pets via a mod to be released at a later date.
Other changes
Savegame compatibility
This release has several changes that are not backward-compatible with saves made on previous Unstable versions, but saves from different Stable alpha versions should work.
Have fun!
Team Stonehearth
Stonehearth Desktop Tuesday: Weather!
So cool, we've talked a lot about making it easier to make houses but why do hearthings need houses? A feature for our next release that adds some gentle gameplay to motivate building plus lots of literal atmosphere, tone, and mood.
http://www.stonehearth.net/desktop-tuesday-weather/