Stonehearth ACE 0.9.4.3 Released!
Hello, everyone!
Guess who’s still around, haha 
hahaha… haha… haha… ha… 
Anyway… Today we bring a couple of little additions and quality of life improvements, multiple balancing changes and improvements and - of course - a bunch of fixes!
As always, please feel free to leave your feedback, report issues and all that. Every report helps 
On with the notes!
Hotfix 0.9.4.3
Added
- Box Cancel Placement Task command. This new tool allows you to box-select and cancel placement tasks.
- New game mode: Gentle. This is not an easy mode - enemies will be as strong as they are in Normal. However, in this new game mode, challenges and the overall progression is slowed down, giving players more time to relax and build their town. It can be an interesting option for Multiplayer - less encounters should help with performance or cases where all players attract strong attacks at the same time.
- New material tags and respective input bin filters have been created. They are: Construction Materials (all stone, wood logs and clay bricks); Any Gears (Bronze and Iron gears); Any Water Weed (Green, Red and Brown algae); Any Thread (Yarn and Thread); Any Fruit (for fruits); Any Basket of Fungi (for different fungi); Any Basket of Nuts (for different nuts); Any Flour (for flours); Dough & Batter (for all baking bases) and Any Cooking Grease & Oil (for Butter, Cooking Oil…).
- Additionally, the “Prepared Food” filters have been entirely remade. We decided to change it from the specific food by food approach to broader food groups (Vegetarian, Carnivore, Fish, Dairy, Desserts, etc…) for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that as the amount of foods in the game grow, that menu becomes overly cluttered. The second reason is that, however, many mods do not bother about adding their different foods to that filter, ACE itself included, as they seem to be rarely used. And the third and last reason is that having food-specific filters definitely encourage the massive production of few food items, while broad groups will encourage more diversity without breaking your storage.
- Ball of Yarn, refined resource. Ball of Yarn can be made from wool. It’s a versatile resource and can be used as fiber or thread.
Changed
- Wool can no longer be used as fiber. The reasoning behind this change is that wool is now a very important resource for weather clothing or beds, and multiple people reported that it was constantly being used by other crafters for less important crafts that required fiber. You can still use Wool (and sheep) as a source of fiber by transforming the Wool into Balls of Yarn, which is a slightly more efficient process than the regular fibers into thread to compensate for the added labor.
- Crafting recipes queued by the Transform component will now be cancelled if the entity is destroyed or the transformation cancelled.
- The performance of the promotion tree screen has been slightly improved by caching the job index.
- The performance of character sheets has also been slightly improved by hiding and revealing the contents rather than destroying and re-creating it every time.
- Both of the changes above could have unforeseen performance implications in the long run. So please report us any issues or unnatural lag that you might encounter!
- The challenge of bear attacks has been slightly reduced.
- The images of all game modes have been changed to be more visually different from each other - and interesting. They also “showcase” all biomes.
- The descriptions of game modes have also been changed to relay some important information, for example: the fact that “Peaceful” games can still face enemies (Titan fight through the Amberstone questline, Hearth of Glory, wild animal dens…) or the fact that in “Hard” enemies are not only stronger but the progression is also steeper and faster.
- Earthbud Flowers, Earthbud Flower Seeds and Hearth Essences can no longer be sold to merchants. (We can hear the huge ‘boo!’) The reasoning behind this decision is that not only these items were very easy sources of gold (they are worth a lot!) but also because the poor little bunnies from Amberstone get to befriend you and share their most important secret with you… for you to make a profit out of it? Seriously? Shame on you! (the traders probably don’t even know what to do with the stuff, anyway)
- All factions are now able to carry the learned recipes for the different tier 3 monuments on reembarkation. Previously all factions would be able to carry the Ascendancy monuments but no other. This is now fixed.
- Juniper Tree Seeds will no longer decay since they now have an unique use as an ingredient for gruit.
Fixed
- Fixed a ‘nil’ error that could be caused by the Progress Tracker.
- Fixed a ‘nil’ error that could be caused by the fertilizing actions.
- Fixed an issue with job requirements being limited by the allowed jobs. This issue could be seen with the Amberstone bunnies.
- Fixed the Rayya’s Children weaver’s Wall Banner recipes. They were not showing up.
- Fixed the wrong images for the Unfermented Mead and Unfermented Fruity Mead filters in containers.
- Fixed an issue where the Town would stop tracking the amount of Fish Traps you have placed after a game reload.
- Fixed an issue that made bee skeps very hard to harvest if you had a couple very close to each other. That is because the area they try to avoid because of the bee can stack. They will still try to avoid areas with too many skeps but most formations are now more likely to work.
- Fixed an issue with pastures where the shepherd would still place feed in the middle of the pasture even though you have a manger.
- Fixed some other seeds that can also cause the “Ghost” issue previously fixed for nuts.
- Fixed an error that could be caused whenever a returning trader wanted or offered the building parts for wells, this was caused because of the well changes on 0.9.4.2 and should now be fixed.
As always, a big thank you to every one of you and we hope you’ll enjoy this new update!
Have a great week!