Kinhold: dig out the whole mountain
Two things landed in Kinhold that I have wanted in there since the very first prototype. Settlers who actually dig, and enemies who really live somewhere!
The whole world is a mine
In our first Kinhold post I said that nothing in this world is scenery. Here is what that buys you: the ground is not a backdrop with a few mining spots painted on it. Every inch of it is real, and every inch of it can come out. Topsoil, stone, the ore underneath, the hill your house is sitting on. Point a pick at it and it is gone, and it stays gone.
You need the right pick, mind. Bare hands dig nothing, and a stone pick will bounce off iron. But within those rules you can dig anywhere you like, including straight down, and directly under your own buildings. Villagers won’t dig under or too close to your buildings, but that doesn’t stop you! Want a secret cave where you sleep at night, or want to put all your crafting stations underground? Feel free! Also, having trouble with an enemy settlement’s defenses and walls? While they are distracted, dig some holes and undermine their walls - and when you return with your army, you have a new entryway that leads directly where you want it to!
You do not have to swing the pick yourself
This is the new part. Until recently the player was the only one in the world who could carve terrain. Settlers could pick up loose rock off the ground, and that was it. Now they dig, and they do it properly, on their own.
You mark out the ground you want gone, and that is the whole of your involvement.
From there the settlement takes over. A crew turns up, fetches their own picks out of the store, spreads out so nobody is swinging into anybody else’s back, and starts digging. Every single load comes home. There is no material fairy: a settler digs until their arms are full, walks it back to the store, and comes back to continue digging. The whole pace of a dig is set by how far your people have to carry it.
That lantern is my favourite new tidbit. Before, only the player could carry a light in Kinhold, which was fine when everyone was asleep by dark, and much less fine once they started spending their days forty feet inside a mountain. But now a digger going underground takes a lantern from the store and sets it against the wall. When the cave face moves on and that lantern is left standing in the middle of the room, somebody picks it up and puts it back against the rock. They light their own tunnel as they cut it, and they pay for it out of the store like any other placed item. No lanterns in the store, no lanterns on the wall.
One rule that does not change: a settler will not dig near your buildings. The no-dig radius exists so your own workforce cannot quietly saw the legs off the settlement while you are away. Undermining is a thing you get to choose, not a thing that happens to you.
And then you have a room
It will take some time for your villagers to mine before you can see the results, but it is worth it! And mining isn’t some minigame or a cutscene or anything else where you don’t get real results in real time. You get a place. An actual room (or multiple rooms!), in the rock, that your villagers cut with their own hands and lit with their own lanterns, and that you can then walk into and furnish.
Somebody else already lives here
Quick note on the other half of the month, because it deserves its own post later.
The world is no longer empty between you and the horizon. Enemy settlements now sit all over it, in different sizes and layouts, so you are not clearing the same camp eleven times.
They are seeded by distance, so the challenge grows as you explore, with the bigger ones further out, and (for now!) one enormous enemy boss base sitting on the far side of the map. Each one is dressed by the ground it stands on, so a camp in the green country and a fort out in the sand read as different places, not the same prefab with a different floor.
Two things about them I am pleased with. The first is that a settlement you have not found yet keeps getting tougher. Its walls climb from ash through oak and thornwood to ironwood, and the largest ones eventually plate themselves in iron, and its garrison re-equips to keep pace with whatever your own village is walking around in. The moment you get close enough to see it, the walls and the gear lock in at whatever they managed to become. Take too long and don’t properly equip your army, and you may find yourself with a very tough fight on your hands!
The second is the flag. There is one standing in the middle of every settlement, and while it stands, that place keeps putting fighters back on its walls. Killing your way through the yard is not the win. Getting the flag down is. Drop it and the survivors break, the reward chest finally opens, and the ground is yours to build on. Cleared stays cleared. And the tougher the fight, the greater the reward!
They are not scenery either, by the way. Raids have started marching out of them, so you had better prepare!
More soon. The devlog gets the updates as they land, and the Kinhold page has the current state of the whole thing.