News

Back in a Moment

Improved

• When the game updates, or the server restarts or your connection drops, you're back where you were by yourself a few seconds later. It used to stop on "Lost connection" until you pressed Reconnect.

True Marks

Fixed

• A mark aimed at a building lands on it. Aimed at huts up a hill, it used to fall short on the slope below, and soldiers sent there stood about on land nobody held.
• Soldiers sent to land near a settlement you're not at war with now tell you so, and which settlement to mark instead.

Friendly Roads

New

• Your allies' settlements are on your roads: travel to a friend's settlement from beside your fire, and home again from theirs.
• On foot, the arrow keys turn and tilt your view, so you can look about with one hand while you walk with the other.

War Effort

Improved

• A raid stops your citizens' work but not the war effort: your barracks keep training soldiers. Only a barracks that is itself on fire stops.
• You rise again at whichever of your settlements is nearest where you fell, not always at home.
• Your horse waits near where you rise, so you're not left on foot. And with a halter you can tame another horse at any time; it takes your old one's place.
• The number keys pick weapons in the order the bar shows them, 1, 2, 3 and on, with no gaps. Each slot shows its key.
• The axe sounds like an axe: a clean swish through the air, and a sharp chop when it bites a tree.
• Travel by road waits 5 seconds after you arrive, not 20. Your settlement on the map says how to travel there when you're not at one of your fires.

Fixed

• Other players' name tags no longer show from far away. Only your allies' carry past 40 m.
• In a colony, claiming land and raising an army now pay from the storage you see there. The Claim button could be lit for land the game then refused.
• A trip by road now names where you're going.

New Heart

Improved

• The game's server is new. It runs the same worlds on well under half the work, so busy worlds stay smooth: no more late updates when open war's armies are out.

Whole Map

Fixed

• Joining a big world after someone else now brings in the whole map. You used to arrive without the world's territory and who's at war with whom, until you reloaded and happened to be first in.
• Playing the main world while a friend's private world is open now takes you to the main world. It could turn you away with "This world is private".

Clear Paths

Improved

• Worlds with open war run smoothly again. Soldiers stuck against a wall kept looking for a way round many times a second, and late in a long evening the whole world lagged.

Fixed

• The pause menu no longer drops you to the main menu by accident. Holding the stick as it opens doesn't move the highlight, it doesn't wrap from Resume to Main menu, and Main menu asks you to press again.

Hold Steady

Improved

• Closing the pause menu with Resume takes the mouse straight back: no extra click to look around.

Fixed

• In full screen (Chrome, Edge), Esc opens the pause menu. Esc stays in the game there, so it used to do nothing.

True to the Shore

Improved

• Docks turn finely: R (□) turns a dock an eighth of a quarter at a time (22.5°), so it can sit square to the shore it runs out from. Its deck, its canoes and where you take one all follow the turn

Out of Sight

Improved

• Villagers, soldiers and other people behind you or out of view aren't posed bone by bone any more (they still go about their business): turned away from a village, nine in ten of their bones are left alone
• The weapon bar no longer reads its own pictures back every frame

Fixed

• The settlement view's build menu and side panel were rebuilt every frame, sixty times a second, even with nothing changing: a click could land on a button already replaced. They're only redrawn when something on them changes now, so they take the mouse

Orders Given

New

• Open war: on the map, soldiers you've sent show a dashed line to where they're going, with how many are on it, and Call them back (R, L1 on a controller) undoes every order: they make for home
• A beach or shore tile can be claimed now (a dock wants one): land down to about a sixth of the tile will do. Tiles mostly sea still can't

Improved

• Well fed (hunger 80 or more), your health mends three times as fast away from a fight: about a minute to full. Battles are unchanged
• Open war's soldiers fight back: struck, a soldier goes after whoever did it for a while even past where it's posted (an archer shooting from range was let go), and idle comrades nearby join in

Stone Gives

Improved

• Striking a building has weight: a thud, and its name and what's left of it under your crosshair as it burns down

Fixed

• Walls can be broken. A blow anywhere along a wall now lands; before, only a blow at the corner it was started from did, so a long wall stood whatever you did. Soldiers sent at a wall break it the same way. A settlement still falls only when its last building does, walls included

Friend or Foe

Improved

• Name tags say friend or foe with a mark, not only a colour: ◆ for your own realm's people and soldiers and your allies', ✕ (and a red rim) for those you're at war with. A friend's name is never in red
• The map and minimap show you, your squad and your allies, not where your enemies are
• Being attacked shows in red at the bottom left, and stays longer: soldiers marching on you, raiders, a building on fire or burnt, your people killed, the watch seeing foes coming
• Bows, spears and rocks have a range again: shots land on the crosshair up to 30 m (a spear 20, a rock 15) and drop below it beyond. Aim high to lob one farther

By Hand

New

• Private worlds have a Building setting. By hand (the default): you place every building, and your citizens gather, farm and work in them. Citizens help: they add farms and storage when they're needed, and can build the rest if you let them

Improved

• Every world says how it plays: Battles or Open war on its card in the worlds list, and the rules, growth and building under the mark in the pause menu
• The Play menu and getting ready show only what you can play: Skirmish and the class picker are off until they're back

One Step Back

Improved

• Esc steps back one level: from the map to your settlement if you came from there, then to first person. Where the browser keeps Esc to leave full screen, leaving it counts as the step
• C closes the map as well as the quick menu. Claiming a tile on the map is now E (□ on a controller)
• On a controller the quick menu holds only where to go: ○ takes you back to first person, and the touchpad or Create button opens the map
• When the browser is holding sound back (until a click or a key; a controller's buttons don't count), a note at the top says so, so a raid's horn is never silently missed

Fixed

• A key could stay held down (you walked on until you pressed W again) after a click-drag caught the page's text. Nothing on the page selects as text any more, and Cmd+A doesn't select it all
• The controller's chat of preset lines is gone (it showed for some players and not others). Enter opens the chat on a keyboard

Shadow Below

Improved

• Under the glider, your shadow passes over the ground below: darker the lower you fly, so you can judge your height and where you'll land

Close at Hand

Fixed

• Off your horse, by choice or by a blow, it stands beside you, never across a stream

A Battle for the Ground

New

• Open war: fight a battle for a single tile of another realm's, where no settlement stands. Pick it on the map and press Battle for it (B). Win, and the land is yours

One Larder

Improved

• Meat and fish are food now, and plenty of it: a deer brings in 9, a horse 12, an aurochs 18, a fish 4. Store it at home and your settlement eats it too. Any meat or fish you had is food already
• The torch is soaked in fat from your food: 1 wood, 4 fibre, 4 food
• Joining from an invite, you start apart from whoever invited you, like everyone else

Hand over Hand

Improved

• Others see you climb a watchtower's ladder, hands on the rungs and knees stepping up

Staked Out

Improved

• The stake marking where a wall starts is easier to see from the builder's view

On the Line

Improved

• Catch a fish and you see it: pulled up out of the water on your line, thrashing, with a splash where it broke the surface

Up the Ladder

New

• Climb a watchtower: walk into its ladder and keep going, and you're up on its platform

Buckets

Improved

• Buildings stand half as long again before they burn down
• With no raiders near, citizens come out of shelter to fight a fire, and it dies down fast

Room to Start

Improved

• Bot rulers claim land more slowly, and not before you've had a few minutes to settle
• Citizens building on their own keep more back for your next tile of land, the barracks and its kin included
• New arrivals start apart from the others, not on top of them

Fixed

• With a controller, the world lists scroll to follow your choice

Spoils

New

• Take a settlement and a card says so: what you took, from whom, and what came with it
• Fallen soldiers leave their kit where they fall: their weapon, an archer's arrows, a little food

Improved

• A spear you pick up goes straight to your hand

Your Own Barracks

New

• Open war: the barracks, flintknapper, archery range, stables and watchtower are yours to place, under Defense in the build menu. The barracks and flintknapper open once your campsite is a settlement, the rest at Hamlet. With "Citizens build" on, your citizens still put them up for you
• Laying a wall, a stake shows the corner it will start from, and stays there once you place it
• Raiders in your settlement: the beating ring shows on the minimap too

Improved

• The colony hints say what a colony costs: 50 food, 50 wood and 40 stone
• When your citizens put up a barracks or one of its buildings, the notice says what it's for

Holding On

Improved

• When your capital falls and you still have a colony, the colony becomes your capital and you keep your land: only the fallen settlement's own tile goes

Fixed

• A burnt-down campfire is lit again by its citizens a minute after the raid ends
• Your horse comes to find you after you fall far from it
• A captured colony shows its own name in the settlement panel

Card Down

Fixed

• The card announcing your settlement has grown could stay on screen: it now always goes after a few seconds

Over the Stones

New

• Jump up onto a boulder and stand on it, or run across the low ones

Fixed

• Under the glider, trees and boulders far below no longer stop you dead in the air, or offer to be broken from up there

Rising Air

New

• Warm air rises over campfires and smoking hearths: circle over one under the glider to climb. Slopes rising ahead of you hold you up a little longer too

Arms Up

Improved

• Under the glider your arms are up out of sight, so nothing hangs in front of the view

Claws and Pelts

Improved

• Soldiers of a village or town show their rank by what they wear: veterans a necklace of claws, captains a wolf’s pelt over the shoulder

Hands on the Bar

Improved

• Under the glider your own hands hold its crossbar

A Word on Wings

Improved

• The guide now tells you how to use the hide glider

Hearth Smoke

Improved

• From a village on, smoke rises from the longhouses’ hearths

Riding the Wind

Improved

• Under the glider you hear the wind rush past, and others see you hanging from its straps

Wings of Hide

New

• The hide glider: craft it from hides, poles and fibre, then step off a height. It opens as you fall; look where you want to go, push on to go faster, jump to let go

Fat and Reeds

Improved

• The torch is harder to make: reeds bound tight and soaked in fat (1 wood, 4 fibre, 2 meat)

Fixed

• The Shrouded you drive off with stones now really run, instead of circling you just out of reach

Springs

Fixed

• Creeks run from their springs to the lakes below: no more dry stone gullies below a fall, or water standing in sheets and spikes over the grass
• No more dark stones scattered across snowfields

Off the Docks

Improved

• Fishers dress for it: a conical hat of plaited reed against the glare off the water, and a wicker creel on their backs.

Bedrock

Improved

• Steep ground up close is stone, not a smear: ledges of grey rock break through the earth, with stones bedded in the slope.

A Roof First

Fixed

• A new colony could, rarely, find nowhere to put its first hut and lose its people at once. It keeps looking now, and clears trees from the spot like any village.

Clear Sight

Fixed

• Battle: you start each life in front of your camp's supplies, facing the flag, instead of sometimes looking straight through its bundle of spears.

Safe Keeping

Fixed

• An update could lose up to the last half minute of play in a world (where you stood, what your settlement had just gathered): the world is saved properly before the server restarts now.

Elbow Room

Fixed

• On laptop-sized screens, the hint card (such as "Build a hut") no longer covers your weapons, or its own Hide button.

Room at the Fire

Fixed

• Arriving in a world for the first time could put you inside a settlement's campfire ring when someone had settled right where newcomers arrive. You now arrive just clear of it.

Already Packed

Improved

• Coming back after an update no longer downloads the people and animals again (about 2 MB), only what changed.

Quick Study

Improved

• Entering a world for the first time is about three times quicker: the world map is drawn on several cores at once while you wait, not one.

Torchlight

New

• The torch: a pitch-soaked brand from wood and fibre. Carry it and the ground around you is lit at night. In open war, a torch sets a roof alight far faster than any blade.
• Open war: settlers can be killed. Striking down another realm’s villager is an act of war, though the settlement keeps its people: a new settler comes in their place.

Dead On

Fixed

• A spear, arrow or stone that strikes an animal anywhere from its rump to its chest now hits. Before, only a narrow column through its middle counted, so a throw through a deer's flank could pass straight through.

First Blood

New

• Blood: a blow that lands draws blood from people and animals alike, spattering the ground where it falls. It soaks away in half a minute.

Improved

• The Shrouded fall back the way they came from: downhill and into the trees, never up a mountainside or out into the open.

Out of the Dark

Improved

• The Shrouded are darker and harder to read: nothing but shadow inside their hoods save two pale eyes, shrouds to the ground worn ragged at the hem, a quiver of black-fletched arrows on their backs, and bows as dark as the rest of them.

Once Is Enough

Fixed

• A settlement that grew a level could show its card over and over, its music repeating, until a menu was opened. Each level now shows once.

The Shrouded

New

• The Shrouded: hooded archers of the deep forest who belong to no realm. Day or night, a band may pick up your trail and shadow you from behind, out of your eye. A hollow hoot from the trees, answered from another side, is the only warning.
• Once they close in they keep their distance and loose arrows by turns from different sides. You can’t run them down: drive them off with arrows or anything thrown, which spooks them out of range, and enough of that sends the whole band away. An arrow to the head kills one outright.
• No face to be seen inside their deep hoods, only two pale blue eyes.

The Pack

Improved

• Wolves hunt as a pack. They come out of the dark from several sides, then circle you, one ahead and the rest at your flanks and back. They go in by turns, the one behind you first, often while the one ahead feints to catch your eye.
• Wolves no longer run at the first blow. A hurt wolf hangs back a while, and the pack only gives up once it’s outnumbered: kill some, or have friends come to your side.
• Packs now come for small groups too, sized to the company you keep (up to six wolves).

Room to Breathe

Improved

• When the server is busy with many worlds that have bot rulers, a new one asks you to try again in a minute instead of slowing everyone’s game.

Clear Streets

Improved

• Settlements find room for their next building about ten times faster, so the game no longer catches for a moment when a village builds.

Doors Open

Fixed

• A new world with bot rulers no longer opens frozen when the server is busy. It took long enough to set up that the server gave up on it before you arrived.

Light Work

Fixed

• Worlds with bot rulers no longer hitch as they open, at a world’s first conquest, or while settlements build their own homes.

Common Ground

Improved

• Grass round a village square is short at its edge, so the square blends into the meadow.

Fixed

• Village streets now run into the square round the fire, instead of starting a few steps off it with grass between, and fade out where they end instead of stopping in a straight cut.
• Round huts no longer have a dark ring around the roof. It was the roof shadowing itself.

Sure Footing

Fixed

• Open war no longer freezes the game when soldiers get boxed in by walls. Finding their way round could stall the whole server for minutes at a time.

Growing Rivals

Fixed

• Bot rulers’ settlements grow into hamlets and beyond again. They had been stuck at the first level, so in open war they never trained archers or riders or built watchtowers.

Garrison

Improved

• Barracks fly their realm’s pennant, so you can tell whose soldiers live there.

Armoured

Fixed

• The mark that shows you wear armour sits beside your health, not under it.

Flagstones

Improved

• A town paves its hearth with a ring of flagstones.

Hides Drying

Improved

• A village’s huts have hides stretched to dry on frames beside them.

Which Way

Improved

• Open war: when your watchtower sees foes coming, your map shows which way they’re coming from.

Fixed

• Pausing a private world with bot rulers no longer runs out their truces while you’re away from the game.

You Are Here

Fixed

• On the map, your settlement’s name no longer covers your own marker.

Colours on the Watch

Improved

• Watchtowers fly their realm’s pennant, so you can tell from afar whose land a tower watches.

Clear Lines

Improved

• The settlement view’s build bar sits on one panel, so its words read over sand or snow; who builds what is now under the Citizens build switch.

Pennants

Improved

• Walls grow with the settlement: a village’s palisade stands in a stone footing, and a town’s flies its realm’s pennants.

Sorted

Improved

• The workbench sorts what you can make into weapons, tools and gear.

In Hand

Improved

• What you carry shows as a row of pictures at the bottom right, the one in your hand larger and lit.

Elders

Improved

• Citizens who work about home wear leather aprons, and every village has its elders: grey-haired, cloaked, with long strands of beads.

War Paint

Improved

• Soldiers wear war paint: bars of ochre under the eyes.

Fixed

• A soldier’s head band sits round the brow; on some it covered the eyes.

Hold Still

New

• Alone in a private world, the pause menu pauses the game: nothing moves, settlements don’t grow and the sun stands still until you go back. With a friend in the world, it carries on.

The Watch

New

• Open war: once your settlement is a Hamlet, your citizens put up a watchtower on high ground near its edge. When the lookout sees foes coming, a horn sounds, the map says "Foes sighted", and the soldiers of your nearest barracks with no orders go to stand round the tower until it’s clear. From higher ground it sees further.

Where You Left It

Improved

• A private world picks up exactly where you left it. Nothing moves on while everyone is away.

Gable Horns

Improved

• A town’s longhouses carry carved horns crossed at each end of the ridge and stand on stone footings. A village’s storehouses fill with sacks and baskets.
• When your settlement grows a level, its fire flares up for a moment.

Colours

Improved

• Soldiers wear their realm’s colour like a uniform: a dyed tunic, with a sash across the chest and a band round the head in the full colour.

Fixed

• The title is back as it was, with no shading behind it.

First Light

Improved

• The title reads clearly against the rising sun behind it.

Every Trade

Improved

• Your citizens dress for their work: farmers in straw sun hats, wood gatherers in fur caps with a coil of rope at the hip, water carriers with a full skin at their side.

Trodden Ground

Fixed

• The trodden ground round a settlement’s fire no longer shows a patch of bright grass in its middle.

Weight of the Blow

Improved

• An overhead chop has the body behind it: the shoulder draws back as the arm rises, and the chest turns and drops into the strike.

Follow Through

Improved

• Others throw with their whole body: the free arm reaches toward the mark and the chest turns and follows through, instead of both arms flinging out sideways.
• Pouches and necklaces cost less to draw in a crowd.

Keepsakes

Improved

• People carry small things of their own: most a hide pouch at the hip, many a cord at the neck with a tooth, a shell or a few beads.

Soft Snow

Improved

• Falling snow comes down in soft round flakes, not square specks.
• Paddling a canoe, both hands and the stroke show in your view.
• The settlement view and the map list only the keys you need most; the rest are in the Guide.

Hide and Sinew

Improved

• Everyone wears shoes of hide, with wraps tied round each ankle, instead of going barefoot.

Hearth and Banner

New

• Settlements show how far they have come. A hamlet’s huts stand on stone footings under thicker thatch, with a cooking frame over the fire. A village raises its realm’s banner by the fire, and a town rings its hearth with standing stones.

Coming of Age

New

• When your settlement grows into a hamlet, a village or a town, its new name rises over the world with what it opens to you, and a short phrase of lyre and flute marks the moment.

Fixed

• The card that names your new settlement no longer sits on top of the pause menu or the map.

Workbench

New

• Crafting is a wide menu of cards, each with a picture of what you make. The one you choose sits large beside them, with what it does and what it takes against what you carry.

Improved

• Every panel over the world shares one frosted, dark-warm surface, so none of them turns grey against the sky or green against the grass.
• The settlement view’s store and take actions sit together in one quiet panel.

Steady Hands

Improved

• In a canoe, your hands close round the paddle, thumbs up the shaft, instead of twisting palm-up beside it.
• On horseback, your fists rest low on the reins at the bottom of your view, and riders you see hold the reins too.

Deep Winter

Improved

• Bushes in snowy country carry snow on their tops, as the pines do, instead of standing green in a winter forest.
• Lingering snow lies in drifts with clean, broken edges, and no longer smears into streaks down steep slopes.

Tell Us

New

• Press I to report a problem: write what went wrong, press Enter, and it goes to us with a picture of your screen and what your game was doing. The first time, GitHub asks you to sign in, and the report is filed as you.

Fine Print

Fixed

• The settlement needs panel grows to fit a long line, such as "1151 of 1488 stone", instead of running past its edge.
• The Play screen tells Chronicle’s rules as they stand: a settlement’s home tile can fall, a fallen realm serves another, and a world is won at 60% of the land or by the last realm standing.

Friendly Fire

Fixed

• Open war: your arrows and thrown spears pass your own and your allies' villagers in a raid, instead of being used up on them.
• Open war: a villager running to its place when a raid's people come out catches up quicker, and none stays unseen for the rest of the raid.

Word Gets Round

Improved

• Open war: a raid's alarm says whose raiders they are, and you hear when one of your soldiers carrying plunder home is cut down and it's lost.

Fixed

• Open war: soldiers carrying plunder answer your orders (they take it home when they're next there). Sent on again after burning a storage, they ignored you, and the raid broke off.

Fair Warning

Improved

• Open war: when someone sends their soldiers at your land, you hear they're coming, as you already did for a bot's march.

Fixed

• Open war: a peace holds. An arrow loosed just before it, landing just after, started the war again.

Rest

Fixed

• Open war: villagers killed in a raid stay down when it's over; one of the survivors no longer vanishes in their place.

No Jumps

Fixed

• Open war: when a raid's villagers come out, one still on its way in runs the rest of the way to the fire instead of jumping there.

Clear Aim

Fixed

• Open war: a blow or an arrow at a house no longer lands on the villagers sheltering inside it (they took it, and the house never burned), and your own villagers running past aren't in the way of your blow.
• Open war: a soldier carrying plunder whose barracks has burnt takes it to your home settlement, instead of wandering off with it.
• Open war: "raiders killed N of your citizens" counts only this raid's.

Gold Spot

Improved

• Open war: on the map, your soldiers carrying plunder home have a gold spot on them.

Names

Fixed

• Open war: someone with no settlement yet is called by their name in war notices, not "A realm".

Old Grudges

Fixed

• Open war: bot rulers remember who struck them. A vengeful ruler goes for whoever last attacked it, and the others count you among their attackers, as they always did after a battle. With no battles in open war, they never held a grudge.

Tally

Improved

• Open war: raiders hear how their raid went too, once it's over: buildings burnt and people killed.

Reckoning

Improved

• Open war: when a raid on your settlement is over, you hear what it cost: buildings burnt, citizens killed and stores lost, or that they were driven off with nothing.

Greedy Hands

Improved

• Open war: a greedy bot ruler's soldiers make for your storage first, to carry off what's in it. Guard your stores.

Call to Arms

Improved

• Open war: a horn sounds when raiders come into one of your settlements, wherever you are.

Won Back

Improved

• Open war: cut down a soldier carrying plunder and what they carried goes to your storage. When your storage burns, you hear that the raiders are carrying it off, while there's still time to catch them.

Spoils Home

Improved

• Open war: soldiers who burn a storage shoulder its spoils and carry them home, packs on their backs, and they go into your storage when they reach their barracks. Cut them down on the way and the spoils are lost.

Hearth and Home

Improved

• Open war: in a raid, citizens take shelter in their homes (a hut holds 2, a longhouse 5) and can't be reached there. Burn a home and its people run out. A small raid, or one your soldiers meet, now costs a village few lives; one that burns everything still costs many.

Alarm Bell

Improved

• Open war: while your settlement is raided, its Soldiers row says work has stopped, so the rates going still aren't a mystery.

Plain Map

Improved

• The map's 3D view on V is gone: the relief map already shows the land from above, so the extra view wasn't needed.

Mending

Improved

• Open war: wounded soldiers mend by their barracks once they've been out of the fight for a little while, so it's worth sending a battered squad home before the next push.

Rally

Improved

• Open war: when raiders come into a settlement, its soldiers under no orders go to meet them wherever they are, not just when they come near the barracks.
• Open war: a raided settlement rings with fire on the map, and its label says so.

Spoils of War

New

• Open war: raids take people. While foes are in a settlement its citizens stop work and run in to the fire, and raiders can cut them down: each one killed is a citizen fewer, until homes and food bring new ones. Its owner hears of the raid, and of every loss.
• Open war: plunder. A storage that burns takes its share of the stores with it, and half of that goes home with whoever burnt it.

Pace

New

• Private worlds have a growth speed: Slow, Normal (twice as fast) or Fast (four times). Settlements grow, citizens build and gather, and bot rulers gather that much faster, and land costs a little more to match. Choose it when you start a world. The public world, and private worlds started before today, keep the pace they had.

Second Nature

New

• A new look for the world: the soft light stays, the brushwork and screen filter go. Edges are sharp again, and distant land keeps its detail.
• Trees by age and kind: young, grown, ancient, dead and wind-twisted pines; giant oaks, acacias on the savanna, birch groves in damp forest, and fan palms at desert oases.
• Winter forests: in the cold foothills under the mountains, snow settles in, pines are laden and the broadleaves stand bare. Lighter snow lingers on cold north-facing slopes, and snow sparkles in the sun.
• The desert grows saguaro, ocotillo and the odd Joshua tree; bushes differ by land, each with its own fruit to pick.
• Shore life: ghost crabs scuttle on the beaches, herons wade the shallows, and flocks of shorebirds lift off as you come near.
• The map is drawn in relief, the whole world from above with every tree and snowfield, and V in the map shows the land around you in 3D.
• From a mountain top you see the forests stretch to the horizon, tree by tree.
• New worlds can have palm oases, in desert valleys and by desert water.

Improved

• Mushrooms, ferns, reeds, flowers, rocks, fruit trees and stumps rebuilt; each kind of tree leaves its own stump.
• Roads and village streets are trodden earth with stones, and fray into the grass instead of ending in a straight cut. Snow banks along them in snowy places, and roofs carry snow.
• Trunks are round, with bark, and branches match their trunks.

Fixed

• Distant lakes reflect the sky like near ones, so a lake no longer ends in a square in the distance.
• A hard dark shadow edge that crossed the land in views from high ground.

Field Guide

Improved

• How to Play's open war section says what the map's soldier shapes mean, and how walls and gates steer an army.

Abreast

Improved

• Open war: a squad going round a wall spreads out as it goes, instead of queueing for one spot while those at the back give up and stand.

On the Record

Fixed

• Wars that bot rulers declare are kept with the world. After an update they were forgotten, and a bot's army turned for home in the middle of its campaign.

Full Muster

Improved

• Open war: bot rulers are a real threat on their own. They put up a second barracks early and wait for a full squad before they go to war, instead of sending soldiers in by ones and twos to be picked off.

Ways Round

Improved

• Open war: soldiers find their way round walls and buildings, through a gap or past a wall's end, instead of pressing into them. A wall with a gate now steers an army to the gate; sent to attack a settlement walled all round, they still break through.

Fixed

• A rider who falls drops to the ground instead of hanging in the air where the saddle was.
• People who walked out of sight and back could show a second, darker pair of eyebrows.

Cavalry

New

• Open war: riders. Once your Hamlet has an archery range, its citizens put up stables, and the barracks trains spearmen on horseback: twice as fast as anyone on foot and harder to bring down. They show on the map as squares.

Improved

• A barracks trains whichever kind of soldier its settlement has fewest of, so new kinds join the ranks as soon as they are unlocked.

Standing Army

Improved

• Open war: soldiers are kept with the world. After an update or a restart they stand where they were, with their wounds and their orders, instead of every barracks starting over.

Massed Ranks

Improved

• Armies cost far less to draw: people more than 40 m off are drawn as one simpler body (clothes and hair included), with a simpler weapon, so a field of soldiers takes a sixth of the work it did.
• People behind you are no longer drawn at all.
• Soldiers' names fade out by 40 m, as bots' do, so an army doesn't cover the field in labels.

Smoke Signal

Improved

• Open war: when a campfire is struck, dark smoke pours off it and its stones char. A settlement's last stand is easy to see.

To Arms

Fixed

• Open war: citizens build their barracks, flintknapper and archery range even while saving up to claim land. Bot rulers that claimed land quickly often never built a barracks, so their wars came to nothing.
• Bot rulers' march notices spell their names right ("The Red Hills' soldiers").

Campaigns

Improved

• Open war: a bot ruler sees an attack through before choosing another target, instead of turning its army round mid-fight.

Fallen, by Name

Fixed

• When a bot ruler's realm falls, the news names it instead of saying "A realm's realm has fallen".

Fire!

Improved

• Open war: you hear the moment one of your buildings catches fire, and where, while there's still time to send soldiers.

Colours and Columns

New

• Open war: the map shows where your soldiers are: a dot for a clubman, a diamond for a spearman, a triangle for an archer, ringed when they are under orders.

Fixed

• Every realm in a world has its own colour. Two realms could share one, and in open war their soldiers looked alike.

Friendly Fire

Improved

• Burning buildings crackle and roar.

Fixed

• Open war: chopping a tree or picking a bush beside a neighbour's hut no longer strikes the hut (and starts a war).
• Open war: a stray blow on one of your own soldiers no longer hurts them or declares war on your own realm.
• Open war: wars started by a blow are kept when the world restarts.

Breach

Improved

• Open war: soldiers sent to attack break through walls in their way instead of walking round them forever.

Room to Start

Improved

• Open war: bot rulers leave you alone while you're still on your first steps. Once your campsite is a settlement, with a barracks of its own, they may come.

Room for It

Fixed

• Starting a private world: the Start the world button no longer drops off the bottom of the page on smaller screens.

Quiet Front

Fixed

• Open war: you only hear about soldiers' fights you can see. Every soldier's fall used to reach everyone in the world.

Across the River

Fixed

• Open war: soldiers swim across rivers and lakes (slowly) instead of stopping at the bank.

Marching Orders

Fixed

• Open war: sending your soldiers against a realm you're not at war with declares war on it, so they fight when they get there. Make peace and soldiers sent against them come home.

Ready for War

Improved

• How to Play explains open war: how war starts, barracks and what unlocks spearmen and archers, sending soldiers with your mark key or the map, and burning.
• Open war stays smooth with armies in the field: a hundred soldiers on the march cost the server next to nothing.

In Ranks

Fixed

• Open war: soldiers spread out round their barracks, or round the spot you sent them to, each at a post of its own, instead of standing in one heap against a wall.

Roof Fire

Improved

• A burning building burns from its roof: it catches at the eaves, spreads across the roof as it goes, and blackens under the flames.

Clubs, Spears and Bows

New

• Open war: soldiers come in three kinds. Any barracks trains clubmen, whose heavy blows stagger. A flintknapper lets it train spearmen, who strike from further out, and once your settlement is a hamlet an archery range adds archers, who keep their distance and shoot. Your citizens put these up themselves.
• Open war: the Soldiers row under your settlement bars shows how many stand ready.

Improved

• Fire looks like fire: campfires and burning buildings have painted flames, burning buildings smoke and char, and all the fire in the world costs almost nothing to draw.
• Open war: barracks go up as soon as your campsite becomes a settlement, so the fighting starts sooner.

Fixed

• Open war: bot rulers no longer announce marches they have no soldiers for.

Garrisoned

Improved

• Open war: barracks stand fully manned when the world opens again, and your first soldier comes with a word on how to send them.

Open War

New

• A new way to play a private world: Open war. There are no battle rounds: all fighting happens in the world. Strike another realm's people or buildings and you're at war. Barracks train soldiers, who guard your land and fight your enemies; send them with your mark key (they go to defend your land or attack anywhere else) or from the map. Buildings burn as they're struck and mend when left alone, and a settlement whose last building falls is lost. Choose it when you start a private world.

Where You Aimed

Improved

• Arrows, stones and thrown spears land where you saw your target too, as blows have since the last update.

Where You Saw Them

Improved

• Blows land where you saw your target: the game allows for the moment it takes to see someone move, so a swing at a runner crossing in front of you connects instead of passing through where they'd already gone.

A Bite

New

• You can see other people eat: a fighter taking a bite for a second wind lifts it to their mouth, which might be your moment.

Stone in Hand

Fixed

• Throwing a stone now shows to everyone else: before, the stone left a body standing still. Bots' throws line up with their stones too.

Spear Throw

Fixed

• Someone throwing a spear now looks like it: an overhand throw, not a thrust at the air.

Overhand

Improved

• When someone throws a stone, you see a real overhand throw: the arm cocks back, whips through and follows on, with the stone leaving the hand as it flies.

Air of the Land

New

• The air changes with the land: hazier on damp coasts and in wet forest, clearer in deserts and up in the mountains. Walk from one to the other and the distance opens or closes around you.

After the Rain

New

• When a rain shower passes and the sky clears, the air is washed clean for a while: distant ridges stand out crisp and clear, then the haze slowly returns.

Sure Footing

Improved

• You step up knee-high lips in the ground, such as the sharp edge of a creek bank beside a fall, instead of stopping at an invisible wall. Real slopes and cliffs still stop you, and the view eases up after a step instead of jumping.

Fits

Fixed

• The Housing bar's reminder to store food no longer runs off the edge.

How It Runs

Improved

• Every few minutes the game tells us how smoothly it's running on your machine (frame times, your graphics settings, screen size and graphics chip, nothing else), so we can make it run better on the machines you actually play on.

This Way

Improved

• Private worlds are easier to find: Play → Chronicle says where they are (the Private worlds tab), and so does the Chronicle card on the Play menu.

Say So

Improved

• A bed free and nobody coming? The Housing bar says to store food: people only move in while there's food in storage.
• When your home grows into a hamlet, you hear that it can found a colony now, and how: go three tiles from your settlements, stand still and hold Use.

Many Trees

Improved

• Broadleaf trees grow in four shapes too: round, tall and oval, old and spreading on a thick trunk, and young and lopsided, each its own height and breadth.

Neighbours

Improved

• Bot rulers in a private world grow their land toward yours instead of off in any direction, so you'll have neighbours to deal with early. They still hold off attacking for the first quarter hour, and cautious rulers keep to themselves.

Steady Shade

Fixed

• Trees in the wind no longer flash strokes of shade in and out: a crown sways as one, each brush stroke takes its light or shade as a whole, and the shadows sway with the trees.

Summits and Firs

Improved

• Mountains in new worlds rise as summits with shoulders and cols between them, instead of rows of sharp spikes along every ridge. Worlds already under way keep their land.
• Conifers grow in four shapes, spruce, broad fir, wind-bent pine and old trees with two tops, and each one its own height and breadth, so a forest no longer repeats one tree.

Painted

New

• The world is painted now, like gouache and dry brush: sunlight and shade in two soft tones, brush strokes in the canopy, the grass and the ground, and clouds with brushed edges.

Improved

• Frames draw faster than before on most machines, even with the painting.

Out of the Saddle

New

• A heavy blow from a club, spear, axe or blade (thrown spears too, but not arrows) knocks an unguarded rider from the saddle. You land beside your horse and can climb back on after a moment. Charging through a fight on horseback now has an answer.

Wars Seen Through

Fixed

• A bot ruler that declares war sees it through a while before it talks peace, instead of making peace seconds later.

Rulers at Work

Improved

• Bot rulers in private worlds grow at about a person's pace, a tile every few minutes early on. They used to stop at three.

Names Straight

Fixed

• When a bot ruler declares war, the notice names the ruler, as peace and envoys do, not their settlement.

Bots with People

Fixed

• Bot rulers in private worlds actually have people now. Their first citizens had no roof and left at once, so bot realms sat empty and barely grew. Bots start with a hut and a farm, and bots already in your world get theirs when you next play.

Lighter Updates

Improved

• Updates download faster: the parts of the game that rarely change now stay in your browser between updates, so each new release is about half the download.

The Guide Catches Up

Improved

• The Guide covers today's changes: parrying by the wind-up, heavy blows, arrows costing stamina, who can join a battle, bot envoys, and inviting friends by link.
• The game has its icon in your browser tab.

In Time

Improved

• Other players' and bots' swings now land on screen just as the blow hits.

Peace Among Rivals

Improved

• Bot rulers make peace with each other too, when one's losing or fighting on two fronts. Their wars no longer run forever.

Loose Ends

Improved

• Near a battle you can't join? A hint explains that only the two realms and their allies fight, and that you can offer one an alliance on the map before it starts.

Fixed

• Citizens building on their own always build a farm when food runs short, even while saving for land.
• Fast computers with 75 Hz screens no longer get their graphics lowered for no reason.
• A bow shot that didn’t go off no longer leaves your stamina draining.
• A bot ruler that turns down your offer no longer leaves it hanging, and a bot only keeps a truce once peace is actually made.
• A swing clicked while you’re staggered now goes off when you recover, instead of playing and doing nothing.

Only What You See

Improved

• Trees, bushes and rocks behind you aren't drawn anymore. A frame now draws about half the triangles it did this morning, so the game should run noticeably smoother on laptops.

Lighter Meadows

Improved

• Smoother still: grass you can't see isn't drawn. Together with 0.31.116's distant trees, each frame now draws about a third fewer triangles than this morning.

Riders from the Rulers

New

• Bot rulers send envoys too: one losing a war to you may offer peace, and one sharing your enemy may offer an alliance. Accept on the map.

Envoys

New

• Bot rulers answer your envoys. Offer peace or an alliance and they reply in a few seconds, each by their temper: cautious ones take peace readily, bold ones only when they're losing. When they say no, they say why.
• A bot that agrees to peace keeps it for a while.

Improved

• On a PC, Esc opens the pause menu instead of just letting go of the mouse.

Lighter Forests

Improved

• Smoother on laptops: distant trees are drawn more simply and skip the shadow pass, about a quarter less work every frame with no visible change.
• If the game runs slowly on your machine, it lowers the graphics quality on its own and tells you. Pick a quality in Settings and it stays put.

Room to Grow

Improved

• Citizens who build on their own now keep enough in storage for your next tile, so you can still claim land.
• Waiting on your first citizen with nothing stored? First Steps now tells you: bring food to your storage, since a farm needs hands to work it.
• Standing where a colony can go, a hint says so. Stand still and hold Use to found it.

Fixed

• Your own arrow on the map and minimap stands out on sand and snow.

Come Find Me

New

• Invite a friend from inside your private world: the pause menu sends a link (on a phone, straight into a text).
• Opening the link signs them up and drops them into the world right beside you. No menus, no code to read out.

The Archer's Arm

Improved

• Each arrow you loose costs a little stamina, and holding a full draw for long tires your arm. Too winded, and the string goes down.
• From horseback, lead your shots: the arrow carries the horse's speed, and the aim no longer makes up for it.

Answering Fire

Improved

• Battle bots don't stand and take arrows anymore. Shoot one from afar and it comes after you, bringing a friend.

Ready for the Fight

Fixed

• Fall during a battle's countdown and you keep your pack, arrows and all. You come back at your side's camp, ready for the fight.
• A colony founded on rough ground always gets its first hut, so its people stay.

Settlers Stay

Fixed

• A new colony's first two people sometimes left the moment it was founded, when the server was busy. Now they move into its first hut and stay.

Heavy Blows

Improved

• Melee has weight. A swing lands as it comes through, not the instant you click: quick for fists and blades, slower for a club. You can see it coming, so raise your guard during the wind-up to parry.
• A heavy blow from a club, spear, axe or blade staggers whoever takes it unguarded. They stumble, slowed for a moment, and any swing they were winding up comes to nothing.
• Landing a blow jars your arm: the swing catches for a beat and the view takes the knock.

True Aim

Improved

• Arrows, thrown spears and rocks land where your crosshair is. Before, they dropped under it: an arrow at full draw fell nearly a metre over 30 m and 8 m over 80 m.
• It works at any distance, uphill and down, and from horseback. A weak draw still flies slower, so lead a running target more.

No Dogpiling

Improved

• Bot rulers don't gang up: a bot won't declare war on a realm that's already fighting two others, unless that realm attacked it first.

Worlds of Your Own

New

• Start a private world: Play, Chronicle, then the Private worlds tab. It's a new island only people with its code can enter. Send friends the code or the link, and the link makes their account too. You can have three open at once.
• Bot rulers: when you start a private world, pick how many realms run by the game share the island, up to seven. They build, claim land, and after a while go to war with their neighbours. A few for a small group, more on your own.

Improved

• Chronicle opens on a list of the open worlds, with your private worlds on their own tab.
• Party is gone from the menu: a private world's code brings friends together now.
• The sign-up code is called the beta invite code.

Claim Your Ground

New

• Found a settlement by setting down your own campfire: a ghost shows where it will go, green where it can stand.
• Housing, Food and Storage bars show how your settlement is doing and what it needs next, in builder mode and under the map on foot.
• The build menu has Shelter, Sustenance, Storage and Defense tabs, with a picture of each building. A building you can't make yet says why.

Improved

• First Steps shows from the start, beginning with Claim your settlement, and counts your wood, stone and food toward the 10 of each you need.
• Settlements can be founded on rougher, wetter ground.
• On the map, unclaimed land says how to reach it: claim the tiles next to your realm, or travel there and found a colony.

Fixed

• The sea around the map matches the map's own edge.

Fresh Rounds

Improved

• Battle mode: every round starts fresh. Last round's arrows and spears are cleared from the field, and everyone's arrows, throwing spear, stones and food are topped back up.

Fixed

• The pause menu no longer flashes each time you move to another choice.

Steady Eyes

New

• Settings has a Depth of field choice: On, Calm, or Off.

Improved

• In a fight the lens goes calm: far less blur, and it stops racing between whoever is in front of you and the land behind. It eases back once the fighting stops.

Fixed

• Name tags and health bars stay sharp, wherever the lens is focused.

Home Fires

New

• Home mends you: hunger slowly fills while you’re in your settlement, and health comes back quickly beside your own campfire.
• Putting goods into storage makes a sound now.

Level Footing

Fixed

• Buildings on a slope no longer sink into the hillside: they stand on the highest ground under their walls, on a stone terrace where the land falls away.

Past the Spear

Fixed

• The lens focuses on the land you look at, never on the spear or anything else in your hands.

Colonies of Their Own

New

• Fast travel: at your campfire, Use takes you to any of your other settlements in a few seconds.
• A colony is named when you found it, like your first settlement: keep the name, generate another, or type your own.
• The map shades the ground where a colony could go.

Improved

• Your first steps sit in a short checklist above your health, on foot and in builder mode alike, with why each one matters.
• One way to pay: buildings, land, armies and colonies come out of storage first, then your pack.
• Colonies stand on their own: no road home to keep open, no supplies to deliver, no raids. Found one at least three tiles from your other settlements; it comes with a hut for its first people, and if your capital falls, your biggest colony takes its place.

Classes Rest

Improved

• Classes are resting while we tune the battles: everyone plays on equal footing, with no class perks. They’re on the menu as coming soon, and you no longer choose one before you play.
• Scouts’ camps are gone with them. When you fall, you come back at your settlement.

A Name of Its Own

New

• When your campsite becomes a Settlement, it’s given a name. Keep it, generate another, or type your own (on a controller, △ suggests another and ✕ keeps it). Rename it any time from builder mode.

Improved

• The first level a settlement reaches is now called a Settlement, not a Camp. Scouts still make camp.

Realms Fall

New

• A settlement’s own tile can be attacked. Take it and the settlement is yours, with its land, buildings, stores and people. Lose your capital and your biggest colony takes its place.
• Lose your last settlement and your realm has fallen. Serve an ally, the one who took it, or another ruler as a vassal: you fight for them, and build and gather into their storage. Or leave that world for good: there’s no starting over.
• A world is won by holding 60% of its land, or by being the last realm standing.
• Back after a while? A summary shows what changed in your realm while you were away.

Improved

• You place the homes now. Your citizens keep things running, adding farms when food runs short and storage when it fills, unless you turn on “Citizens build homes” in builder mode (L, or R3).
• While you’re away, your settlements gather and keep themselves fed, but don’t grow past their level.

Through Your Own Eyes

New

• A quick menu (C, or D-pad ↓) takes you between first person, your settlement, and the map. In Battle mode it switches teams, and on a controller it opens the chat.
• Calls to battle come as a prompt on screen: hold G (△) for a moment to join. Do nothing and it passes.
• Hints: one at a time, low on the screen, saying what to do next and why. Never in a fight. X (or □ in the quick menu) puts one away.
• A new home starts as a campsite. Its first steps (store wood, stone and food, claim land, craft a spear, place a hut, a farm and storage, and welcome your first citizen) make it a camp, which opens walls and lets you name it. Settlements you already have are unchanged.

Improved

• The game is played in first person only.
• The pause menu (B, or Options) is down to Resume, Guide, Appearance, Photo mode, Settings and Main menu, plus Leave the battle while you’re in one.
• Things you do in the world happen there: stop and hold Use to found a colony or make camp where you stand, H whistles for your horse, and you travel by road from the map (select your settlement, then T or □).

Even Banks

Fixed

• Beside some creek waterfalls, a step about a metre high ran across the bank, an invisible wall on otherwise gentle ground. It’s gone.

A Short Respite

Improved

• After a realm loses land, it is safe from attack for 3 minutes instead of 2 hours: long enough to regroup, not long enough to hide behind.

Full Stores

New

• In builder mode, your food, wood and stone each fill as a bar toward the room you have. A full store turns amber and tells you to spend it or build more storage.
• Below your stores, a checklist shows what your settlement needs to reach its next level, ticking off as you go.

Clear Lines

Fixed

• In builder mode, a warning like "Outside your land" no longer prints over the description of the building you're placing.

Across the Planks

Fixed

• Villagers walk over footbridges instead of wading through the creek underneath.

Clean Lips

Fixed

• At the top of a waterfall, the pool no longer pokes up through its bank in ragged triangles of water.

Over the Creek

New

• Village streets get footbridges too, where they cross a creek. Bridges only go up where a road crosses the water, not where it runs along a stream's edge.

Footbridges

New

• Roads between your settlements now cross creeks and rivers on small plank footbridges, rails and all, instead of wading through. Lakes are still forded or gone round.

Harbours, Not Streams

Fixed

• Docks go on lakes and the sea, never across a river: your citizens no longer build one over a stream, and neither can you. Docks already standing stay.

Grey Skies

Improved

• An overcast sunrise or sunset now feels like one: the haze, the clouds, and the sky go a cool grey-blue instead of keeping the sunset's orange glow over a rainy valley.

Your Own Ground

Fixed

• You can no longer build on land you don't hold: a settlement near the edge of its tile let you put buildings on the tile next door, whoever held it. Buildings already standing there stay.

Where Streams Meet

Fixed

• Where two streams run side by side or meet, the strip of ground between them no longer steps up by a metre or more: you walk over it instead of hitting an invisible wall.

Steady Ground

Improved

• No more hitching when battles start: declaring a battle or opening a Battle round used to freeze everyone's game for up to a few seconds. Now it doesn't.
• A world with several battles going stays smooth: battles take far less of the server than they did.
• You're only sent the bots and animals within about 300 m of you, so a battle across the world no longer costs your connection or your frame rate.
• Someone logging in no longer makes everyone else stutter.

From the Live Session

New

• Leave a battle from the pause menu: you're taken back to where you answered the call and aren't pulled back in. You stay on the scoreboard, but leavers don't share the win or the spoils. (Not in Battle mode.)
• Winning a Battle round pays each winner 20 food, 30 wood, and 30 stone.

Improved

• Battle mode gives you a stone axe as well as the club, spear, and bow, and every respawn restocks your kit, arrows included.
• A settlement's level now adds lives to the side attacking from it, not just the side defending.
• Supplies are gone from battles: no more hauling crates to the flag. Provisioners keep their extra gathering.

Fixed

• You can't build where water stands over the ground any more. Docks still go in the water.

One Battle

Improved

• Battle is flag battles only for now, the same fight as in Chronicle, so every round is practice for the one that counts. Team survival, Free-for-all, and Survival are gone.
• Choosing Battle takes you straight into a round. You're put on a side as you arrive, with your party together. Switch team from the pause menu.

Through the Lens

New

• The world now looks a little more like film. Whatever you're looking at comes into focus, the way a lens finds it, and what's much nearer or farther softens. Your hands and what they hold stay sharp. There's a fine grain over everything. Low quality skips the focus.

One World First

Improved

• Skirmish is resting while we put everything into Chronicle and into the fighting itself. It's still on the Play menu, marked coming soon. Chronicle and Battle are unchanged.

Across the River

Improved

• When your land is attacked and a river runs through it, the attackers usually make camp on the far bank and have to cross the water to reach the flag. Your side never has to.

Hold the High Ground

Improved

• When your land is attacked, the flag goes on the tile's high ground and the attackers make camp below it, so they fight their way uphill. On flat land nothing changes; in the hills and mountains, holding your land is easier.

No Invisible Walls

Fixed

• Walking and running beside rivers and cascades no longer stops dead at invisible walls you had to jump over. Small ledges and creases in the ground are stepped over; real cliffs still need a scramble.

Still Water, Deeper Hills

Improved

• Gusts drift slowly across rivers and lakes, instead of racing over them like reflections of fast clouds.
• Distant hills keep some of their own light and shade through the haze, and after sunset the haze darkens with the land, so far mountains no longer glow as flat cut-outs.

Clean Hems

Fixed

• Collars, sleeves, and trouser cuffs end in a clean line instead of jagged teeth with skin showing through.

Whole Skirts

Fixed

• A tunic's skirt no longer splits open behind when a leg steps back.

Clear Creeks

Fixed

• Creeks look like running water from above: half a metre deep they were nearly clear over a pale bed, and read as a beige streak at midday.

Hear the Falls

Improved

• On the new land you hear a fall before you see it: its roar carries up to about 180 m, louder the bigger the drop. Narrow falls were nearly silent until you stood in them.

Sandy Mouths

Fixed

• On the new land, a river's last stretch to the sea crosses the beach as sand, instead of on a strip of grass and trees through it.

Narrow Falls

Improved

• On the new land, falls and cascades run narrower than the river above them, and their width wavers on the way down.

Stone Faces

Improved

• Steep mountainsides show their stone: broad patches of lighter and darker rock and faint weathering streaks down the face, where a whole slope was one smooth tone.

Falling Water

Improved

• Waterfalls pour in ropes of white with dark water between them, streaming down the whole drop, brighter where they face the sun and thinning out raggedly at their sides.

White Water at Dusk

Fixed

• White water, foam, and surf take the light of the hour: warm in the low sun, dim at dusk, faint under the moon. They stayed bright white through the evening and glowed over a darkened valley.

Settled Stones

Fixed

• Boulders on a slope or a steep bank settle into the ground, instead of hanging their downhill side in the air.

Whole Banks

Fixed

• On the new land, a creek that doubles back no longer runs at the bottom of a sheer slot cut under it: it runs over the land, and the pits it left are gone.
• Fewer sheer walls beside rivers below falls and cascades: the banks rise gently from the water.

A Finer Map

Improved

• The map shows the land in twice the detail: coasts, ridges, and the larger rivers are sharper when you zoom in.

New Land

New

• New worlds, Skirmishes, and Battle rounds are made on new land. Rivers begin as small creeks high in the hills, gather into rivers as they run down, tumble over falls and cascades between rock steps, and run on into lakes or the sea. Existing worlds keep their land.

Fixed

• Other players paddling a canoe sit in it, instead of running in place inside the hull.

Right Where You Were

Improved

• Refreshed the page by accident in Chronicle? Within three minutes you go straight back into the same world, where you stood and facing the same way, with no title or menu.

Worlds to Manage

Improved

• Behind the scenes: worlds can be renamed, and retired from the list (and brought back) without losing anything in them.

Fewer Boulders in the Meadows

Improved

• Rivers through grassy lowland carry far fewer boulders; they gather where a river runs through rocky, high ground, by its falls and rapids.

Which Version

Improved

• The pause menu shows, small at its foot, which version of the game you're playing and which version of the land your world was made with. Handy when reporting a bug.

Clear Middays

Improved

• The haze follows the day and the weather: clearest at midday under a clear sky, building toward morning and evening, and thick and grey when it's overcast or raining.

Clouds in the Light

Improved

• Clouds are lit by the sun: their sunward edges glow and their far sides fall into shade, with a silver lining near the sun. At golden hour they turn warm, and a high veil of cirrus catches the sunset's color.

Haze

Improved

• Distance has depth: far ridges fade into a soft haze in layers, blue by day and glowing toward a low sun, thicker in the valleys than on the peaks. The land near you keeps its color.

Smooth Ridges

Improved

• Shadows soften a little more when the sun is low.

Fixed

• Mountain ridges no longer show a sawtooth against the sky, and the shadows they cast across the slopes below no longer stair-step. The land is drawn along its ridges and valleys instead of across them.

Fruit, Stone, and Supper

New

• Villagers who aren't fetching water, wood, or the harvest now go out for fruit or stone: they pick from fruit trees near the village, or break rock with a stone pick, and carry home a basket of fruit or an armful of stone.
• In the evening, the villagers standing by the fire eat.
• Fishers land a fish about half the time, reeled up out of the water on the line, and bring the catch home in a basket.

Fixed

• A tunic's skirt no longer sticks up behind you like a tail when you ride: the back hangs from the seat.
• Woodcutters no longer pick a tree right beside a hut and chop from inside its wall, and if someone fells their tree (or picks it bare, or breaks up the rock) while they work, they stop and head home.
• In hill rivers, boulders no longer hang in the air at the lip of a fall.
• The server checks movement more closely, so nobody can get around faster than they should.
• When a world is full (32 people), the next person to arrive is told so, instead of landing in a second copy of the world that could undo the first one's saves.

Every Villager Their Own

Fixed

• Every villager in a village got the same kind of hairstyle, all old or all new, and the same went for facial hair. Each villager now picks their own, so a village of ten shows about half of each. If you never picked a look, yours may have changed again: choose one in Edit appearance to keep it.

Ten Hairstyles

New

• Ten more hairstyles in Edit appearance. For men: balding, locs, a mohawk, a ponytail, and slicked back. For women: a bob, long locs, a ponytail, locs, and a low ponytail.
• Facial hair for men: a moustache or mutton chops, as well as a beard.
• Villagers, and anyone who hasn't picked a look, now wear the new styles too, so a village no longer looks like one family. If you never picked a look, yours may have changed: choose one in Edit appearance to keep it.

Improved

• The game loads faster: its script and models are sent compressed, about 2 MB less on your first visit.

Fishers

New

• In a village with a dock, the water carriers sometimes go fishing. They walk out to the end of the dock, cast, wait on the float, and reel in a few times before heading home.

Villagers at Work

New

• Villagers move like their work. Farmers cut the ripe stalks, kneel to set seed, and water the rows from a clay pot. Wood gatherers take an axe out to a tree at the edge of the village and chop.
• Everyone carries the day's work home in both arms: an armful of logs, a basket of the harvest, a pot of water.

Fixed

• A villager who walked into a fence on an errand turned back as if the work were done. They go round it now.

Triangle for Rulers

Fixed

• On the map with a controller, △ opens the Rulers panel for peace, alliances, and war, as the hint says. It used to close the map.

Farmers

New

• Villages with farms have farmers. By day they work along the rows, a few spots in turn, then carry the harvest in to the fire.

What You Carry

Improved

• When you're short for a colony or an army, the message says what you're carrying and that it has to go into storage first, as claiming land already did.

Look Before You Switch

Fixed

• Looking through the modes in Battle's team picker no longer switches the round for everyone. The mode you pick switches it only when you join with it, and the picker tells you so.
• After the kind of round changes, it can change again only 30 seconds later, so a round gets played.
• A headshot on an aurochs counts on its head, not just behind it, and the deer's head is measured from the model too.

Battle

New

• Battle, on the Play menu: red against blue, just the fight, one round after another. Pick a side once, everyone is kitted out, and there are four kinds of round: Flag battle, Team survival (4 on 4, one life, first to 3), Free-for-all (first to 10 kills), and Survival (one life, last one standing). Switch team from the pause menu.
• The bow is one scheme: hold attack to draw, release to loose. In third person you see a real draw, arrow from the quiver to the cheek, and you hear it, from other players too.

Improved

• Spear thrusts in both hands, and the club swings with weight.
• The battle flag is marked on screen with a pillar of light, and the scoreboard is bigger and closes when you choose.
• Cloaks hang in folds, with a rolled hide collar at the shoulders.
• When you can't join a battle, it says how to help: become one side's ally first.

Fixed

• Keys no longer stick when the window loses focus, and pressing opposite directions follows the last one.

Deer

New

• Deer in the forests, the taiga, and the open grassland: does and antlered stags in small herds. They notice you from farther off than horses and run faster, so stalk them crouching, or take them with a bow.

Fixed

• The canoe's inside shows its carved wood on the water again, instead of the water through it.
• Crouching leans you forward into a stalk, not back.

Plain Battle

Improved

• How a battle is won, in the battle: the bars are marked as lives, your goal is spelled out, and a line explains that every fall costs a life and supplies at the flag add more.
• Who is on which side: in a fight, everyone's nameplate turns their side's color, and you're told the moment you're in, and with whom.
• The battle report says what the losing side lost (the land, burned buildings, citizens, goods), and how many lives the winners had left.
• Damage numbers are bigger, bolder, and outlined, so they read on a TV and against the sky.
• The mouse wheel changes weapons on foot.

Palisades

New

• Walls go in runs, at any angle: choose Wall in the build menu, place where it starts, then where it ends, up to 16 m. The next run starts where the last one ended, so you can go round a village in one go; R (□) lets go of the line. The stakes stand on the ground all along, up and down the hill.
• From horseback you can pick, gather, and loot what's in reach. Hold the use button to get down.

Improved

• At your own campfire, the use button takes the road to your other settlements (it was only in the B menu).

Dugout

New

• A stone axe to craft (2 wood, 3 stone, 1 fiber): it takes two wood with every hit on a tree. It sits after the club, so the spear and the rest move one key along.
• A flint point to craft (3 stone, 1 fiber): carry one and your spear hits harder, in hand or thrown.

Improved

• The canoe is a proper dugout: one hollowed log, its ends rising to points, carved paler inside.
• Big boulders are worth the walk: the larger the rock, the more hits it takes and the more stone it gives, about 20 from the biggest.
• Nothing you carry wears out.

Coils and Climbs

New

• A new hairstyle, coils: a rounded crown of tight curls. Pick it under Hairstyle in Edit appearance.

Improved

• Hands at rest look relaxed: the fingers curl a little more toward the little finger, and the thumb lies alongside instead of sticking out.
• Running stands taller: chest up and head level, still leaning into the stride.

Fixed

• The bow is a bow again: its stave curves through your grip and the string runs tip to tip.
• Fall into a pit with no way out on foot, and you can scramble up the rock after pushing against it for a moment.

Stone Footings

Improved

• Buildings on a slope stand on a dry-stone terrace that steps down to the ground, set a little into the hill, instead of a dark box hanging off the low side.
• Placing on ground that's too steep or too wet moves the building to the nearest good spot close by, and says how steep it was when nothing nearby works.
• Founding a settlement judges steep ground the same way building does, so land that takes buildings takes a colony too. When it's too steep, it says how much of the ground is flat enough.

Says What It Needs

Improved

• When something can't happen yet, the game says what would make it possible: a building that needs a bigger settlement lists the citizens and storage still missing, and a colony says how your home has to grow first.
• Claiming land too far away suggests founding a colony out there, and the map says so on the tile.
• Attacking land that doesn't border yours says to claim your way to their border first; building outside your land says to claim the tile.
• Short on goods for a building, an army, or a colony: the game says exactly how much of what.

Good Ground

Fixed

• Skirmish capitals start near trees and rocks: no more starting in bare snow with nothing to gather.
• When your land is cut off, the notice says who cut it and why: land must join one of your settlements through your own tiles. If it falls, you're told where it went.

Saddled

Fixed

• Other players now see your horse under you when you ride, instead of you floating along beside a horse standing still.
• You can't walk into big boulders any more: you stop at the stone's edge.

Pack and Store

Fixed

• When you can't afford land, the game says what's short, and if you're carrying it, that it has to go into storage at your settlement first.

Plain Odds

Fixed

• Everyone sees the same odds before a battle, attackers and defenders too, not only those still deciding whether to join.
• Settings on a controller: moving down the list scrolls to keep the chosen row in view on short screens like a TV.

Your Land

Fixed

• When your land is attacked, the battle strip shows that battle, even with other battles closer by, and the notice says it's your land.
• Losing land tells you so, in your own words.

Fair Camps

Fixed

• Battle camps are never right by the flag any more: both sides' camps now sit the same distance out, 36 to 48 m, so neither side can restock lives almost instantly.
• A server update no longer tells everyone "You logged in somewhere else."

Long Shade

Fixed

• Steep rock in shade at sunrise and sunset no longer shows blocky patches of light: shadows soften as the sun sinks, as long shadows do.

Spray

New

• In the test world with draining rivers, mist rises where each waterfall lands and drifts downstream in the wind, veiling the foot of the fall, and a faint haze lies over white water.

Steady

Fixed

• Horses, aurochs, and wolves turn in smooth arcs instead of jerking round.
• Wild horses are back to their true shape, without the swelling at the shoulders and girth.

Weathered

Improved

• Flowers show their true colors: buttercups, poppies, violets, and bluebells bloom bright instead of pale.
• Stones weather: each one a little warmer or cooler, with soft moss on top where the land is damp.
• Every tree has its own green, fruit ripens from gold to orange-red, and small plants lean and vary in size.

Stone in Shade

Improved

• Steep rock in shadow no longer sinks to black up close: light bouncing off the sunlit ground shows its shape, while far mountains keep their dark outlines.

Gusts

Improved

• Gusts of wind roll across the land: you can watch one sweep through a meadow, bend the trees, and darken the water as it crosses a lake.
• Flowers, ferns, reeds, and bushes nod in the breeze, and leaves flutter at the tops of the trees. Mornings are calm; storms blow hard.

Homespun

Improved

• Cloth comes in the dyes people had: lichen green, madder red, woad blue, ochre, walnut, weld, bark, rust, undyed wool, and soot.
• Hands at rest hang half-open instead of in fists, and keep their grip on whatever they hold.

Soft Edges

Improved

• Where meadow meets forest floor, a riverbank, sand, or rock, the edge wanders softly at any distance instead of running in jagged zigzags.

Clear Water

Improved

• Lakes and rivers are clear in the shallows, showing their sand and pebble beds, and deepen to blue-green offshore. From a distance a lake mirrors the sky, with the hills darker along its far shore.
• Waves wash up the beach and draw back, leaving wet sand that glistens. The sea has a line of lacy foam along the shore; calm lakes don't.
• Rapids and waterfalls stream white downstream instead of showing a zigzag pattern, and rivers show their current in faint streaks.
• Ripples break the sun into glints, and the banks of lakes and streams are dark and damp at the water's edge.

Faces

New

• New people: a fuller, truer body for everyone, with a real face, hands, and feet. Choose a man or a woman, and a beard, in your look.

Improved

• Clothes hang like cloth: loose shirts and trousers, a tunic skirt that moves with your stride, a belt and a hide strap that lie flat, and a cloak from the shoulders.
• Faces differ from person to person, and no one scowls.
• In first person you see your own hands and sleeves on what you hold.
• A herd is no longer a row of twins: horses come bay, dark bay, chestnut, dun, and grey, and aurochs and wolves vary in shade.

Envoys

New

• In Last Realm Standing, rival rulers send envoys: a truce to end a war, or an alliance against a common enemy. The offer asks you yes or no (Y or N, or the D-pad), waits until your battle is over, and lapses if you let it.
• A truce ends the war, and neither side may declare another for six minutes.
• The map shows how realms stand where their land meets: red at war, a solid line between allies, stitches for a truce. A key in the corner says which is which.

Improved

• Rulers each have a manner with envoys: a cautious one seeks a truce once a war drags on, and a vengeful one never deals with whoever struck it, or asks twice after a no.
• Moving on foot has weight: you build into a sprint, turn in a wider arc at a run, and stop firmly without sliding.

Fixed

• A road between your settlements no longer clips the corner of another realm's land on its way round.

Startled

Improved

• A herd follows its leader: the others graze near it and trot to catch up when they fall behind.
• Startle a herd and it freezes for a moment, heads up and facing you, then bolts together the same way, and gathers again once it is clear.
• Grazers lift their heads to look about now and then, and a headshot finds the head where you see it.
• Animals move between a walk and a gallop without a jump, and wild horses are built like horses: deep through the girth, on solid legs.
• Wolves spread out around the one they are hunting, and creep in low.
• Aurochs are a warm black-brown, easier to make out against dark ground.

Soft Light

Improved

• Shadows have soft, clean edges instead of stair-stepped ones, and on High they reach twice as far, so trees in the middle distance sit on the ground.
• Where sand meets grass, the edge wanders naturally instead of following a grid of blocks.

Squad

New

• Your party is your squad everywhere, not only in matches: in Chronicle you see each other's battle marks and waypoints too.
• Squadmates show on the map and minimap in gold, with their initial, and on the minimap they sit on the rim pointing the way when they're out of range.

Fixed

• Names on the map no longer print over each other: a label that would land on another steps down a line.

Herds

Improved

• Wild horses, aurochs, and wolves are new animals: rounder, shaded like the people, and in true colors, from a bay horse to a near-black aurochs with a pale stripe down its back.
• They move like animals: they walk and gallop at the pace their legs are going, follow smooth paths instead of stepping, lean into turns, and lie along the slope.
• Grazers graze. Standing, they put their heads down to eat, look up and about, and after a scare stay alert a while before they settle.
• A wounded animal flinches, a wolf lunges when it bites, and every animal falls with its own death.

Firm Ground

Fixed

• People and animals in the distance no longer stand knee-deep in the ground in hollows and along streams, and dropped bags and spent arrows sit on the ground there too.

Where It Fell

Fixed

• Your last moments before an update are no longer lost: where you stood, what you carried, and what your settlement made in the half-minute before the server restarted are all kept now.
• A thrown spear or a spent arrow is still lying where it fell after the server restarts, and canoes moored at a dock are still there.

Cascade

Improved

• In the test world with draining rivers, a stream down a steep mountainside falls as one white cascade, at any height, instead of a staircase of little steps.

Fixed

• In the same test world, the stream leaving a lake no longer has the lake's water spilling over it, and steep streams no longer leave raised ridges along their banks.

Still Water

Fixed

• Flowing rivers drew pale chevrons and lines across their water. The ripples now wander as water does.

Landing

New

• A hamlet by the sea builds its own dock once it has wood to spare, and its people start carving canoes there.

Watching

Improved

• Taken in a Skirmish when the winner's squad is full, you watch the rest of the match over the shoulders of those still in it (← and → to switch), instead of wandering about.

Shoulder to Shoulder

New

• In a battle, fight beside a friend: with another person of your side within a few steps, blows land lighter.

Improved

• Last Realm Standing: bot rulers go to war with the realms they share a border with, so their wars are fought, not just declared.
• Stopped at a waterfall, the offer to carry your canoe round stays while you think.

Portage

New

• Stopped at a waterfall in your canoe? Use carries it round, on to calm water past the drop.

Riverbanks

Improved

• White water over a ford breaks into streaks instead of lining up in chevrons.

Dark Water

Fixed

• Water ignored the night: the sea kept its daytime color and white water glowed. Both now darken with the light.

At the Gallop

Improved

• Arrows, spears, and stones loosed from horseback carry the horse's speed: lead your target at a gallop.

A Word

New

• Chat with your squad and your allies, and nobody else. Press Enter to type, or pick a quick line. On a controller it's in the Options menu.

Improved

• Travel cards say how long the road takes.

Two Fronts

New

• Last Realm Standing: a realm can fight two battles at once, so a squad can split up and hold both.
• Roads cross your land, your allies', and open country, but never another realm's. Where an enemy claims land across a road it goes round if it can, and is cut if it can't.
• A colony grows only while its road home is open, up to the size of your capital. Cut off, it stops growing, and the map says so.

Improved

• A trip by road takes a few seconds a kilometer, behind the name of where you're going. A fall or a battle on the way ends it.
• In a squad, travel the roads between your realm's settlements.

Hold On

New

• Last Realm Standing: a realm falls with its last settlement. Lose your capital and your realm holds on from your strongest colony, which becomes its seat, worn down to a third.
• Colonies stand a siege, as capitals do: win battles beside one to wear it down, then take it.
• Bot rulers whose war has gone quiet take on a second enemy, so a long match keeps moving.

Fixed

• A ruler with a colony is listed once on the map, not once per settlement.

One Banner

New

• Skirmish: take a realm's capital and the realm is yours. Its capital becomes one of your settlements, buildings and all, and its land goes with it.
• A person whose capital falls in Skirmish joins the winner's squad and fights on for them. A squad holds up to four.
• Last Realm Standing has no border: claim land as far as you can hold it. The ring on the map shows only while you choose where to settle.

Fixed

• Match news no longer runs into the health bar when your pack holds a lot.
• The map says "1 tile", not "1 tiles".

Second Look

New

• Attack land of a realm you're at peace with, and it declares war on them first. The map always says why a tile can't be attacked.
• Controller: L1 aims. It draws the bow or raises the spear to throw, and L2 stays block. Sprint is L3.
• Siege matches show how much of your capital still stands in the match bar.
• The match tips are in Guide, How to play.
• The big map shows the match's edge (the yellow ring on the minimap): land beyond it can't be claimed.

Improved

• The B menu always offers a colony where you can found one, with its cost here or how far you still have to go.
• Battle news and the horn are only for the battles that concern you.
• Water near you is drawn from a finer map: crisp shores instead of stair-steps, and calmer ripples over the shallows.
• Battle camps and flags keep out of pits and crevices.
• The map pans faster.
• Leaving a match for the main menu asks twice, since you can't come back to it.
• On a controller, the map tells you to press Triangle for peace, alliances, and war.

Fixed

• Arrows, spears, and stones from horseback (and in third person) flew low: they now go where the crosshair is.
• Closing What's new no longer hides the match tips.
• Prompts name the controller's buttons when you're using one (No arrows · craft some, and others).
• No water inside the canoe.

Watershed

New

• A Shadows setting (Settings, Graphics): raise it if night and shade look black on your screen, often a TV, or lower it for deeper shadows. Night and shade are a little brighter to begin with.
• A new test world on the Dev page, with rivers that follow where rain drains: they rise in the hills, only ever run downhill through rapids and falls, and meet a lake or the sea. Lakes fill hollows in the land and spill out over their rims as streams.

Smooth Water

Fixed

• A canoe swings round smoothly with each stroke instead of jerking a few degrees at a time.
• In the test world, hill rivers no longer flow uphill in places: ripples and the current run down the reaches.

Common Enemies

New

• Bot rulers send envoys of their own in Last Realm Standing: an alliance to a realm that shares their enemy, and peace to a person they're losing to. Open the map to accept.

While You Wait

New

• Tips while a match gets going: one at a time under the clock, on what's worth doing before the fighting starts. Put them away with ✕, Esc, or ○.
• Your settlements are on the minimap, in your realm's color; the capital is the larger mark, and when it's out of range it sits on the rim pointing home.

Improved

• Deep night is a touch less black in the shadows: walls and faces stay readable, and the night stays dark.

Fixed

• Reconnect works with a controller (✕, ○, or Options) and with Enter.

Envoys

New

• Bot rulers answer your envoys in Last Realm Standing: offer peace or an alliance and they weigh it by their temper and how they stand. Cautious rulers take peace readily, bold ones only when they're losing, and vengeful ones never from whoever last struck them; a shared enemy is the best reason to ally. In Skirmish every realm stays at war.

Fixed

• Your canoe's spare paddle no longer shows while you're paddling it.

Paddle Side

Improved

• A canoe turns the way a real one does: paddle on the right to swing left, and the other way round. Look where you want to go and the strokes come on the side that takes you there, a few degrees each, alternating once you're on course.
• In the saddle the view rises and falls with the horse's stride, instead of jostling like a sprint.

Hold the Flag

Improved

• Defenders hold their ground: when the flag starts to go, bots on the defending side break off and fall back to stand on it, instead of chasing attackers round the field. Battles last a couple of minutes more, and most end in a real fight.
• Villagers dress for their work: wood gatherers in hide, water carriers in a plain tunic.
• In the test world, rivers spread into wide mouths at the coast, with gravel bars.

White Water

Improved

• In the test world's hill rivers: boulders crowd the rapids and the foot of each fall, falls are heard before they're seen (a low roar, never loud), and the rivers show from afar and on the map.

From the Hills

New

• Rivers that run down out of the hills in reaches, stepping down through rapids and over waterfalls into white water. Being tried in a test world first; Chronicle and the matches keep today's rivers for now.

Downstream

Improved

• Rivers carry you: rest the paddle and a canoe drifts downstream, and a swimmer is borne along a little.
• Villagers have work to do: some fetch water from the nearest shore and carry it back to the fire, others gather wood at the edge of the village and bring it in.
• Horses are a warm bay with a dark mane, instead of near black.

Fixed

• Tree trunks are bark brown again; dry country had been tinting them red.

Running Water

New

• Rivers have fords: every few hundred meters the bed rises over pale gravel, shallow enough to wade or ride across. In new worlds, Skirmish and Last Realm Standing among them; Chronicle's world stays as it is.

Improved

• Rivers flow: ripples run downstream, and break white where the water runs shallow.

Many Minds

New

• Party ready check: friends mark themselves ready on the Party screen, and the leader sees how many are before finding a match. Going in before everyone's ready takes a second press.

Improved

• Bot rulers each have a temper, shown on the map: bold ones attack often, cautious ones keep to themselves until they're the bigger realm, greedy ones go for the richest land, and vengeful ones strike back at whoever last attacked them.
• Scouts mark foes from twice as far, and their marks last three times as long.

Two Fingers

New

• Whistle for your horse (in the menu, once it's out of easy reach): it comes at a gallop, right to your side, and swims to you if it has to.

Sure Footing

Improved

• Battle flags go on the gentlest dry ground near a tile's center, not on peaks, pits, or steep slopes.
• Fighters bound up steep slopes leaning into the hill, and sit back a little going down.
• In the saddle your hands hold the reins and ride the horse's stride instead of swinging as if you were running.
• Horses sound like horses: the four beats of a walk, the two of a trot, and the rolling three of a gallop, on whatever ground they cross.

Fixed

• Battle bots no longer walk through rocks and tree trunks.
• Battle bots swim across rivers instead of stopping at the bank.

Called Home

New

• The call to arms shows the odds: how the two armies would fare if it were left to them. The ruler who attacked doesn't see them; they already chose.
• Let a call to arms pass: choose "Let it pass" in the menu and that battle stops calling you.
• Battles show on the minimap as a flag in the color of the side holding the ground.

Improved

• Any stone you pick up can be thrown. Throwing stones are no longer a separate thing to make; the ones in your pack became stone.
• When a battle you were carried to is over, you're carried back to where you answered the call.

Clear Ground

Improved

• "Get down" shows for a moment when you mount, then gets out of the way while you ride.
• The Play menu describes each way to play by how it feels instead of how long it runs.
• The match clock, the battle strip, and your settlement's header stack one under another instead of overlapping.

Fixed

• Faint jagged lines no longer cross the ground every 64 m in first person.
• The Main menu button after a Skirmish works with a controller.

Grey Day

Improved

• Overcast and rainy days are soft and grey instead of murky: with the sun hidden, the whole sky lights the land, as it does on a real grey day. Nights stay dark.

Fan Out

Improved

• Bots sent to a marked spot spread out around it instead of standing in one another.
• The call to arms tells you that marking a foe sends your fighters after them.

Lead the Line

New

• Lead your side's bots in a battle: mark a foe (Q, or R1) and the nearest three go for them; mark a spot and they move up and hold it. With no one in sight, bots fall in with you when you're out near the flag.

Improved

• Battles are shorter and more decisive: 20 lives a side (was 24, which a fight never used up), the flag taken in 30 seconds (was 45), and the defense holds after 5 minutes (was 6). A fallen bot is out a little longer, so a death opens a window to push.

Tall Timber

Improved

• Pines grow like conifers instead of Christmas trees: tall and narrow, a bare trunk below, and many ragged tiers with branch tips that reach out and droop.
• Rocky slopes look like rock: warm and cool stretches, layers that follow the hillside, and pale scree where the slope eases into grass. Grass no longer grows on bare rock.

Plain Ends

Improved

• After a battle, the scoreboard opens with whether your side won or lost, and says what happens now: the land is yours, it holds, or how long your realm is safe from attack.
• Nameplates fade with distance: a battle down the valley is people fighting, not a pile of labels. Bots' names are gone by 40 m; people's soften but stay, so you can find your friends.

Even Ground

Improved

• In a match, claiming land trades your spare stock for what the claim is short of, two for one: plenty of food and stone but no wood, and your people trade for it. The map says what they'll trade.
• Bot rulers pay what you pay for land. They had it at half price, and a realm run by people fell to about half their size.
• Skirmish's economy runs a little faster, so the island still fills in about the same time.
• Bot rulers with a person's land in reach usually go for it: you came to fight.

Fair Fight

Improved

• Battle bots fight like people: no more than two press one foe at a time while the rest circle, guard up, waiting their turn. After a swing they give a little ground.
• A blow that gets through rocks a bot back and spoils the swing it was winding up, and a hurt bot often raises its guard. Their guard turns aside blows from the front, as yours does.
• Parry a bot's swing and it staggers, open to your counter.

Good Horse

New

• Tend your horse: beside it on foot, press F (d-pad ↑) to feed it from your pack, or to brush it down. Each once a minute.
• Care builds a bond, from wary to devoted. A cared-for horse wades deeper, gallops a little faster, and jumps farther. A loyal one swims after you instead of waiting on the bank. Neglect wears the bond down.

Improved

• A horse holds steady under you in a fight: blows no longer shove you about in the saddle.
• News is grouped under New, Improved, and Fixed, here and on erasbattle.com.

Second Wind

New

• Eating gives back a fifth of your stamina, even on a full stomach. Winded with food in your pack, you're shown how to eat.

Fixed

• A horse at a gallop can jump a narrow river channel. Fall short and you're in the water, and it waits on the bank.

Whole Realm

Improved

• At the end of a match, a realm's land includes its vassals'.

Restless Vassals

Improved

• Conquered bot realms grow their land, propose attacks to their ruler (yours show on your map, ready to launch), and rise up once they're strong enough.

Hard Won

Improved

• A conquered ruler keeps only their capital's tile, so rising up means growing back to six tiles first.

Fixed

• The Play screen fits every mode on a short laptop screen.

Squads

New

• A party in a match is one realm: one capital, fought for together. Whoever founds it rules; the rest start there and return there when they fall.
• Everyone in the squad builds in the capital, stores what they carry there, and claims land and attacks from its storage. The ruler makes war and peace.
• Bots fill the other realms, so a party of four still faces a full field.

Soft Steps

Improved

• Footsteps fit the ground: a dull pad on a road, a slosh in the shallows. Crouching, you creep almost silently.

Firelit Rain

New

• At night, rain near a fire catches its light: warm streaks around the flames, fading into the dark.

Improved

• Battle bots find their way around walls and buildings instead of stopping at them.

Strokes

Improved

• Paddling: each stroke drives the canoe forward and it glides between strokes, slowing as the water drags. It holds its line and swings round slowly, the way a hull does.

Clear Calls

Improved

• A battle's announcement says who attacks whom; your battle strip says whether you can answer. The scoreboard says who took the land, or held it.

Fixed

• A drawn bow sits lower and clear of the crosshair, and your arms stay still while you walk with a guard up.

Long Siege

Improved

• Last Realm Standing: a besieged capital holds its losses for eight minutes before it recovers (it was two), so a steady siege can bring it down.

The Road Home

New

• Travel by road: standing in one of your settlements, open the B menu and take the road to another whose land joins it. You arrive in a moment, horse and all. Not mid-battle or from a canoe, and twenty seconds between trips.

Straight Roads

Fixed

• Roads keep close to the straight way between a capital and its colony, climbing where they must, instead of taking long detours around hills.

In the Saddle

Fixed

• Riders sit a horse astride, rising and falling with its gait and leaning in as it speeds up. No more running on its back.

Over the Shoulder

New

• Third person: press C (d-pad ↓) to see yourself over the shoulder, and again to go back. The game remembers which you like.

Improved

• Tab (△) opens everything you carry, by name, above what you can make.

Thrown Spear

New

• Throw your spear: hold right click (L2) to raise it, click (R2) to throw. It hits hard (55, more from a soldier) and drops an animal where it stands.
• The spear lies where it fell, or at the feet of what it hit, until you take it back.

Fixed

• Roads ford narrow rivers again instead of detouring around them, and still go around lakes.

Spent Arrows

New

• Arrows that miss stick in the ground where they land. Pick them up again; they're lost after five minutes, or in water.

Improved

• Choosing a class: every class can found, claim, and lead a realm. The Ruler's only edge is land a quarter cheaper.

Fixed

• Keys no longer stick on a Mac when you hold ⌘ or switch away from the game.

Vassals

New

• Vassals: lose your capital in a match and you serve the conqueror. You keep your capital to build and grow, a quarter of what it makes goes to your ruler, and you return there when you fall.
• War council: as a vassal, pick an attack on the map and it goes to your ruler, who launches it with one press. You lead it from your land.
• Rebellion: hold six tiles and you can rise up against your ruler. Win the battle and your realm is free. The map shows who serves whom.

Siege

New

• Last Realm Standing: a capital stands until it's worn down. Each battle won beside it takes a third of its standing (less with walls); at nothing it lies open, and taking it takes the realm. Left alone, it recovers. The map shows how much of each capital stands.
• Bot rulers lay sieges too.

Holding Ground

New

• Land must connect to one of your settlements. Land a battle cuts off shows red on the map with a countdown: retake the land between within five minutes, or it falls (to the attacker, if it borders them). You're told when it's cut off and when it falls.

Improved

• Colonies can go inside your own land, 250 m from your other settlements (it was 500 m). Each settlement works the tiles nearest it.

Plain Words

Improved

• Claiming land: the map shows a tile's cost against your storage, what you're short, and why a tile can't be claimed. Dashed tiles are the ones you can.
• Stone builds; throwing stones are what you throw. Breaking a rock says "Break for stone".
• Building: the chosen building's line says what it does.
• In a party, the leader picks the match; everyone else is told they'll follow. The leader is marked.
• When you fall, you're told what you keep: everything in battle; elsewhere your gear, with what you gathered left in a bag.

Solid Ground

Fixed

• Walls stop thrown stones and arrows, and battle bots walk around walls and buildings.
• A horse wades a ford but stops at a deep channel. If you end up off it in the water, it waits on dry ground.
• Roads go around lakes and still ford rivers.
• The hide wrap goes over a dyed shirt, so its color shows.

Steady Aim

New

• Bow on a controller: hold L2 to draw and aim (the view draws in), R2 to loose, ○ or release L2 to let down. Right click does the same on a keyboard.
• Full screen from Settings. In Chrome and Edge, Esc stays in the game; hold it to leave full screen. Backspace closes menus too.

Improved

• The B menu (Options): up and down move between rows, the left stick works, and the keys show at the bottom.
• Hungry or hurt with food in your pack, you're shown how to eat (F, or d-pad ↑).

Telling Blows

New

• You can tell when a blow lands: marks flash around the crosshair and a small number rises off whoever you hit. Headshots show warm, blocks say so, a killing blow marks red.
• Spoils: the winning side takes a share of the loser's storage, split by score. The scoreboard shows your share.

Improved

• Whoever you hit staggers back, harder the heavier the blow.
• The spear drives forward as you press and recovers faster (32 damage, 0.85 s).

Sworn Sides

New

• Diplomacy on a controller: △ opens the rulers, the d-pad picks, ✕ confirms, ○ goes back.

Improved

• Only the two realms in a battle and their allies can fight in it; your party counts. If you can't join, the call to arms says why.
• When every foe is down, the battle strip says how many lives they have left and what still wins it.
• Conquest is retired. Skirmish is the short match, Last Realm Standing the long one, and Chronicle never stops.

Fixed

• Walk or ride into a battle you can fight in and you join where you stand. No more drifting through as a ghost.
• Declare war, offer peace, and leave an alliance work again from the map.

Paddlers

Improved

• Other players in canoes paddle now: reaching forward, pulling the blade back along the hull, and switching sides with each stroke. At rest the paddle lies across their knees.

Raiders on the Road

New

• An enemy standing on the road between a capital and its colony cuts the colony's supply for as long as they stay. The colony's ruler hears of it, and again when the road is clear.
• The colony panel says when its road home is held by enemies.

Clean Shot

New

• An arrow or a thrown rock to an animal's head brings it down where it stands, with a dull thud. Hits to the body hurt as before, and the animal runs.

Improved

• A grazing animal keeps its head low, so wait for it to look up, or aim down.

Your Keys

New

• Settings → Controls now lists every action with its key and its controller button. Click a key to change it, press the new one (Esc to cancel), or reset them all. A key you take from another action swaps over to it.
• Attack and guard can move off the mouse too. Your keys are kept on this device, and the hints on screen follow them.

Busy Neighbors

Fixed

• Bot rulers in matches no longer stall at a handful of tiles. They trade spare food for the wood and stone they need, and claim land at about twice the pace, so in Skirmish most of the island is held by minute 15 and the fighting starts sooner.

Docks

New

• Build a dock once your settlement is a hamlet: it starts on the shore and runs out into open water (turn it with R until its end reaches the water).
• Your citizens carve canoes at the dock from the settlement's wood and tie up to two there. Walk out along the deck and take one when you need it.
• You can walk on a dock's deck instead of swimming under it.

Roads

New

• Once your land joins a colony to home, a road runs between them: a worn track that follows the lie of the land, winding up valleys and around steep ground, fording a river only when it must.
• You walk and run a fifth faster on a road. Roads show on the map too.

Groves

New

• On new worlds, open grassland and savanna grow trees in groves, with open meadow between, instead of an even sprinkle. There are as many trees as before, and a few still stand alone.
• Every match is played on a new world, so matches have groves now. The first Chronicle world keeps its trees where they are.

Steady Hands

Improved

• Holding a bow, your hands stay steady as you walk. Only a slow sway is left.
• Settling in Conquest and Last Realm Standing: the clock bar tells you, as you walk, whether you can found your capital where you stand, or why not. The ring on the minimap shows how far out capitals can go.
• A warning at one minute and at fifteen seconds. If time runs out, your capital goes at the nearest good spot to where you stand, not somewhere random, and you are told.

Fixed

• Overcast nights are dark, but no longer pitch black.

Still Water

New

• In first person you paddle: both hands on the paddle, reaching forward, pulling back, side to side. The clatter while paddling is gone, and each stroke dips and pulls quietly.
• Rain comes with its weather. Clouds gather and the sun goes before the first drops, the light turns flat and grey, mist closes in under heavy rain, and it all clears slowly after. At night the rain is barely visible in the dark.

Improved

• Skirmish no longer has a closing edge. The island stays the same size all hour, its border only stops claims, and the match ends at the horn.
• Reaching for a wild horse from too far away now tells you to get closer.

Fixed

• Herds move smoothly. Animals no longer step back and forth as they walk, trot, and bolt.
• Wind, water, and surf are softer and quieter, and no longer ring or sweep like a phaser. They sit under your footsteps now, as they should.
• The canoe rides on the water instead of just under it, rocking gently. You can now see other players in their canoes.
• Paddling no longer tires you as if you were sprinting.
• In a match, a battle's strip now sits under the match clock instead of on top of it.

Open Gates

New

• In a match, you can now attack an enemy capital from the map once your land borders it, as bot rulers already could.
• Wild horses trust a rope halter. Carry one and a horse lets you walk within about 8 m, and crouch the rest of the way to stand beside it. Running at one still sends the herd off.

Fixed

• The map no longer refuses an attack just because a battle is underway somewhere else. Up to four can run at once, one per realm, and the map now says which rule is in the way when one is.

Low and Slow

New

• Crouch with Z (R3 on a controller): slower and lower, and grazing animals let you creep in about twice as close before they bolt. Sprinting stands you up.
• Other players see you crouch.

Softer Pines

Improved

• Pines have smoother, fuller tiers, so up close they read as painted rather than chipped.

Shallows

Improved

• Water thins out over the shallows and meets the shore softly, taking on the color of the sand beneath it, with a faint wet sheen where it laps the edge.
• Beaches darken where the sea wets them, with soft drifts of lighter and darker sand further up.

New Worlds

New

• Chronicle can now hold more than one world at once, each its own island with its own settlements and land. When there is more than one, Play → Chronicle asks which world to enter, and remembers your choice.
• Your name, look, class, and leaderboard standing go with you to every world. Your character, settlement, and land belong to the world you made them in.

Ready Room

Fixed

• Friends signing in from the same house no longer lock each other out: only wrong passwords count toward the wait.
• If your party’s match has already begun when you get there, you stay in the menu with a note, instead of trying again and again.

Footing

New

• People standing on a hillside plant both feet on the ground: the downhill knee straightens, the uphill one bends, and each foot lies along the slope.
• Standing still, people shift their weight from one foot to the other now and then.
• Turning on the spot takes a few small steps instead of a spin on the heels.
• When a battle starts near a village, its people stop, look toward the noise, and hurry in to the fire.

Standings

Improved

• Skirmish, Conquest, and Last Realm Standing each have their own leaderboard: wins, matches played, realms conquered, and your best finish. A win counts for everyone in the winning realm.

Fixed

• Bot rulers no longer appear on the Chronicle boards.

Many Fronts

New

• Several battles can run at once, up to four. Each realm fights one battle at a time, so while one squad holds a border, another can strike elsewhere.
• Answering the call to arms puts you in the nearest battle you can join. Battle scoreboards go to the people who fought, and the realms involved.
• Skirmish plays on a bigger island, and claiming land costs half as much in matches, so realms grow and meet sooner.

Improved

• A cleaner B menu: the three ways to play up top, everything else in a quiet row beneath, and calls to battle above all. Every panel shares one calmer look.
• Settings in the main menu is now a page like the others.

A Few Notes

New

• Music, used sparingly: a lyre and a bone flute at dawn and dusk, a quiet line now and then on high ground, and a short phrase at the moments that matter. Then silence again. Never more than one piece every ten minutes.
• A lyre plays softly over the main menu.
• The Music slider in Settings sets its volume.

Hoof and Hull

New

• Horses: craft a rope halter (fiber and a hide), walk up to a wild horse, and press E. Hold still while it decides whether to trust you; food in your pack helps, and it eats some. Startle the herd and it's off.
• Your horse follows you around and waits at the water's edge. Press E beside it to ride: twice as fast, and higher up. Press E again to get down.
• Canoes: craft a dugout canoe (wood and stone) and carry it. Walk into deep water and you paddle instead of swim, gliding along rivers and coasts.

Improved

• Horses and the other animals are smoother to look at, too.

Hide and Cloth

New

• New in Edit appearance: what you wear. A tunic with a hem and rope belt, a plain shirt, a hide wrap, or a hide cloak.
• Tunic hems and cloaks are real cloth up close: they hang, sway in the wind, and swing as you move.
• Grass parts around your feet and springs back as you pass.

Improved

• People look softer and more alive: smooth, painterly shading instead of hard facets.
• Gentler faces: eyes and brows now take a deep shade of each person's own coloring instead of a hard black.

Together

New

• Parties: send your link from Party in the main menu, and up to three friends join you. Your party shows along the bottom of the menu, with a light for who's online.
• When the party leader starts a match, everyone follows into the same one, and your realms are allies from the first minute.
• Before you begin, you and your party stand together, each with their name and class. Change your class or your look right there.

Improved

• Change your class whenever you like before you play: Change class and Edit appearance sit right under your character.

Firm Ground

Improved

• Play now spells out each mode's rules beside the list: how long it runs, how capitals and diplomacy work, colonies, and how to win.
• Settlements and capitals need habitable ground: mostly dry and gentle enough to build on. No more capitals on cliff faces.
• New islands (every match, and the next Chronicle season) carve rivers into broad valleys instead of deep, narrow slots.

Clash

New

• Guard: hold right click (L2) to raise your weapon or fists. Blows from the front do far less, but each one costs stamina, and when you run out your guard breaks.
• Parry: raise your guard just as a blow lands and you turn it aside completely. Your attacker staggers, open for a moment.
• Dodge: press V (○) to sidestep the way you're moving. Time it right and the blow finds nothing.
• Stamina: running, fighting swings, and dodges spend it; it comes back when you rest. Its bar appears only while you're using it. Heavier weapons cost more to swing. Chopping and gathering are free.
• Hits land with weight: your view jolts and you're shoved back, and other people flinch when struck.
• Getting ready: choose a mode in Play, then your class and look, then begin. In a match you pick your class fresh each time; Chronicle keeps yours.
• Conquest and Last Realm Standing: walk out and choose where your capital goes, start at peace and choose your own wars, found colonies, and play out the clock on a larger map. Skirmish keeps its closing edge.

Colonies

New

• Found a colony: once your home is a hamlet, walk at least 500 m from your settlements, open the B menu, and choose Found a colony. Your home can support one colony per level it has grown.
• A colony needs supply until it grows into a village. Claim land until its territory joins your home's, and supplies flow on their own; or carry goods there yourself (each delivery keeps it going for half an hour). Unsupplied, its people slowly drift away.
• Walk into one of your colonies and you manage it: build, store, and mark keep-clear areas there as you would at home.

Fixed

• The main menu no longer flickers as you move the mouse over it.
• The server no longer stops if one request goes wrong.

Matches

New

• Three new ways to play, from Play in the main menu: Skirmish (an hour, six realms), Conquest (two and a half hours, eight realms), and Last Realm Standing (until one realm is left, up to four hours). Each match is a fresh island of its own.
• Every realm gets a capital and starts at war with every other. Take a realm's capital and you conquer it: its land is yours, and its people fight for you.
• The edge of the island closes in as the match goes on. Land outside it is lost, and so is a capital. You'll see it as a wall of light, and on the minimap.
• Empty realms are run by bot rulers who claim land and go to war on their own. Join their battles on either side.
• At the end, the realm holding the most land wins, and the results show who fought for whom.
• Chronicle, the world that never stops, is still there: choose it from Play.

Paths

New

• Classes: choose your path in the main menu. Ruler (claiming land costs a quarter less), Architect (buildings cost a quarter less, and your citizens build more often), Soldier (hits harder, takes less), Scout (faster, sees farther), or Provisioner (gathers more, hauls supplies at full speed). New players choose before their first step; you can change once an hour.
• Scouts can make camp (B menu) and come back to it when they fall. Anyone who isn't an ally can tear a camp down.
• Your class shows as a colored line under your name, and on the leaderboards.

Front Door

New

• A new beginning: Eras now opens on the island itself at golden hour, with a main menu over it. Play, invite friends, check the leaderboards, change your look, read the news, and adjust settings before you step in.
• Invite friends: Party in the main menu gives you a link. Friends who join from it skip the invite code and start right next to you. Share it, or copy it.
• Leaderboards in the main menu, with your own name picked out, and a Share button that makes a picture card of where you stand.
• Settings: graphics quality (Low, Medium, High), a frame rate cap (60 by default, so laptops run cooler and quieter), separate volumes for effects and ambience, look speed, and invert look. Find them in the main menu or the B menu.
• Photo mode (P, or the B menu): the interface fades away and the camera floats free. Zoom with the wheel, shift the light with [ and ], and press Enter to save a picture.
• Main menu in the B menu takes you back to the title without closing the game.
• On a phone or tablet, Eras now says kindly that it is made for a computer for now, and offers to send you the link.
• Eras has a home: erasbattle.com, with news and screenshots. The game is also at play.erasbattle.com.

Improved

• The land looks warmer: trees shade as soft, rounded crowns and glow where the sun shines through them, meadows have patches of sunlit and lush grass, the distance turns blue, and moonlit nights are easier to see.
• Smoother on slow connections: the game sends about a seventh as much data as before, and animals glide between updates.

Always On

Improved

• The world keeps running when nobody's online. Your citizens farm, gather, and build around the clock, so there's always something new when you check in.

Worn Paths

Improved

• Village paths blend into the land: soft edges, dirt that matches the ground around it, wheel ruts on the main streets, and thin, short grass at the margins.
• Paths turn to mud in the rain and dry out slowly afterward.

Growing

New

• Settlements grow on their own: citizens build homes when crowded, farms when food runs short, and storage when it fills, paid from storage. Mark areas "Keep clear" (K in builder mode) where they shouldn't build.
• Villages are laid out: an open square around the campfire, dirt streets that follow the lie of the land, and buildings facing them. Huts gather along the lanes, storage and longhouses near the square, farms out on the edges. Citizens clear the trees in their way.
• Levels: Camp, Hamlet, Village, Town. Each holds more people, grows more food, stores more, and defends better. The builder panel shows what the next level needs. Villages can build the new Longhouse (houses 5).
• Build anywhere on land you own, not just around the campfire. Store and take things at any of your huts, longhouses, or storage.
• War sets you back: buildings on a captured tile burn, the loser loses some citizens, and a ruler who just lost land is safe from attack for 2 hours. Claiming gets a little pricier as a realm grows.

Fixed

• Chop fruit trees for wood. Farms lie on the slope of the land, and buildings no longer sink into hillsides.
• Sound cutting out after a minute in Safari.

Callouts

New

• Battle markers: aim at an enemy, a bot, a wolf, or a spot and press Q (R1 on a controller). A red diamond with its distance shows over it for 15 seconds and follows it as it moves. Up to five at once; marking the same thing again restarts it.
• Waypoints: open the map (M) and right-click, or press Q (R1), to set your waypoint. It shows as a pillar of light in your color, on the map and minimap, with its distance on screen. It stays until you remove it (right-click it again).

Improved

• Only you and your allies see markers and waypoints: anyone you are allied with, or on your side in a battle. Off-screen ones show as arrows at the edge.

Still Water

New

• New leaderboard: Hunters and fishers. Animals hunted, fish caught, and wolves killed, counted from today.

Fixed

• Shorelines no longer flicker. Distant coasts stay put, and far-off water is calm instead of shimmering.
• Running in first person no longer swings your chest and shoulders into view. The camera bobs with your stride instead.

Firelight

New

• Weather: clouds, rain, thunderstorms, snow in the cold, and dust in the desert. Fronts drift across the island, so it can be raining in one valley and clear on the next ridge. Everyone sees the same sky.
• More life: wildflowers, ferns, reeds by the water, cacti, and flocks of birds that scatter when you get close.
• More food: pick mushrooms and fruit, or hunt wild horses and aurochs for meat and hides. Meat fills you up more than berries.
• New crafts: a bow and arrows (hold to draw, let go to shoot; a full draw flies farther and hits harder) and a fishing pole (cast into water, wait for the bobber to dip, and click in time). Gather reeds for fiber to make them. Look for rings on the water: fish are shoaling there.
• Wolves: at night, in the woods, a lone traveler may hear a howl. Stick together, or head home.
• Every settlement has a campfire. At night your citizens gather around it, sitting and warming their hands, then go back to work at dawn.
• Choose your look: skin, hair color, hairstyle, shirt, and trousers. New players pick when they sign up; everyone else can change it any time from the B menu (Appearance).
• First person now shows your real arms, in your own skin and sleeves. Swings, thrusts, jabs, and throws bend at the shoulder and elbow, and empty hands stay out of view until you use them.
• The Guide (B menu): how to play, these notes, and a leaderboard. The leaderboard is also at /leaderboard.
• Battles now count toward your lifetime record: battles fought, battles won, and awards earned.

Improved

• Hide armor is now made from hides (3) and wood, not traded food.
• Snappier attacks: a click just before your weapon is ready still counts, and holding the button (or R2) keeps swinging.

Open for friends

New

• Eras is online at one address, with an invite code for new accounts.
• The world sleeps when nobody is playing, and settlements catch up when it wakes.

Battles

New

• Rulers at war can attack a bordering tile. A horn sounds the call to arms, and anyone can join a side from the B menu.
• Each side has 24 lives. Attackers win by holding the flag or running the defenders out of lives; defenders win by holding out for 6 minutes.
• Bots fill thin sides. Haul supplies from camp to the flag for extra lives and healing.
• Unanswered battles are decided by each side's people, land, food, and terrain.
• A scoreboard and awards at the end, including the dreaded "Outscored by a bot".

Improved

• People rebuilt on a rigged, animated body.

Rulers

New

• Map mode (M): a hex map of the whole island. Claim land next to yours for income every minute.
• Diplomacy: declare war, offer alliances, make peace.
• One mode menu (B) for ground, settlement, and map.

Settlements

New

• Found a settlement and build huts, farms, storage, and walls.
• Citizens arrive, farm, gather, and eat, even while you're away.
• Sound everywhere: wind, birds, water, crickets at night, and every swing and footstep.

Survival

New

• Gather wood, stone, berries, and rocks. Craft clubs, spears, throwing rocks, and hide armor.
• Hunger, health, death, and dropped bags of loot.
• Time of day is the same for everyone.

First steps

New

• A whole island to walk, with day and night, mountains, rivers, and the other players.