What's New
This is the update we have been building toward for weeks. The settlers of Novus Terminus: First Flags are no longer just standing around looking pretty -- they are working. Really working. And you can watch every step of it.
Place a building in your settlement and the whole machinery kicks into motion. A builder walks out of the headquarters, picks up an axe from the flagpole, and heads to the construction site. Trees in the way? The builder chops them down -- and you can actually watch the tree topple over with a satisfying fall animation. Each felled tree produces a log that appears right there on the ground. The builder picks it up, carries it to the nearest flagpole, and sets it down. Now the carriers take over.
Carriers are the lifeblood of your road network. Each one is assigned to a stretch of road between two flagpoles, and they spend their day picking up goods at one end and walking them to the other. Watch a log travel from the forest clearing to the headquarters: a carrier hoists it onto their back with a loading animation, walks the winding road to the next flagpole, sets it down, and another carrier picks it up for the next leg. The goods physically move through your network, pole by pole, until they arrive at their destination. At the headquarters, a depot settler walks out, collects the delivered goods from the flagpole, carries them back inside, and the door closes behind them.
What makes this so satisfying is that every piece of it is visible and connected. There are no invisible teleportations, no abstract progress bars. If you place your roads poorly, you will see carriers waiting around with nothing to do while goods pile up at a distant flagpole. If you build an efficient network, you will see the smooth flow of materials rippling through your settlement like a well-oiled machine.
The whole construction loop now works from start to finish: the building requests the tools and materials it needs, the headquarters dispatches them, carriers transport everything through the road network, and the builder assembles the structure piece by piece. It is still early days, but the core promise of the game -- build a settlement, design your logistics, and watch it all come to life -- is right there on screen.
Behind the Scenes
One of the trickier problems we solved this week was making sure carriers navigate the roads naturally. Our roads are not straight lines -- they curve and wind across the terrain like real footpaths. Carriers now follow these winding paths precisely, leaning into curves with smooth look-ahead turning. We also made sure that when a carrier is already standing on their assigned road, they take a shortcut instead of walking all the way back to a flagpole first. Small detail, but it makes the whole thing look much more natural.
We also did a big spring cleaning of the codebase, removing over 1,600 lines of old code that had been replaced by our new systems. The game is getting leaner and more robust with every update.
What's Next
The transport chain is flowing, buildings go up, and the settlers are busy. Next on the agenda: getting the first production chains running -- woodcutter, food, mining -- so your settlement can truly sustain itself.