Humanica news & patch notes

Hi everyone, friends!

This update adds 50 new annual plans and reworks existing ones. Some issues have also been fixed.

Thanks for following along and for continuing to play!

The settlement of Dexdoz

New:

- Added 50 new annual plans

- Reworked existing annual plans

- When attempting to enter a new age, a warning is now shown: "old annual plans will become unavailable"

- Updated some building and technology icons

Balance:

- Doubled the prosperity gained from kills for all weapons

- Fertilizer no longer increases the number of seeds obtained when harvesting

- Slightly lowered the chance of new domestic animals being born

Fixes:

- Fixed a bug where sometimes not all required resources were spent when researching a technology

- Fixed a bug where production-speed laws also sped up plant growth and settlers' work in garden beds

- Fixed a bug where the amount of resources obtained from harvesting crops and butchering animals was mistakenly capped at 10 units

- Fixed various localizations

- Fixed some resource and animal models

- Fixed incorrect display of happiness values

Hi everyone, friends!

This update refined the landscape editing, making it more intuitive and user-friendly. Animal husbandry has also been improved, there's now an animal statistics window, and shepherds work better. QoL improvements include buttons to close all gates in a settlement, an area clearing tool, and more tooltips and descriptions. Visually, new icons have been added for buildings, animals, and technologies. And of course, tons of bugs and issues have been fixed.

Thank you for following along and continuing to play! With each update, we take small steps forward, getting closer to the 1.0 release.

The settlement of frisbees

New:

- Visually improved sector selection when editing the landscape.

- The landscape editing sector can now be selected and its settings adjusted in a separate window, including priority and target elevation. This window also displays the reasons why editing is paused.

- Added a preview of the future landscape after editing is complete.

- Added a new area clearing tool.

- Added buttons to open and close all gates during an attack.

- Added new icons, including for animals, buildings, and technologies.

- All animals now display resources they drop and resources that can be harvested from them.

- Added more animal husbandry tooltips in the barn and poultry yard windows.

- Improved shepherd logic, they now perform their job better. Shepherds will now slaughter animals when the limit is exceeded with higher priority.

- Added a separate animal statistics window for the settlement.

- Improved tree growing: the tree-cutting tool no longer marks growing trees for felling, a separate action to destroy growing trees has been added instead.

- Unassigned animals now display a corresponding icon above them.

- The construction grid and selected cells are now rendered on top of other objects.

- All actions that destroy natural objects now give at least one unit of a resource (boulders, veins, growing trees, wild wheat, etc.).

- Added descriptions for certain resources.

- Reworked the display of resource tooltips in the technology window.

Balance:

- Pigs and cows now drop 1 hide instead of 2.

- Goats now drop 4 hides instead of 2.

- Only flax seeds can now be found on the world map, rather than flax itself.

Fixes:

- Fixed issues causing enemies to keep spawning at unreachable points in the mountains.

- Fixed road rendering issues on slopes and foundations.

- Fixed several display issues with bridge railings.

- Service inventories of production buildings are no longer shown in the window.

- Fixed a bug where moving the camera with RMB would disable landscape editing.

- Fixed a bug where paused landscape editing would not always resume after terrain clearing.

- Fixed a bug where resource deposits discovered during terrain lowering would appear at the wrong elevation.

- All natural objects are now placed exactly at the center of their cells.

- Fixed a bug where spent resources would not drop from a building if it was destroyed while actively under construction.

- Fixed a bug where villagers would start drying hides and food before the drying building was fully constructed.

- Fixed the display of certain settings after reloading the map.

- Fixed a bug where fertilized garden beds would eject fertilizer as a physical item in January.

- Fixed an issue where shepherds would not butcher dead livestock after reloading a save.

- Fixed a bug where unassigned animals would stand idle and not roam around.

- Fixed a bug where a dead animal could be tamed.

Hi everyone!

The new update adds new tools for mass demolition of buildings, changing priorities, and copying settings. Performance of large settlements has also been optimized and save loading has been sped up. And much more. The detailed changelog is below. Thank you for continuing to play!

From April 27 to May 11, Humanica is on sale with a 20% discount! 

The settlement of GOLO

New:

- Added a demolition tool for buildings by area.

- Added a priority change tool by area.

- Added copying of settings between buildings, including storage filters and recipes settings.

- Building settings are now copied on upgrade.

- Priority can now be changed for landscape editing (currently only via the new tool).

- Performance optimization for CPU and GPU. On large maps, framerate increased by 50% or more.

- Significant save loading speed optimization. On large maps, loading time is reduced by 70% or more.

- Resource source priority now works for gatherers.

- Buildings, resources, and creatures are now highlighted when selected.

- Added tooltips and notifications for resources that can only be gathered by settlers of certain professions (fish, boulders, veins).

- The roadmap can now be viewed in the main menu.

Balance:

- Slightly increased the generation chance of copper ore piles, wild wheat, and wild cabbage.

Fixes:

- When changing the planted crop in garden beds, planting of the previous crop is now interrupted. The same applies to recipes in production buildings.

- A settler no longer instantly loses their job if they are evicted from their home for any reason.

- Pressing the "to battle" button no longer affects archers who have already occupied towers.

- Fixed hitboxes on growing trees, making them easier to select.

- Fixed a bug: residents did not always respond to commands to run to a point.

- Fixed a bug: hunters carrying a carcass were not interrupted after pressing the "to battle" button.

- Fixed the visual of plants in garden beds. Planted seedlings are now more clearly visible.

- Fixed a bug: after map regeneration, the camera control tutorial task would trigger again.

- Fixed a bug: recipe states in a building were incorrectly restored after the building burned down with the "Automatic Reconstruction" law approved.

- Fixed a bug: key rebinding stucked after reopening the settings window.

Hello everyone! A lot of updates and hotfixes have come out over the past month. I've decided that from now on each update should display its own sequence number. We're starting with the milestone tenth! Thank you for continuing to play and share your feedback!

The settlement of karembeu

New:

- New gameplay settings (more details below).

- Option to enable peaceful game mode. Can be selected before starting a game or enabled on existing saves through the settings.

- Reworked enemy spawn algorithm. Enemies now spawn closer to the edges of the map. Reduced the chance of enemies spawning on a mountain they can't get down from.

- If enemies neither deal nor receive damage for a certain period of time, they disappear.

- Reworked save/load windows. Added the ability to delete saves. Saves are now sorted by date.

- If villagers didn't manage to plant a crop in a bed before summer (or harvest it before winter), the seeds are returned.

New gameplay settings:

- Toggle peaceful mode (enabling peaceful mode can kill all enemies, in case they get stuck).

- Enable/disable the tutorial.

- Disable edge scrolling (camera movement).

- Autosave interval.

- Sensitivity for camera movement and zoom.

New graphics settings:

- UI scale (max. 130%)

- Three window modes (fullscreen, window, borderless window)

- Vertical sync and target frame rate.

- Smoothing (anti-aliasing).

- Shadow quality.

- Texture quality.

- Render distance.

- Disable chromatic aberration.

- Color contrast.

Sound changes:

- The night-skip sound has been reworked: it is now softer and quieter.

- The sound effects setting has been split into three types: entities, notifications, interface.

Bug fixes:

- Fixed a bug: the automatic rebuilding of burned structures reset the battle state, causing settlers to leave and go back to work during a fight.

- Fixed villagers getting stuck when the navigation mesh is rebuilt (e.g. after placing foundations, roads, or modifying terrain).

- Fixed a bug: switching a plant in a bed via RMB (instead of LMB) would not switch the plant across all beds in the group.

- Fixes to French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese localizations.

- Time acceleration no longer resets to x1 after skipping the night.

- Fixed cases of enemy attacks at night when settlers cannot be controlled.

- Save names now support any characters from any language.

- UI improvements for correct display of different languages and proper rendering at large scale settings.

- Fixed tooltip display in villager equipment slots.

- Fixed a bug: a burned building with recipes in the queue doesn’t disappear if the auto-rebuild law is approved.

It’s time to reveal my plans for the future. Want to know what’s coming to the game during Early Access? The Roadmap is ready!

Just a reminder that you can help shape the game’s direction by joining the discussions on Discord channel.

Phase I: Quality of Life

In this phase, I’ll focus on fixing all sorts of issues and refining the game’s existing features. I’ll also be adding a bunch of “Quality of Life” mechanics to reduce micromanagement and make gameplay more comfortable. Here’s the breakdown:

• Fixing issues and bugs. Improving the tutorial and tooltips.

• Adding necessary settings. Reworking of the save system.

• Peaceful game mode.

• Tools for mass priority changes, building demolishing, and copying building settings.

• Configuration to prohibit the consumption of certain foods and the use of certain tools.

• Improvements of landscape editing.

• Improvements of annual plans and laws.

• Balance tweaks, addition of new essential resources.

• Improvements of building upgrades, relocation of the town hall.

Phase II: Battles

This is where I’ll start adding new gameplay mechanics. In this phase, I plan to improve every aspect of combat in the game.

• Formation of separate squads with selected weapons and armor.

• Improving control over settlers during battles.

• Smart enemies. They will be able to follow specific tactics and make various choices: wait, charge head-on, attempt to flank, or construct a ladder.

• Procedural map generation settings.

Phase III: Construction

A key feature of the game is its verticality compared to other projects, as it allows you to edit the landscape. And now these ideas will be further refined - more options for vertical construction will be added.

• Vertical construction of fortifications.

• Stone buildings.

• Stone fortifications.

• Ornamental structures.

• Construction of bridges over ravines and stairways.

Phase IV: *Secret Features*

It is not yet known exactly which features will be added in this phase. To help shape this, you can join the discussions on Discord.

Thank you for your attention, and for playing Humanica!

Thank you for your feedback and your warm response to the game! It really inspires me to keep going, and I realize that I'm not doing this in vain. 

Two days after the release, we can sum up the results. The record for simultaneous online users is currently 155 people! Two hotfixes have already been made to fix the issues you reported. And the work will continue.

In the coming days, I will focus on fixing all the bugs as quickly as possible. And in the coming weeks, a roadmap for early access will be formed, and you will be able to influence the direction of the game's development by participating in discussions on the Discord channel.

Humanica is finally out in early access and you can go check it out right now!!!

Humanica is coming out in early access on March 3! And here is the new trailer!

Hello everyone! The release is approaching, so it's time to share what I've managed to make since the autumn demo festival.

The routine of manually gathering resources was tedious. I added a gatherer hut. Now it will be possible to automate the gathering of food, and not just food. However, each hut will have a specific radius and a limit on one target resource.

A certain optimization of resource search by settlers has been done. Now residents know how to “reserve” stacks in warehouses in advance in order to take or put down resources. Here is an example in the picture: there are three warehouses, each of which is almost full. Settlers will immediately carry wheat to different warehouses because it will not fit in one warehouse. This also works in reverse: if there is only one piece of food in the warehouse, not all residents will rush for it, but only one.

New icons of some resources.

Now there are models and animations of every clothing and armor item!

Updated models and animations for all animals have also been added. Among those changed are: boar, bison, pig, goat, sheep, cow, and chicken.

I made the baskets equipable, now they give +1 slot in the inventory. This should speed up the transportation of resources.

Now you can craft items up to the limit. But to get this opportunity, you must first approve certain laws.

Annual plans are still in progress. Each annual plan is a card, and each card has a specific era (each era has its own color).

Updated the visual of cultivated plants. Now flax fields and orchards will look more pleasant.

I encountered some problems with pathfinding in the engine. Settlers couldn't overcome dead ends if they were very large, and they lacked search depth, which couldn't be changed in any way. So I had to implement my own pathfinding system, but on a larger scale. Now, essentially, the entire space is a graph of connected points. If residents want to go a very long distance, or if they cannot get out of a dead end, they will use the new system. Thus, any point on the map is now reachable if there is at least one path to it.

New log residential houses.

Add the game to the wishlist!

To be continued!

Hello, everyone! Today, I would like to summarize the results of the recent Steam Next Fest and discuss my plans for bringing the game to release. There will be fewer images and more text.

First, thank you very much to everyone who played the demo at the festival! <3 The result: 3,000 players, +3,500 additions to the wishlist. You wrote a lot of feedback in reviews, on the steam community section, and on discord. There was both positive and negative feedback. I will try to fix all the flaws and issues that were mentioned.

I analyzed all the feedback and identified the main problems in the game that can be fixed:

• At the beginning of the game (the first few hours), there is too little content, and players get bored.

• The pace of the game is too slow, settlers work too slowly, and the day passes too quickly. Often you just have to wait.

• There is a lot of routine: it gets boring to constantly mark resources for gathering, assign settlers, etc.

• The game is not very intuitive, the interface is uninformative. The tutorial is not clear enough.

• Sometimes the AI of the settlers does not work well: they often carry items one at a time, search for food, tools, and resources in a suboptimal way, and search for available work in a suboptimal way.

• Players cannot customize the game to their liking: there are practically no settings, no key rebinding, no difficulty settings at the beginning, no flexible map selection at the beginning.

I will try to fix all these issues before release.

The release is scheduled for early 2026. I have about a few months to finish the game. Here are the new major features I want to implement:

• Prosperity points system. The more technologically advanced the tools and clothing used by the settlers are, and the more technologically advanced the buildings you construct are, the faster prosperity points will accumulate each day.

• Tree of Laws. Each law will make it easier to manage the settlement or simply give a permanent bonus. Examples of laws: automatic settlement of homeless people, the ability to produce items up to a limit, all residents behave as handymen if they do not have available work, etc. Laws will be purchased with prosperity points.

• Annual plan system. These are essentially bonuses that last for one year. Each spring, the player will be able to approve plans by spending prosperity points. The set of available plans is very limited, but new plans can be found randomly on the world map.

Also, I mustn't forget about improving the existing functionality. Here are the points I would highlight:

• Improve the world map to make it more interesting and challenging to explore.

• Improve fights with enemies so that they are not so simple and boring. Add more tower defense elements.

• Add more QoL features that will simplify management: gatherers' huts, advanced priority settings, prohibiting residents from using certain tools or eating certain foods, baskets should be equipable and add new slots to the inventory, and much more.

• Fix all the flaws that became apparent after the demo festival. 

To be continued!

The new demo is now available! Play it as part of the Steam Next Fest, which starts on October 13 at 5 PM UTC!

Hello, everyone! Today I'm going to talk about how I created the world map.

Initially, the task was as follows: I needed to travel around the world map to add the feeling that the world outside the settlement exists and that something is even happening in it. This feeling was sorely lacking in the game that inspired me so much at the time - Dawn of Man. It's no surprise that my project has a lot in common with this game, but that's not what we're talking about right now. I chose a hex map format because I used to love playing Civilization 5. Generally speaking, at one point I hoped to create an analogue of Civilization, with development from the Stone Age to space rockets, but within a single settlement. Then I had to cool my enthusiasm, and I only developed it up to the Iron Age.

First, I started making a procedural hex map. I used the same methods as when generating the main map on which we build the settlement: we take Perlin noise of different scales and combine them. Each cell has its own specific landscape: plains, mountains, hills, forests, hills with forests, etc. 

After that, I added water and various objects: ancient ruins, herds of animals, neighboring settlements. Units can move across the cells themselves. At the moment, the only such unit is a squad of scouts controlled by the player. 

You can add a bunch of different mechanics to the world map, and there's a ton of potential for creativity, but I decided to stick with a few basic features because I have limited resources. At the moment, you can control your scout squads to clear various points of interest and find useful resources: new plant seeds for cultivation, new animals for breeding, and technological knowledge to unlock certain technologies. Essentially, these are just expeditions, like in Frostpunk.

It took a lot of effort to implement a working hexagonal grid with the necessary coordinates. I also had to use some special features in the generation process. For example, to ensure that no objects spawned within a radius of 2 cells around the settlement.

Next, I added the ability to gradually reveal the map. All unexplored cells will simply be hidden. The further you travel from your settlement, the more valuable points of interest you will find.

Cells are opened through the unit view mechanism. Each unit has a view value, and each cell has a “view difficulty” value. Thus, units will see far across plains, but will not see through mountains.

And, of course, I implemented pathfinding on a hexagonal grid using Dijkstra's algorithm, because units will take longer to move across some cells (such as mountains), and I needed a way to automatically select the optimal route.

To send out scout squads, you simply need to build a scout camp and assign three settlers to it. Currently, this action costs a fixed 20 food. But in the future, I will make it so that the squads’ food runs out during the exploring. You will need to plan how to find useful resources and get the squad back home before they starve to death.

To be continued!

Hi everyone! The project is still alive and development is nearing completion. The release is scheduled for early 2026, but the exact date will be announced later. I'm also looking forward to participating in the Steam Next Fest. It's a good time to tell you what I've been working on for the last year.

Agriculture

After a fairly long break, in November 2024, I continued to work on the game. The first big feature I decided to refine was agriculture. My goal was to make the gameplay cyclical through the seasons, where you plant wheat (or fruits and vegetables) in the winter and harvest in the fall. The interest of this mechanic is to have the player plan how much food to grow so that there is enough to survive the next year.

I made universal garden beds, where you can choose what you want to grow. And all garden beds are automatically grouped together after being built, so that you can change from wheat to carrots in one click.

And you also have to spend a unit of seed to plant a plant. The seed cycle is like this: spend a unit of wheat seeds to plant wheat, then harvest the crop and get the same unit of seeds. But if the player wants to increase the planted area, he can convert part of the harvest (the wheat itself) into seeds.

In the next I polished visuals, tweaked post-processing, made the models of beds take the shape of cells in the construction grid. And in the end we have this picture.

To be continued!

Hello everyone!

In-game Features

• Map. Consists of 3x3 cells. Every cell has its own height and can be connected to the next/nearby. Small cells have the shape of the Irregular quadrilateral (not the square).
• Building. You can place a structure and all of the free settlers will carry resources there and will finish the building.
• Settler management. You can assign any role and living place to free settler.
• Production management. Resources can be added to the queue. Free settlers or settlers assigned to certain jobs will collect resources required for the craft system and will produce it.
• Resource extraction. You can mark resources for collecting it. Free settlers carry and supply it to the warehouse.
• Seasons. Duration of one year - 18 in-game days.
• Hunger and cold. In winter, settlers may freeze to death. Without food, settlers will also die.
• Technology tree. The technology timeline ranges from ancient times (upper Paleolithic) to late antiquity or early Middle Ages. Currently, technologies are available before agriculture. Each technology opens up some constructions, resources to collect, crafting recipes in production. Also, any technology by default can take into account some visual elements (for example: the “grain” resource looks like a basket of grain. But after the “flax” technology, the resource looks like a bag.)
• Attack protection. Once every few days, wild animals attack the settlement. The fight with them takes place in RTS mode.
• Agriculture. Put up beds. Free settlers plant these beds with wheat in the spring and harvest them in the autumn.
• Random effects on settlers. Random buffs and debuffs (poisoning, injuries) that can change the speed or strength of the settlers.

Early access edition

• Basic: new technologies, new resources, new buildings (thatched, log, stone), new crafting tools.
• Exploring the world map. Management of scout detachments, interaction with cells (explore an abandoned village, get resources, talk to a neighboring inhabitants).
• Procedural map generation.
• Nearby settlements. The settlement will contain a certain set of interactions.
• Trade. Sometimes a merchant from a nearby settlement will come to yours. You can trade goods with him.
• Follow the strategy. A separate strategy leveling line that determines the style of the game. There will be three strategies in total: military, commercial, cultural. You can only choose one strategy per game.
• Leader and decrees. The choice of the leader of the settlement, which gives different bonuses. Depending on the character and skills of the leader, it will be possible to issue various decrees. Decrees are temporary effects that stop working after a while.
• Discovering territories. Exploration of the area around the settlement. Unexplored territories are hidden.
• Livestock. Transformation of wild animals into domestic species. Domestic animals live in certain buildings and breed.
• Construction of roads and walls. The type of construction when the visual of the building depends on whether there is another similar building nearby. Therefore, for example, a wall will connect to an adjacent wall.
• Settler generation. Generation of different appearance of them and their portraits. As well as the generation of skills that will be used in the work. The ability to change the names of inhabitants.
• Work priorities.
• Sorting resources in the warehouse.
• Setting endless production up to a certain limit.
• More “smart” combat during attacks. Variety of enemies. Defense with the help of archers on sentinel towers.
• Thirst.
• Building upgrades. For example, upgrading an ordinary hut to a log hut, which doesn’t require the destruction of the building.
• Decorative buildings.
• Possibility to swim in the rivers to get to the other side. Building bridges. Freezing rivers in winter.
• The ability to place ropes and ladders on high slopes so that settlers can climb rocks and mountains.
• The ability to change the height of the landscape by moving the soil to another place.
• Equipable wicker baskets for expanding inventory, transferring resources on carts.
• A visual tool for finding various resources on the map.
• Rearranging the daily routine of the settlers. Now they eat at random times, and in the evening take a break from work in taverns or other places.

Won’t be added

• Faith / Paganism / Cults
• Colonization
• Natural disasters