What's New
Small things make a settlement feel real. This update adds a handful of visual touches that bring Novus Terminus: First Flags closer to the cozy logistics fantasy we are chasing -- and quietly improves the road system under the hood.
The most satisfying change: carriers now visibly carry goods on their backs. When a carrier picks up a log or a stone at a flagpole, the item appears strapped to their back and stays there for the entire walk to the next pole. You can follow a carrier along a winding forest road and see exactly what they are hauling. It sounds tiny, but it transforms the road network from an abstract conveyor belt into something you can read at a glance -- oh, that one has planks, that one has bread, and the one crossing the bridge is loaded with iron ore.
Building placement got a new preview step. When you choose a spot for a new building and confirm it, a translucent ghost of the structure appears on the ground right away. It stays there, semi-transparent and waiting, until a builder actually arrives and begins construction. Before this, a confirmed building simply popped into existence as a construction site the moment a builder touched it, and nothing marked the spot in between. Now you can place several buildings across the map, zoom out, and see at a glance where future construction is planned -- even if your only builder is still hauling materials on the other side of the river.
Tree trunks now cast proper shadows across the landscape. Previously the trunk geometry was excluded from the shadow pass, so trees looked like they were floating just above the ground. Fixing this was a small tweak, but the difference is surprisingly noticeable -- forests feel heavier and more grounded, and the late-afternoon light raking through a stand of pines finally looks right.
On the road side, the pathfinder now treats existing roads as obstacles. New paths curve around old ones instead of crossing through them, which means your road network stays clean and readable as it grows. The red preview line we added last time has been refined too: it appears instantly when a route is blocked or too long, so there is no guessing whether a road will work before you commit.
Behind the Scenes
The backpack attachment works by finding a specific bone on the carrier model and parenting the goods mesh directly to it. This means the item follows every animation frame -- walking, turning, idle bobbing -- without any manual positioning each tick. The building ghost uses a simple transparency shader on the full building mesh, fading it in at placement and fading it out once real construction geometry takes over. Both features reuse existing models, so they add visual richness without inflating the asset count.
What's Next
With carriers, roads, and building previews feeling solid, we are turning our attention to expanding the roster of workshops and production chains -- more buildings, more goods, more reasons to lay down roads.