Beta r868 On Steam Unstable - Northern Alliance!

https://www.stonehearth.net/release-notes-868/

In this release, we bring you an in-progress version of our third kingdom, The Northern Alliance, and their home glacier biome, The Valkyrie Tundra. As we wrote way back during the Kickstarter, “brave and hardy, the men and women of the north live for the sight of a new dawn over unexplored territory. Armed with compass and hatchet, they pride themselves on their tenacious adaptability.”

16 Likes

I need a option to click the like button more plz, been waiting a looooooong time for this. my Silverthorn stories are based on the NA, Hello Ragner and Nile’s and Lily, now i can truly build this village

4 Likes

Hi, team. Thanks for the Alliance.

Is the expected behavior that when the discovery of an animal, you’ll see a prompt about detecting the enemy?

Could you say please when plans add the craft of wet and dry stones to create ponds? I mean without debugging.

1 Like

Your archer can hunt them for food. :smiley:

Yeah, I know :slight_smile: But they are very frequent.

2 Likes

They are SO cute!
I love the new biome and their style - especially the building style. Good work!

But the best new thing for me (by far) is HUNTING! LOVE IT <3
But if I may I’d like to suggest a couple of thingies:

  • I dunno if there are still plans of implementing a proper hunter class; but if not, maybe it could be interesting to give us a way to order the archers to “roam” for hunting or maybe create hunting areas? Alternatively using the harvest command to “pick animals to hunt” could work too :slight_smile:

  • Maybe animals could run after being shot? :stuck_out_tongue: It’s weird that the boar just stares at me :slight_smile: like “oh no, rip me” :3

  • I just love the Northern Alliance songs, GREAT JOB :heart: :jubilant:

  • I love the “Wild game” spawns - but maybe they could have a different sound/highlight. Right now it always sound like an attack :smiley: maybe northerners are just paranoid…

  • Would it be possible to add those lovely tall roofs to the roof builder? :3
    I know, I know, it’s still in-progress. I’M TOO EXCITED THO! :smiley:

I’ll need a couple of extra days to make sure all the new thingies are supported by the current mod I’m working on (the Trapper one) but you guys just actually made it SO MUCH MORE exciting now with all the hunting and trapping usefulness! It’s gonna be wonderful! :jubilant:

Thanks and keep up the great job!

Edit
I keep adding points to this post as I play :merry:

  • Can the other factions hunt like that as well now? Would it be possible to limit it to archers - so Ascendancy and Rayya’s don’t have the advantage of hunting straight away? Might be unecessary, but just a cool thought to give some unique twist to NA instead of just having it feel like it lacks farming :stuck_out_tongue: So just like Ascendancy has to work for a potter (for example), it should have to work for a hunter/archer as well :slight_smile:

  • Also another minor detail, but maybe the animals could have a different color to their contour when selected? I know that the red is because of the hostile amenity that they now have (so we can kill them) but it feels wrong that little cute foxes and such are red now :glum: :jubilant:

Edit 2

  • Food seems a bit of a struggle in a way. Not because I can’t get it - I’m hunting a lot :smiley: - but workers hardly prioritize looting (when ever, really) so unless you stop absolutely everything, no one loots the food. It’s also slightly annoying if you play with “no looting” by default (which is useful due to auto-looting near enemy camps and such). Maybe stuff dropped from animals/forest faction could come as part of the inventory by default? Not requiring looting? Is that possible? :3

  • Snow is great! But it doesn’t look so charming in this biome since it is… uh… already quite snowy? :3 That is excellent, of course :smiley: but maybe it could be interesting if the lower level (“sea-level”) of the terrain was actually grassland/dry shrubland (like yellowish grass). That way snowfalls could be more dramatic and the contrast could be beautiful :merry:

Edit 3
I guess this is mostly it :smiley:

We pushed a bit at the end with console and stuff, just for fun :smiley:

Got to 115 citizens, it’s crazy cool how well you guys advanced with performance - the game was mostly stable!

11 Likes

Same :slight_smile: Here lies my food

4 Likes

Started a quick town to test out the NA, and I have to say they immediately feel different from the other races so great job on that!

Having the mason rather than the carpenter as a starting crafter is interesting. I was immediately worried about how to get stone without carving up the starting area, but then I realised that the high cliffs are perfect as a source of stone. I must say that the buildings feel very spartan with only stone furniture though! It would be great to see animal pelts being used to soften the decor a bit, things like fur rugs or animal pelts. Of course that implies having a weaver early on, which isn’t practical NA, so perhaps the solution is to add some mason recipes which include an animal pelt to create, say, “stone chair with rug” as an early-game version of the comfy chairs?

The nice thing is that with the blacksmith being available a bit earlier for NA, it’s less arduous to unlock a carpenter than the RC have it. There’s also plenty of wood around for the new carpenter to quickly start using, so that speeds up the progression to a “well rounded” settlement with comfortable furniture that isn’t all stone cold.

Having the archer immediately start hunting game is a bit awkward since, as others have pointed out, there are often higher priorities than hauling in the food. I like the idea of dedicated hunting zones, it could even tie into the trapper (so a third zone type besides small animals and bugs) with the idea that hunters and trappers work together to find, hunt down and dress any of the larger game. Archers could still be manually ordered to hunt wandering critters if the player doesn’t have access to a trapper yet, it’s the same as foraging wild food/herbs and upgrading to a farmer. I’m keen to see how shepherds work for the NA, I imagine they need a lot more “infrastructure” (barns and places for livestock to shelter) but would be comparatively more rewarding since you’d get ready access to meat, wool, hides etc. without having to haul them as far.

Overall, I’d say you’ve nailed the objective of making the NA a unique experience, their “feel” could probably use a little polish though. I know they’re meant to be rugged and hardy, but they feel positively Spartan right now. Nordic peoples are known for the warmth and revelry once you get past the gruff exterior, and I feel like the “home life” of the NA could use a little more of that to offset their current grimness.

4 Likes

I feel like things are a bit too… white. It’s so bland and boring, plus the constant weather (snow and rain) effects made it very difficult to see anything.

It would be nice if by default the Valkyrie Tundra was more… tundra"ey".


Furthermore, right at the start I was blessed with three days of snowy weather, which seriously hindered EVERYTHING. Hearthlings got super inefficient and vision was a mess.

I would assume snowy weather is common in this biome, so this and the super white appearance will be a strain on the eye on the long run.

I really don’t see any reason to start here when you could just put your lovely northerners in the forest biome and enjoy the pleasant green scenery and the comfort of berry bushes.


During my quick try-out-session, I carried over a knight and a cleric from an earlier save, and they immediately started chasing deers and tiny critters to the end of the world, which is pretty annoying. It would be nice if melee soldiers could ignore those things.

That’s all for the moment.

1 Like

probably not by default because this seems like a work in progress solution, its easy enough to add though (tried it on my own nordlings) but i removed it again: its really, REALLY anoying if you dont start off with an archer because your footmen will run around and never reach the animals. so it doesnt help untill you DO get an archer.

1 Like

I can’t wait to hear all the NA music! The only problem is that I’m currently ~5 hours away from my computer, but… it’ll happen soon.

Holy cow! That’s a lot of hearthlings!

Going to throw out that I also noticed that they liked to ignore food, especially whatever the trapper was leaving around. I had a hearthling dedicated to hauling, but it was slow going.

Otherwise i’ve had a great experience with the NA. It’s absolutely slower going than the other biomes as the blizzards slow down your hearthlings significantly, but i’m not against that. Hunting is fantastic, the new mason stuff is great… and the templates are fantastic.

Also love getting the cook earlier, I easily outpaced the required the food count by about 700 within a few days of getting the cook.

Net worth was actually somewhat of a challenge to keep up with because i’m used to quickly building out a house with the ascendancy, but the snow biome makes things much slower.

Loving it so far!

2 Likes

I wonder: would covered walkways or shallow underground tunnels change that? (snow has no effect on “covered” Hearthlings I believe?

1 Like

Had a blast with the NA - that is until the goblin rascal asked for 42 oak logs. Oaks in the northern biome? Are you kidding me. Had to abandon the game and restarted.

Next game the goblin asked for several wooden furniture. Grmpffft!!!

There certainly is still some balance issue going on here. Especially since you lack a carpenter and therefore have no access to swords to train soldiers for quite a long time into the game. Fighting goblins is a pain early on when you have only one or two archers.

2 Likes

@Wouter_Sikkema as the NA goes well with your works, how about adding a stone axe as a warrior talisman to bypass @BarbeQ issues easier? (just wondering xD)
neeeeeeeeeevermind… forgot the talisman is assigned in the job .json :frowning: … or not… can’t remember xD

Hmm… cloning the footman files and creating a new ‘axe warrior’ class from it. Then binding all of this to a new talisman made by the stone cutter. Shouldn’t be that complicated… I suppose…

1 Like

not complicated at all but i was suggesting something small since there might be some fixing (or not as with rayyas) and since i’m asking to someone else who surely has his own proyects xD

Yeah. They will probably change some stuff here in the future. NA is still wip after all. Maybe a traveling merchant selling some sword talisman would do the trick as well.

I am having a problem with starting the game in starting resources part. There’s no option to click and game won’t let me proceed. :frowning_face: Any idea what could I do?

@No_Name easy enough to patch into that but it’s a pretty heavy rework of the idea behind Na then, I think it might just be best to wait it out for a second and give the devs some time to ballance and rework it before we go I to ductape territory :wink: (that and I’m still busy working on a rework of smiting, and will be on a holiday for about two weeks after next week, so yeah :stuck_out_tongue: beyond that it’s a nifty idea, but for now you may be better of just playing my nordlings in the frozen tundra. (and yes they are getting the Na themesong untill I go for custom ones :wink: all I n Ed to do for that is push the update to steam atm)

3 Likes