Multiplayer
In multiplayer, you each control a tribe, and can work cooperatively, sharing and connecting your villages to create trading hubs, shared accommodation, and large scale building projects. Play in persistent dedicated servers, host a LAN game, or invite a Steam friend to join. Set up and play Sapiens privately with your friends, or join public servers and explore villages built by hundreds of other players.
AI Tribes and Trading
Now all of those thousands of tribes that you can choose from when you start the game have come to life! If you choose somewhere with a lot of nearby tribes, they will now exist as complex AI controlled villages, with their own industries, trade requests and items to sell. Tribes will also establish themselves around you over time, and can offer unique types of items and resources that can be difficult or impossible to find elsewhere.
Once you have greeted a member of the tribe, you can complete quests, and supply goods that they require to purchase goods in return. These goods can be moved around with sleds, including a covered variant to keep things fresh. Just don't start taking things without asking, or they may get upset!
Major new multiplayer and AI tribe features:
- Dedicated server for Windows and Linux with cross platform play on macOS and Windows. Steam friend invites and LAN hosting.
- Adds non-player simulated tribes to trade with, and a new quest and favor system, with trade offers and requests.
- Villages are generated with huts, crafting areas, fires, kilns and large quarries. Everything they need to keep them going so they can supply your goods.
- There are 4 types of village, each focusing on a particular industry - rock tools, bread, pottery, and bronze.
- Sleds and covered sleds - It's a moveable storage area! Instruct your sapiens to drag them around where you like, or create send and receive orders to automatically transport goods between other tribes or within your own village.
- Tool racks and shelves - New specialty storage furniture, to help store and display your tools and resources.
- Multiple storage area sizes, with a 1x1 and 4x4 variant added.
- Improved and simplified logistics routes, by replacing them with send and receive orders.
- Improved initial map selection, with better controls, more map detail, and better tribe distribution.
More new features:
- Limitless movement - You can now move as far away from your tribe as you like, exploring freely.
- Higher population cap, with optimizations and AI improvements.
- Multiple tribes - You can create and play as multiple different tribes in the same world in both single player and multiplayer.
- Auto assign for roles - To reduce the micromanagement requirement, there is a checkbox to allow your sapiens to automatically be assigned to roles if they are idle and there is no one else.
- Craft maintain orders - To further reduce micromanagement, you can now easily maintain a set quantity of crafted items.
- Research with multiple sapiens at once - You can speed up research and get bonus skills by using multiple sapiens to research the same type of item. However later game research tasks now take longer to balance this.
- Major improvements to the sapien AI. As a result, tribes are now more efficient, and get more done in a day.
- Sapiens now automatically gather food from nearby trees if they are very hungry.
- Campfires now repel all mobs within a 100m radius.
- New events panel, with a list of previous notifications.
- Click and drag or hold 'E' to plant lots of plants quickly.
- Many minor improvements to the UI, including the ability to type to search for most menus, better text entry support, the ability to select all plant types, a button to zoom to the closest storage area in the resources panel, and much more.
- Further improved graphics, shadows and lighting in a number of areas.