Patch 16 is now available for everyone on the Beta Branch! This major patch brings a lot of improvements and changes.
There is one thing you told us again and again: you wanted to feel like a god, not operate one.
So, we took the single most important object in the game — the thing that sits between you and your world — and rebuilt it from the ground up. The mouse pointer (and the imp) is gone! In its place is your hand: a fully realized divine hand that reaches into the world, grabs, points, throws, gathers, and burns with the power you are about to unleash.
And miracles no longer happen somewhere out there. They happen because you did them, right now, with that hand. No menus standing in the way, no indirection, no delay between intent and impact. Charge it, aim it, hold it, release it.
The result is a game that feels closer, heavier, and considerably more alive (and less occluded with UI). This is the biggest change to how the game feels since launch!
And we did a lot more; this patch is a big one!
✋ New 3D Hand Cursor (Magic Hand)
The old mouse pointer has been replaced by a fully-fledged 3D god hand:
The god hand is now used as the cursor – including context-sensitive gestures and animations indicating the next possible move (grabbing, pointing, throwing, dropping, collecting, charging).
A small light is always added indicating the exact mouse cursor position (whicle hand animation can differ)
The hand is also visible over the UI
The hand shines transparently through occluding objects (x-ray).
Mana display directly on the hand: your current mana is shown via a distortion/transparency shader on the hand.
Selected shortcut info now appears as a "tattoo" on the hand; the info tattoo glows while a wonder is charging.
Current wonder level is also represented by hand animation and amount of bolts coming form the hand.
The hand (and the player's god sphere at the altar) now changes appearance based on the player's moral alignment.
Grabbed objects now snap cleanly to the hand.
Various fixes for hand jitter/stutter (including after camera movement), smoother animation transitions, and a small buffer against frantic gesture switching when sweeping over objects.
Improved dropping and collecting resources from main building logic: resources are now dropped at the next valid point of a resource stack; larger resource stacks and improved resource representation.
When carrying droppable resources, the building's full radius counts as a valid target.
⚡ Miracles: Direct Player Execution
Miracles are no longer triggered indirectly – they are now executed directly by the player's hand
All miracles converted to the new direct execution system.
Miracles can be held at maximum charge instead of stop firing immediately.
Improved targeting: trees can now be targeted like buildings, Thunderstrike and Impulse Push now also hit trees.
Sticky targeting system: once targeted mortals stay targeted if the hand is not moved away
Area miracles now works dynamically within a radius and can be executed even without a specific target.
Rebalancing due to direct execution: wonder levels take longer to achieve, effect areas are smaller, area effects have been retuned.
The maximum wonder level can now be upgraded and defined per wonder type.
Strongly adjusted the skill tree: miracles on lower levels are accessible earlier (but level can now be upgraded per miracle), one-shot wonders as benefit are rare now and much stronger
Replaced Increase Food and Increase Wood miracle by general increase resource mircale (just point on the right resource stack at the main building)
🔮 Elemental Orbs
Elemental orbs are now created at the temple.
Added menu to switch between orb types and mana creation (as before).
Orbs now use the temple's storage (four places) and can be grabbed directly at the temple.
New balance: orbs lose power when running out of fuel through the thrower logic.
Dedicated tutorial for elemental orbs, adjusted to the new logic.
New (flame)-thrower hand animation for the orb thrower.
Using the orb thrower is changed to holding the right mouse button (panning cam is now holding both buttons in that case).
Orbs can now be dropped (as bomb), so that they explode on impact via double left click.
🏗️ Building System
Building progress is now shown directly at the building: we removed the old construction side and not create the building directly step by step.
Added building area highlighting.
New snapping system for building placement with smooth snapping to support proper placement.
Significantly faster build-area calculation – this also fixes a major memory issue.
Changed building placement rotation and added option for inverted building rotation in the menu.
Blueprint extraction is no longer possible when you are not the main god or while charging a wonder.
Unfinished buildings no longer provide guest action points.
Improved building boost logic and effect.
🎥 Camera & Navigation
Automatic camera tilt when zooming closer to the ground.
Jumping between settlements now keeps your camera orientation (instead of predefined camera positions).
Clicking buildings in non-focused settlements now selects the building instead of moving the camera to the settlement only.
🖥️ UI & Tooltips
Mana cost tooltip reworked: now also shows your current mana; Yin/Yang removed from the tooltip (Yin/Yang system deactivated).
Decluttered UI ("less is more") – more visible play area.
Particle-based area indicators for all area based wonders (removed the UI-like effects).
Level-up system switched to level-up points. Thereby the player can choose when to level up skills.
The Fate Challenge is now triggered via the player and requires reaching the monument first.
Improved gain icon logic: keep one gain icon and stops moving per increase for a small amount of time
Tooltips now explain which skill upgrade is needed; skills required for a quest are explained in the objective.
Prayers are now part of the overview map; zombies and demons appear in the view menu.
🌲 Economy & AI
New dynamic woodchopping logic (including a fix for wrong routing when a tree was close to a road). Woodchopper now can only chop tree which are available in the environment.
Fixed: workers that could not be assigned to a construction site lost their daytime planning.
Fixed: wrong or doubled production when citizens were moved from one job to another by the player.
Fixed: settlement founding – correct ownership switch when constructing.
Fixed: citizens could become ungrabbable after an attention bug.
🛠️ Stability & Misc
Updated to Unity 6.5 => improved performance.
Balancing: less options to skill during level up at the beginning
Fixed: crash when creating resources on a side thread
Fixed: crash when audio entries are created in the wrong order
Fixed big memory leak: doubled small buildings entries which results in duplicating the whole building set each time a new mortal is created.
Several smaller memory leak fixes (including AI threading, dissolve logic, non-shared materials).
Balancing:
General rebalancing of miracles due to direct execution logic
Making wonder now has higher belief impact on mortals for the player
Possible draw area when using elemetal orbs is now bigger
Elemental orbs are more powerful in general.
Thrower has more fuel.
Various fixes:
Wrongly flipped tooltips at the lower screen border
Fixed doubled ghost ring menu
Fixed bad range of radial menu on epic monuments
Ring items no longer move off-screen when zoomed out
Prayer icon no longer shown when there is no prayer
Chat UI no longer intermixes with highlighting.
Changing maps now automatically selects as many opponents as possible for that map.
Fixed: trees which could not be selected and thereby not collected.
Fixed: floating/buried soldiers on watchtowers
Fixed: several save-game errors
Fixed: broken quests which could results in unloadbale savegame
Reach in. The world is waiting for your hand.
Thank you for the feedback that pushed this patch — keep it coming.
🔑 How to access the Beta Branch:
Open your Steam Library
Right-click on Fata Deum → Properties
Go to the Betas tab
Select Open - Beta from the dropdown menu
Close the window – Steam will now automatically download the Beta version
