Released just three days before Manor Lords, which at the time was the most wishlisted game on Steam, Bellwright was always at risk of being overshadowed. But like the competition, Bellwright is an early access marvel that developer Donkey Crew steadily keeps improving, and the latest update is a big one. So if you’ve stepped away from Hooded Horse’s medieval strategy epic and want to try something a little different, now’s the time to give Bellwright a shot.
If you’re new to Bellwright, it’s a strategy and city building game where you explore the medieval landscape, build up a series of settlements, and eventually overthrow the monarchy. At the start you survive and explore like in Valheim, scavenging for resources before choosing where to put down roots. Then you build up settlements like in Manor Lords, managing your workers and maintaining peace. That won’t last forever though, and you’ll quickly have to command armies like in Total War, as bandits come for your village and your people learn to fight back.
Donkey Crew says the biggest change in the survival game‘s newest update is how you interact with villages once you’ve liberated them. “Now, you have the ability to call militia from the village to your aid, which can be very useful in dealing with stronger enemies.
Villages also have a prosperity level which will affect [their] population, strength of the militia, and possibilities for expanding it.”
If you want your villages to grow and prosper you’ll need to invest in them. This means giving up extra resources for your people while protecting the village’s surrounding area from bandits. Every village also has its own prosperity bar that influences the militia’s overall strength. You can also use it to track citizens that are available for recruitment, purchase potential building improvements, and analyse the makeup of your militia garrison. All of this will make tracking the expansion of your village, alongside its overall defense level, much easier.
Donkey Crew adds that town customization has also been massively overhauled. You can now build roads, assist with overall planning and logistics, and use a plethora of brand-new decorative features to make each township truly unique.
This Bellwright update also comes with a large number of quality-of-life improvements. You can now set up structure settings before their construction is finished, fast travel with companions along rivers thanks to the River Dock structure, and even find the location of a specific item or building in your settlement. The game also has new quests, buildings, and bandit camps, so you won’t be short on new things to do.
Your old saves will still work with this update, but Donkey Crew does note that there might be some issues – like previously cut-down trees respawning – across the open world. If you’d rather play the older version with your save, or any preinstalled mods, you just need to go to the Steam beta branch called “august_update.”
The Bellwright Villages 2.0 update is available on Steam right now, as developer Donkey Crew continues to work on the early access build. You can check out Bellwright here.
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