Stonewards Early Access – Update 0.3.1

Hello everyone!

Update 0.3.1 is now live! This update focuses on polishing the experience and laying the groundwork for Stonewards’ next steps. It brings more varied enemy waves, reworked cave rooms, placeable Ladders, and a new enemy reinforcement mechanic, alongside improvements to companions, character unlocking, everyday interactions, and another round of bug fixes.

The work on cave and wave generation also gives us a stronger foundation for future content. We’re already building on these improvements for our next major update, planned for December, with a new map, new enemies and bosses, two new playable characters, and new crafting recipes to look forward to!

Thank you for all your feedback and bug reports, and a special thanks to everyone who helped test the update!

New Features

• Enemy Wave Generation: Added procedurally generated waves on Bastion and Dungeon, with varied enemy compositions and mixed groups. Enemy numbers and spawn pacing also adapt to your party size.
• Reworked Cave Rooms: Reworked the caves beneath both maps with more natural room shapes, new layouts and decorations, varied orientations, and improved procedural generation.
• Placeable Ladders: Craft your own Ladders at the Crafter and place them throughout the caves, with a placement preview to help you find the right spot! Extend them as needed, climb them while carrying Chests, or recover sections to use elsewhere.
• Enemy Reinforcements: Leaving enemies alive without fighting them for too long can now trigger incoming reinforcements. A warning countdown gives you time to clear the remaining enemies before more arrive!

Balance & Leaderboards

• Fresh Leaderboards: This update starts fresh Global and Friends leaderboards, separate from scores submitted on 0.2.x.
• Healing Score: Healing now contributes to your total run score and appears in the end-of-run summary.
• Endless Difficulty: Increased difficulty growth in Endless on Normal and Hard difficulties for both maps.

Progression & Quality of Life

• Character Unlocking: Character Selection now shows your progress toward unlock requirements. Once those requirements are met, you can purchase the character directly from the same screen.
• Hunter’s Bear: The Bear now rests beside the Campfire while its owner explores the caves, while remaining ready to respond to nearby enemies.
• Campfire Healing: An upgraded Campfire can now heal a nearby Bear even when its owner is away from the fire.
• Crafting: Added an Inventory Full message when you cannot collect a crafted item.
• Inventory: Dedicated item slots now show a faded icon when empty, making their purpose clearer.
• Score Readability: Large scores in the end-of-run summary and score breakdown now use shorter, more readable formatting.
• Save Warning: Added a startup warning when the game cannot write to its save folders, helping identify saving problems before progress is lost.

Digging & Environment Improvements

• Optimized terrain preparation and cave loading.
• Updated visual effects when hitting and breaking terrain.
• Fixed cracks that could appear between sections of dug terrain.
• Improved mined resource placement to reduce drops spawning inside terrain.
• Improved drop placement and direction when breaking wall torches.
• Fixed some props and barrels dropping no items when destroyed.
• Fixed charged Pickaxe hits not applying their additional damage to breakable props.
• Improved collision handling around Wall sections to reduce items falling through near the Ballista.

Combat & Companion Fixes

• Fixed ranged enemies sometimes moving to positions outside their attack range.
• Fixed enemies continuing certain attacks when their current state should prevent them from attacking.
• Fixed Lich attack sequences not cancelling correctly and corrected the placement of its wave spell.
• Improved retargeting when the last melee enemy becomes stuck outside attack range of the Wall.
• Fixed the Ballista’s initial facing direction.
• Fixed Campfire healing not starting when its healing upgrade was purchased while a player was already standing nearby.

Multiplayer Fixes

• Fixed Wall destruction sometimes not appearing correctly for the host.
• Fixed dropped resource visuals not initializing correctly for connected players.
• Corrected the animation and positioning of carried Chests.

UI & Controls

• Fixed sprint behavior when Stamina runs out.
• Fixed the Inventory bar not updating correctly after changing class in the Hub.
• Fixed health bar numbers overflowing at extremely high Health values.
• Fixed held menu buttons continuing to trigger after becoming unavailable.
• Fixed crafting controls not immediately updating after placing an order.
• Added missing translations and improved localization across menus, HUD messages, and world labels.
• Prevented the Emote Wheel from opening while climbing a Ladder.

Grab some Wood, build a way back up, and let us know how your next expedition goes!

Banana Tiger Studio

P.S. Leaving a Steam Review helps us understand what works, what could be improved, and keeps our small team motivated to make Stonewards better. Thank you for your support!