Until now, Whiskerwood players have been on the receiving end of a lot of feline stick. The city builder puts you in charge of a small colony on a distant island of the cat empire. From month to month you need to grow your burgeoning town but also meet the resource demands of your colonial overlords.
After six months of living under the yoke of feline oppression in early access, Whiskerwood’s developers think it’s time we got some tools to push back against our overlords. Whiskerwood’s next patch will add full ship construction, naval battles, and ability to construct island defences, such as towers and fortresses to fight back against your masters.
If you’ve been playing Whiskerwood since it launched in early access, you may have seen how actively the team have been updating it. At first developer Minakata Dynamics was releasing daily hotfixes, addressing bugs. They then switched to weekly patches adding small features and quality of life changes. Most recently, they hit a rhythm of a patch every two weeks adding slightly larger additions. That cadence is about to slow down dramatically, however.
“Bi-weekly has proven a good balance, but now we’ve arrived at a point where a grand leap forward in gameplay is required,” Whiskerwood’s lead programer Daniel Dressler wrote in a recent update post. “We cannot reach our next goal through bi-weekly updates. We need to ask for your trust, as we work longer on a massive update.”
Though, you can understand the need for more time considering the aim for the next patch. “Uur goal for the next update,” Dressler explains, “is to add full ship construction, trading between other colonies, naval battles, and island defenses (towers and fortresses). This is a large chunk of work and we need to destabilize the codebase. We are in effect going back into production mode.”
Until now, the colonies you’ve been able to build in Whiskerwood have centred on a single cluster of islands. You can build bridges and little ferries between them, but you’ve no access to the outside world beyond vessels that arrive at your island unbidden. That might be the cats coming to collect their tithe, a galley bringing fresh mouse labourers, or a pirate ship demanding a ransom. It sounds like the next update will let you wield some force in the world yourself. Whether your combat vessels will strictly be for battling pirates at first, or if you’ll be free to take the battle to the cats is unclear.
Dressler didn’t only detail future plans. Before the team puts their heads down and focus on the big update, they’ve released patch 25, which reworks construction. All island building work is now handled by a construction crew you hire at the construction yard, a building you can pick up and move around your island freely.
Originally, any free mice could turn their paws to construction and the speed of the work was down to the number of idle rodents you had available. Now, your crew’s efficiency will be down to the policies and overtime hours you apply to that crew. It’s a much neater system.
Dressler doesn’t say how long we’ll be waiting for the naval combat patch but considering they’re flagging the change of pace and they had already slowed to a bi-weekly work schedule, it sounds like we’ll be waiting for a couple of months at least.
If you’ve read this far and not played Whiskerwood, Sin’s written a wonderful piece on why it’s one of the best city builders in a while.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
