Topics

1

General Discussion / Back after a technical problem

« on: November 23, 2025, 08:12:02 PM »

As many of you probably noticed, the forums were down for several days. There was a small but fatal error lurking in an unexpected place. But once spotted, it was rather easy to fix. So here we are, up and running again.

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General Ancient Savo discussion / Ancient Savo 0.9.15 released

« on: October 04, 2025, 09:35:16 PM »

The Enormous Elk side-project game is alive and evolving. And available at itch.io and Steam

The freshly released version 0.9.15 improves the simulation of hunting and fishing, and adds different hues of blue for different depths of water.



Full changelog for version 0.9.15

• ADDED: new animal types squirrel, fox, lynx, mallard, and grouse. Also new fish; pike and zander.
• IMPROVED: The seasonal routine now simulates fishing and hunting with greater detail. Active hunting takes into account the availability of bows and arrows, and occasionally a missed arrow will be lost. The size of animal populations now properly affects how likely it is to spot this or that type of animal, and all active hunting affects the population size.
• ADDED: There now is basics of wild animal seasonal behavior patterns. For example mallards are migratory, so they are completely absent in winter. In summer they scatter around on wide area. In late autumn they gather to form a sord, so a lucky hunter can catch many of them at one spot.
• ADDED: There is now a details view for every activity of the seasonal routine. In the routine management dialog click the seasonal routine to see a summary, then click any of the item rows to see details. For example, clicking 'active hunting' row will show the types and numbers of animals caught, also telling if any arrows got lost.
• IMPROVED: The interactive hunting story now includes notifications about fatigue and possible ailments of the hunter(s).
• IMPROVED: The engine parsing textual elements now does better at handling English grammar. For example, it chooses different words when referring to one or many people; 'he is' or 'they are' This logic is designed to be moddable, so when translations are added new grammar rules can be defined in text files without modifying the game source code.
• IMPROVED: Pelts and furs now have four grades. In the summer animals yield inferior pelts, they are mostly good for making leather. In winter when animals have thick warm fur they yield ordinary, fine or excellent pelts. Ordinary pelts are called simply pelts, and they make utility furs, good for making clothing and other everyday items, but they don't have particularly high barter value. Fine pelts make furs which are the all-around basic barter item. Excellent pelts make luxury furs with very high barter value. The grade depends on the type of animal - for example hare fur is nothing exceptional, but lynx fur has interesting color patterns, making it more valuable at the market.
• ADDED: When tanning pelts to get furs there now are separate sliders for each pelt quality grade, and you can choose to process multiple grades at one go.
• ADDED: New item category VALUABLES. The items in this category are pearls, furs and luxury furs
• ADDED: Game difficulty can now be adjusted mid-game using a slider in the SETTINGS dialog.
• ADDED: When planning task MARKET there now is an option to choose which animals (if any) to take to the market.
• ADDED: There now are lighter and darker variation of the lake tile, to indicate shallow and deep water.
• CHANGED: When looking at traps it showed the average daily yield, calculated for past 30 days. That is now changed to displaying the total catch for past 7 days.
• FIXED: The gained, consumed and wasted items per week report got messed up when loading a saved game. This is now fixed.
• FIXED: Generating geography metadata sometimes got water depth and other values wrong. These are now fixed - unfortunately the fix doesn't affect existing maps, so it is recommended to start a new game to get a freshly generated map.
• FIXED: At least on Mac there was a crash on 3D map when enabling the helper grid. This is now fixed.
• FIXED: After returning home from the market your domestic animals could just disappear for no reason, sometimes also leading to the game crashing. These are now fixed.
• FIXED: There were various vague problems after a hunting trip. Traps stopping to catch anything and such. These are now fixed.

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General Ancient Savo discussion / Ancient Savo 0.9.13 released

« on: June 26, 2025, 08:34:47 PM »

Oh, it's a while since I last posted Ancient Savo release news here. This is the Enormous Elk side-project game, exploring ways to simulate a family and multiple generations in a survival game context.

The latest version 0.9.13 got just released at itch.io and Steam.

Also, on 50% discount for the Steam summer sale.

4

General Discussion / Android remote controller updated

« on: February 20, 2025, 11:11:24 AM »

The remote Android controller for UnReal World has been lingering in some sort of limbo; at Google Play, but not available for modern phones. Until today. I finally upgraded the source code to meet the current Android requirements, and after a little bit of juggling the upgraded version got approved by Google.

So, this is an experimental helper utility for irregular players who have trouble remembering the key bindings, a smooth landing for newcomers, a quality of life improvement for anyone who feels more comfortable with gently tapping a touch-screen button which says "eat", an alternative to wireless keyboard for those who wish to play from the couch with a big monitor (or anything else you come up with - these are the use-cases I've heard of. Just trying to say that if you are familiar with the keybindings then there hardly is a need to try the remote controller, this app is just an optional alternative for those who might find it useful.)

There is a free version, so it is safe to test with no financial risk.

The paid version gets rid of the in-house ad banner, and enables custom layouts - you could import your own XML files to make a virtual keyboard layout to match your liking. It is also possible to chain a sequence of commands under a single button, sort of macros.

(still no iPhone version - developing and publishing for iPhone is a bit more tricky to get started with. But that remains a future possibility, as with Ancient Savo development I've been experimenting with some possibilities of deploying to iPhone - but that will still take me time to learn, and it is not on the top of my priority list)

If you are interested, take a look at Google Play

5

General Ancient Savo discussion / Ancient Savo 0.9.01 released

« on: September 20, 2024, 12:51:22 PM »

Ancient Savo version 0.9.01 is now available on Steam and at Itch.io

Establish your homestead in pristine woodlands. Farm, forage, fish and hunt for food. Craft tools and items, barter supplies. Get married, raise children. Teach your kids the skills of self-sufficient life - some skills like iron working are so complex that it might take multiple generations of accumulated experience to learn the secrets of the craft. Send you adult offspring to start homestead of your own. Once your family tree has more than one unit, you can freely switch game focus, choosing which family to play as. Or, if your family happens to die, you can continue playing as another family of your clan. There are no combat elements; cold, hunger and accidents are your main enemies.

The game is designed to be moddable by editing XML files. This allows not only adding new items, terrain types and tasks, but also modifying the existing ones to add new attributes to any existing element. A modding tutorial is planned, and will be published once I have time for that.

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General Ancient Savo discussion / Ancient Savo beta 30 : pottery, children learning skills, and the modding script

« on: August 25, 2024, 10:17:51 PM »

Ancient Savo public beta version 30 is now available at itch.io. And the work continues towards planned September release on Steam

This version adds pottery and related tasks. You can dig soil to get clay, and craft clay items. Construct a pottery kiln to fire clay items to turn them to ceramics.

Another new feature is simulation of characters learning skills when working together with more talented people. So, typically children first helping their parents, then working together with them. Each skill can be defined to have unique learning curve, and skills (very) slowly degrade if not used regularly enough.

There are also some new ailments, and accidents. The likelihood of an accident is mostly determined by the character fatigue, and partially affected by skill level. An accident can simply spawn an ailment, or trigger an interactive text story so that player decisions will affect the outcome.

Like most of the other game elements, ailments, accidents and text stories are defined in XML files making them fully moddable. The modding system was already capable of handling variables and logical conditions. Now there is also a GOTO statement, which can be used to re-direct the script flow.

For more information see the release news on itch.io

---

And, a little bit of background information for those who haven't been following the early stages of the Ancient Savo project; this is an Enormous Elk sideproject, a smaller sister game to UnReal World. From the development point of view this gives me a development sandbox where I can freely test with different algorithms and simulation mechanics without a risk of messing up the vast UnReal World codebase. So, some of the Ancient Savo features might eventually get adapted to UnReal World. But also, as a side project Ancient Savo allows coding adventures of its own. Ancient Savo is built to be moddable from the ground up. At the moment the weather and the map generation are hard-coded. I have some simmering ideas about a possible future sequel, which would be just a set of tools for any modder to create their custom survival scenarios. Ancient Savo already has fully moddable menus and submenus, and the modder can add pretty much anything from terrain types to animals and items and their variables. Well, but future developments depend on the reception and resources - and after so much of coding Ancient Savo my fingers are increasingly itching to write some pieces of UrW code to help Sami with the development.

7

General Discussion / Testing after technical problems

« on: June 06, 2024, 03:38:04 PM »

Hello!

We encountered some technical problems, but everything seems to be back to normal again.

EDIT: Oh, but at first I had trouble posting this message, but I suspect that was because of old cached data lingering around from my previous log-in. So, if you have trouble posting at the forums, try logging out, (force)re-loading the forum main page and logging back in again.

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General Ancient Savo discussion / Coming soon at Steam

« on: April 26, 2024, 09:50:57 AM »

Ancient Savo now has a public "coming soon" profile at Steam

Or, to be more specific, "soon" means "September 2024", but if you so wish you can wishlist the game, and share the link if you happen to know anyone who might be interested in a resource management survival simulation focused on raising a family.

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General Ancient Savo discussion / Ancient Savo beta 20 : iron works and bugfixes

« on: June 25, 2023, 09:36:10 PM »

Ancient Savo beta version 20 has just been released on itch.io

I hope all the reported bugs are fixed in this version. And as a new feature there is metallurgy, which involves steps like harvesting limonite from lake bottom, using a kiln to produce charcoal, processing the limonite to get iron ingots, and finally forging those ingots to make metal tools like spear heads.

10

General Ancient Savo discussion / Ancient Savo public beta version available

« on: June 06, 2023, 09:04:09 PM »

Ancient Savo public beta version now available!

Play as a settler family in 1200CE Eastern Finland, in a region called Savo. Build your home in pristine woodlands. Live off the land, raise a family, send your adult offspring to start homesteads of their own.

This is an open-ended resource-management game, with no combat elements. Cold, hunger and accidents are your only enemy. Both 2D and 3D graphics, you can freely switch between them.

Modding based on editing XML files.

see the beta version trailer video

The game is now available at itch.io

Join the Ancient Savo discord : https://discord.gg/6Crvp6F5dj

Currently at beta phase. Fully playable. Some bugs, some content still missing, a lot of polishing and balancing to be done. Final stable version estimated at the end of 2023, on itch.io and Steam (mobile platforms are planned later on)

11

General Ancient Savo discussion / Ancient Savo private beta available for UrW players

« on: May 08, 2022, 06:41:50 PM »

Hello! As many of you might already know, here at Enormous Elk we have a small side-project in the works. It is a family-scale survival game, with point-and-click gameplay, designed to be mod-friendly. No combat, the cold and hunger and accidents being your main enemies. As your kids grow adult, they can marry and you can choose to switch playing as one of your kids, having a fresh start building a new home in the wilderness.

At the moment of writing this the game is at private beta stage, the beta version being available for UnReal World players. You can find the game at itch.io

There is a Ancient Savo discord, here is the invitation link: https://discord.gg/6Crvp6F5dj.
Discord is where I post regular development news etc. And now there is also this forum subsection, you can post bug reports, suggestions, questions and any feedback here.

12

Off-topic / Ancient Savo private beta available for UrW players

« on: April 01, 2022, 06:02:58 PM »

Hello!

Hello! As some of you might already know, here at Enormous Elk we have a small side-project in the works. It is a family-scale survival game, with point-and-click gameplay, designed to be mod-friendly. Since the start of this year a private beta version has been available to some long-term UnReal World supporters. I just released beta version 6, and decided that it is time to widen the private beta audience.

If you are interested in testing the game and / or supporting the development, take a look here:https://enormous-elk.itch.io/ancient-savo?password=muinaissavo

This is still a private beta version, so please don't post the url anywhere for a wider audience. But if you happen to know a friend who might be interested, it is okay to share the link in a private message.

The game development has been a little bit slower than I was hoping for. This has been for two reasons; my plans growing more ambitious, and me having to spend time at my main work to pay the monthly bills. OK OK, so the game graphics and UI are still far from finished. But they will be the next main focus of the development.

At the moment the game is verified to run on windows and linux, mac testing has been unreliable (and, again, slowed down because I don't have a mac to test with myself). But a mac version will happen. If everything goes well, Android and hopefully iPhone versions will follow later on down the line.

The good old 2D tile-graphics:




But there is also an option for a 3D map: (And it is possible to switch mid-game)

13

General Discussion / Recovering from a forum crash

« on: September 08, 2021, 04:04:56 PM »

Hello!

We recently experienced a server-side crash at the forums. To fully recover from the crash I had to manually restore the latest database backup, which was less than 24 hours old. So, any posts made after that backup are probably lost forever, but the vast majority of forum content seems to be back again.

14

Off-topic / A family survival game (in the making)

« on: August 22, 2021, 06:26:48 PM »

As many of you might already know, here at Enormous Elk we have another game project in the making. The game is called Ancient Savo, and it is also keeping your family alive in the 1200CE woodlands of Eastern Finland. The time-scale of the game is so that one turn is 24 hours, and the gameplay is about planning actions. Like "fell down that area of woods", "sow rye", "build a cabin". You don't actually see your family members going around their daily business, so it is more like the old Sim City and such management games, where you hover over the map clicking tiles to plan actions. No fighting; cold, hunger and accidents are your only enemy. And the game is designed to be modding-friendly.

The development has been going on, and at the moment we have most of the basic elements set up. We have 2D and 3D graphics, and you can switch mid-game. You can plan actions and watch your children grow. You can visit a marketplace to barter with NPCs.

In addition to my own coding we already have a few rather awesome contributions by other people - like four original music pieces composed, played, recorded and mastered by Erik Torpström from Rogue Analogue.

Learning to code the 3D graphics took some time, but finally it works good enough. So that for coming weeks and months I'll shift my attention back to the actual game-play, balancing values, adding details etc.

---

EDIT by Erkka at 26th of December 2021 : Removed some outdated information, and here are the fresh additions;

To be honest, I haven't yet gotten to balancing values and adding details. Instead I've been busy with implementing the basics of a modding system, marriage and ability to continue playing as your offspring. All that kind of stuff took more time than I had thought.

Despite lagging a few months behind the intended schedule, the project is still very much alive. A private beta version is available for a restricted audience, and if no fatal bugs are found, there will be public beta sometime towards the end of January, or in February if bughunting eats away time from the actual development.

Apparently the old screenshot got deleted as I updated the project info at Enormous Elk site, so here is a fresh one:

15

General Discussion / A spambot thread

« on: January 12, 2021, 09:15:28 PM »

For a while we have had two layers of automated anti-spam measures. The first layer is invisible, tracking site traffic and spotting known bots based on a vast database. And the another layer is visible to the user, often an image captcha which is beyond bots' ability to solve. Also, users with less than 3 posts need to pass the captcha when making a new post - that should stop old undetected spambot accounts if they try to activate.

Yet, we witness new spam posted on the forums every now and then. Many of them with copypasted content from elsewhere.

I'm afraid that we can't make our anti-spam measures significantly tighter. At one point I tried adding a third layer, which instantly resulted in a post at Steam forums, someone saying that the registration at these forums is broken.

I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere out there is a sweatshop where poor people get paid paltry money for passing captcha to post spam content everywhere in the internet. I mean, that is a more plausible explanation, instead of there being a spambot AI which can solve those captchas far better than the state-of-the-art big company AI systems do. And if we have real people posting spam, then there is not going to be a captcha to stop them.

For a long time things were fine with custom security questions which were easy for anyone familiar with the game, but made no sense for a random visitor. Eventually, all of those questions became useless (maybe the spam networks keep on building their own database of 'known captcha questions and their correct answers'. Already at that point I suspected that they are paying people to answer those questions and storing answers for bot use. But I really don't know how sophisticated or how ugly the hidden machinery of spam networks are. Just guessing.

All in all, I felt like posting these general thoughts here, for we are all affected by the situation. We have four people in the moderation team, that allows us to manually weed out spam posts and accounts on a daily basis, and I think that is the last line of defense we anyway need to have.

So, everyone:

1. if you suspect spam, but are not sure, one good way is to do a google search with post content. If it turns out that the post is copypaste from old post from some other corner of the internet, please use "report to moderator" button

2. if you suspect spam for any other reason - the obvious ones being malicious links embedded in text - hit the "report to moderator" button

3. Thank you for your co-operation, and we apologize for all the inconvenience!