Potentially even bigger news that the Kickstarter launch - King under the Mountain has just launched Alpha 1 as early access on Itch.io!

The game is still extremely early in development (be sure to check out the roadmap), so the game is only going to be on Itch.io at this stage. Later on it will transition to Steam, so don't worry, any Itch purchases will also include a Steam key when this happens. The same also applies to any Kickstarter pledges or BackerKit preorders.

If you backed the Kickstarter or otherwise pre-ordered the game through BackerKit, you should have received an email directing you to BackerKit to claim your Itch.io game key. If you've not received that, head to kingunderthemountain.backerkit.com and you can retrieve your BackerKit pledge manager which should now include this key. If you're having any issues with this, please email me at ross@kingunderthemounta.in from your Kickstarter/BackerKit email address, and I'll sort it out.

There will probably be a lot of updates to the game, mostly bug fixes to begin with and new features later. If you use the Itch.io launcher it will automatically keep the game up to date, but I realise having yet another launcher is a big ask these days, so the game will also notify you on the main menu if a new build is available. It's always worth updating to the latest version as there will probably be a large number of bugs fixed now that a lot of people are playing the game and finding them! If you do find any bugs (or are not sure), jump into the Discord server where I'll be available most days to talk through any problems.

The last month saw a flurry of activity to finish off the remaining features for Alpha 1. One important feature is that caves within the mountain will now often include harvestable mushrooms, which can kick off an underground mushroom farm to replace your above-ground crops.

Also finally, finally, you can now build bridges to be able to cross the river. No longer will it be an impassable obstacle to your expansion!

Perhaps most importantly for rounding off the gameplay experience to turn this from a pre-alpha prototype to the first real version of the game, is that your settlers will now die - or worse, go crazy - from not fulfilling their needs for food, drink and sleep. If you are unfortunate enough to lose some settlers, they'll need burying quickly to avoid the rest of your settlement from getting very upset at being near a corpse! Right now the main challenge is surviving year to year - if you do survive to the next spring you'll get a bunch of optimistically-happy immigrants to boost, or rather replace, your population.

There's also a lot of small tweaks and improvements as well as bug fixes over just the last couple of days. The game now includes a changelog.txt if you want to browse through these, though it's not particularly exciting yet. Look out for fun dwarf-y bug descriptions in the future!

So what's next? In the short term I'll be keeping a close watch on the automatic crash reporter to fix any crashes experienced. There's still one or two outstanding bugs that I'm aware of and working on ironing out, but for the most part the game seems very stable right now. Looking ahead a little, this version does not include translations other than English, and I'll be working on something to bring extra language support that can also be contributed by the community, rather than just translating to "the big 8" languages. A couple of features, namely producing and using fuel from coal and charcoal, the proper smelting workflow and producing beer has to be pushed out of Alpha 1 so they are at the top of the features roadmap. With all of those in place, there'll be a big push to open up mod support to the community. If you're an aspiring or experienced modder, I'd love to hear from you in the modding channel of the Discord.

As ever, thank you so much to all of you who have already joined me on this journey as I bring King under the Mountain from idea to execution. This is a really major milestone to have been hit, and now you should see a steady progression of updates and features, available to everyone from this point onward. See you next month!