Vikings! We’re so thrilled to roll out our first major update for ASKA including the highly requested and anticipated custom world settings.
Thank you for your patience and support as we’ve been building this system into the game for you as well as some new buildings, features and a whole bunch of fixes & improvements that you’ll see below too.
We can’t wait to see how you all customise your worlds and look forward to hearing all about them! Remember to share your screenshots in the pinned Screenshot Saturday thread too to get a chance to star on our Twitter!


Custom World Settings
We're rolling out the custom world settings, giving you the ability to tweak a variety of world generation settings and giving you more control over how challenging a session is.
Some of the features covered by the custom game mode include the ability to turn off invasions or intensify them, the ability to increase or decrease monster and animal presence, influence weather events and adjust landscape features. A full list of features can be found below and this is something we are keen to develop further over time, so your feedback on this is invaluable.

Game Mode selection
Players will be able to opt between creating a normal or a custom game world when starting a new game.

Custom Game Mode Controls

• Landscape height
  
• Landscape aspect
  
• Invasion difficulty
  
• Monster biome frequency
  
• Monster population per biome
  
• Structure decay rate
  
• Starting season
  
• Year length
  
• Day length
  
• Climate
  
• Animals biome frequency (Deer/Smolkr, Wolves and Bears)

New Features & Buildings


Outhouse
Characters will now be able to support your farming efforts by using the new outhouse.
During their leisure time, villagers will visit the outhouse and produce compost. Players will be able to do the same, limited by a buff that prevents overusing the outhouse.
Villagers will also dispose of spoiled food and compost at the outhouse.

Beauty Pit
The Beauty Pit allows players to change their character's appearance whenever they like. This is a Tier Two building and requires carpentry materials, thatch and iron. Give yourself a fresh new look for Summer or grow a beard for Winter perhaps?

Metal Part Collector
This structure acts as a recycling bin for metal parts. Villagers will automatically drop their broken metal parts and workshop workers will prioritize reusing them over forging new metal parts.

New Resource: Compost
Compost is a new resource used in farming that is produced at the new Outhouse building.

Improved Wall Building System
Added new variants for the various wall types for different angles. Placing walls will now automatically select the correct wall angle based on the terrain the player is trying to build on.

New Addon: Spiked Walls
Walls can receive a spiked barricade addon which damages attacking enemies. Turn your defence into offence!

Multiplayer and Network
Traffic optimization for positions & rotations

AI Improvements

• Fixed animals and enemies being able to phase through closed gates and doors after traversing an open gate.
• Fixed Villagers sometimes sleeping under their beds.
• Villagers will not teleporting to shore from their boat.
• Enemy AI will now keep aggro on Players and Villagers if while they are actively engaged in combat.
• Fix Two-Handed Skeleton sometimes equipping his weapon in a loop when trying to chase its target
• Fixed villagers getting stuck in Longhouses if a Longhouse module was built with its door facing another module's wall.
• Fixed Villagers remaining stuck in the air after dismantling a Watchtower (again).
• Fixed Villagers sometimes getting stuck behind the destructible wall inside cave corridors.

Invasion Improvements
Random Invasions (Blood Moon, Wolves, Smolkrs) will now scale with villager count and time played.

A Very Long List of Improvements and Fixes

• You can now sort villagers in the assign page.
• Fix Disconnection message not being displayed.
• Hoeing in cave no longer teleports the player above ground
• Fixed stone golem boss not fighting after regenerating in stage 2
• Fixed archers not finding arrows but grabbing two bows instead
• Upgrading to Guard Tower no longer keeps old addons
• Using recall last building keeps rotation
• Increased max search range for villagers to 300
• Added whitelists to all workstations that have storage
• Improved cart interactions
• Cart's storage can be accessed from structure menu
• Stone Jotun spells can damage structures
· Made player characters not be culled on the network (movement, animations, attributes)
· Dead monsters no longer get revived if loaded in a spike wall
· Villagers no longer wave if they are in a hurry
· Pets get more food from uncooked items and no longer scale with durability
· Kennel workers always stay up to feed the starving dogs
· Dog perks are stronger and give more health
· Fixes marker discovery on clients
· Fixed addons being placed multiple times with recall last
· Wood cutters no longer break carpentry items for firewood
· Lower tier resources are prioritized for decomposition by harvesting
· Added feathers, bones, junk and bait to settlement resources tab page
· Fixed cooks not being able to do skinning
· Fixed recall last sometimes not working
· Fixed winter invasion being announced incorrectly at the end of the first Autumn.
· Fixed Bear invasion scaling with difficulty
· Fixed very high enemy counts on Viking invasion difficulty due to a configuration mistake.
· Fixed players not being able to rebuild walls anymore after they were destroyed.
· Fixed unlocalized strings at rest and runestone interactions.
· Fixed Invasions still occurring even if the difficulty was set no "None"
· Fix Jotun Blood (Item) not spawning in biomes.
· Fix load page gamepad highlight now showing.
· Added toggle sprint setting.
· Added toggle crouch setting.
· Fix whitelist UI breaking the game.
· Added option to show all structure's ranges on the map at the same time.
· Changed map icons to show a green eye when they are visible on the compass instead of a red eye when they are not visible

Phew, that was a big list! We hope you enjoy the new features and look forward to hearing about your new customised adventures!
As always, your feedback and bug reporting is invaluable to us so please keep the information flowing 🙏

Be sure to follow us on social media @askathegame for fun posts, helpful tips & other updates too.

Thanks again,
Sand Sailor Studio

Vikings! We know you’ve been hotly anticipating our Roadmap and to see the direction of the game and we’re thrilled to share an overview of our first few major updates to ASKA in the months to come.

To be clear, these aren’t the only updates to the game, just the first few ones we want to share with you at this time.

Shall we dig into the good stuff then?

Update One is something you shouted from the rooftops and we want to know we heard you!
Some time this August, ASKA will receive World Gen Options.

You’ll be able to customise many different facets of the game including enemies, gather rates, events, day/night length and more! We hope this will satisfy those of you looking for a peaceful building experience, and also those of you looking for an even harder survival challenge.
In this update we will also be including a couple of new buildings, but you’ll have to tune into the patch notes for that 👀

Updates Two, Three & Four will be spread out throughout the rest of 2024, and will include a variety of buildings, upgrades, system overhauls and new systems. We’re still cooking so we can’t give you an exhaustive list of what will be ready for each update (yet), but you can look forward to things like new enemies, gathering a raiding party & setting sail as well as some more fun additions to make your villages feel more alive.
Later in the year we will look to launch what we are dubbing our “multiplayer” update - where we will look to launch dedicated servers for you all. We’re also adding an in game chat system so that you can communicate with other players online & create lobbies.



One of the most consistent feedback themes we receive from the community concerns AI, especially Villager AI.

We’re constantly working to make Villager behaviour understandable and consistent, and to give you more ways to engage with them. Our long term goal is to reduce micro-management and make Villager behaviour and intent as transparent as possible.

Although they sometimes might seem irrational, our Villagers' brains are actually quite complex! And they're doing their best to stay off your back as much as possible and do their jobs as best as they are able.

But that’s no easy task with all they have going on: They know when to eat and what to eat; they must sometimes defy their schedule to make sure the job gets done; they must pick out equipment and get dressed; drop off materials; plan their routes when setting off to gather a variety of resources (and try to not get killed in the process!); they must sometimes engage enemies and sometimes not… and so many other such “thoughts”.

Our objective is to give you not robots which you have to program yourself, but lively characters that are obviously doing their best to assist you and to see your designs come to completion. ASKA has grown a LOT in the last year and we're in the process of continuing to build on this by reworking key Villager jobs, like the Warehouse and Workshop workers.

We're always listening, and continue to appreciate your feedback and we finesse this to final quality.

To Wrap This Up…


We’d like to advise this also isn’t an exhaustive list and other things might pop up or slip in too as we keep working, but we hope this gives you all the reassurance that we have been and are continuing to work hard on building on the world of ASKA and delivering updates when we feel they are best ready to be released. We can’t wait to hear what you think so please do leave us some feedback in the forums, in Discord, on our social media. We are listening, and we want to ensure we deliver our vision for the game while taking into consideration any major changes our playerbase are advocating for when we feel it's appropriate.

Finally, if you’re reading all of this and you haven’t yet had the chance to explore the world of ASKA, we’re thrilled to say you can pick it up right now in the Gamescom sale for 20% off until 3 September.


Skal!
Sand Sailor Studios.