Emerald Woods - Crafting Station [0.4.5]

A new version of Emerald Woods, the chill survival, farming, building, and exploration roguelike, where you can live completely on your own in the woods is now available!

Play for free for now (online/windows) at https://slash.itch.io/emerald-woods, even using your phone! we are still in an “Earlier Access” phase, so let us know any suggestions you have in the discord.

If you like the game, you can still become an Early Supporter (only 5 remaining!), and get your name into the game.

From the roadmap to 0.5, this version stuck with an item, being able to upgrade your tools. Things quickly snowballed into a pretty big iteration of crafting, with some big impact gameplay changes

What’s new?

Crafting stations were added; you will no longer have access to all crafting recipes from the beginning, instead you will have to build them and then use them to build cool stuff; five stations where added:

• Workbench: Can transform wood into planks
• Furnace: Can melt ore and crystals into more refined materials
• Anvil: Used to create metal tools
• Carpentry Station: Allows building elaborate wooden items and furniture.
• Pottery Station: Allows you to make pots and other clay items.

As a result, the original axe, hoe and pickax tools have been removed and replaced with upgradeable tools you can craft with different materials at an anvil. You’ll have to mine the mountains to find the materials needed for this (new ores have been added to the world: copper, tin and tungsten, as well as quartz and salt crystals.)

Since the tools are upgradeable, their effects in the world will differ based on their power; this mainly affected the line of “hoe” tools, your starting hoes will require a bit more of work to create patches of farmable land.

All these changes on crafting were made based on designs made by stoltverd some months ago. There are many other things we designed together, and I’ll start adding them into the next version.

Some other small important tweaks:

• Add prompt when attacking a being for the first time (to prevent accidentally killing your pet mainly)
• Add skylights shedding light to underground locations (so new players don’t get lost in the first hatch)
• You can now obtain salt from salt crystals.
• Bricks, glass panels, and planks were added as refined materials required for building.
• Doubled the amount of refined cooking ingredients to be found at stations.
• Milk is now available as a refined cooking ingredient to be found at stations.

Finally, QuietGecko also sent me a new test set of spring music melodies, replacing the previous one. I like them much more.

Upcoming Dev

What comes for next versions? taking a look at the roadmap for 0.5.0 I see a lot of Big Hits, not sure which one to follow,

• Animals trapped in buildings
• Minimap
• Simulate temperature and its effects on the health of the adventurer
• Dangerous Areas
• Animal hunting
• Lure with bait
• Redesign of the breeding system
• Predation (don’t even remember what this is, dangerous animals?)
• Temperate woods biome
• Seasons (Summer).

I think I’ll hold a poll to decide what to go with.

Events

As part of the official selection, we participated on “devcom NRW Indie Showcase 2024“, included being streamed on the official devcom channel. I didn’t end up flying to Cologne, but I hope we got some people to get to know the game. We didn’t win any of the categories of the devcom Indie Award.

We passed the first round for Spanish Premios Indie Games Málaga, we are part of the first batch of 238 selected games. We are still waiting for word about Argentinian EVA Play 2024 

I just want more people to enjoy the game and join the community… so if you can please help spread the word!