King under the Mountain

December 2020 Update - Alpha 5 initial release
over 3 years ago – Thu, Dec 24, 2020 at 03:48:06 AM

Another month, another year even, and so it's another dev update for King under the Mountain! There was another fantastic burst of progress this month culminating in the first release of Alpha 5, covering half of the items from the Alpha 5 roadmap already - so I'll jump straight in to the new developments!

First of all there is now a (very bare-bones) embark screen (i.e. "Start new game" screen). This allows you to set a name for your settlement (or let the game randomly generate one) as well as set the seed - the number used to initialise the random generation - before starting the game proper. You can enter text into the map seed field if you like, though the game will turn it into a long number as shown. This means if you discover a map you particularly like, you can use the same seed again in the future to recreate it, or better yet, share map seeds with other players. In the future this screen will contain a lot of options to customise your starting settlers, items, even the map itself before starting a new game, but it's nice to have even this in the meantime.

Speaking of customising settlers, you can now rename them in-game. Perhaps not too exciting by itself but it leads on to...

Twitch integration! While playing the game on Twitch, you can now connect your account using the game's options menu, and this will reveal the options shown above to have settlers in-game automatically have names based on current Twitch viewers, with an extra option to prioritise Twitch subscribers before other viewers. While this feature has been tested and works well as far as I can tell, I don't believe anyone has tried this feature out properly on a Twitch stream yet, so please let me know if you're going to give it a try!

Thanks to one of the several very talented artists I'm working with, there are now new visual assets for the way floors overlap onto each other. On the left in the picture above is my old programmer art wavy-edge type of flooring overlaps, and on the right something looking much much better for different types of floors (see if you can spot how the dirt onto stone looks different, it's subtle!). Also the grass flooring itself has had an overhaul to look better too. There's a lot of artwork in progress and also already completed for features to be added in the not too distant future, but I'd prefer to keep the reveal of those for when the features are actually implemented properly.

So you can name your settlement now, but why does that matter? To help you identify different saved games! Above is the load game screen that's just been added to the main menu (though I'm sure most of the time players will just hit "Continue game" to continue their current save). This means you're not limited to a single saved game at a time anymore! Long overdue like most of the features in the pre-Steam Alpha roadmap and I'm very happy to see it added. The save files themselves have been overhauled so that they use compression, so in previous versions a save file would be 30 to 50 megabytes, now one is generally around 2 and a half megabytes!

Speaking of long-overdue Alpha features, stockpiles have been reworked (they are not quite so fixed in what they can store anymore) and stockpile management/filtering has been added. Click on a stockpile and click on the Settings button to get the view above, this lets you customise which item groups a stockpile stores, down to the level of the items under those, and you can even select the materials for those items if you wish. Since the above screenshot was taken, a priority control has also been added to stockpile management, so you can set which stockpiles should be filled first or last, or somewhere in between.

Finally there's a few small improvements to the settler management screen following player feedback. There's a display of number of beds at the top of the screen, clicking on (i.e. filtering to) a profession keeps the other settlers in view but greyed out, and there's some sort options at the top to view the settlers by name or decreasing unhappiness (which was the old default).

Currently I'm working on a particle effect system - the small, short-lived visual effects you see in most games. This will (hopefully) be things like sparks flying off a blacksmith's forge, pieces of stone chipping away when mining or crafting, water droplets splashing when filling a barrel, little visual touches like that which really start to bring the game together. As always it'll be fully extendable / easily moddable, but it is quite a chunky feature which will take some time, so I thought it best to release an initial version of Alpha 5 before getting stuck into it - which is all of the other new additions you see above! Once that is done (and it also includes showing the progress of a job being worked on) it's on to constructing flooring and roofing - having an area be outside or "inside" will start to become important. Especially a little later when weather is introduced which will really shake up the current gameplay! The goal is for there to be a slight punishment to things being left outside which I think should change the dynamics of building a settlement quite a bit.

Until then though, as ever, the best way to get involved is joining the King under the Mountain Discord where I'm usually on hand and always very happy to hear any feedback or issues players are experiencing. See you in 2021!

November 2020 Update - Alpha 4 Complete!
over 3 years ago – Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 04:06:44 PM

Welcome to the amazingly-ahead-of-schedule November dev update for King under the Mountain! Very good news this month in that everything on the roadmap for Alpha 4 has now been delivered, and a little extra to boot! So without further ado, here's a run-through of what's been changed or added.

The biggest addition is that there is now a full job prioritisation system! A new top level menu, "Priority" has been added which gives you the following new options:

As you can see in the screenshot, when this menu is open the priorities are shown in-game. Previously settlers would pick whichever the nearest job to them was, in order of the professions that they had activated. Now the same still happens, but respecting the priority assigned to a job first - so all the "Highest" priority jobs will be assigned first, then "Higher" and so on. Finally you'll be able to instruct your dwarves what it is you want completing next! As well as being able to set the priority of jobs waiting to be assigned, such as orders like mining and logging, furniture which creates jobs, like a crafting station, can also have a priority assigned which gets passed on to the jobs it creates. This goes even further in that some rooms like the kitchen and farm plot generate jobs without being specific to any furniture, so those rooms can also have a priority assigned (when interacting with the room/zone) which gets passed on to any furniture that already exists or is set to be constructed. So there's a lot more going on than you might think! I'd love to get some feedback on the way this has been represented in-game, both from the choice of colours which I'm not very sure about, and the use of arrows to represent the priorities too. Oxygen Not Included by Klei (a fantastic game) has a similar system, but uses numbers from 1 (lowest) to 9 (highest) to represent priority. Do you think that would be better here?

There's another equally huge (at least in terms of quality of life for the player) addition in the form of an entirely new management screen to go alongside the existing "Resources" and "Settlers" screens - crafting management!

This screen first lists each type of crafting, along with any furniture that crafting can be performed at, and the rooms that furniture can be placed into. Right now, every type of crafting is only performed at a single crafting station which is found only in a single type of room, but the game allows for more complex setups and they could be modded in right now.

Clicking on a type of crafting shows the set of different items or liquids that are produced by that crafting type. These rows allow you to set a total number of items to "maintain" in the settlement, that is, have a total number of items which may or may not be in use. This can be set as a single figure for the whole settlement or scale based on the population as shown. Items are consumed or effectively removed when they are used in furniture construction (such as tools on a workbench) so once this has happened, more will be created. Barrels and cauldrons feel like a special case because once they are placed as furniture, they no longer count as an item, though they appear identical visually, so I'm interested to see if people find this confusing and end up with more barrels and cauldrons than they expect. This row also gives you a total count of how many are currently in your settlement - a more detailed breakdown can be found in the "Resources" screen.

Clicking on one of these item or liquid product rows shows the different crafting recipes that produce the desired output. A crafting recipe is a set of input items or liquids, which get converted into a set of output items or liquids, though currently every crafting recipe only produces a single type of output, but this doesn't have to be the case. Most crafted outputs are produced only by a single recipe, a good example of an exception are wooden planks which can be crafted out of wooden logs or mushroom logs, which are counted and tracked separately, or metal blooms which have specific crafting recipes for specific materials. Any input items which don't use a specific type of material, allow the player to now pick a material to always use in that crafting.

There's also a mini set of priority options for the crafted items and liquids, setting this will set the priority of which crafting recipe is selected next - recipes of the same priority are chosen from randomly, at least for all of the recipes that have their input requirements available. Each crafting station also has a new "Crafting" button to launch this screen filtered to showing everything already expanded for the crafting type it uses.

The crafting types, furniture, crafting recipes and default amounts to produce are all easily moddable, and this screen is a good representation of the mapping from the data files to how they are represented in-game.

Between the addition of crafting management and the priority system, players should now have the tools they need to manage settlements that were getting a bit too complex without them. Being able to manage and prioritise the production of beer in particular should be of great use, as the previous release probably led to an over-abundance of barrels being crafted for most players!

While those two are the main additions (and what was listed on the roadmap), that's not all for Alpha 4! There's even more quality of life improvements in the form of new "Cancel" and "Demolish" options in the build menu.

The cancel option works much like its counterpart in the Orders menu - it is used to mass-cancel any queued up constructions (furniture, bridges, doors and walls). Deconstruct is used to set constructed furniture, bridges, doors and walls to be removed. No longer do you have to click on each thing individually and set it to be torn down!

Along with this work on managing constructions, the game now keeps better track of which material was specified to be used by the player in the construction. An earlier update (one that automatically resets material selection when none of that material is available) had broken this functionality, so now that improvement still works alongside the game again correctly respecting any choices by the player. In other words, set a wooden piece of furniture to be constructed with "Any" material and the game will handle it as best it can, potentially even resetting what it has selected initially, but if the player manually chooses a material to use, it will always stick to that selection.

Although there's not much interest in modding yet, I've added a placeholder sprite as a fallback (literally a square with the text "placeholder" on it) which the game will now use if any sprites are unavailable for some reason. This shouldn't happen in the base game, but when attempting to mod something, a modder can easily forget that a change in one place may mean new sprites are required. Until now the game would have rendered nothing or even crashed if these weren't available, but now the placeholder graphic should make it clear where these are needed.

Although I'm making this game as a one-man team for the design and development side of things, it wouldn't be possible without a bunch of very talented freelancers working on the art and music. There's currently a lot going on in the artwork side of things, to get everything produced for King under the Mountain to press on towards the Steam Early Access release. There's even quite a lot that has already been produced which hasn't been revealed yet that I'm very much looking forward to sharing in future updates. This Alpha 4 release does contain one artwork improvement though - the constructed stone and wooden walls:

These constructed walls, the stone version in particular, were actually my own programmer art of attempting to copy the Prison Architect style for how walls work (although being able to handle a thickness of more than one tile). In fact the very very first code written for King under the Mountain was figuring out these walls and how to render them, as you can see from my channel's very first video from all the way back in 2015.

There's a lot more to come, including overhauling quite a bit of how the environment looks in the game, so look forward to that!

Finally, in the process of writing this update a community member was having issues running the game. After a bit of investigation we figured out that the laptop used no longer had enough memory to start a new game or load an existing one. The additions are adding up! To help with this a little though, a secret feature has been added to let players modify the size of the map when starting a new game. This is done by editing the seed.txt file alongside the game launcher. Previously this was a text file with the number 0 in it only. You can change this to a different number to set the map seed for the random generation, in other words setting it to a number other than 0 will cause the game to generate the same map each time, much like seeds used for random generation in games like Minecraft. This file now contains a second line, which reads "400x300". This corresponds to a map size of 400 tiles wide by 300 tiles tall. You can change this text, and as long as the format is the same (i.e. "XXXxYYY") the game will use that size for the map instead. This was added to let computers without enough memory to generate the current map size still run the game with a smaller map, but you may want to try a larger map too. A word of warning - the minimap does not currently scale properly, the size of the minimap in pixels is the size of the map in tiles, so a very large map will cause the minimap to obscure the whole game. This will be improved in a future release, I just wanted to get something added quickly for the players affected to still be able to run the game. Picking the map size and random generation seed will be built into the UI properly at some point. At some point I'll have to think about optimising the memory use, though ideally the longer I can put that off, the smoother things will be. There is a potentially fun side effect from being able to control the map size, you can now create a tiny "pocket world" as a challenge of playing the game with very limited space and resources.

And that's it for this month and Alpha 4! Alpha 5 should see the remaining very-clearly-missing quality of life improvements in the form of stockpile management and support for multiple saved games/settlements, and then goes on to the lay the remaining groundwork systems - a particle effect system and constructed roofs and flooring - to support the big content additions of alphas 6 through 10. Thank you to all of you sticking with the development of the game! If you haven't done so already, you can wishlist the game on Steam at store.steampowered.com/app/930230/King_under_the_Mountain/ though if you already have access via Kickstarter or Itch.io you will be receiving a Steam key for free!

October 2020 Update - Alpha 4 Release
over 3 years ago – Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 01:27:05 AM

Hello and welcome to the resumed King under the Mountain dev update! I'm happy to announce that the remaining pieces of work for the brewing beer update were completed, so this has formed the initial Alpha 4 release.

In a slightly different format I thought I'd explain the process (for the player's point of view) to making use of this new and perhaps crucial  feature.

First of all, rather than being somewhat random, each new settlement now starts with a fixed number of a fixed group of seeds for planting, as shown here:

In the not too distant future, starting resources will be customisable by the player upon starting a new settlement (the "embark" screen!), but while this feature is not yet implemented, this is the stopgap solution. Expect some seeds like wheat to be more valuable than others, as wheat tends to go a bit further to feeding your population due to the bread baking production chain (at the cost of more time, labour and furniture).

A new settlement will probably want to spend it's first spring focused on planting all of these seeds so they can be harvested in autumn to provide food for the settlement past the initial supply of rations, and now also produce beer! With most features in King under the Mountain, I put a fair amount of research into understanding how the production chains in question work in real life, using this as the basis to have a grounding in reality, before removing or simplifying some parts so the game isn't too grindy with small details. Take the opening line of the wikipedia page on beer -

 Beer is one of the oldest and most widely consumed alcoholic drinks in the world, and the third most popular drink overall after water and tea. Beer is brewed from cereal grains—most commonly from malted barley, though wheat, maize (corn), and rice are also used. During the brewing process, fermentation of the starch sugars in the wort produces ethanol and carbonation in the resulting beer. Most modern beer is brewed with hops, which add bitterness and other flavours and act as a natural preservative and stabilizing agent.  

As malted barley is the most common ingredient, right now that is the only way to produce beer in the game, though I intend to add other methods and other alcoholic beverages over time (or perhaps the modding community will step in before I get there!) So in reality beer is produced from water, barley (or another cereal grain), hops for flavouring, and yeast for fermenting. I decided not to model the yeast aspect of fermentation explicitly, instead you can assume your brewer dwarves keep a small supply with them to be added where needed. That leaves  water, barley and hops. Water is clearly an already very important part of gameplay (there are not many quicker ways to killing off a settlement than removing its water supply) although moving it around currently leaves a bit to be desired (look forward to piping and aqueducts in the future!) Long time players may remember that both hops and barley were already implemented along with the current batch of crops, though they were removed for a while as there was no use for them in game. Clearly that has changed so you'll now want to start farming barley and hops to produce beer!

Once your settlement's most pressing needs are seen to, you can now start to think about the construction of your first brewery. The beer production chain makes use of a new item - a metal barrel called a "tank". One of the many additions to the game's codebase for this feature was to allow for liquids as both inputs and outputs in a crafting process, which beer production is a big part of. To support construction of your brewery you'll need a decent metal production chain fuelled by either charcoal from lumber or coke from coal.

This allows for the production of metal plates and barrel hoops, both of which are the input materials for the new metal tank item. Setting up a brewery is a much more resource-intensive venture than anything else in the game currently!

The first step in beer production from the raw materials is to turn the barley from your farm into malt, using a malting station at the new brewery zone. There's also a new profession required (the brewer) and your settlement is not guaranteed to start with any active brewers, so look out for this as a potential problem with your first brewery!

The malting station, with included water tank and mini-kiln, takes your freshly harvested barley and turns it into sacks of malt. In reality, there are several steps to producing malt, but I felt it worth simplifying those steps to a single piece of furniture which combines all of them "behind the scenes" to a single crafting process in  King under the Mountain. The player does not get away with it too easily however, as after producing the malt it also needs milling (producing "milled malt") which currently takes place at the hand-operated gristmill located in a kitchen. I thought it might be interesting to have the production process need to change locations between a brewery and another zone, but I may end up adding the gristmill to the brewery. In either case, I'm also planning to add easier, more traditional milling methods (a literal windmill or water-wheel powered mill) in the future.

Once you have your milled malt, it's on to the mash tun where it is combined with water to produce wort.

As part of overhauling the liquid-management system in the game, water can now be transferred in other containers than just buckets. Fortunately this means the 6 units of water required by this crafting recipe can be delivered in one go by a dwarf hauling a barrel to the river, filling it, and dumping the whole barrelful in one go! As an aside, the game also tracks liquids in containers better than before, so soup left over in a discarded cauldron can now be used correctly rather than being thrown away as it would in the past.

Flavouring (i.e. the hops) are added in a brew kettle (also known as a "copper", although it does not need to be made out of copper *yet*) to produce hopped wort, which is the final step before fermentation.

Finally, the hopped wort is moved to a fermentation tank for, no surprise, fermentation, which produces the final beer. Fortunately for your now metal-deprived dwarves, these can be constructed either automatically by placing a metal liquid tank, or crafted by a stonemason out of stone blocks.

Once the beer has had enough time to ferment, it can be decanted back into a barrel, ready for consumption as glorious dwarven beer! All that's left is to build the most important piece of furniture of all - the beer tapper - in (of course) the feasting hall for your dwarves to enjoy!

And that's the beer production chain!  It almost goes without saying that dwarves much prefer drinking deliciously brewed beer rather than water from a barrel, and will be much happier in your settlement after a good drink.  Beware though, as if a dwarf drinks nothing but alcoholic beverages for several days in a row, they will become dependent upon it to get through the working day. While this applies, they'll still have the same happiness bonus from drinking beer as before, but if it runs out, expect a disastrous hit to happiness while they go through the withdrawal effects of going sober!

The management of tracking if a dwarf is drunk and/or dependent on alcohol is using a "status effect" system which I don't think I've detailed in a dev update yet. It's the same system that makes the progression of hungry > starving > dead (and the counterpart for being thirsty) work in the game. Perhaps this will be worth detailing in a future dev update?

Constructing a functioning brewery requires a surprising amount of metal ores, ingots and fuel to get going, and with this update you may find more than ever that you want your dwarves to produce certain quantities of items in a certain order, or more likely not produce other items that they currently are doing. This really necessitates the ability for the player to control what is crafted, AKA production management, so that's the next feature which is being worked on for Alpha 4! In a similar vein, being able to prioritise which jobs you want doing urgently rounds off the roadmap for Alpha 4 and probably what is most necessary at this stage.

Finally, a note of thanks to community member gammalget  / falkowich who offered some help in diagnosing and fixing the issue that's been plaguing the Linux version of the game since the Java update. I'm happy to say this has now been resolved so Linux players should be able to use the executable provided rather than need their own installation of Java to run the game.

If  you find any issues with this or any version of King under the Mountain, the best option is to drop a message in the official King under the Mountain Discord server in a relevant-looking channel. I'm also on hand to answer questions directly there, if you're interested.  On that note, thanks as always for sticking with development of the game (or at least this update) and see you next month!

The "Game's Not Dead" sorry for the delay Update
over 3 years ago – Mon, Oct 19, 2020 at 03:55:27 AM

Hello followers of King under the Mountain development! This is the much-needed huge apology for the radio silence for the last couple of months, it's always been a great motivator to have the monthly dev updates out somewhat on time, but there hasn't been anything posted from the end of June until now. Well, the main message is not to worry, development isn't dead, I'm always going to stick to finishing this game until it's finished, or else I wouldn't be able to create anything afterwards!

I'd have liked to have put an actual new version release out alongside this post, but it's been so long since the last update I figured it was better to post this first and then aim to (finally!) release the brewing beer update. Following that will be manual selection of crafting by the player (quite a big change from the current automated process! Perhaps players would prefer a mix of the two?) and then it's on to more content on the road to Steam Early Access.

It's not been all-stop for the last couple of months either, I've been working with an artist to produce a lot of the new assets that are going to be required between now and the Steam release, primarily this has been a lot of different animal species to be added to the game, including backer-specified rewards, and of course, elephants.

Still, I wanted to post this really brief update rather than put things off even longer to a proper update with more details. Perhaps I'll finally release that brewing beer with the next monthly update? Again though, more than anything I want to apologise for the lack of communication and I'll be doing my very best that it doesn't happen again.

June 2020 Update
almost 4 years ago – Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 12:26:36 AM

Welcome to the monthly King under the Mountain dev update! Very happy to say that development is back on track now after all the disruption from covid-19 and other sources the past few months. That said, I was expecting to have more gamedev time than I have had this past month after my day job changed to 3 days a week, turns out they can't make do without me so I've been asked to work most of those extra days! Will see how that pans out.

It must be months now that I've been promising brewing beer is just around the corner for these forcefully sober dwarves, and I'm afraid to say that's still the case - I spent what time I had in the last month polishing the edges of alpha 3 and then investing quite a lot of effort in making crafting stations require tools during their construction. Previously, crafting stations just required a few stone blocks or wooden planks for them to be constructed, and they would magic into existence a few relevant tools to be used as decoration (dwarves would need to equip the relevant tool from their inventory to work at the station), which was more of a holdover from the initial prototype days rather than any conscious decision.

One of the main design goals with King under the Mountain is a reasonable level of realism in the simulation of the game world, so I never really liked these tools just appearing out of nowhere as decoration (you can look forward to beds needing cloth materials to construct them as well). Now, instead, constructing the crafting station requires the tools that would previously have been freely created as decorations to be actual requirements in the construction. This means your supply of tools will mostly get "baked in" to the construction of furniture (until it is removed at least), but the upside is that dwarves no longer need that tool in their inventory, instead they walk over and equip the item directly from the top of the crafting station, work as normal, then place it back after (undoubtedly a bug has been introduced if a dwarf drops dead while having this tool equipped as it goes to their corpse for the moment - that's one to sort out in the future, right now dwarves probably won't be working if they're knowingly close to death, perhaps a cave-in could do it...). The main benefit of this is that as a player you're not relying on the few dwarves with the right tool equipped to be able to work on the crafting jobs, instead any dwarf with the correct profession can come and do the crafting work (though you'll want more control over this in the future when crafting quality is introduced). Here's a video of it in action with a woodcutter's bench now requiring a saw and axe to be created, but the saw is used as part of crafting a log into planks.

Astute players will be wondering "What if I build so many of these I don't have any axes left to chop down trees?" Well, this has led to the implementation of the first non-tutorial hints - the game now gives you a (currently one-time) message if you use up all your axes, chisels, planes and so on with a note to either craft more or deconstruct one of the pieces of furniture to get them back. Soon players will be able to specify what should be crafted rather than the current automatic system. The whole feature looks pretty simple but there was quite a bit of work in getting the AI to either equip a tool from their inventory or wait and pick it up from the crafting station as appropriate!

This does bring something of a requirement for more tools at the start of the game - previously every dwarf would spawn into the game with one of each of the tools for their assigned profession. Instead each settlement now starts with a set number of specific tools. They are currently randomly spread between the dwarves but when more work has been done with container furniture such as chests and crates, I expect these items will start in a crate or similar ready to be picked up and used. As things currently stand, the player now needs to designate a tools stockpile for the dwarves to place them down so they can get into the right hands. The increased tools at game start has been balanced out a bit by the fact that immigrants in the 2nd year and onwards no longer bring extra tools or seeds, you'll need to craft or farm these yourself! They do at least still bring a big stack of rockbread rations, so they shouldn't starve for some time, but I expect the progression of population size is a bit trickier to manage now (I'd love to get some feedback on how people are finding this).

As another nice tidy-up type of task, it's been requested a few times if something could be done about all the dwarves "clumping up" together and getting stuck in queues once the population gets a bit bigger - dwarves that are colliding with another dwarf go at half speed. A slight improvement has been added to the AI pathfinding so that a dwarf will every so often slow down a bit more if it notices that other dwarves in front of it are heading in the right direction. You can see this in the following video where lines denote the direction and speed dwarves are attempting to move in - white means they are unimpeded, red if they are colliding with another dwarf and going slow, or blue if they have decided to slow down even more to let those in front "escape":

It's not perfect as a particularly large pile up of dwarves at a bottleneck like the one above will still cause a traffic jam, but then I'd rather leave that to the players to design their settlements to be more efficient and avoid these chokepoints.

In a more technical change, the version of Java that the game is built upon has been upgraded from Java 8 to Java 11 now using the OpenJDK libraries rather than Oracle's JDK. Oracle decided to make the license more restrictive after Java 8 and businesses either needed to start paying a fairly expensive license (too expensive for a game which doesn't make a profit yet!) or switch to the OpenJDK implementations for any future updates which is what prompted the change, rather than any requirement from my side. Everything *should* still be working as it was, though if you were running the game straight from the .jar file (perhaps more for the Linux players out there) you'll also need to be running Java 11 or later now. Mostly I'm interested in if this causes new issues that I've not run into while testing yet - everything seems to work the same now but I'm nervous with such a large underlying change that it might affect players on different systems.

I've recently replaced my development PC with a hefty upgrade, which had the nice side-effect of exposing an issue that was stopping the multi-language fonts from working correctly for some people that I was never able to reproduce on my old machine. Fixed now, and also the Japanese translation has had a lot of work put in by the Japanese community so that's close to being quite usable for Japanese-speakers which I'm very happy to see.

In fact on that note the latest version with all of the above is now live on Itch.io at the usual place - rocketjumptechnology.itch.io/king-under-the-mountain

Barring any crash-fixing releases, this means I'm now done with development for Alpha 3, and onto Alpha 4 at long last, which I hope won't take anywhere near as long as the last couple, not least because the tutorial feature was already pulled forward from alpha 4 and implemented. Here's what there is to look forward to for the immediate future:

• Brewing and Taverns - a particularly hefty feature as it not only involves the fairly detailed, fairly realistic approximation of the process of brewing beer and serving it out, but also the short and long term effects that can have on your populace!
• Production Management - finally the player will be in control of what is produced and where. I'm undecided yet on if this should entirely replace the current completely automated model, or keep some parts of it for the relaxed "hands off" approach the game offers currently (thoughts and feedback much appreciated!)
• Job Prioritisation - This should at least cover a "work on this thing as top priority" button, but possibly also a mechanism for defining which types of jobs are in which priority order for the whole settlement - something like the approach used by Rimworld - currently job priority is using the skill level a dwarf has in a particularly profession (which isn't really a feature yet) and then distance to the nearest job of that profession.

As mentioned, the tutorial was brought forward out of Alpha 4 so there's really not much left in it, just the above! It feels like after getting the initial mod support in place and deferring the rest of it until after the Steam launch (and the recent general tidy up of smaller tasks), development has climbed over a hump it was stuck on for a while and the upcoming roadmap looks much smoother than the first couple of alphas. In fact most of the alpha milestones are much smaller than they were now, at least until alphas 8, 9 and 10 mostly due to the introduction of combat and the many things that entails, but once the game gets to that point it isn't far from the Steam launch! Onwards and upwards then, and see you next time!