This is a quick hotfix for a particularly bad bug included in the the 24.8 release, and a tweak to the default speed control setting:

• Fixed server error when starting a building in the old building system.
• Changed the default speed control setting to let both clients and hosts control it.

Please come join us at https://www.twitch.tv/stonehearth

With this release, we are finally enabling multiplayer on the unstable branch! This has been a long time coming, and it’s still very rough around the edges, but we’d love for all of you to take it for a spin. To get an overview of how to host and join multiplayer games, please watch or read the Desktop Tuesday on Multiplayer.

Here's the very short summary: Stonehearth Multiplayer allows up to eight towns to embark together on the same map. To play, first figure out which of your friends you'd like to play with, and which of you has the beefiest computer and the internet connection with the fastest upload speeds. This person should be the host of the multiplayer game -- the person who runs the server and to whom everyone else connects. Once this person starts up a multiplayer game through the new main menu button, selects their kingdom, biome, and difficulty level, their friends can now connect to their game via the Steam friends list, or the host can invite them from an in-game UI. As your towns grow, you can trade items, create and decorate a joint space, and use your militaries to help each other out as monsters attack you both.

Note: If you’re not on Steam, you can still totally play multiplayer. Instead of connecting via steam friends, you will want to modify your user settings.json file to open some ports and state which machine is the host, and to which machine the clients will connect. You will then have to make sure all computers have the same version of every mod. Find more details in this thread.

• Multiplayer is super early and the team is actively working on bugs and performance issues. Until we tackle more of these, please be aware that performance will be slow in any game with a large number of hearthlings--due to say, a large, late-game town, or a large number of people all embarking together.
• Playing with people on the other side of the world can also cause performance issues, as can internet connections with slow upload speeds.
• Players may not be able to connect to a game due to a network timeout and get a “something went wrong” error. We have resolved some causes of this, but are still looking into it.
• Multiple clients trying to join a game at the same time may cause the host to crash.

For those of you who tried out multiplayer on the super-unstable branch, thank you! Here are the changes we’ve made to multiplayer based on your feedback:

• Added the ability to assign hearthlings to work for another player.
• Added support for saving and loading building templates. Everyone, host and client, can now save/load templates in the new building editor.
• Added support for trading gold.
• Added an option to prevent clients from controlling game speed.
• Added display of the game's biome, difficulty, and age to the join screen.
• Added mod download progress bars to the join screen.
• Added a new multiplayer menu icon.
• Fixed a crash in mod sync when connecting to a game.
• Fixed a connection timeout when joining games.
• Fixed a server crash when a client disconnects.
• Fixed a client crash if disconnected before placing the banner.
• Fixed new citizens spawning near the wrong town.
• Fixed a UI crash in the multiplayer menu.
• Fixed an error with cultist hearthlings belonging to disconnected players.
• Fixed an error when trying to destroy items twice in a row on laggy servers.

⚠️ Note that all future multiplayer changes will be going directly to the unstable branch, and the super-unstable multiplayer branch will no longer be updated.


In this release, we're including SHED, a program that helps EDiting StoneHearth data. This tool is used by our artists and designers to more easily edit items, quests, and visual effects, and may be of use to modders doing the same.

The tool is still very rough around the edges, has almost no documentation, and a variety of bugs and limitations - for example, cloning items between different mod folders isn't supported, cloning recipes isn't supported, adding campaigns through a mod requires manually adding some aliases, and so on. Still, we think it will save modders some time, which is why we are including it even in its current state.

If you're a modder right now, and you'd like to try using SHED, go to the "shed" folder inside the Stonehearth folder, and run StonehearthEditor.exe. If you find a bug or an issue, or you discover a thing you wish were easier to do, please be sure to tell us on https://discourse.stonehearth.net/ and we will see what we can add to make the tool easier to use.

If you're using SHED and you’d like to improve it yourself, the program is actually open source and can be found on GitHub. Pull requests are welcome! Some work-in-progress documentation is available in the modding guide.

• Added rulers to the building editor - rooms, walls, and roofs show measurements live.
• Added support for patterned roads.
• Added sound effects for placing roads.
• Added the ability to mark blocks as walls or roofs so they display properly in all building vision modes.
• Made building costs update in realtime as the building is constructed.
• Made blocks that cause a building plan to fail to appear over regular building geometry so they’re easier to see.
• Fixed building net worth resetting to 0 on load.
• Fixed a 32-bit integer overflow in building IDs, which caused all sorts of weirdness.
• Fixed building templates having incorrect sunkenness if saved after the building is built.
• Fixed overlapping/intersecting rooms even if their floors aren’t on the same level.
• Fixed some invalid structures appearing valid if they intersected other valid structures.
• Fixed an issue where structures could not be placed on pyramid-like roofs.
• Fixed several rendering issues with the active building area outline.
• Fixed several issues around item placement, especially with fences and mats/mosaics.
• Fixed several issues around item bounds calculations.
• Fixed an issue that allowed building templates to be placed practically anywhere.
• Fixed the builder material list breaking when it has too many colors (e.g. from mods).

• Improved overall gameplay performance (first pass).
• Improved appeal check performance by introducing hearthlings to object permanence.
• Improved mining performance by not merging large mining zones.
• Improved Cleric casting visuals.
• Improved the notifications and combat icons.
• Fixed artifacts produced by bursts of waterfalls as they become empty.
• Fixed enemy camps from pre-A24 savegames not showing alerts.
• Fixed double-clicking dialog buttons while on a slow server breaking campaigns.
• Fixed several UI crashes.
• Fixed a missing sound in the workshop UI.
• Fixed clicks in quest dialog UIs sometimes being ignored.
• Fixed the ability to trigger 2 copies of the town founding quest for the same town.
• Fixed the crafting UI search mishandling letter case and deletion.
• Fixed items from deleted stockpiles not being considered restockable immediately.
• Fixed the game window starting tiny after being closed from the taskbar preview.
• Fixed an AI crash if an in use workshop is removed.

As usual, saves made on unstable are not guaranteed to work between unstable versions, but saves from different stable alpha versions should work.

Have fun!
Team Stonehearth

Find it here: http://www.stonehearth.net/dt-re-embarkation/

Also, just as the builder hit unstable last week, Multiplayer is now available to play on it's own special unstable branch. Head over to this link for details:
https://discourse.stonehearth.net/t/its-happening-multiplayer-available-on-another-super-unstable-steam-branch/34827

Please come join us: https://www.twitch.tv/stonehearth

This is a complete, top-to-bottom redesign and re-implementation of the entire Stonehearth building experience. We have a totally new building “core” that should allow hearthlings to consistently and correctly build almost any structure you can design–and if they can’t, you should be alerted before they even try.We also have a completely new user-experience and UI for the builder, with far friendlier and more powerful tools with which for you to design your buildings.

• To get to the new builder, hit the build button and then hit the “NEW” building button.
• Buildings are now built around rooms. Use the room tool to draw out floors and walls together. Overlap rooms to make floor plans. Add rooms on top of rooms to create multi-story buildings. Use the roof tool to draw roofs on top of your rooms to finish off the building.
• Want to build something that isn’t a room? Our new slab tool is pretty powerful (though we don’t yet do a good job of telling you how to use it.) Once you’ve placed some slab, you can push and pull individual voxels of the placed slab by selecting an individual voxel.
• You can also translate voxel slab around by holding down the ‘shift’ key to get the translation widget (again, we’ll work on this to smooth it out a bit.)
• If a structure turns red, that means it’s placed in an invalid place (it might be intersecting something weirdly, or just floating). Red means it won’t build!
• When a building is done, scaffolding and ladders evaporate and Hearthlings do a little celebration.
• If Hearthlings have not made any progress on a building in some time (currently around 30s), the system will try to figure out of any hearthlings can reach the in-progress pieces. If none can, it will highlight those pieces in red. This is your cue to help your hearthlings out by making sure they have a path to that red area. Build them ladders, make sure the terrain is accessible, etc.

You can find an overview of the new builder in the Desktop Tuesday from a few weeks ago:http://www.stonehearth.net/dt-building-basics/

• Bugs!
• Template import does not yet exist.
• Stonehearth default building templates are still only available in the old builder.
• The old building editor is still in the build so you can still access the old templates.

A few pieces of building functionality are available through the following hotkeys:

• Rotate: period/comma
• Sink/raise a template into/out of the ground: shift + period/comma
• Deselect/Cancel current tool: right click
• Select all walls, slab: double click
• Move slab: shift
• Move rooms individually: shift

• Create a thread on discourse.stonehearth.net with the tag new_builder and write a descriptive title. If it’s a lot of feedback together, one thread is OK. If it’s a bunch of bugs, make a new thread for each bug so that we can easily show which bugs have been resolved, when they are. Then, especially if your feedback is about an error, write a detailed description of exactly how to reproduce the problem. We want to know exactly how to recreate the error, so we can fix it!
• If you’ve got a save showing the broken/weird behavior, upload it for us to take a look.
• Alternatively, send us a template of the broken building (saves are probably better, though)

• Town Name now starts blank, so that you don't forget to change the default random name (not that I, personally, have done this a dozen times or anything)
• Overmorrow! (is now a word in a tooltip in the weather UI)
• Fixed some memory leaks
• Fixed default_locale being put in the wrong place for new mod manifests
• Fixed conflicting mods behaviour for local mods/steam workshop mods in mod screen
• Updated insect names
• Updated ogre rig and animations

Have fun!
✨ Team Stonehearth ✨

Last week we I mentioned that Multiplayer was almost ready to play. Very soon now, we hope to release a very early version of it on a special password protected branch, much as we did with the new building editor a few weeks ago. Check our fourm at discourse.stonehearth.net for details. Until then, let’s take a look at how it will work. Full details at:

http://www.stonehearth.net/dt-multiplayer-basics/

Please come join us at: https://www.twitch.tv/stonehearth

The main feature in this unstable release is the new Re-embarkation system. About a week after you finish the town progression quest line, you will get the option of selecting up to 3 of your hearthlings to leave the town and found a new settlement elsewhere.

The hearthlings departing your town can also take up to 10 items with them, including bags of gold or a shred of the current town’s banner, which will carry its town bonus over with you.

Once the new adventurers have departed, you will be able to select them when starting a new town, from the same screen where you select your initial characters.

Additionally, as part of this change, we have reduced the number of hearthlings you start with to 5, as 7 makes it hard to treat and remember your people as individuals, rather than as a group of units to do your bidding.

• Added display of the next daily report goal in the Town Overview UI.
• Added a glow to the town name input box until it's interacted with.
• Added missing Varanus Meat to input bin filters.
• Added tooltips to names in the unit frame (in case they are too long).
• Added today/tomorrow/day after tomorrow labels to the weather forecast.
• Improved the styling for the mod screen.
• Improved fog and sky colors in various weathers.
• Improved performance of hearthlings restocking and goblins stealing slightly.
• Increased the variety of desert weather slightly.
• Increased all tiers of herbalist shop inventories.
• Reduced tier 3 potter shop inventory.
• Reduced chance of Poultry Days slightly.
• Reduced foggy weather monster spawn range slightly.
• Limited the interest given by the Hearth of the Makers to a maximum of 300 gold / day.
• Changed sandstorms to do percentage damage so they don't kill critters/pets as easily.
• ⚠️ Changed how fog settings are specified:
  
  • scattering sun brightness (4th value) is now on and specifies scattering intensity.
  • height_fog thickness factor (2nd value) now uses a 0 to 1 range.
  • height_fog distance factor (4th value) is now based on the number of voxels.
• Fixed trader stalls not working in old saves (they will now use the old behavior there).
• Fixed a few UI crashes in the citizens, workshop, and character sheet menus.
• Fixed several AI crashes in restocking, fleeing, and healing actions.
• Fixed trader quests offering an item for the same item, and fixed some really bad deals.
• Fixed sandstorms to not damage doors, turrets, etc.
• Fixed shop and inventory UIs showing categories even after they've been emptied.
• Fixed an error due to items with an evolve component being owned by a non-player.
• Fixed hearthlings not preferring to wear Worker Finery.
• Fixed foggy weather monsters staying around for too long.
• Fixed mesh and alignment issues for some of the town-tier-unlockable decorations.
• Fixed the generated manifest for new mods not specifying locale.
• Fixed scroll bar in the notifications UI.
• Fixed several mistakes in object names and descriptions.

Have fun!
Team Stonehearth

We have Steam Workshop Support on our Steam Latest/Unstable branch, and we've uploaded a bunch of mods to help you test it out.

Find the full DT here:
http://www.stonehearth.net/dt-steam-workshop/