Set Sail for the High Seas!
Hello Everyone,
My name is Daniel Dressler and I am the lead programmer on Whiskerwood. On behalf of myself and the team, I want to express our thanks for your support.
About 4 months ago, I asked for your patience as we started work on our biggest update to Whiskerwood yet. And today is the day it ships! With the introduction of an expansive open ocean, this update charts a new chapter in Whiskerwood's core gameplay! Thanks to your feedback during Early Access, we've been able to design a better nautical feature that better integrates with our core in-island gameplay. Our original ideas for nautical gameplay missed critical opportunities we could only catch thanks to feedback from players.
Thank you all again for your feedback on Whiskerwood, and your patience as we developed this update :)
Daniel,
Lead Programmer on Whiskerwood
A Nautical World!
We consider this update to be Act II of Whiskerwood. Until now, you've been playing Act I as you come to terms with living under the rule of the Claws, focusing on only your island and its place in the Colony System. Now you'll explore the whole region, traveling between islands and charting the high seas.
In doing so, you'll encounter Pirates, whose threat slowly wears away at the Claw's colony system. These lawless Pirates smuggle and pillage from the Colonies and challenge the Claw's nautical supremacy. Either willingly or by force, your actions will feed the pirates. In turn, the Pirate Wars will bring the Claws to acts of desperation, acts which will grant you the schematics to outfit a navy!
The Highlights!
Here's a brief overview of what you can expect from this update:
A full Nautical experience, including open ocean & NPC islands!
Naval Combat on said open ocean between your armed ships and pirates!
Act II of the storyline, "The Pirate Wars", and new ways to engage in relations with the Claws
Uncapped resources through trading and open ocean resource nodes
Guano farming on Guano Rocks for unlimited Fertilizer
Industrial scale fishing in the deep sea
Cannon Towers to defend your colony from Pirates
Defensive Walls and Towers with extra HP
Cannon bombardment is now fully simulated, walls and terrain defense provide functional protection. Build up defensive castles and walls
All ships are simulated with open ocean pathing you can manipulate. Consider sending pirates attackers through a maze of cannon towers.
Ships are capital assets requiring heavy investment to construct but can be freely reassigned between docks
Over 19 new quests
Over 3 buildable ship types
Over 9 new buildable docks and structures
Assign ships to create fast ferries
The Open Sea!
Nautical gameplay starts in the mid game. Once you've researched Tier 1 in the following winter, you have a random chance of discovering a lone sailor in desperate need of assistance. If you choose to rescue him immediately, or later on, it will trigger a spiral of consequences which will see you come into possession of vital secrets: the Schematics to Ship building!
Using these schematics, you can fulfill requests from the Pirates, which in turn will buy your colony periods of protection from Pirate raids. In doing so, the Pirates' pressure on the Claws will increase, until it reaches a boiling point and the Claws establish an anti-pirate corps. From there, by currying favor from the Claws, you'll gain the means to build a fighting navy!
And all the while, you'll leverage the bounty of the ocean. Trade, fish, and harvest guano to fuel your industry! Explore the open ocean to uncover valuable points of interest, including Guano Rocks, Fishing Spots, and Sunken Ships rich with salvage to collect.
Speaking of sinking ships, there are a number of situational dangers to be found on the ocean. Most pressing is the constant requirement to eat. Whiskers need food both on shore and at sea -- but on the open ocean, there are no berries to pick. Instead you must pack your own canned food to survive. Run out of food and your sailors and officers will starve. Other dangers include patrolling Pirates, and accidentally selling off your entire food store to another island.
Should your ships arrive at their home dock in one piece, the ship's crew will unload the spoils and bury any dead. On the off chance the ship sunk, the carried cargo will be left floating in the ocean as salvage and any survivors will row home in the emergency lifeboat.
Keeping your crew alive is vital, as not just any Whisker can crew a ship. Only Whiskers with the new skills of Sailor or Officer can set sail. Larger ships require Officers & Sailors, while smaller ships can make do with only Sailors. Whiskers with Sailor and Officer skills will slowly and randomly become available in Whisker ships, but their skills carry a heavy cost. As with other Skills, nautical skills can be taught to other Whiskers using the School.
Late game ship gameplay is focused on maximizing Guano harvests, selling cargo to other colonies at better rates than the smuggler, importing basic resources to feed your industry, exporting finished goods at twice what the smuggler pays, and ultimately eliminating every Pirate island.
We hope you enjoy this expansion to Whiskerwood. We eagerly await your feedback.
Thank you for playing our game :)
Daniel
Lead Programmer on Whiskerwood
Changelog
v0.7.201 Patch #26 Hotpatch #1
Bugs
Fix floating dock pier pilling
Fix playable areas at the edge of giant maps are in forced nautical zoom range
Fix cotton consuming too much space on belts
Fix raft and ferry docks not longer connecting
Fix missing loc key in guano processing unlock prereq display
Fix Machinist showing a blank ship recipe
Fix missing rebind for navy view toggle
Crash Fixes
Note: If you have mods installed at present at least one mod is known to cause a crash on the main menu. Please disable mods if you are experiencing crashes. If you prefer to play on an older build, the new branch “pre_nautical” contains the build prior to the nautical update and all mods are believed to work on it.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Shintai on the Steam forum for reporting the main dock visual glitch
Thank you to p_max666 on the Discord for reporting that panning to the edge of giant maps was getting forced to nautical mode
Thank you to Goose Rookie on the Steam forum for reporting the massive wasted space Cotton Bales were taking on the conveyor belt
Thank you to many players who reported the ferry related docks not connecting bug over Steam Forums, Email, and Discord!
Thank you to p_max666 on the Discord for reporting the mechanist incorrectly showing a ship recipe
Thank you to RizPrime on the Discord for reporting that the nautical map toggle hotkey was missing from the rebindings
v0.7.200 Patch #26
Features
Add open ocean with other islands and points of interest
Add Sailor and Officer skills for Whiskers
Add shipyards & ship construction
Add Cannon Towers for island defense
Add Guano Harvest, Deep Sea Fishing, Trade, and Naval Docks
Add lifeboats when ships sink
Add cell-based open ocean fog of war
Add health points to Cannon Towers and Walls
Add ballistic simulation to cannon ball bombardment
Add waypoint based path finding unified between open ocean and in-island ship movements
Make all ships use simulated navigation
Add sailing navigation simulation for NPC islands
Add trading with other whisker colony islands
Add sail manufacturing schematic and building
Add 3 new pieces of music
Hide islands and points of interest until players discover them by scouting
Add 4 types of cannon balls, Stone, Bronze, Iron, and Chainshot
Add map makers to hint at location of islands and points of interest
Add 19 new story quests
Add compute shader based always persistent ship foam simulation
Add escort naval ship behaviour to protect defenseless ships
Add new nautical related achievements
Optimization
Add logic to write vision state into RT upon map load
Add navmesh clustering for fast isolated region rejection
Optimize ship vision writes to only write when moving between cells
Gameplay
Add Guano harvesting from Guano Rocks
Add Gauno to fertilizer recipe and schematic
Add deep sea fishing
Retune ship construction costs
Tune nautical fishing based on current balance formula numbers
Integrate nautical ship to replace existing placeholder, fix clicking and hide widget when dock is assigned
Make winter stocks quest give approval
Make Cotton Farms quest give logs
Make ship firing ammo limits
Unify combat simulation between ship and building combat
Add two layer ship navigation mapping to accommodate small boats and large ships
Add auto-attack logic for towers to attack hostile ships
Make fishing trip end early if no known fishing spots are stocked
Add randomized trade offerings per island
Add flag on islands to show owning faction
Add acceleration & deceleration to ship movement simulation
Add angular velocity to ship movement simulation
Make escort ships use same path with offset if current pathing is similar enough and goal is far away
UI
Add priority notifications to notify players of important nautical events
Add display of building HP on building details screen and construction tooltip
Separate random ship name generation between player/claw/pirate/trader
Add trade dialog with NPC islands
Draw home icon over a ship's dock
Retune panning in overworld to be 3x faster in overworld only, preserve in-map pan speed
Add aged paper styling to overworld
Teleport camera to ship when selecting ship card
Make arc assignment snap to valid docks
Add easy to read grid coordinates in format A1
Add outlines on selected ships
Show hover status when hovering ships and islands
Display ammo on ship status
Add on-hover widget to show contents of ships
Make dismissed ships travel back to claw homeland
Make drag and select function even with ship selected
Make selection range setting operate in screenspace
Add hover over POIs to show type/name and stockage
Switch ship icons from nautical meshes to in-map meshes
Bugs
Fix moving mouse outside editor/window during click and hold panning causes camera to jump to original location. Use last in-window mouse location instead
Fix plan arc not ending at ocean level
Fix player island sizes not impacting player ocean vision
Fix construction yard workers missing from job list
Fix fly-in animation to match further max zoom
Fix jittery ship zoomed in movement
Fix newly built ships claiming to have food and crew\[
Fix newly built ships moving instead of staying docked
Fix Blocked by ship label may not be instantly dismissed upon assigning the ship
Fix it is possible to send the ship to sea without a crew
Fix NPC island spawning outside playable map
Fix right clicking mouse during action menu deselects ship too
Fix navigation to islands for trading
Fix ship status clipping with islands
Fix spawned salvage not toggling visibility when spawned in-map
Fix not all code paths de-hovering towers
Fix multi-story navmesh bug
Fix trade notification not clearing
Fix damage numbers appearing for ocean hit shots
Fix ship widget rotation not updating in same frame as ship rotation causing jitter
Fix geometric edge case
Crash Fixes
Fix crash when placing warehouse in shipping build
Mod API
Add nautical related parameters to moddable system tune table
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the many players who’ve played through Act I and requested an expanded late game!
Thank you to many players who requested uncapped methods of obtaining Ores & Fertilizer
Thank you to everyone who gave us their trust as we worked silently on this update!
Steam Reviews
We'd really appreciate it if you could take a moment to share your thoughts about Whiskerwood in a Steam review. Each review helps us understand what you enjoy, what you'd like to see changed, and what you'd like to see added next. It's a powerful way for you to not only share feedback with us directly but also influence what comes next in a patch. We're carefully reading through all feedback, and your opinion matters!
Official Wiki and Beginner's Guide
We have some fantastic resources to help get you started on your colony building in Whiskerwood. Check out our beginner's guide and our official community wiki page to help get you the answers you need. We also have a compilation of tips and tricks sourced from the community to help you out right here:
[dynamiclink href="https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3604037222"]
Join the Whiskerwood Community
Become part of the Whiskerwood community. Join us on Discord to chat with other players, share your villages, and see what others are creating. You can also follow updates and discussions on Reddit, stay informed through BlueSky and Twitter.
