Realmwright playtest update: 6 November
Hello playtesters! This build adds a lot, and we want your feedback on all of it. Tell us what breaks, what confuses you and what you love.
Notables, causes and the law
- A notable whose followers hate a law can lead a cause against it and petition you to change it. Refuse it and it grows toward a protest. Win the leader over with an office, an honour or a promise.
- Refuse a cause while its backers are angry and they march on the town hall until you give way, meet their leader or send them home. Refuse them again and they riot by night, burning the hall and looting nearby until dawn or until your guards break it up.
- Break up a riot while most of the town hates its law and a leader with devoted followers can rise by night. If they still hold the hall at dawn, the law goes their way for a year and their leader takes office.
- A notable who dies famous enough becomes a legend, or a saint of their god. Their followers keep their views, visit their grave, name children after them and tell the young about them. You can proclaim a dead notable a legend, or strike their name.
- A saint can be carried by a priest and the faithful to a tomb in a temple of their god, where prayer counts for more and their feast day is held.
- A notable hanged, or killed defending the town, can die a martyr their devoted keep faith with.
- Once your town is a village, a notable with enough devoted followers founds a faction. It pays dues, asks your leave to meet and asks you for a hall. If you refuse, it meets in secret.
- Factions whose leaders feel strongly opposite ways about a law now feud. Call both leaders to the town hall to make peace for a year.
- A notable famed as a captain or champion can found a war band once you build a guardhouse. Its members drill as a company you equip and command.
- Notables now give speeches, from a forum or a soapbox. Passers-by stop to listen, and some come to admire the speaker.
- Followers copy their notable: their trade, their pastimes and their god.
- Settlers who grow up under a law lean its way for life, and grieve it if it is replaced after being long held.
- The town now has offices (elder, reeve, judge, captain, high priest and more), with holders who are paid and can be challenged.
- A notable who is banished may ask years later to come home, or may return at the head of a raid. Realms may also ask to borrow a notable of yours.
- Houses rise from families with more than one notable. They share fame, hold great weddings and feud.
Families, children and homes
- Babies are here. Couples want children, mothers visibly carry them, labour is told as it happens (twins too), and a midwife or healer can bring a hard birth through safe.
- Babies need feeding, cradles and minders. Grandparents, older siblings and nurses take them on, and there is a nursery to leave them in.
- Children play by the ground and the sky: chase and hide-and-seek, skimming stones in summer, snowballs on lying snow, knucklebones on the doorstep in the rain.
- Children of six to eleven go to school every morning and learn to read. From eight they help carry goods near home.
- What a childhood holds (hunger, losing a parent, a birthday kept at home) can shape a child for good.
- Homes can now rise to several storeys. You can add a storey to any home, and each is a home of its own with its own household, larder and hearth.
- New kinds of home: the house (two storeys), the townhouse (two to four, built in rows along a street) and the tenement (flats let by the room). The rich expect a proper house.
- Delvings are dwarf-dug homes under stone, and hovels are rough shanties settlers put up when they have nowhere else.
- Rich households now take on servants: a maid, a cook, a steward, a nurse, a guard and an attendant. You can dress them in your household's colours.
- A new Service law lets servants be hired at will, by contract or for life, and slaves can serve too.
- Dwarves need eight hours a day under rock, so a dwarf who sleeps in the hold can work the fields all day content.
War and the sea
- Armies now have four grades: mob, levy, professional and elite. Elite horse ride out from your stables, and a mage can be given a guard of elite fighters.
- Companies fight at home: when the bell rings, a mob forms at your guardhouse. A captain can lead them if you let him.
- Water is a third school of magic. Its mages put out fires by calling water down on them, and in battle throw an ice bolt that never misses.
- Sea fights are rougher. Masts fall and drag at the ship, chain tears the sails and grape sweeps the deck, and your yard mends it all.
- Ship crews have more to do: a helmsman at the wheel, topmen out along the yards, hands swabbing and coiling in quiet hours and gun crews drilling at anchor.
- By day your guards go out and strike down a fiend at its door, once enough of them have gathered.
- Every warship has one of six looks, and the two sides are easier to tell apart.
Looks and sounds
- Faces are far more varied, with many more builds, noses, teeth, brows, beards and marks. A woman's face now reads as a woman's, and a ♂ or ♀ mark stands beside every named face.
- Archers carry their bows properly and draw them as they shoot. Troops read by their kit: wood and iron shields look different, plate wears a great helm, and elites wear a darker cape.
- Fiends now look like monsters, with violet hide, horns and glowing eyes.
- Every room has its own floor, from muck in the byres to veined marble in the temple, and there are sixteen new flooring choices.
- The world map draws settlements as stone walls, slate spires and canvas tents, and has a legend you can open with G.
- Every world now has a name of its own.
- The main menu stands on views of the moor, an isle, the harbour and the showcase town.
- Four new starts to try: a village, a port, a river town and a dwarf hold.
- Two new pieces of music: one for when danger comes or battle is joined, and one for the quiet hours.
- An ice bolt cracks and tinkles as it strikes, and water called down on a fire rushes and hisses.
Playing the game
- The ledger opens on Counsel, which tells you what to see to before it hurts: no beds for newcomers, food running out before harvest, short winter fuel and wants your people miss.
- The Now list warns of fires, deadly illness with nobody to treat it, foul water, homeless settlers, joblessness and unhappiness, each with a fix.
- Lessons teach you as you go, and a first-steps list ticks off as your camp grows.
- The build menu shows what each building gives, and a Wants row shows who is missing what and which buildings meet it.
- A new trade window lets you deal with a visiting caravan, side by side and line by line.
- Oxen and horses bought before you have a stable now graze by the wagon until there is room.
- You can draw a building by its outline, add wings and cut notches, and draw it again until the first tile is raised.
- Inner walls: divide a building into rooms, with doorways you can open and close.
- You can set a ground order to keep painted ground swept.
- A settler card has a Nature tab showing a settler's traits and ways.
- Feats now unlock things: a banner symbol, a talented founder or an origin for every start after.
- Coop is simpler: your name is your Steam name, and there are chimes and pings for who joins and leaves.
- Photo mode opens on the wide frame, and H keeps the HUD in the shot.
- The feedback form closes with a cross in its corner, like every other window.
Fixes
- Renting out a town home with a worn bed in it no longer leaves a save that will not load.
- A hungry settler now walks back to eat rather than starve at a post far from the stores.
- Wagon pigs no longer eat the hens' grain, so the animals stop going hungry in the first winter.
- New orders no longer start out paused.
- A founded town no longer loses its build menu after a trip to the world map.
- Settlers no longer take a post across water as if it were next door.
- The loading screen now shows tips that are true.