Update 0.4.0 – Farming, Crafting Progression and Iron Ore

Summary
Hello engineers! Welcome to 0.4.0! We introduce to you the farming, iron ore and many more cool things for you to play with! It’s a large update so enjoy our launch trailer, and we really hope you guys will enjoy the changes we’ve done!
Due to the sheer amount of world related things we’ve added to the world we strongly advise you start a new world. Upgrading an older save (0.3.x or older) may result in some of the farming plants missing from the world, certain door and window blocks missing, and other vague crashes and issues.

Features
– Added Farming
– Added Iron Ore, Blacksmithing
– Rebalanced Crafting Progressions
– Rebalanced Survival Experience, Research
– Performance Improvements
– Season Simulation (angle of the Sun)

Farming
One of the main new things you will now be able to do is farming! Farming will allow you to grow your own crops either through planting them by hand, or by creating your own farming equipment. The engineering challenges are numerous!

Iron
The planet is now seeded with iron ore! You can mine it out of the ground, though the veins are quite poor. Richer veins are hidden well, can you find them? You will be able to smelt the ore into ingots which you can then use for various crafting recipes. Iron ore is a little rare and hard to find, but you will find that nature will help you locate the veins.

Progression
We’ve also improved the player progression through the game. We revamped the research to work with categories now instead of on a per-block basis, and we think you will like this system a lot more. The resource costs for research is quite high so you may have to trade resources with other players.

Survival
Survival has also seen some changes, mostly in the foods department. Most of the wild resources like berries and herbs no longer feed you much, and while pumpkins still fill you up a bit, eating a whole pumpkin will leave you kind of bloated. You can still cook meals using the camp fire, and the cooked meals will fill your hunger, stamina and health significantly better. In the future we are going to look at more interesting death penalty mechanics, but for now you could consider running with Permanent Death enabled. It will make the game challenging for sure!

Other Improvements and Optimizations
Finally, we did several other performance and game improvements. First, we took the parallel grid loading from Space Engineers and added it to Medieval Engineers. It will be primarily noticable when pasting large grids into the world, but loading of grids also doesn’t hang the main thread so much anymore. We also did some general optimizations to the planet, they’re mostly minor but you should see a tiny performance improvement.

We also updated the pathfinding of the AI on the planet. While it doesn’t turn our barbarians into military geniuses, they are now more capable of chasing you down and making you sad.

We rewrote how the subparts are managed in the game. Now when you want to make animated blocks you no longer need to use MedievalDoor as a base class, but instead just CubeBlock, and attach the right subparts. The new system is the first system that is needed to allow us to build the Mechanical Blocks, but it will also help you modders out there to create more interesting blocks. We are working on a modding guide for this system, so look forward to this in the near future.

One last touch we added was the game is now partially simulating seasons through the sun angle. Throughout the ingame years the sun will not just rotate around the planet (see what we did there?) but it will also change its angle to the equator. This will change the duration of day and nights, and those of you who decided to build a castle on the north or south poles will definitely notice the Long Night!

Finally, we did a lot of bugfixes, though with this many additions we’re bound to have created a few new ones in the process, especially with the parallelization changes. Please continue helping us by sending your bugreports and we will continue squashing them as they appear!