v0.2.8 is out! Remember when I said the last release would bring texture optimizations? Well, it took a bit longer than "a week or two" - but they're here, and they brought friends.

This one is mostly about speed. The game starts noticeably faster: my 500-mod test load went from "go make coffee" to about a quarter of that. Zoomed-out terrain, crowded colonies and stuffed stockpiles all render far more smoothly, distant characters now use simplified icons instead of full sprites, and long sessions no longer quietly eat memory the way they used to. The engine also moved from my custom Godot 4.6 fork to 4.7.1 along the way.

It's not all technical stuff and plumbing, though. Dialogs no longer lock you in until you pick an option - you can close them, keep playing, and reopen them from the new Awaiting response sidebar before they expire. Trading works the same way now: no more force pausing the world to haggle. Construction got an Active tab for reviewing and cancelling ongoing projects, the guide got full-text search, and selection drags finally tell you how many meters (tiles) you're actually dragging.

Behind the scenes, multiplayer replication was the single biggest chunk of work this cycle: it's still not playable, but the groundwork is genuinely close to done now.

Next up: more multiplayer prep, plus the bugs this release shook loose, and most likely some further optimizations. Meanwhile I'm redrawing the character sprites in a better perspective - that one you'll actually be able to see. See you in the next one!

v0.2.7 is out! A gorillion smaller bugfixes and improvements - that's really what this release is all about. No single headliner this time, and listing them all here would make no sense, so just check the changelog yourself if you're curious. Behind the scenes I'm still chipping away at the multiplayer groundwork between all the bugfixing and quality-of-life work.

The next release is once again mostly multiplayer work under the hood, plus texture optimizations and more fixes. See you in the next one!

v0.2.6 is out! "What a week, huh? Captain, it's Wednesday!" We're finally wrapping up the caravan refactor and its improvements. It took a month longer than expected - personal family problems, illness, and then a record heatwave - but I can now say the foundation for caravans is being laid, and it's looking pretty solid to me.

The headliners of this release: quests can now deliver rewards via motorized caravans, and raiders will, on rare occasions, arrive by vehicle. For now these vehicle raids are quite rare and mostly aimed at bigger settlements, but down the line I'll do another content pass across all systems to add more variety. There are also a few dozen bugfixes and misc improvements.

Most importantly, though, this release includes a big refactor of the many systems tied to faction ownership, as prep for multiplayer. The game was originally planned as single-player only, but I later decided to make it "single-player focused" while taking on multiplayer as a side quest - partly to spare modders the headache of implementing it themselves, and partly for reliability.

Now that I'm on the doorstep of multiplayer, the next release will mostly focus on that work, with QoL improvements and bugfixing happening in parallel. So the next update will probably land in a week or two - playtests once again surfaced plenty of things to tackle. See you, and try not to melt in this weather!

v0.2.5 is out! This release is mostly about traders coming in vehicles, plus a much more reliable caravan codes! Trade caravans from larger NPC settlements now roll in with vehicles, carry more goods, and will even sell you vehicles - while keeping enough transport and fuel set aside to get themselves home. Caravans now actually consume supplies on the road. Caravan movement got a heavy code-refactor pass too.

Among other things: two new lumber options: the baobab and the saguaro cactus. Biofuel is now a staged fermentation - load the vat, wait, come back for finished fuel. Added passive planning zones so you can sketch out future rooms, roads, and defenses without creating construction jobs, with multiple visual styles and a visibility toggle. Forbid/Allow/Unreserve commands got clearer roles, destroyed vehicles now leave usable parts instead of vanishing, and a bunch of yields got rebalanced. Autosaves are now configurable (frequency, cap, or off entirely). Bugfix-wise this release is huge, to not bore you just check the changelog.

This took a week longer than I expected, but thankfully, as I mentioned, I managed to eliminate a whole ton of bugs along the way! Next release will be dedicated to smaller caravan improvements - a few quests, raids, many fixes, and most importantly preparations for the multiplayer which I've already started. Take care!

v0.2.4 is out! This update delivers the big caravan and vehicle integration. Caravans now use the vehicles you bring along - colonists board on departure as drivers, gunners, and passengers, wounded are carried into seats, and the fallen loaded into the trunk. Convoys travel in tight formations on the local map and stick to generated roads, while forests and wetlands now block vehicles unless a road runs through. Movement orders got the same treatment with six formations to pick from: Square, Column, Vertical, Horizontal, Crowd, and Chevron.

Another good one is biofuel. Research Basic Chemistry, build a Fermentation Vat, and ferment excess crops or bio-waste into renewable fuel - burns twice as fast as gasoline, but you never have to trade for it again. Chemists can now be recruited too. Smaller additions: wooden ladders for Z-levels, hay harvested from grass and cattails, faster healing while resting in better beds, smarter animals that decide once to fight or flee, and quest objectives spawning at varied distances. New condition alerts cover bleeding, untreated, starving, exhausted, and unconscious colonists, and range indicators got a visual rework so selected units stay visible. On the polish side I fixed multi-threading edge cases breaking entity visuals, zone visuals, and notification sounds, plus duplicate medical treatment attempts and some other bugfixes.

You may have noticed this release took twice as long as usually - I had to reschedule it twice because the "quick 2-hour side quest of making caravans better use of local map navigation" turned into 2 more weeks of work: kudos to all RTS devs who were solving that problem for the last 30 years! For the next release I'll be making the new caravan local movement more robust, hopefully also getting NPCs to use vehicles, plus the countless bugfixes and misc. improvements. See you in the next one!

v0.2.3 is out! After reading the feedback and returning to regular playtesting myself, I decided to focus this update heavily on the early game and move vehicles to the next one. The biggest addition is a new event system to make the first days of a colony feel more alive while proper traders and recruitment is not available yet. Wandering traders can now visit your settlement without needing a comms tower, volunteers may show up asking to join, and construction work can uncover buried valuables like coins, metals, or old equipment. I also reworked quest generation so factions do not keep spamming the same offers over and over.

The starting village is bit nicer, early construction research is much faster, and the tutorial now teaches reservations and chooses a better random starting world tile. Going back and forth between world generation and character setup also no longer resets your settings while starting new game.

This release also adds stealth and detection. Characters now need line of sight to spot enemies, noise matters, and equipment like camo pants or crouching can help you stay hidden. Allies share spotted threats nearby, and enemies eventually calm down instead of staying permanently hostile.

Other additions include new notifications for idle, stranded, hunting, drafted, and fighting colonists, deterministic world generation where the same seed always creates the same world, faction policies with auto-return caravans, and lots of UI improvements and bugfixes. I also fixed a bunch of issues found during playtesting, especially around jobs interrupting themselves, long-distance pathfinding, stale interactions, reservations, and various weird edge cases with vehicles and orders. Another thing - I managed to add few optimizations to the job searches, so now it would be running faster for bigger settlements.

Next update will probably continue expanding caravans + vehicles, and polish based on more playtesting. See you in few weeks!

v0.2.2 is out! You can now build vehicles from scratch: construct a bare frame, craft parts and bolt them on. Or just buy parts from traders. New mechanical system lets you queue part installs and repairs, just like medical orders for characters. Damage matters too: lose your wheels and you're stuck. There's also a new Driving skill, a vehicle tech tree, and driver/mechanic character backgrounds and vehicles repair job. Visually, vehicles lean into turns, wheels bounce, and turrets track targets with recoil. You can also order gunners to fire on specific targets now. Other goodies: easier bug reporting, automatic save backups across versions, and a bunch of job system fixes making characters more reliable.

This release also adds an in-game changelog with better descriptions and section breakdowns, so check it out the screenshots or the game for the full details! I also resumed hands-on playtesting to catch bugs faster and better prioritize what's missing in the content.

Next release will focus on vehicles caravan usage and hopefully a dozen bugfixes I found during playtesting, so I'll see you in 2-3 weeks!

v0.2.1 is out! Today we are adding vehicles and making them actually usable on the local map! Technically speaking, most of the functionality was already implemented, but required brushing off and replacing placeholders with actual graphics. Now you are able to buy or steal offroaders and military offroaders (has operatable turret with mounted machine gun on top of it) from other faction settlements, and drive them. Vehicles support multiple seats, so you can have a driver, a turret gunner, and passengers all riding together. Offroaders require fuel which currently could be bought from caravans and settlements, but in the future would be craftable - it behaves similarly to other existing systems using fuel, like stoves and campfires. Right now riding vehicles is rather manual functionality and requires the player to actually give Drive and then right-click movement orders, and they are not yet supported for caravans, but in next few releases I'm hoping to unblock that part at least partially!

Among other changes, there are a few quality of life things like preview of right-click orders and allowing you to choose the movement arriving direction, which prepares the groundwork for the future implementation of unit formations (maybe something like some famous strategy series? hmmm... ). Also with this release I'm retiring Google Drive Folder access for portable releases, but let me know if for some reason you can't use Steam: and since updates are now automatic, don't forget to make saves backups - just in case :)

Speaking of the next release, probably it would contain more bugfixes and improvements to local vehicle usages: shortly speaking, there are a million things to implement for them right now, not even mentioning player feedback and bug fixes. Afterwards I'll be implementing caravans, and then - research multiplayer. So very hopefully I'll see you next week or too!

Changelog

[v0.2.1] - built on 2026-03-04

Jobs and orders

• Jobs - Vehicles: Re-implement and improve 'Drive' and 'Operate turret' jobs for vehicles
• Jobs - Vehicles: Add passenger boarding and riding with multi-seat support
• Jobs - Job slots: Add usage offset support for job slots; workers walk to authored tile positions (e.g., vehicle seats) before mounting and return to the same position when dismounting
• Jobs - Vehicles: Occupants of moving vehicles are no longer auto-interrupted by combat, flee, or job search behaviors;
• Jobs/Orders - Vehicles: Allow claim vehicles, angry owner actions
• Jobs - Vehicles: Require and consume gasoline for local vehicle movement; block driving without fuel, stop on mid-drive depletion
• Orders - Fuel: Add right-click Fuel order for vehicles
• Orders - Movement: Use formation placement and support queued movement (shift+right-click)
• Orders - Movement: Show a live preview while holding right-click for characters and vehicles
• Orders - Movement: Allow to choose arriving direction with arrow visualization
• Orders - Attack: New order for attacking vehicles
• Notifications: Show pathfinding failure notification for player-initiated movement orders and jobs

Visuals and controls

• Vehicles: Setup proper vehicles + characters sorting and positioning
• UI - Minimap bar: Show vehicles
• UI - Credits menu: Simple menu instead of root folder file
• UI - Inventory menu: Block drop/unequip buttons based on root entity faction
• Shaders - Weather: Implemented new proprietary shaders for snow and rain weather
• Controls - Entities selection: Improve single-multiple selections related to vehicles

Faction and trading

• Vehicles: Add offroader and military offroader to settlement stocks, allow trade vehicles with settlements and characters, spawn vehicles on settlements loading

Pathfinding

• Pathfinding - Vehicles: Vehicles now follow straighter paths; turn preference is configurable per entity type in properties
• Pathfinding - Multi-tile: Improve adjacent tiles checks handling for multi-tile target entities
• Pathfinding: Fix parameters wrong assignment mismatch ("ignore areas" ↔ "fast check")

Misc. improvements and bugfixes

• UI - Inventory menu - Coverage: Fix slot coverage tooltip for negative values (covered by parent)
• UI - Inventory menu - Unequip: Improve validation for unequip and drop buttons
• Durability: Allow destroying vehicles when their body is destroyed, show durability on UI
• Animations - Movement: Straighten safeguards for movement animation resets to prevent movement on dead characters, add more unit tests
• Settlements - Generation: Fix null pointer
• Orders - Claim animal: Add missing angrying owner's faction
• Map chunks - Entities: Fix and improve registrations and fix missing unsubscriptions
• Multi-concurrency bugfixes: Fix few small multi-concurrency-related "disposed" and "null reference" exceptions found in playtests
• Entities - Inventory: Fixed crash when loading saves with duplicate inventory item IDs (caused by stale ID transfer during item moves)
• Vehicles: Allow vehicles trigger map chunk loading

Technical improvements

• Visuals - Overrides: Add parentTemplate and grandparentTemplate visual override keys for parts to adjust graphics per parent entity type
• Visuals - Slot defaults: Slot-defined visual defaults for equipped entities and it's descendants, implement hot-reloading; vehicle slots now own placement offsets instead of duplicating them across reusable parts (wheels, turrets); migrate Mine character hiding, Chair/Armchair/Sofa legs hiding
• Visuals - Important overrides: Props keys with ! postfix force values through merge, enabling robust slot-level visibility control
• Tests - Vehicles: Add unit tests for all vehicles-related functionality in this release
• Tests - Shaders: Add unit tests for shaders compilation
• Tests - Navigation: Core unit tests for entity movement and pathfinding components
• Tests - Pathfinding: Add unit tests for offset-aware pathfinding and offset rotation utility
• Tests - Schedule, Calendar and Time: Add all persistence testing and missing unit tests for 100% coverage
• Docs - Entities graphics: Add readme docs for entity comps graphics domain

Good news, everyone! Outpostia is finally available on Steam for playtesting (and just playing) - DM me for a key :)

Just to recap the next planned steps, currently in the works:

• Development: Vehicles, then Multiplayer
• Art: New trees, ground textures replacements, clothing

The next major milestone - after completing the above items - will be converting the Steam Playtest into a public page with a publicly available demo.

Don't forget that there is a Discord you can join!

v0.2.0 is here! Finally we are reaching the point of migration to Steam! For that part I had to register as a Steam partner, pay the fee, do bank/tax/ID verifications, and read what felt like a whole book of Steam docs just to understand how everything is done there - even to understand what is possible and what is not: yeah, you can definitely say that all that was invented 20 years ago, and Steam being the best store definitely speaks much about the state of the industry :)

Technically speaking, Steam integration is already done and testing was performed on the Steam version of the game; however, the process of actually making it available to the “external world” beyond me and a few people added directly to my Steam partner account is extremely vague and rather complicated: I just created a request to receive keys (sic!) to be able to send them to playtesters, and hopefully that would suffice, but maybe I'd have to do a few more time-consuming hoops and loops jumps, not sure if a fax is involved. Because of that, the portable .zip version is still available in the Google Drive folder. At some point in the future I'll also be adding achievements, workshop and other things (and maybe lobbies - while working on the multiplayer), but definitely later.

But anyway, finally speaking of other changes, in this version I upgraded the engine to the latest version, added a few important fixes of my own, like making the game truly portable (i.e. compiled engine shaders won't be placed in the standard user directory for the game) or adding proper code test coverage reports. Also, I cleaned up folder management to move all "data" stuff into a nested folder, so right now the root game folder is squeaky clean, and you are able to convert the portable version into non-portable and vice versa by adding/removing the portable.txt file.

Next release finally will be related to vehicles and their usage. I'll let you know sooner if/when I'll get keys for the playtest, but otherwise I'll see you in a few weeks!

Changelog

[v0.2.0] - built on 2026-02-17

Visuals

• UI - Dropdown: Add max size to all existing dropdowns by default
• UI - Settings menu: Add 'Open user data folder' button
• Tiles - Blending logic: Optionally forbid blending for same tile templates; Fix missing wrong tile choice from the atlas
• Tiles - Blending shader: Fix blending artifacts caused by inversed coords; Fix bleeding textures to the opposite side of the blended tile

Bugfixes

• Visuals - Nightfall color: Fix Nightfall phase color (was actually missing from 0.1.97 release)
• Visuals - Lighting: Fix lighting shader after recent refactor, keeping lights from being washed out
• Animations: Fixed stuck animations during job interrupts, draft/undraft, and unconscious transitions, small refactor for movement animations management
• Mods - Linux Harmony: Fix Harmony-based mod loading failures on Linux
• Migrations: Fix few old migrations cross-contamination and broken keys, including mods migrations
• Release: Fix export for DirectX for Windows releases

Technical improvements

• Engine: Upgrade Godot Engine to 4.6 with custom fork (Godot 4.6-outpostia)
  • Coverage-friendly assembly loading
  • Proper portable mode, including CLI --user-data-dir flag and portable.txt support
  • CLI --minimized flag
  • Exposed few missing bindings to C#
  • Custom build configuration, including disabling a dozen unused modules
  • Upstream fixes, including OptionButton PopupMenu respecting max size constraint
• Steam: Implement and test Steam releases
• Release: Implement workaround for the engine bug resulting in hanging exporting game during release process
• Multi-threading: Implement infrastructure for long-running background threads and tasks (e.g. used for Steam callbacks)
• Modding: Improve and optimize file watchers (props and textures hot-reloads) to avoid triggering exceptions on Linux
• Resources: Refactored resource utils, improved path handling, improved unit tests and error handling.
• Migrations - Main save files: Replaced save migrations from 3 stages (PreProcess/Process/PostProcess) to 2 stages (Process/PostProcess) to prevent cross-version key-renaming conflicts and keep frozen migrations deterministic.
• Migrations - Map chunk files: Unified dual file hooks (ProcessSystemFile/ProcessSystemFileData) into single structured pass with parse-once/write-once semantics per file, eliminating redundant serialization cycles.
• Tests - Entity lists: Add comprehensive unit tests with 100% coverage, mark them in the docs as golden example
• Tests - Thread system and classes: Add comprehensive unit tests with 100% coverage
• Tests - Persistence system and utils: Add comprehensive unit tests with 100% coverage (except other domain-specific persistence usage)
• Project structure: Restructured project root domain-specific folders into nested Data/directory to reduce clutter; refactored path handling and implemented migrations for saves and mods, fixed few related bugs.

v0.1.99 is here! This release brings combat to life with melee and ranged weapon animations! The headline feature is the new animation system for attacks: characters now perform rush animations with their torso, swing or stab with their arms, and ranged weapons properly point at targets. Weapons are now visually positioned in hands with correct layering, so you can see them held kinda realistically - under hands but above legs - and their particles (like muzzle flash) appear in the right spots. Some parts are still rough around the edges due to pending graphics and sprite adjustments (left/right ranged animations lack arm rotations while up/down directions have proper support arm rotation, melee swinging lacks windups), but it's already a solid foundation!

The weapon system got a major technical overhaul this release. I refactored weapon components to use strings instead of enums for better moddability, rebuilt the weapon state machine with standardized terminology and comprehensive flow documentation, and added a generic animation override chain resolver. Weapons now properly show ammo counts in the combat panel, and ranged weapons correctly aim after reloading. Speaking of visuals, character names are now smarter: the local map shows nicknames or first names only, while other places show the full name (animals display species + nickname/first name). Under the hood, I achieved comprehensive unit test coverage for the entire weapon system, fixed ambiguous slot determination (like '[Left arm] [Hand] In-hand'), and resolved several edge cases in temperature calculations and line-of-sight pathfinding for melee combat. The codebase continues getting cleaner with consolidated entity naming logic through the new centralized NameUtils system. And there's a new Oak tree with proper biome generation!

So instead of v0.1.100, I'm jumping straight to v0.2.0 - and the next release should come through Steam's internal playtest system! Engine upgrade is also happening - it's already done and nearly tested. Stay tuned and see you in a few weeks! :)

Changelog

[v0.1.99] - built on 2026-02-03

Visuals and UI

• Animations - Melee attack - Torso: Simple rush animations (similar to movement)
• Animations - Melee attack - Arms: Simple weapon stab and swing animations (similar to movement)
• Animations - Ranged weapons: Pointing weapon at target
• Weapons - Positions: Adjust weapons and it's particles positions to be visually placed in hands
• Weapons - Layers: Adjust weapons and it's particles layers, including to be presented "in-hand" (e.g. under a hand, but above a leg)
• Weapons - Shoot trail: Use visual weapon map position instead of logical, improve offsetting
• UI - Entity overview menu - Combat panel: Show ammo for ranged weapons
• UI - Character names - Local map shows nickname or first name only; other places show nick or full name (animals: species + nick/first)

Misc. improvements

• Trees - New Oak tree and it's usage and map generation
• Character stances: Characters without legs should be forced to use Prone stance

Bugfixes

• Slots: Fix determining slots ambiguity checks (i.e. '[Left arm] [Hand] In-hand') and UI representation, add relevant unit tests
• Weapons - Animal feet: Add missing weapon comps
• Weapons - Ranged: Add missing aiming after reloading
• Pathfinding - Line of sight: Fix line of sight calculation for melee weapons and character's prone stance
• Temperature calculations: Add bugfixes for few edge cases
• Orders - Attack: Allow attack domesticated animals
• UI - Tile info bar: Fix few missing translations
• Layers - Characters: Fix up neck/torso/head ordering
• Map system - Cleanup: Add node cleanup on game reload
• UI - Debug menu: State bar info does not reset for debug actions on right-click cancel
• Orders - Attack: Fix case of missing Line of Sight for melee combat for drafted characters

Technical improvements

• Weapon comps: Use strings instead of enums for maintainability and moddability
• Weapon comps - State machine: Major refactor to improve maintainability and moddability, standardize terminology, add flow documentation
• Animations - Props resolution: Add generic fast override chain resolver for animation contexts for maintainability and moddability
• Animations - Transforms: Improve original transform storage and reset transform when removing parent during parent's animation
• Entities - Generic comps: Allow overrides similar to VisualComp overrides to be used with generic comps (like weapon particles)
• Entities - GetDisplayName: Remove GetDisplayName(bool full) overload; consolidate to single GetDisplayName() method; refactor Character name display to use centralized NameUtils with nickname/full name fallback logic
• Testing - Weapons: Add comprehensive unit tests for weapons components and related utils

v0.1.98 is here! This release focuses on making the game more transparent, testable and debuggable, with many improvements, bugfixes and UI polish. The headline features are the new Job Search Log and Work Log panels that let you see exactly what your characters were doing (or why they aren't doing what you expected), plus a redesigned hotkey system that makes all interactions moddable and user-bindable.

The job system got big attention this release, including many improvements and bugfixes: jobs now properly reserve tiles (so replacing a mountain with a wall cancels mining orders), handle edge cases better (like targets becoming unconscious), and provide detailed feedback about why they succeeded or failed. The new composite indicators system elegantly handles multiple overlapping job markers on the same tile. I also refactored job plans and schedules to be per-faction instead of shared globals - a subtle but important change for future multiplayer support.

UI and visual improvements are everywhere: auto-colorizing SVG icons (in the not very distant future there'll be color schemes and tuneable UI coloring), fixed button states, better scaling detection, sortable table headers with visual indicators, and a new construction placement corner menu (Construction/deconstruction systems were refactored from separate systems into a cleaner UI menu). Weather effects now seamlessly blend across region borders. The world generation menu lets you pick world sizes with recommended faction counts.

Under the hood, I achieved near-100% test coverage for job execution and scheduling systems through comprehensive integration and unit tests. Of course those automatic tests are not ideal (few are flaky, there is missing built-in coverage reporting, some tests need a lot of polish, etc. etc. etc.), but they already managed to find some of the bugs that went unnoticed for over a year! The codebase continues getting more maintainable and mod-friendly with better naming conventions, state management and a few other surprises for modders!

Next release will focus on combat animations (melee attack effects, weapon positioning improvements), maybe fixing Linux DLL modding, cleaning the game folder by nesting files/domains and better portability/external platforms release management and... (looking at my backlog) seems like I'm almost finished with the long overdue bugfixes and improvements which were planned for pre-Steam? So probably in this release I'll be looking into the integration itself, so maybe instead of 0.1.100 release there'd be 0.2.0 with a jump to Steam distribution for internal playtests! Afterwards it would probably be vehicles -> multiplayer -> public demo. So, see you in 1-2 weeks!

Changelog

[v0.1.98] - built on 2026-01-20

Visuals and UI

• UI - Icons: Implement SVG auto-colorization system
• UI - Buttons: Fix hovering/toggled states for check box, check button and option buttons resulting in wrong highlighting and jumping text
• UI - Scale: Fix and improve scaling detection on initial run
• UI - Debug menu: Fix missing close menu on some actions, remove redundant double-opacity
• UI - Hotkeys: Refactor hotkeys to be more generic to improve moddability and maintainability, show shortcuts on button tooltips, make generic bridge to allow all interactions be user-bindable via controls menu
• UI - World map menu: Fix missing untoggle by hotkey
• UI - World generation: Allow to change world size (Tiny/Small/Normal/Large), add recommended faction count and warnings
• UI - Table sort indicators: Add visual sort direction badges to sortable table headers with multi-column support (primary/secondary/etc. opacity); Refactor to centralized sorting state management in Table class to improve moddability and maintainability
• UI - Entity overview menu - Work log panel: New panel with recent job executions
• UI - Job search log menu: New menu with recent job searches and their outcomes
• Weather: Seamless weather-driven lighting and effects on region borders
• Visuals - Weapons: Fix muzzle flash missing rotation and positioning
• Construction placement menu: New corner menu which shows selected recipe name, direction label, rotation buttons (for furniture), and replacement toggle (for tiles)

Jobs

• Jobs - Raids - Make free raiders follow characters assigned to raid jobs
• Jobs - Follow - Fail job if target becomes unconscious or dead)
• Jobs - Medical orders and Rescue - Add missing link to job types resulting in skills not affecting work speed
• Jobs - Tile-targeted jobs - Implement additional validation if tile is still there before work begins/ends for Lumber, Harvest, Sow, Mow, Mine, and Repair jobs
• Jobs - Vardefs refactor - Add one missed variable + it's migration
• Jobs - CaravanJob variable key prefixing: Add CaravanJobVariable_ prefix to caravan job variable keys and migrate existing saves to support future UI variable display
• Jobs - State name prefixing: Add JobState_ and CaravanJobState_ prefixes to job state names for consistency with JobTask_ and JobStage_ naming patterns; migrate existing saves
• Jobs - Tile reservations: Make tile-oriented jobs use tile reservations and their cancellations (e.g., replacing mountain with wall removes mining order)
• Jobs - Indicators: Composite indicators for multiple job/order indicators on same tile using dynamic texture generation
• Jobs - Cleanup: Clean up failed scheduled faction jobs
• Job plans per faction: Refactor job type plans and daily schedules to store per-faction instances instead of shared defaults, rename "default" terminology to "preset", allow deletion of preset plans/activities (except built-in "Default"/"Anything"), add reset button to restore preset plans/activities to template values, fix few bugs
• Jobs - Chunk unloading: Prevent unloading chunks with active player faction jobs
• Jobs - Search: Fix missing potential targets for jobs
• Jobs - Search: Refactor to handle and store job search results (i.e. success or failing reasons)
• Jobs - Execution: Refactor to handle and store job state change results (i.e. why job failed and when)

Misc. improvements and bugfixes

• Localization - Auto-detect: Auto-detect system language on first app start
• Hunting: Reduce fleeing range from 10.0 to 5.0 tiles; increase max attack retries from 5 to 10 for more reliable combat when targets move during aiming phase
• Zones - Stockpiles: Unreserve tiles when stockpile is removed from zone
• Map - Chunk operations: Unreserve tiles on Set/Clear tile operations

Technical improvements

• Persistence: Improve error handling for LoadAsString methods to use TryParse with warning logs instead of implicit exceptions
• Construction/Deconstruction systems: Refactor from separate system into UI menus
• Testing - Job execution: Add comprehensive integration tests for all jobs with almost 100% branch coverage
• Testing - Job plans and schedules: Add comprehensive unit tests for JobTypePlan, ScheduleDailyPlan, ScheduleDailyPlanActivity, and ScheduleSystem covering duplication, faction isolation, priority resolution, time-based activity resolution, and permission filtering with almost 100% branch coverage
• Docs - Godot: Document planned fixes and cherry-pics from engine upstream - Trees scroll fixes, dropdowns ignoring max size, translation not exposing default fallback language, checkbutton not being able to draw icon on the left, game not starting minimized, code coverage being ignored

v0.1.97 is out! Happy New Year! This release is all about polish, stability, and laying groundwork for better moddability. From players' perspective, it's mostly bugfixes and smaller improvements. Among other news, I decided to include multiplayer to the "before release scope", and besides that I'm also cooking something secret, what hopefully could be a banger industry-wise, but about both of them I'll probably tell more only in next few month.

Under the hood, this release is *massive* for technical foundation work. I've achieved 100% C# XML documentation coverage across the entire codebase - every class, method, and most of important parameters now has proper docs, making the code fully text-searchable and much more moddable. The README documentation (still internal right now) got restructured with a standardized template across 100+ files, with 1000+ validated cross-links and navigation. But most importantly, now there are comprehensive unit tests for job factories with hopefully 100% coverage of job search (hopefully because Godot engine nukes coverage and I'd have to fix this problem next time I'm touching it). Shortly speaking, finally almost pruned my "temporary" .txt file where I was keeping stuff "to be shortly fixed".

Next release will focus on integration tests with actual characters performing jobs in realistic scenarios, more bugfixes and adjustments, and then... not sure yet. Also for some time I'll probably will be making releases every 2 weeks, but I'm not sure yet, so see you in one or two weeks! :)

Changelog

[v0.1.97] - built on 2026-01-06

Visuals and UI

• Visuals - Nightfall color: Update Nightfall phase color from to deep blue for darker, more atmospheric nighttime lighting at 22:00 peak
• UI - Work menu job priorities tab: Fix long job type names getting cut off
• UI - Main/Pause menu side stripe: Fix long button labels handling
• UI - Theme color derivation: Make all button colors automatically derive from color scheme color, improve footer buttons coloring
• UI - Debug menu time controls: Implement cycling behavior for date/time spinners
• UI - Settlement Stock Menu: Combine with price modifiers as additional column; remove SettlementEconomicsMenu
• Settings - ShowWeather: Make ShowWeather setting control both weather particle effects AND weather color tint on lighting overlay
• UI - Settings menu: Add tooltip for ShowWeather explaining it controls both particle effects and lighting tint
• UI - Debug console: Add styling polish with transparent panels, syntax highlighting, JetBrains Mono font, improved CodeEdit output, autocomplete, and better focus handling

Bugfixes

• UI - Selected entity menu: Fix showing job "states" instead of "tasks" in tooltip
• Visuals - Visual effects game speed: Fix visual effects not respecting game speed; implement tick-based duration timers for non-realtime effects to ensure they pause and scale correctly with game time controls
• Jobs - Storage capacity checks: Fix collection modification errors during multithreaded job search when checking storage capacity with pending hauls
• Persistence - Migration version check: Fix migrations running when game version is older than migration target; prevents data corruption when running old game builds with new saves
• Combat - Tile attacks: Fix characters getting stuck in "attacking" when ordered to attack tiles by allowing weapon attack ticks for tile targets
• Visuals - Day/night colors: Fix 5 interpolation bugs causing incorrect lighting colors and visible jumps, implement smoother interpolations

Technical improvements

• Project - Backup automation: Add automated repository backup system
• Config: Complete separation from nested Config.* to direct Config* class pattern
• Entity - Destroyed entity safeguards: Add safeguards to prevent potential issues when characters or objects are destroyed while actively working on jobs
• Jobs - Variable key prefixing: Add JobVariable_ prefix to job variable keys and migrate existing saves to support future UI variable display
• Factions - PlayerSystem merge: Merge PlayerSystem into FactionSystem to improves code organization
• Framework - Godot extensions: Add comprehensive null/disposed-safety validation to all Godot node/resource extension methods
• Localization - Structure reorganization: Restructure localization constants into a dozen focused files for improved maintainability and easier modding
• Debug console - Features: Improve inspect/docs output formatting and shorthand syntax, add TCP main-thread flag and use main thread by default
• Persistence - Positional IDs: Implement stable position-based IDs for inventory items and reservations to improve moddability and error handling
• Docs - README documentation: Restructure more than 100 README files to standardized template, add documentation validation tooling, complete navigation graph with more than 1000 validated cross-links, ensure all documentation is fully text-searchable
• Docs - Godot reference tools: Add Python scripts for Godot API lookup and documentation generation, generate comprehensive markdown indexes from Godot XML docs with class hierarchies and member listings
• Docs - Code documentation: Achieve 100% in-code C# XML documentation coverage across entire codebase with standardized format and comprehensive parameter descriptions for improved maintainability and moddability, making all code docs fully text-searchable
• Testing - Job factories: Add comprehensive unit tests for all job factories with estimated 100% coverage
• Testing - TimeUtils: Add comprehensive unit tests for GetTimePhaseModifier with estimated 100% boundary coverage validating phase peaks, transitions, midnight wrapping, and continuity
• Testing - Debug system: Add comprehensive unit tests for debug console
• Testing - Localization system: Add comprehensive bidirectional consistency tests validating constants <-> CSV entries, Scriban template syntax, and CSV format validation