It's update time again, folks! And this time, we've got some exciting news: we're introducing Training Expeditions that allow you to tailor your custom game experience to your heart's desire.

What's new:

• Training Expeditions (custom game mode)
  
• Steam Trading Cards
  
• UI/UX improvements

There’s more to unpack, so let’s dive in!

P.S. If you've already picked up Against the Storm and have been playing it, make sure to leave a Steam review. Every opinion matters!

New year, new me Against the Storm update! Today, we’re finally bringing you the long-awaited Training Expeditions - a customizable game mode, where you can freely choose your starting conditions and adjust game settings to your liking.

The Training Expedition is unlocked at level 10, after buying the Obsidian Archive Level 10 upgrade in the Smoldering City. We decided to lock it behind an upgrade for a reason - to not invalidate the game’s core gameplay and progression loops, and to avoid spoiling the fun too early. While the custom mode is an amazing feature to experiment with crazy runs and weird conditions, it’s not supposed to be the first thing a player experiences when starting the game.


Training Expedition

Now, what exactly is the custom mode and what does it allow you to do? Once you unlock it, you will get a new button on the World Map HUD. Clicking it will bring up a panel with A LOT of options. There you will be able to choose a biome, the 3 playable species, your starting resources, the difficulty level, embark bonuses, Forest Mysteries, and modifiers from all three areas of the game (Daily, World Map, and Prestige). You can freely combine modifiers, even if they are contradictory in nature (but beware, the game will simply choose one or disable both, depending on the nature of the contradicting effect).

One common request from the community was an option to adjust the game length. That’s why in Training Expeditions, you will finally be able to change the number of Reputation Points required to win a game, as well as choose the Impatience threshold. There are 4 options for Reputation (10, 14, 18, 30) and 5 options for Impatience (2, 4, 10, 14, 30). There is also an option to change the passive Impatience generation rate.

One last thing to note about Training Expeditions - they yield no rewards. That’s because balancing a fully custom mode like this would be a nightmare (both design-wise, and for the players). Training Expeditions are meant as a fun way of experimenting with the game, either by playing a more relaxed version of it or by challenging yourself beyond even the most difficult Prestige levels. Both these extremes, and everything in between, would be impossibly hard to reward fairly (and keep balanced as new features and modifiers are introduced into the game).

There are also some smaller changes coming with this update. This time we focused mostly on bugs and localization improvements, but there are a few UX/UI changes as well. Most notably - a much-requested camera speed increase when moving from building to building.

We also added Steam Trading Cards for Against the Storm. If you’re playing on Steam, you’ll now be rewarded with up to six (out of eleven) Steam Trading Cards which you can sell, trade with other Steam users, or collect to craft a Steam Badge. Crafting the badge will reward you with one (out of three) Steam Backgrounds and one (out of ten) emoticons. If you’re lucky, you can also get special foil Cards. Happy trading and collecting!


Crafting Steam Badge

Lastly - we wanted to take this opportunity and thank all of you who played the experimental branch over the last couple of weeks for testing the new Blightrot changes. With your help and feedback we finally see a clear way forward with this system, so expect a Blightrot revamp on the main branch very soon.

Thank you for providing us with feedback and suggestions for the new update. If you’d like to share your ideas for upcoming updates, here are some useful links:

• Steam Discussions, Discord, Reddit - discuss the game with the community and share your impressions
  
• Feature Request Tool - suggest specific new features

We wish you a happy new year and can’t wait to see what the upcoming 12 months hold for Against the Storm!

May the storm be gentle on you,
Eremite Games

Number of changes: 95
Inspired by community: 49%

Changes marked with ⚡ were inspired by the community.

• ⚡ Added a new customizable game mode - Training Expeditions.
  • To put it plainly, a Training Expedition is a custom game. When starting one, you can select a biome, species, Forest Mysteries, resources, modifiers, embark bonuses, and game length (among other things).
    
  • All modifiers from the World Map, the Daily Expedition, and Prestige difficulties can be selected when starting a custom game.
    
  • Some modifiers might be contradictory (like Dangerous Lands and Forbidden Lands) and you won’t be stopped from picking them - but beware, they will not work together, so the game will probably only activate one of them (and remove the other one when starting a run).
    
  • You can change how much Reputation is needed to win. There are 4 settings for this:
    • 10 points (quick game)
      
    • 14 points (default game)
      
    • 18 points (prestige game)
      
    • 30 points (marathon)
  • You can also customize the maximum number of Impatience points. There are 5 settings for this:
    • 2 points
      
    • 4 Points
      
    • 10 Points
      
    • 14 Points (default)
      
    • 30 Points
  • You can also change the speed at which Impatience is automatically generated:
    • 0% per minute
      
    • 26% per minute (default)
  • You can decide to enable or disable Blightrot, and choose between 5 levels of footprints/corruption (50%, 100%, 200%, 250%, 400%).
    
  • You can choose towns for Trade Routes, but they need to be on the World Map first.
    
  • You can freely choose the Forest Mysteries that will be active in a given game (or leave them to be randomly drawn).
    
  • If you like how a map looks, you can copy/paste its seed into the custom game UI. Seeds only influence glade layout, resource nodes, fertile soil, ore deposits, and events. Changing a custom game’s settings will also influence the map (so a seed will only give you the same result if all the other settings are the same).
    
  • Custom game settings can be saved into so-called templates. Every profile has 6 template slots.
    
  • To unlock Training Expeditions, you will need to buy the Obsidian Archive Level 10 upgrade in the Smoldering City.
    
  • Training Expeditions give no rewards and don’t influence the Blightstorm Cycle.

• ⚡ Rebalanced the Pottery and Wine order. Instead of building an Artisan and providing barrels, it now requires (drumroll, please) pottery and wine.
  
• ⚡ Moved the Destroyed Cage of the Warbeast glade event from Dangerous Glades to Forbidden Glades.
  
• Overheating and Vassal Tax Forest Mysteries were temporarily removed from the game. We found them to be troublesome because of several reasons - lack of proper UI, balancing issues, and potential bugs. We want to take some time and redesign them.
  
• Removed the Faster Building stat from the Vanguard Spire Level 5 upgrade. Added the Additional Caravan Choice reward instead (moved from the Obsidian Archive Level 10 upgrade).
  • We decided to replace this upgrade because the +10% construction speed change was a minimal and boring stat increase. With it out of the way, we feel that every node on the upgrade tree finally has at least one interesting reward, and we can focus on adding more levels in the future (instead of replacing existing ones).
• Removed the Additional Caravan Choice reward from the Obsidian Archive Level 10 upgrade, and added the Training Expedition unlock instead.

• ⚡ Improved the wording in the description of shelters and species-specific houses. Instead of saying “number of places: X”, the description now reads “can house X residents”.
  
• ⚡ Increased the speed at which the camera moves to selected buildings and glade events.
  
• ⚡ Camp icons in resource node panels are now ordered from advanced to small.
  
• ⚡ Changed the number color for some Hostility sources in the Hostility of the Forest tooltip (from green to red when the value is 0, so it's clearly visible which sources increase Hostility).
  
• Updated some Encyclopedia entries with more up-to-date screenshots and videos.
  
• Changed the icon for the Wet Soil Prestige modifier to avoid duplicates.

• ⚡ Fixed a bug that caused villagers to stop working when being reassigned to the same worker slots too quickly.
  
• ⚡ Fixed a bug with demo saves being incorrectly transferred to the full version.
  
• ⚡ Fixed a bug that caused the Bed and Breakfast cornerstone to not give Amber on trader arrival.
  
• ⚡ Fixed a bug with the starting glade having an incorrect resource layout.
  
• ⚡ Fixed a bug with the delivery threshold in the internal storage exceeding the storage limit.
  
• ⚡ Fixed a bug with camps displaying “no deposits” alerts when the delivery threshold is set to 0.
  
• ⚡ Fixed a bug with the Like a Machine deed being possible to complete even after losing a game.
  
• ⚡ Fixed a bug with the Stormforged version of the Trade Negotiations cornerstone being drawn in games with a trade block effect.
  
• ⚡ Fixed a bug with the Forge Trip Hammer cornerstone applying its Resolve penalty to Workshop workers.
  
• ⚡ Fixed a bug where gaining multiple Reputation points would only decrease Impatience by 1.
  
• ⚡ Fixed an issue with Citadel Resource icons not being visible on modifiers right after expanding the draw distance on the World Map.
  
• ⚡ Fixed a bug with the Third Party modifier not working correctly.
  
• ⚡ Fixed a typo in the description of the Overexploration cornerstone.
  
• ⚡ Fixed a bug with the Temple of the Forsaken Gods daily modifier having an outdated effect (Reputation from Resolve block instead of additional Timed Orders).
  
• ⚡ Fixed a bug with the Hostility sound effect playing multiple times when gaining a lot of Hostility points.
  
• ⚡ Fixed a bug that causes the game to automatically unpause after choosing an Ethereal Cornerstone.
  
• ⚡ Fixed a bug with the Order reward tooltip staying on screen after finishing an Order.
  
• ⚡ Fixed an issue with camps displaying a “no workers” alert for a split second after being upgraded.
  
• ⚡ Fixed a bug that allowed players to turn off the Blighstorm Cycle animation and see the world generation process under it.
  
• ⚡ Fixed an incorrect percentage value in the Hunter-Gatherers perk preview icon.
  
• ⚡ Fixed an issue with the Ancient Practices perk showing too little information about its progress in its tooltip footer.
  
• ⚡ Fixed an issue with two buildings being permanently locked in the Encyclopedia (even if the player has unlocked all the content in the game).
  
• ⚡ Changed the name of one of the two Workstation Upgrade perks to avoid confusion (the one upgrading the Makeshift Post is now called Worker Mobilization).
  
• ⚡ Fixed a few typos and grammatical errors in English:
  • Local Taxes perk description.
    
  • Tooltip for sacrificing oil in the Hearth.
• ⚡ Fixed a few typos and grammatical errors in Japanese:
  • Frequent Caravans perk description.
    
  • Objectives for orders based on Standing levels with other towns.
• ⚡ Fixed a few typos and grammatical errors in French:
  • Label in the difficulty tooltip in the Embark Panel.
• ⚡ Fixed a few typos and grammatical errors in German:
  • Embark button text.
    
  • Score tooltip for Unity category.
• ⚡ Fixed a few typos and grammatical errors in Russian:
  • Trade Hub perk description.
    
  • Species Resolve tooltip.
    
  • Fertile Soil section in the Embark Panel.
    
  • “Alerts” header in the options menu.
    
  • Rotting Wood Forest Mystery description.
    
  • Zhorg’s intro text in the trader panel.
    
  • “Unlocked content” header in the level-up pop-up.
• ⚡ Fixed a missing translation in Polish for the Liquid Luck order.
  
• ⚡ Changed the name of the Foragers\ Camp in Korean.
  
• Fixed a bug with one of the Dangerous Glades in the Cursed Royal Woodlands having fewer resource nodes than intended.
  
• Fixed an incorrect label in the Quick Deliveries perk.
  
• Fixed an incorrect label in the Shattered Obelisk modifier.
  
• Fixed a bug with a missing visual effect on some buildings when they are hit by lightning.
  
• Fixed an issue with the lightning effect being always active in the Stormbird glade event.
  
• Fixed an issue with the water effect being always active in the Lumber Mill.

• ⚡ Added one new music track to the game (The Marshlands, clearance season).
  
• Added new sounds to all 8 traders in the game. Traders will now speak short phrases when opening the trader panel, making a sale, and closing the trader panel.
  
• Added Steam Trading Cards. On Steam, you can now collect up to 6 (out of 11) Steam Trading Cards.
  • You can craft 5 levels of Regular Badges for Regular Cards and 1 Foil Badge for Foil Cards.
    
  • Crafting each level of the badge will reward you with:
    • 1 out of 10 emoticons
      
    • 1 out of 3 backgrounds
  • You can sell or trade your Cards.

In this special section, we want to take a few paragraphs to answer a community question and delve into the origins of our game and provide some insight into how it came to be.

Sit back, relax, and let us tell you a story.

It all started back in 2019 when we were brainstorming ideas for a new game. We decided to adopt a world-building method where we would alter one element of the real world and explore how it would impact an imaginary universe. After considering various concepts, one idea stood out: what if there was a world in which it never stopped raining?

We began to consider the many ways in which this would affect the environment, culture, architecture, and other aspects of everyday life in this world. We explored the magical properties of the rain, the role of fire (including religion), the species that could inhabit the world, farming conditions, food spoilage, water drainage, rituals, urban design, technology, fashion, professions, and many other elements of a world plagued by constant rain.

As we delved deeper into this concept, Damian began sharing some concept art which further convinced us that we wanted to develop this world:


Wok Samurai concept art

However, this may or may not come to you as a surprise, we initially imagined Codename Rainpunk (as we called it at the time) as an RPG game. After all, we were a tiny indie studio working on the game after hours. Of course, it had to be an RPG! We were sane enough not to make it an MMO, though.


Rainpunk RPG concept art

After working on a prototype for a few weeks, we quickly realized that the scope of an RPG game (even a modest one like we had envisioned for Codename Rainpunk) was beyond our resources. Market research and our passion for classic strategy games led us to pivot towards a city builder enhanced by roguelite elements (one of the remains of the RPG game) set in the world of Rainpunk.


Rainpunk City Builder prototype

The new prototype (developed at the end of 2019) turned out to be very promising and thus we greenlit what later became Against the Storm. For the following months, the core team worked on numerous aspects of the game until we were finally ready to announce it to the public in May 2020, followed by the first public demo in September 2020.

And thus began our great journey with you - the players - whose feedback and support have been integral to the development and evolution of the game ever since.

And now, the featured community memes, folded for your reading convenience:

[expand type=showmore]

Against the Storm in a nutshell by KITVS


Big brain by Yassine Meskhout


Familiar city screen by gegc


Presents by AngryTetris


Primadonna Chickens by Lain Vohn Dyrec


Scroll of Truth by Edward
[/expand]
Thank you for reading and have fun with the new Update!

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1336490/view/3650762049141623983
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1336490/view/3602347155558454392
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1336490/view/3489755739074348647
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1336490/view/5024356235717954632

Hi everyone!

The time has come - we’re super excited to announce that Truck World: Driving School, a free-to-play standalone version of Truck World: Australia, will be released on January 10, 5 PM CET (8 AM PT).

In Truck World: Driving School, you’ll go through a range of graded lessons teaching you the basics of truck driving, such as handling your rig, parking, maneuvering etc. Ultimately, you’ll reach the game’s pinnacle: the final exam assessing how well you have grasped everything taught throughout the game. Take up the challenge and strive for the perfect score!

Add the game to your wishlist so you don’t miss the release, and stay tuned - we’ll see you soon!


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1952360/Truck_World_Driving_School/

I hope you enjoyed Christmas and New Year. Before the holidays I was working on the global histograms, and today they're released! Global stats are now live for both the public demo and the Kickstarter closed beta.

New Features

• Global stats have arrived! Histograms now allow you to compare your performance with the rest of the world.
  
• Alongside the histogram, you can now see not just the stats for your best solution and the current solution, but the previous run of the solution. This makes it easier to see how much your stats have improved with your latest changes.

Other Changes

• You now return to the Save Select screen rather than the Level Select screen when coming back to the main menu.
  
• The game no longer claims to be live on Kickstarter!

Hi everyone!

The time has come - we’re super excited to announce that Truck World: Driving School, a free-to-play standalone version of Truck World: Australia, will be released on January 10, 5 PM CET (8 AM PT).

In Truck World: Driving School, you’ll go through a range of graded lessons teaching you the basics of truck driving, such as handling your rig, parking, maneuvering etc. Ultimately, you’ll reach the game’s pinnacle: the final exam assessing how well you have grasped everything taught throughout the game. Take up the challenge and strive for the perfect score!

Add the game to your wishlist so you don’t miss the release, and stay tuned - we’ll see you soon!


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1952360/Truck_World_Driving_School/

1. Add a navigation map, press M to open the map
   
2. Add the function of automatic watering crops when it rains
   
3. Canceled decay from all foods
   
4. Add pistol and rifle magazines, make them in the craft list, drag the bullets to the magazines to fill the ammunition.
   
5. Fixed the bug that land animal AI can go into the sea
   
6. Add the durability progress bar of weapons and tools. When the durability is exhausted, they will not be destroyed directly. They can only be used after repairing
   
7. Fixed the bug that the items harvested by planting crops disappeared
   
8. Modified the harvest of 2 kinds of banana trees planted to get fiber
   
9. Cancel the need to use a craft table to repair weapons, and you can directly repair weapon tools in the inventory. Note: weapon repair will become more and more expensive as it is used and worn out
   
10. Add the function of repairing firearms
    
11. Increases damage of all weapons
    
12. Increased player swimming speed
    
13. Added the function of zooming the camera distance with the mouse wheel, shortcut: ALT+mouse wheel
    
14. Add charcoal to the player's craft list, and it can also be crafted by campfires. The first campfire needs to put the wood into the conversion slot and the fuel slot respectively, and the second campfire needs to put the wood into the fuel slot and turn on it in the crafting list to craft charcoal.
    
15. Fixed crafting arrows required wrong materials
    
16. Fixed the problem that the steel axe repair cost was too high
    
17. Added coconut tree leaves dropped by felling coconut trees, which can be used as fuel or building materials
    
18. Adding bamboo, coconut leaves, and banana leaves as fuel can be put into a furnace or campfire to burn, prolonging the burning time of wood
    
19. Fixed mouse still showing after press E to close the planting menu
    
20. Added damage and hunger and thirst status prompt UI
    
21. The death location is marked as a small package icon, which will disappear after 30 minutes. You should go to find the dropped items as soon as possible.
    
22. Ants removed
    
23. Tips: The purpose of the Water bottle: you need to find a fresh water source to fill the water. In a place deep in the jungle, there is a well with water resources. You need a water bottle to hold the water.
    
24. V1: Fixed the bug that the after death and respawn does not display the mouse

Hello!

I'm very happy to announce that Hero Team is releasing today in Early Access.

There are some major new features in this version compared with the last public demo version that you might have played during Steam Next Fest:

• Double Jumping: Who doesn't love double jumping?? It makes getting around feel much faster and nicer
  
• Auto Healing: Now, if you've taken damage but can escape and avoid damage for 5 seconds your health will start to automatically recover. This might sound like a small thing, but it actually makes fights much more interesting. Previously, once you were low on health there wasn't much you could do except make a last-ditch attack and hope for the best. Now you can weigh up whether you can escape for long enough to recover (perhaps throwing out some covering fire to make your enemy retreat while they reload.)
  
• Speedrun Practice Mode: The practice map now has a timer, and you can earn Bronze, Silver, and Gold stars depending on how fast you can destroy all the target dummies. I think I set the target times to be pretty tough, and I'll be curious to see if you agree. (Please post your score screenshots/videos here on the Steam Community or on the Discord!)

and there are also the boring-but-necessary quality of life features that you'd expect from a quality indie PC game:

• Graphics Settings: Gaming on a potato? You're now covered with Low, Medium, High, and Epic graphics quality presets, and a "Rendering Resolution Scale" option that renders fewer pixels and upscales to get more frames per second while keeping the UI looking perfectly sharp at your monitor's native resolution. If you're interested in graphics tech give this option a try even if you don't need it. The upscaling is done with Epic's new "Temporal Super Resolution" technology, which gives shockingly good results imho.
  
• Input Remapping: You don't wanna know how much time and effort it took me to make this part of the game, but the important thing is it exists now, and you can set up the controls however you'd like. Keyboard and mouse, and Xbox controllers work natively, of course, and you can use PS4, PS5, and Switch controllers through Steam's great support for them. It's enabled by default for a seamless experience.
  
• Ultrawide Monitor Support: The game now takes advantage of every pixel on your monitor, while the UI stays neatly in the central part. I don't actually even have an ultrawide myself, but I tested this out using the NVIDIA Surround feature to make a pretend ultrawide out of my side-by-side monitors and even that looked sick, so I'm very jealous of everyone who gets to play the game on a real ultrawide beauty (send me pics!)

Obviously this is day one of the Hero Team Early Access era. I know that you need more content to play, and I can't wait to get started on it. I've got a zillion ideas, but this post is too long already so I'll make another post laying out the roadmap.

Thank you so much for your interest in the game, and for your patience waiting for today. I hope you enjoy playing it, and I hope you'll stick around as it develops more! Please don't be shy about sharing your feedback, because I truly want this to be a game that you love.

- Jon

• Italian Growliano and Honey Buggy vehicles have narrower wheel placement for more stability.
  
• LOD quality and Texture quality now varies per Quality setting.

All our lives we have been told that time travel does not exist...what if I told you that now it may be possible! All you have to do is close your eyes, lay down comfortably, count the sheeps in your mind and...sleep!



Today I will tell you about the adventure you will experience with me and my friends. My dreamy story is divided into stylized storyboards referring to six different historical eras. Each of them has its unique biome and levels. Doesn't sound too clear? Well, let's start from the beginning.

We begin the adventure in the time of the first humans when the most popular gadget was a stick and stone, and you could only dream about high-speed Internet - awful right? Life in prehistory sucked...



The next era we will go to will be antiquity. I say right away that this will not be an all-inclusive trip to Egypt. Egyptians believed in life after death, and I believe in life... after sleep, without sleep it's hard to live, isn't it?



The next station is. The Iron Age! Or more precisely, ancient Greece, considered the cradle of Western civilization. Mythology, art, philosophy, culture, Greek salad... Well, maybe not exactly, but you'll check it out for yourself.



It was time for the Middle Ages I don't know about you, but I have always wanted to become a knight. It is known, women love a man in armor, and Amelka looks like a princess just waiting for her prince.



At this stage, we can safely be called explorers. Like Columbus, who discovered America. We will discover modernity, which hides in its history conquests, battles, and industrialization...



The last era I will introduce to you is Modernity. Its beginning was quite complicated, but it is thanks to it that we now have the Internet, fast cars, and chips!



You can get motion sickness from these trips... I tell you, history is not that boring at all. I encourage you to get acquainted with the first era by yourself right now by playing demo Lesson Learned..


See you on the school bench!
Franek & Gaming Factory

"Nothing will stop me. Nothing."
– Ferrus Manus

The fighting on the surface of Isstvan V intensifies as the Iron Hands continue to push forward into the traitors, their resolve never faltering. Ferrus Manus and Gabriel Santar lead the assault, but they are soon bogged down as the battle turns into a desperate slog between once close brothers.

The March of the Gorgon has been extended by one week! If you haven't yet been able to defeat Fulgrim's daemonic form and earn the exclusive card back and deck deal, now is your chance to strike once more!

Hi everyone! As promised on our Discord, today we released a small hotfix for not working drag and drop for components and skills. Additionally, because one of the features planned for the next big update - contextual notifications about changes in money and fans, was already done we decided to push it now instead of waiting a few more months ;)

As always, if you find any new bugs or have suggestions about the game, you can leave them at the previously mentioned Discord server or on mestoegames.com/bugsreport ;)

• Added contextual notifications about accounts balance and the number of fans changes for the character and company

• Fixed a bug that prevented components from being assigned to commissions via drag and drop
  
• Fixed a bug that allowed assigning locked components to commercial projects