Hello everyone. Some of you may have noticed that I didn’t put out a blog post last week, but we’re back this week with lots of exciting updates.

Plants

I’ve been adding the beautiful art created by our pixel artist into the actual game proper. This is quite a long data-entry heavy process, but it’s made a little more bearable by the beautiful results. I’m about halfway through the total biomes by now. Here are just a few of them:

Misty Tundra

Inlenook

Woneyed

The Wastes

Painforest

The Pits

Animals

Work is continuing on getting interesting animals into the world. I have some nice behaviours coded but will hold off on showing you any gifs until the animal tiles are done.

Preditors

There are various bear- and wolf-like creatures now in the world. Some of these will aggressively attack and chase any humans or livestock that they encounter, and others will more cautiously stalk their prey. The stalkers will not attack a large group of humans, preferring to wait until someone is isolated and vulnerable.

Prey

There are animals for you to hunt. Most of these flee when you get within a certain distance from them so to catch them will require cunning or teamwork. Some of them, like deer, will just run away from you, and others, like racoons and rabbits, will flee up the nearest tree, or down the nearest rabbit hole, where they will be out of your reach.

Working Animals

There are animals for you to work. Horses, reindeer, camels, cows, sheep, and goats. These will only be available to you if you spawn in certain biomes (for example, the reindeer are only for taiga based survivors). Some of them can pull wagons and some of them can be ridden with saddles. These animals will make it possible to live nomadically, and many of them will seriously change how many resources you are able to carry long distances, but you will only get them if you embark to one of the most difficult areas of the world.

What’s Next?

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be coding the mines. I’m hoping in this time I’ll be able to have interesting terrains and dangerous creatures. The deeper in the mine you travel the more dangerous the monsters but also the more rich the rewards will be. Then at the end of July hopefully all of the biome and animal art will be finished by our artist, and then I will go back to that and finish the second half of the biomes.