After an intensive polishing and testing period, the new Health & Security update is now live! A special thank you to everyone who helped us iron out the bugs on the beta branch for this update!
The Health & Security update is the second major milestone in our EA roadmap, adding new buildings, items, services and challenges - both in single- and multiplayer games! Let's run through all the things we added in this update!
Until now, you've had to take care of building maintenance and fire safety, but the plan has always been to expand on this for more variety and challenge. In this update, we're adding two more services:
The health service introduces the need for your folks to stay healthy. If they become sick they will work and move slower, and - depending on the difficulty - may even die! This service unlocks when your settlement reaches the "Large village" tier, and adds a new production chain for medicine, as well as a new building that grows and harvests herbs. A doctor is required to distribute herbs to your folks, and to provide a place for your folks to visit if they become sick.
Folklands is a peaceful game, and we are going to great lengths to keep it this way. However, lots of people like having an element of danger and challenge - and your folks like to feel safe, regardless of how dangerous it really is. As you build your settlement, you may notice bandits roaming around the map. They'll leave you alone for a while, but when you reach the "Small town" tier, they might start to take an interest in your buildings and goods. To prevent this, build walls and gates, and employ Guards to patrol your settlement. A good settlement is a safe settlement, that's what we always say!
We've been playtesting the game with you players a lot in the recent months and added tons of nice tweaks and new features to help you enjoy the game. We'll try to list them all, but we may have forgotten some!
Pubs: The pub no longer requires you to manually stock up on beer, reducing micro management.
In addition, there's now a "Visitors" section you can look at, showing who's currently having a good time in the pub instead of being out and about plowing the fields. If that's your thing.
Houses: Added more visible warning symbols to show what's going on with the villagers inside
Villager information: Redesigned the villager information popup to better show their current state of happiness, and how their needs and desires are met.
Transporter utilization: It's always been important to keep an eye on the workload of your transporters, but this was hidden away in the settlement overview screen. It's now also visible in the bottom right corner, together with the Settlement progression, letting you quickly adjust when needed.
Kingdom quests: Kingdom quests no longer spam pop-ups on your screen - instead, a small notification is shown when a new quest is available which lets you accept them when you're ready. We also added a new button to automatically stock up the required resources for a quest.
Production information: Each resource-producing building now shows you an overview of their production for the last 10 weeks. This lets you quickly see if something is wrong with the production, and track how changes to your settlement improves or reduces it!
Resource distribution: A new toolbar button lets you see where and how frequent different resources are distributed around your settlement. This makes identifying bottlenecks or resource hogs a lot easier!
Improved tooltips and panels: The top tooltips can now be pinned if you want to inspect them closer, and new tooltips have been added to explain things like education and villager levels.
Better education: Building upon the improvements in the previous update, you can now easily educate any of your folks from the school, and in general, tracking the education level of - and educating - your folks is now a lot easier.
Tons of new tips and quests: We added a lot more quests and tips to help guide you through the progression of the game.
We may have forgotten some things, but fear not - we're not going anywhere! We really really think you'll love this update as much as we've enjoyed working on it. If you have feedback, questions, suggestions or issues - don't hesitate to report them in the forums or join our Discord where we hang out and play.
Now, go out and play the new update!