Here's my news on the upcoming big update, v 0.40.

Most of the initial core stuff is now in place, its just down to a week or two of fine-tuning and bug-fixing. You've got mining, farming, brewing, electricity, research, and wall building. Soon after in another update I will add weapon and armour crafting too.



It's not going to feel complete yet. I've been playing it and it feels a little slow. You wait around a lot waiting for things to build or produce. Then every now and then bandits run in and kick your ass. Its still fun, but I can make it much better, so here is the plan for the updates immediately after 0.40:

You will be able to organise your characters and assign permanent jobs, eg a builder will make sure all buildings are complete, a worker will make sure your production line is always running etc. This will free you from micro-management and allow to base to run itself for long periods of time.
You will get remote notifications of attacks, idle workers, events etc. This will keep you constantly informed on the state of your base, even if you're not there watching it. That way you won't feel uneasy about leaving it unattended.
There will be a "surrender" button. When you find yourself getting wiped out by a stronger force, you can surrender, meaning they might push you around, raid your goods, take some money etc. But they will leave you alive, which will be vital to surviving in the early game before you get your defences up.

All this will mean that you can happily set your base up with a crew and then take an adventuring squad off to explore and trade and do things while your base progresses. Then you can come back later and build some more stuff, make some upgrades, rest, then set out exploring again. Eventually it will become a stronghold where you can retreat when things are going bad, or war breaks out or you anger a major faction. If things are going well you could then venture into more dangerous lands (coming soon) and build an outpost, which will be easier this time when you have better technology and skills.

But I haven't added numbers 1, 2 and 3 yet, they won't be in version 0.40. I'm not going to delay the update further for that, because people can still have lots of fun playing it in its current state, and the whole game is similarly incomplete anyway. Its an alpha after all, if I start thinking like that then I'll end up holding off every update until it reaches version 1.0.

So as usual, have fun when it comes out and remember it will continue to get better.