Greetings Adventurers,
v0.3.3.5 is now live!
Well... this update ended up becoming quite a bit bigger than I originally planned. 😄
The idea was to keep this one relatively small before moving on to the larger Mountgate Harbor update. Instead, I ended up touching some fairly fundamental parts of the world and everyday gameplay.
That means Mountgate Harbor will arrive a little later than originally intended – but I think what came out of this update is well worth it.
A new destination has appeared in the mountains: Highcrag Mining Camp.
For now, Highcrag is a relatively humble outpost, opening up additional opportunities for Mining, Mountain Foraging and Mountain Hunting.
But consider this its foundation.
Highcrag is intended to gain more purpose as Vellgar continues to expand. There are a few reasons why this particular place now exists on the map, and you'll see more of those over time. 👀⛏️
And bringing a proper mountain location into the world led to something considerably bigger.
Locations across Vellgar now have actual elevation data, and the Travel System has been completely reworked to make use of it.
Going uphill and downhill now makes a difference.
A journey can take a different amount of time depending on which direction you're traveling. Climbing towards a mountain settlement takes more effort than making the journey back down.
It's a relatively simple idea, but one that makes the geography of Vellgar feel much more coherent. Mountains, valleys and lowlands are no longer just visual differences on the map – the terrain now actually influences your journey through the world.
Elevation also gave me the opportunity to rework the Weather System.
Weather can now react differently across the full elevation spectrum of the world, giving much more flexibility to how conditions behave between lowlands, settlements and mountainous regions.
Together with the Travel changes, this is one of those systems that might not look enormous on a feature list, but adds another layer to the worldbuilding and sense of place.
A mountain shouldn't just be a mountain because the background says so.
Now, being up there actually matters.
The other major focus of this update was something you'll probably notice during everyday gameplay: Inventory and Banking.
The Banking interface has been reworked to provide a cleaner and more organized workspace, while several unnecessary UI rerenders have been removed.
You can also now drag an item directly onto the Storage slot where you want it to go, making manual organization considerably smoother.
Combined, these changes should make moving and organizing items feel much less cumbersome.
The location icons across the World Map have been updated, including the newly added Highcrag Mining Camp.
Mountain Foraging and Mountain Hunting have also received another balancing pass, with additional resources added to the Mountain Foraging drop table.
And down in the plains, you can now find Onions while Foraging. 🧅
The Settings Menu has been reorganized into a cleaner structure to make individual options easier to find.
There's also a new setting specifically aimed at improving the readability of custom player name colors, giving you an alternative when certain player-selected colors don't work particularly well with your UI.
As usual, there's more going on underneath the larger additions.
Some Statistics that weren't properly appearing in the Journal have been fixed, XP and Item popups should no longer completely overlap when using UI scaling, and several other UI issues have been addressed.
I've also added an automatic loading fallback. If the game detects that you've become stuck during the loading phase, it can now attempt to recover from that state automatically rather than simply leaving you there.
This wasn't really supposed to become this update.
But between Highcrag, elevation-aware Travel and Weather, the Banking improvements and all the smaller changes surrounding them, I think v0.3.3.5 is one of those updates that moves Guilds of Mountgate another meaningful step in the right direction.
It also lays some groundwork that will become increasingly useful as the world continues to grow.
And with that foundation in place, work continues toward Mountgate Harbor.
Have fun exploring Highcrag! ⛏️❤️
See you in Vellgar!