Update 0.2.9 — Nailcross, City Allegiances & Stability

A new update for Morhval: Ravenglaire is now available.

This update expands one of the systems I have wanted to develop for a while: making the cities of Ravenglaire feel less like static locations and more like places whose future can actually be influenced by the player.

Nailcross

Nailcross is a brand-new city introduced in this update, and one of the first settlements built around the new City Stability system.

Cities now have their own stability, representing how safe, functional and prosperous they currently are.

A stable city can maintain guards, merchants, services and local institutions. As stability falls, crime becomes more common, businesses may disappear, services can shut down and the city gradually becomes a much less safe place to live.

And the player can directly influence this.

Fight for the Cities — or Against Them

You can now become involved with individual cities and take Civic Assignments to help improve their situation.

These jobs can involve things such as:

• dealing with local threats

• recovering missing supplies

• protecting caravans

• rescuing citizens

• hunting known criminals

• securing dangerous locations

• helping maintain order around the settlement

Completing these assignments can strengthen the city and improve its stability.

But you do not have to be the hero.

Players who choose to associate themselves with the Blackroad can take the opposite approach.

Instead of helping cities recover, Blackroad assignments allow you to deliberately weaken them — attacking their infrastructure, disrupting trade, helping criminals and gradually pushing settlements toward collapse.

At sufficiently high standing with the Blackroad, it can even become possible to participate in the destruction of an entire settlement.

This also introduces a more meaningful choice between the two sides.

Supporting the cities closes certain doors with the Blackroad, while committing yourself to the Blackroad will make the organized settlements of Ravenglaire increasingly hostile toward you.

The goal is for this system to eventually create very different versions of Ravenglaire depending on how you choose to interact with the world.

More Variety in Procedural Assignments

Several procedural quest systems have also been revised.

Assignments such as Caravan Under Threat, civic contracts, organization jobs, local work, escorts and courier jobs now have improved destination selection.

The game remembers recently selected locations and tries to avoid repeatedly sending the player to the exact same dungeon or destination when other appropriate locations are available.

Regions with fewer bandit camps can now also make use of appropriate man-made dungeons as possible hideouts, giving contracts more variety across different parts of the map.

Fast Travel Improvements

Fast travel has received another pass.

The game now checks whether your horse has enough energy before beginning the loading process. If the journey is impossible, you will be told immediately instead of waiting for the destination to load first.

The amount of work performed before the loading screen appears has also been significantly reduced.

Terrain validation and other expensive operations are now handled after the transition begins instead of freezing the game immediately after selecting a destination.

City Population & Streaming

A large amount of work has gone into the way cities are loaded and simulated.

NPCs belonging to a city are now treated as persistent city actors, helping prevent important characters from disappearing as the player moves between different districts.

This particularly affects:

• market vendors

• municipal buildings

• Iron Watch personnel

• Athenaeum personnel

• guards

• merchants

• other city services

At the same time, keeping an entire city fully simulated was far too expensive.

The new system therefore keeps distant citizens present in the world while reducing their simulation cost. NPCs far away from the player can temporarily stop running physics, AI and other expensive processes while remaining loaded and visible.

Heavy interior details and distant collision geometry are also streamed more aggressively.

The intention is to keep cities populated without requiring the entire settlement to run at full simulation quality simultaneously.

Technical Changes

This update also includes a number of stability and performance improvements:

• Improved city NPC persistence

• Fixed several cases where service NPCs could disappear after travelling through a city

• Fixed NPCs potentially falling through terrain while distant city chunks were still being constructed

• Improved restoration of missing municipal and faction NPCs

• Reduced city CPU usage from distant NPC simulation

• Reduced unnecessary physics and terrain checks for distant citizens

• Improved urban interior and collision streaming

• Reduced streaming work performed every frame

• Improved fast travel loading behavior

• Reduced work performed before the loading screen

• Fixed horse energy being checked too late during fast travel

• Improved procedural quest destination rotation

• Fixed procedural contracts potentially reusing stale quest identifiers

• Improved handling of old cached civic assignments

There is still a lot I want to expand in this system, particularly regarding how extreme levels of stability change the appearance and functionality of a settlement.

But this update establishes the foundation: cities can now become places worth protecting — or targets worth destroying.

Thank you, as always, for playing and for continuing to report problems during Early Access!