It's been a week since the last update, and I've been making good progress again. That list of stuff I was aiming to complete before the private test should be finished by the end of today, and I've playtested a bunch and fixed a load of other issues too.

One of the things I needed to work on was making AI tribes actually craft the resources that they are selling. This is now working nicely and it's good to see the tribes react to your trading and start producing things. I do still need to get them gathering and producing the required resources for that crafting though too, so there's still some more work to go there.

I also made it so that AI tribes won't trade if your favor is too low. This had the added benefit of making it easy to lock trading behind a quest. So generally your starting favor with an AI tribe will be in the 40-50 range (for now), and completing a single quest will give you 10 favor, putting you over that 50% threshold, allowing trade. A nice "gamey" mechanic that fits in really well.

This morning I also worked on a new reputation system that influences that initial range. So if you have generally high favor with the tribes you have met, then new tribes you meet will also like you more, and you might be able to trade without first completing a quest.

I've worked on a whole lot of other similar little things too, and there are more to go. I've decided to carry on with my own playtesting and fixing over the weekend, and if I don't hit anything major, the private test will go out next week.