Greetings, Lords and Ladies!

A brand new update has arrived in the Public Beta. There is a long list of bug fixes that were hindering your enjoyment of the game and the recently released DLC - check the full list of changes below!

You can expect this patch to arrive to the main game during the upcoming weeks. If you wish to help with the Beta testing, all you have to do to access the Beta branch is right-click on the game in your Steam library, select Properties -> Betas and choose the openbeta in the Beta Participation dropdown. After you confirm the dialogue, let the game update and you are ready to play!

If you do so, please make sure to start a new save file as there was a number of bugs that may have corrupted your existing saves and could continue generating issues during your game that have already been addressed. We greatly appreciate your reports of any bugs or issues either here on the Steam forums, in the comments of this article or better yet - in our Discord community![discord.lordsandvilleins.com]

One big change of this patch is exposing the localization files to the StreamingAssets folder of the build. This means that anyone can add a new language to the game by simply creating a new json file in their installation folder, specifically "Lords and Villeins_Data\StreamingAssets\Locale\". We encourage any passionate community members to use the existing official localizations as a template (you can open and edit them in any text editor) to create their own community translations of the game and distribute them with the community.

To allow collaboration, we are also hosting a https://www.localizor.com/lords-and-villeins. While we can not distribute any of the community translations officially, we will assist with exporting the appropriate json file for any language that will get fully localized and share them through our community members so that you can distribute them as an unofficial mod online or on our Discord[discord.lordsandvilleins.com]. We have also created a dedicated channel there that any translators can use to coordinate and ask questions.

Thank you everyone who choose to participate and make Lords and Villeins more accessible to other players!

For those who are curious about the behind the scenes of game development, I want to briefly discuss how the systems of Lords and Villeins can manifest into bugs as a small number of them is repeatedly reported over the years and it may seem that those never get fixed. This would include things like AI starving to death, standing and not doing anything, villagers dying on reload, the cycle of day and night being broken, or villagers not paying taxes, collecting resources or finishing their tasks.

These are the issues that often get reported because that is how a certain bug manifests in the eyes of our players but in reality, those are many different bugs disguised under the same symptom. There are many points during which our AI can fail and it creates a cascading effect in which the AI of a specific NPC will simply turn off completely, while some of its other systems are still influencing that NPC. This causes them to grow hungry, but without a functioning brain to go and eat, it eventually leads to their death. However, the specific point where things went wrong is many times different. And each time we introduce new content, we have to extend the capacity of the AI, add new activities and develop new features, each with a potential to a new bug that later manifests with the same symptoms.

This is also paired with the fact that Lords and Villeins is a system-driven game, with many systems constantly interacting with each other and the potential complexity is too big to reliably test for with a big team, let alone for a small indie studio like ours. Despite extensive testing with every update, closed beta runs and often open beta tests, some issues always unfortunately make it through, and compounded by the fact that these issues appear to be the same, it may create the impression that nothing is being done to fix them.

This also complicates our job to identify the cause of the problem and fix it, as many times the only actionable information we can look into is a crash log that does not always tell the whole story. On top of that, many bug reports turn out to be a miss understanding of the game mechanics of the game and to address that is not a question of fixing a bug, but rather a rework of the UI or another extensive update to our tutorials which is not something that can be done quickly enough.

In no way are these few paragraphs intended to avoid responsibility for the issues in the game, but I am hoping that more transparency and some behind-the-scenes details would help to bridge some understanding. We are always very thankful for all of our players and the time and patience that they invest into our game to master it and enjoy everything it can offer.

Thank you for staying with us on our journey and stay tuned for the update to go live!


Main Game:

• Localization assets are now exposed in the StreamingAssets folder, allowing anyone to develop localization mods with ease
  
• Warehouse book now takes into account contracted amount (red numbers next to the item) to restrict the ability to grant resources over the available amount
  
• Save file name is no longer restricting special characters
  
• Accounting Report now updates the total amount if tenures are changed while the UI is opened
  
• Animals that belong to the caravan will no longer required to be fed until they are purchased
  
• Fixed broken How To sequence for updating storage settings, setting soldier pay, creating new soldier regiment, building heat source and changing equipment
  
• Fixed an issue with fishermen not generating enough demand for yarn to repair fishing nets
  
• Reduced time it takes to process animal corpse by the butchers
  
• Fixed an issue that corrupted HP value of animals which could lead to animals never being butchered
  
• Fixed an issue with clergy not being recognized in data logging as a family business which led to incorrect statistical logs
  
• Removed a zoom button next to "All zones" option in the Statistics Report UI as there is no function related to it
  
• Notification indicating completed royal delivery no longer displays text about favor, as it is only awarded during custom deliveries.
  
• Fixed scaling on the loading screen
  
• Added further code preventing chests and shelves being targeted for vandalism.
  
• Fixed bug causing fees to the clergy not being attributed for payment
  
• Fixed a localization issue in Simplified Chinese in the "Settling" tutorial mission
  
• Fixed tutorial maps losing their status of a tutorial map when they are saved on their last (bonus) chapter.
  
• Fixed excessive demand for some resources in certain zones (Royal Forest)
  
• Terrain change event no longer trigger recalculation of the pathfinding grid to improve performance boost as they tend to be very frequent. As a downside, villagers will sometimes ignore dirt path in their pathing until the path gets recalculated later
  
• The fast-forward button in Statistics UI now correctly resumes to current season
  
• Fixed number of crashes when the user did not own the DLC, impacting for example the ability to pay taxes
  
• Fixed UI crash with a delayed encounter
  
• Fixed a number of crashes related to ActiveNPC data not being properly uninitialized
  
• Fixed a number of crashes related to AI behavior that can result into NPC being stuck and starving to death
  
• Fixed seasonal and yearly supply and demand data of individual families for animals not being logged
  
• Fixed a game crashing bug that happens any time an NPC dies
  
• Fixed a serialization issue of the config files as it relates to storing starting family professions
  
• Fixed incorrectly initialized starting value of animal HP leading to their quick deaths
  
• Raised the limit for a zone template size to 100 tiles
  
• Fixed an incorrect formula that was preventing from demand for production material to scale up properly
  
• Fixed incorrectUI logic when setting 0 money clergy fee on fee-farm zones
  
• Overworld map overlay and resource sum now correctly updates when a family grows their size
  
• Fixed issue with work groups being deleted accidentally when their members are reassigned. This could also cause the clergy to break down and stop collecting taxes.
  
• Added condition in demolishing structures activity, to ignore objects that were recently detected as inaccessible and thus not block the rest of the objects in the queue.
  
• Updated the LZ4 library as it was triggering a native crash in certain scenarios

DLC Content:

• Fixed water and mountain tiles indicating "Possible production" title when nothing can be produced there
  
• When a house is demolished on a tile with a terrain feature, the original terrain feature is restored