The next Sapiens update is coming along nicely, and I thought it was time to let you all know how things are going. After taking a bit of a break over Christmas, I started the new year working on a new mechanic for improving soil. So in 0.4 we will now have compost, manure, and mulching, which allow you to improve the soil quality and grow crops faster. To balance this and add realism, as you harvest or clear from the land, the soil quality now slowly reduces too, so eventually you'll need to move your crops to more fertile land, or mulch to put the goodness back in.
Just after that was done, we got hit by a cyclone in New Zealand. It was a significant disaster, and we lost power for a week. But once I was able to work again, I started adding new building materials. It has always been my plan to give different building materials different strengths and weaknesses, and I'll be working more on that soon, but first I wanted to add stone block structures to the game. Stone blocks were historically a widely used early building material, and Sapiens felt like it would really benefit from having them. So you will now be able to chisel out stone blocks directly from the ground, and use them to build walls and columns, and craft tiles which can be used in floors and roofs. I also added new rock types, with the addition of granite, marble, and lapis lazuli, as well as sandstone in a variety of colors.
Historically the first chisels were made out of hard rock, but rock chisels could mostly only be used on soft rocks like sandstone and limestone, so that's what I have done in Sapiens too. However there needed to be a way to chisel granite and hard rocks too, and so I decided it was time to add bronze to the game. You'll first need to mine copper and tin ores from the ground. Then at a kiln you can learn the new blacksmithing skill, and combine the ores to smelt bronze in a crucible. Once you have bronze ingots, you can then smith them into new tools and weapons. There are bronze variants of all of the existing tools, which will work faster and last longer. And of course you can craft bronze chisels which will unlock the ability to build with hard stone blocks. With the addition of bronze and the new rock types, I needed to do a lot of work on the look of the game, adding more detail and realism to the textures, and improving support for metallic materials. So we now have shiny metals and bump-mapping on the terrain and objects too, which really helps to make the world feel more alive.
I still have quite a lot more planned for this update, so keep an eye out for an announcement here when it's nearly ready. And keep in mind that the features I've mentioned here and these screenshots are a work in progress, there will still be changes before they are released in a few weeks time. If you want to keep a closer eye on progress, please join the Discord where I post much more frequent updates. Thanks for your continued support and patience while I'm working on the update. - Dave https://store.steampowered.com/app/1060230/Sapiens/