Alpha 5 released!

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