0.5.1: Canoes, Point & Click mode

Hi everyone!

A new update that has just gone out, which adds two major new features: Canoes, and point and click mode.

Canoes are simply hollowed out logs, which provide a small amount of storage space, room for one sapien, and very fast transport over water. As well as making it quicker to retrieve distant resources, they also make it possible to trade with more distant tribes.

Point and click mode is a whole new separate camera/control option, where instead of a first person 3D view, you can have a visible cursor always, and click on objects easily. This is a highly requested feature, is now the default, and should work well for many players, however the 3D camera mode will stay, and you can switch between them at any point in the settings or with ctrl+tab.

As well as these two major features, there are many other tweaks and fixes. The population now grows faster, and levels off at a higher maximum cap. Your sapiens will now walk faster and further to complete tasks than before, and there are some quality of life features like a new chop & replant option, and contour/strata lines on the terrain to add detail and make the lie of the land clearer.

This is not a “major” update, it’s just another step on the way, and we’re not done with boats and water yet. Right now I’m working on fish, and the next coming update will have new modes of water transport, a number of different fish, and fishing, but log canoes are a good start, and I wanted to get this in your hands now.

I hope you enjoy the update!

- Dave

Full release notes:

Adds canoes

Adds point-and-click camera/control mode. This is now the default, you can switch back to first-person/3D mode in the settings or with ctrl+tab

Adds chop and replant order

Adds configurable contour lines on the terrain to help you determine altitude changes

Investigation tasks now provide some context to help distingush between them

Increases population caps and birth rates

Increases walk speed by 50%

Rock and tile paths now require only one rock/tile per path segment

Digging dirt/sand and dirt/sand paths is now faster

Reduces mammoth spawn rate in the early game

Doubled the distance that sapiens will travel to complete orders

Increases camera ray hit distance so you can issue orders for objects that are further away

Fixes multiselect bug where sometimes you couldn't issue terrain clearing/digging orders even though some selected vertices were valid for that order

Fixes crashing bugs

Fixes bug where items in storage areas on uneven terrain appeared to float

Fixes bug where the function keys wouldn't work to open the tribe/build/settings menues if a menu was already open

Fixes bug where keyboard shortcuts didn't work when the resources panel was open