We are now approaching the 6 month mark of Early Access, so we think it’s prudent to give you guys an update on where we are and where things are headed!
As always, we wish to thank you all for being a part of development with us. Your feedback and bug reports are invaluable and are helping shape the direction of the game. It is not an exaggeration that the feedback you share with us has a direct impact on our development priorities.
Since our last State of Early Access update, the game has seen 2 major updates. With v0.8.0, you gained access to new decoration and entertainment options, an entirely new system for setting production limits on your resources, major updates to AI behavior, and too many quality of life changes to list here. With v0.8.1, we got more technical as we focused almost entirely on improving performance across the board. We’re pleased to see many reports of significantly improved framerates, especially for larger towns!
Needless to say, there is still a lot we want to add to the game, and there is still a lot we can do to improve performance. So let’s take a look at what’s in store for Farthest Frontier in the next few updates, starting with v0.8.2!
Note: everything you read here is a preview and is subject to change before release. This is not an all-encompassing list of changes and features we are planning for the game before v1.0.
Table of Contents
V0.8.1 brought many improvements to framerates, but that was only our first major push to optimize the game. We are actively working on further optimization, particularly to various AI routines. As you can imagine, having hundreds of little villagers running around deciding what to do and how to get there can get rather taxing on the CPU!
One thing already on the list for v0.8.2 is road placement. We have optimized this system so there will be no more hitching, especially on larger towns.
You can expect framerates to improve all the way up to v1.0 and we’ll be sure to highlight where the improvements have been made in our patch notes.
As with every update, v0.8.2 will feature a number of bug fixes and improvements to the game. This list is expected to grow as we approach its release:
- Production can now be toggled in all production buildings (ex. mines)
- Soldiers now display shields in their equipment when selecting the Barracks.
- Building occupation slots now indicate that they are unavailable if production is toggled off.
- Building occupation slots can now be edited while production is toggled off or halted.
- Fixed an issue where sound calls would accumulate when the game is alt-tabbed out, then play all at once when maximizing the game window.
- Fixed an issue where toggling off death notifications in the game settings would not actually disable them.
- Fixed an issue where typing in a negative number in the Trade UI when a merchant is both buying and selling would treat the request as a buy order.
- Fixed an issue where trying to recruit educated workers, ex in the School or Healer’s House, and no free villagers are available would not always display the window to select from existing educated villagers.
- Fixed an issue where equipment icons would remain stuck in the building UI after selecting a tower or barracks and then another building, or when removing soldiers.
As promised back in our first State of Early Access, we have an answer for all your stone needs. Coming in the near future (probably in v0.8.3), we have the Quarry.
The quarry will be a new tier 4 resource building that can be placed on a new type of deposit. Once built, the quarry can be mined indefinitely, providing your town with a steady supply of stone. We expect every map to generate with at least one of these deposits, with more mountainous maps possibly generating multiple.
As with the quarry, the promised forestry system is coming in the near future as well. In an upcoming update, you will be able to upgrade your Work Camps to tier 2. Tier 2 work camps will support additional workers and have a new production ratio setting for “Tree Planting”. Villagers dedicated to planting trees will do exactly that, reforest your map within the work area.
Replanting trees will not be universally effective across all terrain. When you set the work area, you will be able to see the quality of the land for tree growth, similarly to placing grazing areas or arborists. You can expect arid wastelands to not be the best environment for new trees, while lush biomes will net you the best results.
Tier 2 Work Camps should do away with any need for manually planting decoration trees to keep your endgame towns stocked with logs.
Finally, the vaunted deep mines will also be making an entrance in the near future. As with quarries, Deep Mines will be a tier 4 resource building placed over a new category of deposit; and just like quarries, you can expect to find at least one such deposit on every new map.
Deep Mines will support all of the minable resources currently in the game: clay, sand, coal, gold, and iron. Deep Mines will be bottomless, so your endgame towns can thrive unto eternity.
Burying the dead is a sacred rite and an important step in coping with loss. We always intended grave placement to be an important decision, but we understand the desire to rearrange towns as they grow. As such, we will be introducing a new mechanic in v0.8.2 to allow you to relocate graveyards.
As we still want this to make this a meaningful commitment, relocating a graveyard will not be as straightforward as moving normal buildings. There will be a gold cost which scales with the size of the graveyard and the number of graves within it. We feel that this is a good compromise between being unable to move a graveyard at all and doing so with no regard for the dead!
We also hear your need for a more efficient method to keep your deceased, as even the best maintained towns that exist for hundreds of years will eventually fill the map with gravestones. We are considering endgame options for that in the future.
Similarly to graveyards, we hear your requests to be able to move the Town Center. We wanted the Town Center’s location to be an important step in setting up your town, but we understand that plans change. Where you started your town should not be the final call on making your idyllic city.
Some players have found a way to circumvent the game by using the clear tool on the Town Center and/or its rubble to effectively remove the Town Center and place it somewhere else. While this was a clever use (or abuse?) of game mechanics, it was not intended. This method of removing the Town Center was buggy and even enabled the placement of multiple Town Centers (center, my ass). You couldn’t see the result of this in the release build, but in the dev build with full logging, the game was exploding with errors. We could not exactly let this workaround exist, so it was patched out in v0.8.1.
But do not fret. In v0.8.2, we will be adding a proper method of relocating your Town Center. As with graveyards, there will be a gold cost associated with the move that will scale with the tier of the building.
Anyone that has placed Arborists in their town knows the pain of setting up and maintaining them. Just one Arborist requires about 40 fruit trees, which have to be planted individually. To top it off, those trees eventually expire, which requires you to return to the arborist and manually place new ones. To put it bluntly, this is not exactly the definition of fun engaging gameplay.
With v0.8.2, we are making several improvements. First up, you will have the option of placing fruit trees in 1x1, 2x2 and 3x3 grids. This will greatly expedite setting up your orchards. In addition, we’re going to get those lazy arborists actually helping plant the trees.
And finally, and perhaps most importantly, you will have a new option to automate replanting of fruit trees, on by default. With this setting, arborists will automatically replant after culling a dead fruit tree. No more need to constantly check back on your arborists to make sure they are working because half the trees expired.
Several updates ago, we made Compost Yards easier to manage by removing the cap on their capacity, thus allowing nightsoil collectors to work even after all 3 compost bins were filled up. As towns grow larger though, it is often desirable to have your Compost Yards located in several locations around the map. This naturally makes it more of a chore to check all of them and assign the compost to your fields.
With v0.8.2, we are going to be introducing new automation options for the Compost Yards. By default, compost will be deposited to the field with the lowest fertility that does not already have compost applied to it. You will also have the option to set this behavior to the field with highest fertility, or to toggle off automation off entirely if you wish to manually control where your compost is distributed.
With our focus shifting from bug fixes to new features, the pace of updates has predictably slowed down. It takes more time to develop new features than it is to address issues with existing ones. The game has come a long way from the slew of rapid-fire hotfixes we had to do with v0.7.5.
We expect v0.8.2 to go into playtesting sometime by the end of February or early March and its public release by mid-March. We are fully committed to creating a quality game for you, so we will not rush anything out just to meet arbitrary dates, but we do want to get features to you as soon as they are ready!
We expect Early Access to continue through most, if not all of 2023, and possibly longer given our propensity to give you MOAR (if you have any doubts, just see our development history for Grim Dawn!). So stay tuned for more new buildings, new resource production lines and more as we continue to work with you on making Farthest Frontier the best version of itself!
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