Devlog #25 - Working Areas & Weaponmaker

Hi together and welcome to the next devlog!

Today's devlog is all about working areas and the weaponmaker.

Working Areas

In The First Explorers you will be able to customize working areas for harvesting, planting and farming buildings. This includes for example the woodcutter, the stonecutter, the forester or the farm.

For me it is very important to offer the player different possibilities to set a working area. So the first step was to ask you, the community, what you'd love to see.

Two months ago I conducted a survey on the TFE discord and it became clear, that the majority of the community would love to see a brush mechanic for painting the working area. On the other hand a lot of people wanted to set the working area with a circle like back in the Settlers 3&4 days.

I wanted to try both suggestions, so I just decided to develope both of them. Playtesting quickly showed that in general both ways make sense independent of the building type. As a matter effect you will be able to choose which way of setting the working area you want to use. Both options work for all building types.

Check out this video to see both ways of setting a working area in action!

Keep in mind that this is still work in progress. There is quite a long list already, what I want to improve, but also let me know what you think about this and share you ideas & suggestions!

Now onto another important topic, the Weaponmaker.

Weaponmaker

Weapons play an important role in the game. You need them to recruit new soldiers to defend your territory, to claim enemy territory and of course to win battles.

In the first settlement tier (called Hamlet tier) you will be able to build the first level of weaponmakers. The Weaponmaker L1 is capable of producing lightweapons like the lightsword, the lightspear and the lightaxe.

These lightweapons are used to recruit level 1 men at arms soldiers, which are the swordsman L1, the spearmean L1 and the axeman L1. They counter each other, but that's a topic for a future devlog ;)

To produce lightweapons you need copperore and woodhandles. Copperore is harvested at the copperhut and woodhandles are produced from hardwood logs in the woodturner building.

The production of the three different lightweapons differ in their needed ressource counts and production time. This means that for example a lightaxe costs more copper than woodhandles, but the lightspear costs more woodhandles than copper. Of course The First Explorers will still stick to integer counts and ratios like 1:1, 2:1, 1:2. You won't see something like "this production chain needs 1.43 copperore and 0.75 woodhandles".

And that's a wrap for today. Thanks a lot for stopping by and make sure to leave a comment what you think about the content of todays devlog! :)

Best, Sebastian