Greetings Viceroys!
Before we begin the changelog routine, we want to make sure you're having a great day, so here are some pictures of Eremite pets:
By the way, there's a dedicated #animals channel on our Discord server that will boost your serotonin level whenever you need it. Come join us!
Now that we know you're all cheered up, we can continue to throw goods at you. Here we go:
- Upgradeable hubs - get bonuses for growing Hearths' hub levels
- Villagers fulfill their needs at Hearth
- 8 new decorations
- 10 new Cornerstones
- 8 new Orders
- And more!
PLAY THE GAME
DEVELOPER NOTES
Last update, we released a somewhat controversial change to housing and villager routines. Since then, we got a lot of feedback, both positive and negative, about how your experience with the game had changed because of it. This prompted us to take another look at the system and try to figure out a better way of solving the house placement problem and its relation to hearths. After some intense design work and a very successful experimental phase, we came up with a promising new mechanic that would replace the latest change to villager routines - the hub system.
Hubs have existed in Against the Storm for a long time now, but they were only vaguely explained in the Atlas and served mostly as logistics centers. In earlier versions of the game, you would simply place a Makeshift Hearth and a Storage on distant glades, so your villagers would have a shorter distance to cover each time they took a break. Then, after the previous update’s villager routine change, the Hearth was pushed out in favor of shelters, so a hub was essentially anywhere you moved your houses to. This gave homes a lot more meaning, but had unintended consequences - more micromanagement, less flavor, and constant fear of nonoptimal house placement.
Hearth's panel with Hub levels.
With the new hub system, we want to get rid of all these not-so-fun elements, strengthen the fantasy of building hubs, and improve overall town layouts. That’s why we decided to revert the last change to housing (villagers once again fulfill their needs by the Hearth), and introduce a brand new mechanic - upgradeable hubs.
From now on, each Hearth has a radius that indicates the area of its hub. Within this area, you need to build houses, decorations, and service buildings to progress the hub level of a given Hearth. Each hub level gives special global bonuses (resolve, production speed, etc.). At the same time, villagers will not move into houses that are outside of a Hearth’s reach, and other Hearths’ radiuses can not intersect. Each Heart essentially creates its own hub that needs to be progressed, and the bonuses of these hubs stack.
New decorations.
Additionally, decorations now play a much bigger part in a settlement’s development (as they help progress a hub to higher levels). We decided to go even one step further and divided them into three categories:
- Comfort,
- Aesthetics,
- and Harmony.
Each category has a different resource cost and each hub level requires a growing amount of decorations from different categories to be placed within a Hearth’s radius.
Last but not least, with this update, we also bring you some smaller content changes. We added 10 new regular Cornerstones, 8 Stormforged variants, 8 new Orders, and 8 decorations. We also buffed traders a bit, removed some lackluster perks, and improved the balance of a few Orders and Cornerstones.
As always - we hope you enjoy these new additions and feel free to let us know what you think about them (Discord might be the best place for that). And if there are any features you’d like us to consider in the future, create a suggestion via our official feedback tool and vote for other ideas that matter to you.
Have fun and may the storm be gentle on you,
Eremite Games
