Hello everyone,

After weeks of testing and refining, we are happy to merge Foundation’s latest experimental version to the main game. This update brings significant changes in the form of game balance and added features. As such, it is advisable to start over; while previous saves will indeed load, some of the work introduced in this update will undoubtedly disrupt villages’ productivity, happiness and more. That said, there’s a lot to be excited about with 1.9.4. Read on for all the details!

New Meat Production Chain And Additional Food Need

The Butchery, a brand-new building unlocked in the first tier of the common progression path, has been added to the game! This means boars are now much more useful as a resource: after placing Hunter’s Huts near dense forests, you will be able to capture the animals. Then, butchers will turn them into meat to be consumed at your markets or sold to traders.

Such a change fits nicely with the fact that villagers—including Serfs—now require two different food types to be happy.

Tavern Overhaul And New Entertainment Need

The Tavern has undergone significant changes in this newest version of the game. You are now able to create berry brews—a special drink made of berries and water—at the Berry Brewery. Served alongside a delicious meal, this is sure to be a hit among your people!

Introducing a new drink serves two main purposes: adding variety and perhaps more importantly, letting you deal with the fact that commoners, citizens and soldiers now require to be entertained! This new need affects happiness, so you want to make sure concerned villagers can quench their thirst.

Progression and Balancing Changes Overview

Update 1.9.4 features a trove of progression and balancing-related changes. Here’s a quick glance at what you can expect:

New Features

• Butchery workplace and meat resource
• Entertainment need, berry brews and berry brewery workplace at the Tavern
• Levy mandate
• Kinstone Abbey trade route
• Discoveries
• New advice
• New action bar shortcuts for mandates and village aspirations
• Quick promotions
• Resources linked to some workplaces are now displayed on click

Balancing Changes

• Tax Office was moved to the Labour progression path
• Additional food need for villagers
• Villagers have a chance to leave starting at -25% happiness
• More workplaces now require higher villager statuses
• Removed residential availability from immigration factors
• Trade routes have added resources to buy and sell from
• Adjusted plenty of building construction costs
• Events have been improved across the board
• Several unlockables have been moved around
• Your second territory no longer has an upkeep cost

The exhaustive list of changes can be found in our game design changelog on our official website.

Levy Mandate

Update 1.9.4 adds a new way to access “emergency funds” with the Levy mandate. Activating this mandate grants you a large quantity of coins at the cost of villagers’ happiness. The debuff is applied for a set duration (currently: 30 days) and stacks should you activate the Levy multiple times. Use with caution!

The Levy mandate has been added as a result of the Tax Office function now being exclusive to the Labor progression path. Our design goals with this change is to further associate taxes with this estate and encourage better decision-making regarding early to mid-game profit.

New Trade Route: Kinstone Abbey

A new, Clergy-allied trade route has opened! Merchants from Kinstone Abbey sell a variety of useful and rarer resources such as gold bars, gems or marble. They’ll be looking for herbs, honey and planks to name a few. Unlocking this trade route requires you to produce manuscripts at the Scriptorium.

Enhanced Transport

Our engine team has been hard at work developing behind-the-scenes optimizations for Foundation. Chief among them is our rebuilt transportation system that is being rolled out as part of this update.

Before, villagers sometimes had to travel long distances to satisfy their needs and seek resources, which was more obvious while facing shortages. This led to scenarios where villagers would cross the whole map—so to say—just to reach a market or specific building like a warehouse or a church. Not good.

From now on, our transport algorithm further favors local management of resources and needs. To put it in more concrete terms, villagers will associate with markets or buildings near where they live. The same principle applies for production chains: a weaver hut requiring wool will get it from the closest available warehouse stocking some, itself linked to the closest sheep farm—effectively giving a whole new meaning to “hubs” within your villages. They will operate in a much more satisfying and natural way.

Map Generator Improvements

We are pleased to share an updated version of our map generator. When we first released this feature, we got a lot of feedback about terrain that felt a bit too bumpy, so we started iterating on a new version of this tool that would allow for flatter topographies. We took this opportunity to add several new configurable parameters as well, in order to have maps feel even better than before.

Each map type has its own set of parameters you can adjust to your wishes. For instance, the Fluvial map type lets you modify the following parameters:

• River
• Island
• Slope
• Cliff
• Promontory
• Hill

If you are particularly happy with one of the procedurally generated creations, here’s another bit of good news: you will be able to easily share them thanks to a unique map code system! Input the alphanumeric code into the designated space, click the confirmation button and voila: you have a new world to settle in!

Adjustments to Job Requirements

Several jobs now require more advanced villager statuses. In previous iterations of the game, you could (mostly) ignore promotions and still manage to get all production chains going. However, we feel like some jobs should require a bit more investment and decision making before your villagers can access them.

Two examples of jobs adjusted to the new reality of higher status requirements are the Tax Collector and Bailiff, which now require Commoners at a minimum.

Important Changes to the Promotion System

As you will now spend a lot more time dealing with promotions, it no longer made sense to limit this function to once every 30 days. Hence why with 1.9.4, we’re introducing two important quality of life changes regarding promotions:

• You can now use the promotion mandate at will
• You can now promote villagers directly from their detailed information window

Advanced Resource Tracking

This update also introduces easy identification of resources in the world from select workplaces such as the Hunter’s Hut. In this example, selecting the building reveals where boars live on your map. Using the Extraction paint tool produces a similar result, displaying available berry and stone sources, so you can plan your village accordingly.

New Take on Immigration

Immigration waves will now feel more rewarding and steady across the board. Previously, passersby would take into account multiple factors before deciding whether or not to join your village. One such factor, housing, has been completely removed from the equation, effectively softening the difficulty associated with immigration.

Another change we made is that unless your immigration rate is nil or disabled, you will always get a minimum of one newcomer per immigration wave.

Discoveries

Foundation is a city-building game with quite a lot of interconnected systems that you learn to master over time. We want to make sure this doesn’t hamper your fun nor prove too daunting, so we thought of an additional tool to help you learn the ropes: discoveries.

Crucial systems or concepts are now accompanied by one-time notifications whose stated goal is to provide assistance in a concise way. We are confident this new feature, in addition to help topics, will answer most questions that may arise while playing.

General Changelog

New

• Meat production chain with the Butchery
• Entertainment need
• Berry Brews at the Tavern
• Levy Mandate
• Discoveries
• Environmental Resource Display
• Berries
• Fish schools
• Stone nodes
• Boars
• Advanced onboarding
• Food diversity
• Enacting the Mandate Levy
• Leaving villagers

Improvements

• Auto-assigning higher status villagers to workplaces will not demote them anymore
• Transport behavior has been enhanced, a change that will be most noticeable with larger villages. The algorithm now focuses more on local ‘resource hubs’, which should fix workers traveling great distances to do their job

Updates

• Help topics
• Housing
• Generating revenue
• Immigration
• Markets
• Promotions
• Trading
• Trade routes
• Villager Happiness
• Localization

Modding

• Exposed missing unlockables
• Exposed Butcher-related assets (job, building, etc.)
• Exposed Tavern buildings
• Exposed Master Builder job (Crafter Workshop)
• Exposed Kinstone Abbey (trading village)
• Exposed Jeweler’s workshop building part
• Exposed Entertainment need
• Exposed missing Happiness factors
• Added members to GAME_RULE_MODIFIER_WORKPLACE_RECIPE
• GAME_ACTION_APPLY_GAME_RULE: OptionalDescriptor field no longer optional (renamed to Descriptor)

Fixes

• Common Resources mod interfered with housing placement and prevented them from being placed
• Masterpieces couldn’t be added to Churches
• Crash when selecting a Monastery with a Modest Facade