Hi Everyone,

We’ve been reading the forums, chatting with you on discord, and checking out all the suggestion on our community feedback post. We’re happy to announce our first free content update is now available in the beta branch (go to your library, right click properties > betas > then choose next-version-preview).

Update Notes:
Wooden Walls
You can now build wooden walls. They have a height limit of 3 and cost 7 wood a piece. They can help keep vikings out early, but they are vulnerable to fire and ogres.

Stone Roads
Stone roads are now available to build and can also be placed over the top of existing roads. They increase peasant movement speed 50% over normal roads.

New Statue - Queen Barbara
A new statue is available to impress your peasants. We also added a happiness bonus to both statues.

Noria, Aqueduct, and Reservoir
You can now irrigate the land (soil enrichment)! Build a noria near water to pull water up. Use aqueducts to transport it to your fields, and reservoirs to provide irrigation. An irrigated tile allows you to farm it regardless of underlying soil type and provides a bonus crop yield to tiles that are already fertile. Aqueducts and noria cost gold to maintain.

NOTE: During this update beta period we will be adding the concept of ‘salt water’ vs ‘fresh water’ where Noria can only be built in fresh water, this will arrive soon

Fire Changes
Now only buildings with fireplaces can spontaneously catch fire, and if you have good well coverage you can reduce the risk of fires spreading to zero.

Tune Food and Time
We’ve increased the length of an in-game year by 50%. We’ve also re-tuned food production and consumption rates. This has the effect of allowing people more time to transport food, which should reduce the cases where heads of household can’t get food back to the houses in time.

UI Updates
The building information UI is now docked at the left corner of the screen (speed controls are in the top left now), and has received an overhaul. You can now see how much a building is at risk of catching fire if a something is burning nearby. We also added a list of everyone living and working in the building as well.

There’s also a new highlight effect on building selection!


Other Tweaks and Fixes
Z now pans camera down as well as s, so wazd works now too.
Added more names to the villager pool
Town squares count as roads
Pressing Escape closes any visible UI
You can now see and edit your map generator seeds
Added expanded tooltip info for all resources
Added hotkeys (delete for demolish, and c for chop)
Houses now count neighbors across the street
Generals can regen while out of battle
Fix issue where viking raid would always happen shortly after loading a save
Fixed bugs where vikings could kidnap people on the other side of walls
Ogres can now disembark their ships and attack even if your land is completely walled off
Viking ships now have catapults
Fix bug where generals could die before the rest of their army
Running multiple festivals at once yield diminishing returns with each stacked festival
Fixed bug where demolishing an in progress wall section would cause walls below to have strange life values

If you find any bugs or issues you can reply to this thread or email contact@lionshieldstudios.com.

We'll be hotpatching the beta for the next few days, then we'll push it live to everyone.