Lorne's end of the year wrap up!

Steam post image Let’s take a look at the end of year report for Lorne and its progress!

First off, everyone here at Lorne would like to wish you and yours a fantastic New Year, and we hope you had a wonderful end to the previous year however you chose to spend it. As we mentioned in the previous update, this one is a bit delayed so let’s jump into it!

World changes

The world of Lorne continues to evolve, and over Q4 we’ve made a number of changes to help make the overworld feel more alive, more readable, and more rewarding to explore. Now, let’s go through them.

Guidance From the Village Elder

To help players traverse the world, the Village Elders can now point you in the right direction by giving you hints toward the nearest shrine. Exploration is still key but a little guidance never hurts.

Buff Icon polishing: To make buffs clearer and easier to read at a glance, we’ve created new icons specifically for buffs and updated the existing ones. This should make it easier to understand which effects are active during combat and exploration, while also better matching the overall art style.

Creatures Now Drop Meat: Animals in the world will now drop meat when defeated. This pads out the food stuffs available and gives you a easy source to replenish your HP.

Steam post image Crafting & Resource Tweaks: Several adjustments have been made to improve resource flow and crafting clarity

• Added color and changed symbols in the crafting UI to make selection clearer

• Increased rock yield when harvesting to help you build out your Bastion

• Greatly increased the availability of Dark Iron Ore in the overworld, making it more viable as a progression resource The old crafting UI's symbols: Steam post image Steam post image Steam post image The new crafting UI's symbols: Steam post imageSteam post image Vendors: The world of Lorne wouldn’t feel empty without its inhabitants, and during Q4 we’ve looked into expanding and continued to work on the vendors. From new types of vendors to better balance and better interactions, vendors are now a much more integrated part of Lorne.

  We’ve introduced several new vendors, with different types of specialities including food vendors, a blacksmith, or potion vendors, each with their own inventories and roles. A food vendors for example would offers consumables for example apples, cookies, fish, meat, bread or cheese depending on the vendor. While a blacksmith would have different weapons, arrows or trinkets for sale.

  Example from a blacksmith vendor

  Finally, vendors are no longer limited to only a few areas but are now available in all zones, making it easier to restock, prepare, and adapt as you explore Lorne.

  Changes to the building system

  During Q4, a large part of development went into improving and stabilizing the building system, as well as the invasion system. The goal has been to make building feel more intuitive and better integrated with both combat and progression, as this is a cornerstone of the gameplay.

  Improved Building Feel & UI: We’ve made several visual improvements to make placing and managing buildings much easier. Building placement has been refined, collision issues have been fixed across walls, connectors, ramps, gates, traps, and explosive barrels, and hover feedback has been added to building buttons. Missing resource messages and clearer tooltips now help explain why something can’t be built, rather than leaving players guessing.

  Building visuals have also received attention: placeholder icons have been replaced, new thumbnails have been created and imported, descriptions have been added to inform you what resources each building requires, and the entire building system widget has been reworked and polished for better clarity. Several new resource types have also been added to the building system, and the first full cost iteration has been completed for further balancing.

  Towers and Traps: Towers and traps have seen both visual and balance updates. Projectiles have been scaled up to improve visibility, tower models have been rescaled to better fit the world, and several bugs related to explosive traps have been fixed.

  Tower Tier 3

  Known as the Mage Tower and it's now finally fixed and ready to be shown off! This will be the strongest tower available, the Mage Tower has a slow attack speed with long range, higher maximum damage and splash damage.

  Invasions

  Invasions are one of the cornerstones in Lorne and during Q4 a lot of work went into laying the foundation for them. While many parts are still very much a work in progress, we’ve made solid strides towards a better and more complete system.

  At the core of this work has been building out the wave system itself. Enemies are now properly added to invasion waves, with waves being renamed, reorganized, and updated so that each one ramps up in difficulty. World Tier progression is now tied to invasion waves, increasing with every 12th wave to ensure that pressure and challenge continue to rise as you survive longer. With this said Lorne will have the elements of a infinite invasion mode, allowing waves to restart and scale endlessly for those who want to truly test their defenses. On the technical side, a lot of effort went into making invasions more reliable and less prone to breaking. Enemies now spawn on all valid spawn points, no longer despawn due to optimization systems, and correctly persist across waves. Enemy behavior during invasions has also seen notable improvements. They no longer shares targets incorrectly, movement now aborts properly when needed, and wave enemies will no longer wander aimlessly. Behavior Trees have been adjusted to make invasion enemies more focused on their objectives, and collision tweaks were made to better support enemy navigation.

  A new enemy type

  Finally, we'd like to introduce a new enemy the Exploding Ent. These volatile foes add a new layer of threat by damaging buildings (and anything nearby) when they detonate. Exploding Ent behavior has been implemented, added to invasion waves, and balanced to work alongside existing enemies. Invasions are still one of the hardest systems to get right, but with each update they’re becoming more stable, engaging and we’re excited to keep pushing them further.

  Miscellaneous

  And let's drop a bunch of smaller changes that's also been implemented during Q4!

  • Fully implemented the undead warhound into the game

  • Optimized culling interval for destructible terrain

  • Fixed various bugs that crashes the fame

  • Fixed bugs with explosives such as staggering and sfx

  • Fixed a bug where arrows collided where they should not

  • Various visual bugs fixes

  • Fixed a minor bug with Soul Dust collection

  • Implementation for WIP targeting systems for monsters with various checks and behaviors

  • Fixed a bug with zone presentation

  • Fixed a small bug with the Undead Archer

  • Made sure that the death sfx for the Ibex is local

  • various code clean up

  • Fixed a bug with stat gain when a character leveled up multiple times at once.

  • Cleaned up stat window

  • Increased the number of stat points gained on level up by 3

  • Created an area to try out an emote call on the character.

  Porting: In the spirit of transparency, we’d like to inform you that there has been a snag in the porting process. It’s nothing we don’t believe can be resolved in time, but it will delay you receiving Lorne for console. If you’d like to change your platform selection to PC instead, please let us know and we’ll make a note of it.

  Game Jam: As a final note, we’re excited to announce that we’re hosting a game jam! Submissions will be open from January 12th, 2026, to January 26th, 2026, and it’s open to everyone so whether you’re a seasoned dev or just getting started, we’d love to see what you create! Not feeling like joining in this time? No worries! You can still check out all the awesome submissions and take part in the voting, which runs from January 27th to February 10th. Voting is open to everyone, so come help decide the winners! Community feedback: And as always we're interested in your input, and we’ll continue to your ideas and feedback on Discord as we move forward and if you dont have Lorne wishlist ed yet feel free to whislist Lorne on Steam feel free to do so! We hope you all had a fantastic New Year celebration, and we’ll see you in the next one!