Heard of the Story? News

Just a very fast hot-fix to address quests not loading correctly. Also features some other minor fixes:

• Fixed smithy being placeable on too uneven terrain
  
• Fixed being able to hold equipped items while petting cows
  
• Fixed minor interaction glitches in the start menu
  

Just a quick patch to fix a couple of small frustrating issues 🙂

• Fix being unable to interact with things when your scissors or hammer break and you try to craft anyway
  
• Wild cows now move when you sleep through the night. This also helps them if they got stuck somewhere during the day
  
• Change the cattle barn constructions visuals slightly so that it’s not possible to have a floating hay roof
  
• Fix table appearing twice during the tailor construction
  
• Fix crafting particles falling through the tailor floor and table
  
• Fix cloud positions not being centered on map
  
• Fix corset and jerkin not giving you ideas
  

The 3rd major update is here, introducing lots of new content, and huge improvements! Though it’s been a while since the last one, we’ve been at work harder than ever to bring these new changes to fruition we hope you will like them!

Next up, we’ll be returning back to the rhythm of small and frequent updates focusing on quality of life, bug fixes, and other improvements. Feel free to let us know what you most want, we’ll now have the freedom and opportunity to address new requests!

• New Tailor building
  
• - Requires the new spinning wheel to be built
  
• - Requires the new scissors to be used
  
• Clothes are now treated as equippable items
  
• New craftable clothing items
  
• - 36 new clothes in total
  
• - Split into 13 new items with variants
  
• - Some items such as dresses or tops, also feature different 5 colours for each variant
  
• You and the founding villagers will now start with shabby clothing
  
• - Immigrating villagers will wear fancier clothes and equipment
  
• Your appearance is now customisable at the beginning of the game
  

• New villager appearances
  
• - 9 new facial hair styles
  
• - 5 new male hair styles
  
• - 11 new female hair styles
  
• Improved the skin colour from the unnatural grey to a more human peach-like colour
  

• 100-10,000x faster villager AI performance
  
• - You’ll most be able to feel this in the late game with many villagers. Whereas before, the game would be very sluggish at large villager counts, now it can handle 200 with ease!
  
• - The most noticeable effects will be villagers spending much less time idling and responding hastily in conversations
  
• Linked to this are much faster loading and new-game generation times
  
• Whereas before, saving was done partially automatically, saving is now more strictly defined by:
  
• - A quick-save: which auto-saves at night. You can access the quick-save of your previous save file at the top of the existing adventures list
  
• - A new save button: save without exiting
  
• - The existing save and quit button
  

• New Cattle Barn building
  
• - Requires the new bucket to be built
  
• Cows now spawn around the map
  
• You can tame cows by attracting them into cattle barns with food. But be careful, if you let them get too close, they’ll eat it!
  
• After you have tamed cows, you’ll be able to milk and pet them
  

• Food is no longer eaten immediately upon clicking it as it is first equipped into your hand
  

[h3]Townsfolk UI improvement[/h3]

• Villager accessories and equipment are now shown on villager icons
  
• Each villager icon now further shows:
  
• Your relationship with them
  
• Their mastery
  
• A related improvement is that a villager’s mastery will now be prioritised and show up as the first item in the trading menu
  
• Improved the name background to be a nice banner
  

[h3]Trees regrow[/h3]

• Just like with other vegetation, trees now re-grow every night
  
• Trees specifically will not grow nearby buildings
  
• This ultimately means that buildings of towns is no longer limited and can go on indefinitely!
  

• Significantly improved positioning of villagers for construction contributions
  
• Improved look of all hay roofs & fixed tears in previous ones
  
• Improved construction animations
  
• Improved look of other building icons
  
• Improved positioning of items when villagers examine them
  
• Balanced learning
  
• Fixed the workshop’s stack of wood sometimes floating
  
• Fixed tavern construction look and size not matching up with the final building
  
• Fixed some details in the title screen
  
• Fixed some villager animations being slightly off
  
• Fixed being able to place some buildings on top of workshop constructions
  
• Fixed Townsfolk page not refreshing when you first open your book
  
• Fixed villagers examining items at the same time as they are wearing them
  
• Fixed worn accessories being thrown
  
• Fixed some items getting stuck in mid-air when thrown by villagers
  
• Fixed being able to move while eating
  
• Fixed interact button still sometimes interacting with glitched collisions
  
• Fixed being able to craft other normal items in specialised workshops (eg, a flower crown by hammering an anvil)
  
• Fixed villagers being able to use bakeries without peels
  
• Fixed villagers’ appearance not updating after deciding to wear equipment from a quest
  
• Fixed villagers saying rogue exclamation marks aggressively when angry
  
• Fixed villagers wasting a lot of time by not giving up and trying to pursue impossible goals
  

As you may expect, we've been busy preparing the next big patch of Heard of the Story! Releasing sometime in February, it will include a lot of new content and major performance improvements!

With players building bigger and bigger towns, the visual uniqueness of villagers is something that has become very important, and so we've invested a lot of time into designing and creating an assortment of clothes, hair styles, and facial hair styles for you and your villagers to wear! To go along with this, there will be a more detailed customisation screen at the beginning of the game, as well as a separate 'equipment' inventory section so that these items no longer take up regular inventory space. Of course, these items will all be craftable in a new Tailor building. Below are some of the concepts we brainstormed before starting development on the new appearances.



So far, the villager AI centered around using a graph-based database. For various reasons, this turned out to be a bad decision for performance. In this update, we completely refactored out the database, which has led to insanely faster AI performance, between 100-10,000x. In particular, this has a huge impact on large worlds. Previously, a town spanning 50 villagers would start to appear sluggish for conversations, new buildings, villager immigration, and overall, raised new issues and bugs. Now, those delays will be simply completely gone! This opens up the opportunity for much larger worlds than previously possible, with towns potentially having hundreds of roaming villagers - the upper limits of which we are still testing!

One of the most requested buildings from an earlier Discord poll - the Cattle Barn - is also coming in the 0.9 patch. With it, will come the first round of animals in the game - 🐮🐄! To construct the building, you'll need to attract some cute little cows which you'll be able to find roaming in the forests surrounding your town. Feed them with some hay, or even some of the bread you bake, and they'll return the favour by providing you with milk, which you'll be able to use to make cheese and butter! Thanks for sharing what you want to see and helping shape the game!

So those are the main new things coming! We're looking forward to seeing you try the new update when it's ready!

- Improved the way personality is interpreted by a villager when they are choosing what to say. Previously, certain speaking styles would be unintentionally much more common than others, now they are more balanced and consistent. Specifically, you’ll see this when villagers are describing their goals, reacting to insults, and responding to other villagers
- Fixed some villager descriptions of goals overflowing
- Fixed some villager personalities getting insulted during trading when they shouldn’t
- Fixed cart item being ‘free’ during trade and also other related issues to the cart
- Fixed being able to see barrels and the cart in mid-air when constructing the mine
- Fixed not being able to craft in the same workspace twice and other related crafting issues
- Fixed a ‘goodbye’ from a previous conversation being able to cause a glitch in a new conversation
- Fixed villagers in the Townsfolk menu strangely wearing only blue clothes
- Fixed mine door having the wrong hint
- Fixed mine windows not lighting up when the building is in use

As always, we are also working on some great new content and improvements for the next big update - stay tuned!