Friday 07.02.2025
Hey Vikings, we’re back with our newest update, rejoice!
Our first update for this year is probably one of our most important yet! There has been a lot of feedback from the community about the finite nature of some of our most important resources, namely wood and iron, as trees do not regrow and caves can be depleted.
Without further ado then – the patch notes! (They’re pretty long, so get comfy!)
Players can now replant trees using the newly added Foresters!
Tree regrowth will be player-driven by way of a new building: the Forester. This new building can be found under the advanced production buildings tab in the build menu and works in a similar way to the farm.
The forester has a series of pots in which you can plant saplings. Planting saplings costs nothing, and you will be prompted to pick the type of tree you’d like to plant.
Each tree type yields different types of wood. For instance the regular fir yields logs, the small fir grows faster and yields long sticks, and for the birch tree you’ll have to upgrade the forester.
Saplings require water and compost to grow, similar to regular crop fields. Once a sapling’s growth reaches 100% it can be picked up and planted.
Before you can plant a tree however, you’ll need to get yourself a shovel. Shovels are new items which allow you to dig holes where trees can be planted. Once a tree is planted, you’ll have to wait for it to grow, but you won’t have to tend to it anymore, just let nature take its course. Currently, a fir grows in 32 in-game days, and a small fir in 24 in-game days.
Most importantly, you can assign villagers to plant trees for you. Each Forester comes with a Forestry marker and you can also build additional markers. Be wary however that villagers will attempt to keep a certain distance between trees. They will also plant trees in any holes you dig in marked areas.
Besides the ability to regrow trees, we’re also giving players the ability to regenerate iron and stone in the caves by way of an explosive device. While our Vikings haven’t discovered gunpowder quite yet, they will discover that the cave crawlers have laid weird eggs in the mines. These crawler eggs are harvestable with a knife, and will replenish seasonally yielding a regular flow of resources.
Both the crawlers and the crawler eggs will now have a chance to drop crawler sacks. While harmless on their own, the Vikings soon discovered that when put together, fire, jotun blood and crawler sacks cause a powerful explosion, powerful enough to rip through rock, wood and flesh.
Besides the sacks, crawler eggs also yield maggots and crawler slime. Crawler Maggots are a new food type for which the Vikings have no new recipes yet, so they can be only consumed raw. They can be used as bait however! Crawler Slime can be used as compost, as the plants seem to enjoy it!
The explosive sacks are now craftable at the Workshop House. They’re ASKA’s equivalent of TNT and when detonated in cave corridors specifically, they will cause cave-ins, refreshing the cave walls which can be mined for iron and stone.
NOTE: Explosive sacks won’t cause cave-ins in cave rooms.
This will be a player-only activity, so periodically you’ll have to go detonate corridors. Villagers will know to evacuate the blast area when setting off an exploding sack. The sack features a fuse, and you’ll have 10 seconds to clear the area before the thing goes off.
While designed to refresh cave corridors, the exploding sack can be used to destroy trees, stone clumps and even enemies! You can also stack up multiple explosive sacks for even greater damage.
To support the new resources, we’ve also added an upgrade for the Cave Entrance, called the Reinforced Cave Entrance. This improved mine entrance features increased storage capacity for iron and stone, while also adding new storage for the crawler resources.
If you love nothing more than a quiet day of fishing for you and your villagers, you’ll be pleased to hear that we’ve implemented a few important improvements to help you be the fisherman (or woman) you’ve always wanted to be!
Special attention has also been given to the ways villagers fish, especially when using boats. They should now be more effective and do a much better job at navigating using the boats.
The fishermen buildings will receive a safety area, similar to warehouses and workshops to ensure villagers have enough space to dock their boats.
Sturdy fishing rod features far better durability than its counterparts. This will be especially helpful since fishing has been made to work as originally intended, with rarer, stronger fish now dealing more durability damage to rods.
In addition to the above, we’ve also implemented various menu, villager, building system, multiplayer, and QoL changes. For the full patch notes, check out our dedicated Steam post!
Our Roadmap for 2025 is still not fully ironed out yet and we’re having a lot of internal discussions regarding this just now. It shouldn’t be too much longer, but we know you’re keen to hear from us on this – hang tight a little longer, we should have something to share fairly soon here.
Skal!
Your Sand Sailor Team
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Friday 07.02.2025