What's New
Forests in Novus Terminus: First Flags just got a whole lot bigger. This update is all about scale -- filling the landscape with thousands of trees without the game breaking a sweat, and making the simulation itself run more smoothly in the background.
The biggest visible change is how we handle distant trees. Previously, when the camera pulled back far enough, trees would simply vanish or snap to a lower-quality version with an ugly pop. Now, faraway trees are replaced by clever impostor images -- flat cards that show the tree from whatever angle you are looking at, baked from the original model with matching lighting and colour. The trick is in the transition: as you scroll across the landscape, trees crossfade between their full 3D form and the impostor through a subtle dissolve pattern. There is no hard cut, no flicker, no moment where a tree suddenly looks wrong. It just quietly shifts, and unless you are specifically watching for it, you will not notice at all.
The result speaks for itself: roughly five thousand trees on screen at once, a view distance of 150 metres, and a stable 54 frames per second. Forests finally feel dense and sprawling the way they should in a logistics game where lumber is a lifeline. Panning across a valley full of pines and oaks with carriers winding between them is genuinely satisfying now.
We also fixed a shadow bug that had been lurking for a while. Trees close to the camera were sometimes losing their shadows when the rendering engine confused the player's viewpoint with the light's viewpoint during the shadow calculation. That is sorted now -- every tree casts a proper shadow regardless of distance, and the late-afternoon light through a thick forest looks noticeably better.
On the economy side, buildings now require planks instead of raw logs as their construction material. This is a small but meaningful change for the logistics chain: you need a sawmill running before you can expand, which gives the early game a clearer sense of progression. The building menu has a new plank icon to match.
Behind the Scenes
The game's simulation -- the part that moves settlers, updates production timers, and tracks resources -- now runs on its own dedicated thread, separate from the rendering. This means that even when the screen is packed with trees and carriers and buildings, the logic ticking along underneath stays consistent and smooth. Visual updates are neatly queued up and applied once per frame, so the two never step on each other's toes. We also overhauled how the simulation tracks changing values like walking progress or production timers: instead of resetting and recalculating everything every tick, values are now set once when something changes and left alone until the next change. Less busywork for the CPU, more headroom for a bigger world.
What's Next
With the world able to support thousands of trees and the simulation running on its own thread, we are laying the groundwork for much larger maps -- more terrain, more resources, and longer trade routes stretching across the landscape.