Hello Towers of Aghasba fans.
We have been working on Update 12 since September 2025. That makes what was supposed to be a small update that took 1-2 months into the the 12+ month range. This is not ideal and for that I want to say thank you for being interested after all this time. Part of the reason for the silence was we had to downsize and reshape the team from roughly 20 to 25 developers working on ToA, into a smaller, roughly, five person team working part time. That puts a complicated wrinkle on everything. Towers of Aghasba has always been a large project relative to team size too. The good news is, as delayed as things have been, we have been working on many things for Update 12! Some of them are done at time of writing, others need a little longer for finalization and testing. The other big reason for the silence, is we didn't want to talk about things unless we were about to be releasing them to you all to enjoy or gather feedback on. It's very easy to generate hype but it's much harder to deliver on that excitement. In short, we didn't want to get your hopes up when we didn't even know what our future held during the past 12 or so months.
So what is IN update 12?
Well, the big three are:
Building Snapping for what are arguably, player housing pieces. The three sets are Stick, Wood and Stone styles. Alongside this we've relaxed the building piece limit in some ways and made it more permissive in others.
A Creature AI system overhaul. This one has been pretty tricky for us and the version you get to experience in Update 12.0 will not be final by any stretch. What it will mean in the long run is better creature behavior, where and how creatures show up and what it means if you have to fight or feed them. We have intentions to make some critters only show up at certain times of day, and yes, some of these "critters" are Withered too.
A gameplay tuning pass to make the game more interesting including a gentle hunger system, and a less gentle 0 Amity system which you will be able to opt out of if striking a balance with nature is not your thing. Regarding cooking, you will want to cook instead of always eating raw foods. Taking life at 0 Amity means YOU take damage, so we've given you more seeds to plant sooner. Plus they can make more trees and plants all over the map.
Other smaller changes we're including in Update 12:
A wide range of UI adjustments
A new foliage pass across the map, arid trees in arid places etc
Player Map Markers, place the item, and select the icon it leaves on your map
An update to the player map, better sized icons
Creature dung now acts as a 1 minute fertilizer
Most plants in ecosystems grow much faster
Grand Trees with more unique behaviors
An Armor balance pass
A Weapon damage pass (a nerf in many areas, what you use matters more)
Withered Spawning should be less fixed now, they like to come out at night, mostly.
Improved Harvesting and Item vision with the Shimuscope
New Merchant Requests depending more on location and tier
New Regeneration Potions (expensive but op?)
Hopefully addressing achievement bugs once and for all...
Mounts spawn much closer behind the player causing them to get stuck in terrain much less
Improving multiplayer stability and hopefully crushing a rare bug that could delete MP client's save data
All items now should have a Scrap value except for things that would cause problems to scrap.
Probably a ton of small things we've collectively forgotten about...
When?
As soon as it's stable and been given a full game testing on both PC and PS5 both on single and multiplayer. If we had a date we could give with confidence we'd have given it. As soon as we can.
And the Future?
We want Update 12 to be our last "too big for this size team" update. That doesn't mean we're not going to have an impact past update 12, but we're going to be, internally, very careful, with what we try to tackle. After update 12 lands in everyone's hands we will be ready to do a round of hotfixes specific to community feedback AND going forward we should be much more able to address critical bugs and gameplay concerns.
Update 13, Shimu-Willing, should be smaller, more focused, and much quicker to get to you all. Time will tell if we meet this goal. We still have at least two members of this team that are like kids in a candy store requesting features we have no right asking of each other. We need a feature diet.
For the super observant out there we did put out a small micro patch today, just to be clear this is NOT update 12, but a step to prepare for it soon.
Thank you again for your kind words, constructive criticism and care. There's so many great games to play these days it's a real honor to have any of your time to ourselves.
- The (Smaller) Dreamlit Team
