With Alone released two weeks ago, it's time to look to the future, and see what's coming next.


The next milestone is called Ironwood and is planned to include the following main changes:

• Materials (hardwood, iron &c) will be unlocked by performing a special "mission"
  
• A mystical forest map defended by elves and dryads
  
• An abandoned mine infested with giant spiders
  
• Changes to enemies including better AI, ranged and AoE enemies
  
• Introduction of an upgrade system for the ship

Bear in mind that everything here is subject to change, depending on what works, what doesn't, feedback received and that sort of thing.

Unlocking different materials is a very important part of the game since using more primitive materials limits your effectiveness in resource collection and combat.

Currently you unlock a material by successfully claiming a specific island. The issue is that it's a similar process and fight to any other island you'd be attempting to claim, and so it lacks a clear sense of importance.

In this new milestone, this process will change. Metals will be unlocked by claiming and clearing an abandoned mine, and wood will be unlocked by taking a cutting off a World Tree in a new set of enchanted forest maps.

The enchanted forests are procedurally generated maps and are swarming with elves and dryads who will stop at nothing to prevent you reaching the World Tree and taking a sapling. If you succeed in this mission, then the appropriate trees will grow naturally in your start island, giving you access to the special wood.



To aid you in your quest, there are a number of enchanted wells which will refresh your health - of course they're well defended.

The abandoned mine is still a work in progress and more information will be given in time.

Aside from some specific boss enemies, most combat can easily be resolved by approaching the nearest enemy and hitting them until they stop moving.

This is going to change. Firstly, with the introduction of ranged enemies - such as the bowelf



As well as the addition of some "support" enemies which can make your life harder. The dryad for instance can cast an area of effect spell which will prevent you from moving - making you easy prey for her allies.



The goblins and undead will also receive their own interesting units to make combat just a little bit trickier.

Of course, a lone bowelf is not much of a threat, which is why certain enemies can group up into squads - so they can support each other and require a bit more thought into how battle is approached.

The ability to Upgrade buildings is something that has been planned for a while now, and will be worked on fully in another milestone. However, as a first step, this milestone will include the ability to upgrade the ship to make travel times shorter, more comfortable, and perhaps even to make certain islands reachable.

I hope this has given a good overview of what to expect soon. There's no release date as of yet, since there's quite a bit of work to be done, but I will be giving frequent updates of features as they're implemented. Feedback is always welcome.

As always, if you want to keep track of weekly progress, you can follow the dev diaries here: https://devdiaries.alone.epicllama.games/

- new arcania content!
- new battle exploration system
- graphic effects
- UI upgrade
- removed XP cap
- bugs and typos
- add full screen settings button

Because of the recent collapse of Ethereum and graphics cards, it took nearly two years to buy new computers to continue development : steamsad :
This remake will learn from the lessons, abandon the first person game form, adopt the top down game form, pay attention to details, and abandon the previous design scheme with high expectations and low hands

fixed some minor typos mistakes.

AO20 is open-source.

Check our GitHub
https://github.com/ao-org

• Axeman and Spearman merged (spearman now has a shield)
  
• Halberdier is no longer trainable
  
• Added flag bearer (non-combat unit that increases nearby soldier's satisfaction)
  
• Alcohol is now distributed through the food shop
  
• Inn removed
  
• Bandit event no longer spawns regular infantry soldiers
  
• Reduced the time it takes for woodcutters to turn logs into timber (~48%)
  
• Reduced the time it takes for woodcutters to turn logs into timber (~48%)
  
• (negative) Increased the time it takes for charcoal burners to turn logs into charcoal by 10%
  
• (positive) Increased charcoal burner's charcoal yield from 2 to 3 per tree log
  
• Charcoal burner can now house 2 workers instead of 1

• Fixed militia units sometimes missing animations
  
• Fixed units going over 100% hunger
  
• Fixed units not showing inside garrisons
  
• Removed tax modifier label from difficulty settings
  
• Fixed town fires still happening on peaceful difficulty (no longer happen)
  
• Fixed luxuries not being consumed properly after houses upgrade
  
• Fixed not being able to build in the 1st mission of the tutorial

• Added 4 extra variations of the militia unit, making them look more disorganized
  
• Added 3 new grave decorations

Cleaner test track, console improvements, more binds!

Console

• Ability to delete existing command hotkey sets.
  
• More key information given upon binding new command hotkeys.
  
• Last session's first successful command is saved and inserted into command history of the next session, so it can be easily repeated by pressing the up arrow.
  
• More efficient interface structure.
  
• Few minor appearance improvements.

Test track

• Fixed an interface bug related to hiding OSD.
  
• All the green floating arrows are now hidden alongside the OSD.
  
• Only the starting point arrows and markers are shown, unless the relevant 'activity' (lap or 1/4 mile) is active - the minimap is much cleaner now!

Options

• Added an option to switch between looped or randomized music tracks, though this isn't fully working yet.
  
• All garage, Mechanic, and Painter keys are now rebindable! With this, everything that was planned to be rebindable is now rebindable!

Misc

• Restored original "TV camera" (dropped camera) behavior - tighter zoom, no random roll.
  
• Minor visual improvements to some of the "COLD MORNING" weather conditions (viewrange-dependent).
  
• A more solid solution for the first person player hull producing sparks.

Major reduction in progress this week due to an avalanche of hardware malfunctions - all will hopefully be back to normal next week!

The streets of Valo need more personalities! ( and we may need some new hardware :| )
Check out some interesting rewards in the crowdfunding thread! :)
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1571280/discussions/0/3053988806896458547/

Check back for more next week!
Stay tuned! :)

Hello Champions!

It's a rainy Sunday here and we would like to drop a super quick note about the latest hotfix released on Friday. As you know, we are super fast with bug fixing and this is the most important thing we've considered when we started thinking about the long term plans for the game. We've released 10+ patches so far and i think nobody in the world can say a thing about our availability here or on our social, trying to solve as much problems as possible when they pop-up. We are proud of the work done, and we would say that we've always pushed the EA launch as something different from the usual EA launches. We don't have a vertical slice of the product to iterate, we have a fully playable product that needs to be iterated, polished and balanced to became what we had in mind since the very beginning. No game breaking bugs, no crashes, solid builds: we can say that all of this is real and again, proud of this and happy to know that players appreciated it. By the way, all of this does not mean that we have done with the development of course. We've updated the game trying to keep game saves safe everytime [and we'll continue like this], we've updated the game testing stuff on our internal branch and we've updated the game keeping in mind what we said above. A solid build to play is a must for us, and this is not going to change, but it's important to remind that development is a pain and sometime we can't simply know what is going to happen with the implementation of new features. The last patch was basically built around a first round of economy balancing that will be completed tomorrow. Two weeks ago we've put in the revive for companions. Yesterday we've receveid a few messages complaining about both things so it was worth claryfing once again what's going to happen next.



The revive feature was working fine when patched. We've worked on the feature this week too, and apparently the last update caused some regression. A few players experienced crashes or have been forced to restart the game trying to revive companions or trying to interact with them once gone. Crashes or no chances to interact with items/loot chests in FA, are directly connected to this, we are going to fix this tomorrow. The other economy-related issue is the one about repair costs and durability. We've increased durability for items on Friday, we are going to release the [almost] final iteration tomorrow. Repair costs will be lowered [by now, they are lower than the costs we had at release] and a first bunch of items will get their real in-game value. Remember that is never about a single feature but we are talking about connected systems. The problem with the repair cost is that the value of the items is still wrong and super high, compared to the money available in loots, quests and so on [even because right now, the sellling price for items have been decreased and we've iterated loots and rewards as well]. In both cases and for future patches, please, don't panic :) . "The game is broken" or "The last patch destroyed everthing" or stuff like that is non sense now, because bugs can happen at this stage, even if we had no significant tech issues since launch. And we are aware in real time of things gone wrong in case. Regression is pretty normal, we usually talk about what we do before and after a patch note and we build and fix at speed of light. Our idea was to update twice per week when possible but to avoid issues like this, we are probably going to patch on Thursday instead of Friday, to avoid scary weekends like this and let you play safe. Thank you for the support as usual, Major Update on the way soon! Have a great Sunday!

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/919360/Alaloth_Champions_of_The_Four_Kingdoms/

Coming out December 9, 2022…

Hello everyone, we've got another hotfix addressing optimization and bugs. As many of you realized, we're running on HDRP (we're going for beautiful and social) which is definitely not ready for games. But since our experience goal is to be a slow-paced, social and beautiful atmosphere, HDRP is the way to go. We're doing our best to optimize so more people can join the fun :)