It has been a while. The short version: the world got a lot bigger, the year got seasons, villagers started building their own houses, and the game learned to talk to more than one player without falling over.
From Island to Continent#
The old world was a handful of islands. Nice, but it never felt like Scandinavia. The world generator now works on three levels: continental plates (thousands of kilometres), regions of roughly 96 km and 16 km cells. The result is a Pangea-sized continent next to other continents, with a mountain spine along the windward coast, fjords cutting into it, high plateaus (the “vidda”) with lakes and bogs, and a gentler lowland towards an inland sea.
The coast got a proper skerry belt: hundreds of rocky islets on a shallow platform in front of the fjords, while the open ocean stays empty.
The high plateaus are broad and gently rolling now, dotted with lakes and meandering streams instead of being cut up by tiny gullies.
Water That Looks Like Sweden#
Lakes were turquoise. Swedish lakes are not turquoise. They are dark and tea-coloured from all the dissolved organic matter, amber in the shallows. The water shader now does exactly that, and the sea is grey-green instead of Caribbean.
Seasons#
The world now runs on a calendar at 60° north. Day length goes from over 18 hours in July to a few hours in winter, the weather follows the season, birches leaf out, turn yellow and drop their leaves, grass dries to straw, snow builds up and the lakes freeze over, with wind-blown snow on the ice.
Villagers Who Build#
Building blueprints are in: a blueprint is placed as a construction site, villagers haul the materials from the stockpiles and build it step by step. Rooms get their function from the furniture inside, villagers have needs, skills, homes and relationships, and they keep all of that across save and load.
Multiplayer Foundation#
YUMA is meant for bigger persistent servers, so a lot of invisible work went into the network side: terrain edits are compressed and only sent to players nearby, clients send the intent to dig and the server checks tool, reach and cost, a dedicated server without a GPU now computes the same terrain materials as the graphics card, and the server keeps terrain around remote players, working villagers and construction sites. Two players, one big hole, one 4 KB packet. Progress.
What’s Next#
Wildlife just landed as a first version: roe deer, elk, boar, wolves and bears spawn in herds by habitat and season, sense players by sight, sound and smell (with the wind), flee or hunt, and keep living in a cheap background simulation when nobody is around. They are still grey placeholder shapes - animations and combat come next. After that: the first playable winter.