Vonkelveld · published
v0.34.0 is about looking at your world and understanding it. Six things were wrong with what you saw; all six are fixed.
Every city is its own. Each place now carries a colour drawn from the tradition of the region it stands in — neighbours read as kin, and no two of them are alike. A place keeps that colour for its whole life, whatever becomes of the towns around it.
A skyline you know it by. Any place grown large enough raises one great work at its heart — a ring of standing stones, a moot hall, a bell tower, a cathedral, a citadel, an observatory — chosen by the place itself and by what its age has learned to build. You will start recognising cities from across the map.
Walls, and what they are made of. A town that has learned to build encircles itself: timber palisade first, then stone with towers at its corners, then a true fortress. The wall is not decoration — what it is made of tells you what the place has become. Towns too small or too young stand open.
A mark beside the name. Every named place now wears a small sigil in its own colours, so you can pick a city out before you have finished reading its name.
The worked land. Fields now ring a settlement and follow the water out into the country, with country folk living among them where before there was nobody at all. And the fields stopped blinking: a plot used to live barely longer than it took to grow in, so it spent its whole existence arriving and departing. Worked land now stands for generations, as it should.
Age is something gathered, not something lost. Buildings and people no longer fade toward transparency as they age. They weather, they lean, they gather grime and patch and repair. Nothing that is still standing is see-through.
The crowd has somewhere to be. People walk with purpose instead of wandering, and some of them walk together — you will see a household set out as one.
Roads that read like roads. And a road nobody walks any more returns to the land instead of lingering as a pale line across it.
The year turns the shape of the world. The seasons now move more than the colour of the ground.
A finished age stops counting. When a scenario reaches its ending and you choose to play on, the score and the achievements close with it. The age is over; what follows is yours, and it is not a score.
Roll a world. A Randomize option now sits under the advanced settings of a new age.
Up close, a wall is a wall. Seen from inside a town, the ramparts running north and south had been drawn as a row of separate blocks with gaps between them. They are continuous masonry now.
Continuing an older age: a world kept by v0.33.0 or earlier will be rebuilt from its own record when you load it, rather than resumed from its saved position — the first load takes a little longer and nothing is lost. The worked land changed how it grows, and we would rather rebuild your age honestly than resume it under rules it never lived. Finished ages and their scores are untouched.