November sees the launch of a new Sandbox Preview Trailer, and a refresh of all our screenshots to highlight all the great progress that is being made with Sandbox. Patch 0.2.11 shipped a few days ago, and was a substantial patch expanding gameplay with the addition of villager needs and the entire new snow biome. If you want to grab Folk Tale now and avoid the recent price increase, there's 25% off in the Steam Sale until 2nd December.
Villager Needs
Villagers now need a variety of things to keep them happy, ranging from protein (meat and fish), vegetables (pumpkins), and carbs (bread), to entertainment (mead) and basic clothing. We'll continue to add to their needs in future patches. If any of your villagers aren't having their needs met, they'll let you know via the event notifications that popup in the bottom right of the screen. Continue ignoring villager needs, and they'll eventually pack up and leave town. In a future patch, we'll be adding in ranting and rebellion.
The needs system has added considerably to gameplay. We've shifted our short-term goals to be purely gameplay focused, so the next few patches should see significant improvements in playability, starting with the latest Patch 0.2.11.
Research
Most buildings now have research that provide village-wide buffs, worker productivity bonuses, or unlock new crafting recipes. Not all have coded effects at the moment, but we'll be adding more and more with each new patch.
Crafting
Researching Plate Armor for example grants access to several Common quality plate items that can be crafted at the Blacksmith. Items take different amounts of time to craft depending on their complexity and size, and multiple items can be queued so you don't have to wait around. As each item is crafted, it gets added to your Global Inventory from where you can distribute it to your villagers.
New Buildings And Professions
The Herbalist profession can now be trained at the Herbalist Den. Placing Farmer's Fields and changing their crops to Herbs will activate nearby Herbalists. Herbs are cultivated and taken back for concocting into Lesser Medicine, which will be used to cure minor ailments when sickness is added in a future patch.
The new Weaver profession is trained at the Weaver's Hut. Placing Farmer's Fields and changing their crops to Cotton will activate nearby Weavers. Cotton is cultivated and taken back for weaving into Bolts Of Cotton.
Last up in the line of new professions is the Tailor who take the Bolts Of Cotton and fashion them into Basic Clothing. Over time, villager clothing becomes shabby and in need of replacing. Villagers will buy new Basic Clothing by visiting the Tailor's Emporium.
RTS Controls
Unit command and control has become a little easier with the addition of Control Groups and Attack-Move. Holding CTRL+1...4 will assign the current selected units to the '1' key. Holding CTRL while right clicking somewhere will command units forward. Any enemies they come into contact with will trigger them to attack. We'll continue to adopt RTS conventions in future patches, including double left clicking a unit to select all units of the same type in the proximity.
Snow Biome
We've added the Snow Kit and Snow Monastery Kit, along with the lovingly designed 'Howling Tundra' map that we streamed the design of over on our Twitch Channel. The fantastic looking Monastery Of The Mangy Wolf is home to the Werefu Monks, a race first introduced in the original Tutorial. They've had a visual overhaul, and now come in three varieties: Warriors, Priests, and Head Priest Wolf Chow (pictured below), whom you may recall incited the Ritual Of The Bloody Fang to turn the Monks into lycans.
Also inhabiting the snowy wastes are Yeti, a sentient race allied with Jack Frost. We'll be expanding on Jack Frost, his minions, and their opposition to the Werefu Monks in future blogs.
Swamp Biome
The Swamp Biome received a solid upgrade in 0.2.11 with the arrival of the Goblin Village Kit, and the Toadkin Race. The Goblin Village Kit adds several starter buildings that map designers can use to create convincing goblin villages.
The Toadkin Kit adds the Worker, Warrior, and a placeholder for the King, sat on his palanquin. We took a closer look at Toadkin in last month's dev blog.
Environment Settings and Weather
Noticed that everything has started to look better? That's because we've added environment settings, enabling you to set mood lighting and weather for each map using the Editor. Weather can be enabled if you want rain or snow. We've also tweaked the ambient settings for all the available zones.
Supersampling
For players with high end PC's, we've added supersampling, accessible via the in-game Console. Supersampling unlocks rendering at higher than native resolutions, scaling down the result back to your native resolution. The results are a terrific boost to visual fidelity, helping world detail pop. The downside is that you need a powerful graphics card with at least 1GB of gpu memory.
Patch 0.2.11 includes a number of bug fixes and minor enhancements. For the full list of changes, please read the Patch Notes. If you like what we're doing, now is a great time to pick up a copy of Folk Tale with a 25% discount in the Steam Sale. Alternatively, leaving a few kind words in a review would be very much appreciated.
