9/10 indie city-builder on Steam just got its first big content update

Does something here smell fishy?

Late in 2023, an indie city-builder from Germany quietly put together an impressive Early Access launch that cracked 100,000 sales in a single week, thanks to the power of Wuselfaktor and its relaxed atmosphere. The team at Envision Entertainment, which is led by The Settlers creator Volker Wertich, has not been idle since then and just published the fruits of its labors – the first content update for Pioneers of Pagonia.

If meat, bread, and vegetables alone are not enough to satisfy your tastes, then there’s good news for you: Update 0.4.0 added the Fishing Hut to the game, which can pull two resources, Trout and Herring, fresh from the waters of the sea or lakes to supplement the diet of your Pagonians. One Fishing Huts supports three workers, who’ll require the new Fishing Rod tool from the Wood Workshop.

Fish is finally on the menu! / Envision Entertainment

The Fishing Hut isn’t the only new building added to the game, however: A large Warehouse with storage space for eight different resources is available as well now, allowing you to create a hub for logistics within your town much easier than before. Hitherto only small resource piles with the capacity to store a single type of good had been available.

Statistics fiends will be pleased about the brand-new production and unit graphs showing you all kinds of useful data about how your town is currently doing, allowing you to quickly identify and smooth out potential bottlenecks. On a technical level, the game’s zoom function has been enhanced to allow you to zoom out further and enjoy a bird’s eye view of your settlement from higher up than before.

You can check out the full Pioneers of Pagonia update 0.4.0 patch notes below.

Warehouses allow you to build real logistics hubs for your various industries / Envision Entertainment

Pioneers of Pagonia update 0.4.0: patch notes

New: Fisher

• Herrings have been added to the ocean and Trout swim in the lakes
• Your fishers head out to promising shores in range and try to catch them
• Note that save games from the versions before 0.4.0 do not contain fish deposits, therefore the fisher has nothing to find
  
  
• Fish can be used to create rations or supply market stalls
• Herrings are used in nutrition meals, Trout in comfort meals
• The comfort meal score needed to gain population beyond 750 Pagonians has been increased to reflect availability of fish
• The amount of nutrition necessary for mining is unchanged for now as subsurface mining will impact this with a later game update

New: Warehouse Storage Building with 8 Piles

• Offers space for up to 8 different commodities, and up to 64 units of each one
• The contents of each pile can be chosen and set manually:
• Any specific commodity (e.g. silver blade)
• Any commodity of a group (e.g. any weapon, will be occupied as soon as production piles of any weapon type fill up)
• Any commodity (will be occupied as soon as any production piles fill up)
• Nothing (pile will be emptied / stay empty until changed)
• Some templates offer quick setups, e.g. “construction depot” for all 8 commodities used for construction
• Each pile can be manually set to priority. This means the Warehouse is supplied with priority for that commodity and will only redirect and offer these priority commodities to other buildings which are set to priority.
• The functionality of the standard storage building has been adjusted to the same behavior.

New: Production Statistics

• Production and consumption statistics added to the tooltip of each commodity
• Reflect the production and consumption history of the last hour of each commodity
• Includes information for commodities traded or lost (e.g. stolen)

New: Unit Statistics

• Various statistics have been added to the tooltips of the unit interface
• Reflect the changes during the last hour, delivering valuable information, e.g.
• Amount of specific unit types like carriers, diggers or builders and how many of them are idle
• Development of total values like Balance of homes, total amount of combat units, wealth and many more

Gameplay

• Reworked “Start new game” flow to better distinguish between guidance maps, preselected maps, generated maps and playing with / without enemies.
• Removed the original guidance map without NPC villages
• Added two new maps to the predefined maps section
• New storage building behavior
• Configure piles individually or choose from several storage presets (e.g. mining resources, construction material, …) for all piles at once.
• Priority storing and delivery can be set per pile.
• Reworked distribution of surplus commodities to storages and warehouses: The supply will now depend on fill state much more than on distance
• This ensures that multiple distant locations get supplied simultaneously instead of the more distant ones only getting supplied after closer ones are full.
• It is useful to distribute commodities in advance and shorten delivery distance e.g. for border stones, construction materials, and more.
• Manual production orders and building priority setting is removed from NPC Village buildings when merging with player
• The camera can now be zoomed out further
• Reduced amount of builders for the well from 2 to 1

Map Generation

• Improved visual quality of shores and water areas
• Improved road layout of NPC villages

Misc

• Shadow quality has been improved
• Rendering performance improvements in situations with a lot of piles on the screen
• Added more LOD levels to a lot of assets to improve performance
• Reduced VRAM usage
• Disabled generated maps on specific old graphic drivers which are known to be unable to support procedural map generation. To unlock map generation an updated driver is required, otherwise those systems can only play the preselected maps and save games created on another system.
• Improved audio mixing
• Added bonus track “Off To New Shores“ to the soundtrack
• Improved various icons

Fixes

• Fixed: The workflow animations at the wood workshops had bugs
• Fixed: Workflow animations at the mint
• Fixed: Idle builders were blocking carriers bringing commodities
• Fixed: NPC camps were sometimes not destroyed after loosing all units
• Fixed: Addresses some issues during road placement

Pioneers of Pagonia is Germany’s apology for Gollum