Beta Test for the 1.3.0 "Free Beer" Update Starts Now!

Dear Pioneers,

We have great news for you!

The beta test for the "Free Beer"-Update 1.3.0 starts now!

A promise is a promise, and you shall receive! The Brewery will be available for free for everyone in the next update! Cheers! 🍻

Besides that, we’re working tirelessly on our first big DLC Meadowsong! In the course of that we reworked some features for the base game, too. These are now ready to test in our current beta!

As always, everyone who owns the base game is eligible to access the Beta Branch on Steam to test all new features! We are excited for your feedback! Please tell us what you think on Discord or in the Beta Branch Discussions on Steam. Thanks!

Highlights

• The Brewery is now available for everyone!

• The food system got a major update, food diversity is now rewarded

• Generated maps got many changes and new options

• Our first DLC “Meadowsong” will be released simultaneously with the “Free Beer” update

Meadowsong

The first DLC of Pioneers of Pagonia will be released on May 27, 2026!

Meadowsong expands the game with numerous new buildings, animals, goods, and production chains, as well as a new challenge: The mysterious “Withering” is spreading across islands. Experience the story of Meadowsong and solve the riddle of the mysterious witch coven!

Wishlist the DLC now!

Get a sneak peek at some first concepts here:

1.3.0 “Free Beer”-Update

Gameplay

The Forager can gather Elderberries now, which can also be found on generated maps. Next to Beer the Brewers can also produce Elderberry Juice. Finally, our Pagonians can drink something else than water!

Generated Maps

Some challenges that are already known from the 1.0 campaign will now appear on generated maps, too! The obstacles “Landslide” and “Thorny Forest” as well as the werewolf boss “Mashka” can also appear on any generated map.

You can also increase the randomness of enemy types on generated maps. Find more details in the patch notes below.

Additionally, we added experimental settings. You asked and you shall receive: You can increase the population limit from 3.000 to 5.000, 7.000 or 10.000 Pagonians. With the experimental settings it’s also possible to generate very small and very large maps.

Please note that these settings are not officially supported and the experience may depend on your system specifications.

Food Variety System

The pumpkin diet is finally over! From now on the new food variety system rewards the player for offering abroad variety of meal ingredients. Whenever a Cook or a Carrier prepares a meal, they try to use ingredients which were not used in the previous meals, increasing the variety bonus of a meal. This will happen automatically if multiple different ingredients are available. Read more about the different boni in the patch notes below.

New Food Overview

The population overview has been extended to Population & Food Overview and we added a new tab with the Food Overview! From now on you’ll always be informed what kind of foods your market stalls have to offer!

Pagonia Editor Improvements

We added support for map-specific game data! Among other things this enables richer customization and custom scenarios. We are excited to see your new community maps!

Other Improvements

As always, we have numerous Gameplay & UI Improvements as well as Bugfixes for you. Read the detailed patch notes down below.

Thank you so much for your support and have fun testing the new features!

Take up your tools! Your Envision Entertainment Team

"Free Beer"-Update 1.3.0 Beta Patch Notes

Highlights

• The Brewery is now available for everyone!

• The food system got a major update, food diversity is now rewarded

• Generated maps got many changes and new options

• Our first DLC “Meadowsong” will be released simultaneously with the “Free Beer” update

Meadowsong

• The first DLC for Pioneers of Pagonia will be available on May 27, 2026!

• It expands the game world with numerous new buildings, animals, goods, and production chains, as well as a new challenge “the Withering” spreading across the islands.

• Wishlist now!

1.3.0 “Free Beer” Update

Gameplay

• The Forager can gather Elderberries now, which can be found on generated maps from now on

• New building: The Brewery

  • Uses Wheat, Water and Wood to brew Beer

  • Can also produce Elderberry Juice.

• New market stall type: Beverages

  • Offers Elderberry Juice and Beer

Generated Maps

Note that some of the features listed here require you to choose “Customize” to access them when setting up the custom game

• The obstacles “Landslide” and “Thorny Forest” now also appear on generated maps

  • To remove obstacles, Pathfinders are now also available on generated maps

  • Pathfinders now explore a very small area after removing an obstacle to ensure that they can access the next obstacle

• The werewolf boss “Mashka” is the first boss which can now also get activated on any generated map

• Randomness of enemy types

  • Until now, all activated enemy types were placed roughly in equal strength, reflecting an “even distribution”. This option can now be changed to “Some randomness” (new default) and “Strong randomness”

  • With increased randomness, some of your selected enemy types may occur very often and others rarely or not at all.

  • This also enhances exploration, as it comes as a surprise which enemies exist and in what numbers you encounter them.

  • Note that disabled enemy types will not be placed, you can still exclude specific ones. Of course, randomness does not have any effect if you only choose one enemy type.

  • Note that enabling a specific boss will always place the associated enemy type too since their bases are required for the boss to function

• If you want a more relaxing experience, you can completely disable enemies raiding your settlement

• AdjustedThe map generation quality got improvements in several areasEnhanced obstacle and hurdle generation for more natural layouts, refined placement rules for plants, treasures, artifacts, and objective POIs and improved lake and terrain blocking.

Generated Maps Experimental Settings

We added two experimental settings for generated maps. To access them, you have to “enable experimental settings” in the options, section gameplay. Note that these settings are not officially supported and the experience may depend on your system specifications.

• You can increase the population limit from 3.000 to 5.000, 7.000 or 10.000 Pagonians.

• The original map sizes are named “Standard”, “Increased” and “Large” now, and with experimental settings you can access both smaller maps (“Very small” and “Small”) and larger maps (“very large” and “largest”)

Food Variety System

The new food variety system rewards the player for offering a broad variety of meal ingredients to the Pagonians. Whenever a Cook or Carrier prepares a meal, they try to use ingredients which were not used in the previous meals, increasing the variety bonus of the meal. This will happen automatically if multiple different ingredients are available. The detailed rules are:

• The initial variety bonus for a meal is 1 (no variety)

  • Example: If you constantly feed your people with Pumpkins only, there is no variety bonus

• For each ingredient fetched by the Cook, which uses a different ingredient than the previous meal cooked in the same building, the variety bonus is increased by one

  • AdjustedExampleIf a Carrier living in a Hut is constantly able to cook meals using the side dishes Corn and Pumpkins taking turns, the variety bonus will be increased by +1, doubling the comfort value of each meal.

• The variety bonus will further increase if multiple previous meals used different ingredients.

  • Example: If a Cook is able to use the main dishes Deer meat, Trout and Rabbit meat taking turns, the variety bonus increases by +2 since the last 2 used ingredients are always different.

• The variety bonus will add up for each meal component

  • Example: If a Cook is able to use three different main dish ingredients and three different side dish ingredients, the variety bonus will increase by +2 for main dish and +2 for side dish, summing up to +4 (to a total multiplier of 5).

• The total meal score can exceed 100 points if you have all ingredients for comfort meals or nutritious meals available.

• The new system also avoids that only highest scoring meal ingredients are used while others pile up unused, but instead all ingredients will be used somewhat equally and still result in higher meal scores. The food requirements have been rebalanced to reflect the higher values of the meal scores.

• The amount of Comfort Meal score required to get a newborn has been increased accordingly. While the initial values are not very different (only a limited food variety is available), much higher scores are needed later (as many ingredients become available). Overall, you can grow your population faster than before if you offer various ingredients, but if you offer only one or two types of ingredients, it will be slower.

• The amount of Nutritious Meal score required for mining has been increased accordingly. Surface mining now requires a nutrition score of 2 while sub-surface mining costs 5 per tour.

• Cottages and Huts now also show a meal history for home cooking in their interface.

• All residential buildings got their tooltips about newborns improved.

Food Overviews

• New marketplace food overview

  • If you select a Market Fountain, you will get an overview of all meal ingredients available at nearby Market Stalls.

• New global food overview

  • The “Population” overview has been extended to “Population & Food Overview”, a new tab with the Food Overview has been added.

  • It shows a similar food overview as the market fountain, but it sums up all your market place areas.

  • There is a new option to define whether your Carriers prioritize eating or priority transports, which may help in resolving Carrier shortage (default is equal priority)

  • There is a new option to disable home cooking for Huts or both Cottages and Huts. This can be useful in the late game if you want to ensure that only Cooks in the Tavern use the ingredients to produce meals with higher scores.

• We added a commodity group for “processed ingredients” and redistributed some food and plant related commodities between natural products / animal meal ingredients / plant meal ingredients / processed ingredients.

Gameplay improvements

• All boss enemy units are now immune to the Warlock scare ability

• Outdoor piles under prolonged threat by enemies will be removed from the economy

  • Therefore, currently unreachable commodities are no longer considered “available”

  • This ensures that production process for those commodities will start if the target production value is not reached

  • If the threat is gone, those outdoor piles will be added to the economy again

Controls

• If the camera jumped to a new different location during a dialogue, you can now use the BACKSPACE key to jump back to your original location

Other

• Added an option to increase or reduce the amount of music played by changing the duration of the breaks between music pieces.

• Credits are now split into base game and “Meadowsong” credits and selection is done via a dialog in the main menu

• Added a news section which may be used for special events.

UI Improvements

• Commodity tooltips in the building selection interface and many other interfaces now show how many units of the commodity you have globally in your economy, e.g. “Softwood Trunk (130 owned)”

• The cycle option in the context menu below top bar commodity tooltips now shows how many buildings there are to cycle, e.g. “cycle source buildings (8)”

• Objectives UI has new context actions, displayed at mouseover with a tooltip too:

  • Clicking the left mouse button on an objective to build a specific building type will switch directly to the construction mode of this building

  • Clicking the left mouse button on a trade objective will now cycle through available Trading Posts or switch to the construction mode of Trading Posts if none exist.

• Monument of Wisdom & Light Spire

  • Special ability buttons are now positioned in the controls

  • Special ability buttons now show a small mana bar

• Added more explanatory tooltips to the Pathfinder's Hut

• Information regarding yields on farm fields have different colors now for better readability

• Warnings for carrier shortages now include a hint that units can be demoted back to carriers

• The save and load game window now shows the map type: Campaign Map, Modded Map, Generated Map or Developer Scenario Map

Bugfixes

• FixedCampaign map 3Fixed wrong speaker of a dialog line

• Fixed that clicking the “Builders Edition button” was linked to the wallpapers DLC

• Fixed that clicking some entries in the top bar initiated unwanted camera jumps or entering building construction mode

• Fix rare crash when trying to cancel a building construction via hotkey

Pagonia Editor Changes

• Added support for map-specific game data, enabling richer customization and custom scenarios

• Improved stability when opening, closing, and editing maps

• Fixed rendering issues for faction buildings and POIs

• Maps can now include DLC dependencies and pass required data correctly when launched

Known Issues

Choosing playstyle in map gen rarely can have double categories

Maps created by Pagonia Editor can be exported despite failing the consistency check. This can corrupt DLC 1 maps

Some missing Icons and VFX

Food Variety System balancing not final