Hi all! The update is going really well, and I've just finished off the biggest remaining chunk of work (over 4000 lines of code in a week!), which was a rework of the AI tribe industries and generation. So they are now ready for final testing, and looking good too.

We now have a total of 4 types of industry for the 0.5 launch:
Rock Tools, where they craft and trade all kinds of rock tools, have a single rare-rock quarry (lapis/marble/red rock/greenstone/granite), and flax farms for twine etc
Pottery, crafting and firing urns, bowls, bricks and tiles, with a clay quarry
Bread, wheat farms through to flatbreads. No quarry, just bread!
Bronze, with both a tin and copper quarry. They buy and sell both ores, craft and sell ingots, and craft them into complex tools to sell too.

So if you’re on the unstable branch, with covered sleds working great now too, it’s time to get trading!

Just to let you all know, I will soon be closing down the unstable branch to new players by setting a password until after the 0.5 release in late July. This should help to avoid confusion, and I won’t have such a need for feedback during this time, as we’re nearly feature complete and I can only fix bugs from then on.

From here, we will have a few new bugs due to these major AI tribe changes, so I’ll no doubt be working on those this week. I’ll also be tracking down the memory spike/stuck sapiens bug, as well as working on getting the tutorial done for 0.5, and possibly Steam based P2P multiplayer if I can get that working in time. I’ll also start working on a new trailer very soon too.

There are of course still plenty of minor issues that have been reported that have not yet been fixed, and many of these won’t be fixed until future updates after 0.5 goes public. This is a bit annoying, but it’s just the nature of game development, especially solo, and in early access. Basically if we can put up with a few bugs, we can get new features a lot faster. The bugs will still get fixed down the line, in a more efficient way, often even by chance when I’m working on something else.

Thank you again everyone. If you are on the unstable branch, please do give it some more testing over these next couple of weeks, as we’re not quite done yet, I do need these last bug reports! Nearly there!