Seedling goes underground!

In short

Seedling goes underground! Grab a torch and climb down a cave mouth into the Hollows, a dark world lit by glowcaps, with voles, glow moths and crickets, old dens to explore, and a lilac rime that creeps back if you let it. Your town can follow you down: homes, workshops and stores go below, and a Root Stair carries everyone up and down. Cave mouths open in the worlds you already have too. Down there you can also make a friend: win a cave creature over with its favourite food, give it a name, and it walks with you and helps. No two pets are alike, your settlers can keep them too, and a Pet School and a Pet Nursery help you raise the one you want. And back by the water, fishing is now a calm little game of its own. There's a lot more besides: it's all in the notes below.

New

• Dining tables have a Stats tab: how much is eaten per hour, and how much food and drink was on the table.
• A Stash button on stockpiles, warehouses and chests: everything in your backpack that the store already holds goes in with one click. Your hotbar, tools and gear stay with you.
• Fishing is its own little game now: cast and a window opens over the water. Ease your bobber near the fish shadows, hold still while one tests it, click when it bites, then keep it inside your circle to land it. Stay as long as you like.
• Torches: craft two from a stick and fibre in your hands. Right-click one to carry it in the new Light slot next to your hotbar. Underground it lights the dark around you for ten minutes, then the next one from your bag lights by itself. Your friends' torches glow too.
• Cave mouths: new worlds have rocky hollows near the start with a dark hole into the caves below.
• Rope ladder: build one on a cave mouth, then climb down (or just walk in) and climb back up the same way.
• Dig through cave walls with a pickaxe: limestone, and copper ore where a green streak shows in the rock.
• Limestone splits into stone blocks in your hands (two for one).
• Glowcaps grow in the first caves and light their corner of the dark, no torch needed. Pick them to eat (they grow back), and anything glowing you can see goes onto your map.
• Giant glowcaps stand like lamps in the big moss caverns.
• Root tangles hang down the cave walls: an axe gets root wood, which snaps into firewood by hand or planes into planks at the workbench.
• Cave moss carpets the damp floors: twist two into a fibre.
• Below a cave mouth, daylight falls down the shaft into the dark, warm by day and faintly blue at night.
• The PDA map has a button for every layer you've mapped (the surface, the Hollows, ...). The caves under the layer you look at show as a faint dotted outline, so you can see what lies beneath your town.
• Friends on another layer show on the map and minimap with a little badge: "↓1" is one layer down, "↑S" up on the surface.
• Rime: patches of pale lilac crystal crust lie on the Hollows' floor, glittering faintly in the dark, with little crystal shards standing along their edges. It leaves the arrival cave, the water and the glowcaps' light alone.
• The rime grows: from your first visit it spreads over any open floor it can reach, and over cleared ground again, a cell at a time, faster the deeper you go, and around your colony while you're away too. A cell about to be overgrown glints and pulses first, so you see it coming. The glowcaps' light keeps it a few steps back, which leaves natural safe spots, until someone picks the glowcaps.
• No wall holds the rime: it lies over roads, and grows right through buildings. A building it has covered is kept in crystal: it pauses, everything inside stays safe, and a tuning hammer frees it again. Stairs, hoists and the floor around them stay clear, so there's always a way out.
• The tuning hammer: once someone has been down to the Hollows, craft one in your hands from sticks, stones and fibre. Hold the mouse on the rime and it rings a clear note: the crust shatters into glittering splinters and stays away from that spot for a whole day.
• Rime dust: every bit of rime you clear leaves a pinch of glittering lilac dust in your bag.
• Chime flares: little brass bells made at the workbench from rime dust, a glowcap and fibre. Throw one up to 16 m in the caves: it rings where it lands, shatters the rime in a wide circle, and lies there glowing for two minutes, lighting up the cave and putting it on your map.
• Walking on the rime: it crunches underfoot and slows you down, and your torch burns twice as fast and lights a smaller circle while you stand on it. Ring a path clear and you're quick again.
• The singing brazier (new "Deep" tab in the build menu, with the rope ladder): a little fire under a singing bowl. While it burns firewood or charcoal, the rime cracks away around it ring by ring and can't grow back within six cells. Carriers keep it fed, or put some wood in yourself; if it runs dry, its note fades over an hour and the rime slowly creeps back in from the edges.
• The brazier warns you: a toast when its fuel runs low and when it goes quiet, a "Fuel low" or "Out of fuel" sign above it, and a lilac ring with a red or amber note on the map. Its panel shows how long the fuel lasts.
• Placing a brazier shows a soft lilac disc where it will hold the rime off, next to the ones already burning.
• The map paints the rime pale lilac, so you can see where the crust is.
• The burrow house: a snug home dug into a mossy hill, with a round green door, round windows and a glowcap lantern. Two settlers can live in it, or you can claim it as your own. It only goes underground.
• You can build in the caves now: homes, stores and workshops fit wherever the ceiling is high enough. Fields, mills, turbines and traders need the open sky, and the build menu says so.
• Gatherers pick glowcaps and cave moss underground, and woodcutters cut root tangles for root wood.
• Settlers climb the rope ladder too: someone living on the surface can work in the caves and climb back up to bed, and settlers you lead follow you down. Without a ladder they tell you what's missing.
• With Short Commutes, cave workers move into a home below when it's nearer than their bed up top.
• Settlers keep off the rime and walk round where it will grow within the hour. Anyone standing there steps away ("The rime is coming!") and a note tells you where.
• Someone who couldn't get off in time falls asleep in the rime: a glowing lilac crystal closes round them. They're fine and don't get hungry, the top bar counts them and the map marks them. Bring a light and hold E by them: the crystal shatters into rime dust and they follow you out across the rime, back to a singing brazier. A brazier whose ring reaches them frees them by itself too.
• The rope hoist (Deep tab): build it on the surface over the Hollows and it digs its own little landing in the cave below, rime and all. Pick what each end sends: every 20 seconds a crate swings down or up the rope with your goods, and carriers on both ends bring them and take them on. You can put goods in or take them out yourself too.
• The tunnel crew (Deep tab): pick walls with the survey marker, chalk crosses go up on them, and your diggers carve the tunnels and rooms you planned, bringing the stone home. Harder rock needs a better pick on their rack.
• Three new workshops from the Hollows (Deep tab): the mushroom bed grows glowcaps in the dark, the oil press squeezes them into glow oil (a singing brazier burns 6 hours on a flask), and the compost heap rots rime dust and cave moss into deep compost.
• Deep compost for your fields: give a farm some and its farmer sows a bag with each seed, so those crops ripen 15 % sooner.
• Mushroom stew: the kitchen cooks glowcaps with meat into a filling new meal.
• The Glowcap Lamp for your home: three glowing mushrooms on a twisted root, made at the oil press. Put it on a table for a soft green light.
• Deep research: once you've been down in the caves, the Research tab gets a second track, "The Deep". It runs at the same time as your surface research, with its own topic and queue.
• The Deep Study: a scholar's nook for the caves, with shelves of jars and crystals, a slanted desk and a caged rime crystal. Deep topics are studied there, and carriers bring its goods from the cave's chests.
• First deep topic, Spelunking: it teaches the glow lantern, a hand light that burns glow oil, wider and steadier than a torch.
• Goals show how deep you've been ("Depth 1") next to the era.
• Glow Posts (deep research): a twisted root crowned with living glowcaps that lights its corner for good, no fuel. Light up your tunnels, or line your streets up top with soft green lamps.
• Old dens lie in the Hollows: little ember hollows, dens, plate hollows and now and then a great den. Rough red rock scored by huge claws, nests and scorch marks on the floor, and pale crystal grown smooth over all of it. Their ember rocks still glow red after all this time, so you can spot a den from far off in the dark.
• No pickaxe cuts the scored rock, so the dens keep their shape, but fallen rock can be cleared for stone (and sometimes a Hush Shard is hidden in it).
• Hoard piles open: hold E on one and the crystal crust cracks away. Inside are Hush Shards, glow oil, chime flares and more; the bigger the den, the richer the pile. Each pile opens once and stays open.
• Hush plates glow in the dens. Read one with E: the crystal's advice comes together one plate at a time, always in order, and the PDA Wiki's new "The Hush" page keeps every chapter with the gaps still to find.
• Claw marks: lines scratched into the rock of the dens, rough and quick and signed with the same mark. Read them with E and the Wiki's new "Claw marks" page gathers them. Read them twice.
• Hush Night Lamp (home): a gold-white crystal hovering over an ivory stand, found only in hoard piles. Put it on a table and it lights your room warmly.
• New letters arrive as you go deeper, open your first hoard pile and read your first plate.
• Relics: hoard piles can hold one of ten little treasures somebody very big once carried home and kept (a teapot that still sighs steam, a festival mask, a crystal flute, a child's lantern and more), each with a little story of its own. You always find ones you don't have yet first.
• Hoard Museum (deep research "Hoard Museum", up top): an ivory hall with a crystal lantern on its roof. Put the hoard on its plinths (or ask the carriers to bring them). Every relic has renown, a whole set counts half again, and renown brings visitors who pay at closing time and makes your colony more tempting to newcomers.
• Fittings: hoard piles can hold a Warm Stone (a home's residents are happier) or an Ancient Gear (a workshop works 15 % faster). Fit one from the building's new "Fitting" tab; it hovers over the roof, and comes out again any time.
• Hush notes: insight notes (a quarter of a topic done at once) and rare treatises (half) from the hoard piles, read on the PDA's research page for either track. A Hush Codex opens a topic of your era before what it needs.
• Reading the Hush I (deep research): every plate you read for the first time from then on also gives an insight note.
• Shard Sieve (deep research): a sifter washes fifty scoops of rime dust into one gold-white Hush Shard. Traders pay well for them, and the gates below will want them.
• Hush pylons: tall ivory towers in little ruined stations of the Hollows. Some still hum and keep the rime away for twenty cells all round, a safe clearing to build in. The quiet ones wake for five Hush Shards and three glow oil (hold E): the crust cracks back ring by ring and never returns. Your map marks every pylon you've seen.
• Creatures of the Hollows: round burrow voles with glowing freckles, glow moths that flutter over to look at you, slow root snails grazing the rime with moss on their shells, and cave crickets chirping in the dark.
• Cave creatures are shy: crouch and creep to get close, and don't run, they hear you from further away. A chime flare scares everything off, and a moth stays away a while after.
• Cave hunter's lodge: a hide lean-to against the rock for the caves. Its hunters bring back vole meat and fur and cricket chitin, and creatures keep turning up round it.
• Vole fur makes warm boots at the tailor, and cricket chitin a big bundle of light arrows at the fletcher.
• Pet Keeping (deep research): creep up on a vole, moth or snail with its favourite food and offer it a bite at a time. Little hearts show its trust; when it's won over, you give it a name.
• Your pet walks with you everywhere, up and down the caves: a moth lights your way, a snail helps you through the rime, and a vole sometimes sniffs out one more of what you gather.
• Pet House: a cosy row of little round doors with a perch and a mossy garden, for the pets not walking with you. Swap who comes along or rename them there, and grow it into the Big Pet House with room for twelve.
• Settlers can keep a pet: give one from the Pet House or the settler's new Pet tab. It follows them around and helps like a trait (a vole helps gatherers, a snail helps farmers, a moth just makes them happier).
• Pet Treats: every pet eats one a day, from your bag or the Pet House, where carriers bring them. Bake them in the kitchen or make a few by hand from a glowcap and cricket chitin. A hungry pet shows an empty bowl and stops helping until it gets one, but it never runs away.
• Pet Basket for your home, woven at the tailor with a fur cushion: your pet naps in it while you're home.
• The Hush gate: a few hundred metres from your landing, in a gatehouse of the old ones, stands a sealed door. Research Gate Key I, then bring it copper ingots, glow oil and Hush shards; everyone's gifts add up. Once it opens, you can look down its stairs to the second layer. That layer is still in the works and comes in a later update.
• Your map shows the way to the gate once you know its key.
• The caves have a sound of their own: still air in the Hollows, with drips and trickling pebbles now and then in the dark.
• Calm music for the caves, two pieces of it.
• Moss and rime floors have their own footsteps. Rime crunches like glass.
• The rime, the braziers and the caves' big moments have real recordings: the rime's note rings like glass, great stone doors grind open, plates glow, a tamed pet gets fairy-tale bells.
• The caves' creatures are heard: little feet on stone, crickets chirping, moths fluttering and snails gliding.
• A News panel shows what changed: it opens once after an update, and from the main menu any time.
• Once you have been in the caves, the main menu can look into a chamber of glowcaps too. You can switch it off in the settings.
• Root Stair: stairs between the surface and the Hollows that you can build wherever you like, from root wood, limestone and a little rime dust. No research needed once you've seen the Hollows. You and your settlers walk through them, so your underground town can sit right below your town. Goods still need a Rope Hoist: settlers put away what they carry first, on the ladder too.
• Worlds from before the caves get cave entrances too: they open up on land nobody has built on or dug, so what you made stays exactly as it is.
• Carriers use the Root Stair: if the stairs lie in a post's work area, they bring goods down and up, as far around the other end as their reach has left. The map's carrier overlay shows how far that is.
• Every pet is its own: each has a gender, a nature and its own strengths, some help you more and some a settler, some eat more, some glow brighter, some are strong enough to let their carrier take more.
• A new Pets tab in your PDA shows who your pet is, what it does, how it differs from others of its kind, a place to rename it and a tiny bag for treats and whatever else you want it to mind.
• Pet School and Pet Nursery: teach your pets to help better, eat less, carry more or glow brighter, and raise young ones that take after both parents, often a little better. Two new research topics after Pet Keeping.
• Cricket pets: cave crickets can be tamed now, with a little cave moss. Their chirp comes back from walls you haven't seen, so your map of the deep fills in farther round you.
• Light reach: press L in the deep to see how far your lamps and braziers reach on the ground. Gold is lit, lilac is also safe from the rime.
• Root Garden: a new building for the deep. A rootkeeper plants roots in the cave floor and cuts them once they've grown, about two days later. Roots are all it needs to grow more roots.
• Off hand slot: your off hand now shows in the inventory. Drag a light on or off it, or press F to swap it with what's in your hand. A torch burned below half is spent when it leaves.
• Tap Q to put away: a quick tap of Q puts away what's in your hand, unless you're looking at something Q would take down.
• Ringers' Hut: a new cave building. Workers with tuning hammers ring the rime away around it and bring back the dust. The rime grows back, so it never runs out.
• Splitting Bench: a new building in the caves where a worker does the small conversions you'd otherwise do by hand: limestone into stone, cave moss into fibre, root wood into sticks or firewood, fibre into rope.
• Tunnels with the survey marker: select a tunnel crew with the survey marker and press R until Tunnel. Aim at a wall, set the length with the mouse wheel, and click to lay it straight on the way you're looking, shown on the minimap too. Click a picked wall to take that length away again.
• Delete a region: every region in the list now has a Delete button (it asks once), and so do the drawing tools.

Improved

• Every recipe and building that doesn't need research now shows from the start, so you can see what a workbench takes before you've ever twisted a rope.
• The crafting queue now has its own place, even when it's empty, so the recipe list doesn't jump when you start or finish something.
• Shift-clicking a tool at a workplace now hands it to the workers instead of dropping it in the building's input.
• Gatherers, woodcutters and other harvesters now visit up to five spots nearby before heading back, or until their bag is full.
• Farmers bring in several ripe crops on one round, too.
• The number of items in a slot now sits on a small dark backing, so you can read it over any icon.
• The credits now name the developer.
• Messages stay on screen a little longer.
• Load World no longer tags worlds as "Older land": every world comes along with the game from now on.
• The settings menu is split into tabs: Game, Controls, Sound and Graphics.
• Older replays bring themselves up to date when you open them. No more repair button.
• Deliveries are now a grid of all items at a glance: a big icon, the refill numbers below it and the priority beside it. Click an item to pause or resume it without losing its numbers.
• The Production tab works the same way: click an item to pause it at that workshop, and give it a priority to make it first.
• Dining tables list every food and drink they take. Later food joins when its era opens, and each one has its own numbers.
• Buildings are now as solid as they look: you can walk on the landing platform, stand on sloped roofs, and duck under what has room to duck under. Aiming at a building still works from anywhere on it.
• The Wiki has tabs now: Guides, Items, Buildings and Nature. Each one is sorted into categories, so things are much easier to find.
• Looking at rime now says it's rime, and that a tuning hammer breaks it.
• Root Stairs no longer have an inventory: nothing is stored in them.
• Far more animals live in the caves now, on bare floor and on the rime alike, so there's game to find and hunters have work. Animals you can tame stay a lucky find.
• An animal shot on the rime lies on top of the crust. Hunters shoot from the nearest ground they can stand on and haul the catch in.
• The bow is a real bow now: hold left click to draw and let go to shoot. The arrow flies on a curve, as far as you drew it, and a hit brings the animal down. Right click lowers the bow again.
• A clearer way to your first neighbours: research now goes Woodworking, Landing Platform, then Shelter and everything else, so nobody ends up with tents and no way for people to land. Anything you already researched stays yours, and research you had queued gets the platform added in front of it.
• Root Stairs just go up and down: no menu any more. Press E beside them, or simply walk in.
• Smaller arrows: arrows are a bit slimmer and shorter, in your hand and in the air.
• The string pulls back: when you draw the bow, the string bends back with the arrow on it and snaps straight when you let go.
• Pet details: click a pet in the pet house (or on a settler's page) to see its full page with stats.
• Rope hoists: they now work like transport huts without workers. Goods run as routes between the regions at its two ends, and crates stop once the region at the other end reaches its limit.
• Regions per layer: every layer now has its own regions. Open the map on a cave layer and draw there; buildings down there count for that region, not for the land above them.
• Shy moths: glow moths only come over when you hold berries in your hand. Otherwise they leave you be.
• Hungry pets: the sign over a hungry pet is now a crossed fork and spoon that glows and turns to face you, so you can read it even in the dark.
• Glow moths: a moth's light now follows its Glow stat, and there's no separate "Helping you" stat for it. A hungry moth nearly goes dark, and you lose its extra light until it's fed.
• Glow post: its glow is softer now, not such a bright blur.
• Museum page: the Hoard Museum only lists relic collections from layers you've actually been to.
• Homes by place: tents, huts and other surface homes can't be placed underground any more: burrow houses are for that. Ones already down there stay.
• Brazier light: a singing brazier now lights up the whole area it keeps free of rime, so you can see where it's safe. The other wards do too.
• Glow posts hold the rime: a glow post now keeps the rime off within 3 cells, for free, and its light reaches just as far.
• Calmer rime: the rime spreads half as fast, but a spot you cleared by hand starts growing back after about 8 hours instead of a whole day. Better hammers hold it longer.
• Burrow House: the inside now looks dug into the ground: earthen walls and ceiling, moss creeping up the walls, roots hanging down and little glowcaps at the foot of the walls.
• Region brush: when you draw a region, a ring on the map shows the brush's size and where it would paint before you press.
• Recipes one by one: when a workshop can make the same good in more than one way, you can switch each way on or off on its Production tab.
• Pet School and Nursery: a progress bar shows how far along a lesson or a stay is, and the time left is in real minutes.
• Stairs: you can press E on stairs from all round them now, a good step past their corners, and with a hammer in hand by looking at them. What you're looking at still comes first, like the chest beside them.
• No more Mushroom Beds: gatherers can pick glowcaps, so the bed is gone from the build menu and picked glowcaps and moss grow back in 36 hours. Beds you already have keep working.
• Glowcaps and the rime: small glowcaps keep the rime off 1 cell around, giant ones 2.
• Research order: after the Landing Platform comes Shelter, then the rest. Organization needs Containers and Agriculture needs Foraging. Topics you've already finished stay done.
• Only what's there: gatherers and tunnel crews only offer what can actually be found on the layer they're built on.
• Production tabs: gatherers, woodcutters, tunnel crews and farms now have a Production tab: pick what they go for and how much the town should keep.
• Settlers caught in the rime's crystal now show on the minimap as a lilac diamond, and on its edge when they're further away.
• Rootkeepers plant their roots right against the cave walls, side by side, instead of out in the open.

Fixed

• The crafting list no longer scrolls by itself when a craft finishes.
• The research page and the Stats tab now update by themselves while you have them open.
• Farms now list water flasks with the things they use, so you can set a delivery rule for them.
• A stockpile you drag out without having the sticks on you now shows all its planned tiles right away, not only the first.
• Rain splashes stay where they land now, instead of sliding along the ground with you as you walk.
• Taking down an era building no longer takes its era with it: once a new era is unlocked it stays unlocked, and its research stays in the tree. Saves that already lost an era get it back.
• Walking into a Root Stair no longer throws you back up: you walk down its steps, and a little way down you're on your way.
• Bow the right way round: when you're not shooting, the bow now faces away from you with its string on your side.
• No more glowing arrows: arrows no longer glow faintly at night.
• Burrow houses: torches and lanterns now stay lit in your hand inside a burrow house.
• Root Stair: settlers now walk down the steps instead of sinking into them.
• Trapped by the rime: settlers walled in by rime no longer pop out on their own. Clear a way to them, or the crystal takes them until you free them.
• Doors: tapping to leave a house could put you straight back inside. Doors now wait a moment before they listen again.
• Museum: the Hoard Museum no longer shows visitors standing about inside. They still come and pay.
• Brazier deliveries: the singing brazier's Deliveries page now lists everything it can burn, with the usual numbers to change.
• Homes underground: a Burrow House is dark like the cave around it: without a torch only its glowcaps show the room, and a torch or lamp warms it up.
• Crystal: buildings and settlers kept in crystal no longer glow. They show where a light reaches them, like the rime. Rime parts on other things stopped glowing too.
• Off hand text: the text next to the off hand slot wraps again, so the inventory no longer pushes the window beside it off to the side.
• Rootkeeper: a rootkeeper now plants in a small room you've dug for them. Before, moving their work circle left its middle out, and they said there was no free ground.
• Holding E on your home: holding E now always opens its panel. Only a quick tap goes in, and letting go early does nothing. Closing a panel with E no longer goes straight through the door behind it.
• Workers in a crystal building: when the rime keeps a building in crystal, a worker inside it now sleeps in the crystal too, and comes out when it's freed.
• Pet School deliveries: the Deliveries page of pet buildings and of fuel-burning plants now shows what carriers bring, with the usual numbers to change.
• Birds in caves: birds, hares and moths of the open air stay above ground now.
• Crash with the tunnel crew: picking wall tiles west or south of where you started could crash the game. It doesn't any more.
• The Pet School, the Pet Nursery and the power plants that burn fuel no longer act as stores: their Deliveries page shows the treats or fuel they need, and carriers don't drop other goods there.
• No more notifications popping up over the main menu.
• The main menu looks into the caves only now and then, not on every start.
• The news on the main menu shows each update's short summary again, not only its list of changes.