Hi everyone! Yevhen here, reporting on our achievements through the last year.
Some may ask how come we can still pull out updates while our homes are being razed to the ground. One shouldn't think about how bad is the situation, but about what can be done to get the most out of it. And we still can get a lot.
Our work is a manifestation of our freedom and a huge middle finger to those toilet-stealing animals, who happened to be our neighbors. Our profits will be used to put a drip in the ocean of pain they're about to face here.
So let's get back to business. In short, there's a bunch of new buildings, a new slightly hilly map and a whole lot of quality-of-life improvements, just how you like it.
My personal favorite is rowhouses. They are not yet as meaningful as they would be in a finished game (basically they just provide high-density residences atm), also there's still no corner buildings, but you can already bend them into something cool-looking and organic to get that real 18th-century-town look. As a bonus you can have a shop on the 1st floor which can hold up to 8 slots of resources.
The update also introduces basic health mechanics. Each citizen now has a health metric which depends on food and environment (building charcoal piles near houses is not a good idea anymore). Also there are randomized illnesses (it currently kicks in when you reach 250 population). People will have a flu, a bone fracture or a bad tooth from time to time. The new barber surgery building may help them in that regard, but don't overestimate the 18th century medicine. You can learn more from in-game help, which is slowly expanding.
Added/changed:
New decorative bush: Guelder rose
Tavern owners now won't mind getting alcohol from farther market stalls
Added help text for slaughterhouse and burial plot
New building: dairy
New resources: butter, cheese, smetana
New decorative bush: Lilac
Added a message log where you can see all recent notifications you may have missed
Salo and animal hides now need to be salted in the slaughterhouse for preservation
Some resources now have limited shelf life and perish when expired
Now only the closest boatyard will fix fishing boats
Some minor optimizations for bigger cities
Now using "c:\Users\USERNAME\Saved Games" for saved games To port your previous saves, move them from "c:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Ostriv" to "c:\Users\USERNAME\Saved Games\Ostriv"
Redesigned stats window divided to 3 tabs with added nice graphs
Number of simultaneous trade deals is now limited to 5 per type
Added help text for warehouse
Can now fill the resource lists automatically, based on local availability
New building: barber surgery
Randomized market stall models
New building: smaller granary (has twice less capacity and 8 resource slots)
Improved logic behind raw materials supply
New building: brickworks
New building: brewery
Slightly reduced charcoal price
Each citizen now has a personal log with all the significant life events recorded
Added info on available map resources on new game start
New building: distillery
Added help text for limeworks
New building: hopyard
Priest will now move to a new church if previous one was demolished
Trade demand and proposal will now increase over time. Even more so if you import a lot.
Now showing total area of farm fields in farm properties
Families will now share their money with relatives living separately
Siblings will now be visible in the family tree if they live in the same house
Family members will now visit graves of their deceased relatives
Graves now have a link to personal log of the deceased
Better visualizing failed crops
Children aged 15-18 can now work as laborers (with reduced productivity). Also added a hire option for that
Can now set custom threshold on wealth tax
Warehouses, hay barracks and granaries now have their storage capacity visible directly in properties panel
New building: sand pit
Clay pits, saltworks and sand pits can now only be placed on suitable places
All clay pits (and sand pits) are now slightly different visually
Can now build paved roads
New building: iron ore mine
New map
Citizens will now be able to share some of their thoughts when you click on them
Each forestry can now mark specific trees for removal by painting with a mouse
Increased forestry log limit from 12 to 18
Optimized the chopping tasks distribution between different forestries
Added more on-screen tutorial tips for early game
Improved trade screen UI
Row houses!
New building: stone well
Fixed:
Crash related to clay pit demolishing
Undesired flowering on trees when looked from afar
Demolished village houses didn't take care of their bushes
Junk reserves stayed in market stalls preventing demolishing them
A few minor UI corrections
Horses produced cow hides when slaughtered
Slow saved game load on Intel/AMD GPUs
Potentially fixed issues with false-inaccessible stone deposits
Crash after destroying a mining cart
People could get stuck in an endless gardening loop
Crash related to farms
Endless deliveries of <1 of a resource
Orchard yearly fertility change didn't save properly
Unsuccessful animal relocation could lead to not being able to demolish building
Error when clicking "Continue" without any saves
Some pop-ups fell out of screen on some UI scale settings
Could fire mayor while in camp center
Harvest amount was sensitive to FPS
Taverners didn't pay wealth tax
White lines on demolishing buildings in some cases
Crash after demolishing camp cart parking
Some bridges didn't connect land correctly ("Inaccessible")
White lines after starting smeltery construction
Animals in saltworks consumed twice as much hay as usual
A lot of people asked of the ways to support us outside of buying the game, so we made this little symbolic DLC which not only helps ensure the future of Ostriv, but also adds a nice decorative building:
I know you're getting nervous when there's no news, but Ostriv is all about being chill and relaxed. Our goal has always been to make the best city building game possible, so that's what we do. That's what we do besides surviving a genocidal invasion. Missile strikes, constant electricity blackouts and internet access problems are not exactly the best thing for business, but we've still managed to do some progress. Rowhouses are my personal favorite new feature, which also is one of the most labor-intensive to do organically and which pulls a lot of new requirements. I mean you can't have 3-storey buildings and not have cobblestone roads, right?
(nevermind the placeholder models)
Most of the new buildings are brick, so there's a new production chain dedicated to bricks. One of the raw materials for bricks is sand, so we need sand pits in addition to clay pits. This leads us to another feature which will determine where you have available clay and where you have sand.
Alpha 5 will also introduce health mechanics, so there's a lot of new requirements for simulation to handle sudden citizen's inability to go to work or die before their parents.
I'm sure you can't wait for all of it to be released, but so am I. Big update usually means more sales, which means more money, which means we can buy more stuff for those who defend our right to live and create. So it's in our best interest to deliver as soon as possible. Whenever that is.
So this is decided: the next update will be Alpha 5 and it's gonna be huge. Please don't expect it too soon, as the war sure has some negative impact on our productivity, but rest assured that it's coming.
This update will have at least 10 new buildings, product shelf life, improved city stats, improved trade and lots of other fixes and cool new features, including of course new bushes!
As a bonus, check out this little teaser of how we adapted this reference kindly provided to us by Taras Shevchenko:
Currently I don’t have access to my main working computer and can’t work on Ostriv as before. But having something to work on is still the best cure for stress. So I’ve been working on this little title on my laptop. It's a city-building game that's simplified down to a puzzle where you just snap random blocks together trying to reach demands and build a nice-looking city map.
