Alpha 2 is upon us! The main feature is that the placeholder production of metal (which was simply and easily turning raw ore into metal ingots) has been replaced by a more in-depth production chain. Raw, mined metallic ore needs crushing down to remove the useless stone and get to the usable ore. This is then smelted at a bloomery furnace into a "bloom", following how iron was historically produced before modern mass-production. The bloom is then hammered by a smith into usable metal, which can be worked into its final form. This update also introduces fuel in the form of coke (refined from coal) and charcoal (produced at a charcoal clamp using wooden logs).

Alpha 2 also includes the most-requested feature by players - a screen to view and manage all of your dwarves! This was teased in last month's update but it has now been released, head on over to rocketjumptechnology.itch.io/king-under-the-mountain to download Alpha 2 if you already have a copy of the game, or purchase it if not! It's still early days for the user interface (I'm treating the whole thing as a placeholder) but this work solved some of the problems of dealing with the UI (most importantly a way to draw entities like the settlers as interface components) so expect more to follow - perhaps most importantly a screen to manually organise crafting and production so that the player has direct control of what is being created!

Following the "add a natural resource" reward emails which were sent out previously (please do get back to me if you've received one and not responded yet, or if you think you should receive one and don't remember seeing anything), more recently emails have been sent out for the "Add an animal species" and "Design a farmable crop" rewards. In the end there were only 8 of the former and 4 of the latter, with two super-backers covering both! Unlike the "add a natural resource" these will all require custom artwork to be created so I look forward to sharing these in the future.

As it had been so long since the Alpha 1 release, Alpha 2 was actually released early while there was still more content intended for part of this release milestone. First of all, metal plates are to be added as a new intermediate product so that constructing furniture out of metal is a bit more sensible - rather than hammering a few metal ingots together to form an elaborate construction, instead plates will be forged by a blacksmith which are then put together along with other mechanisms to produce some of the machines used by the dwarves (such as the ore crushing station). Expect this to feature more heavily when brewing is added due to the number of metal tanks needed as part of the brewing production chain.

Also on the topic of working with metal - dwarves in King under the Mountain are the only race to know the secrets of producing steel, superior in strength and quality to iron which will be important when different materials have different in-game effects, particularly in combat! Central to this is the crucible furnace, which will be the largest piece of furniture in the game so far, used to convert iron to steel in sizeable quantities.

Long-rumoured to the world of King under the Mountain are giant mushrooms - mushrooms so large, tall and tough that they can be used as an equivalent to trees! A later update will see a visual rework of the game's funghi, but I wanted to have using-giant-mushrooms-as-trees in one of the earlier updates.

With those features added the next major milestone (Alpha 3) will be all about mod support. Modding is an absolutely central pillar to the design of the game and I can't want to see what people are able to come up with once the ability to mod the game is thrown wide open. It's these early days of modding which will shape exactly how mods work and what they look like, so if this is something you're interested in, please get involved (ideally via the Discord server) and help me to add what it is you want to be able to support mods.