New Discoveries and a Change of Plans

This weekend I completed the implementation of the tribalism discovery as part of the base mod and did a code cleanup of all discovery related code within the simulation, compacting 12 discovery-related classes and sub-classes into one single compact discovery class. I also did a quick test of the world save/load process and fixed a bunch of issues related to how the new discovery class interacts with it. There are still a bunch of minor issues related to the new implementation of discoveries but I'll think I'll be able to solve them before the end of the weekend. Next week I'll focus on adding a bunch of new discoveries, including a pair of agriculture-related discoveries (terrace farming, slash-and-burn) using the new discovery modding system. I also hope to add a bunch of new discovery modding elements that I might not necessarily use in the base mod but could be used by modders who plan to add new discoveries.

Regarding the change of plans , I originally was going to move into "Decision Modding" after finishing up with discovery modding. But seeing that I have spent month and a half so far just working on discovery modding, and considering the original implementation of 'discoveries' was way less complex than that of decisions, I could easily see myself spending more than two months working just on decision modding... I have already spent 3 months working on 0.3.3 and there's still quite a bit of work left to do. So with all that in mind I decided to push "Decision Modding" on to 0.3.4 and updated the roadmap accordingly. Decisions are something that will come into play more heavily once I start working on tribal inner politics and interactions, which is all part of 0.3.4. So it makes sense to implement decision mods in tandem as part of the same release.

The new plan is to start working on the 0.3.3's community-chosen mini-feature once I'm done with the new discoveries in two weeks and then prepare for the public release of 0.3.3. The poll to chose which feature I'll focus on is still open and you can still try to influence the results. Though at this point it seems very likely that "drainage basins and rivers" is going to be the chosen feature for this release. I'll close the poll by the start of the next weekend.