ACE Tuesday #07 "Interlude"

Good evening, everyone!

Welcome to the newest ACE Wednesday. I mean-- Tuesday. Honestly, let’s just agree with ACE Weekly Video, alright? :jubilant:

(But just for the record, it’s still Tuesday on my time)

This week’s video will be shorter and slightly more simple - following the same style of last week’s video, today we’ll be showcasing some of the changes and new things on the other biomes!

I’d also like to apologize for the sound quality on this one. I’ve had a trouble with my headset and ended up having to use an onboard microphone, which is bad… So I’ll probably have to go after a new headset this week! :merry:

That said, let’s go on with it! Enjoy! :heart:

Here’s a transcription from the video:

  • Hello everyone! Welcome to another ACE Tuesday!
    For this week’s video we’ll be somewhat continuing what was started on last week’s video. After the “Highlander” episode, I received a lot of messages asking what were the new additions and diversity variants of the other, default Stonehearth biomes - so since things have been a little hectic lately, I decided to make a slightly shorter and simpler video this week to showcase some - but not all - of the new cool things added or changed on the Desert and Arctic biomes.

  • The Temperate forest biome is probably the one with the less changes. That is because our starting point is that it and the Ascendancy faction represents the default Stonehearth experience so all the creatures, items and visual variants - other than some really specific and obvious things like the Rayya’s Children kiln, which is clearly made on Rayya’s Children style and not Ascendancy style - are Temperate forest and Ascendancy by default. So our content variety and visual diversity effort is focused on everything but the Ascendancy and the Temperate forest biome, which will remain more or less as what the game already is while the others will see significant visual changes to reflect their culture and location.

  • This overhaul will go through everything, not only the biomes themselves but the faction profession outfits, equipment, workstations… Once we are done, the idea is that even though the content between factions is roughly the same, the visual experience will be completely different. This will not only add a lot of value to each playthrough but also make multiplayer games very interesting and cool looking.

  • The current additions to the Temperate Forest biome as of now are basically the Boletes, its specific kind of fungi, and the brown bear. By the way, the bear is going through a lot of redesigning, but I’d like to show this nonetheless. Bears will spawn on bear dens - or as attackers from the Forest Faction.

  • Now let’s go to the Desert! Home of the Rayya’s Children, the desert presents the player with its own unique fungi as well, the truffles. Although not specifically aiming to be realistic, we’re trying to have at least some plausability background for additions, so… it was difficult to find a desert fungus but they do exist, sand truffles are actually a thing!

  • As you can see, the desert feels a bit more alive with some of our tweaks. For instance, since animals have variants for all biomes, we’ve unlocked certain animals that were forbidden to spawn on certain biomes. Every biome is now able to spawn all animals (except some unique critters). Here in the desert we can see that deer and caribou have been replaced by gazelles, squirrels have been replaced by their not-so-distant furless cousins and even if slightly, animals were all changed to reflect their environment more nicely. Colorful desert birds, brown sand raccoons, scorpions and scarabs and we even found a desert bear - it’s called the Gobi bear from the Gobi Desert, and they have this pretty creamy fur, but we’ll probably go with a more generic name - just like we changed the Scots Pine to Highland Pine.

  • Not only animals but many of the monsters are also seeing a visual overhaul. One of my personal favorites was the cactus ling, replacing the entling. It was probably created by Allie and can be seen on her “modelling guide” that Team Radiant kindly shared with us. Although I didn’t have the model itself, I did my best to reproduce it from that image alone and I must admit I’m positively surprised with the results. The Cactus entling is an adorable new addition to the desert! Other monsters like the stone golems are also changed to reflect the new stone types of each biome - in this case Sandstone - and the change might even go further into different creatures… but we’ll let you figure these out over time!

  • Likewise, the Arctic has seen the same kind of treatment. Its unique stone is the Slate and its unique fungi are the morels. We’ve shown some of the arctic animals before like the snow bunnies and winter foxes, but we also have proper caribous with those classic white fur necks, red deer instead of the regular does, different birds with the Duckduck being heavily inspired by penguin colors.

  • Oh! And I was almost forgetting - other than that, we’re also adding wild packs of poyos and sheep. Wild animals behave slightly different than their domesticated counterparts, laying far less eggs and not being harvestable for wool, but they do provide - in very small amounts - some of their usual herding resources if you are patient enough to wait the far longer timers for eggs or decide to just slaughter them - which you can. These will serve as an interesting new “random” chance of acquiring some early herding items if you are lucky enough or explore a lot! And they look cute, of course.

  • Although very simple, this diversity project has a really cool effect on the game overall, making it nicer and more worthy of playing on different biomes and with different factions, each playthrough has a lot of value added to it on top of all the cool things the game already offer! So although not really a challenging task, it’s definitely one of the things that will make ACE stand out once it is out!

  • By the way - although the latest ACE build is playable for whoever joins our channel and goes into our github and downloads it - since ACE itself is mostly an open project - we are getting closer to a point where we can start thinking of a broader “testing phase” available through Steam Workshop. I won’t promise anything since estimating dates is a cursed prospect by itself, but I’d guess that we’ll at least have news on that by the start of October. So stay tuned!

  • That’s all for today - sorry for the slightly shorter video but we’ve been doing a lot of “under the hood” work and as such there might not be much actual content to show on video yet. Thank you very much for watching and remember to drop a comment or any questions you might have, and follow us on our channels and our forum thread! Good bye!

13 Likes

Great.
Lovely artwork and progress.

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Hey man I had to make a bear for my Elderscrolls mod. It’s heavily based off the wolf in Stonehearth. If you are interested hit me up! I have yet to announce it on my page however for you ill drop you a picture if you’re interested! My bear is still work in progress recently made it this week and only have only put hour of work on it. If so ill give you permission to use it for the community mod, I would love to at least help out with one thing in the community mod. I also have snow bear version also due it being in Skyrim!

Bear Pictures



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Cactuslings! :heart_eyes:

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That bear actually looks quite lovely!
Good work :merry:

I think it could indeed be useful, even if we modify it a little. Would that be alright? :smiley:

If so, please feel free to PM me with a link to download the models - alternatively you can reach me on Discord through the ACE Discord!

Indeed! @Allie just made them too lovely to ignore!

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It’s still a work in progress so I don’t wanna send it over right yet as things need be renamed and few edits. However if you see anything you want edited hit me up I’m trying make it as Stonehearth as possible.

Thst bear is the best thing since sliced bread, damn son well done :smiley:

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Thanks man I have around +1000 hours in Qubicle. Honestly became a big passion hobby of mine once I played Stoneheath back in the day. It starts to become second nature with speed sculpting. You would be surprised with some of the things I have made. Glad someone enjoys my work though! Thanks. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

3 Likes