What's New
A settlement needs more than pretty scenery -- it needs stuff. Wood, stone, iron, coal, gold, fish, and game: this week we filled the island with all the raw materials your settlers will depend on, and we made every one of them visible, harvestable, and alive.
Start near the mountains and you'll spot clusters of angular boulders hugging the hillsides -- stone quarries, their rough-cut rocks catching the light. As your settlers chip away at them, the boulders physically shrink and some disappear entirely, leaving behind smaller rubble. It's a satisfying visual feedback loop: you can glance at a quarry from across the map and immediately tell how much stone is left without opening any menus. Deep inside the mountains, veins of iron, coal, and gold wait to be tapped -- these are hidden resources that won't reveal themselves until you send miners to claim them.
Down at the coast, silver fish dart in lazy circles just offshore. Each school is a little cluster of a dozen fish orbiting and weaving around each other with a natural, slightly unpredictable movement. Overfish a school and the numbers visibly thin out; leave it alone and the population slowly recovers. Sustainability matters here.
Inland, herds of roe deer roam the meadows and forest edges. Young fawns are light tan; as they age, their coats darken to a rich chocolate brown. The deer graze, reproduce when conditions are good, and grow old. When a deer reaches the end of its life, it quietly walks toward the nearest tree and disappears -- no dramatic death animation, just a gentle, dignified exit. But here's where it gets interesting: the deer and the forest are connected. If you clear-cut the trees around a herd, their habitat degrades. Reproduction slows, then stops, and eventually the deer begin to leave. Let the forest recover and the wildlife returns. It's a small but meaningful ecological loop that rewards sustainable play.
The forests themselves are no longer just scenery either. Trees can now be felled -- and when they are, they topple over with a satisfying falling animation, lie on the ground as logs, and eventually regrow as tiny saplings that slowly reach full size. Deforest an area too aggressively and the zone becomes barren, unable to regenerate. But practice careful forestry and the woods sustain themselves indefinitely.
Behind the Scenes
Getting the ecosystem to feel right meant connecting a lot of moving parts. The island is divided into hundreds of local zones, each tracking how many trees are standing versus felled. Zone health determines whether saplings can regrow and whether deer can reproduce -- creating a web of cause and effect that plays out naturally without the player needing to manage it directly. We also added a debug overlay for development that projects every resource deposit onto the screen with colour-coded icons -- invaluable for balancing placement density during testing, even if players will never see it.
What's Next
The raw materials are in place and the ecosystem is breathing. Next, we need buildings and settlers who know what to do with all of it -- time to build the production chains.