This is the first major content update, and it introduces some new challenges.

Viruses are a new threat, which can be introduced by some visiting sapiens, especially if you recruit them. You can help stop the spread by isolating infected sapiens, but this will become a lot easier to manage once you have researched medicine.

You can now allow sapiens to eat raw meat, however there is a high risk of food poisoning, which they can get in other ways too. They can also get burned around fires, so you might want to find some aloe and keep some burn medicine stored.

To create medicine, you'll want to investigate the new plants. They can be hard to find, so you might need to explore further out.

There are also many other significant improvements to the AI, graphics, performance, and a bunch of other new features and fixes too.

The update will go out next week, but if you don't mind helping to find any remaining bugs, you can try it out now on the public-beta-unstable branch. Please keep the feedback and bug reports coming, thank you!

- Dave

Full Release Notes:

Herbal Medicine

Adds viruses which can be introduced by visiting sapiens, and spread through your tribe

Adds food poisoning, which can occur if you allow them to eat raw meat, or store raw and cooked meat together

Adds a risk of getting burned while delivering fuel or crafting at kilns or campfires

Injuries can now occur while doing more activities like chopping trees or mining

New medicine skill, research, and craftable items

Adds 6 new plants and the elderberry tree

Adds fired and unfired bowls

Sapiens can now die from starvation or hypothermia, and these systems have been rebalanced

Sapiens will seek fire when they are very cold, and stay there until they warm up

Campfires and kilns now melt the snow near by

Many craftable items must now be researched individually

Adds a new immunity trait

AI improvements

Sapiens now interact with each other more, and talk to each other while seated

Many improvements to the AI with how they prioritize and choose tasks

Sapiens will now run when hunting, and for urgent tasks like treating with medicine

As running makes mammoths easier and safer to hunt, they now take more spears and provide a little less meat

Improved pathfinding, with smoother movements and walking animations

Improves a number of other sapien animations

Mouth movements while talking

Injured and sick sapiens will now go to bed, and their outcomes will be better if they sleep

Graphics and Performance

Significant optimizations in many areas

Many improvements to shaders and rendering quality, including more vibrant colors

Adds new options to toggle bloom and ambient occlusion, and adds a lower quality water option

Improvements to a number of models, especially thatch buildings, which also have a slightly larger window allowing you to fly through

Newly crafted log drums and balafons will now display the correct wood type

Other Changes

Decorative items will no longer go rotten or despawn, until they become usable with "allow use"

You can now dig and fill steeper slopes

New notification text when you move too far from your tribe

Notifications are now color coded

Some status effects like injuries can now be more severe, and are colored red/orange to indicate this

Notifications now stay up when the game is paused

You can now build anything out of split logs to complete the tutorial goal, not just a split log wall

The tech tree has been redesigned to make more sense

Balafon crafting now requires wood working instead of tool assembly

Playing any musical instrument will complete the music tutorial task

Undiscovered items now don't show what they are in the resources panel

Bug Fixes

Named objects will now preserve and display their name when carried and moved around

Fixes bug where bamboo didn't grow back

Fixes issues with selecting paths

Fixes bug with issuing orders in multi-select

Fixes bug where mammoths could become invisible after a successful hunt

Fixes bug where the order of sapiens changed when you changed their role assignments

No longer follows symlinks when deleting worlds

[*] Many other minor fixes