Sep 18, 2023

Going Medieval - SeVerin

Greetings medievalists!

Let’s continue the water discussion: First, we’ll talk about how it will affect buildings.

Water will not be able to pass through walls, floors and roofs. Now, since these elements have variations (like rounded walls), it may appear as water should pass through, but keep in mind that variations are just cosmetic and don’t change anything regarding their functionality. Certain types of these construction elements will allow water to pass through, like: grated floors, wicker, barn and grated floors.

Things that don't block water (above) & things that block water (below)

Open doors will let water in, regardless of door type. Open windows, on the other hand, will let water in but only a certain amount, resulting in shallow water on the other side (e.g. room).

When it comes to production buildings, being in water will stop their production. Yes, even shallow water will stop production, so be careful with your experiments. How can you remove water from such places? Dig holes, place barriers, because, if you don’t do so - water is there to stay.

With water comes wetness, so even if you get rid of it, the marks and effects will stay for a short period of time. Water affecting the temperature will be evident during summer, as it will emit coldness.

Upon hearing news about the water, many of you mentioned drawbridges as a must-have thing. We agree, but they will come a bit later, as we still have to work on them.

We’re aware that many of you suggested introducing watermills. That’s a nice idea, but we’ve thought about its incorporation and, from our perspective, it would increase the production chain side of the game. Put bluntly: if you imagine a gameplay spectrum with Factorio on one side (as a representative of production heavy games) and Sims on the other (as a representative of life simulation games), we want to lean more to the Sims side. It would look cool, we admit, but we want to make them a smart integration to the rest of the systems. Since we’ve already planned this update carefully, we decided that watermills are not a priority at the moment, nor are fountains. We’ll definitely notify you once we get back to them.

Another thing we want to mention that is not happening is Ice voxel. We know what you think, once the winter comes, your nearby river/lake should freeze. Freezing lakes should be walkable and mined and extracted into ice blocks which you would use for cooling down your storages/rooms. It’s a wonderful and realistic idea! But our recently introduced depth levels pose an issue: if we allow water freezing, that means every level should be turned into an ice block. That would result in 3 different levels of walkable surfaces within one voxel. The thing is, our technology and gameplay is not set up to support that. Without going too much into logistics and potential code issues, our hard surfaces are all positioned as one voxel. That’s why we’re unable to introduce things like half-walls - they would offer only aesthetics but not functionality, and we already have nice alternatives for them (merlons).

Just to clarify - we’re not saying this is impossible. We’re saying that given our available technology, we’ve chosen to focus our priorities elsewhere. So yeah, our core setup opted us out of this feature.

Alrighty, that is enough talk about water and hard surfaces. Next time we’ll talk about how water affects all living things - humans, animals and even plants. There is a lot to say in that area. See ya in two weeks!

Stay Medieval,

Foxy Voxel

Sep 4, 2023

Medieval Monday #38

Going Medieval - SeVerin

Greetings medievalists!

It’s not uncommon for you to influence our development process. That is happening all the time, in both big and small ways. Among all of your suggestions, one feature stood out as the most requested, and we always thought about it, but wanted to tackle it once the game’s roadmap is done. Well, you continued to voice your opinion about this feature and we couldn’t put it aside anymore. It had to be done, at least in some capacity. So that’s what we are doing at the moment.

We’re happy to announce that water is coming to Going Medieval.

First, we want to talk about options we considered and challenges they posed, before we go into discussing the system we’ve chosen.

We had to establish clear 2d rules before we could move to 3D.

The first thing we had to decide is water distribution mechanics. Its speed, weight, amount distribution, etc. We didn’t want to turn the game into a realistic water simulation, but that doesn’t mean that we didn’t experiment. We tried to experiment with fast simulation and distribution (voxel to voxel), but this would unnecessarily be taxing for the CPU. Water pressure posed a similar issue - initially we consider water pressure as an attribute, which would lead to creation of underwater caves (and even building destruction by water) and while it seemed cool, you would not be able to clearly understand what was going on while layer calculation would work full time, again, taxing the CPU.

Showcase of some of our 3d experiments.

After some trial and error, it was decided - water should be simulated just enough to keep and maintain predictable behavior, while offering additional control from the player (e.g. for creations of dams and lakes). Think Minecraft, where it would fill empty spaces (if available) step by step. So, in a way, water will most of the time appear as static and not simulated. Allow us to explain.

Water voxel has the same size as your regular voxel, meaning 1x1x3m. Water voxel will have a depth value which will be filled out as the water voxel moves to the empty space. This depth will have 3 different levels (four if you count being empty), and depending on the amount of water, will provide certain limitations for settlers, but more on that in another MMT.

“What about the traversal of water between the levels?”, some of you might ask. Well, if water reaches the end of the level (height-wise) and needs to “fall down”, in that case, a waterfall will appear.

Does this mean water will be infinite? Not exactly. Water will be spawned by a water inflow voxel. Think of inflow voxels as water sources for rivers and ponds - they will constantly deploy water until that water covers the inflow voxel. Inflow voxels will not be buildable as their number is calculated based on the map seed and optimized for average CPU performance. You will be able to spawn them with dev tools, and this way you will be able to add water to the old maps that don’t have generated rivers (use it at your own risk).

Okay, this is a good point to stop this blog, but don’t worry - there is still a lot to talk about. How water affects buildings and settlers, new map type, and a couple more surprises. We’ll continue this topic in two weeks, but until then, feel free to discuss potential scenarios and how you wanna use what you read here.

Stay medieval,

Foxy Voxel

Aug 1, 2023

Update #9.5 | Coin Bartering

Going Medieval - SeVerin

Greetings medievalists!

August’s mini update, officially titled “Coin Bartering” (0.15.4) is now live on Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG. All those fixes and improvements from the experimental branch are now stable, tested, and present in this update! We call this one a “mini-update” because it doesn’t have new features, rather a much needed overhaul of existing ones.

But first, for an optimal user experience, we suggest that you:

Disable Mods if you have them

Please note: if you are using unofficial mods you might experience crashes or even an inability to start the game. If this occurs, turn the mods off before starting the game. If the problem persists, be sure to delete all of the folders in the steamapps\common\Going Medieval and then verify the game files.

Now, onto the update:

Look at this update as a couple of smaller QoL improvements that will in no way revolutionize the way you play the game, but it might give you “hey, this is a cool moment”. We’ll categorize them and try to explain the general idea behind some of the choices made. Let’s get to it.

Animal Protectors

A lot of players reported that it's frustrating that foxes and polecats would just simply go into your settlement and kill small animals. So we added a few things:

Pet dogs/wolves/bears (while awake) now protect animals in their proximity. Regular domesticated animals will not perform this function.
Torches, braziers, and production buildings (while the flame is on) also protect animals around them. NOTE: they’ll protect them, even through walls.
Settlers (while awake) also protect small animals.

The protection works as follows:
When the small animal enters the proximity zone (emitted by the stuff we mentioned above), they'll get protected. During that time in that area, they’ll not be attacked by predators.

Leaving the proximity will still have them protected for the next 2.5 hours
If the small animal is targeted by a predator and that small animal goes back to the protector's range, the predator will back off immediately.

Some things to note:

Animals that come with traders can't be targeted by wild animals
Animals that come with traders will never sleep
Animals returning with the caravan if returning at night will be protected from predators for some time
Animals returning with caravans will not fall asleep in the next 8 hours
Animals purchased from merchants will not fall asleep for the next 8 hours

Now let’s talk wound tending and healing QoL!

Healing v2

We haven't touched wounds and wound tending since the Early Access launch, so we wanted to add a set of changes to make everything a bit more QoL-fy :)

Patient Job

The Patient job type is now added to the JOB panel. This job just makes settlers go to beds and wait for their wounds to be tended. So it's basically like convalescence but if convalescence is not active or is a low priority that settler will continue doing other stuff. This solves the issue of wanting your settlers to be tended but you don't want them to convalesce so they can get stuff done :)

Self Tend

Players can turn this on in the MANAGE panel. It's self-explanatory - settlers can tend their own wounds. If they choose to do so, they’ll get a bit less XP for that and the tend quality will have a low quality.
NOTE: If you turn off the Tend job in the jobs panel, this will disable self-tend as well.

Healing Kit in pouch

Settlers will carry healing kits in pouches now (only healing kit items - not herbs, tallow or honey) and use them when tending instead of going to get healing kits somewhere far.

Jobs have different priority depending on hour type

Some of you reported that it doesn't make sense that wounded settlers would not convalesce while in leisure/any hour type. Well, in the old system, “rest” was considered a job and jobs get low priorities in these hour types. It was… a messy system. But check it now!

We now have the option to forcefully set priorities and also enable jobs per hour type.

Carry wounded’s goal: settlers will carry wounded even if they don't have a tend job turned on and in leisure/any hour. This makes them a bit more natural at acting and saving their friends even if they are in leisure mode.
Tend wounds will have higher priority than, let's say, needing to play backgammon, because community. BUT, they’ll still be willing to ignore the call if the player turned off tend job for that settler.

Main takeaway here’s are:

Patient/Convalescence Job - These jobs have a pretty high priority in leisure/any hours and are forcefully enabled even if the player disables them in the jobs panel.
This way the jobs panel is 100% efficient only in Work hours.

Now let’s talk wounds...

Wounds v2

Wounds can now be categorized 3x different ways:

First category will not trigger the settler need to be tended. This is used for wounds like bruises that can't be tended with medicine and time will heal itself.
Second category is used for wounds like scratches. They need to be tended sure, but the settlers do not need to lay down in order for that wound to pass.
Third category is Minimum Wound Severity. Like before, as time goes by wounds lose severity and are weaker in their effects. But now, let's say the settler breaks a leg. They will need tending and rest for a few days but then when the wound heals 90% it will hit the minimum severity threshold and will still be there with some small effects on walk speed etc, but will heal on its own over time with no need for further tending or rest.

Wounds can now be tended anywhere! Settlers can tend to other settlers anywhere, no need for them to be in a bed. Just two small notes here:

NOTE 1: The settlers still prioritize taking them to a bed and then tend them. Also the tend wound anywhere only works if the settler that is being tended has fainted and is laying bleeding on the ground and there are no beds available to tend.
NOTE 2: Player can right click priorities tend on any settler anywhere and that should work without a bed for the patient to be in.

Now let’s talk more fun stuff:

Coin Bartering

We added gold coins as resources to the game

Yes, at the end of the 14th century, 95% of the global population perished due to rampant plague. While the pure survivor and willingness to persevere at any cost were on the minds of those folks, you just know that at one point someone would try to reintroduce familiar monetary systems, because the current value can be deemed to abstract at some crucial points.

Coins are in the game!

Coins can not be produced, only acquired through trading
Coins always have a value of 1 and never change when bartering like other resources do.
Almost all Merchants have some amount of coin
Coins appear at the top of the bartering list when merchants arrive (if the player and merchants have no coins then it will not appear)
Coins can be smelted into gold ingots (if you want to do that)

This basically means that all wealth has been rebalanced. Everything is a bit less valuable now. But all other wealth parameters (attack size and strength, influence, room impressiveness, expectation etc) have been scaled down accordingly. This is done so we can keep the simple rule of 1 gold coin being 1 wealth/value equal. We’ll see how and if the system will continue to expand but this seems like a good starting place. Maybe you’ll want to keep your wealth only through value which you can easily manipulate? Maybe you like your dungeons filled with coins because that’s how old school you are? Maybe, down the development, certain quests will only be done via the old good coin deed. Now, now, we’re not promising anything here nor anytime soon - just leaving your imagination to potential scenarios.

Birds

This is 100% a visual thing and has nothing to do with gameplay. NOTE: Environmental effects need to be turned on in the graphical options for birds to be visible.

Birds sometimes fly over the map - depending on the time of year and time of day, also their type and direction change with time of year.
Birds sometimes fly out of trees and bushes when settlers start chopping them down. This is random and just happens sometimes (also dependent on the time of day and year).
Birds should not appear at night. This can sometimes happen if they appear 1s before sundown and fly over when the night has started.
Crows will sometimes fly around carcasses of humans and larger animals after a while.
Only for piles that are not in the home area (this is about 10x grid spaces around a player's building) and that are not under the roof.
Crows will sometimes spawn as they eat the carcasses (has no gameplay effect).
Will fly off when a settler is nearby or when animals haul the carcass away.
If a flock of crows appear while the settler is in the proximity of the pile the crows will not fly away until the settler a) picks up the pile, b) exits the proximity and enters again.

And let’s end this mini update with building cosmetics

We have new Paintings and Tapestry variations. We added 3x new variations to paintings and 2x new tapestry variations.

You might even recognize some of them as certain designs are inspired by modern memes and situations here and there.

We also updated the portrait art for various factions:

Now all factions have unique portraits except mountain bandits, looters, river bandits, Ravagers, and Society of Fellows. This will be changed in the later updates.

Bugs and fixes.

Fixed the issue where unconscious settlers would sometimes spawn in the middle of a voxel, essentially making them stuck in torment.
Fixed the issue where sometimes wild Foxes would sleep in pens, and they feed from inside pens during the day even though other sources of food are available on the map
Fixed the issue where Wild polecats would sleep in stockpiles in the settlement on voxels on which there is something deposited already.
Fixed the issue where If a caravan returns at night, the animals in the caravan will immediately fall asleep. This would lead to small animals like chickens being killed by predators.
Fixed issue where shelves would drop stockpiled items when building floors below them.
Fixed several text issues
Fixed huge stuttering with late game settlements that had a large amount of piles.

Known issues

Settlers will not choose the closest production building (if there are more of the same type), but the one that has a production set first in the global list of productions.
If your settlers are experiencing weird animations with some actions, be sure to cap the game's FPS in the game's options. Cap it to 60fps. If the issue persists, cap it at 30.

That would be all for the official update notes. New patches and improvements will be deployed accordingly. In the meantime, feel free to post your experience regarding the new update on Steam discussions. If you want more dynamic/direct communication - head over to our Discord server. Even though we might not reply, we are reading everything.

Foxy Voxel

Follow us on Twitter: @going_medieval
Our Facebook: Foxy Voxel
We are on TikTok, too: @going.medieval

Jul 26, 2023

Experimental Branch Patch (0.15.3)

Going Medieval - SeVerin

Greetings players! The newest patch (0.15.3) is now live on all platforms on the experimental branch. Please save your progress and restart your game client to update. You should be able to load normally and continue playing. If you have any problems, please let us know.

For those that missed the full log of the new experimental update, you can find it here.

Before we go to regular bugs and fixes, we added something to spice up the current medieval space... You know, a bit of immersion here and there. :)

Birds

This is 100% a visual thing and has nothing to do with gameplay.
NOTE: Environmental effects need to be turned on in the graphical options for birds to be visible

Birds sometimes fly over the map - depending on the time of year and time of day, also their type and direction change with time of year.
Birds sometimes fly out of trees and bushes when settlers start chopping them down. Random, just happens sometimes (also depends on the time of day and year).
Birds should not appear at night. This can sometimes happen if they appear 1s before sundown and fly over while the night is started.
Crows will sometimes fly around carcasses of humans and larger animals after a while.
Only for piles that are not in the home area (this is about 10x grid spaces around a player's building) and that are not under the roof.
Crows will sometimes spawn as eating the carcasses (has no gameplay effect).
Will fly off when settler is nearby or when animals haul the carcass away.
If a flock of crows appear while the settler is in the proximity of the pile the crows will not fly away until the settler a) picks up the pile, b) exits the proximity and enters again.

Bugs and Fixes

Fixed the issue where some settlers wouldn't produce books if UNTIL was used for counting.
Fixed the issue that prevented snow from melting on grated floors even though temperatures are above 0C.
Fixed the issue where the brazier would emit heat but would not show the fire visual effect.
Fixed the issue where settlers would tend to ignore the beds' players assign them and go back to their previous beds.
Fixed the issue where a settler would appear stuck on the ladder when training animals.
Fixed several text issues.

Quality of life improvements

Healing Pouch has a proper graphic now.
Job overrides tooltip added (rest, tend and patient jobs have some additional info in tooltips).
Tend goal is now a higher priority than the patient job (in any/leisure/sleep hour types).
Fixed issue with Archers not engaging in ranged combat in some situations
Fixed issue with late-game saves becoming sometimes bloated and crashing the autosave function

Known issues:

Settlers will not choose the closest production building (if there are more of the same type), but the one that has a production set first in the global list of productions.
If your settlers are experiencing weird animations with some actions, be sure to cap the game's FPS in the game's options. Cap it to 60fps. If the issue persists, cap it at 30.

DISCLAIMERS:
⚠️ We decided to keep Dev version of the game on the experimental branch, and that means that a Dev log with red text will appear from time to time. This will help us get more info from your side when crashes and bug reports occur.
⚠️ Also, at the moment, the experimental and the main branch are very different. You should not play saves from the experimental branch on the main one as it can cause various bugs - please avoid doing this.

As always, use F10 and/or the experimental bug subforum for reporting experimental issues. Thank you!

Foxy Voxel

Jul 20, 2023

Experimental Branch Patch (0.15.2)

Going Medieval - SeVerin

Greetings medievalists!

As promised - we have a mini update for you GM enjoyers. 0.15.2 is now live on the experimental branch on all stores. Please save your progress and restart your game client to update. You should be able to load normally and continue playing. Once it is properly tested, we will push it live in the official update! Here are the notes for what awaits you in this version, but first, a warning:

Disable Mods if you have them

Please note: if you are using unofficial mods you might experience crashes or even an inability to start the game. If you do, turn the mods off before starting the game. If the problem persists, be sure to delete everything in the steamapps\common\Going Medieval and then verify the game files.

Now, onto the update:

Look at this update as a couple of smaller QoL improvements that will in no way revolutionize the way you play the game, but it might give you “hey, this is a cool moment”.

Animal Protectors

A lot of players reported that it's frustrating that foxes and polecats would just simply go into your settlement and kill small animals. So we added a few things:

Pet dogs/wolves/bears (while awake) now protect animals in their proximity
Torches, braziers, and production buildings (while the flame is on) also protect animals around them. NOTE: they’ll protect even through walls. This is an intentional design choice that helps us utilize CPU properly atm.
Settlers (while awake) also protect small animals.

The protection works as follows:

When the small animal enters the proximity zone (emitted by the stuff we mentioned above), they'll get protected. During that time in that area, they’ll not be attacked by predators. Leaving the proximity will still have them protected for the next 2.5 hours
If the small animal is targeted by a predator and that small animal goes back to the protector's range, the predator will back off immediately.

Some things to note:

Animals that come with traders can't be targeted by wild animals
Animals that come with traders will never sleep
Animals returning with caravan if returning at night will be protected from predators for some time
Animals returning with caravans will not fall asleep in the next 8 hours
Animals purchased from merchants will not fall asleep or the next 8 hours

Now let’s talk wound tending and healing QoL!

Healing v2

We haven't touched wounds and wound tending since the Early Access launch so we wanted to add a set of changes to make everything a bit more QoL-fy :)
Patient Job
Patient job type is added to the JOB panel. This job just makes settlers go to beds and wait for their wounds to be tended. So it's basically like the convalescence but if convalescence is not active or is a low priority that settler will continue doing other stuff. This solves the issue with wanting your settlers to be tended but you don't want them to convalesce so they can get stuff done :)
Self Tend
Players can turn it on in the MANAGE panel. It's self explanatory - settlers can tend their own wounds. If they choose to do so, they’ll get a bit less XP for that and the tend quality will have a low quality.
NOTE: If you turn off the Tend job in the jobs panel, this will disable self tend as well.
Healing Kit in pouch
Settlers will carry healing kits in pouches now (only healing kit items - not herbs, tallow nor honey) and use them when tending instead of going to get healing kits somewhere far.
Jobs have different priority depending on hour type
Some of you reported that it doesn't make sense that wounded settlers would not convalesce while in leisure/any hour type. Well, in the old system, “rest” was considered a job and jobs get low priorities in these hour types. Some of you tried to amend this by turning off the rest of the job, but then they would never rest even when having nothing to do. It was… a messy system. But check it now!

We now have the option to forcefully set priorities and also enable jobs per hour type.

Carry wounded goal: settlers will carry wounded even if they don't have a tend job turned on and in leisure/any hour. This makes them a bit more natural at acting and saving their friends even if they are in leisure mode.
Tend wounds will have higher priority than, let's say, needing to play backgammon, because community. BUT, they’ll still be willing to ignore the call if the player turned off the tend job for that settler.

Main takeaway here’s are:
Patient/Convalescence Job - These jobs have a pretty high priority in leisure/any hours and are forcefully enabled even if the player disables them in the jobs panel.
This way the jobs panel is 100% efficient only in Work hours.

Now let’s talk wounds.

Wounds v2

Wounds can now be categorized 3x different ways:
“needTend: false” - this wound will not trigger the settler to be tended. This is used for wounds like bruises that can't be tended with medicine and time will heal itself.
“needRest: false” - this is used for wounds like scratches. They need to be tended sure, but the settlers do not need to lay down in order for that wound to pass.
Minimum Wound Severity. Like before, as time goes by wounds lose severity and are weaker in their effects. But now, let's say the settler breaks a leg. They will need tending and rest for a few days but then when the wound heals 90% it will hit the minimum severity threshold and will still be there with some small effects on walk speed etc, but will heal on its own over time with no need for further tending or rest.
The good news is that wounds can now be tended anywhere!
Settlers can tend other settlers anywhere, no need for them to be in a bed. Just two small notes here:
NOTE 1: The settlers still prioritise taking them to a bed and then tend them. Also the tend wound anywhere only works if the settler that is being tended has fainted and is laying bleeding on the ground and there are no beds available to tend.
NOTE 2: player can right click priorities tend on any settler anywhere and that should work without a bed for the patient to be in
Now let’s talk more fun stuff:

Coin Bartering

We added gold coins as resources to the game

Yes, at the end of the 14th century, 95% of the global population perished due to rampant plague. While the pure survivor and willingness to persevere at any cost were on the minds of those folks, you just know that at one point someone would try to reintroduce familiar monetary systems, because current value can be deemed to abstract at some crucial points.
Coins are in the game, but don’t expect much from them for now.

Coins can not be produced, only gotten through trading
Coins always have a value of 1 and never change when bartering like other resources do.
Almost all Merchants have some amount of coin
Coins appear at the top of the bartering list when merchants arrive (if the player and merchants have no coins then it will not appear)
Coins can be smelted into gold ingots (if you want to do that)

And let’s end this mini update with cosmetics

We have new Paintings and Tapestry variations. We added 3x new variations to paintings and 2x new tapestry variations.

You might even recognize some of them as certain designs are inspired by modern memes and situations here and there.
We also updated the portrait art for various factions:
Now all factions have unique portraits except: mountain bandits, looters, river bandits, Ravagers, society of fellows. They still have the standard Forest bandit portrait

Bugs and fixes.

Fixed the issue where unconscious settlers would sometimes spawn in the middle of a voxel, essentially making them stuck in torment.
Fixed the issue where sometimes wild Foxes would sleep in pens, and they feed from inside pens during the day even though other sources of food are available on the map
Fixed the issue where Wild polecats would sleep in stockpiles in the settlement on voxels on which there is something deposited already.
Fixed the issue where If a caravan returns at night, the animals in the caravan will immediately fall asleep. This would lead to small animals like chicken to be killed by predators.
Fixed issue where shelves would drop stockpiled items when building floors below them.
Fixed several text issues
Fixed huge stuttering with late game settlements that had a large amount of piles.

Known issues:

Settlers will not choose the closest production building (if there are more of the same type), but the one that has a production set first in the global list of productions.
If your settlers are experiencing weird animations with some actions, be sure to cap the game's FPS in the game's options. Cap it to 60fps. If the issue persists, cap it at 30.
Healing kits look the same as the food pouch on the settler. Will be different. This is just for looks. Not important for gameplay