Farthest Frontier News

As we approach the finish line, it is time for a State of Early Access update!



Today, we are ready to go over our full plans, from v0.9.3 leading up to Farthest Frontier leaving Early Access with v1.0 later this year! If you've been eager for a roadmap, this is the update for you.

We are planning a total of 5 more major patches before we will consider the base game content complete and can start our post-release journey with free updates and paid expansions. This may sound like a lot, but we want to get features out to you as soon as they are ready. We are aiming for a Fall release window for v1.0. Above all else, we want you to have a polished experience!

Learn more on the official website.

A quick heads up, intrepid pioneers of the Farthest Frontier, another update is soon upon us.

We hope you have been enjoying the major additions in v0.9.2 and are eagerly awaiting what's next. We wanted to give you a quick heads up that v0.9.3 should be entering public playtesting in the next couple weeks.

Performance
This update has a heavy focus on optimization, especially for very large settlements. From our own internal testing, we observed as much as a 90% increase in framerate for towns with over 2000 villagers. Naturally, your mileage will vary based on your system specs and town setup, but we expect most players should see measurable gains! This is our first major pass on performance, but not the last. You can expect more improvements as we approach v1.0.

Balance
v0.9.3 also includes a significant pass on game balance. For starters, buildings will have significantly increased radii for desirability bonuses, granting you much more flexibility in how you lay out your settlements.

We also we made the decision to adjust the pace of the game overall. You will find that, at 1x speed, each game day will take 8 seconds, up from 5 seconds. We found that, as we balanced the game over the years, it became difficult to balance villager productivity and needs against the limit of how fast we can make them move around (before it looks ridiculous, and some of you might argue things have already gone too far) and how much distance they can cover in a day. Increasing the length of the day will provide much needed flexibility, result in less villagers accidentally dying of exposure, and provide a more relaxing 1x pace for those that currently find the game to be a bit frantic.

Combat
In addition, we are working on further improvements to combat controls:


In v0.9.3, you will see all of your active military companies on the bottom of the screen, which you can use for quick-selection and deployment without having to track down your military buildings or using control groups.

We also made significant improvements to Archers, letting them move faster and automatically go to rearm themselves when they run out of arrows rather than charging in to their doom in valiant fisticuffs combat.

What's next
We know you are eager to see our plans leading up to v1.0, and we are eager to share them with you. We are in the process of preparing another big State of Early Access update in June that will lay it all to bare! Everything from v0.9.4 to the vaunted v1.0 will be revealed!

Makeship’s interested in doing another plushie with us, and we hear you like those. But what should it be?!



Vote with your clicker on the official website while you can!

We are always committed to addressing your critical concerns. We recently released a series of 4 hotfixes for v0.9.2, with the latest just today.

The latest hotfix includes a pass on combat tuning, based on your feedback, and addresses a number of frustrating issues.



You can read all of the hotfix changes on the official website.

We are now diving deep on preparing the next patch, which will include a number of significant optimization improvements, and of course MOAR!

Exciting changes are on the way in v4.1.24, be sure to check out the reveal!



We hope you all enjoyed this (not so real) news. But while the announcement was not real, bear mode very much is!

You can continue to opt into it through beta in your Steam library:

• Right click Farthest Frontier.
  
• Choose “Properties”.
  
• Select the “Betas” tab.
  
• Select the Bear Mode branch in the dropdown box.
  
• Suffer the consequences of your life choices.