With the relatively short period between the content-rich November release of Patch 0.2.11 and the holidays, efforts were focused on improving gameplay and fixing bugs so that we could release the much improved 0.2.12 build in time for the festive break.

At the top of the community-requested improvements is Load/Save. While it's been available in game for several patches via the console, it wasn't functionally complete which rendered it unusable. Throughout December, Load/Save received much love, and in Patch 0.2.12 it is now stable. We've left it accessible via the console to allow for a period of both internal and community testing, so if you run into a problem please let us know, and submit your output_log.txt file (Player.log on OSX). Pending positive test results, we'll soon be moving forward with integrating Load/Save into the main UI.

The camera is now at a fixed angle, which becomes more shallow as you zoom in closer to the ground. There are numerous reasons for introducing this, the most important of which is maintaining frame rate. By angling down towards the ground in typical RTS fashion, we're able to reduce the amount of geometry in the camera frustum, which means lower frame rendering times and higher FPS. When we launched in Early Access we deliberately set the minimum specification quite high, with the intention of lowering them as development progressed. As optimizations continue to be added, its looking increasingly promising for being able to lower the minimum spec towards launch. We're now able to play a meaningful game at 25fps on an old Macbook pro with an Intel HD3000 graphics card. If you're not a fan of the new camera system, that's not a problem. You can disable camera locking under Settings and return to the previous camera setup.



Referring back to the Let's Play videos and streams we watched post-0.2.11, we noticed players weren't rotating their buildings as much as we expected due to convoluted controls. Revisiting the controls, we've opted for the more expected behaviour of placing rotation on the scroll wheel, overriding the normal zoom function when in construction mode. We also noticed some confusion over how close economy buildings had to be placed to resources. To address this, when placing buildings we added icons over nearby resources, setting them 100% opaque when they are within the building's boundary, and 50% opaque when they are outside but nearby (and therefore likely to be captured once the player unlocks the Expanded Boundary research).

Being able to watch play sessions is so incredibly useful to us in learning how players engage with the game, and where improvements are needed. It's one of the primary benefits of being in Early Access.

If you played Patch 0.2.11, you'll know that the Needs system we introduced expanded playability, but lead to some confusion because of a lack of information provided in the UI, and a likelihood that villagers would start leaving. Throughout December the team worked on improving the UI, adding quick-glance indicators to buildings so players can see if a building is missing workers, or how many workers out of the maximum are currently trained. Missing workers is the primary cause of not being able to meet villager needs later on, so knowing when there's a problem helps players address the issue before it starts affecting villager happiness. We also expanded the number of event notifications, and added advisor voice over to tell players when a worker had left or a building didn't have any workers (more on this later).



Digging deeper into the Building Dialog, the Workers tab received much needed attention, enabling players to recruit directly from the list of available Peasants (villagers without a profession), demote workers, and find them (thanks to the newly added camera panning system for event notifications). Auto-Recruit was enabled, easing micro-management demands for those wanting to simplify their tasks by automatically filling vacancies. This isn't quite perfect, and in the next patch we'll be adding checkboxes that appear allowing to you check which slots are to be auto-recruited; useful for early stages when you don't have enough villagers to be employing a full compliment of professions.



The Research tab in the Building Dialog became functional, especially for the Blacksmith buildings. You might recall the misleading "We don't have enough Iron Ingots" advisor line that would play when trying to unlock research. This was indicative of an increasing number of missing lines from the original tutorial; it was meant to be "We don't have enough research points." So this month we set about recording a new set of advisor lines scripted specifically for Sandbox, broadcast live in one of the Sunday Dev Hangouts. 7 hours of material recorded over two sessions was condensed into 70 minutes of candidate takes, from which 600 individual lines were then selected and dropped into game. These include lines for future features that will be coming online in the next several patches.



If you'd like to read all the improvements made in Patch 0.2.12, they are fairly self-explanatory in the Patch Notes.

Looking to the New Year, we have a number of short-term objectives:

- Sickness, death, and medicines - the Herbalist get their functional purpose, while the Monks will receive a second function (in addition to brewing Mead), to collect dead corpses and bury them in a new village Graveyard. Expect outbreaks of coughing and vomiting.

- The Needs system will be iterated and expanded, adding ranting behaviour leading to rebellion where some villagers run around setting fire to your buildings. Wells will become functional to help fire fighting.

- Clearing areas of Trees/Stone/Iron Ore deposits - we need more interaction with the environment. Being able to clear areas to make way for village expansion contributes to a feeling of progression and further investment in the ownership of what we as players are doing.

- Quest Designer - being able to trigger quests will allow handholding tutorial quests to ease new players into sandbox, as well as prototyping how the player will progress into the RPG side of the game. This eventually leads to portals, the hero party system, and the World Editor combining multiple location maps into a single playable experience.

- Monster Dens - these are a natural progression from the wave spawning system. On the Hard snow map especially, the wolf packs present a constant and frequent threat. It makes sense for such creatures to have a home/nest/den with health that can be attacked. Attacking a nest will cause any monsters inside to come out and fight, and destroying the nest will prevent future waves from attacking your village. Leaving a nest alone will result in a 'settler' monster spawning that goes looking for a site to establish a new nest.

- Enable the selling of Mead and Pumpkins.

- Implement the Crooked Cauldron, Stables, Jeweller's Shop and Marketplace with their associated professions.

- Enable building upgrades.

For a look further ahead, it's worth taking a look at the Development Roadmap.

That's it for 2014. From us all on the Folk Tale dev team, we hope you've all had a great holiday.

With the relatively short period between the content-rich November release of Patch 0.2.11 and the holidays, efforts were focused on improving gameplay and fixing bugs so that we could release the much improved 0.2.12 build in time for the festive break.

At the top of the community-requested improvements is Load/Save. While it's been available in game for several patches via the console, it wasn't functionally complete which rendered it unusable. Throughout December, Load/Save received much love, and in Patch 0.2.12 it is now stable. We've left it accessible via the console to allow for a period of both internal and community testing, so if you run into a problem please let us know, and submit your output_log.txt file (Player.log on OSX). Pending positive test results, we'll soon be moving forward with integrating Load/Save into the main UI.

The camera is now at a fixed angle, which becomes more shallow as you zoom in closer to the ground. There are numerous reasons for introducing this, the most important of which is maintaining frame rate. By angling down towards the ground in typical RTS fashion, we're able to reduce the amount of geometry in the camera frustum, which means lower frame rendering times and higher FPS. When we launched in Early Access we deliberately set the minimum specification quite high, with the intention of lowering them as development progressed. As optimizations continue to be added, its looking increasingly promising for being able to lower the minimum spec towards launch. We're now able to play a meaningful game at 25fps on an old Macbook pro with an Intel HD3000 graphics card. If you're not a fan of the new camera system, that's not a problem. You can disable camera locking under Settings and return to the previous camera setup.



Referring back to the Let's Play videos and streams we watched post-0.2.11, we noticed players weren't rotating their buildings as much as we expected due to convoluted controls. Revisiting the controls, we've opted for the more expected behaviour of placing rotation on the scroll wheel, overriding the normal zoom function when in construction mode. We also noticed some confusion over how close economy buildings had to be placed to resources. To address this, when placing buildings we added icons over nearby resources, setting them 100% opaque when they are within the building's boundary, and 50% opaque when they are outside but nearby (and therefore likely to be captured once the player unlocks the Expanded Boundary research).

Being able to watch play sessions is so incredibly useful to us in learning how players engage with the game, and where improvements are needed. It's one of the primary benefits of being in Early Access.

If you played Patch 0.2.11, you'll know that the Needs system we introduced expanded playability, but lead to some confusion because of a lack of information provided in the UI, and a likelihood that villagers would start leaving. Throughout December the team worked on improving the UI, adding quick-glance indicators to buildings so players can see if a building is missing workers, or how many workers out of the maximum are currently trained. Missing workers is the primary cause of not being able to meet villager needs later on, so knowing when there's a problem helps players address the issue before it starts affecting villager happiness. We also expanded the number of event notifications, and added advisor voice over to tell players when a worker had left or a building didn't have any workers (more on this later).



Digging deeper into the Building Dialog, the Workers tab received much needed attention, enabling players to recruit directly from the list of available Peasants (villagers without a profession), demote workers, and find them (thanks to the newly added camera panning system for event notifications). Auto-Recruit was enabled, easing micro-management demands for those wanting to simplify their tasks by automatically filling vacancies. This isn't quite perfect, and in the next patch we'll be adding checkboxes that appear allowing to you check which slots are to be auto-recruited; useful for early stages when you don't have enough villagers to be employing a full compliment of professions.



The Research tab in the Building Dialog became functional, especially for the Blacksmith buildings. You might recall the misleading "We don't have enough Iron Ingots" advisor line that would play when trying to unlock research. This was indicative of an increasing number of missing lines from the original tutorial; it was meant to be "We don't have enough research points." So this month we set about recording a new set of advisor lines scripted specifically for Sandbox, broadcast live in one of the Sunday Dev Hangouts. 7 hours of material recorded over two sessions was condensed into 70 minutes of candidate takes, from which 600 individual lines were then selected and dropped into game. These include lines for future features that will be coming online in the next several patches.



If you'd like to read all the improvements made in Patch 0.2.12, they are fairly self-explanatory in the Patch Notes.

Looking to the New Year, we have a number of short-term objectives:

- Sickness, death, and medicines - the Herbalist get their functional purpose, while the Monks will receive a second function (in addition to brewing Mead), to collect dead corpses and bury them in a new village Graveyard. Expect outbreaks of coughing and vomiting.

- The Needs system will be iterated and expanded, adding ranting behaviour leading to rebellion where some villagers run around setting fire to your buildings. Wells will become functional to help fire fighting.

- Clearing areas of Trees/Stone/Iron Ore deposits - we need more interaction with the environment. Being able to clear areas to make way for village expansion contributes to a feeling of progression and further investment in the ownership of what we as players are doing.

- Quest Designer - being able to trigger quests will allow handholding tutorial quests to ease new players into sandbox, as well as prototyping how the player will progress into the RPG side of the game. This eventually leads to portals, the hero party system, and the World Editor combining multiple location maps into a single playable experience.

- Monster Dens - these are a natural progression from the wave spawning system. On the Hard snow map especially, the wolf packs present a constant and frequent threat. It makes sense for such creatures to have a home/nest/den with health that can be attacked. Attacking a nest will cause any monsters inside to come out and fight, and destroying the nest will prevent future waves from attacking your village. Leaving a nest alone will result in a 'settler' monster spawning that goes looking for a site to establish a new nest.

- Enable the selling of Mead and Pumpkins.

- Implement the Crooked Cauldron, Stables, Jeweller's Shop and Marketplace with their associated professions.

- Enable building upgrades.

For a look further ahead, it's worth taking a look at the Development Roadmap.

That's it for 2014. From us all on the Folk Tale dev team, we hope you've all had a great holiday.

PC, Mac*

Sandbox Player: The camera is now a fixed angle to aid performance on lower end machines. The angle can be changed by holding LeftAlt and moving the mouse. Free camera rotation can be enabled under Settings->Gameplay
Sandbox Player: Console: Load/Save improved a lot
Sandbox Player: Added first batch of new advisor voice over lines
Sandbox Player: Improved building health UI with productivity and assigned worker count
Sandbox Player: Buildings with no workers now show permanent hover icon overhead
Sandbox Player: Field hover name now shows which crop is planted
Sandbox Player: Clicking event notifications zooms to focal point for some event types
Sandbox Player: Mouse scroll wheel now rotates building when in placement mode
Sandbox Player: during construction placement mode, resources nearby building will be shown as 100% opaque if the resource is within the building’s boundary, 50% opaque if outside and close by
Sandbox Player: Selecting an existing economy building will show resource icons over resources within the boundary
Sandbox Player: When the last worker at a building abandons the village, the Advisor will tell you
Sandbox Player: Massively reduced gold earned from selling finished goods
Sandbox Player: Building Dialog Worker Tab: Worker highlight fixed
Sandbox Player: Building Dialog Worker Tab: Find button enabled
Sandbox Player: Building Dialog Worker Tab: Auto-Recruit enabled
Sandbox Player: Building Dialog Worker Tab: Correct profession portraits now showing
Sandbox Player: Advisor now warns when you are trying to train your last peasant and prevents you from doing so (otherwise you can’t build more cottages)
Sandbox Player: Workers are now demoted to peasants when their building is destroyed
Sandbox Player: Stockpile dialog updated with recently added resources
Sandbox Player: Reactions tweaked when mobs attacked at range
Sandbox Player: Fixed ranged units facing targets during weapon reload
Sandbox Player: Performance optimizations for character animations (16% FPS boost on CPU-bound machines)
Sandbox Player: Added Jeweller hammer props in preparation for activating Jeweller profession
Sandbox Player: Added LOD1, LOD2, LOD3 models for Toadkin Warrior and Worker
Sandbox Player: Weapons now have correct stats (see website)
Sandbox Player: Settings And Exit To Main Menu buttons added to pause/escape menu
Sandbox Player: Blacksmith Chainmail research now unlocks 4 crafting recipes
Sandbox Player: Blacksmith Leather research now unlocks 4 crafting recipes
Sandbox Player: Blacksmith Axes research now unlocks 1 crafting recipe
Sandbox Player: Blacksmith Daggers research now unlocks 1 crafting recipe
Sandbox Player: Blacksmith Maces research now unlocks 1 crafting recipe
Sandbox Player: Blacksmith Swords research now unlocks 1 crafting recipe
Sandbox Player: Tailor’s Emporium Clothmaking research now unlocks 4 crafting recipes
Sandbox Player: Herbalist’s Den Elixir research now unlocks crafting recipes
Sandbox Player: Herbalist’s Den Poisons research now unlocks crafting recipes
Sandbox Player: Herbalist’s Den Herbalism research now unlocks crafting recipes

#0120 Sandbox Player: Characters Weapons Breaking When Being Retrained Or Demoted
#0123 Sandbox Player: The Fog Of War Is Bright Blue
#0126 Sandbox Player: Maps Often Stop Loading At 35% Progress
#0127 Sandbox Player: Research Not Lowering Building Costs
#0128 Sandbox Player: Workers Dropping Off Resources Ignore Production/Research Split
#0129 Sandbox Editor: Water Bank Tiles Aren't Paintable

Our focus this patch has been on improving existing gameplay and fixing bugs. Load/Save has received a good deal of attention, but will remain accessible via the Console for now to allow for a period of community testing. Please try it, and report any save related bugs in the Steam forum under the Bug Reporting sub-forum so that we can get them fixed and roll out load/save into the main UI.

Plenty of UI improvements have been made to provide information about villager needs. These should make it easier to respond to economic production challenges and prevent villagers leaving en masse.

At the start of a new game, you’re likely to manually assign workers by clicking on the building and clicking on the train profession button. As your village gets larger, and in the absence of the civics dialog for finding peasants, you’re best to use the Workers tab and recruit directly. Auto-AI is also added this patch, and is worth setting on critical economy buildings once your population reaches as decent size. In a future patch we'll be adding the ability to define how many worker vacancies should be auto-recruited.

We haven’t implemented the Advisor speech queue yet, so he can end up speaking multiple lines at the same time. We’ll aim to fix this in the next patch.

Mead and Pumpkins cannot currently be sold.

Guard Mode is broken in this patch.

If when Alt+Tabbing, the camera is left facing the sky, hold down LeftAlt again and re-orient the camera by moving the mouse. If this is frustrating, the keymap.json file can be edited to change the keybinding (see below).

There is a known problem when exiting sandbox editor or player and trying to start the Old Tutorial. As a temporary fix, please restart the game and go directly into the Old Tutorial.

We’ve disabled Sandbox Terrain-Cam in this patch temporarily while we fix a few bugs with the new camera system.

*We are experiencing crashes on older Mac's with 512MB video cards. Mac's with newer 1GB cards or HD5000 integrated graphics cards are working fine. We are trying to identify the cause of this problem with an aim of pushing out a fix ASAP. Our apologies if you are affected by this. You may wish to consider turning off auto-updates and staying on Patch 0.2.10 until a fix is available. UPDATE: Installing Yosemite can fix the problem.

We’d like to remind players that the default build for Windows is now 64-bit, which the vast majority of players are using. Players with older 32-bit versions of Windows will need to opt in to the 32-bit build. For more information, please visit http://steamcommunity.com/app/224440/discussions/0/540744474771635312/.

And finally, ‘tis the season to be jolly, so from all of us on the Folk Tale Dev Team, have a very happy holiday!

PC, Mac*

Sandbox Player: The camera is now a fixed angle to aid performance on lower end machines. The angle can be changed by holding LeftAlt and moving the mouse. Free camera rotation can be enabled under Settings->Gameplay
Sandbox Player: Console: Load/Save improved a lot
Sandbox Player: Added first batch of new advisor voice over lines
Sandbox Player: Improved building health UI with productivity and assigned worker count
Sandbox Player: Buildings with no workers now show permanent hover icon overhead
Sandbox Player: Field hover name now shows which crop is planted
Sandbox Player: Clicking event notifications zooms to focal point for some event types
Sandbox Player: Mouse scroll wheel now rotates building when in placement mode
Sandbox Player: during construction placement mode, resources nearby building will be shown as 100% opaque if the resource is within the building’s boundary, 50% opaque if outside and close by
Sandbox Player: Selecting an existing economy building will show resource icons over resources within the boundary
Sandbox Player: When the last worker at a building abandons the village, the Advisor will tell you
Sandbox Player: Massively reduced gold earned from selling finished goods
Sandbox Player: Building Dialog Worker Tab: Worker highlight fixed
Sandbox Player: Building Dialog Worker Tab: Find button enabled
Sandbox Player: Building Dialog Worker Tab: Auto-Recruit enabled
Sandbox Player: Building Dialog Worker Tab: Correct profession portraits now showing
Sandbox Player: Advisor now warns when you are trying to train your last peasant and prevents you from doing so (otherwise you can’t build more cottages)
Sandbox Player: Workers are now demoted to peasants when their building is destroyed
Sandbox Player: Stockpile dialog updated with recently added resources
Sandbox Player: Reactions tweaked when mobs attacked at range
Sandbox Player: Fixed ranged units facing targets during weapon reload
Sandbox Player: Performance optimizations for character animations (16% FPS boost on CPU-bound machines)
Sandbox Player: Added Jeweller hammer props in preparation for activating Jeweller profession
Sandbox Player: Added LOD1, LOD2, LOD3 models for Toadkin Warrior and Worker
Sandbox Player: Weapons now have correct stats (see website)
Sandbox Player: Settings And Exit To Main Menu buttons added to pause/escape menu
Sandbox Player: Blacksmith Chainmail research now unlocks 4 crafting recipes
Sandbox Player: Blacksmith Leather research now unlocks 4 crafting recipes
Sandbox Player: Blacksmith Axes research now unlocks 1 crafting recipe
Sandbox Player: Blacksmith Daggers research now unlocks 1 crafting recipe
Sandbox Player: Blacksmith Maces research now unlocks 1 crafting recipe
Sandbox Player: Blacksmith Swords research now unlocks 1 crafting recipe
Sandbox Player: Tailor’s Emporium Clothmaking research now unlocks 4 crafting recipes
Sandbox Player: Herbalist’s Den Elixir research now unlocks crafting recipes
Sandbox Player: Herbalist’s Den Poisons research now unlocks crafting recipes
Sandbox Player: Herbalist’s Den Herbalism research now unlocks crafting recipes

#0120 Sandbox Player: Characters Weapons Breaking When Being Retrained Or Demoted
#0123 Sandbox Player: The Fog Of War Is Bright Blue
#0126 Sandbox Player: Maps Often Stop Loading At 35% Progress
#0127 Sandbox Player: Research Not Lowering Building Costs
#0128 Sandbox Player: Workers Dropping Off Resources Ignore Production/Research Split
#0129 Sandbox Editor: Water Bank Tiles Aren't Paintable

Our focus this patch has been on improving existing gameplay and fixing bugs. Load/Save has received a good deal of attention, but will remain accessible via the Console for now to allow for a period of community testing. Please try it, and report any save related bugs in the Steam forum under the Bug Reporting sub-forum so that we can get them fixed and roll out load/save into the main UI.

Plenty of UI improvements have been made to provide information about villager needs. These should make it easier to respond to economic production challenges and prevent villagers leaving en masse.

At the start of a new game, you’re likely to manually assign workers by clicking on the building and clicking on the train profession button. As your village gets larger, and in the absence of the civics dialog for finding peasants, you’re best to use the Workers tab and recruit directly. Auto-AI is also added this patch, and is worth setting on critical economy buildings once your population reaches as decent size. In a future patch we'll be adding the ability to define how many worker vacancies should be auto-recruited.

We haven’t implemented the Advisor speech queue yet, so he can end up speaking multiple lines at the same time. We’ll aim to fix this in the next patch.

Mead and Pumpkins cannot currently be sold.

Guard Mode is broken in this patch.

If when Alt+Tabbing, the camera is left facing the sky, hold down LeftAlt again and re-orient the camera by moving the mouse. If this is frustrating, the keymap.json file can be edited to change the keybinding (see below).

There is a known problem when exiting sandbox editor or player and trying to start the Old Tutorial. As a temporary fix, please restart the game and go directly into the Old Tutorial.

We’ve disabled Sandbox Terrain-Cam in this patch temporarily while we fix a few bugs with the new camera system.

*We are experiencing crashes on older Mac's with 512MB video cards. Mac's with newer 1GB cards or HD5000 integrated graphics cards are working fine. We are trying to identify the cause of this problem with an aim of pushing out a fix ASAP. Our apologies if you are affected by this. You may wish to consider turning off auto-updates and staying on Patch 0.2.10 until a fix is available. UPDATE: Installing Yosemite can fix the problem.

We’d like to remind players that the default build for Windows is now 64-bit, which the vast majority of players are using. Players with older 32-bit versions of Windows will need to opt in to the 32-bit build. For more information, please visit http://steamcommunity.com/app/224440/discussions/0/540744474771635312/.

And finally, ‘tis the season to be jolly, so from all of us on the Folk Tale Dev Team, have a very happy holiday!

Set your alarm this Sunday when we'll be recording a voice acting session live on air. Watch @Trendane on camera as he performs the Advisor's lines for Sandbox.

Sunday 14th December:
03:00 Sydney (Monday, AEDT)
00:00 Hong Kong (CST)
19:00 Moscow (MSK)
17:00 Europe (Western, CET)
16:00 London
11:00 New York (EST)
08:00 Los Angeles (PST)

http://twitch.tv/gamesfoundry

Please Follow the channel, and you'll receive an email from Twitch when we start broadcasting.

See you then!

If you missed the hangout, you can catch it again over on our YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvs2Sul5xNw&list=PLfbRgg_s65Xez6fgTuWtIeTICYCqj6XH6&index=1

Set your alarm this Sunday when we'll be recording a voice acting session live on air. Watch @Trendane on camera as he performs the Advisor's lines for Sandbox.

Sunday 14th December:
03:00 Sydney (Monday, AEDT)
00:00 Hong Kong (CST)
19:00 Moscow (MSK)
17:00 Europe (Western, CET)
16:00 London
11:00 New York (EST)
08:00 Los Angeles (PST)

http://twitch.tv/gamesfoundry

Please Follow the channel, and you'll receive an email from Twitch when we start broadcasting.

See you then!

If you missed the hangout, you can catch it again over on our YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvs2Sul5xNw&list=PLfbRgg_s65Xez6fgTuWtIeTICYCqj6XH6&index=1

November sees the launch of a new Sandbox Preview Trailer, and a refresh of all our screenshots to highlight all the great progress that is being made with Sandbox. Patch 0.2.11 shipped a few days ago, and was a substantial patch expanding gameplay with the addition of villager needs and the entire new snow biome. If you want to grab Folk Tale now and avoid the recent price increase, there's 25% off in the Steam Sale until 2nd December.

Villagers now need a variety of things to keep them happy, ranging from protein (meat and fish), vegetables (pumpkins), and carbs (bread), to entertainment (mead) and basic clothing. We'll continue to add to their needs in future patches. If any of your villagers aren't having their needs met, they'll let you know via the event notifications that popup in the bottom right of the screen. Continue ignoring villager needs, and they'll eventually pack up and leave town. In a future patch, we'll be adding in ranting and rebellion.

The needs system has added considerably to gameplay. We've shifted our short-term goals to be purely gameplay focused, so the next few patches should see significant improvements in playability, starting with the latest Patch 0.2.11.



Most buildings now have research that provide village-wide buffs, worker productivity bonuses, or unlock new crafting recipes. Not all have coded effects at the moment, but we'll be adding more and more with each new patch.



Researching Plate Armor for example grants access to several Common quality plate items that can be crafted at the Blacksmith. Items take different amounts of time to craft depending on their complexity and size, and multiple items can be queued so you don't have to wait around. As each item is crafted, it gets added to your Global Inventory from where you can distribute it to your villagers.

The Herbalist profession can now be trained at the Herbalist Den. Placing Farmer's Fields and changing their crops to Herbs will activate nearby Herbalists. Herbs are cultivated and taken back for concocting into Lesser Medicine, which will be used to cure minor ailments when sickness is added in a future patch.



The new Weaver profession is trained at the Weaver's Hut. Placing Farmer's Fields and changing their crops to Cotton will activate nearby Weavers. Cotton is cultivated and taken back for weaving into Bolts Of Cotton.



Last up in the line of new professions is the Tailor who take the Bolts Of Cotton and fashion them into Basic Clothing. Over time, villager clothing becomes shabby and in need of replacing. Villagers will buy new Basic Clothing by visiting the Tailor's Emporium.



Unit command and control has become a little easier with the addition of Control Groups and Attack-Move. Holding CTRL+1...4 will assign the current selected units to the '1' key. Holding CTRL while right clicking somewhere will command units forward. Any enemies they come into contact with will trigger them to attack. We'll continue to adopt RTS conventions in future patches, including double left clicking a unit to select all units of the same type in the proximity.



We've added the Snow Kit and Snow Monastery Kit, along with the lovingly designed 'Howling Tundra' map that we streamed the design of over on our Twitch Channel. The fantastic looking Monastery Of The Mangy Wolf is home to the Werefu Monks, a race first introduced in the original Tutorial. They've had a visual overhaul, and now come in three varieties: Warriors, Priests, and Head Priest Wolf Chow (pictured below), whom you may recall incited the Ritual Of The Bloody Fang to turn the Monks into lycans.



Also inhabiting the snowy wastes are Yeti, a sentient race allied with Jack Frost. We'll be expanding on Jack Frost, his minions, and their opposition to the Werefu Monks in future blogs.



The Swamp Biome received a solid upgrade in 0.2.11 with the arrival of the Goblin Village Kit, and the Toadkin Race. The Goblin Village Kit adds several starter buildings that map designers can use to create convincing goblin villages.



The Toadkin Kit adds the Worker, Warrior, and a placeholder for the King, sat on his palanquin. We took a closer look at Toadkin in last month's dev blog.





Noticed that everything has started to look better? That's because we've added environment settings, enabling you to set mood lighting and weather for each map using the Editor. Weather can be enabled if you want rain or snow. We've also tweaked the ambient settings for all the available zones.

For players with high end PC's, we've added supersampling, accessible via the in-game Console. Supersampling unlocks rendering at higher than native resolutions, scaling down the result back to your native resolution. The results are a terrific boost to visual fidelity, helping world detail pop. The downside is that you need a powerful graphics card with at least 1GB of gpu memory.

Patch 0.2.11 includes a number of bug fixes and minor enhancements. For the full list of changes, please read the Patch Notes. If you like what we're doing, now is a great time to pick up a copy of Folk Tale with a 25% discount in the Steam Sale. Alternatively, leaving a few kind words in a review would be very much appreciated.

November sees the launch of a new Sandbox Preview Trailer, and a refresh of all our screenshots to highlight all the great progress that is being made with Sandbox. Patch 0.2.11 shipped a few days ago, and was a substantial patch expanding gameplay with the addition of villager needs and the entire new snow biome. If you want to grab Folk Tale now and avoid the recent price increase, there's 25% off in the Steam Sale until 2nd December.

Villagers now need a variety of things to keep them happy, ranging from protein (meat and fish), vegetables (pumpkins), and carbs (bread), to entertainment (mead) and basic clothing. We'll continue to add to their needs in future patches. If any of your villagers aren't having their needs met, they'll let you know via the event notifications that popup in the bottom right of the screen. Continue ignoring villager needs, and they'll eventually pack up and leave town. In a future patch, we'll be adding in ranting and rebellion.

The needs system has added considerably to gameplay. We've shifted our short-term goals to be purely gameplay focused, so the next few patches should see significant improvements in playability, starting with the latest Patch 0.2.11.



Most buildings now have research that provide village-wide buffs, worker productivity bonuses, or unlock new crafting recipes. Not all have coded effects at the moment, but we'll be adding more and more with each new patch.



Researching Plate Armor for example grants access to several Common quality plate items that can be crafted at the Blacksmith. Items take different amounts of time to craft depending on their complexity and size, and multiple items can be queued so you don't have to wait around. As each item is crafted, it gets added to your Global Inventory from where you can distribute it to your villagers.

The Herbalist profession can now be trained at the Herbalist Den. Placing Farmer's Fields and changing their crops to Herbs will activate nearby Herbalists. Herbs are cultivated and taken back for concocting into Lesser Medicine, which will be used to cure minor ailments when sickness is added in a future patch.



The new Weaver profession is trained at the Weaver's Hut. Placing Farmer's Fields and changing their crops to Cotton will activate nearby Weavers. Cotton is cultivated and taken back for weaving into Bolts Of Cotton.



Last up in the line of new professions is the Tailor who take the Bolts Of Cotton and fashion them into Basic Clothing. Over time, villager clothing becomes shabby and in need of replacing. Villagers will buy new Basic Clothing by visiting the Tailor's Emporium.



Unit command and control has become a little easier with the addition of Control Groups and Attack-Move. Holding CTRL+1...4 will assign the current selected units to the '1' key. Holding CTRL while right clicking somewhere will command units forward. Any enemies they come into contact with will trigger them to attack. We'll continue to adopt RTS conventions in future patches, including double left clicking a unit to select all units of the same type in the proximity.



We've added the Snow Kit and Snow Monastery Kit, along with the lovingly designed 'Howling Tundra' map that we streamed the design of over on our Twitch Channel. The fantastic looking Monastery Of The Mangy Wolf is home to the Werefu Monks, a race first introduced in the original Tutorial. They've had a visual overhaul, and now come in three varieties: Warriors, Priests, and Head Priest Wolf Chow (pictured below), whom you may recall incited the Ritual Of The Bloody Fang to turn the Monks into lycans.



Also inhabiting the snowy wastes are Yeti, a sentient race allied with Jack Frost. We'll be expanding on Jack Frost, his minions, and their opposition to the Werefu Monks in future blogs.



The Swamp Biome received a solid upgrade in 0.2.11 with the arrival of the Goblin Village Kit, and the Toadkin Race. The Goblin Village Kit adds several starter buildings that map designers can use to create convincing goblin villages.



The Toadkin Kit adds the Worker, Warrior, and a placeholder for the King, sat on his palanquin. We took a closer look at Toadkin in last month's dev blog.





Noticed that everything has started to look better? That's because we've added environment settings, enabling you to set mood lighting and weather for each map using the Editor. Weather can be enabled if you want rain or snow. We've also tweaked the ambient settings for all the available zones.

For players with high end PC's, we've added supersampling, accessible via the in-game Console. Supersampling unlocks rendering at higher than native resolutions, scaling down the result back to your native resolution. The results are a terrific boost to visual fidelity, helping world detail pop. The downside is that you need a powerful graphics card with at least 1GB of gpu memory.

Patch 0.2.11 includes a number of bug fixes and minor enhancements. For the full list of changes, please read the Patch Notes. If you like what we're doing, now is a great time to pick up a copy of Folk Tale with a 25% discount in the Steam Sale. Alternatively, leaving a few kind words in a review would be very much appreciated.

PC, Mac*

Sandbox Player: Storage capacity now limits total item count, not item count per type
Sandbox Player: New dev map added ‘Howling Tundra’ using the new Snow kits
Sandbox Player: Stinking Swamp updated to include new assets
Sandbox Player: Added Research tab to buildings (Blacksmith only atm, extending functionality to other buildings asap but icons added anyway)
Sandbox Player: Added Crafting (Mostly Blacksmith, requires research points which can be gained by diverting building production into research, unlock armor and weapon research to learn starter crafting recipes)
Sandbox Player: Added villager needs; villagers tell you what they need via the new Events Notification icons that appear bottom right; tooltips contain descriptions.
Sandbox Player: Added Weaver’s Hut building
Sandbox Player: Added Weaver profession
Sandbox Player: Added Tailor’s Emporium building
Sandbox Player: Added Tailor profession
Sandbox Player: Added Herbalist Hut building
Sandbox Player: Added Herbalist profession
Sandbox Player: Added Cotton option to Farmer’s Field and enabled economy chain (Farmer’s Field -> Cotton -> Weavers -> Storehouse -> Tailor -> Basic Clothing); needs Weaver to cultivate
Sandbox Player: Added Herbs option to Farmer’s Field and enabled economy chain (Farmer’s Field -> Herbs -> Herbalist Den -> Lesser Medicine Potions); needs Herbalist to cultivate
Sandbox Player: Guard Mode added to character portrait wheel. Useful for military units.
Sandbox Player: Control Groups implemented (CTRL+1..0 to assign, 1..0 to select, holding down SHIFT while selecting will add that group to your current selection), TAB can move through group when Character Sheet is open
Sandbox Player: RTS Attack-Move implemented (hold CTRL while clicking to move)
Sandbox Player: Added in enemy attack targeting and highlighting on hover
Sandbox Player: Implemented lashing and rewarding workers (building dialog screen) to temporarily increase worker productivity (partial, UI feedback missing)
Sandbox Player: Soundtrack added for Grasslands, Swamp and Snow zones
Sandbox Player: Soundtrack volume slider enabled under settings
Sandbox Player: Tweaked wolf walk animation speed
Sandbox Player: Added city-wide and building buff framework linked to research (partial)
Sandbox Player: Improved appearance of biome ambience settings
Sandbox Player: Console: Added new commands “ambience”, “cliffs” and “music” to change ambience zone, music region and cliff biome respectively
Sandbox Player: Console: Added new command ‘weather snow|rain|sunny’
Sandbox Player: Console: Added ‘supersampling’ to unlock 125%-200% super sampling which is then resized back to native resolution for super high quality (1GB+ GPUs recommended)
Sandbox Player: Added villager footstep sound effects
Sandbox Player: Added right click for quick equipping from global inventory to character
Sandbox Editor: Added Weather Environment Setting for Snow/Rain/Sunny
Sandbox Editor: Added Atmospherics toolbar button to set map theme (drives ambient lighting, skybox colors, clouds, music, weather, ambient sfx loops)
Sandbox Editor: Added Snow Kit
Sandbox Editor: Added Snow Monastery Kit
Sandbox Editor: Large multi-tile Pieces are now paintable
Sandbox Editor: Added second grass texture to Paint Tool (for Grassland maps)
Sandbox Editor: Added 50+ new loot items (see Game Guide on website)
Sandbox Editor: Added Toadkin Kit (King, Warrior and Worker) **
Sandbox Editor: Added Werefu Monk Kit (Warrior, Priest, Wolf Chow)
Sandbox Editor: Added Yeti Kit
Sandbox Editor: Added Goblin Buildings Kit
Sandbox Editor: Updated art asset for massive trees in Swamp Kit
Sandbox Editor: Added Yellow/Orange trees and more Pine Trees to Grassland Kit

#0111 Sandbox Editor: Rotate [] Shortcuts Also Changes Paint Tool Brush Size
#0112 Sandbox Editor: Inspector Not Resizable Causing Usability Issues
#0113 Sandbox Player: Soundtrack Volume Isn't Saved/Setting Properly
#0114 Sandbox Player: Arrow Keys No Longer Move Camera
#0115 Sandbox Player: Console Load/Save Reviving Dead Characters
#0116 Sandbox Player: Console Load/Save Not Saving Character Inventories
#0117 Sandbox Player: Initial Resources Being Re-added When Loading A Saved Game Via Console
#0118 Sandbox Player: Females Are Using Male Names
#0119 Sandbox Player: Characters Sometimes Spawn Below Ground


*We are experiencing crashes on older Mac's with 512MB video cards. Mac's with newer 1GB cards or HD5000 integrated graphics cards are working fine. We are trying to identify the cause of this problem with an aim of pushing out a fix ASAP. Our apologies if you are affected by this. You may wish to consider turning off auto-updates and staying on Patch 0.2.10 until a fix is available.

** The Toadkin King is a prop placeholder for now.

Please note we have removed the community maps from this patch temporarily. A number of kit pieces have been updated and will visually impact a number of maps. We'll add the community maps back in once authors have updated their maps. You can continue to grab them anytime from the Community Maps & Videos sub-forum.

We’d like to remind players that the default build for Windows is now 64-bit, which the vast majority of players are using. Players with older 32-bit versions of Windows will need to opt in to the 32-bit build. For more information, please visit http://steamcommunity.com/app/224440/discussions/0/540744474771635312/

We’ve also made some key binding changes. While key mapping is not yet implemented in the UI, can you define your own by editing the StreamingAssets/Data/keymap.json text file.

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PC, Mac

#0121 Sandbox Editor: New Maps Cannot Be Saved
#0122 Sandbox Player: Basic Clothing Icon Not Showing When Clothes Manufactured At Tailors