Farthest Frontier’s Early Access has been a tremendous success so far. Nearly one million of you have now ventured into the Frontier and braved its challenges. Your feedback has helped shape the game and your bug reports have been invaluable in tracking down some tough to reproduce issues. But now, with v0.8.3 in your hands and those bottomless resources at your disposal, we think it is a good time to talk about Farthest Frontier’s journey out of Early Access.
We have been busily gathering the community’s input and requests, seeing how they meshed with our own vision for the game as we plotted our course towards v1.0. Today, we are ready to share many of the myriad of major additions we are planning for Farthest Frontier up to its full release. These new systems and mechanics will not only flesh out the endgame but make each playthrough feel more distinct, offering new approaches and playstyles as you refine your ideal strategy for your settlements.
Coming up next, we are bumping the version number right up to v0.9.0. This is not merely a symbolic increment as the next update is going to carry quite a bit of heft. So let us dive in!
Note: everything you read here is a preview and is subject to change before release. This is not an all-encompassing list of every feature in the works. Nothing is set in stone, until it is!
Table of Contents
- Spirituality
- Combat Updates
- Paper Industry
- Guild Halls
- Crypts
- New Animals
- Achievements
- Mod Support
- Optimization and Bug Fixes
- Quality of Life
- When is the Next Update?
- When is 1.0?
- Town Showcase
Religion has been a contentious topic in the community, inspiring some rather heated comments on both sides of the argument. Back in our first State of Early Access post, we vowed to make the addition of spiritual buildings another fun and engaging mechanic rather than something thrown in just to check a box on people’s lists. With v0.9.0, we are delivering on that promise.
With Farthest Frontier’s religion system, you will fulfill your people’s spiritual needs by designing your own faith through the use of relics. Relics are ancient objects that inspire reverence. Some were items once owned by historic individuals. Others are remnants from old legends, rumored to still carry a divine spark. Regardless of their origins, each relic features its own set of perks to bolster your town. By collecting and combining these relics in your settlement’s temple, you will generate a religion for your people (if you dislike the name generated by your relic choices, you can always set a custom name).
Relics come in many forms, bolstering everything from your people’s health, to your harvests, and even the prowess of your soldiers. One relic is rumored to increase the aggression of the wildlife and raiders. That one is probably not for the faint of heart though, but it sure sounds Achievable. 
Your main source of relics will be through excavating ancient ruins. Your villagers will have to brave the wilderness in order to discover what remains inside. Be aware though: all this activity can also attract raiders! ruins will be generated when you start a new map, but existing towns can still interact with the relic mechanic by purchasing relics from traveling merchants, or as occasional loot from raiders.
If you like the aesthetic of the ruins, do not fret. Excavating them leaves behind a harvestable version you can preserve for your people, or tear down for stone.
Unless you are into the pacifist playstyle, combat plays an important role in surviving in the frontier. We want to build upon the existing foundation and bring you MOAR.
You can expect new raider types, including catapults that will quickly put an end to passive defenses and those beefy triple wall stacks. But with new threats come new ways to defend yourself. Construct new towers to bring the pain back to the invaders. Recruit new soldiers, including the ability to specialize into ranged-only archers. Take out those new catapults with your new horsemen.
Er, wait…wrong one…
All of this will come with a new controls for deploying your troops and a new way to manage your army through the Town Center, including the ability to recruit soldiers before you build a barracks in order to have them patrol your city. This presents an alternative way to defend your town early on without resorting to static towers. No more having your soldiers turn back into civilians as soon as their barracks is destroyed!
In addition, exploring the wilderness will become ever more dangerous as you will discover that raiders have settled down permanently in raider camps. Clear these out to claim some loot of your own. It is only fair!
With v0.9.0, you will have the option of developing a new industry in your town. Turn your flax into paper at the paper mill, then have the book binders turn those into books, a new luxury item for your tier 4 homes. Build a Library in your settlement as a new source of entertainment, as long as you keep it stocked with reading material.
All that pristine paper demands some quality bureaucracy. With v0.9.0, you will be able to construct a Guild Hall. The guild hall will be an endgame building that consumes paper to boost one of your industries. Which industry is afected will be up to you but, with a limit of one guild hall, the choice will be consequential for the future of your settlement.
With v0.8.3, trade and natural resources can sustain your towns virtually indefinitely, but there is one aspect of the game that will eventually run out: space to bury the dead. If you have ever looked at your graveyards closely, you will see that they paint a picture of the progress your people have made, with the earlier grave markers being much less elaborate than ones you see after your settlement has developed. But they take up a lot space. Crypts will allow you to give your people the respect of a proper burial while taking up a much smaller footprint.
Moooo
Cows are great and all, but a thriving frontier deserves MOAR. In early access, we plan on adding chickens, horses, and goats to diversify your options.
Achievement hunters out there can relax. Farthest Frontier will be shipping with an array of achievements so you can flax, I mean flex on your profile! You can expect Steam Trading Cards to go online in the future as well.
We genuinely appreciate the time and effort players put into modifying our games and making them your own. Games are entertainment and if making some changes makes them more entertaining for you, all the better. Grim Dawn has some fantastic modifications and we hope Farthest Frontier will too.
As such, we plan on formally supporting mods in the near future. What form that will take is something we are still reviewing, but Steam Workshop support is definitely high on the list.
It probably goes without saying that bug fixes and optimization are our top priorities. Every update has included some degree of both and we have no plans of stopping on the way to v1.0. In fact, we have a programmer on the team who is dedicated solely to improving the game’s performance when he’s not addressing the occasional bug report. You can expect every update to include additional improvements.
As with optimization, we are always on the lookout for opportunities to improve the way you play the game. In the past, this has included things such as automation for the compost yards, improved planting options for arborists and of course an automated way to regrow trees with the tier 2 Work Camps.
Here is a list of some of the improvements we have planned:
- Storage Transfers/Limits: ways to not only transfer resources between storage but also set limits on how much of a resource you wish to store in a particular building at a minimum/maximum.
- Raider info: select raider units to learn more about them and their stats.
- Crop Summary: view all of your Crop Fields in one convenient list to better plan your crop rotations.
- Notifications and Immigration Quest History: if you miss/forgot what happened, you can view a record of recent events.
- MOAR
V0.9.0 is in playtest right now! To learn more about public playtests, you can read the FAQ (note: this requires registration on the forum).
In our continued efforts to bring you MOAR, early access will go beyond our original estimate of 1 year. We want to deliver a quality product that we are proud of, one you will not only enjoy playing but can be proud of supporting. At this time, we estimate Early Access to last 5-8 more months.
What we have previewed today is not an all-encompassing list of what we have in store, and v1.0 is by no means the end of development. In a way, v1.0 is only the beginning of the journey, a foundation. We plan to support Farthest Frontier with content updates and expansions. Where the game will go next will be based in part on what you want to see!
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