What’s new in Kindling

v0.3

Changes introduced in v0.3.

The year turns, and the farm learns to drink. Three new crops, water you have to carry or channel, something to keep the raiders off, and one fix that matters more than all of it.

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Season is now the biggest lever on the board

Every crop has ONE season it actually wants, and it only runs at full speed there. The season either side costs it more than half its rate; the season opposite costs it three quarters. Nothing at all grows in winter — not slowly, stopped, at no cost, standing there until spring.

• Spring — barley, oats
• Summer — turnip, beans
• Autumn — rye, pumpkin

This matters more than it first looks, because a crop that takes eleven days spends most of its life in the season after the one it started in. The sowing window tells you when you MAY sow; this tells you what the sowing is worth. Aim at any bed and the readout now says which of the three you are in.

The clock also finally tells you which day of the season it is — "SUMMER 4/9". Every sowing window is a span of days-of-season, so the season name alone could never tell you whether the window you were holding seed for shut tonight.

Three new crops, so every season has something to plant

• Rye — early autumn, seven days. Hardy in every direction: it grows on spent ground and shrugs off drought. The one sowing a failed summer cannot take from you, and the only straw still standing once the spring cereals are in.
• Beans — late spring or early summer, seven days. The only crop that gives ground back: a ripe harvest leaves the bed a point of tilth richer instead of poorer. Slower than a compost heap, but it costs no fire at all.
• Pumpkin — early summer only, eleven days, ripening deep into autumn. The thirstiest thing in the ground and it will not even start on soil you have not fed twice. Four to a cell. Effectively unfarmable on rain alone in a dry year.

All three come off tall grass in their own half of the year, so you only ever need to find one seed — every harvest gives one back.

Irrigation

Rain is the only thing that waters a bed on its own, and summer is the driest season in the year — which is exactly when your thirstiest crops are in the ground. Now you can do something about it.

• Water tank — 240 litres, filled by rain, and it must be open to the sky. Cheap, and it fails in the season you most need it.
• Well — draws groundwater whatever the weather, but must be sunk within six paces of water. About seven beds, forever.
• Cistern — copper age, 720 litres, sealed, loses nothing to the sun.
• Conduits and channels — the thick main line costs one cell of reach per cell of pipe; the thin branch costs two. One main with short branches off it reaches about twice as far as the same stone spent entirely on branches.
• Bucket — 20 litres a trip. For the crop that is dying today.

The head rule is the skill. A vessel pushes water eight cells, plus one more per twenty litres in it — and that whole distance is multiplied by every level the run steps DOWN. So site the vessel uphill. Over-plant and the level falls, the reach shrinks, and the far end of the run browns off — in order, nearest served first, so you can see exactly where you overreached. Water visibly drips from a branch that is actually delivering, and stops when it is not.

You build the first fire

The Old Camp no longer contains a campfire. The opening used to be relight Maren's fire; it is now build your own. The centre of the camp is scorched earth inside a ring of stones — a cold pit, not a cold fire.

The camp is now a ruin you can read. Six stones make the fire ring, with two missing on the side you approach from, so you can walk into the ring rather than climb over it; two collapsed walls meet at a corner still standing two courses high.

New worlds start you at the camp. Spawn used to be a fixed point about eight blocks off it, facing whatever terrain the seed happened to grow there. You now wake three cells from the hearth with the cold pit in front of you.

Note pages out in the world are marked with cairns — three stacked stones — instead of a single loose rock that looked like every other rock the world scatters.

Nothing changed about how campfires are made: still 2 chipboard + 3 gravel, still by hand, no bench needed. Only the free one at spawn is gone. The distant lean-to and the last camp keep their own cold campfires.

Fences, and something with teeth

• Fence — post-and-rail, joins to its own kind and to walls. Encloses without blocking the view.
• Sharp stakes — two cells tall, so nothing walks through them and nothing jumps them. They wound creatures and shove them back, and they wound you too; armour does not soften it. Each pair carries twelve bites and then falls.

Livestock

Fence a patch of ground, put a trough in it, and the animals inside stop being scenery and start being a flock — headcount, feed, condition, breeding and all. Sheep, hens and pigs. The flock lives as a record rather than as animals standing in a field, so walking away costs you nothing and the days still pass.

Summer is when a herder works. Cut grass with a sickle, stand it in a stook, and about two days of dry weather makes hay — and rain does not pause the curing, it undoes it, at half the rate it went forward. A small flock wants something like thirty-six hay to cross one winter, all of it cut months before it is needed. Milk becomes curd becomes cheese, which is the only dairy that waits.

And lighting the coop through winter roughly doubles what hens lay — about 0.6 eggs a head a day against 0.15 in the dark. That is the fire argument in one number: light is not comfort, it is food.

Things that changed underfoot

Four changes to behaviour you already knew. None of them add an item, so they are easy to miss:

• Animals follow food. Hold hay or oat grain and wild sheep follow you from about seven blocks; hens follow grain, boar follow turnip, beans, pumpkin or compost. This is how you start a flock — you lead animals, you never catch them.
• A penned sheep drops no wool. A wild one still gives 1 wool and 1 mutton; a kept one gives 2 mutton and nothing else, because a kept sheep is sheared rather than skinned. If you have always killed sheep for wool this will look like wool is broken. It is not — get shears.
• Struck animals now run away. Prey that is hit bolts for four seconds at speed. This was previously backwards: the flight direction was negated, so an animal you shot would sprint straight at you. If you remember that happening, you were not imagining it, and it is gone.
• The fire cooks more — eggs, and curd into cheese. There is also a second compost recipe: 2 ash + 1 straw + 2 manure. Manure replaces the straw, never the ash, so the fire is still what fertility ultimately costs.

Fixes

• Autosaving could crash the game on any world that had accumulated placed blocks or footpath wear — that is, any world anyone had actually played. Fixed.
• Fences and pipes punched holes in the ground beside them, which you could see the sky and water through.
• Sharp stakes could be planted around a creature, pinning it in place to be ground down from outside its reach. They now refuse to plant through anything living.
• Stakes could not actually kill you — you would sit at zero health instead. They can now.
• The Survival Guide had stale advice: it still told new players to punch trees and to find a workbench standing in the forest, and the torch recipe was two ingredients out of date.

Known gaps

There are no cattle. The rules for them exist and so does beef, but there is no cow model, so no cow can be spawned or penned. Sheep, hens and pigs are the livestock you can actually keep. It is named here rather than left as a wiki entry for something unobtainable.

Read the survival guide →