And come March, I'm hopeful we'll see them both taking place.
The most fundamental additions in the upcoming version will concern new trees, raw material wood types and their varied impact on crafting. Let's have a sneak peak at these...
Aspen trees
Aspen trees will now appear in the game world. These large deciduous tree grow up to 15-30 meters in height. They grows in groves, fresh coniferous forests, rich spruce mires as well as on clearings and hills.
This addition precedes a slightly more distant goal of eventually adding character crafted punts into the game. For the time being, aspens will bring nice variety into the world, and an additional type of timber to utilize. Grown aspens provide big trunks when felled and their bark can be also peeled for tanning purposes.
Aspens growing in the grove.Wood type for slender trunks
Wood type is now added also for slender trunks and as a natural consequence some crafts will require slender trunks of specific species. For example: axe handles are best made of birch or rowan trees for the required durability, blunt arrows were almost exclusively made out of birch, and spear hafts of spruce.
And so on.
There's also different slender trunk tile graphics for different tree species so that the different type of slender trunks are easily distinguishable the same way as the big trunks currently are. Some tree tile redrawing/stylizing has been also made, eg. for rowan trees, so that they better express the essence of the tree species both in their standing and felled appearance.
Here you can see small piles of slender alder, rowan and birch trunks placed to the south of the relevant standing young trees.Spin-off and crafting dialog improvements
Several spin-off features, improvements and adjustments have emerged from these wood type related additions, and you'll be seeing their full effect on the gameplay in the next version. These last two screenshots along with their descriptions show a little bit of the new wood type additions in effect.
Sara is crafting wood slats, with an intention to make arrow shafts from them - and there are several additions to be seen in the screenshot.Firstly, we'll see that birch is now also a preferred wood type, in addition to pine. As a result the best wood slats, and the arrow shafts thereof, are now made of pine and birch.
But here Sara goes making her wood slats from spruce, which is also doable, although the highest quality results can't be expected.
Sara has been making some wood slats from slender spruce and birch trunks and is now crafting arrow shafts.Here you can see that Sara's inventory shows wood slats described by their wood type rather than the generic name. This is the new wood types in effect.
Certain applicable timber type items now derive the original wood type from the materials used.
Notice also that the material requirements dialog now shows the actual item name, "Arrow shaft", rather than previously seen generic "Craft an item".
Stay tuned. The spring is coming.
So, if everything goes smoothly we'll be releasing a new version in March. There are bunch more features still to be added, and bunch of not mentioned here already added. Stay tuned. The spring is coming.
