Dear Community,
Our current community poll is still ongoing, but a clear trend is already emerging: Expanding the trading system is currently at the top of your wishlist!
Of course, we haven't been sitting around doing nothing while the poll is running. Instead, we've been hard at work this week on a major trading update, implementing numerous new features and improvements.
Trading between settlements is becoming much more detailed and realistic.
From now on, both trading partners will need their own Trading House. Goods and coins will no longer simply be transferred between settlements. Instead, they must be physically transported. This is where trading donkeys come in, carrying goods and payments between Trading Houses.
But be careful: Your trade routes aren't automatically safe!
Enemy players can attack your trading donkeys and steal the goods or coins they're carrying. To protect your valuable shipments, you can assign soldiers to escort your trading caravans and defend them against potential attacks.
Maritime trading is also receiving a major expansion. With neutral trading islands, pirate islands, and automated ship trading routes, you'll have even more opportunities to buy and sell goods and establish new trade connections.
Alongside the trading system, we've also spent considerable time improving performance this week. In particular, we've further optimized pathfinding and calculations related to workers and goods transporters.
In one of our stress tests involving approximately 350 goods transporters, we increased the frame rate from 59 FPS to around 83 FPS. That's an improvement of approximately 41%!
However, I also want to be transparent about these results: The test was conducted on an NVIDIA RTX 5080. Not everyone has access to such a powerful graphics card, and actual performance improvements may vary depending on your hardware and the size of your settlement.
That's why your feedback is so important to us!
With these latest optimizations, our goal is to further improve WARSTEAD's performance, especially in larger settlements with many workers and goods transporters.
Since every player uses a different hardware configuration, we'd love to hear about your experiences with the update. Feel free to share your FPS results and general performance feedback with us on Discord. Your feedback helps us continue optimizing WARSTEAD across different systems.
You can now find direct links to our Discord server, Twitch channel, and YouTube channel in the game's main menu.
We've also implemented numerous additional improvements that we won't go into detail about here.
Here are the most important changes at a glance:
The new trading islands and additional features are currently undergoing their final testing phase.
If no major issues arise during the final tests, we plan to release the Trading & Performance Update this weekend (November 7–8, 2026)!
We want to make sure that all new features work reliably before releasing the update to everyone.
Thank you for your continued support, your many suggestions, and your participation in our community poll!
We're continuing to work hard to improve and expand WARSTEAD, one step at a time.
Your Nighthaven Interactive Team