Hey everyone! Welcome back for one last official update to the main Stonehearth game! This year, right in time for the holidays, we celebrate you--five years of the amazing community we’ve come to know and love. Fueled by gratitude for all the things you’ve done and built in Hearth, we’ve packed the following things into our last major release, Stonehearth 1.1:
The game runs better than ever! We’ve fixed a number of crashing bugs, optimized a wide variety of services and fixed a last few critical building bugs that have been getting your hearthlings stumped and stuck.
Though not exactly a performance fix, crafters now also no longer get stuck forever on items they do not have ingredients for, and for those of you too impatient to wait out the 30 Hearth days it takes for a town to build a cathedral (no time at all, really, compared to the real thing),
InstaBuild now works for all building templates made in the new builder.
The game now runs on OSX! The game is available now on Steam for Mac users, and a Humble Bundle version is in the works.
Are you wondering how the game will run on your mac? The good news is that it should run reasonably well, at least on the lowest of graphics settings.
Minimum Spec: (Works for about 20 hearthlings, and lowest graphics settings)
OS: macOS 10.11 (El Capitan)
Processor: Intel Core i5 1.7GHz
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: Radeon HD 5870 or GeForce 630, or Intel HD Graphics 4000
Hard Drive: 2GB available space
Recommended Spec: (Works for about 40 hearthlings, and good graphics settings! Minimum recommended for hosting a multiplayer server.)
OS: macOS 10.12 (Sierra) or later
Processor: Intel Core i7 2.8 GHz+
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M or better
Hard Drive: SSD, 5GB available space
What do those traveling merchants do between being called to shops? Thanks to some work from our summer intern, instead of just brief visits to your town, travelers will spend the day exploring your town, admiring the decorations and attractions around the city, buying items from your Market Trading Shelves, and resting in your designated traveler beds. Satisfied travelers may even leave a gift as compensation for a good stay!
Travelers will begin to consider visiting your town once you have at least one bed Reserved for Travelers, which you can do from the bed assignment menu. They can arrive in the morning or evening, and the number of visitors you get is limited by the number of beds and attractions that you have in your town. Attractions are placed items that include things like hearths, banners, benches, rugs, fountains, trading shelves, and various decorations. The value of the traveler’s gift is based on the city tier and the traveler's satisfaction, which is based on their appeal score after being in the town plus the quality of the bed they slept on. Higher satisfaction yields better gifts.
Also, on the subject of merchants and shops, Clan Amberstone’s cricket golems are super useful! It is now possible to get them earlier in the game through an encounter.
As part of our Kickstarter promise to our Legend Tier backers, we’ve added two new encounters to the game that were designed based on their input: a visit from the Royals of Hestia, and an encounter with The Dragonborn King. These encounters have a rare chance of occuring after your town hits Tier 2.
Sometimes, despite the best plans of players and hearthlings, hearthlings just get stuck while building, or in pits while mining. If a hearthling is stuck in a place where they have no access to food and are in danger of starving to death, you will now get a notification so you know about the problem and can unstick them. Usually building a ladder is sufficient but if they’re in a really bad state or are stuck in a wall or on top of a weird shaped piece of furniture, we’ve added a very handy hearthling teleport button, which you can find in the upper right section of the Character Sheet UI. You can use this button once per day per character. It is only clickable when a citizen is idle, to minimize conflicts with other AI routines.
Have you ever wanted to make a mod for Stonehearth? We now have an in-depth Modding Guide! Created by Ana/Relyss, available here.
We also made a number of changes to the game to allow modders greater control. For example, we’ve added the ability for modders to specify mod dependencies (loading order), we switched crafting from work units to effort, changed a number of data fields to mod-friendly arrays, and improved mod loading speeds by zipping mods as they’re being uploaded to Steam Workshop, for faster launch and loading screens in game. We’ve also updated SHED to work with mods that were created in the steam_uploads folder, so that modders can use this modding tool with greater ease.
Note to Modders: Here are the list of changes since the last unstable release.
But wait, there’s more! :) This isn’t the end of the road for Stonehearth. A number of hard working community modders are creating Stonehearth ACE. Look for more updates on this and few more extras in the weeks to come. :)
We thank you, truly and deeply, for your years of support. It has meant everything.
Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the water feature comes the end of our fellowship in Hearth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.