Build number: 636414

Hello dear homeowners,

The development and stabilizing of patch EA 0.9.16 took us longer than we all wished, but reworking a lot of the engine's core functionalities and the game's core systems to achieve moveable and interactable interiors and exteriors is not easily done. But finally, here it is: "Home Sweet Home"!

As mentioned above, we had to dig deep into the core. This is why we sadly can't be sure that we and our QA were able to find and extinguish all possible issues caused by our changes during the stabilizing phase. And we also have a small list of known issues that we still want to work on in the next few days. This is why we are already preparing to bring out a small patch before Xmas this year.

Please support us with this and enter the issues you find in our bug tracker - together we will manage to drive out the biggest bugs in this version in the coming weeks: Redmine bugtracker. Please do not forget to add save games or crash-dumps, where available, see link to forum

Please note: The game does not display/load save games from outdated patch versions as they have become incompatible due to the rework of core systems.

Highlights & Overview

New features: With patch EA 0.9.16, among others, we bring you interiors for your residences, family life for your dynasty members, more NPC behaviors and work animations in the exterior areas of all businesses!
Content & Balancing: We continued with our efforts in upgrading the AI and the balancing of the economy. Beside that, we implemented dozens of new animations, objects and sounds and we upgraded a lot of textures and shaders.
Bug fixes: While working on the features of patch EA 0.9.16, we - again - fixed a loooot of bugs, including crashes and issues with the multiplayer mode!

Information for hurried readers: We have implemented 4 new hotkeys: H = select the Avatar, J = select the left hand, K = select the right hand, O = open/leave the interior.

We value your feedback!

Please support us and take the time to give reviews. Thank you very much!
If you have the time, we would appreciate it if you could fill out a short survey regarding the changes we made in patch EA 0.9.16: Link to the survey
Please note: we do not collect any personal information other than your feedback - you will remain completely anonymous. This survey will end the day we release the next patch.

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New features

- From now on, you’ll see no more workers looping the same work animation on the same workplace in the exteriors of all businesses, resource producers (mine, quarry, lumberyard) and natural resources (brushwood, grove, cemetery, fishing spot). Instead, every worker has a working behavior that lets them walk between workplaces and perform different animations in sequences.
- Characters who enter a building are walking all the way from the street connection point to the building's main door. If a character is riding a horse or is using a cart, then the horse or the cart becomes invisible as soon as entering the exterior; we decided to do so because before we changed that, we constantly saw the horse carts of the transporters waltz over the workers in the building's exteriors...
- We have implemented interiors for all cottages (formerly country/farm houses), houses, patrician houses (formerly city houses) and mansions.
- The layout, kind of furniture and lighting of the interiors depends on the level of the residence: the interior of a cottage is poor and dirty, while the interior of a mansion is pompous.
- Additionally, even within the same residence level, the furniture of the interior depends on the look of the building itself; cottage number 1 has a different interior than cottage number 2, etc.
- Interactable Objects: The interior of your residence holds a number of objects with which you can interact via right-click:
-- the workbench opens the building's menu (production menu)
-- the family painting opens your family tree
-- the abacus opens your skill tree
-- the scales opens your budget book
-- doors/ladders/curtains/stairs let your selected character leave the house or go to sleep
-- chairs/stools let your selected character sit down
-- bathing tub (patrician house and mansion only) let your selected character take a bath
- Family Life: Family members who are inside your residence with nothing to do will start after a short period of time doing things like cooking, cleaning the house, eating, searching for things and so on. They will receive a little amount of XP for that, which increases with the level of your residence.
- Training: Your family members are now able to train their attributes inside your residence. The boost will last for some hours, while the duration increases with the level of your residence.
- With patch EA 0.9.16, we implemented Ambient Occlusion (AO) which enhances the engine's possibilities to cast shadows. You can switch AO off and on in the options.

Content & Balancing

- Entry right: Your characters can enter your residences and the residences of allied dynasties. You are not allowed to enter residences of neutral dynasties and of course not residences of dynasties you are in a feud with.
- We added an option with which you can enable/disable the camera following a selected character into interiors.
- In case you want to start an action with a character to be performed in the interiors and the character is already inside, then you do not have to select a target anymore and the action will automatically start in that interior as long as no one else is already performing the action in the same residence.
- Most 'non-aggressive' actions can be performed in the interior of your residence as well. These are for example compliments and giving a present, but not pickpocketing.
- We implemented hotkeys for quick access to your party: H = your Avatar, J = left hand, K = right hand.
- We included a new section about interiors in the ingame wiki.
- We reworked the tutorial to include interiors.
- When you are inside a residence with the camera, then you can hear the weather sounds muffled.
- Breaking an alliance with another dynasty now has a more severe and longer lasting impact on your reputation with the target dynasty.
- You now hear a dialogue and see a bouquet when a character gifts another character with a bouquet of flowers.
- Widows and widowers of a deceased true bloodline family member now show a status that explains why they are not allowed to marry again. Note: They can still be 'traded' in a dynastic trade.
- We implemented new behaviors for the neutral NPCs in the game: from time to time, they talk to the merchants in their market booths or visit the grave of a relative. During the night, some NPCs go to bed - no, not all, because rogues would have no one to 'interact' with if all were going to bed :-) We will implement more of those behaviors to make the world feel more alive.
- Smuggler: all smuggling actions can now be 'illegal' - the game starts with smuggling of rum, contraband and smuggling of goods set to 'legal'.
- We raised the political power of the Sovereign: from now on, the Sovereign is the only one allowed to make law changes to controversial laws like ‘Play Music’.
- We enhanced the AI further and will do so for the patches to come as well.
Multiplayer: We further reduced the network traffic to make your multiplayer experience smoother.
- With this patch, we implemented that for each action that requires a target, the validity of the target gets checked again once the actor reaches it. When the target had become invalid while the actor was on the way to it, you will get feedback. This feedback is sometimes not sufficient enough, so we will enhance this system in the patches to come.
- We have switched some laws between office chambers to balance out the office powers.
- Depending on the achieved title, the penalties in court become more severe.
- Walls and furniture will smoothly fade-out in interiors when the camera is close to them.
- We splitted the first group of residences in the 'Erect building' menu into cottages and houses as they were treated differently already before but had the same name.
- When a residence is selected, you can use the new hotkey 'O' to toggle the camera into the interior or back out.
- We added two new buttons in the action bars of characters and buildings:
-- 'Focus camera' to focus the camera on the character or building
-- 'Look outside' to leave an interior with the camera when a building is selected
– Additionally we added a new button in the right lower corner of the game to exit interior views at any time.
- The production times for flannel and flower bouquet have been raised.
- A number of new character animations and sounds have been added.
- We invested more time to balance out the hospital and the windmill, but both professions are still not where they must be. We will work further on it.
- From now on, selected characters and focused characters have different selection rings so you have better visual feedback. Please note: selected means that you’ve clicked the character once, focused is when you have double clicked a character (or used the respective button in their action bar), so that the camera follows moving characters.
- In order to reduce the overlapping of dozens of characters at marketplaces, we have decided to at least for now hide characters again who found no free standing position at the main market tent.
- We changed the amount of items gathering workers bring home at once to reduce gathering times especially at game start.
- When selecting one of your characters or buildings, you now have the possibility to cancel the currently performed action via the 'X' icon next to the action icon in the character panel on the bottom left of the HUD. And we have improved the progress display of actions :-)
- And finally birds: We have now beautifully animated birds!

Bug fixes

- several issues that led to crashes in singleplayer and in multiplayer have been fixed
- fixed a number of issues that led to a crash after loading a saved multiplayer game
- fixed a bug that caused characters to heal too fast, especially when they were waiting for a treatment of their wounds; depending on the character level some characters might still have no problems with certain diseases
- fixed a bug where the rostrum remained closed after using the "Play music on a rostrum” even if the action was cancelled and the rostrum empty
- fixed a bug that caused boats and ships to be blocking each other when reaching the far trade point or their home port
- fixed a number of issues in the pathfinding system
- fixed a bug that could cause the current production of an employee to be canceled instead of being paused overnight
- fixed a bug that - on rare occasions - caused an employee to sleep while standing outside of the building... we called it the 'sleepwalker' easter egg until we fixed it :-)
- fixed a bug that made it possible to select boats and ships as targets for a small cake of joy
- fixed a bug that caused a banished player party member to stay in the party while the player was unable to use and even kick them
- fixed a bug that could cause a banished character to be stuck at their residence or at a far trade post
- fixed a bug that prevented evidences for crimes from being created when the action had no character or building as target but a coordinate
- fixed a number of bugs within dialogues
- fixed a bug that caused the surname of the character not being displayed when applying for an office
- fixed a number of bugs that caused texts not to be displayed or displayed just in parts in the multiplayer lobby
- fixed a bug that caused a family member who just became an adult while performing a child-only action to become frozen
- fixed a number of bugs with the display of attributes in item tooltips and in the character info window
- fixed a number of bugs with birthtraits
- fixed a bug that messed up the item filters when switching between the building menu of production businesses and residences
- fixed a bug that prevented AI dynasties from hiring henchmen after having reached higher titles
- fixed a bug that caused the building value to increase dramatically according to the overrated worth of hired employees
- fixed a bug that caused heavy rainfall to destroy a lot of buildings on the map in rare occasions
- fixed a bug that caused the costs of actions not to be refunded when the performing character was beaten unconscious
- fixed a bug that caused warehouse transporters to procure items no matter if the procure setting was checked or unchecked
- fixed a bug that linked to the wrong ingame wiki page when using the help button in the window of a new born child
- fixed a number of bugs in different maps
- fixed a bug that allowed pregnant women to use alcoholic drinks
- fixed several localization issues.

Known issues

- The robbers are currently not sleeping in their tents in the robber camp and instead entering the main tent; we will look into that in one of the coming patches
- You may notice that while your character is under way to perform an action somewhere, another character may interrupt them with for example the action "Greet someone". The bug here is that your action currently doesn't restart after the interruption. We are looking into that!
- With the whole system rework to make interiors and exterior areas working, we still have a number of issues that will be taken care of as soon as possible:
-- Many actions with a building as target block other actions that target the same building while the first action is performed
-- Workers and transporters may behave a bit strange (nothing severe :-) ) when the storage of a building is full
-- In rare occasions, it can happen that a character can not find a valid path to a position on an exterior of a building. We are still investigating this issue and hope to have a solution ready for the upcoming patch.

Important information

The game does not display/load save games from outdated patch versions as they have become incompatible due to the rework of core systems.
If you are experiencing difficulties with loading and saving the game, you may attempt to delete all files from the folder “%userprofile%\Saved Games\Guild3” (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\Saved Games\Guild3).
Multiplayer: If you have a restrictive firewall then you may have to manually open the following outgoing ports to be able to play in multiplayer: 61111 TCP & UDP, 36895 TCP & UDP, 36975 TCP & UDP. You can find this information in the FAQs Multiplayer on our webpage as well!
It is quite possible that some problems that you have in your game are caused by missing or corrupted files. In this case, the following might help: right-click on "The Guild 3" in your Steam library, then Properties - LOCAL FILES - VERIFY INTEGRITY OF GAME FILES...
If you still have issues afterwards, then we recommend uninstalling the game and then manually delete the folder “%localappdata%\Guild3” (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Guild3). Then re-install the game.
Crash dumps for bug reports can be found in “%localappdata%\Guild3\sentry\reports” (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Guild3\sentry\reports) per default.
Join our official Discord server where you can meet us (that is, when we take a break from developing games) and other players to chat about the game.