And along with it, spring, summer, and autumn. When starting a new game in any of the three standard biomes, you will now be able to select the season to start in. Seasons determine weather distribution, as well as foliage appearance. Expect golden autumns on temperate maps, blooming cacti in the desert during spring, and a brief respite from the ever-present snow during arctic summers. Additionally, seasons affect farming, as each crop has its own preferred seasons, during which its growth rate is doubled. Seasons last a different amount of time in different biomes, but in all of them, a full year will take 84 game days.

Like most systems in Stonehearth, seasons are fully moddable. Mods can alter the seasons in the default biomes, and modded biomes can have any number of seasons of any length, using both existing and custom weather types, foliage assets, and seasonal crop preferences.

⚠️ Season-based foliage appearance will not apply on savegames made before this version.


Thank you for testing the Geomancer! Here are the fixes made as a result of your error reports:

• Added storage categories for geomancer resources and products.
• Improved golem performance.
• Fixed golems trying to wear human clothing.
• Fixed summoning stones appearing as placeable in the builder menu.
• Fixed an error when deploying golems on non-terrain surfaces.
• Fixed an error when placing geomancer mimic stones on non-terrain surfaces.
• Fixed summoned landmarks sometimes being offset by 1 voxel in each dimension.
• Fixed terrain patches generating terrain over zones (stockpiles, farms, etc.).
• Fixed geomancer activities not displaying in the AI activity label.
• Fixed several geomancer strings not being localizable.

• Added new crafting rewards for Northern Alliance shrine upgrades.
• Added more options to input bin filters.
• Added new sound effects to berry harvesting, forges, entlings, and the Crystalline Arbalest.
• Added new portraits to the Amberstone campaign.
• Added several new mild weather types.
• Removed auto-targeting of animals from Northern Alliance combat untis other than archers.
• Improved UI performance.
• Improved crafting performance.
• Increased the default and maximum citizen limit to 30 and 80, respectively.
• Increased landmark spawn chance.
• Increased the appeal and price of Rabbit items.
• Fixed a memory leak in the UI that caused it to slow down over time.
• Fixed a crash in reachability checking.
• Fixed an error in crafting code that could cause orders to get stuck.
• Fixed traveler NPCs immediately leaving after they arrive in town.
• Fixed an issue that could cause the injured rabbit quest to become unbeatable.
• Fixed an error in the Northern Alliance rabbit raid encounters.
• Fixed a missing goblin animation.
• Fixed an error when naming the town while the banner is being moved.
• Fixed berry bushes spawning on mountains in the temperate biome.
• Fixed several typos in the Northern Alliance campaign.
• Fixed conversations between guards leading to staring contests.
• Fixed an issue that could cause re-embarkation with modded classes to fail.
• Fixed an error when using consumables stored in containers.
• Fixed ladder undeploy icons appearing too high.
• Fixed immigrant citizens spawning in unreachable places.
• Fixed items being placeable such that they overlap zones (stockpiles, farms, etc.)
• Fixed the iconic blacksmith workbench having wrong material tags.

Have fun!
Team Stonehearth

We're a little behind the release, but in case you haven't yet tried them out, here's a DT on The Northern Alliance and their home, The Valkyrie Tundra:

http://www.stonehearth.net/dt-northern-alliance-glacier/

1.0 announcement or not, we’ve still got a couple more features to deliver before this is shipped. This release includes some of the last major changes that are going into 1.0, before we switch completely to bug fixing and optimization.


In this release, we are adding the Clan Amberstone campaign, which introduces the Rabbits. If you befriend these industrious subterranean folk, they will share their resources, recipes, and centuries of accumulated wisdom. Some of them may even join your town! The questline is started automatically shortly after your town has reached tier 2 (upgraded hearth).


Now that the Rabbits are out of their hiding, they may be convinced to teach you the ancient art of Geomancy, which allows you to place terrain patches and ore veins, summon landmarks from far-off places, and craft golems to take some of the burden of repetitive tasks off your hearthlings’ shoulders.

In addition to Geomancers being able to summon landmarks, some of them will now also appear naturally in generated maps.


Thank you all for testing the Northern Alliance and the Tundra Biome, and giving us tons of feedback! Here are the changes we made as a result:

• Added 2nd tier Northern Alliance building templates.
• Added spindle and sword recipes to Northern Alliance masons.
• Added a herbalist staff recipe to Northern Alliance potters.
• Added Northern Alliance variants of several existing cooking recipes.
• Added automatic auto-looting of hunted animal drops.
• Added a +2 Body bonus to the Font of Fire.
• Added Tundra resources to input bin filters.
• Improved the notifications for Northern Alliance hunting events.
• Increased wintermoss growth speed and seed drop rate.
• Reduced the difficulty of Northern Alliance monster encounters.
• Fixed Northern Alliance spirit animals appearing hostile.
• Fixed Northern Alliance shrines displaying incorrect town bonuses.
• Fixed stone torch and candle visual issues.
• Fixed several typos in the Northern Alliance town progression campaign.
• Fixed goblins demanding oak logs in the tundra.

• Added wood, clay, and stone fence posts and slats.
• [Modding] Added support for live-editing graphics assets in the “steam_uploads” folder.
• Improved encounter spawning logic to be less predictable and more robust.
• Improved server performance.
• Improved building template placement in confined spaces.
• Fixed building template thumbnails sometimes not updating when resaving.
• Fixed several issues with fixture placement in the building editor.
• Fixed several issues with item placement.
• Fixed several issues with undeploying and restocking AI.
• Fixed several UI errors that can be caused by mods with missing data.
• Fixed visual artifacts in the building editor road too.
• Fixed deployed tonics being considered usable crafting ingredients.
• Fixed the collision of growing plants.
• Fixed several AI infrastructure issues.
• Fixed savegame overwriting failing if the savegame’s folder is open in explorer.
• Fixed a crash related to Northern Alliance hunter looting.

Have fun!
Team Stonehearth

Hey Everyone,

For many years now, you’ve been asking us: when will Stonehearth be finished? And we’ve always answered--when it’s done!

Well… as of today, we feel we’re finally there. Stonehearth has become a game that we on the team are genuinely excited to play. From all of your feedback, we believe that many of you have also had a few (or more than a few) wonderful experiences inside Hearth. Therefore, at the end of July, we will exit Stonehearth from Steam Early Access with our 1.0 release. Following that release, most of the team will move on to other projects, though we’ll provide support, modding guidance, and bugfixes through the end of the year.

Really? It’s.. Done? I’m sort of... stunned!

Yeah, it’s sort of an amazing statement, especially those of us who have been working on it for so long. But actually, yes. Stonehearth finally feels like the game we envisioned when we started on this journey. Most of the features we originally dreamed up at the time of the Kickstarter are implemented. The campaign at last has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the world of Hearth is now full of allies, enemies, classes, systems, and encounters we consider worthwhile to experience. There is no other game in the world with a 3D builder like ours, and no other community builder that offers synchronous multiplayer the way we do. Finally, the game is moddable from top to bottom and its Steam Workshop page is full of content beyond our original imaginings.

Though it’s true that Stonehearth doesn’t contain everything we dreamed about -- the decisions we made on what to prioritize inevitably led to some systems not being as robust as we’d have liked--we feel that the game is ready for a larger audience to enjoy. With the launch of the new builder and multiplayer, we’ve tackled two of the three largest critical engine-related tasks (the stuff that only our team can really do). The third task is improving performance, which we are addressing now, and will continue to improve after release.

But… It could be Even *More* Done!

It’s true! However, many of the members of the team are ready to pursue other opportunities, for both personal and professional reasons. We first noticed this trend at the end of last year, but since we believe so hard in this game and in making something satisfying for all of you, we agreed to remain together until we collectively felt the game was in a good place. We believe we accomplished this with the launch of A24+/Beta. Though the prospect of moving on is quite difficult -- some of us have been working on Stonehearth for five years, long enough to have watched many of you in the community move on to different phases of your life: graduating middle school, high school, college, first jobs, first children, and more -- in the end, we wanted to bring the experience to a close on a strong, unified note, as opposed to a long fading out.

We remind ourselves that ownership of all games passes from the people who first created them to the people who play them. We’re confident that in your hands, Stonehearth will be well loved, and we hope that with the modding infrastructure we’ve built, you can continue to add your own dreams to it. To further enable this, after the 1.0 launch in July, we will continue work on our modding guide. If you have API requests, we will continue to work on those, along with performance and bugfixes, until December.

What Happens Now?

Since the beginning, we’ve tried hard to be a transparent team. Because we wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for your support, we’ve always felt that it was our responsibility to be as honest as we could with what was happening around us, and what comes next. So… here’s what happens next:

• The team is currently jamming hard on getting Stonehearth in a shippable state by the end of July 2018. Remaining features include: performance, bug fixes, Rabbit Clan, Glacier, Northern Alliance, Geomancer, Seasons, and Mac Support.
• At the end of July, we will remove the Early Access tag from the game and officially call it 1.0
• In August the majority of the team will roll off onto other projects or new life challenges.
• Three members will remain to work on bugs and performance and mod support until December of 2018, when we will issue a point release (1.1) containing whatever bugfixes and aforementioned features that did not make it into 1.0.
• As it is unfair to ask a team of three to shoulder the community responsibilities once maintained by a group of fifteen, our participation on Discourse and Steam will be significantly reduced from August to December, and formal support for bugfixes, mod api requests, and questions will cease after January 2019. I expect that we’ll still stop by to marvel at your creations and hang out, but it will be as community members, as opposed to the game’s active creators.
• In that vein, Desktop Tuesday will continue until Tuesday the 24th, and the Thursday 6:00pm streams will continue until 27th of July. On the 27th, we will have an all-day community-focused stream to commemorate all the beautiful things you’ve built over the years.
• Stephanie will be streaming tonight, July 5th, 2018, from 6:00pm to 7:00pm (Pacific time) to answer any questions you may have, and will be hosting an AMA on discourse.stonehearth.net immediately following this announcement until tomorrow, July 6th if you prefer that mechanism of communication.

We’re proud to have shepherded this pipe dream of a Kickstarter into its current state, and we’re grateful to have met and hung out and played with all of you along the way.

Cheering you on, from whatever adventures come for us next,
Team Stonehearth (Stephanie, Chris, Albert, Brad, Linda, Allie, Nikki, Morgan, Justin, Ana, Malley, Angelo, Max, Luke, and Aaron)


You said you wouldn’t abandon this game. What changed?

Though it’s true that we can imagine an infinite number of additions to Stonehearth, we as a team realized that we could not commit to indefinite development, and so found a point at which we felt we could reasonably call the game complete. It’s not abandoned--it’s finished!

Is Riot killing this game?

Riot bought Radiant Entertainment in April of 2016, and gave us time and resources to bring Radiant’s first game, Stonehearth, to a state that the team could feel proud about. Though it’s certainly true that some of the external pressures on the individuals on the team come from opportunities posed by other Riot projects, and though Stonehearth is not a priority from Riot’s overall strategic perspective and therefore cannot be funded by Riot indefinitely, Riot leadership has always emphasized player focus as the company’s core mission, and therefore, wanted us to conclude the game in a way that did right by as many of you as possible.

Why are we only discovering this news now, so close to release?

We have, historically, not been great at dates, so we didn’t want to announce anything until we knew we were absolutely going to hit it. Well, we’re pretty sure now: the game is in a good place, the final features are streaming in, and we’re in a good place to make a July deadline.

What about the Mac Port?

We’re working on it! Engineer Angelo has made a lot of progress on this in the last few months. We expect this to be in your hands no later than our 1.1 release in December, and we will also release an unstable version as soon as we feel it’s ready for wider testing. At the moment, we expect the port to work on low graphics settings with any Intel graphics card Macbook Pro from 2014 and onwards.

What about the Linux Port?

I’m afraid it’s more work than our team can handle at this point. We’re going to cut this feature, and apologies to all of you who backed for this explicit reason. If there is no other way for you to play this game other than on Linux, and you backed for this reason only, please reach out to us via Kickstarter and we’ll see what we can do to make it right.

You say you are proud of the game, but from my perspective, it’s horrible. Why is this?

We could talk about this forever, and we’re really sorry you feel this way. If the game is unsatisfying to you, it probably stems from one of the following three major mistakes we made as devs, and that were only really obvious in retrospect. First: it turns out that games of this sort are just really hard to make with a team our size. Moddable, decomposable AI, pathfinding around destructible environments, dependency analysis around building--and more--are all really hard technical problems--hard to solve, hard to maintain, and hard to debug. Second, we allowed our focus on the technical things to distract us from the design of the game itself, which leads to a campaign and core loop that feel at times, uneven and clunky. A third mistake was to make our own engine, which meant that when it came time for our designers and artists to add content to the game, they really struggled to do so. By the time we noticed these were major issues, we were so deeply invested that fixing any of them would have taken a rewrite and maybe years to address, and so we built the best thing we could out of what we had. So one overall conclusion to all of this is that this was our first game, we were really naive *and* really ambitious, and as a result, the final game was flawed in proportion to our ambition.

What is the game going to cost at 1.0?

Since the game is a bit smaller than we originally intended it to be, we are going to set its permanent price to $19.99 around the time of the 1.0 at the end of July. We also feel this reflects the fact that if you backed during the Early Access period, you backed not just for the game, but also for a chance to see and influence the game in its development. Many thanks to all of you who have done so; it’s been a pleasure to be with you on this journey.

What are you all doing next?

Lots of different things! Though some people are moving on to other projects at Riot, others are leaving to pursue personal goals.

I’m still very upset! Is there anything I can do?

Many things! Stonehearth is a passion project for all of us, and we recognize that as backers and Early Access supporters, you’ve invested more deeply into this game than most people do on most games. If you’d like to ask more questions or talk more, leave us a note here in the comments, or on our forum at discourse.stonehearth.net. Since you’re probably here with us in Early Access because you’re passionate about the creation of games, I hope that you’ll be able to take something from our victories and hard learnings and go make something fabulous.Wherever we are, we’ll be rooting for you.


Mammoth Bonanza, Dragon Whelps, Kitten, Puppy
Currently available from the Lvl 3 pet shop. KS supporters at the $15 level and above will receive additional access to all four pets via a mod that will appear on their Humble Bundle backer page. The mod will allow one of these animals, chosen at random, to be a starting pet for one of your settlers.

Friendly Faction: Rabbit Clan
This will be part of our 1.0 release, including a campaign and rabbit citizens. Many rabbits (Clan Amberstone) are NPCs and some may even join your town, but they are not playable as an independent faction.

Glacier Biome
Currently available on the Steam Latest branch.

Mac & Linux Port
We’re working on the Mac port, and expect this to be in your hands no later than our 1.1 release in December. We will also release an unstable version as soon as we feel it’s ready for wider testing. At the moment, we expect the port to work on low graphics settings with any Intel graphics card Macbook Pro from 2014 and onwards.

We have, however, chosen not to pursue the Linux port. We do know that it is possible to make a Wine wrapper that will enable the game to work on Linux, but if this solution does not work for you, and it is the only means by which you can play the game, please reach out to us through Kickstarter and we’ll see what we can do to make amends.

Pirates, Ninjas, Politicians
After some discussion, we decided that this feature doesn’t really fit with the thematics of Stonehearth, so we have dropped plans to implement it.

Animal Trainer
A prototype exists, but we were never able to make it satisfying from a gameplay perspective. Cut from the game.

Magma Smith
We have investigated this, but whenever we think of something they would do, it seems to work better as part of the blacksmith or geomancer. Cut from the game.

PvP
We did a lot of research and experimentation on multiplayer modes. PvP is simply not part of our vision for the game, its tone, and the experience you would get from playing with other people. This feature is therefore cut. We have made sure, however, that PvP can be modded in if someone wants it bad enough, and at least one PvP mod is available from Steam Workshop right now.

Geomancer
Will be in the 1.0 release.

Elementals
Ents and stonelings are in. Fire elementals burninating the countryside proved to be more heat than we could handle, so those were cut from the game.

Engineer
Currently available.

Seasons
Will be in the 1.0 release.

Co-op Multiplayer
Currently available.

Festivals
Candledark and Frostfeast were completed as mods by the amazing community members Froggy and RepeatPan. We’ve also included town celebration events as part of the town tier quests, completing a building, or re-embarking.

Alternate Planes
This was not really a clearly defined feature, and we could add something to tick the box, but we did some experimentation, and didn't think any of the outcomes did it justice, so we’ve cut this feature.

Musical Score & Art Book
We will make these available to relevant Kickstarter backers through their Humble Bundle pledge pages some time before the 1.1 release in December.

3 Playable Kingdoms
Two are currently available. The Northern Alliance is available on Steam Latest right now, and will be available on the stable branch for 1.0 in July.

Dwarves
Cut from the game. Sorry about this one; we were daunted by the amount of work required to significantly reimagine gameplay for subterranean dwellers.

And that’s it for this very long announcement; thanks for sticking with us--through this, and for the last five years. There isn’t anything we’d rather have done than take this journey with all of you. For those of you unwilling to think or say goodbye just yet, keep watching steam--we’ve got a few more treats coming in unstable pushes over the next few weeks, so stay tuned, and see you all, hopefully, on streams and in comments in the weeks to come.

This hotfix release addresses a couple of severe bugs in release 868:

• Fixed berry bushes not being harvested correctly.
• Fixed Northern Alliance Tier 3 celebrations getting stuck.

In this release, we bring you an in-progress version of our third kingdom, The Northern Alliance, and their home glacier biome, The Valkyrie Tundra. As we wrote way back during the Kickstarter, “brave and hardy, the men and women of the north live for the sight of a new dawn over unexplored territory. Armed with compass and hatchet, they pride themselves on their tenacious adaptability.”

With the Northern Alliance come:

• A Glacier Biome, featuring large expanses of snow fields and tundra, as well as large crystal-clear lakes.
• New critters and flowers native to the frozen tundra.
• A new early game experience focused around different ways to get food. Hunt game with the hunter loadout, trap underground beetles to make bug meat kebabs using an early-game cook, and survive raids on your farms from hungry rabbits, squirrels, and other furry varmints.
• The Northern Alliance’s version of the Tier Progression campaign, which unlocks new music, new hearths, new shrines, and in a later version, new building templates.

• Added a new Zilla monster raid.
• Added a new celebration animation for Arke.
• Added new sound effects for entlings, cougars, titan wolves, titan portals, and bushes.
• Added support for remembering whether slice mode was enabled in savegames.
• Added meat drops to animals killed in combat.
• Removed the secondary confirmation dialog when continuing a save with different mods.
• Fixed phantom items appearing in placement menus.
• Fixed destroyed buildings sometimes preventing future buildings from being placed.
• Fixed hearthlings sometimes not prioritizing cooked food.
• Fixed another case of encounters like the daily report firing multiple times in multiplayer.
• Fixed closely-planted seeds being destroyed as they grow.
• Fixed deployed items counting as valid recipe ingredients.
• Fixed deployed items appearing as separate entries in the town inventory UI.
• Fixed farmers getting stuck if part of their farm was blocked.
• Fixed a visual error in orc citizen outfits.
• Fixed blacksmith workbenches not being undeployable.
• Fixed support for mods that increase the starting hearthling number beyond 7.
• Fixed several issues with combat commands.
• Fixed several issues with fixtures in the building editor.
• Fixed several building system errors.
• Fixed several minor UI issues.
• Fixed several minor AI errors.

Have fun!
Team Stonehearth

Hey everyone, welcome to another Stonehearth Desktop Tuesday! We hear a lot from you that one of the main things that would make the game much better is improved performance. We totally agree–bad performance can cause everything from slow framerate, to the UI going unresponsive, to hearthlings stalling out on tasks and buildings and restocking forever. Let’s take a closer look at the things that cause bad performance, how you can diagnose it when you’re experiencing it, and what we’ve been doing to make it better.

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

Another polish release with a few optimizations and some bug fixes, including several for major bugs introduced in the previous release.

• Added new sound effects for titan tentacles.
• Optimized AI and timer performance slightly.
• Optimized workshop UI slightly.
• Improved responsiveness of restocking newly-reachable items.
• Fixed several memory leaks.
• Fixed trapped pets dropping resources that needed to be manually looted.
• Fixed the hearth of cheer quest UI.
• Fixed encounters like the daily report triggering multiple times for reconnected clients.
• Fixed an issue where the town naming UI could get stuck.
• Fixed items with multiple qualities not appearing in item palettes.
• Fixed a building issue where 1-unit high blocks could become unbuildable.
• Fixed several errors in the building editor.
• Fixed all perks having the same tooltip in the character sheet UI.
• Fixed the loadouts modding API that broke in r864. It is now using a new format. See this thread for details.
• Fixed an issue with quest traders stealing in-use items.
• Fixed several errors in happiness, chasing, growth, and trade code.
• Fixed several errors in the farming, player market stalls, and character sheet UIs.
• Fixed stone windows requiring a mason pedestal.
• Fixed giant stoneling monsters masquerading as pebbles.

Have Fun!
Team Stonehearth

In this release we continue with our polish, bug fixing, and optimization phase, so you will see a large number of small improvements, as listed below. Please continue reporting bugs, and make sure you have automatic error reporting enabled in your options!
Thanks for all your feedback on the Titan encounter. We’ve fixed a few bugs and deficiencies in it as a result:

• Removed tree destruction from Titanstorm lightning.
• Balanced Titan event spawn rate (it’s a bit less frantic at the start now).
• Fixed crash when a female orc footman joins the town (Titan campaign reward).
• Fixed camera lockup during Titan intro/outro transitions.
• Fixed Titan encounter music not resuming on reload.
• Fixed re-embarkation discriminating against orcs.
• Fixed portal destruction not causing damage to the Titan.

• Added an Auto Rescue option to the options menu, defaulted to off.
• Added sort and search to the building editor template menu.
• Added search to the building editor fixture menus.
• Improved UI performance.
• Fixed the UI failing to load on game launch.
• Fixed numerous UI errors.
• Fixed several UI text rendering issues.
• Fixed date display in the promotion UI.

• Added new ambient desert audio.
• Added a new (previously disabled) Rayya’s Children music track.
• Added several new recipes for the mason - bed, doors, windows, and light sources.
• Added support for choosing which animals to trap in a given trapping zone.
• Added insects to the trappable critters list.
• Added insect meat recipes.
• Improved server performance.
• Improved water simulation performance.
• Improved shadow and atmosphere rendering performance.
• Improved robustness of AI in unexpected situations.
• Improved waterfalls visual effects.
• Improved the mason pedestal model.
• Changed water puddles to expand in squares instead of circles.
• Fixed items not being restocked if the map is generated on the edge of the overworld.
• Fixed numerous building system errors.
• Fixed hearthlings not being able to build inside caves.
• Fixed items on top of scaffolding being counted as inaccessible.
• Fixed issues with undeploying items hanging on walls.
• Fixed goblin camp terrain restoration.
• Fixed several trapper bugs.
• Fixed campaigns getting stuck when rapidly clicking the shakedown dialog buttons.
• Fixed clerics healing themselves while starving.
• Fixed clerics not using tonics and bandages when healing bedridden hearthlings.
• Fixed crafters sometimes getting stuck in indecision loops when their job is toggled.
• Fixed a visual issue with the cook outfits.
• Fixed crash when reading JSON files with more than one "mixintypes" node.
• Fixed mining zones being affected by the Destroy tool.
• Fixed hearthlings floating into the air if picked up while getting knocked out.
• Fixed pasture animals net worth calculation only counting one animal per pasture.

Have fun!
✨Team Stonehearth✨

It's here. :D To celebrate finally being in Beta, the quest spawns at the end of the orc campaign. Go play if you want to experience it unspoiled; watch for details about what it is and how we got to this version of the design.

Find the full description here:
http://www.stonehearth.net/dt-the-titan/