Rise of the Settlement – Dev Diary Community Update #22

Greetings, Settlers 🏛️

This update brings a few important systems that help the settlement economy move closer to the long-term vision of Rise of the Settlement.

Caravans now have more progression and customization, taxes have been introduced to help settlements remain financially stable, and after a lot of thought, Rise of the Settlement will also receive a playable demo.

Special thanks to two of the best contributors who enjoyed and believed in the project: Vik the Viking and Max Goldmere, who have now become traders in the realm.

Caravan Updates

Caravans can now unlock upgrade slots as they level up.

At levels 2, 10, and 20, each caravan unlocks a new slot that can hold a caravan upgrade.

Each upgrade has a fairly high activation cost, making every choice important. Upgrades can be changed at any time, but activating a different one will always require paying the cost again.

There are now two types of caravan upgrades:

• Standard upgrades with a simple positive boost

• Stronger upgrades that provide a bigger bonus, but also come with a downside to another caravan stat

Upgrades can affect the following caravan stats:

• Caravan speed

• Caravan cargo capacity

• Travel distance

• Profitability of sales (profit margins)

• Experience gained per run

A caravan can have up to three upgrades active at the same time, and they can be changed whenever needed.

Taxes

Until now, it was almost impossible for the settlement economy to keep up with debt and production costs, especially in the early game.

Even with caravans selling resources, settlements often struggled to keep up with the large amount of goods being produced and stockpiled.

Because of this, taxes have now been introduced.

There are currently two types of taxes:

• Taxes on people wealth: collected monthly at the beginning of each month

• Taxes on business / production building wealth: collected yearly at the beginning of each year

This allows the settlement to better sustain production, continue buying produced goods into stockpiles, and eventually sell them through caravans.

At the moment, taxes are still in their first implementation phase. There are no direct negative effects yet besides reducing the wealth of people and businesses, but taxes should still be set carefully, as high tax rates can heavily impact the settlement’s long-term growth and development.

This still creates indirect consequences:

• Poorer people develop socially much slower, advance more slowly through social classes, and remain limited in their needs and benefits

• Poorer businesses struggle more to afford upgrade materials, which slows down their development and can reduce the settlement's overall growth

Later on, taxation will directly affect other systems as well, such as happiness and other factors that influence production and settlement efficiency.

Demo

After a lot of thought, I decided to create a demo for Rise of the Settlement.

The demo contains the full game experience, but with limits on how far the player can advance in technologies and, indirectly, how many resources the settlement can access.

The goal of the demo is to achieve two things:

• Help players understand what to expect from Rise of the Settlement

• Allow interested players to better understand the core idea of the project and see its long-term potential

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Fixed a caravan tooltip that was showing incorrect information

• Fixed an issue where settlement wealth was overlapping the barter filter buttons

• Fixed an issue where export goods were not updated corectly

Final Note

The settlement can now finally become profitable, and total wealth can eventually become positive.

This means that the economy and monetary systems are slowly starting to work together, but there is still a long way to go before they reach the level of complexity that is planned.

Without spoiling too much about what comes next, I feel there is still a lot of room for improvements related to trade presentation, barter systems, and social classes — so stay tuned.

As always — thank you for supporting the journey.

Your feedback shapes every update.

🎮 Join our community: 👉 Discord Server

See you in the settlement. — Luki