Brineworks Update (1.9) available!

Greetings, Viceroys!

Much like Mariah Carey already playing from the grocery store speakers, we too couldn’t wait to bring holiday gifts early! Over the past several weeks, we’ve been analyzing your feedback and iterating behind the scenes. We’ve added new content and wrapped it all into today’s Brineworks Update. We hope you enjoy it!

Here’s what’s new:

• New farm: Brineworks (grows Salt and Insects)

• 2 new dangerous glade events: Lurker and Petrified Gargoyle

• New forbidden glade event: Small Stormforge

• Special offers at traders

• 9 new Stormforged versions of existing Cornersones

• New legendary Cornerstone and 2 new perks

• Encyclopedia improvements

• Random main menu skin

• And more!

Continue reading for our design notes, full changelog, and information about settlement saves.

DEVELOPER NOTE

Our initial goal with today’s update was to address several frequently mentioned UX/UI suggestions that have been circulating in the community since the release of the Nightwatchers DLC. As development went on, however, we realized that this alone wouldn’t make for a substantial patch. So we revisited a few older content ideas we still felt were promising and sprinkled in some spicy balance changes to help freshen up the game.

Let’s start with the most exciting additions: the new glade events. We’re introducing three in total - two dangerous ones (the Lurker and the Petrified Gargoyle) and one forbidden one (the Small Stormforge). While we’ll leave their exact mechanics and lore for you to discover, we’d like to highlight a few of the rewards you can earn from them.

If you choose to purify the pond where the Lurker resides, it will transform into a Deep Pond, which has more charges than a Large Pond, yields more Fish per charge, and has a 50% chance to also provide Algae and Scales.

With the Petrified Gargoyle, you can decide to turn the possessed statue into a decoration, granting a unique new effect: cheaper Rain Engine installation and increased rainwater production.

And by using the Small Stormforge, you can upgrade one random Cornerstone to Stormforged rarity, or gain a new Stormforged Cornerstone if none of your current perks are eligible for an upgrade.

But that’s not all in terms of new content. Update 1.9 also introduces the Brineworks, a brand-new farm building where you can grow Salt and Insects on farmfields. We added this building because, until now, both of these resources had very few sources despite being valuable ingredients in many recipes. The Brineworks should also introduce some interesting new options to the farming branch of the game, such as the ability to produce meat-based foods primarily using a farm (which wasn't really possible before).

As you can see, much of this update is focused around making certain playstyles more appealing and making your runs more varied overall. That’s also the idea behind the new special offers available from traders. Once you unlock this feature in the Smoldering City, each trader who visits your settlement will bring one random perk or blueprint at a 50% discount. Sometimes it’ll be the exact blueprint you were desperately hoping for; other times it might be a niche perk you’ve never considered, but for just 5 or 10 Amber, it might be worth a try.

With the same goal in mind, we also rebalanced several Cornerstones in this update, focusing primarily on buffing some of the