Kukolony

A villager colony system for Valheim. Place a hearth, hire villagers, register your chests and hand out jobs - they haul your goods and gather wood, stone and ore while you get on with the game, and gather round the fire when the work is done.

This is the free edition. What Patreon supporters are testing now is in Work in progress - early access on Patreon - https://patreon.com/KuchukboromDebbarma286

What's new

0.7.2

• Villagers get where they are going. No more standing still beside railings, posts, stair edges and short walls, or hopping nothing near a bench or a fire; they open any door in their way (and shut it behind).
• Limits on the job card - each Gather line shows have / [limit] with −/+ right there, the same limit as Items → Limits.
• Filters when choosing items - Gather by how and biome, and the others where they have them.
• Haul: Move what is over the limit to the overflow; filing out of the overflow stops at each limit.
• No chest stores it - Items → Categories names a category no chest is marked for.
• Better gear and materials from the overflow at a hearth on a raised floor.
• Watching a villager is smooth from any distance.
• Settings: Keep working when the server is empty (KeepAliveWhenEmpty).
• Also in work in progress on Patreon: Cooking is part of Make, Herd's list.
• Update the server and every player together.

Earlier releases are in CHANGELOG.md.

Contents

1. What's new
2. Requirements and install
3. Quick start
4. Keys
5. The Kolony
6. Villagers
7. Structures and their settings
8. History
9. Waiting on
10. Stock
11. Item categories
12. Jobs
13. Work lists and turns
14. Work in progress - early access on Patreon
15. The map
16. Off-screen simulation
17. Multiplayer
18. Settings
19. Console commands
20. Good to know
21. Credits

Requirements and install

• BepInEx (denikson-BepInExPack_Valheim) and Jötunn — both are listed as dependencies, so a mod manager fetches them for you.
• Every player needs the mod, and so does a dedicated server. On a server, the server runs every villager; alone or hosting, your game does.
• Optional: PlanBuild. If it is installed, villagers can build your blueprints (see Plan Totems). Nothing is needed if it is not.

Manual install: drop the Kukolony folder into BepInEx/plugins/. The config is written to BepInEx/config/com.kuku.kukolony.cfg on first launch, and every setting in it can also be changed in game (see Settings).

Quick start

1. Build a Kolony Hearth (in the hammer's build menu — 10 wood, 10 stone). It is the colony's record: its name, its people, its structures, its jobs. It starts with a random name; rename it on the panel's Home page.
2. Press [ (the Kolony key) to open the Kolony panel on the nearest hearth (with more than one base, the name at the top opens a list to switch, and the key opens that one from then on).
3. Hire a villager — Villagers → Hire. It costs coins (50 by default), arrives with a name and nothing else, and feeds and dresses itself from your chests.
4. Register a chest. Look at a chest inside the hearth's reach and press Ctrl + \, or use Structures → + Register for everything nearby. Set what it holds: Anything, Only these (Food, Wood…) or All except.
5. Put food in a registered chest. Villagers eat from registered storage and starve without it. Put a bed in reach, register it, and give it a sleeper.
6. The jobs are already there. Every Kolony starts with one job of each kind — Gather (wood and stone), Haul, Farm, Tend, Make, Herd, Repair — with sensible defaults. Open Jobs to adjust one, or add a second of a kind pointed somewhere else.
7. Give the villager its work — its card's Work tab, + Add job, and tick the jobs in the order they matter (▲ ▼ reorder them). Or pick several villagers on the list (tick their rows, or Space; Ctrl + A for all shown) and add work to all of them at once, or open a job and + Add villagers.
8. Watch it work. Hover a villager to see what it is doing; press Watch (or W) on its card to follow it with the camera.
9. Grow from there: register a kiln and a smelter and list what they make on Tend; a bench or a cooking station and list what to make or cook on Make; an axe or a pickaxe in a chest and list ores on Gather; a Kolony Field and list crops on Farm.
10. Take someone along. Walk up to a villager and press Use: it follows you.

Keys

Every key below is configurable. The four mod keys are ignored while you are typing in chat, the console or a text box.

Hovering a villager shows only the keys that will actually work on it — a villager of another Kolony says "Answers to X, not to you" instead. The same goes for chests, stations, benches and beds: the key is offered only when it would open something.

In the panel:

The Kolony

A Kolony is your settlement as a whole; each Kolony Hearth you place is one base of it.

The Kolony keeps, the same from every base:

• a name (random at first, editable on the panel's Home page — it colours every pin the Kolony owns on the map);
• its villagers, its jobs, its parties, its fallen and its history;
• its members: the players it belongs to, all equal. Whoever places the first hearth founds the Kolony; a hearth placed by a member becomes another base of it. A player belongs to at most one Kolony.

Members. Open Home and choose Members to see who belongs. + Invite asks a player who is in the world; they get a line on their screen, press the Kolony key and accept or decline on the card it opens. Any member can remove a member or leave. To everyone who is not a member a Kolony is closed: its villagers are seen in the world and nothing more - no panel, no map pins, no trading, recruiting or registering its pieces. An admin (or the host) can join any Kolony without an invitation: stand at its hearth and type kukolony_claim in the console. Use it for a Kolony left with no members, or to rejoin your own after changing character - a member is a character, not an account.

Bases. Home's Bases list shows each hearth of the Kolony: who lives there, how far it is, a name of its own, and a button that switches the panel to it. The panel's header switches too.

Each base keeps for itself:

• a reach: a circle (96 m by default, settable up to a ceiling) in which structures can be registered and work happens, widened by the work flags assigned to it;
• its registered structures and its stock list (Copy from on the Items page copies another base's).

A villager lives at one base — its home base — and sleeps, stores and draws from there; it never walks to another base's chests. Change it on the villager's card. A job pointed at a flag or a field is worked by the villagers who live at that flag's base.

Losing a base closes it: its structures are let go and its villagers move to the nearest base left. Only losing the last hearth ends the Kolony.

How many Kolonies a world may hold is MaxKolonies (0 for no limit), set in the config file. The free edition keeps one Kolony per world; a world with more keeps the oldest working and the others resting. Both limit Kolonies, not bases. A hearth cannot be placed on ground another Kolony already reaches.

Losing a Kolony's last hearth starts a cooldown (one real minute by default) before a new Kolony can be founded. By default any loss counts, including an enemy levelling it; CooldownOnAnyLoss off counts only your own removal.

The Kolony panel

The front door to everything. Sections along the top, each a list on the left and the chosen thing on the right; each remembers where you were.

• Home — three tabs. Attention: what needs it, worst first: Starving, Down, Waiting on (one line per thing they wait on), Stuck, No work, No bed, structures not found, jobs nobody runs, and last anything held in the overflow. Choose one to see who it is about and Show them to open that list already filtered. Bases and Members list those. On the right, the Kolony's card: its name, its numbers (each a link), parties out on their own, this base's structures, stock limits and reach, what you are looking at (Register or Open), what is nearby and unregistered, and its History. What the Kolony did the day before comes as a few lines each morning (MorningReport).
• [ with no Kolony yet opens a start card that explains how to found one and shows any invitations waiting for you.
• Villagers, Jobs, Structures, Items (stock, what is in the chests, categories, overflow), Parties, History, World, Settings — below.
• With more than one base, the name at the top (Name ▾) opens a list to switch between them. A base far away is shown as from afar: the server's copy, and changes are sent to it.
• Choosing items - for a chest, a station, a stock line, a gear slot, a route - opens a picker with a search and up to three more lists along the top: what the page itself offers (Stored, Known), Kolony (everything in every base's registered chests and the overflow, with how much is where) and Carrying (your bag). Each shows only what that picker takes, and only when there is some; the list you used last is the one it opens on next time.
• The line at the bottom says what the last action did; … opens the last 20. Changes that go to the server show sending… until they land.

Hover the hearth for its name, headcount, structure count and the manage key.

Villagers

Hiring, naming, dismissing

• Hire on the Villagers list hires one. It costs NewVillagerCost coins (50; 0 makes them free).
• Every villager has a name and its own appearance. Rename it in the Name box on its card's Overview tab.
• Dismiss (on its card, asks first) drops whatever it carries and wears where it stands and lets it go; the hire is not refunded.
• The list filters with Show (All, Working, Stuck, No work, Starving, No bed, In a party, Fallen). Pick several (tick boxes, Space, Ctrl + A) and one page adds jobs to all their work lists (Add to N work lists), replaces them (Replace N, asks first), or sets one Stance for all.
• A villager's card has tabs: Overview (name, Sleeps in, Home base, comfort and more), Work, Gear, Bag, Skills and History.
• Send home returns a party member to its Kolony.

Food

Villagers eat from your registered chests. Food is worth its own burn time from the game's data, so a cooked meal keeps a villager going longer than a raw one. They eat when they run low (HungryBelowSeconds), and sit down on a nearby seat to do it when there is one (never a boat's - a moored boat is not a dining room).

• A working villager burns food at FoodDrainRate × real time (0.5 = a meal lasts twice its own duration). Idle villagers barely eat.
• Hunger only advances while the villager is loaded and ticking — a settlement you walk away from does not starve behind your back, and the step is capped after a long gap.
• Starving shows red on the hover and at the top of the panel's Home. Whether it actually kills is StarvingKills (off by default).

Energy and rest

Every action costs energy (EnergyPerAction). Below TiredBelow a villager stops work and goes to rest; it resumes at RestedAbove. Rest is triggered by energy, never by nightfall — a settlement works in shifts.

Recovery is in in-game hours, so it scales with the day length:

Comfort makes those hours shorter. Those figures are what a rest costs at comfort 1 — bare ground. A villager sleeping somewhere comfortable recovers faster, in Valheim's own proportion: comfort 7 rests it at 2.2x the rate, so a 4-hour bed becomes a bit under 2 hours. It is the same arithmetic as your own rested buff, which means the furniture you already build for yourself works for your villagers without you learning a second system.

One rule catches people out, and it is vanilla's: furniture counts for nothing without a roof. An unroofed bed surrounded by chairs, banners and a fire is worth exactly as much as the floor. The villager's Comfort row says so in yellow when that is what is wrong.

The Comfort row on a villager's card names the level, what is around its bed, and how much faster it rests there. It is missing when the bed's part of the world is not loaded — that is "nobody is near enough to look", not "the bed is bare". Turn the whole thing off with ComfortMatters and the hours above are the hours, wherever a villager lies down.

Skills

Villagers get better at what they do. Nine skills, each levelling from their own work: Woodcutting (each blow), Mining, Foraging, Farming (sowing and harvesting), Hauling (putting things away), Cooking, Crafting, Hunting (bow hits) and Fighting. Each level costs more than the last (SkillXpBase × (level+1)^SkillXpExponent, up to SkillLevelCap, 100), learned five times over by default (SkillXpRate), so the early levels come quickly and mastery still takes a long life. A death costs nothing.

• Skilled villagers work better, up to four times as well at the cap (SkillWorkBonusAtCap, 3):
  • Woodcutting and Mining: a novice is slow (ChopSwingSeconds, MineSwingSeconds, 4 s a blow); a master swings four times as often.
  • Foraging and Farming: quicker hands, and a chance of an extra pick.
  • Hauling: a skilled hauler scoops up more of the same thing lying close by with each pickup, up to HaulScoopAtCap (10) more at the cap.
  • Cooking and Crafting: quicker loading of stations and faster crafting; a chance of an extra helping off the cooking station.
  • Hunting: shoots from further (HuntRangeBonusAtCap, 80% further at the cap), draws faster and aims truer - the game's own archery reads the villager's skill as it does a player's - and hits harder.
  • Fighting: hits harder and swings more often, blocks better and tires less. It grows from every blow landed and every blow taken in a fight.
• Teach with trophies. On a villager's Skills tab, Teach next to a skill lets you hand over a trophy from your pack. It is used up and the villager learns from it: a little from a Meadows trophy, much more from each biome further on, and a great deal from a boss's (TrophyXpTier1–7, TrophyXpBoss).

Health, death and revival

A villager's health grows as it gets stronger. It starts at VillagerMaxHealth (50) and is multiplied by the armour it wears, the last meal it ate (while it is fed) and its overall skill (every skill's level added up) — so a veteran in good armour on a good meal takes an enemy ages to bring down. Healing grows the same way. The Skills tab spells both out, for example 620 = 50 × armour 2.4 × food 1.6 × skill 3.2. Every factor is a setting (HealthPerArmour, HealthPerFood, HealthPerSkillLevel, and the RegenPer… three), and HealthCap (100,000) and RegenCap (50×) are the ceilings.

• Villagers have a real health pool (VillagerMaxHealth, 50) and heal while fed (HealFullSeconds; 0 uses the creature's own rate).
• Death costs nothing. Its bag and gear locker go into the Kolony's ledger with it — nothing is dropped where it fell, however far from home. The death is announced, to the player it was following too.
• A fallen villager comes back at its bed after ReviveSeconds (one minute of world time, which only runs while the game does), carrying everything it had, and still in its party. A villager without a bed wakes at the hearth.

Gear

Every villager has a gear locker separate from its bag: armour slots (head, chest, legs, cape, utility) and racks for weapons, shields, torches and tools. The bag is for cargo only.

• They dress themselves. New villagers arrive naked and shop your registered chests for the best piece per slot - when idle, and after every job, at most once a minute, at home. With combat on that includes one melee weapon and one ranged weapon (bow, crossbow or staff) - the best of each - and the gear row says bow when one is missing. Neither is ever put back as spare, so an axe kept as the melee weapon beside a bow stays. Outclassed pieces go back to storage for the next villager.
• The right hands at the right time. The job's tool while working, weapon and shield in a fight, a torch at night — one owner of the hands at a time.
• A villager never takes the settlement's last tool. A spare axe or pickaxe in a chest is shopped; the only one is left for you.
• Gear presets. Every job, every party and every party member can have one: per slot (melee, ranged, shield, helmet, chest, legs, cape, utility, tool), Automatic — the best they can find — or one particular item. A named item is fetched from your chests and used before anything "better". At home the preset of the job being worked applies; in a party, the member's own or the party's. A villager whose locker is full says so.
• Gear on the villager's card shows it all, grouped, with Give and Take. Give gear hands over a piece from your inventory.

Getting around

• Doors: a villager opens a closed door or gate in its way as it comes to it - any door but one that needs a key - and closes it behind itself a few seconds later (DoorCloseBehindSeconds) — only doors it opened, only when nobody stands in the doorway; one left open stays open.
• Jumps: a hop over a knee-high lip (never into a beam overhead), and a deliberate step down when stranded above where it is going.
• Headroom: a stroll, a work spot or the place a villager stands to reach something is picked only where a villager fits standing - never the low space under a raised floor or a stilt deck.
• Stuck detection: a villager making no progress toward its destination for StuckGiveUpSeconds gives up and tries something else, and refuses that target for a while rather than walking the same impossible route again.
• Small talk: villagers exchange a few words when they pass and greet a player who comes near. Rare on purpose.
• Villagers with nothing to do go home and pass the time: two to five gather in a ring by a lit fire (or the hearth), chatting and laughing; at night they warm by the fire; some sit on a bench or the grass, some stroll. They look at their work again every 20 seconds, and real work pulls them away at once. Their words are seen by every player, not only on the machine running them.
• Emotes: now and then a villager shrugs or stretches while idle, waves or bows to you, laughs in small talk, and cheers a kill or something it made. Everyone sees them. Rare on purpose (VillagerEmotes, EmoteMinSeconds).

Where things are stored

Among chests your filters treat alike, one chest fills before the next. Each chest belongs to the place it stands nearest - the hearth or a work-area flag - and villagers use the chests of the place nearest them, always in the same order: nearest the hearth or flag first. The first chest in that order with room takes the item, whatever it already holds, and whoever is filing from wherever. Taking things out empties the last-filled chest first, so the front ones stay full. When goods end up behind anyway - several haulers at once, a chest that was open or out of reach, room made by something taken out - a haul job set to Tidy chests (or Both) moves them into the earliest chest of that place with room, so chests pack from the front. Contents are read even from chests nobody is near, so an item with nowhere to go is left where it is rather than carried to a full chest.

A bag holds only what it is for: what a hauler, tender or cook is delivering, its gear waiting for the locker, what it is mending with, and a little food. Anything else — a hunter's loot, a crafted item, the end of an interrupted haul, spare food — is filed by the villager itself, nearest chest first: at a break between jobs, once three-quarters of its bag is used, or after five minutes. When no chest has room for something - every chest is full, or none takes that item - the villager hands it to the Kolony's overflow. It is listed under Items, Overflow, a line per item with how many; plain goods have no limit, and gear is kept piece by piece up to OverflowGearCap (beyond it, a piece is left on the ground beside the chest it belongs in). What is held is not used by any villager. Move on a line (or Move all to storage at the top) files it into the chests of any base that have room, and the Kolony tries by itself every OverflowAutoMoveMinutes. Select a line to Take out as many as you choose (a slider, or All) - into your bag, at your feet what does not fit - Move to storage, or Delete them for good (press twice). A villager never takes a chest back from a player who has it open.

Watching a villager

Watch on a villager's card follows it with the camera and shows a live card: what it is doing, its job, which step of the job it is on (or which reflex has it — resting, eating, fighting), what comes next on its list and how long the current turn has left, energy, food, health, stance, what it carries, where it is going, and its home. Tab cycles villagers, E opens the watched one's card, Esc returns.

Watching works at any range, including from a dedicated server: the ground the camera is pointed at is loaded while you look at it and let go when you stop, so a villager fighting a greydwarf two hundred metres out is a fight you can see rather than a person on an empty hillside. Your own character stays where you left it and nothing about what the world simulates changes. If the one you are watching dies, the camera comes back on its own.

The hover

Look at any villager: name and Kolony, what it is doing (with a diagnosis when it is getting nowhere — "no axe in any chest"), energy and food (red when starving), how kitted it is, and the keys that will work on it.

Structures and their settings

Only placed, networked build pieces inside a Kolony's reach (the hearth's circle or any of its flags) can be registered. Loose items and creatures cannot. A registered record stays visible if its object is destroyed or moves out of reach; it is marked and cannot be worked until you remove or repair it.

Registering:

• Look at a piece and press Ctrl + \ - or open the panel: the Home card offers Register for what you are looking at.
• Or Structures → + Register (the Nearby, not registered filter): everything in reach that could be registered, searchable, each with a Register button and what it would become.
• Press \ while looking at a registered piece to jump straight to its card.

The Structures list's Show filters by role (Storage, Tending, Crafting, Beds, Fields, Flags), by Problems (not found, out of reach), by Paused, or Nearby, not registered; Ctrl + N opens + Register.

Changing several at once. Pick structures of one kind - chests with chests, stations with stations - and one page sets them all: in use or paused; for storage what they hold (Only these / All except lists), whether villagers may take from them and whether they take unclaimed things; for stations who works them, keeping each in its own fuel and when, what to feed them (each gets only what it takes), what to carry and how full to keep them; for benches mending. Storage shares are set for all of them too (count Limits stay per chest). Beds, fields and flags share only in use / paused. Up to 64 at once.

• On the list: tick the box on each row, or Space on the highlighted row; Ctrl + A picks every row shown (filter to Storage first to pick every chest).
• Out in the world: Ctrl + Shift + \ starts picking - a card on the left lists what is picked - then \ on each structure picks or unpicks it. Ctrl + Shift + \ again finishes and opens the page for all of them.

Every structure's card has a tab for each role it plays, and About: its name, what it is used as, and Unregister (asks in a dialog; the piece stays standing; works from anywhere). A Paused switch at the top of every tab stops villagers using it without forgetting how it was set up.

Storage (chests and anything with an inventory)

• Holds: Anything, Only these categories, or All except these categories — chests take categories only, never single items. Villagers file matching things here and carry mismatches elsewhere. Both lists are kept when you switch; the one not in use is shown dimmed.
• What no chest takes, or no chest has room for, goes to the Kolony's overflow - hauling never leaves it lying. The overflow says what to do about each item (see Items, Overflow).

Bed

• Sleeps here: which villager (or nobody). A bed cuts rest from 10 hours to 4.

Plan Totems

With PlanBuild installed, a Plan Totem registers as a station this mod knows how to work: a tending villager asks it what the plan is still short of and carries exactly that, trip after trip, until the building is up. Drop a blueprint, register the totem, walk away.

Marks

Shift + \ floats a mark over every registered structure, so you can tell the Kolony's chests from everyone else's at a glance.

History

History shows what the Kolony did, one in-game day at a time, for the last seven days - the days on the left, the chosen day on the right:

• A line of the day's big numbers — collected, put away, used, made, eaten, jobs done.
• Collected (picked up), Harvested, Put away, Taken from storage, Used up (craft materials, fuel, ore, cooking ingredients, seeds), Made (crafted and cooked) and Eaten — each with its biggest entries and All › for the rest.
• By item (the By activity / By item switch at the top of a day) — one line per item: everything done with it that day, and what your chests gained or lost. Nine ore taken out of a chest and smelted show as one line ("taken from storage 9, used up 9", chests −9), not as nine under each of two headings.
• Work done — each villager and the jobs it finished, how many times; › shows that villager's own day. A villager's card has its own history too.
• What happened — deaths, revivals, hires, members joining or leaving, expeditions setting out, skill level-ups and new bases.

It is counted where the villagers run and kept with the Kolony, so every player sees the same history, from anywhere. Each section shows its six biggest entries before All ›; a day keeps up to 60 per section and a villager's page eight, and anything past that is counted under Other things, so the totals stay true.

The morning report. When you join a world, and each morning after, a few lines in the corner say what your Kolony did the day before — the totals, the biggest things put away, the hardest worker, and who fell or came back. A day the Kolony did nothing says nothing. Switch it off with MorningReport.

Waiting on

When villagers run out of things to do, the panel's Home lists what they are waiting on: every reason once, the most serious and then the commonest at the top: Repair: no hammer, Make: none of the 8 foods it takes in any chest, Gather: it is outside where this job works (3659). Select one for how many are waiting on it and who.

It is the settlement's shopping list. The line disappears on its own as they find work again.

Stock

Each base has its own list (Items → Stock; + Limit adds a line, Copy from › replaces this base's list with another base's). Per item:

• Stop at - every job stops at this many: choppers, miners, foragers and hunters leave what would bring more, stations stop taking what makes it, benches stop making it, and haulers leave it lying once the chests hold that many. Stop at 5000 Wood is set once, not on every job. Counted as what is stored, what is being made and what lies about the Kolony.
• Keep back - villagers never take the store below this many, so keep back 2 Bronze Axe leaves them the third and never the last two. It holds everywhere a villager spends the stock: tools, weapons, gear, food, crafting materials, and fuel - keep some Wood back so a cold night does not empty the woodshed.
• Repeat (once Stop at is set) - Keep this many, or Make them once and stop.

A crafting bench still says what it makes and in which order; how many comes from here, and an item with no limit is not made. Older per-job and per-station limits were moved onto the list the first time the server started with this version.

Each row shows what the base holds against its Stop at as a bar ("keep N" when only keep back is set), so the rule can be checked at a glance. An item's page also lists Made at: the benches and stations that make it. Clear limit removes the line (asks twice, undoable).

Items → Limits is the one place limits are set, per base: every item the base has - its chests, its villagers' bags (not the gear they wear), out with a party or not, and the Kolony's overflow - and every item with a limit, each as have / limit or no limit, with the limit typed right on the line. Show All, At limit, Below limit or No limit; hover a line for where the count comes from. Craft orders, stations, jobs and fields only show the limit and open it here.

Items has three more views: In chests (what each base holds, all hearths together or one in focus), Categories (below) and Overflow - what no chest takes or has room for. Each overflow line says what to do: in no category (Add to a category ›), no chest takes it (Give a chest › adds its category to a chest you pick), its chests are full, or Move to file it now. Villagers also fetch from the overflow when no chest has what they need, walking to the nearest hearth to take it.

Item categories

Categories are yours alone: none come built in, and any can be deleted. **Items → Categories →

• New** makes one; Change › on its card sets what it holds (an item may be in several). Each category's page says which chests and jobs name it (Named by); deleting one takes it off every chest and job that named it. An item in no category goes only into chests that take Anything - otherwise to the overflow. Wherever such an item is listed - the overflow, Limits, the Kolony's chests, an item's card, a chest's card (In this chest, in no category) and the Categories list (Held, but in no category) - Add to a category › (or + Category) puts it in one, or makes the category on the spot. Saved in their own file beside the config (com.kuku.kukolony.categories.cfg); on a server the host's is used.

• Chests take categories; jobs' Which items and Never handles take categories and single items.
• A category with items that no registered chest is marked to store (named on its Only these list) reads no chest stores it in the Categories list; its card says so, with Give a chest ›. Its items still go to a chest that takes Anything, or the overflow - the label is only a reminder.

Jobs

A job is named work a Kolony owns; a villager runs a queue of them. Every job has:

• Name.
• Repeats (1-50): how many rounds before the queue advances.
• Places (Change ›, Where it works): the Kolony (its hearth's radius), and/or any of its flags, in the order you choose — the job works the first place with anything to do and moves on when that place is done. Reach (shown once a place is named) overrides each place's own; Use each place's own puts it back.
• Walking past: when villagers report work outside its places, a note says so, and Work everywhere points the job at every place at once.
• Gear (Change ›): a gear preset for whoever works it.
• Each line's limit, on the line: Gather, Make, Tend and Farm show what the Kolony has against its limit
  • 21 / [20] - and −/+ change that limit right there: the same limit as Items → Limits, for every job. 0 is no limit (made or gathered without end). Herd's lines show how many to keep instead.
• Choosing items: Change items › lists what the job can take on; a long list has filters over it - Make by station and kind (Forge, then Weapons), Gather by how (Mine, Chop, Pick, Hunt) and biome, Tend by station, Farm by biome - each with how many it holds.
• Stops at (Stock ›) on Farm and Tend; Set up on (Stations ›) on Farm. Every job judges a limit by what its work gives - a deer by its meat and hide, a seed by its crop, an ore by its bar - and stops once all of that is met.
• Who runs this: the villagers who have it, as names; ✕ takes it off one (undoable) and + Add villagers puts it on the end of theirs.
• Delete job (asks twice, undoable).

The Jobs list's Show filters by kind, or Nobody runs.

Two kinds, chosen from + New job: Haul and Gather. The rest are work in progress on Patreon (see Work in progress).

Haul

Loose items on the ground go to the chests that take them, and chests are kept sorted. Which items and Never handles filter by item or category. What to do picks the work: Pick up (the ground and crafters' bags), Tidy chests (moves mismatched contents between registered chests - wood from the overflow chest into the one that names Wood) or Both, one chest trip after every delivery from the ground, so chests are sorted even while the floor never clears; Fill the bag before delivering makes a round trip worth the walk. With tidying on, Move what is over the limit to the overflow carries what the chests hold of an item above its Limit (Items → Limits) to the overflow at the hearth - 200 Deer Soup with a limit of 20 leaves 20 in the chests - and the overflow - its automatic filing and Move alike - files it back only as the chests run below the limit (the item reads at its limit). A villager never re-takes what it just put down. Haulers take what matters first: anything about to vanish (dropped items the game would delete within the hour), then what a smelter, bench or kitchen is waiting on, then the pile worth the walk - and two haulers never race for the last room in the same chest.

Hauling takes everything its filter allows - a stock limit stops gathering and making, never hauling, so nothing is left lying; what no chest takes or has room for goes to the overflow.

Hauling no longer picks: berries, mushrooms and the like are a Gather job's items. A Haul job that foraged in an older save hands its picking to a Gather job of its own, named after it (Haul - picking), placed next to it in every villager's list - nothing that used to be picked stops.

Gather

Say what you want; it works out how. A Gather job is a list of items — Wood, Copper Ore, Raspberries, Raw Meat — chosen from everything the world gives. Each line says how it is got: Mine - Iron Pickaxe or better, Chop - Bronze Axe or better, Forage - by hand, Hunt. Nothing listed: nothing to do. Mine, Chop, Forage and Hunt are no longer jobs of their own; an older save's Mine, Chop and Hunt jobs are Gather jobs now, with the items they gathered (every ore, every wood its trees give, every animal's item).

Mining, in every land. A vein, a deposit or a crypt's scrap pile is mined from scratch - the villager fetches the pickaxe it needs (iron for silver), breaks it, then works the pieces. A vein under the ground is dug to first, a few digs at most and never beside anything you built. Rock of the Mistlands (giant bones: soft tissue, black marble), the Ashlands and the Deep North is mined when a line asks for what it gives; ruins, walls and furniture never are. In a crypt or cave, villagers following you work what is in there with you - on your floor only - and never wander into one on their own.

• Limits steer it. Each line shows the Kolony's limit for its item (40 / [200], set right there) — an item at its limit reads enough and gets nobody until stock drops. No limit: gathered until storage and the overflow are full.
• The crew spreads out. Villagers on the job go evenly over the items that have work; when hands are short, the item furthest below its limit comes first. A villager keeps its item until it runs out nearby, reaches its limit, or it lacks the tool - so nobody swaps axe for pickaxe all day. The card shows who is on what (Copper Ore ×2 · Wood ×1).
• Where: the job's places, in your order, as for every job; an item none of them has reads none in this job's areas and is asked again after a few minutes (things grow back) or when you change the places.
• Tools per item. A copper line takes a pickaxe good enough for copper, a fine-wood line a bronze axe; each is fetched from the chests when the line is chosen, and a villager keeps every tool its job's items take, so moving from copper to wood is a swap in hand. An item nobody can work says so: needs an Iron Pickaxe - none in the Kolony. The better-tool swap at the start of a turn works as before.
• Leave nothing on the ground (ticked by default): everything that falls from what they break, fell, pick or kill is picked up - not just the items listed (copper also gives stone, a pine wood and resin)
  • and goes in a chest that takes it, or the overflow. Unticked, they pick up only the listed items and the rest waits for a Haul job.
• Also hunt (shown with combat on): items only animals give are got by hunting them, with the job's gear and each villager's stance. A hunter fetches a bow, shoots game from HuntShotDistance (25 m), roams the job's places for game and gives up on prey it cannot catch after twenty seconds; game comes alive and slowly breeds round a working hunter (HuntLoadsWildlife, HuntSpawnEnabled, HuntSpawnCap, HuntSpawnSeconds). Unticked, those lines say so and are skipped.
• Also clear stumps, bushes and loose rock (off by default): those are broken too whenever they give a listed item. Off, wood comes from trees and logs, stone and ore from veins and deposits. Logs are cut up before new trees are felled.
• Leave standing (with a chopped item): never fells the last that many trees of a place.
• What they are on shows everywhere: the villager list (Gather · Copper Ore), the card's Gathering row and the hover (Copper Ore - mining).

Work lists and turns

A villager's Work tab is its list of jobs, in order — Haul, Make, Gather — and the order is the priority. + Add job opens a picker over the Kolony's jobs: what is chosen shows as numbered chips in order, to move or remove; each row on the tab has ▲ ▼, Edit › and ✕. The list holds job identities, so editing a job on the Jobs page changes it for everyone running it.

Pick several villagers on the list (tick boxes, Space, Ctrl + A) to give them work together: Choose… the jobs, then Add to N work lists keeps what each already has, Replace N swaps the whole list (asks twice, or in a dialog when some are too far away to undo). Every Kolony starts with one job of each kind, so there is always something to pick from.

The list loops and runs by these rules:

• Every result that ends a tick spends one attempt: a finished trip, a failed one, and nothing to do alike. When the job's repeats are spent, the next job starts. With the base jobs at repeat 1, a job that cannot start hands over at once.
• A job that keeps reporting progress but finishes nothing for two turns while standing still is handed over (one walking to far-off work is not), and a job that breaks counts as a failed attempt. Nothing holds a villager for ever.
• Turns: one entry keeps a villager about PresetTurnSeconds (two minutes; 0 = off) - it hands over at the next finished piece once the turn is up, never mid-trip - so a list actually rotates even when the first job never runs out of work.
• A full lap where nothing was possible pauses four seconds rather than spinning.

The watch card shows the current step, what comes next, and how long the turn has left.

Work in progress - early access on Patreon

Patreon supporters are testing these now; in the free panel each is shown, marked WIP, and asking about it says what it is. https://patreon.com/KuchukboromDebbarma286

• Farm - villagers sow, tend and reap your Kolony Fields.
• Repair - villagers mend worn walls, roofs and stations with a hammer.
• Tend - smelters, kilns, windmills, spinning wheels and fires kept fuelled and emptied; honey and sap.
• Make - crafting at the benches and the cauldron, cooking at grills and ovens, mending worn gear and upgrading it.
• Herd - tamed animals fed, eggs collected, herds kept at the size you choose.
• Parties - take villagers adventuring, give them roles, send them out on routes.
• Boats - villagers sail with you, crew and steer, follow lanes and moorings.
• Combat - villagers fight beside you, defend the settlement and hunt.
• Work flags - claim ground far from the hearth and send jobs there.
• Many Kolonies - more than one Kolony in a world.

The map

• Every settlement has a pin with its name and population; every villager has one labelled with what it is doing, updated as it moves, even when unloaded. Clicking either opens it.
• Work flags a job points at are pinned, named after the job.
• Icon says what a thing is; colour says whose it is: every pin a settlement owns shares one colour hashed from its name.
• These pins are never written to your save, and only a Kolony's members see them.
• A party out on its own has a pin where it is, its zone drawn as a circle and its route as a line. Click the pin for its card.
• What a party finds is pinned as a pin of your own, saved like one you placed.

Off-screen simulation

The colony keeps working when nobody is there. The server keeps a halo of zones loaded around every villager away from players (VillagerHaloRings — 2 rings = 25 zones) and every registered structure, so distant villagers keep genuinely moving, hauling and trading. A party member beside its player holds none: your game already has that ground.

• KeepAliveMaxZones caps the total (0 = no cap; reaching the cap is logged).
• KeepAliveFilterObjects loads only what the Kolony needs in held zones — villagers, buildings and registered structures, loose items, creatures within reach of a player or of a party out on its own, and the berry bushes and crops a foraging or farming Kolony needs growing. Trees, logs, stumps, ore and boulders are built one at a time, only while a villager is working that one, so a distant outpost costs a handful of objects instead of its whole forest. Off-screen, villagers walk through unbuilt trees rather than around them; anywhere a player is standing, everything loads as normal. Switch this off to load everything, exactly as before.
• KeepAliveEmptyGraceSeconds: after the last player disconnects, the world keeps running this long, then pauses until someone returns. While it is paused the villagers are put away with it, and come back where they were.
• KeepAliveWhenEmpty: on a dedicated server, the Kolonies keep working with nobody online - the grace above never ends. Off by default; on costs the server its CPU while it runs.
• A travelling villager more than TravelObservedRange from any player covers ground unseen rather than walking a navmesh nobody has loaded.

Multiplayer

• Every player and the server need the mod, at the same version. On a dedicated server the server runs every villager, party members included, wherever they are; your game shows them.
• World settings are the server's. Food, rest, claims, keep-alive, combat and the rest are sent to every client on join and locked there; only an admin may change them while connected, and only through a config manager - the Kolony panel shows them read-only. Keys, panel size, the morning report, the log interval and the network limits stay yours.
• Two players near one kitchen no longer fight over it: a machine that loses a station it was loading waits a few seconds before taking it back, so the two take turns.
• A Kolony is one settlement for everybody. On a server every edit goes through the server, so any member can manage their Kolony from anywhere and everyone sees the same thing. An edit made from a copy someone else changed a moment before is refused with a note, and the panel shows the fresh copy so the next try works. A change waiting on the server shows sending….
• Trades, hires and hand-overs go through the server and are checked there; nothing can be lost or doubled between a player, a villager and a chest. A villager never writes a chest a player has open.
• From anywhere: the Kolony panel, the structure key and hover at an outpost, a flag's card, a party member's record and far map pins all work without the hearth being near you.
• Dedicated servers are supported and were the deployment used during development. Crossplay joins work; if a crossplay player is dropped shortly after joining, raise JotunnSendQueueBytes / JotunnSendTimeoutSeconds on the server.

Settings

Settings in the panel opens with About Kukolony - the version, the edition, the Patreon link with Copy link, and in the free edition what is being tested there. Below it, every entry (except the developer ones and the Kolony limits, which stay in the config file) grouped by section, with a search over all of them: a check box for switches, a slider with the number typed beside it for ranges, a choice for options, text boxes, and press a key for the hotkeys. Reset puts a value back to its default (undoable), and a setting's description is on its name when you hover it. Changes save to the config file at once. Entries marked (world) are the server's when you are on one, shown but not changed here - that is every entry below except the hotkeys, PanelScale, MorningReport, ActivityLogSeconds and the Network ones, which are always yours.

Console commands

For single-player and whoever hosts the world - they run on the host and act around the host's own character, so a player connected to a dedicated server cannot use them - except kukolony_claim, which any admin can type from anywhere. (cheat) commands need devcommands.

Good to know

• Villagers eat only from registered chests. No registered food is the most common reason a new colony stops.
• Tools live in chests. Chop needs an axe, Mine a pickaxe, Repair a hammer — in a registered chest villagers may use. The last one is never taken.
• A job says what work is; the villager's list says the order. Give villagers several jobs unless you really want one forever.
• Reach is everything. A chest just outside the circle is not the Kolony's. Flags extend it.
• Cooked food burns if nobody takes it off — list the dish on a Make job (Also cook), not just a Tend.
• "Not found" on a structure means the server cannot find it either — it was destroyed. Remove it, or rebuild it and register the new one.
• The log (BepInEx/LogOutput.log) carries every [report] line the mod told you and a sampled activity trace. If you report a problem, attach it.

Credits

Built with Jötunn on BepInEx. Villagers wear the game's own player rig and gear. Blueprint building via PlanBuild when installed.

Changelog

Entries for Repair, Tend, Make (with cooking), Herd, parties, boats, combat, work flags and many Kolonies describe the Patreon edition (work in progress).

0.8.3

Boats that sail on out of sight and chart in seconds, job cards that take a page not five, and Gather that tries every way an item is got. The server and every player update together.

• Ships sail on when nobody is near them. A Kolony voyage whose ship nobody has loaded - you sailed off, or logged out of the server - goes on along her course at her own speed, her crew aboard, and is found further along (or arrived) when you come back. Before, she stopped where she was lost to sight and the voyage was given up as "stuck" a few minutes later. Far ships still show on the map. VoyagesWhileEmpty decides whether they also sail with nobody on the server (on by default).
• "No way by water" is known at once. The world's bodies of water are charted once (on the worker, kept per world), so a voyage to a lake inland or a sea behind the mountains is refused straight away - lanes you have drawn still join the water they cross.
• Boats chart their routes on a thread of their own. A long first voyage over water never sailed before was charted a few milliseconds a frame and could take a minute; it now takes seconds, and the game never waits on it. It checks itself against the main thread first and goes back to the old way if they ever disagree (SeaPlanThreaded turns it off).
• Villager-sailed ships set their sail and turn their rudder. The helm still sails her steadily whatever the wind, but she is no longer a bare mast gliding along: full sail at speed, reefed when she slows, struck when she stops, the rudder over on every turn - seen the same from every player's game.
• A list job's card has two tabs: Items and Settings. The switches, places, gear and who runs it no longer sit pages behind a long list. Each item is one row now - its state, its crew and its limit beside it; how it is got is in its tip. Half the pages.
• Faster job editing. All shown (Ctrl+A) in a chooser picks everything the search and filters leave. Copy from › adds another job's items. Duplicate copies a job, settings and items and all. Tick several jobs on the list to set their places or gear, give them to villagers, or duplicate or delete them, together.
• Gather tries every way the world gives an item. An item holds each way it is got, and a line tries them in turn - Leather Scraps are hunted from boars, then mined from the mud piles in Swamp crypts (they used to be mined only, so a meadow Kolony never got any, and the villager asked for a pickaxe). When no way finds anything, the line says what each one found. The chooser's How filter lists an item under every way, and its line describes them all. Rock found only in crypts and ruins comes after the animals that drop the same item (wolf, lox and moose pelts, too), and no pickaxe is fetched for it.
• Hunting without a bow passes its turn at once for an item only runners drop (Deer Hide, Deer Meat), with the game here runs - it needs a bow, instead of roaming every place first. Needs a bow now counts only game that drops what was asked.
• A hunter roams empty ground for a minute at most, then the next item gets its turn. A hunt that found nothing used to hold a villager for several minutes per item, so Wood on the same list rarely came round.
• Each turn of hunting breeds game straight away on the job's ground, choosing only animals that drop what the line asks for. Before, it waited for a walk to end, then picked any animal.

0.8.2

Work shared out in turn - one item, then the next job, nothing favoured - a crew that spreads, gear fetched for the whole list, the overflow kept in balance both ways, and Farm in the free edition. The server and every player update together.

• Farm is in the free edition - villagers sow, tend and reap your registered fields.
• Haul: Keep the overflow in balance (was Move what is over the limit to the overflow) now works both ways: haulers carry what the chests hold above an item's limit to the overflow, and bring what the overflow holds back into chests that have room, up to the limit - by hand. Move to storage and the automatic filing every ten minutes are gone (OverflowAutoMoveMinutes); Take out stays.
• Honey and sap say where they come from on a Tend job - collected from Beehive - not "no station makes it".
• Work in turn - nothing favoured. A villager's list loops one item at a time: the job whose turn it is works its next item (a small batch - BatchSize, 5: up to five trees, rocks or picks; up to five crafts in one trip), then the next job gets its turn, and next time round each job takes its next item - Gather Wood, Make Axe, Gather Copper, Make Bow... Each villager starts at a place of its own, so a crew spreads by itself; an item that cannot be done now is passed over at once. Before, a villager stayed on one item until it ran out and items were picked by scarcity and crew, so some waited a long time. Repeats leaves the job screen.
• A crew spreads over the list - a villager whose next item another villager on the same job is already on takes the item after it instead (when every item that can be done has someone on it, it joins one all the same).
• A blocked job costs no time - a job that can do nothing now (no tool, everything at its limit) hands its turn to the next job at once, not a tick later; only a whole list with nothing to do pauses and says why over its head.
• Make crafts a batch per trip - up to BatchSize in one visit to the bench, not one a trip.
• Gear up for the whole list - at home, before work, a villager fetches every tool its list needs (each at the tier its hardest item asks) and a bow if it hunts, and keeps nothing its list does not need.
• Villagers' floating names and health bars are hidden unless you show them - Shift + \ shows them with the registered marks.

0.8.1

Villagers work more: a day set by their nature (night owls work the night), new three-or-four-trait natures given to every villager once, a Building skill, Villager life settings with a preset; seats and roofs fixed. The server and every player update together.

• Villagers keep the hours their nature gives them - and work more (RimWorld-style, both editions). Up at 06:00, work until two hours before bed, free time, asleep 21:00-06:00: a Night owl works the night and sleeps through the day, an Early riser starts two hours early, the Lazy take an hour more free time and the Industrious half. With no bed it sleeps its hours by the hearth, slower. Their status says exactly where they are (sleeping until 06:00, on a bench - free time until 21:00), and the Life tab shows the day. Before, the evening at the fire and the night in bed took about half of every day.

• New natures, three or four traits each - good and bad mixed: Night owl, Early riser, Light / Deep sleeper, Industrious / Lazy, Handy / Clumsy, Jogger, Kind / Abrasive, Iron-willed, Neurotic, Tough, Glutton / Ascetic, Hardy, and the rest. Every villager you have is given a new nature once - memories, friends and skills kept.

• A Building skill - raised by building plans and mending; Handy villagers build faster, Clumsy slower.

• Villager life settings (Settings → Villager life; 6 - Villager life in the config): one Preset - Workers, Light (default) or Full - and each part on its own: free time, sleeping without a bed, feasts, mourning, small talk, emotes, whether mood moves work speed. The old VillagersKeepRoutine / VillagerFeasts / VillagerSmallTalk / VillagerEmotes switches carry over.

• Mood only moves work speed - unhappy villagers no longer take breaks between jobs.

• Feasts only in the free time after work - those off work come; Hold a feast waits for the free time. Mourning at most once a game day, briefly, for the first to fall that day; others weigh only on their moods.

• Chatting and emotes only off work, and rare under Light.

• An idle villager says why it is idle. With nothing it can do on its list, it passes the time - and its hover now keeps the reason beside the pastime: strolling - Build: no workbench near what is planned (43), sitting on the grass - Build: needs Wood - none in the chests, ... - nothing on its work list. Before, it said only "strolling" or "resting", which read as laziness rather than a blocked job.

• Villagers chatting by the fire turn to each other - each faces the one beside it it is talking with, rather all staring at the middle of the ring; one waiting for company still faces the fire.

• Idle villagers sit on a seat first - the nearest free bench, chair or stool within 30 m, on the hearth's ground or a place one of their jobs works; only without one do they gather by the fire, sit on the grass or stroll. A seat across the map is never worth the walk.

• Every place on a bench is used - a bench with three places seats three villagers side by side, each on its own claimed place; before, the first villager on it kept the whole bench.

• Fixed: two villagers sat on the same seat - a seat counted as taken only once somebody was on it, so two that chose it together both sat there, one inside the other; and a player on it was not seen at all. A seat is now claimed the moment a villager chooses it, anybody on it (a player, a villager another game runs) keeps it theirs, and a villager arriving at a seat somebody got to first stands and chooses again. Meals use the same seats.

• Fixed: villagers born or waking on the roof of the hall their hearth stands in - the spot beside the hearth was found by looking down from the sky, and the first thing below was the roof. It is found from the hearth's own height now, on open floor a body fits on - one rule for a new villager and one waking with no bed.

• Fixed: villagers stood on a roof for good - at the fire, a gathering or a feast, a villager counted as at its place when it was right above it, so one on the roof over the hearth never walked and nothing saw it stuck. Being at a place now means at its height too: it walks down, or is put back on the ground.

• "Resting" means tired. A villager sitting on the grass for want of work says sitting on the grass; one resting because it is worn out says resting, tired.

0.8.0

Villagers build: a Build job raises what you plan with PlanBuild, whole blueprints too, foundation first - in the free edition as well. The server and every player update together.

• A Build job, with PlanBuild (optional; free and Patreon): plan with PlanBuild's Plan Hammer, or place a whole blueprint, on the Kolony's ground, and villagers raise it from the chests - foundation first (a piece only once PlanBuild says it would stand, stone before wood, the lowest first, nothing near a new piece until the ground has settled). Plans inside a Plan Totem's reach are the totem's: villagers fill its chest with what its plans still lack, and it builds them. Any other plan a villager builds itself with a hammer, working a roof from the floor below and stepping out of where a piece goes. Without PlanBuild, + New job lists it as requires PlanBuild, so it is known to be possible.
• A Plan Totem is no longer a station or a chest: it needs no registering, and haulers never fill it with whatever comes to hand. Tending no longer looks at it (it had stopped feeding it anyway); it also read the totem's materials by the wrong names, so a villager would never have found them.

0.7.9

Fallen villagers leave a body instead of a puff of smoke. Patreon: sea raids, Kolony against Kolony at sea, a lookout aboard, parties that board with you and gather the way the Kolony does, archers that shoot from their reach. The server and every player update together.

• Sea raids (Patreon; SeaRaids, on by default): sailing the open Ocean, a raider ship may come for you - kitted as well as your crew (or you, alone), as many, in the same kind of ship. Your lookout calls the sail; they run you down, but a ship at full sail with a fair wind outruns them. They fight you and your crew, and leave nothing behind. SeaRaidChancePerMinute (0.1) and SeaRaidIntervalMinutes (5) set how often.
• The lookout calls a hostile sail (Patreon) - a rival Kolony's ship under her war banner coming into sight (about 300 m), and which side she is on, before anything else; the helmsman answers.
• Archers shoot from as far as they answer (Patreon) (RangedReactDistance, 30 m): a villager with a bow took a foe on at 30 m but only loosed from 18, so on a deck - where it cannot step in - it stood watching anything between. Two ships' crews now trade arrows across 25 m of water.
• No more Use to follow (Patreon): pressing Use on a villager no longer takes it into your party or sends it away - a party is made and changed from the Kolony's Parties screen (], Take with you). Crouch + Use (trade) and Shift + Use (its card) are unchanged.
• A fallen villager leaves a body - it crumples the moment it is struck down, dressed as it was, and lies there until it wakes at its bed, instead of kneeling and vanishing in a puff of smoke. ReviveSeconds sets both and now defaults to two minutes (an existing config file keeps its own value).
• Kolony against Kolony at sea (Patreon): raise a ship's war banner and her crew fights any other Kolony's crew at sea - archers on both decks, each crew answering the other. Banners down, nobody's crew is anybody's enemy, so friends sharing a server never fight unless one asks for it; players are never a crew's target.
• A Kolony's own crew defends her at sea (Patreon) (a serpent, a rival crew) - before, only a party's members fought aboard.
• Your party boards when you do (Patreon): step onto a boat and they follow you aboard, as Ctrl + the party key calls them. Ctrl+Shift + the key still sends them ashore, and they stay there until you board again.
• Left ashore while you sail (Patreon), a party member defends where it stands instead of chasing a serpent out at sea along the beach.
• Parties and expeditions gather the way the Kolony's Gather job does (Patreon) - their gather list is one Gather job now: what lies loose first (pebbles before a pickaxe, branches before an axe), each keeping to an item until it runs out there, moving between items by themselves, and nothing left on the ground. Only their ground differs: the party's circle, the expedition's zone. The Kolony's limits still never stop them, and far from home they never walk back for a tool.
• Archers shoot what comes (Patreon; RangedReactDistance, 30 m): a villager with a bow, crossbow or throwing spear meets a hostile at its reach - at home, in a party and aboard - instead of waiting for it at sword's length (15 m), which is why they were never seen to shoot.
• A badly hurt player comes first (Patreon): below a third of your health, your party turns on whoever is hurting you.
• A lookout aboard (Patreon; VillagerSeaTalk): near you, one of the crew calls what it sees - a serpent and which side it is on, shallows ahead (from the sea chart the helm steers by), land and its biome, a storm, fog, night, a fair wind or a headwind read against the ship's heading - and talks on long crossings. The helmsman answers a warning.
• Fixed: archers on a ship never turned to shoot (Patreon) - a villager held on deck kept the way it faced, so its shot waited for a turn that never came. It now turns to face what it shoots.
• Villagers never damage a ship (Patreon) - not only while held aboard, but climbing on or walking the deck too.
• Fixed: a moved hearth vanished from players' games - only the server still had it; it is now built again where it was moved to. (A game that already lost one shows it again after rejoining.)
• Fixed: a cook left its meat on the fire to burn (Patreon) - putting on the last of the meat left none in the chests, so the dish read "needs Boar Meat" and the cook went to sit at the hearth. Food of its own on a station now keeps it there until it is off; a break, the evening, a feast or bedtime waits for it too.

0.7.8

Settlers, not just workers: villagers with a nature, a mood and words of their own; move a hearth; woodcutters cut up the logs they fell. The server and every player update together - a villager's record gained its life.

Settlers, not just workers. Each part can be switched off; off is as before.

• Every villager has a nature (VillagerTraits): two or three traits - hard-working or lazy, cheerful or grumpy, sociable or a loner, early riser or night owl, a glutton, brave, tidy, a green thumb... - that change how fast it works and learns, how it tires and eats, how it spends its leisure, how much it talks. Shown on its new Life tab; kept through death.
• Villagers have a mood, with its reasons (VillagerMoods): food and a good meal, rest, a bed of its own under a roof, a comfortable home, company, its nature, and what happened lately - each reason shown in words with its points, and what it would most like. Happy villagers work a little faster; unhappy ones a little slower and take a short break every few jobs, saying why. Nobody ever leaves. The morning report says who is unhappy.
• Talk to them (VillagerTalk, key T): a greeting, how it feels and why, what it would like, a word about a friend. Near you, villagers now and then speak up on their own - hungry, tired, low, bedtime.
• Friends, rivals and partners (Patreon; VillagerRelations): time together makes friends of villagers whose natures fit and rivals of those who grate; friends seek each other out, rivals keep apart and grumble; close friends may become partners. A fallen villager is grieved, and remembered at the hearth the next evening.
• A day's rhythm (Patreon; VillagersKeepRoutine, VillagersSleepAtNight): work by day, the evening at the fire, bed at night - by nature. Night work and parties carry on.
• Feasts (Patreon; VillagerFeasts): now and then of an evening, or with Hold a feast on the Kolony's Home - a meal each from the chests, toasts round the hearth, everyone happier and closer for days.
• A newcomer is welcomed by the others; an attack fought off lifts the Kolony (the brave more, the timid less).
• Move a hearth to safer ground: stand where you want it and press Move here on the Kolony's Home. It is the same hearth - villagers, jobs, registered structures, stock and history all stay - and the villagers' homes go with it.
• Fixed: villagers sat in the air beside a bench - they now sit on the seat itself, the game's own way.
• In chests counts the registered chests only - what villagers carry was counted in, so a chest taken down left its items listed.
• Fixed: villagers left the logs of the trees they felled - the fall ended their turn and they walked on to the next tree. Now they watch it fall and cut up its log (and the log's halves) before going on.

0.7.7

Gather picks up what lies loose and breaks bushes for wood; item cards show the stack size. The server and every player update together.

• Gather picks up what lies loose before mining or chopping for it - a Stone line takes the pebbles on the ground first (no pickaxe needed), a Wood line the fallen branches, then mines or chops once none are near.
• Gather's wood comes from bushes too - a Wood line breaks the bushes that give wood, with bare hands when the villager has no axe, as a player punches them. Stumps and loose rock still need Also clear stumps, bushes and loose rock.
• Every item's card shows its stack size - "a chest slot holds 50" - whether opened from In chests, Overflow or Limits, to set a limit by.

0.7.6

Villagers walk better - stairs, ladders, doors and tight spots - stand at what they work, and cost less CPU. The server and every player update together.

• Villagers walk better (part 1 of the navigation work). Each of these can be switched off in the config, and off is exactly as before:
  • Smoother turns (VillagersSmoothTurns): no snapping heading, and a walk rather than a run into a sharp corner.
  • A guard on every step (VillagersStepGuard): no step into lava, off a long drop, or into water too deep to wade unless that is where it is going - it turns aside, or stands.
  • Stepping round what is in the way (VillagersStepAround): to a side that is actually open, the other side the next time at the same spot, backing up when neither is; a creature in the way is waited for or stepped round; a stuck villager is freed along its own route rather than toward its goal through a wall.
  • Walking straight (VillagersWalkStraight): within 7 m of where it is going, on the same floor, with the way plainly clear for its whole body, a villager walks straight there instead of zig-zagging along route corners.
• Villagers walk better (part 2): stairs, ladders, and building. Each can be switched off, off is as before:
  • Their own navmesh (VillagerNavmesh): the game's ground, the same size, but theirs - so it can carry the rest.
  • Stairs and ladders on the route (VillagerNavLinks): a route goes up and down stairs (walked, not hopped) and ladders (climbed the game's own way); one a villager cannot get along is left out for a while.
  • Ground re-read after building (VillagerNavRefresh): a wall built, a piece taken down or a door swung near a walk is seen within seconds, and the walks it changes are planned again.
• Villagers walk better (part 3): doors. Each can be switched off, off is as before:
  • Routes through doors (VillagerNavThroughDoors): a shut door a villager may open is no wall in its navmesh, so its route goes straight through; the door is opened a few steps before it, and it waits the moment the leaf takes to swing. A door that will not open is treated as a wall for a minute.
  • Finding a door (VillagersDoorRoutes): a villager with no way to where it is going looks for a door near it, walks to it, opens it and goes through.
• Villagers stand at what they work, not across the room (VillagersReachFromShape; off is as before): how close a villager comes to a chest, a kiln, a smelter, a bench or a fire is worked out from that thing's own size - about 2.6 m from a chest, a little more for a long smelter - instead of a flat 5 m, and it counts as there once it stands beside it, whichever side. Where the ground does not let it nearer it works from as near as it gets, as before.
• Villagers stand still while their hands work: putting into or taking from a chest, loading a kiln, picking something up - they stand for the moment the reach takes instead of walking off to the next thing mid-gesture.
• Lighter on the CPU (section "8 - Performance", each 0 for as before): a villager no player is near thinks twice a second instead of twenty times - walking on smoothly between - each in its own moment so a crowd never thinks at once; and at most so many villagers think, routes are planned, ground sweeps are read and creatures looked round at in one frame, the rest taking their turn next frame. A [cpu] line each minute says what it costs, and kukolony_cpu (or CpuProfileEveryMinutes) times the busiest parts.
• A settlement grid, for testing (NavGridMode, off by default; Shadow to try it): a fine half-metre map of the ground round the Kolony, read from the world itself - every floor, stair tread and doorway a villager's whole body fits. In Shadow each short walk is planned on it beside the navmesh and the two are compared in the log; villagers still walk the navmesh's way.
• Fixed: an expedition member going to and fro for ever - sent to a tree near the zone's edge, called back by the band, then sent to the same tree again. One called back now leaves that tree for a few minutes and works something nearer the middle.
• Fewer villagers stuck in one place. A small terrain step at the feet (a few centimetres to a forearm high) is hopped - it held everyone at one spot at home, every probe above the ankle reading clear. A villager stuck in the same place a third time is moved a few metres on along its way, past what stops it; a fourth time, home - or a party member, beside its party (one stood stuck on its band's road 162 times, never escalated because party members are never sent home).
• Doors are worked from their opening, not their hinge - many doors pivot at the hinge, a metre or more from the gap: villagers chose the wrong swing and judged the wrong spot clear.
• Stall lines in the log name the piece in the way (a stair, a door, a wall) instead of "collider".

0.7.5

Work areas drawn on the map, fields registered like chests, register many at once, and items filtered by kind. The server and every player update together.

• Fixed: a villager could fight something for ever - an expedition's only member swung at an unseen, frozen Draugr for nine minutes: a creature no game was running. A villager now fights only what is running - the server takes over one nobody near is running, else it is left alone - and a player watching that villager now sees the creature it fights. A villager going out to stop one says "heading off", not "meeting". One fight lasts at most three minutes, and one that lands no blow for a minute is given up even while the other side hits back. A long fight logs how it stands every half minute ([fight-diag]).
• Items lists filter by kind - Limits, In chests and Overflow have a Kind dropdown (Weapons, Food, Ore, Wood...), the same kinds a job's chooser filters by. In chests shows its hearth choice only when the Kolony has more than one.
• Fields are registered like chests - no stake. Hoe a patch, look at it and press Ctrl + the structure key: it becomes a field sized to fit it. Its card: Villagers sow and Villagers reap (on/off each), only these crops, size 4-32 m, active/paused. Hoed ground you do not register is yours - no Farm job works it, and Forage leaves planted crops alone (ForagePlantedCrops, off). A field turned back to grass goes by itself (FieldGoesWhenRegrassed, on). A hoe or cultivator in hand rings the fields nearby; the map shades them. Kolony Field stakes become fields by themselves (3 wood to the overflow).
• Work areas are drawn on the map - no more flag to build. Structures › + Work area: click its centre on the map, [ / ] for its reach, Enter. The map circles every work area and each hearth's reach; an area's pin opens its card - name, reach, Active / Paused, Move, Show on map, which jobs work it, Remove. Work areas are the whole Kolony's. Kolony Flags from older versions become work areas by themselves (same name, place, reach and jobs); the piece goes and its 5 wood lands in the overflow.
• Register many at once. + Register groups what is nearby by where it stands (Kolony, each work area); tick several and Register N picked. It works from a work area far from the hearth too.

0.7.4

Villagers keep one of each piece of gear, tenders use the overflow, and expeditions work on the way. The server and every player update together.

• Villagers keep one of each type of gear, the best - nothing extra. One melee weapon, one magic, one ranged, one shield, one torch, one pickaxe, one axe, one hammer; every other piece - an old one after an upgrade, a mended one, one picked up - goes back to storage, as unworn armour always did. A gear preset's pick is kept. Lockers held three bronze spears, three bucklers and two crude bows.
• Fixed: an expedition with no tool for anything on its list waited out its days. Sent for Ancient Bark with no bronze axe in the Kolony, the band stood at its point for days; it comes home now, saying which tool it lacks.
• Expeditions work on the way. Heading out to each point, the band's members work what they pass near the path (within 30 m) and keep up with it, instead of only working once they arrive. On the way home they only travel.
• Expeditions pick up only what they were sent for - a new Picks up row on the party's card: Listed items (the default) or Everything. A band sent for corewood came home with fish and bones.
• Fixed: villagers resting by a camp fire stood up and sat down over and over. Once sat, they were asked again each moment whether they had got there, and a fire they cannot stand in answered no; the band hardly rested, and the camp dragged on. Settled now stays settled until a villager is moved off its spot.
• Fixed: tenders never fetched from the overflow. Tend had its own chest-only fetch; it uses the shared one every other job uses now - chests first, then the overflow - so coal in the overflow reaches the smelters.
• Fixed: a smelter out of coal said "none of the 2 foods it takes in any chest" - it names the coal now.

0.7.3

Villagers reach what they go to, limits count only what you have, and no more to and fro in narrow rooms. The server and every player update together.

• Fixed: villagers going to and fro in narrow spaces (a storage room's aisle). The new corrections for being stuck - sliding along a rail, stepping aside, skipping a corner - acted whenever a villager was slow to get along its way, even while it was walking through; they act now only when it has actually stopped.
• Limits count only what you have. What is still inside a station - scrap queued in a smelter, meat on a grill, bars waiting to come off - no longer counts toward an item's limit, for every item and every job. A smelter full of scrap read as iron the Kolony had (49 of 50 with none in a chest).
• Villagers reach out. A chest, bench or hearth they cannot quite get to - too high, over a lip, round a rail
  • is used from where they stop, when that is within six metres.
• Fixed: nothing fetched from a chest stacked or shelved a level up. Villagers stood beneath it, were told they were not there yet, and gave up - a smelter went without its scrap. Every walk to a chest, hearth or bench now answers "am I there" the same way: where the walk arrives is the place.

0.7.2

Villagers who get where they are going, cooking as part of Make, and limits set right on the job card. The server and every player update together.

• Fixed: big stations standing close together read as out of reach. Only the four nearest spots beside a station were tried for a way there, and for two kilns side by side those were the pockets between them; the open front was never tried. More spots, further out, are tried now.
• Fixed: villagers pinned in place beside railings and edges. The creature rig villagers are built on carries a solid "attack" collider of its own; it caught a deck's railing or the ground and anchored the whole villager, which stood still while every check said its way was clear. Only a villager's body collides now.
• The server names every registered structure villagers cannot reach ([reach] in the log): one with no spot beside it a villager fits and a path from where its villagers stand reaches, checked every few minutes and whenever structures change.
• Fixed: nothing taken from the overflow at a hearth on a raised floor. The spot in front of such a hearth is in the air; villagers walked as near as the ground goes, were told they were not there yet, and gave up - better gear and materials sat in the overflow for good. Where the walk arrives is now the hearth.
• Fixed: villagers standing still with a clear way ahead. A pose nobody let go of - sat down, asleep, at a bench - held the body where it stood, since the server plays its villagers' animations itself. A villager asked to walk is now never held in a pose: it stands up, and the log names the pose.
• Fixed: a Gather line for Bear Hide said "we have enough Boar Meat". A line's hunter weighed every animal by all it drops, so a boar near a Bear Hide line read as "enough" of its meat. Something that gives none of a line's item is simply not that line's work now - no hunting boar for bear hide, and no false "enough".
• Fixed: a hauler stood a minute at a crafter it was collecting from, waiting on a bag busy with the crafter's own work, then gave the errand up. It waits ten seconds, then leaves that crafter for a while and works on.
• Fixed: villagers pressed against a railing beside their way. A route laid close along a deck's rail had a villager rubbing it with a shoulder and pushing into it for good; a villager stalled against something at shoulder height now slides along it.
• Settings: Keep working when the server is empty (KeepAliveWhenEmpty, off by default). On a dedicated server the Kolonies go on working after every player has left, instead of pausing after the grace.
• Watching a villager is smooth from any distance. The server sends a player who is watching as if they stood beside the villager: its moves come first, not after everything round the player's own base, and a watched villager walks on its legs rather than gliding along unseen.
• Fixed: villagers stuck at railings and short walls. Their route ran across a deck's railing or a quarter wall as if it were a step, and nothing got them over: the hop looked only at knee height and only where the way rose. A villager stalled at something low its route crosses - found by a solid sweep from ankle to 1.3 m, so a thin rail cannot slip between checks - with its head clear, now hops it.
• Fixed: villagers stuck beside posts and rails. A walk's next turning point cut close to a post sits where a body cannot stand; the villager pushed at it, an arm's length off, until it gave up. Stalled that near, it now counts the point reached and walks on.
• Fixed: villagers would not hop a step or a lip near a workbench or a fire. The invisible zone round every bench and fire that keeps monsters from spawning read as a wall at head height, so the hop that gets a villager up a stair edge never came inside a base.
• Villagers open any door in their way - a gate between two bases or out past the hearth's reach, not only doors near their own hearth - and shut it behind them; a door left open stays open. Only a door that needs a key stays shut, and the log names it.
• Limits on the job card. Every Gather, Make, Tend and Farm line shows what the Kolony has against its limit - 21 / [20] - with −/+ right there; it is the same limit as Items → Limits. The Limit › button is gone.
• Filters when choosing items. A long list gets dropdowns over it, each with its counts: Make by station and kind (Forge, then Weapons), Gather by how and biome, Tend by station, Farm by biome.
• Fixed: Herd's list. An animal the game gives no name showed a blank row, the hen had no icon, and the job card showed raw names without icons; every animal now has its name and an icon (its trophy, else what it drops or eats). Biomes read as words everywhere (Black Forest, Ashlands).
• Cooking is part of Make. The Cook job is gone: a Make job lists what the benches and the cauldron make and what grills, ovens and the iron cooking station cook, in one list. Dishes are cooked as before - loaded, watched, taken off before they burn - by Also cook (on; shown when a dish is listed). An older save's Cook job is a Make job now, with the same dishes, limits and villagers.
• No limit means without end, in Make too. Like every other job, an item on a Make line with no limit is made without end (it used to be made not at all); a new line still gets a starting limit - 1, or 20 for a dish. Copies below a line's ★ are upgraded in turn while it makes, not only once its limit is met.
• Fixed: a line at its limit with no count to show read enough (); the watch card named the wrong step for a Gather or Make line's work.
• No chest stores it. A category with items that no registered chest is marked to store says so in Items → Categories, and its card offers Give a chest ›. Its items still land in an Anything chest or the overflow - the label is only a reminder.
• Haul: Move what is over the limit to the overflow. With tidying on, a haul job can carry what the chests hold of an item above its limit to the overflow at the hearth (200 Deer Soup, limit 20: 180 go). Filing out of the overflow - the automatic pass, Move and Move all to storage - now stops at an item's limit, so that excess (and party goods brought home over a limit) stays there instead of going straight back into the chests; such an item reads at its limit.

0.7.1

Mining in every land, and villagers who fight again on a dedicated server. The server and every player update together.

• Fixed: villagers' swings and arrows did nothing on a dedicated server (since the network savings in 0.7.0). A villager's animations went only to players nearby, and the server skipped playing them itself - but an attack's hit comes from inside its animation, so every swing and shot started and none ever struck. The server plays its villagers' animations again; only the copies sent to players are limited to those who can see.
• Underground, a foe behind the stone is not a fight. In a crypt or cave, villagers ignore what is on another floor or on the far side of a wall until it lands a blow on them or on you. The whole party had stood at a wall "moving for a clear shot" at a blob in the next corridor, given up, and taken it up again a moment later - leaving the scrap pile they were mining beside them.
• Villagers hit things low to the ground. A melee swing goes where the swinger looks, and villagers looked dead level - a spear passed clean over an Oozer, a blob or anything short, and five villagers could swing at one for minutes without touching it. They look at the foe's middle now, as the game's own creatures do.
• Mining everywhere. A silver vein, a copper deposit and a crypt's muddy scrap pile stand in the world as a plain breakable that drops nothing itself - the ore is on the fragments it breaks into - so villagers only ever mined one somebody had already cracked. What a rock breaks into is read now: the vein itself is the source, chosen and broken from scratch, with the pickaxe its fragments need fetched before the first swing. Rock placed by a location rather than the world's growth - the crypt's scrap piles, the Mistlands' giant bones (soft tissue, black marble), the Deep North's ice - is mined when everything it drops is a material; a barrel of mead, a trophy stand or anything built (a fortress wall, a ruin) never is.
• Buried veins are dug out. A vein whose part lies wholly under the ground is dug to with the pickaxe's own dig first, as you would - at most six digs a vein, never within five metres of anything built (a chest counts). A great rock that only sits low - an Ashlands cliff - is mined, never dug around.
• Crypts and caves: no more teleports into walls. Inside an interior, a stuck villager's rescue spot counts the carved rock as wall, must be on the same floor and must fit the body; a party member caught up beside you is never set half into a corridor wall; and work is chosen on the villager's own floor - a villager in a crypt no longer picks a rock on the swamp 5 km below it and walks into the wall at it.

0.7.0

Two editions, rebuilt jobs, and much lighter. Includes 0.6.5, which was never published. The server and every player update together.

• One chest full, then the next. Arrows sat as 80 in each of three chests of one room, with room to spare: topping up a partial stack outranked the chest already in use, so once two chests each held some - a moment the first was open or out of reach - deliveries took turns between them for good. Now, among chests your filters treat alike, the one already holding the item comes first, and each place (the hearth, a work flag) fills its chests in one fixed order - nearest the hearth or flag first - whoever files and wherever they stand. Taking things out empties the last-filled chest first.

• Tidying gathers what got split. A haul job set to Tidy chests or Both now moves an item from a later chest into the first chest of the same place that holds it and has room - so arrows in three chests end up in one. Always forward in one order, so it never shuffles back.

• Add to a category, wherever an uncategorised item shows. Not just the overflow: Limits, the Kolony's chests, an item's card, a chest's card and the Categories list offer Add to a category › (or + Category) for anything held that is in no category - and only for those.

• Two editions. The free edition carries villagers, the Kolony, chests, stock and overflow, the Haul and Gather jobs and idle villagers gathering by the fire; the rest - Farm, Repair, Cook, Tend, Make and Herd, parties, boats, combat and defence, work flags and more than one Kolony per world - is work in progress being tested on Patreon and shows as WIP in the free panel: the option is there, marked, and asking about it says what it is, with the link to copy. A world moves between editions without losing anything: a job the free edition does not run waits in the list, read-only, and a second Kolony rests while the oldest works. A player joining a server of the other edition is told which edition the server runs.

• Settings > About: the version, the edition and the Patreon link (Copy link). The release switches (parties, combat, work flags, one Kolony) are gone from the settings - the edition decides - and the Kolony limits are no longer a panel row.

• Removed: living villages (NPC villages found in the world). They were never finished and are gone from the mod, with the World tab, their settings and their console commands. A world that has them is cleared once on load: the villages' people, what they built and their hearths. Your own Kolonies are never touched. The Waters tab now opens with key 8.

• Lighter on CPU, memory and the network. Line verdicts are kept in one shared cache with no per-tick strings or lists; the herd count, chest search, loose-item search, farm ground checks, bag decodes and the panel's structure list are worked out once and shared instead of on every tick. Villagers' records are resent far less: work and claim stamps are written seldom, swings, emotes, speech and planting puffs go only to players who can see them, far villagers of your own Kolony are sent every few seconds, the people list only when somebody moves a few metres or their energy changes a tenth, and the whole summary only when a game missed one (every 5 minutes otherwise). A "[perf]" line in the server log once a minute counts summaries, their bytes and verdicts reused.

• Every job audited for soft locks. Fixed:

  • Gather: villagers sharing a job no longer swap lines every two seconds; a limit on a by-product (stone from copper rock) no longer stops the copper line; one tree out of reach no longer idles the whole line for minutes; "regrowing only" is honoured.
  • Lists take turns across a queue: coming back to a list job works the item served longest ago, and a lone villager on a gathering line moves on to one that has waited ten minutes. A line that gives up without a reason steps aside.
  • Farm: an unreachable ripe crop is left a while; seed that will not be spent ends the turn; "no tilled ground free" is shown when that is why.
  • Make: a crafting trip never inherits the last one's "already crafted" (it looped); a cold cauldron is lit between pieces; a fire it cannot help no longer stops every line; materials are counted once (a crafter's own bag was counted twice, so trips set off for what was not there); a copy fetched for upgrading still counts; mending runs when every item is at its limit; upgrading its own gear gives up after two minutes.
  • Repair: a piece that will not take a repair is left a while.
  • Cook and Tend: one grill with no fire no longer stops the kitchen; a cook waits on a cold loaded grill only 90 s; a full bag never locks a cook out of finished food (put down by the grill and picked up as room frees); food a player's game took off is picked up; a chest held shut is left after 20 s; a full chest is set aside; a full bag ends a fetch instead of looping.

• A Herd line whose only hungry animals are ones the herder could not get near says so ("a hungry Boar it could not get near - trying again soon") instead of "all fed".

• Herd and Tend made foolproof: an animal or egg a herder gave up on no longer keeps it choosing work it cannot do; a cull never loops when every extra is named, saddled or following; everything a cull drops is picked up; eggs, meat and honey go into the bag and on to a chest, else the overflow (a tender with nowhere to put something no longer stops working); an empty hive's line steps aside instead of starving the others; a hive that will not give up its honey is left a while; fire and collect passes end within 90 seconds.

• New job: Herd. List the animals to keep and how many: herders feed the hungry ones straight from the bag (a fed animal breeds), leave warm eggs to hatch until the hens are at their number and then collect them, and - with Cull extras on - cull above the number for meat and hide (never a named, saddled or following one, never the last pair). Haulers no longer take an egg that is hatching.

• Honey and sap in Tend. Register beehives and sap collectors: a tender empties them into its bag once half full, and files it. Between pieces of work tenders now also take off whatever a station in their places has finished - honey, sap, a smelter's iron - whatever is listed. Honey and Sap can be listed for their limits.

• Villagers at leisure. With nothing to do they walk home and pass the time - gathered in a ring by a fire or the hearth chatting and laughing, warming by the fire at night, on a bench or the grass, strolling - instead of standing where their work ran dry. They look at their list every 20 seconds. Small talk is now seen by every player.

• "Put X in a category": type a name no category has and choose Make the category - it is made with X in it, and every search finds it from then on.

• Villagers walk smoothly. A walk is one route, followed a little way ahead along its corners: no stopping to turn at every corner, no hugging posts and stair stringers, and stairs that double back count as getting there. A walk that is really getting nowhere tries one thing at a time - ask the way again, open a door, step up, step aside, be put back on walkable ground, give up - instead of half a dozen rescues fighting each other (the log's endless "stepping round something in the way" is gone). A job's next target a few metres on is walked to directly.

• Farmers plant already-tilled ground first, nearest of it, before breaking new ground - a tilled patch around the field's marker was left bare while the farmer tilled fresh ground at the edge.

• Farmers do not till on their own. Break new ground is off unless you tick it (an older save keeps what its fields allowed); with it off, farmers plant only ground that is already tilled - they no longer walk to untilled squares and give up on them.

• Hauling no longer stops with "collection was modified" while choosing what to pick up.

• Tend rebuilt as a list job. List what you want made at the stations (copper, iron, coal, flour, thread, eitr, meads...); tenders work out which smelter, kiln or mill, up to the Kolony's limits (counting what is already in the stations), taking turns between products.

  • Fuel is automatic: a station is brought its fuel while it has something to work.
  • What a station makes goes straight into the tender's bag and on to a chest - smelter and kiln output used to lie at the output point for a hauler; fermenters too.
  • Keep fires lit (Off / After dark / Always) on the Tend job replaces each fire's fuel switch and "when".
  • Station cards lose Villagers, Feed it, Carry to it, Keep it %, the fuel tick box and When: they say what is made there and how the station stands now. Older saves: lines come from what the stations were fed.

• Villagers look busy at every crafting station - the cauldron and any station without an animation of its own get the bench's working animation instead of standing still.

• Villagers take from every chest and the overflow, always. The per-chest "Villagers may take from here" switch is gone; what you keep back on the Stock list is still kept.

• No more whole stacks walked off: a farmer takes ten plantings' worth of seed and a crafter five crafts' worth of a material - a farmer had carried off all ninety carrots as "seed" (carrots grow seed carrots), leaving the kitchen and the cauldron with none. Only the seed being sown counts as a farmer's own; the rest is filed. Feeding a fire takes one fireful of wood, and fetching a meal takes a ration (10), not the whole stack. Every fetch now has to say how much it takes, so no job can take a whole stack by accident again.

• A skipped line says why on the villager and in the log, and "no X in any chest" says where X is.

• Cook lists food only; the Frost Foundry's casts are tended from its own card.

• Farm rebuilt as a list job. List the crops you want; farmers work out the field, the square and the seed, up to the Kolony's limits (counting what is already growing).

  • Harvest goes straight into the bag and is filed - reaped crops used to be left lying on the ground.
  • Everything ripe in the job's fields is reaped first, listed or not.
  • Squares under water, under a roof or crowded by trees and rocks are skipped before anyone walks there - a farmer used to walk to each one and be refused, down the bank and into the river. Water is checked even where the server has no ground loaded (a hilltop field reaching over the edge sent farmers to the river bed), and reaping between plantings no longer moves the square being walked to.
  • Broken ground is given a few seconds to show before it is tried again (the tilling can land on a player's game first), and the seed in a farmer's bag stays its own across squares - it was filed and fetched again after every refused square.
  • Ground nobody's game holds is taken by the server before it is broken - the tilling used to go nowhere there, and the farmer swung at the same square to no effect. The farmer only plays the work when work is done, and the puff of a sown seed is seen by every player, not only by the machine that planted it.
  • A villager is never sent or put at the world's origin (an unknown position reads 0,0): a farmer handed back by a player's game at (0, 28, 0) on the sea bed is sent home, and whatever asked is named in the log.
  • Square by square, walking to each; bad squares are left alone for a while instead of writing the field off; fields work at any size up to 32 m; nothing is planted on floors.
  • Seed keeps itself: a crop's seed is kept back on the Stock list, and seed carrots are grown first when seed runs low.
  • Fields are just where: an optional only these crops, the size, and a live status on the card.

• Cook rebuilt as a list job. List the dishes you want; cooks use whichever station cooks each, dishes take turns, and food comes off straight into the cook's bag. Cooking stations need no feed list.

• Picking goes straight into the bag for every job (Gather's berries too), and works on a dedicated server (the game's own pick needs a local player).

• A harvest in the bag is goods, filed - not kept back as a villager's ration.

• One Make job replaces the Craft job and the benches' order lists. List what you want made; villagers use whichever registered bench makes each item, up to the Kolony's limits (adding an item with no limit sets one of 1).

  • Upgrades: set upgrade to ★N beside an item - once its limit is met, copies in the chests are upgraded a step at a time at a bench of the level each step needs, and villagers bring their own gear up at home.
  • Everything takes turns: items rotate one piece of work at a time, and making, upgrading and mending take turns, so nothing is missed and nothing hogs the crafter.
  • Each line says what stops it (needs Forge level 3 for ★3, needs 4 Bronze, every bench is busy...); benches show their level and what Make makes there. Old Craft jobs become Make jobs listing what their benches made.

• Gather and Make share one kit for their lists (choosing a line, the crew, what villagers show, the card), so a change to one reaches both.

• A crafter no longer keeps what it made. Made hammers, swords and armour were treated as the crafter's own gear: swept into its locker until that was full, the rest held in its bag for good ("bag full, waiting to be collected"). What is made is now goods - filed to a chest, else the overflow - and spare copies already in a bag or locker are filed the same way. A villager with no work says nothing to do instead of its last job's line.

• Villagers fight with a bow and a melee weapon, by distance. They shoot a foe beyond 8 m and draw the melee weapon once it is within 5 m (keeping what they hold in between, with a moment between swaps). Archers at the back of a formation step away first and draw only when caught. Aboard, everyone shoots.

• They gear up with both: with combat on, villagers shop the best melee weapon and the best ranged weapon from your chests, keep both, and the gear row says bow when one is missing. Gear presets have a Melee and a Ranged slot. A formation's front and back lines come from which a villager is better with.

• One Gather job replaces Mine, Chop and Hunt (and Haul's foraging). List the items you want - Wood, Copper Ore, Raspberries, Raw Meat - and it works out how: mined, felled, picked or hunted, with the tool each takes. Jobs offered are now Gather, Haul, Farm, Tend, Cook, Craft, Repair.

  • Limits steer it: each item shows its Kolony limit; an item at its limit gets nobody, and when hands are short the item furthest below its limit comes first.
  • The crew spreads out over the items that have work, and each villager sticks to its item until it runs out nearby, hits its limit or lacks the tool. The card shows who is on what, and items that are enough, none in this job's areas or need an Iron Pickaxe.
  • Leave nothing on the ground (on by default): everything that falls from their work is picked up and filed - a chest, else the overflow. Also hunt and Also clear stumps, bushes and loose rock are switches; Leave standing stays for trees.
  • Tools per item: a villager keeps every tool its job's items need and swaps in hand.
  • Villagers show what they gather: Gather · Copper Ore in the list, a Gathering row on the card, Copper Ore - mining on the hover.
  • Old saves: Mine, Chop and Hunt jobs become Gather jobs with the items they gathered; a Haul job that foraged gets a Gather job for its picking next to it in every list. Parties and expeditions now pick up everything that falls from their work too.

• Crypt scrap piles are mined again. Muddy scrap piles in crypts (and anything else that drops nothing but ore or scrap) count as deposits wherever they stand. Location props that drop other things (barrels, item stands) are still left alone. Buried silver veins are mined from the ground above them with an iron pickaxe.

• Gather lists have no percents. Party and expedition gather lists are plain lists. Everything listed is picked up as it is found, with members spread evenly over the items around you; an expedition comes home when its bags are full.

• Hand over overflow stays put. The party card's button no longer comes and goes with who is near: it's there whenever somebody carries for you, and when it can't hand anything over it says why.

• Your villagers can be seen and managed from anywhere. A player's game was sent a villager's record only within 250 m, so far from home every villager read "no work" and its card said "too far off to manage". Your own Kolony's villagers now reach you at any distance (others' only nearby); name and stance changes reach the server by id.

• No walk to a full chest. What no chest has room for, or none takes, goes into the overflow where the villager stands.

• Hauling is simple: whatever the job's filter allows is picked up and filed - a chest that takes it, else the overflow. A stock limit no longer leaves things lying on the ground.

• Nothing is ever left on the ground when filing. What no chest takes or has room for goes to the overflow; the last path that put things down beside a chest is gone.

• A full bag always goes home. Every party member walks a full bag home, files it and comes back - it used to need the Ferry loads home duty, and without it a member stood at 24 of 24 for good. The duty is gone; it is a reflex.

• Crafting stations can make the parts their orders need. With Make the parts its orders need on, an order short of something no chest has is begun by making that part - at whichever station can, recursively (bronze, then nails, then the pickaxe), only as many as needed. Re-checked every step: a removed order or a reached limit stops it, used-up materials re-plan it, and parts stay reserved for the order for five minutes if it stops short.

• The overflow's fix is a button that fits - on each line and on the item's card.

• Limits in one place. Items → Limits lists every item a base has - chests, its villagers' bags (not worn gear), party and expedition members included, and the Kolony's overflow - as have / limit or "no limit", set right on the line. Every job's "enough?" reads that one count; orders, stations, jobs and fields only show it. Fields sow Fill (up to the crop's limit) or Once; "keep N growing" is gone.

• Chests take categories only - no single-item lists, caps or shares, and "take what no other chest wants" is gone (chests' old item lists, caps and shares are dropped on loading).

• No built-in categories. Every category is yours and can be deleted; the old fifteen are removed from existing worlds, and deleting a category takes it off every chest and job.

• Hauling never stops for want of a chest. What a job may handle is picked up and filed in a chest whose category fits and has room, otherwise in the overflow.

• The overflow explains itself - per item: in no category, no chest takes it, its chests are full, or it will be filed - with the fix one click away.

• What a crafter makes goes straight to the overflow when no chest takes it or has room, the moment it is made.

• A full overflow stops all work. When the overflow's gear reaches its limit, every job halts ("the overflow is full - work has stopped") and Home says so first, until you take some out or give its categories a chest - nothing is left riding in a bag.

• Villagers fetch from the overflow when no chest has what they need, collecting it at the nearest hearth.

• Villagers step round a post instead of pushing into it. Held in one spot for a second and a half while walking somewhere further off, a villager steps a few metres to whichever side is open, then walks on with a fresh route - it used to push into a pillar for twenty-five seconds until the wedge rescue moved it.

• A crafter no longer fetches for an order it cannot finish. It checked only the first missing material, so it fetched the makings of a stew with no carrot in any chest, turned to the next order, and a hauler carried the makings back as "goods" - fetched again, carried back again, and nothing made. Every material must be at hand or in a chest before anything is fetched; the missing one is named - and enough of it, not merely some (three raspberries for a jam that takes eight is not a jam).

• Strays in a bag are filed after a minute, for every job. What neither the trip nor the job is using - the makings of an order it dropped, what a party brought home - goes to the chests (or the overflow) even while the villager stays busy; before, a crafter at its forge carried them until a break that never came.

• Crafting and mending take turns, and so do the things mended: after something is made, a worn tool waiting at a bench is mended before the next craft, and each worn kind takes its turn rather than the first in the nearest chest every time. (Orders already took turns per bench.)

• A mend that cannot be fetched is set aside for three minutes and said once in the log, instead of "fetching Hammer to mend" between every craft.

• What a villager fetched to work with stays with it, for every job. A crafter's materials, a farmer's seed while it sows, and the wood a cook or crafter carries to a fire are no longer taken back to the chests by haulers or filed by its own putting-away - the shape of the crafter loop, closed everywhere it could happen.

• Home from a party, the bag is put away first - what the trip brought goes to the chests (or the overflow) before the villager starts work.

• Forage is part of Haul. A Haul job has a Forage box (on by default): with nothing to carry, the hauler picks berries, mushrooms and the like - straight into its bag, nothing left on the ground - and files them. Its gather list, "leave what does not grow back" and stock stops moved over from the old Forage job, which is no longer offered. Existing Forage jobs become Haul jobs with Forage on (same villagers, same settings). Party and expedition members picking from a gather list put the harvest in their bags too. Farmers reaping their fields do the same, and stop reaping with a full bag.

• Formations. A party's card has Formation: Loose (as before), Column, Wedge or Ring. Each member gets its own place, by role - shields and blades in front, bows behind - turned the way you are walking. Work comes first and the place is home. In a fight the front line meets the enemy on your side and the back line shoots from behind you, stepping back when rushed. Works on expeditions while they travel.

• A gathering party works while you walk. A member following you closed all the way to its comfort distance before turning back to work - and behind a walking player it never got there, so the party followed the whole way and only worked once you stood still. With a gather list, members now catch up only until they are back inside the ground they work round you, then mine, chop, pick and pick up as you go. And what is on the gather list is picked up even at your feet (the ring kept clear for your own loot does not apply to what you asked them to gather).

• Gathering work is no longer wiped as "deleted". The sweep that clears deleted jobs off villagers' lists did not know a gathering order's jobs (they are the order's, not the Kolony's), so a party's and an expedition's work was taken away a minute after it was given, handed out again, and taken again - nobody stayed on an item long enough to learn it was not there, or to mine.

• A party learns what is not here. On a gather list, an item everybody on it finds none of is passed over and its hands go to what is around - the tin underfoot rather than raspberries that do not grow in this forest. Asked again once you have moved on, or after a few minutes. The same check expeditions already used. (A party of five spent half an hour looking for berries.)

• What each item is gathered by, put right at the source. Read off the game's own tables: barrels, furniture, braziers, bedrolls and trophy stands counted as rock to mine (so Blueberries, Flint, Deer Hide and Tin "came from" barrels, trophies from item stands - and miners might break them); stumps and bushes counted as rock, so Wood and Resin read "Mine"; and only the hare counted as game, so Raw Meat and Deer Hide could not be hunted. Now loose rock is only what the world grows and an axe cannot cut; a tree's gift is chopped first; what grows back on a bush is picked; and anything the hunter hunts (bosses aside) is game.

• A tool is a tool by trade. Pickaxes train Pickaxes, axes Axes or Woodcutting - a weapon that happens to break rock is no longer fetched, carried or named as one.

• Berry bushes are picked, never mined or chopped. A bush a pickaxe or axe could break counted as loose rock (and undergrowth) - so "Blueberries - Mine", a villager sent home for a pickaxe to pick berries, and a miner liable to break berry bushes. Anything picked is now only ever picked.

• Tools are named by tools. "Lox Bite or better" named a weapon as the pickaxe to bring; only real pickaxes and axes are named now.

• Gather shares stick. Clicking a share up or down sent the whole list each click, and every click after the first was refused as stale ("That changed on the server a moment ago"). The share is written once you stop clicking.

• Terrain edits wait for their ground, wherever they are built from - the burst of "Terrain compiler could not find hmap" when a player joined (and the villagers walking under edited ground after it) is gone.

• A crafter with a bag of finished goods no chest takes no longer loops for ever. Its hammers had nowhere to go and stayed in the bag, so every few seconds it filed the wood and stone it had just fetched for the next one, fetched them again, and never reached the bench. What no chest has room for now goes to the Kolony's overflow, and a crafter keeps its fetched materials until it has used them, as cooks and tenders do.

• Crafters light and feed the fire under a cauldron, the way cooks already did for grills - one shared piece of work now serves both. With cauldron orders waiting and its fire out, the crafter switches it on or brings it a log; when the orders are done, a fire it switched on goes back off.

• Villagers no longer walk waist-deep in the ground or through rocks. On a dedicated server the ground a villager walks is the server's own, and it differed from yours in two ways. Terrain edits around a settlement could be built before their ground was ("Terrain compiler could not find hmap" in the server log), leaving the server on the unedited ground under your levelled or hoed earth; they now wait for the ground. And rocks, trees and the game's locations (with the levelling round them) were never built where only villagers were; rocks and trees are now built near a player, and locations always. A server that already logged the warning needs a restart.

• Every job stops at the stock limits, judged by what its work gives. A hunter now lets a deer go mid-chase once its meat and hide are both met, instead of finishing the hunt. Farmers stop sowing a crop once the Kolony has enough of what it grows into. (Chop, Mine, Forage, Tend, Cook and Craft already did.) Gathering orders still gather their share; what they bring home of something the chests already hold enough of goes to the Kolony's overflow.

• Farmers reap as well as sow. A field's farmers pick its ripe crops first, then sow the empty squares again. Ripe crops are reaped even at the limit.

• A Kolony Field is staked only in cultivated ground - the sign shows red on grass. Fields already placed stay where they are.

• A party gathers like an expedition. The party's long work list is gone. In its place, Gather: choose items with a share of a load each, and the party mines, chops, picks or hunts for them around you, picking up only those. Change it any time - members on items you kept carry on, the rest switch at once. Nothing listed, they follow.

• Fewer duties: Carry for you and Ferry loads home. Collect drops is part of gathering now (and its Collects / Never collects lists are gone), and Keep the camp is gone. Members no longer have their own orders or gear: the party's apply to everyone. Old parties keep their name, members, gear, stance and these two duties.

• Hand over overflow (O) on the party card, only while a carrier is near with room and you hold something they may take. Overloaded, it sheds your heaviest stacks until you are not. It replaces Take my overflow on the villager card.

• No tool, no problem. An item on the gather list nobody has a pickaxe or axe good enough for sends one member home - filing their bag there - for one from the Kolony's chests, and back. The line says who went, and Give tool › hands over yours if you carry one. Gathering out in the field no longer wanders home for a tool mid-job.

• Change an expedition's gathering order while it is out, on its card - the same editor it was sent with. Brought-home totals stay with their items.

• Version mismatches are said, not swallowed. A party change a server on an older Kukolony cannot read now tells you so (update the server's mod) instead of quietly not saving; parties saved by a newer build say so on the Parties tab.

• A boat's card is just the boat. What she is doing, who is aboard, and her home mooring - choose any of the Kolony's moorings (or none), or Moor here. Sail to, Sail home, Stop, the crew picker and Bring party aboard are gone from it (your party boards by Ctrl + ]; villager voyages return with sea expeditions).

• The Waters tab. The Kolony's moorings and lanes, in their own tab: rename, Show on map, Edit in chart camera, Remove - and a lane can be extended from either end.

• Edit marks and moorings in the chart camera. Drag a mark or a mooring to move it, Delete to take a mark out (Shift + Delete for the whole lane), Ctrl + click on a lane's line to put a mark in, X on a lane's end to mark on from there, scroll to turn a mooring. Moorings now stand in the world too.

• Boarding is your call: Ctrl + ] and Ctrl + Shift + ]. Stand on a boat and press Ctrl + the party key to bring your party aboard; Ctrl + Shift + the party key sends them ashore, aboard or not. Nothing boards or lands them by itself any more: not stepping onto a boat, not Shift+E (only the helmsman goes aboard; it stays aboard after the voyage until sent ashore), not walking away.

• No room means they stay put. A boat's standing room is counted by her deck's area, with you on it - a raft takes a couple, not five. Whoever does not fit stays where they are and catches you up once you land, instead of being stood in the air.

• Standing crew stand on the boards. Villagers standing on a raft's or a karve's deck floated a metre up, sank slowly through the deck and popped back up. Their place is found on the real deck and they are held on it.

• A halted voyage no longer holds its crew when you sail another boat. Shift + ] to halt, then Shift+E on a different boat: her voyage waited "boarding" for a helmsman left on the first boat out at sea. The old voyage now ends, and its crew come across.

• Farmers on a dedicated server no longer say "this is Meadows - what that field grows will not grow here" about carrots. The server never learned the game's plants unless a field's panel was opened there, so every crop was unknown and blamed on the biome. It learns them when first asked now; a crop the game truly does not have says so instead.

• Lanes - mark the way for your boats. Press ' aboard a boat (or swimming) to drop a lane mark where you are; marks within 120 m and three minutes of each other chain into a lane (Ctrl+' ends it). Every route your Kolony's boats chart trusts the water along a lane - whatever the map says - and follows the line you marked. Mark a hard narrow passage once and every villager voyage sails it. Lanes are the Kolony's, drawn on the map, listed on the Waters tab.

• The chart camera. Shift+' lifts the camera off you to fly over the water nearby (WASD, Q/E, Shift faster): click to drop lane marks where you point, M to place a mooring there (the scroll wheel turns it), Backspace to take the last mark back, Shift + Delete to remove the whole lane under the ring (it turns red), Escape to come back. You aim with a ring on the water, a karve wide - green deep, amber shallow, red land - with the depth read out; lanes stand in the world as coloured ribbons with numbered posts, and the leg the next click adds is drawn from your last mark.

• Never stuck for good. When a helmsman can get no nearer along her course for twelve seconds, she is glided through along it - steady, at a crawl, touching nothing she could be harmed by - and sails on past the hard spot.

• Narrow, shallow rivers a player can sail, the villagers sail too. The chart refuses water only where she would actually touch (her keel at the middle, her beam at the banks); tight water is costly but taken. Her sides need far less water than her keel, as a real hull does, so a river shelving to its banks is no longer "shallows". In tight water she crawls; she brakes for anything ahead she cannot pass; she looks for a way round further along her course, and rejoins it past the obstacle, not into it again; a slide out of a corner goes only to real open water, by a clear way.

• Fixed: "waiting for you to come back aboard" while you stood in the boat. A karve's deck lies below the water line; you read as swimming.

• Fixed: knocks on the hull from the crew. A seated villager's body struck the hull it sat in.

• Routes sized for her hull, charted at 4 m. The sea chart is four times finer and knows how much clear water each spot has. A route keeps a hull's half-beam and a margin clear of land - a longship is no longer sent through a strait a karve fits - keeps to the middle of a channel, and straightens only where that keeps her clear. Rocks and piers boats meet are charted as obstacles of their real size and forgotten if not met again in a few days.

• She looks ahead at the real water. On the game sailing her, the next 150 m of course are checked every two seconds against the actual ground (terraforming included) and anything solid; a stretch she cannot sail straight is gone round before she reaches it, and she rejoins her course after.

• Smoother sailing. The helm follows the line rather than chasing each corner, slows for a bend before it, and is down to careful speed before a landing or a berth - no more overshooting a mooring.

• Fixed: villagers walking into the low space under a raised floor or a deck, and getting stuck. A stroll, a work spot or the place a villager stands to reach something is picked only where the villager's body fits, and a villager never hops into a beam overhead.

• Boats on a server, rebuilt: the ship is sailed from the game of the player aboard. Before, the server held a ship under a villager's helm even with you on her deck - the deck lagged under you, she heeled and struck things, and you were thrown off. Now she is held, as the game intends, by the game of a player aboard (any ship, voyage or none); the server holds only a ship nobody aboard and nobody holding. The voyage itself is kept by the server on your Kolony and sent to the ship, again and again until she carries it - an order is never lost between games, whoever holds her, through a disconnect or a restart. A boat slid out of a corner never stays stuck still after changing hands. Voyages under way when you update are ended cleanly ("voyage reset").

• Fixed: a boat with no voyage sailed backward in circles, and took the wheel back. Steering orders left on a boat whose voyage was over (or lost) still drove her; and taking the wheel only paused them. Now the helm steers only while a voyage is on - leftover orders are cleared - and a player at the wheel, however they took it, pauses the voyage until Shift+E steers on.

• Register a boat from anywhere. A boat (like a work-area flag) registers to your chosen base wherever she lies - look at her, Ctrl + \ - and her card opens like any other.

• Fixed: on a server, your party swam after you instead of boarding while you sat at the tiller or on a bench. The server knew a player was on a ship only while their feet were on its deck; it now also asks the ship who is aboard. Members board as you do, and any still not aboard after 10 seconds are helped aboard.

• A party member who dies comes back to you. Back on their feet at home after the revival time, they rejoin their party if it is still out with you, and come to you as a party member does (walking, or put beside you after the party's catch-up time if far). Before, they stayed home and the party card said "home" for good.

• Let a villager steer: Shift+E at the tiller. Standing on any boat, the tiller's hover offers [Shift + E] let a villager steer. With a party out, one of them takes the helm (the one ticked Helm on their party orders, else one aboard, else the nearest); with nobody out, you pick who first - free villagers, nearest first, with how long they would take to come - and they join your party and come to the boat. Then click the map: the click lands at the nearest shore (a click on land finds the coast) or a mooring within 60 m, shown with a dashed line and named in the bar; Enter sends her - and your whole party is called aboard with the helmsman (only yours: another player's party keeps to its own player). Under way, E takes the wheel yourself and Shift+E lets them steer on; stand ashore a moment and the voyage is over, your helmsman stepping off with you.

  • Shift+click on the map sends her to exactly that spot on the water - no snapping to land.
  • A new course at any time: Shift+E while your helmsman is already steering opens the map again; the same villager sails the new course.
  • Stuck by the shore? She never backs into the bank: the helm looks astern before it reverses, and with the way astern blocked too - or aground, or stuck leaving, or once the helm would give a stretch up - she is slid to the nearest water she floats in (up to 80 m, at a crawl, held clear of anything she could strike), then sails on. No more quarter of an hour backing and filling.
  • Shift + the party key (]) halts her, wherever you are - fell overboard, she stops instead of sailing on without you. Press it again (aboard or beside her) and she sails on the same course.
  • Step off and she stops. Leave the boat under way - over the side or onto a bank - and within two seconds she stops and waits ("waiting for you to come back aboard"); aboard again, Shift + the party key sails on. Ashore a few seconds, the voyage is over. Falling in right beside her counts too: feet well under the water line are in the water, even inside the ship's own "aboard" reach.
  • Sending your helmsman away (E, stop following) ends that voyage instead of calling them back.
  • Voyages far from home now sail on and take orders: before, one whose base was out of reach sat charting the way, and Her Kolony cannot be reached to take the wheel.
  • Shift+click on the map sends her to exactly that spot on the water - no snapping to land.
  • A new course at any time: Shift+E while your helmsman is already steering opens the map again; the same villager sails the new course.
  • Stuck by the shore? Leaving, the first time she sticks - or anywhere, once the helm would give a stretch up - she is slid out to the nearest open water on the chart (up to 40 m, at a crawl, held clear of anything she could strike). No more quarter of an hour backing and filling.
  • Sending your helmsman away (E, stop following) ends that voyage instead of calling them back.
  • Voyages far from home now sail on and take orders: before, one whose base was out of reach sat charting the way, and Her Kolony cannot be reached to take the wheel.

• Moorings. Moor here on a boat's card makes where she lies, and her heading, her home mooring; Sail home berths her there - slowly in, touching the pier allowed, turned to lie as she lay. Moorings are listed on the card (rename, remove) and drawn on the map; a pier at one is never charted as a hazard.

• Archers fight from the deck. A villager aboard with a bow, crossbow or throwing spear in its gear takes it up and shoots from where it is held, standing up off its bench to draw; the helmsman keeps steering.

• Fixed: a ship a villager steered changed hands every second on a hosted game (the host's player aboard and the server's helm took turns owning her).

• Fixed: a party member left on another boat stood there for good. One standing on a boat its player is not on - left behind, or put back on an old boat when a world loaded an earlier save - was "stranded aboard a boat" until she drifted ashore. With its player further off than a wade, it now follows them as the party does (walking, or put beside them when far).

• Fixed: a halted (or arrived) boat turned backwards in circles with nobody steering. A villager seated on a boat had its collisions with her turned off only on the machine running it; on every other game it sat in the helm seat overlapping the tiller and hull, and once a player's game held the ship, that overlap shoved her stern round. Every game now keeps a riding villager and its ship apart.

• A rock in a river no longer seals it. Something solid a boat meets is charted as very costly water, not a wall: routes still go round it in open water, and go through - at a crawl - where it sits in the only channel.

• A party voyage whose player leaves the game for a minute is over, instead of waiting with an old course for when they return.

• A sailing boat is on the map. While a villager is charting, boarding or sailing her, the boat has a pin on the minimap and the big map ("Heinrikr sailing"), and the big map draws the rest of her course and a ring where it ends. The pin goes the moment she stops - arrived, halted, the wheel taken, or the voyage over.

• Fixed: on a dedicated server, steering a boat after a voyage lagged, and players fell out. The server kept the ship after her voyage ended (the game hands a ship to its sailor only from a game with a player of its own); every turn of the rudder went to the server and back, and the deck lagged under the player. A ship the server no longer needs - voyage over, halted, or the wheel taken - now goes straight to the game of a player aboard.

• Rivers and gorges. A chart cell now counts as deep where any of its five sample points is, so a gorge narrower than a cell - whose banks hid its water - is sailable. Charts saved before are surveyed afresh. When a route still ends short, the server log says what is in the way.

• Narrow water is sailable. Routes needed 24 m of water 1.2 m deep every step of the way - a karve is 4 m wide, and a strait or river a player sails her through was refused ("no way by water nearer than 443 m"). Narrower water (about 16 m, then a river about 8 m) is now allowed but dear: a route takes it only when there is no wider way, and in it she follows its course rather than cutting along the bank. Water too shallow for her keel is still never taken.

• Routes across the whole world. A route is charted in two steps: first over a coarse grid of the whole map (64 m cells, about 77 000 - seconds even across the world), then in full detail only inside a corridor round it. A voyage across the map costs what a short one does, and a place no water reaches is answered in seconds.

• Routes find the shore you meant. A route's goal is now the landing itself: any open water joined to the boat from which she can go straight in to it. Before, it was the open water nearest the landing, which could be a channel on the wrong side of a spit, and she would push into that bank for ever. When the water she is on goes nowhere near a landing, she goes as close as it gets, or refuses if that is more than 40 m short. And no voyage sails in circles any more: two minutes without getting nearer means arrived (on the last leg in) or chart again, and three charts that change nothing stop her, saying why.

• Fixed: a party member made helmsman followed its player off the voyage's boat.

• Villagers sail boats themselves. A villager steers the boat you stand on (Shift+E at her tiller) to where you click on the map, and a registered boat (look at it, Ctrl + \) gets a Boat tab with her status and home mooring. A voyage nobody is watching sails on, held loaded by its own crew.

  • The sea is charted. The world's water is charted from its seed the first time a voyage needs it and kept, so routes take milliseconds: open water deep enough for the hull, wide of the shore, preferring the deep - round islands and headlands, through straits wide enough, never into Ashlands water. If there is no way by water, the order says so at once.
  • No harm to the boat. A ship takes damage from any knock at 1.5 m/s or more. Near anything - the shore, shallows, a rock - the helm slows to a crawl below that, and keeps even the swing of the bow under it while turning, so nothing it touches hurts it. Rocks, sea stacks and piers the chart cannot know of are seen ahead and steered round, and remembered: every later voyage charts round them. A stretch it cannot get through, it backs out of, marks, and charts another way; with no other way it stops and says where.
  • The boat is never a chest: haulers no longer count a ship's hold as storage.

• Your crew sits down at sea. Party members aboard take the boat's own seats first - the benches, and the rope by the mast, each in the pose that seat has when their body can show it, sitting otherwise - then stand on the deck, and with no room for even that they stay ashore ("no room aboard - waiting ashore") instead of crowding onto one spot. A seat you sit down on is given up to you; a seat that comes free is taken by someone standing.

• Fixed: passengers damaged the boat. A ship damages itself whenever something strikes it faster than a threshold, and a passenger put back on the deck at sea - after drifting, or coming back from the water - was set down at a standstill on a deck moving at sailing speed: every "finding its footing" was a hit at the boat's own speed. Passengers are now held to the boat every physics step, moving with it, the way the game holds a seated player: seated ones on the seat, standing ones on their place on the deck. Nothing slides off, and nothing hits the hull.

• Removed: OverboardRecoverSeconds. A held passenger never ends up in the water, so there is no floundering to time.

• Chests fill from the front, whatever they already hold. 0.6.5 still put an item in a chest that already held some before the first chest of the place: one stray stack of amber in the second "world drops" chest pulled every amber after it there, while the first had room. Now, among chests your filters treat alike, only the order counts - the first chest of the place with room takes it - and tidying moves anything from a later chest into an earlier one with room, so chests pack from the front, one at a time.

0.6.4

Choosing items from what the Kolony holds. The server and every player update together.

• Every item picker has a Kolony list. Beside the search and Carrying, a Kolony list shows what the whole Kolony holds - every base's registered chests and the overflow - narrowed to what that picker takes, each line saying how much is where ("120 in chests · 40 in overflow"). Chest filters, station inputs, stock lines, gear, shares, routes, gathering orders: anywhere an item is chosen. It shows only while the Kolony holds something the picker offers.

0.6.3

A fix for villagers stuck on boats. The server and every player update together.

• Fixed: a villager stood on a moored boat for good, working nothing. Eating and idling look for the nearest seat, and a boat's passenger seats counted - so a hauler walked onto the karve at the dock for lunch. A villager on a deck outside a party is held there so nobody walks into the sea, and nothing ever let this one off: 25 minutes of "stranded aboard a boat". Boats are no longer seats, and a villager stranded on a boat lying still within a gangplank of dry ground climbs off by itself, toward home first. At sea, or under way, it still stays aboard.

0.6.2

Storage shares, changing many structures at once, villagers that stand on a station's own floor - and workers that move on down their lists again. The server and every player update together (the structure record gains the shares).

• Fixed: a chopper never moved on to the next job on its list. Felling a log went straight to choosing the next piece, so nothing chopped was ever counted as done: the turn never handed over ("Next: Tend - turn over, finishing this one" for ever). Each felled piece now counts, and the list moves on when the turn is up. Mining had the same gap for a deposit's last piece.
• Fixed: a hunter never moved on either. Hunting never counted a kill as done, so its turn never handed over. A kill now counts once its drops are picked up, and a hunter that finds no game hands over at the end of a walk once its turn is up.
• Storage shares: keep a percent of a chest for an item - 20% Wood, 50% Stone. The chest's card shows it as a coloured strip, one colour per item and grey for what is free, with a slider per item saying what the percent comes to in that chest (20% of a 20-slot chest is 4 stacks). Shares never add past 100%; what none names stays free for anything the chest holds. Set on several picked chests at once, each gets the same shares sized to itself. A share and a count limit both apply - the lower wins. The server and every player update together (the structure record gains the shares).
• Change several structures at once. Pick chests (or stations, or benches) and one page sets them all - holds, only these / all except, may take from, takes unclaimed; for stations who works them, fuel and when, what to feed (each gets only what it takes), what to carry, how full; in use or paused. One kind per set, so every setting shown applies to every pick.
  • On the Structures list: a tick box on each row, Space on the highlighted row, Ctrl + A for every row shown. The Villagers list takes Space and Ctrl + A too.
  • Out in the world: Ctrl + Shift + \ starts picking, with a card on screen listing the picks; \ picks or unpicks what you look at; Ctrl + Shift + \ again opens the page.
• Villagers stand on a station's own floor. A forge upstairs in a house on stilts was worked from the grass underneath - the nearest walkable ground to it - through the planks. A villager now looks for a spot beside the station at its height that it can walk to, and works from below only when there is none.

0.6.1.1

Minor fixes and a few conveniences. The server and every player update together.

• Delete from the overflow. Beside Take out on an overflow line: Delete (press twice), and the amount on the slider is gone for good.
• Items, In chests: everything in the Kolony's registered chests, hearth by hearth. All hearths lists each item with its total and where it is kept ("Ashfell 120 · Riverside 40"); pick one hearth from the list at the top to see only its chests, each line saying how much more is kept elsewhere. Select a line for every hearth's share as bars, with Focus on any of them.
• The party page says what applies where. Gear and stance apply everywhere; Work and Spacing sit under With you, since a party works its list only while it follows you - out on its own, a gathering order decides the work and other trips do none. A member's own orders are laid out the same way.
• A haul job picks what it does: Pick up (from the ground and crafters), Tidy chests (only move things between chests into the chest they belong in) or Both - one choice on the job's page in place of the "Tidy containers too" tick box. Existing jobs keep what they did.
• Fixed: haulers spent their day fetching single coal and stone for the overflow - and walking at a pile down a cliff they could not reach. Only what a hauler already carries goes to the overflow; nothing is fetched off the ground for it.

0.6.1

Smelters that smelt everything you tick, taking things out of the overflow, villagers freed from pacing, and a much lighter server - less traffic, less CPU. The server and every player update together.

• A smelter (or any station with several inputs) shows every input as a tick box on its page, with how much the Kolony holds of each. Tick copper and tin and both are smelted: villagers take them in turn, and each trip brings its share of the room - half each for two - so neither sits in its chest behind a full load of the other.
• Take things out of the overflow. Select a line under Items, Overflow: choose how many with the slider (or All) and Take out - into your bag, and at your feet what does not fit - or Move to storage.
• Fixed: a villager pacing back and forth in one place was never freed. The stuck check only saw a villager standing in one spot; one walking round and round a few metres - an upper floor with no way down, a corner of a building - while going somewhere further off was invisible to it. Pacing for 45 s now gets the same help: a stride on, then open sky, then its bed.
• Haulers hand what no chest has room for to the Kolony's overflow at once, instead of carrying it about or standing over it saying "nowhere to put Deer Hide".
• Lighter: a Kolony's record is no longer rewritten (and resent to every player near it) when nothing in it changed; member and work lists are decoded once rather than on every read; a party member on an expedition looks its expedition up once a frame rather than ten times, and a gathering order's job list is built once rather than every tick.
• Much less network traffic: a villager's full record goes only to players within 250 m of it (or watching it) - everyone else sees it through the summary, as before - and "last worked" is written at most every 10 s. Ground under a watch camera is sent only to the player watching.
• The server's summary sends a Kolony's villagers only when something about them changed, not every 2 s. The server and every player update together.
• The History screen stops re-downloading the whole history every 8 seconds when it has not changed, and a player joining gets the full summary alone - everyone else keeps getting only what changed.
• A Kolony's history has a record of its own, kept on the server and never sent to players (the History screen asks for it). Writing it no longer resends the Kolony's whole record to everyone near the capital every 30 s. Existing histories move over the first time they are written. An expedition writes its progress to the Kolony's record every 120 m instead of 40.
• Lighter on the server's CPU: the ground a Kolony keeps loaded is judged once a second instead of thirty times.
• Fixed: a villager's home could be a kilometre away - the place it was hired or recruited - when it has no bed. Home is now beside its base's hearth in that case, and the watch card says so.

Earlier releases

The whole history is in plugins/Kukolony/CHANGELOG-full.md in this package.