A large update is imminent - large enough that we’re running an optional beta to test it out before we make it permanent. There’s a complete reworking of the freeplay / custom game mode AI, a new streamlined setup mode called Skirmish, major rebalances for the campaign, a big extension to the enemy mounting system, and lots of new artwork to replace older assets.

We are after feedback on all manner of things in this very extensive update, mainly focusing on glitches that crop up, crashes, and balance. Any and all feedback on this optional beta is very much appreciated - please post it to the community discussions! Thanks so much to our focus group who have been providing feedback to get this patch to this point.

Please note that optional betas are only accessible on the Steam Windows 64 bit build.

WARNING: This beta changes many things about freeplay mode, including how it is saved! Old freeplay saves will no longer be loadable.

IT IS STRONGLY ADVISED TO MAKE A SAVE BACKUP: We highly recommend making a backup of your saved games before you run an optional beta, on the off-chance that some changes cause them to be corrupted. To see where your saves are stored, see the information in this thread on the Steam forums.


If you would like to join the beta, the code is newbeachtesters. If you don’t know how to join a beta and would like to, follow the instructions below:

1. Find Empires of the Undergrowth in your Steam library, right-click on it and choose "Properties"
   
2. Choose the "Betas" tab
   
3. In the box titled "Enter beta access code to unlock private betas", enter newbeachtesters
   
4. After the "Access code correct" information appears, make sure you've chosen "Open beta" from the "Select the beta you would like to opt into" drop-down menu
   
5. Press close - the game will now update to the beta branch

• Smarter AI - much cleverer freeplay AI! It’ll give you a run for your jelly.
  
• Freer Freeplay - new freeplay features, new uber creatures!
  
• Skirmish Mode - quick-to-setup game vs AI colonies based on freeplay
  
• Prettier Artwork - for beach story & freeplay levels, & some creatures!
  
• Campaign Balance - the campaign has been rebalanced with many changes
  
• Mount Your Enemies - many more enemy creatures can now be climbed by your ants!

Freeplay now lives in the Custom Game menu, along with the new Skirmish streamlined setup mode.

• Freeplay AI completely reworked
  
  • Much more intelligent building & food collection priority
    
  • Assist allies under attack & plan coordinated attacks
    
  • Guards resources, steals aphids, harrasses opponents
    
  • Nest designs tailored to species & room location
    
  • New build priority system for different species
    
  • Build orders adapt to storage & battle needs
    
  • Will hide from rising water on applicable maps
    
  • Customisable temperament & reactions
• Streamlined setup mode called Skirmish
  
  • Quick battle setup vs computer-controlled colonies
    
  • Emphasises colony vs colony combat with conquest victory condition
    
  • Preset landmarks & creature spawns
    
  • Generally shorter form games
• New landmarks
  
  • Huge creatures (whip spider, great blue skimmer or bullfrog)
    
  • Caterpillar plants
    
  • Relocatable aphid plants (rosemary in beach levels, fewflower milkweed otherwise)
    
  • Carnivorous plants
• New uber creatures
  
  • Bombardier beetle
    
  • Red velvet ant
    
  • Eastern newt
    
  • Narrow-mouthed toad
• Beach tiger beetle & beach wolf spider are now custom game only creatures
  
• The above have had stats & abilities changed to differentiate them from the new campaign creatures taking their place (see below)
  
• Freeplay can optionally use the fixed landmarks from Skirmish
  
• Freeplay now has the option of spawning environmental creatures with roaming patrol routes

Most levels in the campaign have been changed. In general, in the 1.x & 2.x levels aggressive creatures drop less food, whilst environmental food is increased. In the 4.x levels, aggressive creatures drop slightly more food. The 1.x, 2.x & 4.x levels should now feel fairly consistent in that regard. There are many other changes, too.

• All beach, forest & rainforest creatures have had their food quantity recalculated & reduced
  
• All swamp creatures have had food quantities increased to bring them in line with the new values in the rest of the game

• Food has been added into both levels
  
• 1.2 slave maker attacks will now have level 2 & 3 ants amongst them
  
• 1.2 slave maker attacks will get harder more rapidly on hard & insane
  
• Challenge mode cricket attacks will be more frequent on harder difficulties
  
• Funnel web spiders now become food items rather than harvestable corpses on death
  
• Enemies in top-left of 1.2 will now attack the queen on being unearthed

• More food added to the undergrounds of both levels
  
• Has higher level enemy ants on the map & in attack waves
  
• Notification about creature mounting moved to 2.1
  
• 2.1 underground caverns added
  
• 2.1 has more daytime surface food
  
• 2.1 has a new food arrival event with new narrator dialogue
  
• 2.2 aphids now produce food throughout the night
  
• Melee wood ants speed increased to 320 up from 300
  
• Melee wood ants given 30% AoE resistance
  
• Reduced number of challenge mode beetle larvae in some areas
  
• Creature changes
  
• Beach tiger beetle replaced with northern dune tiger beetle (same stats as old beach tiger beetle)
  
• Beach wolf spider replaced with sand bear wolf spider (same stats as old beach wolf spider)
  
• Larger variant of hermit crab added

• Level 2 & 3 huge whip spider added for hard & insane in 3.2
  
• Significantly increased health of huge whip spider
  
• Huge whip spider now has a health bar like the bullfrog & great blue skimmer

• Aggressive creatures now drop a little more food
  
• Pervasive fire ant free hatch timer improved to 1m30s (from 1m40s)

• The beach environment has been updated to bring it up to the fidelity of the more recent swamp & rotting log environments. 2.1, 2.2 & the freeplay / custom game maps The Dunes & Towhead all use these new assets.
  
• New decorative beach assets: flowering bindweed, water weeds, limpets, scallop shells, sea-smoothed rocks, sea urchins
  
• New artwork for the 2 replacement beach creatures: northern dune tiger beetle & sand bear wolf spider
  
• New model for black ant queen
  
• New water look for beach levels

In this update, many more creatures can be climbed and mounted by your ants - not just the very largest creatures! As a general rule of thumb, most creatures as big or larger than a large tiger beetle can be climbed - but there are some exceptions. Smaller mountable enemies cannot be climbed by larger ants - for example, a leafcutter major cannot climb a wolf spider.

Ants mounted on enemies deal bonus damage, and apply a damage buff to allies attacking the creatures from the ground. There are circumstances where you may be better off disabling enemy mounting, however - if speed is an issue, it takes ants time to climb up and down larger creatures, and if a creature despawns with ants still on it those ants will be lost.

The pine woods tree frog is currently unmountable (we intend to change this before this update leaves the optional beta phase).

All festive levels are now active for testing - access these by clicking on the spider web for Hungry Spider, the gift for Festive Spider, and the hanging lantern for New Year’s Feast. These will be reverted to their timed form when this update leaves beta.

• Food has been added into most extra levels in line with the food value changes
  
• The Hungry Spider now has 80% thorns resistance
  
• Aggrandise
  
  • Different levels of huge whip spider final boss added depending on difficulty
    
  • Removed extra whip spider juveniles from the final boss
    
  • Fish no longer loses resources on harder difficulties
    
  • Huge whip spider will no longer ignore player’s ants on the way to the queen

• Realistic Mode removed & replaced with Advanced Options for control of individual things it did
  
• Seasonal costumes option added in Advanced Options to allow them to be disabled
  
• Point values have been reassessed & updated (this affects enemy creature spawning & score)
  
• User interface updated in multiple places (augmentations, level select, options menu, achievements) to use up more screen space & allow more space for language & UI scaling
  
• UI scaling slider added to the menu to allow manual increasing of UI scale (good for handhelds & TVs)
  
• Updated harvesting spots on some dead creatures so no more ants are harvesting than there is food available
  
• Minor performance improvements & reduction of visual artefacts on resources
  
• Changed the Battle Arena tile set to the new beach one
  
• Localisation additions & changes
  
• Updated enemy mounting button icon
  
• Tooltips will now show when the game is paused

• Fixed some visual effects remaining on creatures after death
  
• Fixed an issue where attack points could sometimes be unreachable causing attacker to wait on the floor by them
  
• Uber velvet worm can now be harvested by 8 ants at a time
  
• 1.1 & 1.2 player colony now black in colour
  
• Fixed an issue in Tug Of War 2 that would lead to the enemy colony spawning black ants
  
• Decals now correctly delete when a tile is downgraded or deleted
  
• Fixed an issue where ants would not rotate for a short while after collecting a queen egg
  
• Fixed an issue where ladybirds may not land if they are not being observed by the player (quantum ladybird wave function now collapsed)
  
• Fixed an issue where loaded eggs would only appear after the game had started
  
• Fixed a pontoon construction point in 4.2
  
• Numerous text & AI scaling fixes
  
• Matched the colour select UI more closely to the in-game colours
  
• Queens will no longer perform pain animation on loading
  
• Salamanders & newts will still be rendered when just off-screen
  
• Aura effects should display better on inclined surfaces
  
• Lynx spider should no longer do its climbing animation when walking
  
• Fixed a wood ant firing sound issue

Vlog 5 talks mainly about the planned summer update for Empires of the Undergrowth - balance changes to the campaign, new uber creatures, new artwork and more.

We also check in on Dan P with some updates to Horticular, Adapt and Ecosystem coming in the near future (other games published by Slug Disco) - if you want to skip that and get straight to the EotU stuff, the timecode is 4:54.

We've had the last of our extra levels in the 'sequel season', so it's time to re-evaluate the road ahead with an updated map. The compressed parts of the previous one are fast approaching, so we can 'zoom in' on that part of it, as it were, to give a bit more detail. Most of this newsletter will deal with breaking down what'll be arriving in the near future.


A bombardier beetle attacks fire ants from NappyB on our Discord

We also have some business news - we've joined with indie publishers Hooded Horse to publish Empires of the Undergrowth! There are also some real-world events we'll be attending soon. More on that later - first and foremost, let's get the new roadmap up and talk through it in order.


Here's the updated roadmap. Please note that the exact order in which things will happen, as well as the timings, are very approximate - sometimes things take more time than expected, and sometimes they take less. Some of the updates may be clumped together, whilst others may be more spread out.


Graphic design is my passion (click to see full size)


Starting on the right-hand side in the top corner, we've just had the last of the 'sequel season' of extra levels. The Culling 2 was released on May 1, and it represents the last of the extra levels we had stocked up for you lovely people to play whilst we work on the big stuff. Rather than panic and quickly develop a bunch more of them, we thought we'd wait a while and just concentrate on getting to a point where we've released our planned changes to the existing campaign levels and freeplay mode.



Sequel season was a really neat opportunity to revisit some of the older extra level ideas, and give them a new spin in the context of the content that has been added to the game in the meantime. Undoubtedly there will be more extra levels (represented towards the centre of the roadmap, after all of the near-future updates are released) but for the meantime we're quite happy with the reception given to the four in this set.


The upcoming balance changes to the campaign levels will be arriving sooner rather than later. They shouldn't be thought of as blanket changes - each level has been reworked to accommodate the changed food values (in general less food from dead enemies and more from other sources, except in tier 4 where food from creatures has increased), and in the case of the beach levels some larger changes are being made.


A new size class of hermit crab has been added which will patrol the beach at night, and aphids will continue to produce honeydew after dark (making them a much more valuable commodity to look after). There's also some stuff that will make use of some previously unused narrator dialogue, making the overall changes to the beach levels far more interesting than a simple food rebalance.


What doesn't kill you, usually succeeds in the second attempt

Apart from the new crab size class, 'beach creature changes' also refers to the changes to the wolf spider and tiger beetle that were detailed in the previous newsletter and vlog - the link here has the right timecode for that moment (at 3:36). These are art-only changes (apart from the food rebalance) to firmly establish the location of the beach levels as coastal Europe.


A host of changes are coming to the menu system and user interface - more menus will be full screen-sized rather than floating boxes, making the visuals less cluttered when navigating them. The old and unhelpfully-named option called ‘realistic mode’ has been broken down into its component pieces (hiding pheromone markers, trails, and buried food and creature outlines) and added to a new tab on the updated menu, which also includes options for disabling seasonal hats on the queen if you so wish - not everyone wants to look at a Santa hat in December.


Updated level selection menu

The most eye-catchingly obvious of these changes is probably the level launch menu, which looks much cleaner and has some fancy live-rendered ants in it now. You can see this in motion in last month’s vlog (at 4:41 seconds).

The whole interface itself will soon have an option to set its scale, which is a long-requested feature for both accessibility and display format reasons. Apart from being a must for players with visual perception or eyesight issues, people who want to play on the Steam Deck or to use a controller whilst looking at a TV on the opposite side of the room will soon find text and menus across the game a much more readable experience.


We’ve been working since the new year on updating the beach assets to bring them up to scratch with the precedent set for the swamp and rotting log environments. This was detailed more in the previous newsletter - so go and check that out for more extensive details (the same goes for the new black ant queen model).


WIP beach (ignore unfinished nest entrances, etc)


We've been hard at work plugging in all the sprockets and widgets to bring the improved AI systems to freeplay. In this quick demonstration video, you can see an AI colony respond directly to a threat near their nest entrance and engage its harassment module to fight off the intruders.



When it realises the odds are not in its favour, it makes the independent decision to make a tactical retreat before it loses all of its ants. This form of reactive AI was much simpler in its previous implementation for freeplay colonies, and it’s satisfying to see this coming together now. The work to make this more intelligent AI system saveable in freeplay mode has recently neared completion, so we’re fairly confident in putting this in the ‘more imminent’ section of the roadmap. Freeplay games that include AI colonies should be significantly more engaging and more tactically diverse.


The new landmarks that are coming include large creatures (currently bullfrogs, dragonflies and whip spiders) and relocatable aphids on milkweed plants. The new options include the ability to drop some of the early game randomness of the landmarks, making the placement of them more intelligently fair, at least at the start of a freeplay run to allow the player time to build up before the difficulty ramps.


‘Interim Update’ is the unofficial term we’ve been using for the large sets of changes coming between the fire ant and final campaign updates, taking the name from a convention we used in an earlier update cycle. Since a good chunk of what was considered part of this update will be ready sooner (and is therefore earlier on the roadmap), we’ll keep the name for everything else that is likely to come a bit later. At that point, we’ll do a dedicated video covering all the changes.


Fishing spider spies you with all eight eyes

The 4th tier challenge mode (featuring the six-spotted fishing spider, Dolomedes triton) and the new freeplay map ‘Wetlands’ that prominently features fire ant bridge building make up the most anticipated part of this update, but the new uber creatures are sure to be a welcome addition as well. The game will get its full complement of achievements at this point, too (with the exception of some that will come with full release).


The new addition for this part of the roadmap that needs a little more clarification is New Game Plus mode. It was detailed very thoroughly in last month’s vlog (5:58), so for a full rundown that’s the definitive source. For convenience’s sake here’s a brief summary:

• Upon completing the campaign, you’ll have the option of converting a save to New Game Plus
  
• That process will be similar to rehousing the colony in the campaign in terms of lost resources and gained royal jelly
  
• All levels will be significantly harder
  
• All ants will be unlockable from the start with your stash of jelly, including the bonus species (bullet ants)
  
• Queen upgrades, species-specific upgrade and minor improvements will all be active in documentary campaign missions in New Game Plus mode to counteract the increased difficulty
  
• The mode can be completed again, in New Game Mode +2, 3, etc to an as-yet undefined limit

Note that this change is unlikely to come until we leave early access, but plenty of people have been asking if it’s going to be a feature so we wanted to confirm that and get some of the details out nice and early.

That covers the updated roadmap - please feel free to join us on our Discord, or discussion forums, if you have any questions! We will endeavour to update this roadmap every 6 months or so going forward, until the project is finished. It’s likely that everything up until the ‘Interim Update’ part of it will be ticked off in relatively short order.


A short while ago, we got to know the lovely people from Hooded Horse - an indie publishing company that has been making some waves for the past few years with its strategy, sim and RPG games. Empires of the Undergrowth seemed like a good fit for them!



We’ve partnered up with them to get the word out about Empires of the Undergrowth to more people. Whilst we maintain complete creative control of the project and management of our own resources, Hooded Horse can bring their more extensive business acumen and experience to the party when it comes to promotion and marketing. This can only be a good thing for EotU - it should mean more eyes on the game, more feedback for us, and ultimately a more successful project. If you see some changes around the EotU store pages in the near future, then that's the work of their wise hands.

The jumping spider-eyed amongst you may have noticed that EotU is part of publisher bundles by Hooded Horse for the time being, and we’re very happy to be counted alongside games such as Against the Storm and Clanfolk!


There’s an event in Wales on 13th May called ANTCON, in Carmarthen, Wales. It’s a small event for ant enthusiasts, focusing on their keeping and care. We’ve been invited to attend and give a talk, so a few of us from the team will be visiting and director / developer Liam will likely be doing that short presentation - and I’ll make sure it’s recorded! I’ll be documenting the whole event and editing a highlight video for our YouTube channel, so make sure you’re subscribed to us (why aren’t you already? We put some really good stuff up there!) so that you can see that as soon as it goes up.

Later in the year there is a very good chance we’ll be attending Gamescom 2023 in Cologne, Germany, in some form - our new publishers Hooded Horse will be there also. That’s in August, so if you’d like to meet some of the team (and play a whole bunch of awesome indie games whilst you’re at it) then there’s plenty of time to get tickets!


If you’d like to submit a screenshot for this section of the newsletter, by far the easiest way is to join our Discord and post in the appropriate dedicated screenshot channel. It’s a very friendly community and aesthetically pleasing screenshots are always well-received. This time, though, I've gone through the Steam Community screenshot posts since I've been neglecting those for the past few newsletters.

To get a better angle on your screenies, hit shift whilst you press the photo mode button (F9 by default) for a camera that is uncoupled from the ground for maximum freedom!


A wasp mantidfly perches on a pitcher plant in this shot from Philippe Echtebaise


An aesthetically pleasant ultrawide shot of the rotting log from matrixmod


Not even the froglings survived - it's a massacre in the swamp from TheeGamerTv

The Culling 2 - the final level in the 'sequel season' series - is out now in Extra Levels!



Take command of big-headed ants (Pheidole morrisii) in their first stand-alone level. In The Culling 2, your colony must survive for six nights in the swamp, whilst packs of hostile creatures invade as darkness falls. They will build up over time, eventually becoming overwhelming - even for the best-prepared colonies.

Your hope lies in controlling the amount of enemies before they become insurmountable. Cull their numbers during the day, whilst gathering food to last out the night. Mighty big-headed supersoldiers will help you hold the lines as they charge and crush their enemies with a single bite.

We hope you've enjoyed extra level sequel season! We'll be taking a break from extra levels for a while, as we're concentrating on the freeplay and tier 5 updates for the timebeing.

Hi all,

In the next few days we will making some adjustments to the regional pricing of Empires of the Undergrowth. The USD price of the game is staying the same at $19.99, and the Euro price will remain €19.99 also. The regional discounts in some other currencies will be reduced to become closer to the USD & Euro price.

We thought we should give a heads-up so that anyone who's been waiting to pull the trigger before the regional changes come into effect can make an informed decision. The change will likely occur on Monday 1st May.

With the Earth Appreciation Festival in full swing, we thought it'd be a good time to do a short livestream of Empires of the Undergrowth! Community manager Mike will be playing one of the more recently added campaign levels (4.1 'Cold Blood') for the occasion. Please join in, and ask any questions you like!

The Earth Appreciation Festival is now live on Steam! Slug Disco is a co-organiser of the event this year, along with Mechanistry and Straw Fawn.

Empires of the Undergrowth is 10% off in this festival of games that highlight the wonders of nature (such as EotU, Timberborn and Wandering Village) as well as games that deal with human-made issues, such as Frostpunk, Deponia and This War of Mine.



Slug Disco and Hooded Horse will be donating 10% of revenue generated by Empires of the Undergrowth during the event to Buglife, a UK-based invertebrate conservation charity that is very close to our hearts. Invertebrates represent a fundamental part of the ecosystem, and we're very happy to be supporting a charity that works towards their conservation.

We'll check in again a little later in the week with the Earth Appreciation Festival to see how things are going, perhaps with a little round-up video - see you then!

Challenge mode, and game plus, and new artwork, oh my!

After going over some in-person events that have happened recently for a couple of Slug Disco's other publishing projects and an important business move, Mike breaks down recent progress for Empires of the Undergrowth - including the long-anticipated challenge mode for tier 4, and plans for the post-campaign game plus mode coming along with tier 5.

To skip the Slug Disco news and get directly to the Empires of the Undergrowth goodness, start the video at 03:11.

The penultimate level in our Sequel Season is here - the short-form extra level Enemy of my Enemy 2 puts your queen in the middle of a map, surrounded by hostile creatures. All of them must be eliminated to win, but only a small garrison of Royal Guard ants protects the queen.



You can't build brood chambers, but you can dig with your mouse. Thankfully, the enemy packs are hostile to one another - and therein lies the key to victory. Tunnel them out strategically, forcing them to encounter one another before reaching the queen.

We think this level will probably benefit from another balance pass in the future due to it being too difficult, but we aren't quite in a position to make a new build of the game for it just yet due to our current work on the campaign and freeplay changes. For now, it will remain an extremely difficult extra level (almost certainly the most difficult, particularly on insane difficulty) but we are curious to see if a meta arises that can reliably beat it before we make any changes!

Extra levels don't take us very long to develop - they're there to give everyone some extra time in the Undergrowth whilst we work on the really big stuff!

We're entering a stage of development where we're making some pretty fundamental changes to both the campaign and freeplay mode, in order to get them closer to their final implementation when the game leaves early access. That's been the priority for our devs in the past few weeks - and we'll detail some of the changes that are coming in this newsletter.


A fire ant about to be entangled from NappyB

On the graphical side of things, there's a new Formica fusca queen model on the way and a change to two of the beach creatures for geographical consistency. We've also been finalising work for the visual improvement of the beach levels. Whilst we're not ready to show that in all its glory we will go through some of the new things that will be making the beach even beach-ier than it was before.

A little later this month we'll have the penultimate extra level in the Sequel Season appearing. Once again, the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Well, not quite your friend, it'll attack you, too - but you get the idea.

Finally, in late February I sat our 3 devs down to confront them with the harsh reality that some people don't like their game. This was a giggle, and all in good fun - see the results later!


We have been due a large overhaul of the campaign ever since the fire ant update. The food balancing in the 4.x levels is closer to our philosophy going forward for how food from aggressive creatures will work in the finished project, and we are now at a point where it's time to implement this.


Something on your nose? From Dolly on our Discord

To reiterate the reasoning behind this - in the game as it currently stands, colonies often reach a 'tipping point' beyond which nothing can realistically threaten them, and this was not our original intention. Some creatures have methods of circumventing this, such as wolf spiders that can charge past ant lines underground - but these are more like band-aids over a much deeper issue. Once the colony cannot be realistically threatened, things become much less interactive. Enemies arriving in the nest to attack the queen become, instead of a threat, a free delivery.



We balanced the fire ant levels with this philosophy, with aggressive creatures dropping significantly less food for their difficulty than creatures in the 1st and 2nd tiers (the 3rd tier is immune to this due to leafcutters not eating creatures). We accept that the difference is quite jarring and can be disconcerting for a player who is used to a level of resources from fallen critters in previous tiers.

We agree with the overall consensus that we pushed things too far in the other direction when it came to balancing 4.x, so we're going to be increasing food from aggressive creatures a little in those levels whilst decreasing it across the board in the rest of the campaign. Food from other sources is being increased to compensate, but players starting the campaign from scratch should get a much more consistent feel for what they can expect from slain aggressive creatures.

Such a change is going to require tweaking, and we'll be inviting the community to be a part of that when the time comes. It's likely that we will run an extended optional beta.


We originally envisaged the upcoming freeplay changes to be a lesser update, rather than the entire overhaul that it's turning out to be! As we've moved forward with introducing the improved AI systems from the 4.x levels into it, we've come to the inevitable conclusion that, stats-wise, freeplay and the campaign operate on two entirely different levels. If we want to balance plant-harvesting leafcutters against voracious omnivores like fire ants, we're going to need a different set of numbers.

A short time ago, the stats for critters in the campaign and freeplay were divorced from one another, so that they can be balanced separately. How different they need to be will be down to the testing phase, once again, and we are very likely to run another optional beta for the freeplay changes. This is likely to be ready for testing after the campaign balance pass detailed above, so will probably be a separate event to it.

Other changes are also in the works for freeplay - a CSV-driven way of sharing freeplay setups is being implemented (the rarely-used copy/paste method is going to be retired), and this ties into another exciting addition to the mode that we'll detail in a future newsletter or vlog.

Outside of these larger changes, a smaller one that is freeplay-relevant is an increase of the number of harvest points on an uber velvet worm to 8. This was just an oversight with this one particular creature and did not represent where we intend to go on that front!


One of the earliest models made for Empires of the Undergrowth in its current form is the Formica fusca queen. Matt has been itching to have another go at her, and has recently done so. We're sure you agree that the new model is much improved!


The new Formica fusca queen

Since she's a constant, static feature in levels she features in, she was a much more pressing candidate for improvement over other models. Older stuff can always be improved, and we have a priority list for this. Improvements to, or replacements for, other models depends on time.


View from above

We will be making changes to two of the beach creatures for reasons that shall be detailed shortly - both the tiger beetle and the wolf spider will be replaced with similar yet distinct species. Earlier in the project, in the geographical crunch that was necessary to get the game to an initial early access release, the intended location of the beach levels (coastal Europe) was compromised by the inclusion of two North American species - the beach tiger beetle (Cicindela dorsalis) and the beach wolf spider (Arctosa littoralis).


The northern dune

This is now being corrected. The beach tiger beetle is being replaced by the northern dune tiger beetle (Cicindela hybrida). This beetle has different pigmentation to its predecessor, but shares the same behaviour - including an appetite for ants.


The new king of speed on the intertidal flats

The beach wolf spider is being replaced with the splendidly-named sand bear wolf spider (Arctosa perita). An active night-time hunter, it shares the same niche as its American cousin and will also be a one-to-one replacement for it in the campaign levels.



We see no reason to replace the existing species in places such as extra levels, so dorsalis and littoralis will still be around for the foreseeable future! So, in the current plans, the Hungry Spider will remain a beach wolf.


Texture differences between the new (left) and old


The art team has been hard at work sprucing up the beach environment to bring it up to scratch with the more recent additions. Environment artist Dan C has been building pebbles, plants and shells, and creating a large amount of sand textures. So much sand.


Sea-smoothed pebbles for your improved beach!

New decorative elements for the beach include limpet and scallop shells, as well as other marine adornments such as seaweed and flowering bindweed.


Lots of new beach assets appearing in the game files now

Please note that in the small thumbnails of the assets in the above editor screenshot they are missing their in-game textures. These are starting to go into the levels now, and our hope is that we can include the beach visual improvements alongside the campaign balance pass beta test.


Within the next few weeks from the time of writing, extra level Enemy of my Enemy 2 will appear. Like in its predecessor, digging is done with the mouse and no ants are controlled. This time around, the queen is located at the very centre of the map, which puts her at a much more perilous crossroads.


Uh-oh!

Buried enemy packs are hostile to each other, and the order in which you unearth them is crucial. Get them to take each other out before they reach your queen, where a limited number of powerful Royal Guard ants are protecting her. Harder difficulties represent a more intricate puzzle, and as always with these types of extra levels, game knowledge and a good feel for how powerful individual creatures are is paramount.


A red velvet ant threatens the queen, from tester NappyB

As things stand, the higher difficulties of this level are very difficult - perhaps too difficult! It’s due a final balance pass, but we’re not in a position to package another build of the game before it appears (everything is current in bits because of the ongoing campaign and freeplay changes). We’ll be interested to see if a distinct meta appears to beat insane difficulty before we get a chance to apply a rebalance!


In late February, I sat down with our 3 devs John, Liam and Matt, with the intention of bruising their egos a little. Whilst we’ve had plenty of support for Empires of the Undergrowth, there’s definitely some meaner comments out there and I thought it’d be healthy (and definitely not soul-destroying) for them to read through them.



We all had a giggle making this, and no foul is intended to anyone whose comment is featured in it! Let’s be honest, everyone who says we take a long time to do things isn’t wrong. There are few combinations as deep-cutting as both mean and witty, as many of the featured comments demonstrate. You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?

Thanks to our Discord members, and Chinese community managers Kaidi and Lin, for helping me organise and collate the comments for this video.


If you’d like to submit a screenshot for this part of the newsletter, the easiest way for us to see it is to post it on the appropriate channel of our community Discord. Alternatively, you can post it to the Steam Community which I’ll occasionally rifle through. As an absolute last resort, you can email me at mike@slugdisco.com.

To get better screenies, hold down shift when entering screenshot mode to uncouple your camera from the ground plain.


A squadron of salamanders from Bananta on Steam


A swarmed spider from doom guy


One last look at the old black ant queen from heheboiboi999