Once again we are taking part in the ongoing Halloween Kekri Sale with the pleasing numbers and haunting imagery. So let the new adventurers be respected with the discount, and the ancestral spirits with our special Kekri costumes and customs...

Kekri is an ancient Finnish harvest festival celebrated in the fall when the annual agricultural activities were all accomplished and the harvest collected. Kekri meant the end of the crop year, which was a big turning point. It was the time when the souls and spirits of the dead wandered around and visited the living. The ancestors were respected and welcomed. Sauna was heated up for them, and meal prepared too. The living celebrated accordingly, and so do we.

Kekri time included tradition of Kekripukki (Kekri goat) figure. People would dress up as horned creatures, wearing furs or coats upside down, and went around in their disguises and were offered food and drink.
So, what does a decent developer of tradition rich game do to follow the tradition?
Yes. He dresses up as Kekripukki.


Well, hello there, any foods or drinks to offer? Some purchases will do as well.

Again this year the we have launched a special Kekri-themed game title screen for duration of this sale & festivity period. So just enter UnReal World for more haunting imagery.


We wish you happy Kekri time - or happy Halloween if that suits you better.
All in all, now just celebrate and participate in the festivities at this special time of the year.

ːurw_sageːːurw_fireːːurw_treeː

For a short period of time a pathway has opened to get into the realms of certain traditional roguelikes for discounted price.
Steam offers Awesome Traditional Roguelikes bundle - with UnReal World naturally included - until 13th of August. We, and all the games included, also offer individual Daily Deals so you can decide whether you wish to pick a good fistful roguelikes, or just a selected one.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/15790/The_Traditional_Roguelikes_Bundle/

So, there's still summer left and there are no showstoppers discovered in the latest version -- that equals getting off to holidays now.

We can call this latter summer holiday, and I have feeling I'll spend quite a long one. It's likely autumn, or early winter, before we get back to development chambers again. You can still reach me by e-mail, but expect delays with replies. And on rainy days I may rarely pop up at the community hub too. You'll surely hear from me every now and then even during this holiday period, but I'll be far more absent than present. Take care, help each others out, stay safe and have some good times and adventures!

Off to holidays then...

And hey, the Summer Sale still continues for a little while, so the quick ones can take a tactical advantage to get straight into version 3.63 for discounted price.

And well, version 3.63 is kind of a summery release in itself. There's features and fixes on all fronts, but some is specifically related to the lush of the summer. You can find the full changelog below but here's a moody image of certain real world item which you can now find in UnReal World too.




- added: separate key command for commanding your pets and companions [!]

Talking to someone and commanding your pets and companions are now separate commands. Commanding is now done with with [!] key, and the good old [C] key is used only to talk to someone in normal fashion.
The game notifies you about the new [!] key command when talking to companions in normal way, or when talking to someone when there are pets out of sight. These little messages hopefully make it easier to get the new command policy memorized. Also, if you mistakenly try to [C]hat with pets the list of commands is still displayed.
If there are no pets or companions around at all trying to command them [!] just displays an informative message and doesn't proceed into fruitfless target selection.
Also, if there are no companions in sight the menu for shouting commands doesn't anymore contain needless "Choose a target in sight" option.

- improved: fire mechanics

Various features have been added to make fire burning, its' warming effect, obtained information and visual appearance more detailed.

* Burnt-out fire graphics is related to the amount of fire burned at the site. Small fires leave small remains, large fires leave large remains.

* Remains of fire accumulates over time so sequential fires burned at the site will increase the remains. The remains will still eventually disappear with few days pause in fire burning.

* embers graphics has been added and remains of burnt-out fires will be now appear glowing red for awhile. For how long the embers will be glowing depends on the amount of fire burned.

* when looking at burnt-out fire it's now also told if there are glowing or still warm embers. This information gives an idea eg. about how recent a campfire found in the wild might be.

* glowing embers from nearby burnt-out fires helps you to start new ones. This is automatically checked if you start making a fire with glowing remains at adjacent tile.

- added: smoking requires continuous maintaining of fire

In the previous versions smoking succeeded if the room was heated once, and the process required no further maintenance. Now the heating must be maintained through the whole process.
It's not critical to maintain an exact temperature but the fireplace in your smoking cabin should be warmed up properly on daily basis. Should you forget it one day it's still possible to compensate by heating it up even more the next day.
If the heating is completely neglected you will find your smoked foodstuff all spoiled. If the heating has failed only to some extent you may find some of the smoked foods spoiled.

- added: gradual heating up and cooling down of fireplaces and sauna stoves

When warming up a fireplace or sauna stove it now takes some time before the stones get properly heated up and start releasing warmth into the room - and this process is gradual. As a rule of thumb you should keep fire burning at least 3 or 4 hours to get fireplaces and sauna stoves properly heated up. The cooling down is gradual as well and fireplaces and sauna stoves will retain warmth hours and hours after the fire has burnt out. The warmer the fireplace or sauna stove has been the slower it will also cool down.
With these changes in action you can't expect to have a nicely warm room at an instant you light up a fireplace. Or you can't have a sauna bath right after lighting up a sauna stove. However, the fireplaces are designed so that they release some heat when the fire is burning. This allows you to still effectively warm up by the fireplace while it is still only getting heated up.
Also, now you might notice having to warm up the fireplaces longer and more carefully than in earlier versions to have your cottage nicely warm during the coldest winter days. With gradual cooling down of fireplaces the winter morning temperatures inside your cottage may sometimes apppear surprisingly low compared to the earlier. This is because in earlier versions fireplaces retained constant and exceedingly high temperature for very long-time after the fire had burned out.

- added: sauna stove tile slightly stylized

It's a bit darker and has smaller mouth now. This is to better distinguish sauna stove from a common fireplace.

- added: building a sauna stove

Sauna stoves can be now built by the player character. You’ll find the option from [M]ake menu -> uilding -> [W]ooden building.

- improved: throwing water on the sauna stove

Before it was necessary to use sauna scoop to throw water on the sauna stove. Now it's done simply by [a]pplying a water container beside the sauna stove. An option for throwing water from the container appears when the condition is met.
Messages about the results are also updated and now it is told if you get mild or proper steam - depending on how hot the sauna stove is. There’s also a sound effects added so you can hear how the sauna stove really hisses.
With these additions sauna scoop now becomes a deprecated item. It continues to exist in object galore, but with no real use. Upon using sauna scoop you only get a message to use new mechanics instead.

- added: leaf trees now grow and lose their leaves gradually according to the season

You can see leaf trees gradually getting more lush in green in the spring, and again losing the leaf cover in the late autumn.

- added: vasta – a kind of broom to beat and treat oneself with during sauna bath

Vasta is a kind of broom made out of leafy birch twigs and used during sauna bath to gently beat oneself in order to get the muscles relaxed, body massaged and skin cleansed.
Vasta can be made by yourself from [M]ake menu under tility articles. Making of vasta requires bunch of leafy birch twigs which can be collected from birch trees using your TIMBERCRAFT skill.
To use vasta [a]pply it while taking a sauna bath. There’s also sound effect added so you can hear what the beating with vasta really sounds like. Using vasta improves the healing effects of sauna bath.
There’s also game encyclopedia [F1] entry about vasta available.

- added: collecting leafy birch twigs

When collecting branches from birch trees (by using your TIMBERCRAFT skill) you now get leafy birch twigs if the season is right. If not, mere branches are collected. There are appropriate messages to indicate if the leaves aren't big enough just yet, or already gone old. This addition is foremostly added for making vasta which requires leafy birch twigs to be used.

- added: shout commands activated when pets are too far to respond to talked commands

When commanding your pet that is too far away you are now automatically given options for the possible shouted commands. Foremostly this makes "Come" always an available command for dogs.

- added: wandering Njerpez can be met in small groups too

Njerpez warriors don't wander all alone anymore but can be met in small groups, or pairs as well. If a conflict will arise from these encounters you have to be extra careful now. A group of wandering Njerpez can also have multiple dogs with them.

- adjusted: wandering Njerpez commonness based on the region

Wandering Njerpez are most commonly met in the east and south-east. That's an old rule which hasn't changed, but in the previous versions the borderline of their existence and non-existence was strict and rigid. Now the wandering Njerpez commonness is more gradual, decreasing the further into the west and north you go. Now it's been also verified that Njerpez raiders don't ever try to reach regions of western and northern cultures, so that's where to settle if you want to avoid raiders completely.

- added: pause for spacebar when player character falls through ice

- added: non-weapons can be thrown even when both hands are wielding something
This makes it easier to bait a trap, feed a dog, toss firewood into the fire and so on as you don't have to unwield anything to be able to throw such things.

- added: reindeers can be milked

It's now possible to milk reindeer does. The period when the milking is possible is the same as with cows, but the yield is little lesser.

- adjusted: milking period of sheep shortened with few months

Sheeps now yield milk only from swidden month to harvest month.

- added: character age and days played now appear in

rofile screen[/b]

This info is displayed at top of the screen saying eg. "You are 16 winters old, and have lived 7 days of adventuring life."

- removed: character [L]og screen

It's been considered useless for a long-time, and it's no longer in use at all.

- fixed: fresh bloodscapes sometimes disappearing instantly upon map load

- fixed: throwing water on the sauna stove not increasing the temperature

This had gotten broken somewhere along the way when adjusting temperature checks. Now it’s fixed and you will again notice the character getting warmer upon throwing water on the sauna stove.

- fixed: no message or results of arrow breakage when it happened upon hitting a creature

Now if an arrow breaks upon hitting a creature the breakage message is displayed and broken arrow will remain at the location.

- fixed: companions that were commanded to stay put did still engage into fights

- fixed: continuing early interrupted fence building requires the raw materials again

- fixed: character not falling into the water if thin ice at the location is broken by dropped items

- fixed: planted crop graphics appearing at picked mushroom location

- fixed: when dropping items selecting the only item in filtered inventory category drops it immediately ignoring the other selections

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Cheers! ːurw_sageː

Summer Sale has started allowing you to get UnReal World and enter the far North in discounted price.
Simple as that.

And before the sale is over, there will be a new patch released.
Look forward to that.

Having hard time learning UnReal World keyboard commands?
Interested in modding keyboard macros for repeated tasks?
Or just wishing to use a touch screen to play the game on your desktop computer instead of the physical keyboard?

We have some good news for you!
There is UnReal World Mobile Controller app now available for Android devices and it does exactly those things.
Tap a "BUILD FIRE" button on touch screen and your character starts to build a fire. Tap "EAT" button and it will open a list of your food items, and you can use the Mobile Controller buttons to choose the item to eat. Edit a XML-file to customize the Mobile Controller virtual buttons, so that you can have buttons so arranged it best fits your personal playstyle.

The app comes in two versions; A free version with Google ads and with the standard virtual button layouts. And a paid full version which doesn't have ads and also allows you to use custom layouts.

Find the UnReal World Mobile Controller at Google Play.
Mobile Controller Full version
Mobile Controller Free version

The app idea was suggested by a fellow indie inventor Ilmari Tamminen from Vaakalintu Ltd.
He did a whole lot of the design work, while Erkka (UnReal World co-designer) did the coding.
This thing has been cooking for quite some time and now it's officially released.

Mobile Controller works with UnReal World version 3.62 onwards.

It's time for the first release of 2020. Version 3.62 now released consists of some half a dozen additions and dozen of fixes as follows:


Version: 3.62 (stable)

** Saved characters from version 3.40-> are compatible with this version. **

- added: trading cap for meat and fish

Villagers stop accepting meat and fish in trading when if they have decent reserves already. This cap isn't fixed but depends on village population. Also, cooked meat and fish are often accepted in larger amounts than raw.

- added: digging and filling up pits are now pausable tasks

You can stop these processes at will and continue later on by [a]pplying your shovel again.

- changed: pits are now simply called pits instead of former vague term 'hole in the ground'.

- added: tracks getting covered and decayed by snowfall and rain

Snowfall and rain now affect to tracks getting covered and decayed. You'll notice these effects by tracks getting less visible, and eventually disappearing completely. How fast this happens depends naturally on amount of the rain or snowfall. Severe snowfall may cover even the fresh tracks in an hour or so. Decay caused by rain is often lesser, but still noticeable. The older the tracks are the sooner they are prone to decay and disappear in case of both elements.

- added: tracks left by children now appear smaller

This includes graphical presentation and description of the tracks eg. "You see here small human tracks."

- added: aggressive village dogs calm down together with their masters

In case of minor breaches villagers might punish you for a while and calm down after you had learned your lesson - but their dogs didn't react accordingly. Now village dogs will calm down if their masters do so. This doesn't prevent village dogs from being a serious threat as they don't always reason the power of their attacks the same way the humans do and may cause lethal wounds by accident.

- adjusted: precautions regarding character save failures

Additional precautions to overcome rare cases of character data blanking upon unexpected termination of the game have been added.

- adjusted: map maintenance routines

The adjustments remedy rare occasion of too frequent maintenances of fresh characters with heavily explored zoomed-in maps.

- fixed: overlapping tracks modifying the existing track information

Things like animal size and track freshness were sometimes mistakenly modified by overlapping tracks.

- fixed: watercraft mistakenly transported with the character when zooming out right after getting on shore

- fixed: everlasting small bones

Certain bones would never get eaten up completely no matter how long dogs would chew on them.

- fixed: carcass disappearing if the creature dies while making a hole in the ice

- fixed: human tracks described wrong

NPC description was mistakenly added to track description. It said eg. "You see here craftsmanhuman tracks." instead of intended "You see here human tracks".

- fixed: quality improvement when items decay to stale stage

Foodstuff and skins might mistakenly improve a bit in quality when decaying if their original quality was the lowest possible.

- fixed: sages of some cultures not replying with valid phrases when asked for their skills and expertise

- fixed: animals released from the forest cover not following character on zoomed-out map level

This got broken along with NPC pet ownership additions. Now it works again as it should.

- fixed: some cave treasures you heard of were never to be found

The bug was caused by map maintenance being prone to mistakenly remove cave treasure locations.

- fixed: partially skinned carcasses mistakenly turning skinned upon map load

This bug usually manifested itself when skinning got interrupted and the character fell asleep, which also initiates map save and re-load.

- typo corrected: angrered -> angered

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Cheers! ːurw_sageː

Today, February 28th, Finland celebrates Kalevala Day and the Day of Finnish Culture in honor of The Kalevala - a 19th century work of epic poetry regarded as our national epic. That's something to celebrate, but we've got some more for you on this special day...

In early 2020 we received an interesting e-mail from a player (Cheers, Travis!) sending congratulations on a milestone: UnReal World had lasted 10,000 days in the real world.
This was calculated from the date stamp in executable file of version 1.00b distribution archive. We don't even remember the exact release date, but it was summer of 1992. So the continuing lifespan of the game is at least 10,000 days - and well, it's quite something.

Needless to say, The Kalevala and UnReal World go well together. It is not so much about direct influence as a book, but the game draws inspiration from the same pool of oral tradition, folklore and mythology of our ancestors. Of this content some is rooted in ancient unrecorded history dating back thousands of years, and some is closer to Iron Age - where the game takes place. So let this day be a celebration of The Kalevala, but also 10,000 days of digital Finnish Culture in the form of UnReal World.

10,000 days is a long time. Lines of source code in the game now sports somewhere around 140,000.
On average that makes:
14 lines of code per day
for 10,000 days.

Changelogs for version releases contain around 15000 lines of text, so that makes:
1,5 lines of changelog entries per day
for these 10,000 days.

That's just some numbers to give an idea of the long history, which is continuing as we speak. It seems to be 69 days since the last announcement. So on average there should be around 966 new lines of code and 103 lines of changelog entries written.
We haven't checked but we are continuing.

Would you buy an old but continuously developed fenno-ugric roguelike from these guys?

From the left: Sami (creator) and Erkka (co-designer) of UnReal World

We wish you happy Kalevala Day and the Day of (digital) Finnish Culture.
Let's continue.

It's evident that you have noticed it already...

...but we thought of reminding you personally in case you want to give it a shot.


Sami (creator) and Erkka (co-designer) in the real world, not too far away from the development chambers.

We've given our shots for this winter and are ready to enter the holiday season.
The last release of this year (version 3.61) came live just a few days ago and has been happily received.

Last update of the year 2019 is live now.
In addition to fistful of bugfixes there's also a small bag of new features of which some are long-awaited and suggested improvements. Enjoy!



Saved characters from previous versions (3.40 ->) are compatible with this version.


- added: companions can help you with hauling and pushing items

Unoccupied companions spontaneously help you when pushing or hauling heavy loads is being proceeded.

- added: fence gate

Gates can be [o]pened and [c]losed just like doors. They can be also built by player character from [M]ake menu under uilding options.


Screenshot from version 3.61.
This settler is happy to finally be able to add gates to his fence. There are two gates to be seen in half-constructed pen.

- added: when [C]ommanding animals the animal name is displayed in the menu title

For example, if you would command a dog called Rekku the menu title appear as:
"ANIMAL COMMANDS: REKKU"
This helps owners of multiple animals to be sure they chose to command the desired one.

- added: target selection if multiple creatures occupy the same location where an action is to be done

If there are multiple creatures at the location where you proceed to execute certain actions
you will be asked to select the target creature. This applies to following actions:

- melee attack
- packing and unpacking animals
- looking at the location

- added: limping and animal size tracking information

When examining tracks now you can also see if the creature is limping. This requires character's TRACKING skill to be 25% or more. Severity of the actual leg injury can't be interpreted so crippled animals also leave limping tracks.
Animal size, big or small, can be also seen from their tracks now. This is so obvious that only absolutely untrained trackers will fail to notice it.
Moreover, the actual track graphics are also shown smaller or larger depending on the creature size. Notice that as the young animals smaller in size their tracks pretty much always appear as small ones.
The new information is displayed in tracking messages for example like this:
"You see here fresh limping tracks of small elk..."


Screenshot from version 3.61.
A flock of forest reindeers have escaped from the hunter. There's bunch of tracks to be seen, and now we really want find out where did the crippled one go.

- added: tree in front of the character automatically selected when cutting branches

You don't have to specify a direction for cutting and peeling actions if there's a tree in
front the character you. That tree is always automatically selected for these actions.

- added: chat option to ask for a sage in the village

When chatting with NPCs there's now a way to find out ask if there's a sage in the village. "Is there a sage around?" chat line can be found from "Ask for help/company" chat options. If there's a sage you will be told his whereabouts in the village.

- changed: need for heated room, fireplace or fire are checked first in cookery recipes

It's more convenient that way as you aren't bothered with meaningless ingredient selections if these requirements aren't met.

- fixed: failed hideworking with "somebody else got the skin" message diplayed and no skin obtained

This rare occurrence might happen if the hideworking got cancelled at the very last minute of the hideworking process.

- fixed: agriculture graphics representing a planted tile disappearing soon after planting certain crops

This was a result of crops mistakenly entering wintering state if the planting was done early enough, and thus the planted graphics was removed. They still sprouted properly though.

- fixed: wrong inventory weight with certain startup scenarios

When starting a new character the inventory weight was displayed wrong until you made your first move.

- fixed: gaining skill options during character creation by hovering over encyclopedia hotspot

- fixed: wrong tying equipment requirements when making patches of items

This was noted eg. when making arrows. Crafting multiple arrows mistakenly increased both tying equipment length and amount requirements.

- fixed: pushing duplicates items

The issue was related to ice breaking messing up item data while pushing action was proceeded.

- typo corrected: "coffing" -> "coughing" in herb effects dialog

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Cheers! ːurw_sageː