Quality of Life and Pathfinding Update - November 2024

A little life sign...., not that you think Settle the World is coming to an end It continues, but unfortunately very slowly.
At the moment I have a lot of stress in my real-life job and just can't manage to work on Settle the World for several hours a day.

But developments have been moving forward for a few weeks now.
Not as fast as last year, but at least it is going on.

Of course, the game still contains bugs or features that do not yet work properly.
Settle the World is far from finished...but the game is quite playable.

Changes ( shortened):
- The ingame help in cities now shows the production requirements for the goods needed by the citizens.

- Complete rework of the pathfinding. Units now use roads to get as close as possible to their target point and then use a more complex pathfinding from there to find a way to the target.

- Buttons for units in the cities have been redesigned.

- The game now starts with two additional units and a large merchant ship to speed up gameplay.

- To increase the population of cities, units can now be added to the population. The city then grows by one citizen and the unit then disappears. This replaces the previous mechanic where the player could choose what happens when a city's food storage is full (never worked properly....).

- Units that have passed other units and ended up on a city now enter it automatically and do not remain on the map.

- The stock overview for cities now shows which goods are missing to keep the population supplied.

- In the city view, missing goods to supply the population are outlined in red.

- The Cheyenne native tribe has different chieftain images that better match the used colour palette. New images for other native tribes will come with later updates. Despite the help of ChatGPT in creating the images, this part is extremely time-consuming.

- Sound effects for workers on fields are now played correctly and only if production is possible on the field.

- Pathfinding crashes have been fixed.

- The seagulls that disappeared with the last upate are now back on the map.

- Coffee can now be found in wrecks and ruins.

- Bug that duplicated units has been fixed.

- Optimization of the line-of-sight calculations of units (thanks to Denis).

I have already started working on some new features, but these are not yet integrated in this version.
The following features are planned (among others):

- Automatic patrol points for warships.
- Automatic trade routes for trade units.
- Attack / defense of cities.
- Attacking villages of natives.
- Trade with natives.

The work on this will still take a lot of time, as I can't work as much on Settle the World as I used to (see above).

Nevertheless, I hope you like the new version of Settle the World and would be very happy to receive your feedback and constructive criticism.
You can contact us
- by eMail (theotheoderich (at) gmx.de Subject: Settle the World)
- on Discord (https://discord.gg/UJyZSJJqYg) (English and German language sections available)