Patch Notes for 4/25/2026

Performance

I took a pass at the things that were making frame rate dip in larger settlements. A few hot spots in the rendering loop were doing more work each frame than they needed to:

Smoother frame rate with lots of villagers and wildlife. Depth sorting (the system that decides what draws in front of what) now updates a couple times less often. You won't notice the difference visually, but the game has more headroom for the rest of the simulation.

Faster combat with hunters. Hunter targeting no longer scans your entire population every frame to find the bow-users, it just remembers who they are and updates the list when roles change.

Off-screen wildlife stops "thinking." Birds, bats, rats, and other ambient critters now pause when they're outside your view and pick right back up where they left off when you scroll back. They were burning a small amount of CPU pretending to wander around in places you couldn't see.

Visuals

A bunch of layering bugs that became visible during weather:

Rain and snow now render in front of buildings, not behind them. Same for fog effects.

HUD elements stay on top during storms. Tooltips, floating "+5 Wood" text, building HP bars, and the rotation widget no longer get hidden behind rain or snow.

Fog of war correctly covers weather in unexplored areas, rain doesn't fall on tiles you haven't discovered yet.

Seasonal color grading applies on top of weather. The autumn warmth, winter blue, and spring green tints now color the entire scene, including rain and fog, the way they were supposed to.

Notes

I am still watching frame time on larger maps. if you've got a save with a packed late-game settlement and notice slowdown, please post details (Era, population, weather conditions). It helps me prioritize the next round of optimizations.