Timber and Stone v0.5b

Change Log For Version 0.5b


General Changes:
Rate of mining has been increased slightly.
Notification window sizing is now being saved & loaded.
The “Return to Campfire” mechanic has been removed.
New lighting structure – Campfire.
The Pause Menu Key now also closes the pause menu, and resumes the game.
Unit Frame images have finally been added to the selected unit interface, a health bar is also shown.
Several new GUI tiles for hand-tools have been added.
There is now a line-of-sight check for spotting enemies. This should make spider holes much more dangerous.
The Chop Designation now works across multiple Z-levels, reducing the need to spam up and down while selecting trees.
You can now track resources in the main GUI. Press the “Track” button in the Resources menu to keep an eye on your numbers. By right clicking in the tracking box, you can remove these.
Music should be getting played more often.
Some new sound stings have been added, these are very short and should play more often than music to fill the gaps in-between.
The 2D map has been made the default when starting a new settlement.
Builders and miners can now fall off ladders and take damage. This is very rare however, and is based on the height of the ladder and the unit’s level.
Enemy corpses are no longer automatically removed from the game. They must be right clicked on, and set to remove corpse, or gather it’s resources. If selected to gather resources, a forager should come over and attempt to salvage any of the enemy unit’s resources.
You can now choose the starting location for your initial settlers and the starting campfire.
Worker unit types are now much more likely to fight back or flee from enemy attackers, especially while they are working.

New Resources & Gatherables:
Spider Silk, for creating an additional recipe for rope. Obtained by foraging from slain spiders.
Animal Hide, no current uses. Obtained by foraging from slain wolves. Animal fat & hair can also be gathered from wolves.
Stone arrows can now be gathered from goblin archers.

New Designation – Roads:
Roads are useful when your settlement has become complex to the point where unit pathing has become a problem.
Units tend to want to walk along road designations more than out in the open.
When a road designation is placed onto grass, it will slowly turn to a dirt path when units walk upon it.
Roads will soon become much more important, and necessary for migrants, traders and other visitors, and keeping your roads guarded is going to be crucial.
Roads are meant to be quite picky about their placement, and unable to be resized in depth. Keeping them at a 1-3 block width is also recommended to help pathfinding.
The designation is placed much like Farming designations, in patches. And they can be removed the same as farming zones as well, via a right click menu.

Updates to the Crafting Menu:
Removed are the large resource type buttons, which have been replaced by tabs. More options are now available to add several iterations of a single resource to the queue at once. And duplicate sequential resources in the queue are now being grouped together to reduce clutter (stacking). The queue controls now default to dealing with the stack, ie. pressing “Move To Top” will move the entire stack to the top of the queue, holding “Left Shift” while using the controls will allow you to move a single item from the stack. A few resources now have short descriptions, helpful to the new player.

New Options have been added:
Pause on enemy sighted.
Pause on migration.
Pause on unit death.
Music & SoundFX volume sliders.
Enable V-Sync.
Set Draw Distance. (mostly only noticeable while zoomed out, and setting it to max might kill your framerate)

New Enemy Behaviors:
Wolves now travel in packs and are more likely to roam around and sleep than attack head on.
Spiders tend to burrow underground and wait for prey to travel near their holes.
Goblins will now hunt, chop trees, create a goblin campfire, and rest.
Skeletons now behave more like zombies, slow moving with horrible vision.
Necromancer behavior has been turned off, and their spawning temporarily removed, their behavior is still WIP and will also impact skeleton AI. Eventually making both enemy behaviors more robust.

Bug Fixes:
Water should now ‘path’ more reliably. Fixed a bug where water would sometimes randomly stop while diverting.
Fixed an error where destroying blocks above water would cause the water level to rise.
Migrants will no longer migrate from the ocean.
Units will no longer produce a notification when spotting dead enemies.
The sudden drop in framerate (or stuttering) while fishing has been fixed.
Fishermen should now be able to fish from a higher distance above the water.
You can no longer select mining designations that are underwater.
Fixed a bug where building one block above water wasn’t possible.
If water flows into a block that a unit is occupying, the unit will now swim. Previously, this would break the water and leave a hole.



The new enemy behaviors create a drastic change in how the game is played. No longer will a spider or skeleton spawn at the edge of the map and make a direct path to your units. They now roam the map with their own intentions. This allows the player more exploration, time to focus on building their settlement without the immediate need to create moats, walls and defenses. I would like to mention that this roaming behavior is only the start of the enhanced enemy AI, actual attacks will be coming, invasions and siege is still a major goal I have for Timber and Stone. The game is going to become difficult again.