As you might have expected there were a few questions asked during the dev stream. Here are those questions and the answers given to them. Answers are given by Zantai unless otherwise stated. I’ve tried to group similar questions together so they’re not in the same order as they were asked in the dev stream.
Phenixer: Who the heck made the music? It’s amazing!
This is our friends over at Skewsound who we’ve been working with since Grim Dawn and still helping us out on Frontier as well. You’ll be happy to know we’ve set those music tracks you’ve been hearing earlier and some more live on youtube right now. You guys can check them out, listen to them and enjoy.
Elhaym: did you draw inspiration from any games in the genre?
Honestly, a lot of old favourites of the genre like a lot of the people working on Frontier are real fans for example of Caesar games, Anno. We definitely looked at some of the more recent ones like Banished.
MLG_Pifu: how does this game compare to something like banished, what sets it apart?
Medierra: The fundamental gameplay is similar but with a lot more depth in terms of town progression, multi-tiered economy, much more detailed farming, strategic building with desirability / need for coverage from various services and entertainment buildings, etc
allatrona: What do you guys think farthest frontier selling point compared to other city builders?
I think the setting is great, although we’ve had a lot of similar medieval builder themes coming out of course right when we’re doing it. The big highlights are definitely the resource system, the farming system, the trading system, the progression you feel as your town is growing; buildings can upgrade, can produce over 70 different items in the game. There’s a lot of depth, a lot of variety and I think really that’s what we focused on. Quality, variety and an uniquely deep experience.
SwankyMarrow: Any revolutionary gaming aspects or system to this game?
What I would definitely point out right away is I think we have one of the most advanced farming systems you’ll see in a town builder. It’s very detailed in crop rotations, soil composition, diseases that can spread between fields. You actually have to care about the fertility of your field decreasing if you plant too many plants that actually drain nutrients from the soil. Obviously there’s the raiders system. All of our resources are moved around the world in real time, they actually have a real presence. So if our resources are stored in a storage area way off in the distance, the villagers have to go way over there to pick them up and transport them to where they need to go. So that’s something you have to consider when laying out your town. You can’t just throw everything around as far apart as possible and expect the resources to teleport back to the centre of town. They’re not going to do that, they’re actually going to be wherever they were dropped off.
WinterTMX: Hmm, does it have floods? Ehehe… imagine someone building a nice little town next to a river, and then BAM! Flood! no town!
No, we do not have flooding.
Coincidente: can lightning provoke fires?
MedeaFleecestealer: Yes and does quite often!
emkyooess: Seasons? Winter?
Yes, right now it’s early spring, well mid spring. Coming up to summer it’ll be optimal planting season, but we don’t have any fields up yet.
weldin_live: does weather have any impact on the gameplay?
It actually does. You can have heatwaves that cause your harvests to fail. You can have early blizzards; blizzards can also increase the wood your people are using up to stay warm in their homes and surprise chills can also affect the crops as well. Being stuck out in the cold villagers can be affected, suffering from exposure and eventually developing gangrene if wounds are not treated. Villagers can even die if they’re out in the cold for too long.
mokel: Is this the same engine as GD?
Unity game engine
nukkuu: I thought the game would’ve been made in the same engine as grim dawn, what was the benefit to building in unity?
So the Grim Dawn engine is a proprietary engine that was originally used to build Titan Quest and we overhauled it quite significantly to make Grim Dawn. But it was built to make ARPG’s. I wasn’t really designed to do something like a town builder. So we had to consider what other options there were; we could have built our own engine which would have been a significant time investment or we could use one of the major engines that exist already like Unity and Unreal. We ultimately went with Unity and then implemented our own features on top of the baseline engine’s to make a town builder.
Ramstab: is the game going to be launched on all platforms?
VivaLinux: Hello, Release on GOG is planned or not ?
emkyooess: GOG for the final release too? Please?
Currently we’re focused on Steam, we’ll see about GOG down the line. Not currently, especially for early access.
emkyooess: I understand not for the indev/early access. But for final release, I hope I’ll be able to get it!
Medierra: Not sure I’ll do GOG… I like them but it was a lot of effort to support / integrate their galaxy stuff on GD for what is a pretty small chunk of sales
YetiHill99: Modding support? To what extent if yes?
ragunragun: looks like an upgraded version of banished. mod support?
Well, it is based on Unity so I expect you guys to be able to dig in there with those tools. We’d have to discuss how we will support modding down the line, obviously that isn’t our priority right now; our priority is to finish the game, but I expect the game will be moddable just by venture of being built in Unity.
Toomuchbob: release date? sorry if answered I just got here!
9th August.
RektbyProtoss: What’s the max pop you’ve reached so far Z?
I think I got to 12 hundred before I gave up. I could have kept going, but with builds constantly in flux I kinda wanted to start a new town of the latest stuff to make sure I was testing stuff coming from the programmers.
SwankyMarrow: How big is the Development team?
Let’s see, on Frontier we’ve got 6 people currently. We’ve actually had some people switching back and forth to make sure that it was going to be as ready for you guys as possible by August 9th. Ironing out those bugs, getting optimisation up as much as we can. Maybe squeezing in a few more features.
droblit: is there a campaign?
toomad2309: Will there be a multi mission campaign?
MedeaFleecestealer: No, no campaign.
Foureigh: any plans for MP? coop or something?
No, this is a single player experience.
SwankyMarrow: how far can you zoom in
You can zoom in pretty close to see these guys working.
emkyooess: Bridges? Tunnels? Roads over hills?
Roads over hills are absolutely possible. I can make a road right over here and they can get on with making that. We do not have tunnels, we would like to do bridges, bridges would be great. Currently we do not have bridges … maybe … maybe.
Medierra: bridges are beyond our technical capability
Shuranosuke: Can you build roads?
RektbyProtoss: Roads aren’t mandatory for walking, but roads speed up walking and are placed manually
emkyooess: Roads manually managed, or is there nice automatic upgrading of “these are the paths people take so they got worn in”? I’ve seen both in games.
toomad2309: paved/cobblestone roads?
MedeaFleecestealer: Yes, they can be upgraded if you have the stone to do it.
SwankyMarrow: I joined kind of late – is there dark magic, Demon goats, witches?
allatrona: Are there any magical elements in the game?
Not officially. Might be a fun reskin though.
SaltyAsChuck: Can we name or follow individual townspeople? Mr. John Wolf-Slayer deserves to be noticed
You absolutely can. If I click on Rena here, you can centre the camera on her and where she’s going the camera’s going to follow. And if you want to name her, what do we have here, Mr. John Wolf-Slayer - Miss John Wolfslayer. And that name gets saved in your game settings so in future towns you might see that name come up again.
allatrona: do villagers die of old age?
If you’re so lucky enough to have a prospering town that exists for many years, yes, your villagers will eventually pass on from old age. It’s sort of a sign of success that your town has prospered for so long that people are dying of old age and not say typhoid.
emkyooess: How are jobs assigned?
Whenever you place a new building and there are labourers available in the labour pool they will automatically be assigned to that role. For example as soon as I built a firewood splitter Miss Oliphana got right to work. Same with the hunter cabin. But if you want to change that we have a professions tab which gives you a detailed rundown of what exactly your villagers are doing. And what is available is determined by what buildings you have in your town.
jonasrosland: Will villagers start families?
MedeaFleecestealer: Yes
PewSquare: Can you assign no no areas to prevent people from going there
MedeaFleecestealer: Nope
Grudof: Rotate buildings only 90deg?
MedeaFleecestealer: Full 360 in 90 segments.
emkyooess: Do we spend a lot of time in the professions window? Some other games in the genre, that’s the main window you’re always fiddling with. And I’m looking forward to that micro moving back a little bit.
I wouldn’t say you spend a lot of time in it. It’s definitely something you want to access pretty regularly, but nothing you’re going to have open all the time.
l0kvi: All villagers are the same or some are better in different fields?
We do not have skill sets for villagers if that’s what you’re going for. In terms of ability all villagers perform their roles equally. So you don’t have to worry about micro-managing which villager does which job; you want a villager, they’re available, they’ll go do it.
ragunragun: is it exclusively an economic style strategy game? can you train military and raid other villages/monster packs?
MedeaFleecestealer: Your military is to defend you from raiders.
SaltyAsChuck: When you have guards/soldiers… do you take control of them in any way or is it automated based on threats or markers/exploration markers?
Both. By default your soldiers are going to be garrisoned in a barracks or towers and from there they’ll used any ranged weapons to take out threats that gets too close. However, you can deploy them using a rally flag to automatically patrol an area you’ve marked and attack anyone who gets too close. Finally you can select your villagers just like in an RTS and then you can command them to do whatever is needed. And the same thing can be done with soldiers.
ragunragun: is there exploration? with rewarding side quests?
You can see around here I only have a small area explored and I can in fact set down exploration markers to have my villagers set out there and explore more of the map.
MadClover: This might’ve been asked already but are maps generated or hand made?
Our maps are randomly generated. Every time you start a new map it’s going to be completely different. Different resources, resources are in different locations, different layout, the type of map you might select will also determine what type of seed is selected. You can see at the bottom here there is a seed for my town and you can write that seed down and enter it in Advanced Options for a new settlement and if you want to play the exact same town, exact same map - or want to give your friends the same map you played on for them to try and make a bigger town than you, you absolutely can.
emkyooess: Are there any difficulty settings beyond the enemy threat? Year length scaling for a shorter winter? Etc?
We don’t have scaling on seasons. I did mention at the beginning if you didn’t come in at the beginning of the stream that there are difficulty settings you can set right when you start the town. You can change the intensity of diseases, you can change your starting resources and population, you can change the animals that appear for example on lower difficulty you see more deer and less wolves. You can set how intense raids are.
KattenBertil: What negative events or setbacks exist?
Well, let me put it into perspective I guess. One time my town ran out of soap in the middle of winter and we had a bit of a smallpox outbreak. A third of the population later we did eventually solve that problem, but there are some consequences.
Shuranosuke: Can you dig and/or level the terrain?
MedeaFleecestealer: Yes
mokel: Can you plant new trees?
You actually can. If you go into Decorations you’ll see a number of different tree options you have. This is good if you just want to plant to be decorative or if you want to plant trees for future cutting down.
Whirblewind: how much time will tree conservation take? will it be generous like say minecraft where trees grow fast and don’t take much effort, or rigorous, like say microtown, where planting takes lots of time (and/or resources)?
Planting trees is not expensive, it only take a gold per tree. I don’t currently have gold in my town to get them planted, but it’s not super complicated. Once planted those tree will grow, it’ll take a few years for them to get to full size. But not quite as fast as say Minecraft, but still not too bad.
ragunragun: are there different biomes with different foliage/resources???
Yes, as I think I mentioned, there are 5 different biomes you can start with. If you want a very specific environment or you click random and the game will generate something completely unique for you. Arid, as I mentioned, can be very high on some resources and very low on others so that can drastically change your experience.
ragunragun: alright but can you discover different biomes in one map??
Well, I guess it depends on what you consider a different biome. For example this is a lush forest here and we have mountains so they would be 2 different biomes. There’s map type like areas as I mentioned, but there’s also there are also biomes which are sub details within a map. So yep, within each map there’s going to be a variety of biomes.
NewEfty: is swamp or small island one of the possible biomes?
MedeaFleecestealer: Yes
NewEfty: awesome! the game looks really pretty but kinda tired of forests
MedeaFleecestealer: Then choose Arid Highlands which don’t have a lot of forests.
allatrona: can you settle more than 1 town on the same map?
No, it’s one town per map. You could make little sub settlements where you have houses and production buildings together like further away from your main town, but as having a town centre that defines a town you’ll have one per map.
NewEfty: will there be breweries, mead halls, wine plantations?
MedeaFleecestealer: Breweries and pubs.
NewEfty: if the game will have breweries and the like, will alcoholism be an issue?
RektbyProtoss: brawling vills aren’t very productive
MedeaFleecestealer: Yes, it can be.
Tickerai: How do you increase your population?
Well, there are 2 ways. There’s the traditional nature method which I hope you’ve learned about already and there’s immigration. So earlier in the game we had a pop up that we could attract more immigrants if we had 4 months of food and 6 houses. Throughout the game though you’ll also have random immigration event that will immigrate to your town in small groups or have larger groups like 8 villagers show up and ask to be allowed into your town. If you can’t support that addition to your town you can decline them, but it is a nice big boost to your labour pool.
Horiahoria740: do traders arrive by boat like in banished?
MedeaFleecestealer: No
Onyxghost: Do you have content updates planned for this game?
We absolutely plan on supporting this game throughout early access and beyond. Where we go with that will actually kinda depend on what you guys are interested in too. We definitely want to add more buildings in the future. We’re discussing having another tier of housing in future that would be the ultra lucrative tier you could reach at the end of the game and beyond what we think will be interesting and what you guys might find fun.
the8anarchist: another tier of housing?
As I mentioned when we were placing housing there is a desirability value that those have that affect their ability to update. For example in the starting shelters they’re looking for a desirability of at least 30 to get up to the next tier. So if we add another tier of homes you would be looking at homes with really high desirability and those homes would pay the most taxes and have the most populations.
SimplyPhy: How many tiers are there?
So there are 4 tiers of town centre and 4 tiers of homes right now.
SaltyAsChuck: Along with raiders and predators… can we have traitors if people get too unhappy?
I wouldn’t say traitors, there are deserters. If villagers in your town get too unhappy they will leave and seek their luck elsewhere and they will take some things with them; the clothes they were or some food supplies.
l0kvi: In terms of late game town, will we be able to build big castles or cathedrals?
MedeaFleecestealer: No
Giblix: will there be a tech/development tree such as in the civ series? and is this just building on random maps or will there be a campaign such as Tropico/Anno have?
We’re not planning to do a campaign, it is building a random map as you mentioned. In terms of tech tree we talked about doing something like that. I’m not sure we’ll do something like that for release, but maybe down the line.
toomad2309: on contamination what sort of sanitation options are there?
Well, if you look at my villagers over here you’ll see they’re already beginning to generate waste and the way you depose of that is you build a compost yard which we haven’t unlocked yet. But I want to get on that soon because the waste is going to build up and cause diseases as well.
NewEfty: will the endgame disaster be grim dawn?
That would be a nice twist, but this is not a prequel to Grim Dawn.
floredon: is this set in the same world/IP as Grim Dawn?
No, this is not a sequel or prequel to Grim Dawn.
Paganblade: are there natural disasters? tornados? flooding?
We opted not to do natural disasters. The way they often work in town builders is like it is kind of fun to see a town get devastated, but maybe only once and after you saved. To have it happen randomly can be pretty crushing sometimes.
Medierra: no tornados or flooding but buildings can be struck by lightening and catch fire, heat waves can destroy crops and cause water shortages
Medierra: the natural disaster type stuff that exists are things the player can significant mitigate through proper town planning / food management
Medierra: I don’t really like totally random disasters that just own your town and you’re left to try to rebuild
Dravakar: will there be threats to your village other then natural threats like disease, hunger and so forth? like monsters, attacking other villages?
There are raiders that will attack periodically. You could turn raiders off if you don’t like that mechanic.
RaksoHnS: What are the dangers that this game poses, are there any physical opponents, or does the challenge comes from either natural or environmental causes?
A bit of both, you can have raiders attacking you; on higher difficulties there are even invading armies that will demand payment or they will attack you. There are diseases, there are wolves and bears as you can see.
NewEfty: any chance for a RING THE BELL button to get all the villagers to run to safety?
MedeaFleecestealer: Already exists. Just remember to turn it off again or they’ll starve in the town centre.
SwankyMarrow: Any Grim Dawn easter eggs?
RektbyProtoss: yes
meeesj: will there be any gd references in the game? npc names area names etc?
MedeaFleecestealer: Yes
Caerbae: is this a rogue-like kinda game or can I save and branch my saves as much as I want to?
You can save as many times as you want. There’s an auto save system that triggers.
tuftyfella: is it possible to take screenshots without the UI?
It absolutely is, you can toggle the UI right off and take awesome shots of the town in action.
lunar_tarsius: Is there an option to scale the Ui/text/elements?
Yes, there is. That’s one of the settings you have.
saganonn: Is the UI scalable like GD?
Yes, it is.
paranoialife: Is there a Forced Stopping point, or can we have our towns go on indefinitely?
You can go on as long as you want.
foxhull: Is there going to be any controller support at early access launch by the way? I’d love to jam this on the go on Steam Deck.
We have not tried running this on a Steam Deck yet. I feel like it would be fine. Not officially supporting controllers.
Paganblade: are there map size options?
Yes, when starting my game I selected a small map. There are small, medium, large settings. That will determine how large amount of space you have to work with obviously. So a smaller map might be more difficult to work with because you’re not going to have as much resources on the map to access.
allatrona: so, since there are map sizes, does that mean the map stops somewhere?
MedeaFleecestealer: Yes
SwankyMarrow: Are there any tamed animals?
MedeaFleecestealer: Cattle if you call them tamed.
gerwazy29: Do people need winter clothes?
So our villagers since they arrived on the frontier did come with some hide coats. Eventually, as the population grows and hide coats get worn out you will need to make new ones. And that’s where some of the future research buildings we’ll be making are. For example a tannery.
maxasylum: Are there religions or cults in the game?
Not currently. That might be fun to implement though.
Medierra: we’ve talked about a religion system but weren’t able to fit it in, in the time we wanted to get to release - seems though like something we could revisit in DLC or a sequel
Nero1024x: Are there non believers in this game?
MedeaFleecestealer: No religion so no non-believers.
onni25: Hi, the game looks great so far, sorry if this has already been asked, but will it have ultrawide screen support?
I don’t think ultrawide is currently supported.
atropabellad16: hi peoples. which of the crate devs is hosting this? i’m a GD noob (only 2,700 hours) and am looking forward to FF entering EA
I’m Zantai on the forum, you might have seen me posting our various updates. It comes into early access this August if you haven’t heard yet. We’re super pumped for you guys to be playing this game. In fact we’re actually going to have some youtubers and streamers get access to the game in the future so besides this stream which is happening right now there’s going to be more people streaming the game, checking it out, giving you their honest opinion. And kinda giving you a genned up look at the game you’ll be playing pretty soon.
Medierra: Zantai is like the most famous Crate designer
orbo_twitch: How did you get into Game Development?
I’m actually a former engineer, but I love modding. I spent a lot of my free time when I was younger modding games. I modded World of Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 and that’s kind of what got me interested in game development when I realised that’s the same game I paid for. I wasn’t an artist, wasn’t a programmer so those avenues didn’t made sense for me, but that was the point I realised that a designer is a thing that people do and I like to think I’m okay at it so I applied for jobs and ended up at a company called 38 Studios that no longer exists. But because of that I got to meet Arthur/Medierra who’s in the chat and the rest is history, been here for 10 years.
Paganblade: after the bear is dead can villagers scrap it for food?
Yes, they can. Once it’s dead it leaves a carcass that the villagers can harvest for food, tallow and h hide.
saganonn: is there a plan to do a early access demo? i wanna try it to know if it plays more like an Anno or banished
We’re not planning on doing a demo. That said Steam is pretty generous with its refund policy. You can check a game for up to 2 hours and if you don’t like it you can get it refunded no questions asked.
Nero1024x: 2 hours after making payment or 2 hours ingame time?
RektbyProtoss: it’s 2 hours ingame time usually
frankstar: do we have a price tag yet?
Medierra, do we have a price tag yet?
Medierra: uhhh, its like $29.99 or something?
allatrona: is there any statistics view?
Oh boy, let me show you the statistics view. Here we have the annual report, a full rundown of everything going on in your town
RaksoHnS: What is the sandbox-mode goal of the game? Some kind of “ultimate” research to end your town progression?
So we’re actually still expanding what endgame means. For example as I mentioned earlier we’re adding another tier of housing; that’ll be a pretty steep goal to aim for - a town with tier 5 housing in it. A few things beyond that, we’re still discussing what kind of buildings we want to add, but I would say the goal would be getting your town to the highest tier, your housing to the highest tier.
brucesx: Are there jails like Devil’s Crossing ?
We do not currently have jails. That would kind of be a fun mechanic to incorporate, having crime. We’ll see, we’ll see what we do down the line.
toomad2309: are there dogs?
MedeaFleecestealer: No, only wolves.
Paganblade: is there a government structure?
You are the government. Fully autocratic.
SwankyMarrow: Do you have a roadmap for DLC after it’s released?
We’ve got ideas of what we want to do post release. It’s not something we’re ready to talk about yet. We’ll definitely get into that down the line.
Medierra: We can barely plan beyond next week, let alone figure out a roadmap for future releases
emkyooess :How fast does food spoil?
Well, that actually depends on what food we’re talking about. Nuts take a long time to spoil, raw meat will spoil much faster. Another thing you can do over here is go into Food Production and get a Smokehouse up and that will smoke the meat to make it last much longer. Another thing we can do to preserve food longer is get a root cellar up.
WnxManiacMan: Can you make decide what villagers eat, and save the nuts for example?
Villagers will prioritise the food that’s going to spoil sooner, but they also try to diversify what they’re eating so one of the requirements for upgrading your housing is having sufficient food categories so villagers will want more variety in their diet to progress to a higher tier.
SimplyPhy: Will it be realistically possible to defend yourself from an army on hard difficulty, or is paying them off the only viable option?
Medierra: I never pay hostile army scum
allatrona: can you build city walls? or towers for defence?
MedeaFleecestealer: Yes
Whirblewind: If you can remember roughly how many citizens could the average player expect to have by an “end game” village?
I think that’s entirely up to you what you consider to be “done”. I’ve gotten a town up to over a thousand villagers and then I decided to move on to a new town. I could have kept going for example. You might decide getting to tier 4 housing is where you want to stop, but it might be sooner than that condition. It depends on what you’re going for, how big a town you want to have.
Nero1024x: How big is the area to build town? Endless?
That depends on how big a map you take.
RektbyProtoss: pretty much
Medierra: Not endless but on large maps, it is quite large - looks like 6,553,600 meters squared
allatrona: is the city center and houses the only buildings that can upgrade?
Not at all, in fact most of the buildings I clearly have up on the screen can be upgraded. A root cellar can be upgraded to tier 2 which provides extra storage capacity and a reduced rate of food spoilage. Likewise a hunter cabin can be upgraded to additional item recipes because they can be upgraded to hunting small game for hides and increase their ability if raiders attack it.
BioVenomGaming: If a T2 house drops its values, does it go back to T1? Or just make people unhappy?
Medierra: people will eventually abandon it and it will go into disrepair and eventually collapse if you don’t correct the issue
Nero1024x: So, I can build village with 10 million people? Engine can handle that?
I’m going to say the engine cannot handle 10 million people. I think that might actually have a villager on every square inch of the map at that point.
BioVenomGaming: No way to prevent death from rabies in early game?
Medierra: hide coats and other army, plus weapons reduce chance of rabies. Hunters are also much less likely to get rabies, so it helps if you have enough hunters to repel wolves
SimplyPhy: Is there any system of class/caste; e.g. are villagers that live in t4 homes wealthier than villagers that live in t1 housing?
Sort of. Villagers living in tier 4 housing do have higher expectations. Their desirability expectations remain high, they want more food types, they want more amenities around while tier 1 shelters like we have right here have pretty low expectations. In fact you could place these shelters by the sawpit and they’d live there just fine; they won’t be happy about it, but it’s going to make the homes be abandoned for example.
princetrollestia: What time period does this game occur in?
It’s left ambigous, you can imagine whatever time period you like. It’s sort of medieval/colonial times themed.
ACanOfWin: how long is a game meant to last? decades? centuries? are you meant to go through eras and technological advancements, or is it along the lines of perma-frontier times and make a sprawling frontier town?
It’s a fixed era for technology, you do not advance your technology through eras. I’ve had games run for 80-90 years, approaching a century. You can play for as long as you want.
jalex3: does demolishing buildings return materials?
Yes, if you want to demolish a building it will reclaim half the resources spent.
sebe221: Do you plan to implement challenge leagues. e.g. every 3 month a reset with new achievements and some rewards (new skin for you town hall) to gain. And yes; i´m an ARPG player, but interested in any crate game
It’s not something we’ve really talked about. I guess if the community did we could consider it down the line? Never really thought about having seasons in a town builder though.
allatrona: are there any big world wonder building types?
MedeaFleecestealer :No
KeepStay: Do settlers have individual stats?
They don’t have stats in terms of skills, they do have their own need and health values. Erkland hasn’t had enough to eat recently, but he’s warm and he’s mostly happy for now. But if that food goes lower then he’ll eventually lose happiness there and suffering with his health as well.
emkyooess: Planning features? “I’ll eventually want my brewer here, but don’t build it yet. Reserve the space.”
You can place construction sites and then pause them so they’re not actually getting built. That’s one form of planning you can do.
Nero1024x: How about vehicles? Are there any in this game
MedeaFleecestealer: Wagons, that’s it.
Paganblade: Is there transportation or does everyone walk everywhere?
Medierra: Later you can build transport wagons to help haul heavier items around, greatly increasing the efficiency of mines and work camps
elmaxuy: Can we use animals or cart for transporting resource from one point to other?
You can, there is actually a wagon shop in the mid-tier game that will actually focus exclusively on transporting the resources from far off work camps and mines as in all those really heavy resources that a villager can’t carry effectively.
maxasylum: global map and neighbors?
MedeaFleecestealer: Nope
allatrona: what does “education” do for villagers?
A couple of things. First off education does make villagers more efficient at the jobs they do. It’s also necessary for some buildings to be run. In order to have a healer’s hut for example there needs to be villager with basic education working in there.
Giblix: trade? will there be a diplomatic system in place?
There is an extensive trading system in the game. Traders will visit your town at the Trading Post. You’ll be able to barter with them for the goods that they bring and are looking for. One of the things you can potentially do for example is buy them cheap from one merchant and then wait for another one to come along with a much more premium price and make a profit on that.
In terms of diplomacy, that’s not really a system we’ve really focused on yet. We might elaborate on that in the future, but that’s for release, not earlier.
You cannot barter with the raiders and make them friends, sorry.
atropabellad16: how often does the trading post update? do i need to be looking at the trading post every 5 mins?
It’s random and it does have a pop up that lets you know a new merchant has arrived. Merchants do arrive throughout the year. Every year you’ll have at least one merchant arrive, but you could have more and if you upgrade the trading post to tier 2, you not only have more merchant types visiting, but more will come every year.
allatrona: how does the trade system work? do you buy goods with gold or do you trade resources?
You buy goods with gold, but you sell goods for gold so it’s sort of a 2 step process.
allatrona: is there any automatic trade? “Buy stone if you have less than 500” ?
We don’t have automatic trading in at this time to maintain a certain level of resources, but that might be a good feature to add though, we’ll see.
SwankyMarrow: Are you able to lock down your town due to COVID? (disease)
Well, kind of. You can actually quarantine sick villagers inside the healer’s house which can upgrade for a large capacity. So if villagers are sick with a contagious disease they will seek out a place at a hospital to limit the spread of the disease. If you don’t have enough space in your hospitals for all your sick villagers then the disease will spread more rapidly.
Medierra: pro move is to garrison them inside the TC and keep them there until they die of starvation
Well, that is the Medierra strategy folks. I didn’t give you that idea.
BioVenomGaming: Aging - When do old people die (random or hard capped) Babies? Children?
MedeaFleecestealer: When they die
allatrona: are villagers born as babys or as adults?
RektbyProtoss: babys
droblit: what are your next projects besides this one?
We’re still keeping a tight lid on some of the projects, but we do have an RTS in the works and we have a survival horror game in the works. We will reveal more on those when the time comes.
allatrona: do different map types have different type of seasons?
They do not. We would like to get a little bit more variation though, for example an arid map to have shorter winters and hotter summers. That’s not a feature we currently have, but would be a nice feature to get.
SwankyMarrow: Are there in-game holidays?
There are not. We’re leaving things like ambiguous. However, whatever culture you want your people to have … We’re not saying there’s Christmas in the game.
toomad2309: can you have unscheduled non-secular festivals?
MedeaFleecestealer: No
allatrona: are there gonna be “skins” for buildings, as in could I have a town with eastern buildings?
That is actually something we talked about and I feel that maybe we should do that; have reskin options for your towns so you can customise it however you want. I’m not sure when/if that’s going to happen, but yeah that’s something we talked about.
FungusMouse: How feature complete will EA launch be? Or rather how long is EA anticipated to be?
EA is anticipated to be I think it was 8 to 12 months we talked about. In terms of features the game is very complete. You can get through all the tiers we have right now from tier 1 to tier 4, all those buildings, all those reproduction modes, gather and produce over 70 resources so in terms of early access you’re getting a very complete experience. We want to keep growing that experience for you, but if you want early access I think in August you will have a game that feels very complete.
orbo_twitch: Which lessons you learned with Grim Dawn influence your work on Farthest Frontier? Which aspects are different?
I don’t think we’ve learned anything. (j/k) Obviously the more games we make the more experience we’re going to have doing them. We’ve improved on the processes we’ve previously done to do them more efficiently. I don’t think I can pinpoint any particular lesson that we’ve taken from Grim Dawn development. We’ve been a team for so long that we kinda know what everybody’s great at doing so we can get the right people on the right tasks and do those efficiently. That’s also a benefit of having a small team like ours; while yes, everybody gets to wear many hats we’re all very good at wearing those hats.
SimplyPhy: Will players be able to upload their town, and have others be able to open them?
There’s no reason why not. There’s going to be a save file on your computer so if you want to zip it up and upload it to google drive for example to share with others that’s absolutely possible. As I mentioned before you can also write down the seed for your town and use that seed to generate a new town and you or someone else can play the exact same town in the exact same setting.
allatrona: do you have an overview of buildings view?
MedeaFleecestealer: You can see all the starting buildings, but the upgrades only appear when they upgrade.
Horiahoria740: does raining always last a couple seconds or the duration is random?
Medierra: random
Random, just like it is in real life.
WnxManiacMan: Do you ruin farmland over time?
Well, that’s up to you how you maintain your farm. As I mentioned at the beginning of the stream farming is one of the major features in Farthest Frontier. You will decide what kind of crop rotation you want to have, what kind of crops you’re going to plant, how much time is going to be spent on maintaining the field, the composition of the ground the crop is planted on. All that is going to affect how fertile it is, how many weeds there are and that will impact how your yields are. Will a farmland become ruined over time? If you plant nothing but carrots all round year after year, yes, eventually it will be.
toomad2309: can you macro manage the rotation?
You can decide exactly what crops are planted and it’s a 3 year crop rotation. What happens in year 1, then year 2, 3 and then it’ll roll back around.
You can see that we’ve got our crop rotation here to select the crops we want. I could for example get some peas, beans going in there and those will actually provide fertility to the ground as you would in real life. You want some maintenance in there because you want to get that weed level down. Clover is another good option which won’t produce food for your village, but it does help fertility and weed suppression. So there’s a lot of depth in here on how you want to lay out your crop rotation and you will decide what you want to do in each field you place and this compost yard over here - which is why I built it here - gets finished collecting and producing the compost it’s actually going to turn it into compost you can put on the field and improve their fertility further.
orbo_twitch: Is there an end goal/winning condition in a match of farthest frontier?
There is not an explicit victory condition. You decide when your town is finished and you’re happy with the result.
jalex3: can you make coal/gold mines?
Absolutely. In my area here looks like I have some iron, but I bet if I explored further out I’d find some coal and gold deposits as well.
toomad2309: Do/Will towns have scores?
MedeaFleecestealer: No
allatrona: how do you unlock more buildings?
Some buildings have pre-requisites of having other buildings in your town. In the context of the buildings placed already I wasn’t able to place a compost yard until I had a saw pit and I think a storehouse as well. So different buildings have different requirements, but a bunch like tier 2 and tier 3 are locked completely. And for those to unlock them you have to upgrade the town centre. And it looks like I’m missing some stone to do that. Still missing 25, I bet there’s some stone around here somewhere. That’s one of the limitations on this map, there might not actually be that much stone. So that might be something I struggle with down the line and might need to trade for.
allatrona: can give an order to the buildings you are building?
RektbyProtoss: you can check a tickbox to prioritise building
Medierra: you can’t order them but you can prioritize them and / or disable construction
FungusMouse: Is it possible to have maps generated that are missing resources therefore forcing trade/workarounds?
Medierra: Not every map has every resource - sometimes you need to trade for raw materials and generate money by focusing on goods your town is naturally suited to produce. There are a few different map types and some of more challenging ones are often missing certain resources. like Arid Highlands doesn’t usually have clay or many forage items and soil is poor.
Calvalon: Is there a difference in height? So do you have a longer range shooting arrows from a hill?
So while range does not increase you do actually get a bonus to damage from uphill towers. I put a tower down here you can see the bonus numbers are much smaller. If you wanted to be strategic you could put all your storage up on the hill and surround them with towers up on the hill and they’ll do a lot more damage to anyone trying to get up the cliff.
The dev stream will be up on Crate’s Twitch channel for a couple of weeks I think and it’s also available on their youtube channel.
