Hey Vikings, we’re back with our newest update, rejoice!
Our first update for this year is probably one of our most important yet! There has been a lot of feedback from the community about the finite nature of some of our most important resources, namely wood and iron, as trees do not regrow and caves can be depleted.
Without further ado then - the patch notes! (They’re pretty long, so get comfy!)

THIS PATCH IS TREE-LY GOOD

Added: Forester Hut and Forester House

Players can now replant trees using Foresters.
Tree regrowth will be player-driven by way of a new building: the Forester. This new building can be found under the advanced production buildings tab in the build menu and works in a similar way to the farm.



The forester has a series of pots in which you can plant saplings. Planting saplings costs nothing, and you will be prompted to pick the type of tree you'd like to plant.

Each tree type yields different types of wood. For instance the regular fir yields logs, the small fir grows faster and yields long sticks, and for the birch tree you'll have to upgrade the forester.

Saplings require water and compost to grow, similar to regular crop fields. Once a sapling's growth reaches 100% it can be picked up and planted.



Before you can plant a tree however, you'll need to get yourself a shovel. Shovels are new items which allow you to dig holes where trees can be planted. Once a tree is planted, you'll have to wait for it to grow, but you won't have to tend to it anymore, just let nature take its course. Currently, a fir grows in 32 in-game days, and a small fir in 24 in-game days.

Most importantly, you can assign villagers to plant trees for you. Each Forester comes with a Forestry marker and you can also build additional markers. Be wary however that villagers will attempt to keep a certain distance between trees. They will also plant trees in any holes you dig in marked areas.

COOL VIKINGS DON’T LOOK AT EXPLOSIONS

Cave Overhaul and Infinite Iron
Besides the ability to regrow trees, we're also giving players the ability to regenerate iron and stone in the caves by way of an explosive device. While our Vikings haven't discovered gunpowder quite yet, they will discover however that the cave crawlers have laid weird eggs in the mines.
These crawler eggs are harvestable with a knife, and will replenish seasonally yielding a regular flow of resources.

New creepy-crawly resources

Both the crawlers and the crawler eggs will now have a chance to drop crawler sacks.
While harmless on their own, the Vikings soon discovered that when put together, fire, jotun blood and crawler sacks cause a powerful explosion, powerful enough to rip through rock, wood and flesh.

Besides the sacks, crawler eggs also yield maggots and crawler slime.

Crawler Maggots are a new food type for which the Vikings have no new recipes yet, so they can be only consumed raw. They can be used as bait however!

Crawler Slime can be used as compost, as the plants seem to enjoy it!



Cave-ins and explosive sacks

The explosive sacks are now craftable at the Workshop House. They're ASKA's equivalent of TNT and when detonated in cave corridors specifically, they will cause cave-ins, refreshing the cave walls which can be mined for iron and stone.

NOTE: Explosive sacks won't cause cave-ins in cave rooms.

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This will be a player-only activity, so periodically you'll have to go detonate corridors. Villagers will know to evacuate the blast area when setting off an exploding sack. The sack features a fuse, and you'll have 10 seconds to clear the area before the thing goes off.

While designed to refresh cave corridors, the exploding sack can be used to destroy trees, stone clumps and even enemies! You can also stack up multiple explosive sacks for even greater damage.



Reinforced Cave Entrance
To support the new resources, we've also added an upgrade for the Cave Entrance, called the Reinforced Cave Entrance. This improved mine entrance features increased storage capacity for iron and stone, while also adding new storage for the crawler resources.



Besides the crawler sacks, you'll also find some icky new maggots and crawler slime.

Maggots are a new food type for which the Vikings have no new recipes yet, so they can be only consumed raw. They can be used as bait however!

Crawler slime can be used as compost, as the plants seem to enjoy it!



Fisherman Boats Overhaul
Special attention has also been given to the ways villagers fish, especially when using boats. They should now be more effective and do a much better job at navigating using the boats.

Villager AI for boat fishing has been greatly improved.

Villagers will now navigate much better using boats

Villagers will no longer lose their boats

Villagers will no longer abandon their boats in the middle of the sea

The Fisherman House (Tier 2) will now support only two workers. Existing saves with three villagers assigned as fishermen will see their 3rd assigned fishermen being reassigned as builders.

Fisherman Hut/House Improvements
The fishermen buildings will receive a safety area, similar to warehouses and workshops to ensure villagers have enough space to dock their boats.

New Item: Sturdy Fishing Rod

Sturdy fishing rod features far better durability than its counterparts. This will be especially helpful since fishing has been made to work as originally intended, with rarer, stronger fish now dealing more durability damage to rods.


Menu Improvements

The Tutorial Menu is now more gamepad friendly

Improved how villagers are sorted based on suffering in the settlement menu

Added an option to rebuild / dismantle destroyed buildings from the settlement menu

Fixed a bug causing the compass to ignore filters in some cases

Cloud saves storage and performance optimizations (the changes will take effect after syncing your save session with the cloud in game, or after removing it and uploading it again).

Added the option to sync a save on cloud when creating a new game.

Added a setting to prevent new items from being auto equipped to the quickbar

Fixed a bug where "Create" was shown instead of "Save" when editing a task for the first time

Added villager's workplace on the map

Fixed a bug causing a lot of deaths to be "Under mysterious circumstances" when the circumstances were in fact not so mysterious.

Fixed a bug that allowed players to create duplicated schedule presets

Fixed Ragnar’s beard sometimes stretching in the main menu

Fixed character attribute tooltips in Main Menu being displayed at the wrong position



Villager Improvements

Fixed cave workers getting stuck mining a wall if they have a Tier 1 and a Tier 2 pickaxe in the inventory

Fixed a bug where villagers would move without a walking animation

Archers assigned to train at the archery range will now supply themselves properly with arrows. Previously they could get stuck in a resupply loop.

Cooking house worker now avoids at all cost using the main ingredient of a recipe in the filler slots (no more 4 raw meat for meat stew)

Fixed a bug causing the farmers to deal less till / weeds progress than they should.

Miners will now take enough torches to light up a cave room in only one trip, instead of one trip per torch

Fixed miners getting stuck complaining about needing better pickaxes instead of mining other cave walls



Building System Improvements

Added a highlight on world resources when these don't allow a building to be placed in preview mode.

These highlights will persist for a few seconds after cancelling the preview so to better take care of those items by removing them or relocating the building entirely if blocked by terrain features.

Multiplayer Improvements

Fixed disconnects caused by destroying barracks, archery ranges & markets

Clients now drop items with prediction (i.e as smooth as the host)

Fixed an issue where hosts & clients would not save on disconnect. Now they should do so on every disconnect beside those caused by game breaking errors as these could potentially create corrupted saves.

Fixed clients being unable to equip items for villagers using drag and drop.



Various improvements and QoL changes

Reduced survival stress. Hunger and thirst have been adjusted.

Stumps can now be removed by using an axe. NOTE: Villagers can’t remove stumps yet, this will be part of a future patch. There’s an intricacy to the way our trees are generated and how stumps work that calls for a more complex solution.

Adjusted durability and decay for some times to make them more lenient

Slag is now usable as a poor form of compost

Adjusted weather events to ensure smoother transitions

Fixed a bug where fishing rods would heal their own durability when being used. Fishing rods now break. It was originally intended that depending on the type of fish, they would damage the rod.

Adjusted weed speed growth - they now grow much slower making farming slightly more relaxed

[*]Increased warehouse storage capacity by increasing the stack size storage for various items, especially medium items.

FAQ: Will there be a roadmap?
Our Roadmap for 2025 is still not fully ironed out yet and we’re having a lot of internal discussions regarding this just now. It shouldn’t be too much longer, but we know you’re keen to hear from us on this - hang tight a little longer, we should have something to share fairly soon here.

Skal
Sand Sailor