> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://thrones-reforged.gitbook.io/thrones-reforged-docs/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://thrones-reforged.gitbook.io/thrones-reforged-docs/patch-notes/dev-blogs.md).
# Dev Blogs
## Viking Raider System: Beta 0.5.4 Preview
Given the barebones state of the Viking Invader system, I have decided to fully revamp it into something much more interesting. Here are the details for the upcoming changes in Beta 0.5.4.
### Smarter Spawning
Raiders no longer arrive on a fixed schedule. Before making landfall, each faction now reads the political situation:
* How wealthy is the player?
* How full are the player's food stores?
* Is the player at war?
Raiders will also always have a base chance of making landfall each season (around 50%), which may increase depending on the political situation.
### Wind Delays
Even when a faction's cooldown expires and conditions are favourable, the seas do not cooperate on demand. Each faction now draws a random wind delay at the start of raiding season, staggering fleets naturally across April to September. Some years the southern coast stays quiet well into summer. Others see the first sails in April. You will not always know when they are coming.
### Landing Forces
Most raids are manageable, especially in the early campaign. Occasionally, favourable winds deliver not one fleet but two or three simultaneously, representing a genuine coordinated invasion rather than opportunistic raiding. These multi-army landings are rare enough to be a genuine threat when they happen. Full stacks become possible as the campaign progresses and raider intensity ramps up.
### Wipe Memory
The system now remembers what happens after each landing:
* Destroying an invading force swiftly deters that faction for 18 turns before they dare attempt another crossing.
* Allowing an invading force to ravage unchecked for too long backfires: word reaches home of undefended shores and easy plunder, and the next wave arrives with greater numbers and harder-hitting troops.
### What Is Still Coming
Events and dilemmas (paying off raiders, hiring them, culture-specific responses) will be introduced further down the line.
Update 0.5.4 is almost ready. Stay tuned. Skål!
***
## Food Storage and Winter Handling: Beta 0.5.4
I am continuing the work on the food economy that has been causing problems since Beta 0.5. Today I want to cover the fixes and improvements coming in 0.5.4, specifically around how the granary system handles winter and how it learns from your campaign over time.
### Food Stores
The storage system introduced in Beta 0.5 had the right foundations but behaved incorrectly at its edges. Two bugs have been fixed and the system has been extended with new mechanics for 0.5.4.
The first bug: on the turn winter arrived, players with full reserves still received famine penalties regardless of their stores. The second: if your deficit exceeded what remained in storage, the granaries would empty but the portion of the shortfall they could not cover was forgiven, leaving your population better fed than your actual reserves allowed. Both are now fixed.
### What Changed
The system now remembers your worst winters. At the end of each harvest, your stewards look back at last year's hardest month and use that as their estimate for what is coming, drawing from reserves in advance so your population is already covered when the first month of winter hits. A stable, predictable deficit will be planned for almost perfectly. What the stewards cannot anticipate is anything unexpected: new armies recruited mid-winter, sudden territory changes, anything that shifts your food situation in ways no harvest record could foresee. The first winter of any campaign is also entirely unprotected since there is no prior year to learn from.
**Example:** Your kingdom runs a deficit of 40 each winter for two years. At the end of the third harvest, your stewards draw 40 from the granaries pre-emptively. Winter arrives and your population is already covered. Now imagine you recruit a few units in October. Your actual deficit is 70. The stewards only prepared for 40. The remaining 30 lands before they can respond, so you receive food shortage penalties. The granaries adapt the following year.
***
## Population System: Beta 0.5.4 Fixes
I have been slowly working through bugs and balance for the upcoming Beta 0.5.4, and one of the things I had to come back to is the population system. On paper it was designed to be a living constraint on how you wage war. In practice, several critical bugs meant almost none of the individual factors were actually working correctly. That is now fixed, and the difference will be significant.
### What Is Now Working
* **Population growth and famine** will correctly reset each turn and show you exactly what happened this turn in the tooltip. In Beta 0.5.3 these were accumulating silently across the entire campaign, making the numbers meaningless.
* **Raids by enemy armies** will correctly drain the population of the faction on the receiving end. If your provinces are being raided, you will feel it in your peasant base population every turn until the raids stop.
* **Riots** will correctly fire against your true population and apply a visible penalty. Poor riot management can now genuinely set back your population recovery by several turns, especially in a province with many peasants.
* **Building bonuses** will now persist correctly. Markets, guildhalls, and estates in Beta 0.5.3 were being silently wiped after the first turn they were built, meaning your investment into population infrastructure was contributing nothing.
* **Noble allegiance** now correctly penalises regions whose majority religion does not match your state religion, applying a drag on that region's noble contribution each turn.
* **Foreigner migration and recruitment** now show accurate per-turn values so you can see exactly how quickly your mercenary communities are growing or shrinking.
* **Baseline peasant growth** has been reduced from 0.5% to 0.3% per turn. Food will matter at every stage of the campaign.
* **Noble and peasant ratios** have been completely reworked to make achieving positive noble effects easier to obtain.
*
```
```
***
## Public Roadmap
I have decided to create a roadmap to give a better idea of what is to come. It covers everything currently in development, what is coming in each major version through 1.0, and the design philosophy behind how updates are structured. If you have ever had questions about where the mod is heading or what is being worked on, the roadmap is the place to look.
As always, feedback and questions are welcome.
***
## Follower Items: Beta 0.5.4
I am continuing the slow but steady work of reworking the mod's core systems. Today I want to talk about the new follower mechanics.
### Followers
The Scribe, Blacksmith, and Bard followers have been overhauled. The old shared item pool has been replaced with a culture-specific system grounded in the history of each faction. Previously, the Scribe and Blacksmith drew from the same small pool of roughly 10 to 15 items regardless of who you were playing. The Bard, now called the Praise-Singer, granted no items at all. The system felt generic rather than representative of your faction's identity.
The item pool has grown to 56 unique pieces, each locked to the culture that historically produced it. Your faction's heritage now determines what your followers can actually provide. The Scribe unlocks manuscripts and chronicles, the Blacksmith unlocks weapons and regalia, and the Praise-Singer unlocks oral and performance items. All are drawn from culture-specific pools. Governors who oversee provinces with a scriptorium or forge can also receive items from those buildings, even without the corresponding follower.
Items also no longer arrive every turn. A new cooldown system means your collection builds up gradually across a campaign, making each item feel earned rather than routine.
A lord of Alba with a Scribe will receive Gaelic manuscripts such as the Book of Deer, the Book of Kells, and the Book of Armagh. His Blacksmith might produce the Tara Brooch or Ardagh Chalice. Meanwhile, a Norse jarl's Praise-Singer brings drinking horns and whalebone plaques, and his Blacksmith can forge the legendary Gram sword.
The goal is for your followers to feel like a genuine extension of your faction's identity, not an afterthought. With only 10 item slots at maximum rank and three followers competing to fill them, you will need to think carefully about who you are equipping and what you actually want.
Plans are also being made to redo the artwork for the Blacksmith follower, and potentially all of them.
***
## Tax System Overhaul
I am back from my break and slowly fixing bugs and improving the overall balance of the mod. Today I would like to cover a substantial improvement to the tax system, which should give it a much more central role in each campaign while also addressing the food issues that have been causing problems since Beta 0.5.
### Tax System
The tax system has been overhauled. The old food production modifier has been replaced with something more historically grounded.
Previously, changing your tax level directly modified food production. This created an exploit where dropping taxes before winter would instantly boost your food output, and raising them again in spring had no real consequence.
**What changed:** The tax level now determines how much of your surplus food reaches your granaries each turn. Heavy taxation means your collectors requisition grain and livestock from settlements before it can be stored. Your treasury fills but your reserves do not. Light taxation leaves more surplus in local hands, gradually building the buffer that carries you through winter and famine.
This effect only applies during a surplus. If you are already in deficit, stores drain regardless of tax level, so you cannot exploit the system by dropping taxes mid-winter to conjure food from thin air.
**Example:** You end summer with 80 surplus food. At minimal tax, roughly 26% flows into your granaries and your stores grow. At extortionate tax, only 8% reaches them and the rest is seized as renders. Come winter, when food goes negative, those missing reserves will be felt. The lord who taxed heavily all summer will find his granaries bare when the frost arrives.
I have added screenshots showcasing the new tooltips as well. Thanks to Cornelius Crispus for bringing this tax exploit to my attention. This new system, paired with other buffs being introduced alongside it, will bring the food economy back into a healthy state.
***
## Burh System: New UI and Tiers
Here is a quick look at how the Burh system is shaping up with a new UI, tier effects, and tooltips. There are currently five tiers, each with their own flavour and modifiers, ranging from your walls literally crumbling to an unbreakable circuit of royal strongholds.
Feedback is very welcome. Due to engine limitations, this is about as far as the UI can go for now.
*Note: Ignore the treasury in the screenshots; it is a test save. Everything is still being worked on and is subject to change.*
***
## Population Mechanics: Clergy and Foreigners
Here is an update on the new, fixed, and improved population mechanics, specifically involving the Clergy and Foreigner populations. In the current update these systems are broken. They have been fixed and revamped fully for a more varied and dynamic experience.
Both Clergy and Foreigner populations now give different bonuses based on which faction the player is controlling.
### The Clergy System
The Clergy represents the power of the Church in your lands. For Christian kings, they are your scholars. For Pagan kings, they are a source of spiritual resistance.
**Christian Kings:**
* A large, thriving Clergy provides significant research rate boosts, cheaper and faster church construction, and increased public order.
* Invest in your monasteries to stabilise your kingdom and modernise your state.
**Pagan Rulers:**
* An influential Christian Clergy becomes a state within a state. They will sabotage construction (up to +160% cost) and lower allegiance throughout your lands.
* The more the Church grows under a Pagan king, the harder it becomes to control your own settlements.
### The Foreigner System
The Foreigner population is now tied directly to cultural integration.
**Pagan Rulers:**
* These are kinsmen and settlers. A high population grants positive public order, boosts Norse allegiance, and provides a recruitment discount.
* Use your Longphorts to attract settlers and turn the British Isles into a Norse stronghold.
**Christian Kings:**
* While you need these men for mercenary replenishment, they bring banditry, diplomatic penalties, and civil unrest.
* Relying too heavily on Heathen blades will turn your own people and the Church against you.
These changes will also heavily impact allegiance management, loyalty, and noble population growth. The tooltips have been fully rewritten to reflect all of this.
***
## Viking Raider System: Beta 0.5 Preview
Beta 0.5 is well underway and has transformed into a massive undertaking, easily the largest update so far. Here is a sneak peek at a system I have been working on.
### The Five Factions
Five independent raider factions raid the coasts of Britain, each with their own spawn zones, army identity, and internal cooldown:
* **Dubgaill and Finngaill:** Norse factions raiding from the northwest Scottish coast and Ireland.
* **Víkingar:** Norse raiders hitting the entire southern English coastline from Cornwall to Kent.
* **Norðmenn:** Norse forces pressing down from the northeast Scottish coast and Northumbrian shores.
* **Hæðen:** The Danish faction. Raids exclusively into Northumbria and the northeast.
### How It Works
Each faction runs on an independent cooldown that shortens as the campaign progresses, making raids more frequent over time. Vikings only sail during the historical raiding season, which ran from April through September. When spring arrives, each faction draws a random delay before setting sail, so raids are staggered naturally across the season rather than hitting simultaneously.
Army compositions reflect historical reality. Norse warbands are fast and skirmisher-heavy, with berserkers as a rare and devastating centrepiece. Danish forces arrive behind guaranteed dense shield wall formations, with berserker reserves only fielded in the largest late-campaign armies.
Army sizes vary independently of the campaign phase. Most raids are manageable harassment forces. Occasionally something much larger makes landfall. Full stacks are possible but rare enough to be a genuine event when they happen.
This new system is designed to create sustained pressure on the player throughout the campaign. It will also come with specific events and dilemmas based on which culture you are playing, letting you decide whether to pay the Vikings off, fight them, or, at some risk, employ them for your own wars.
***
## Food System Revamp: Spoilage and Seasons
Here is a sneak peek at something I have been working on for a while. I have completely revamped the food system from the ground up, implementing a spoilage and theft mechanic paired with a full seasonal overhaul that fundamentally changes how food is managed.
### New Mechanics
**Spoilage and Theft**
Food stores now suffer spoilage and theft every turn, ranging from 3% to 10% of your total stores. The fuller your granaries, the harder they are to manage and the more you lose to rats, rot, and theft. A small early-game faction barely feels it. A large kingdom sitting on overflowing granaries will bleed supplies constantly and must plan around it.
**Seasonal Overhaul**
Seasonal effects have been completely overhauled and are now deeply tied to the historical reality of 9th century Britain. Winters are brutal. A bitter winter with multiple armies still in the field can drain even the best-stocked faction. The harvest season is now your single most important window to bank food before winter arrives, and the decisions you make during it will directly determine whether your faction thrives or starves when the snow comes. Every season has a distinct identity and forces a different kind of thinking from the player.
The goal was to make food a real strategic layer at every stage of the game, preventing snowballing and making campaigns more engaging.
*Three screenshots are attached showing the food spoilage system in action. The first shows Westseaxe on turn 3 (harvest), the second shows Gwynedd on turn 125 (harvest), and the third shows Gwynedd on turn 126 (winter). Spoilage is balanced for both early and late game. The final screenshot shows the new winter effects applied to Gwynedd.*
***
## Burh System: New Mechanics
Today I want to give an update on the work currently underway. As mentioned in a previous post, I have been working on the Burh system for English factions.
The new Burh system is going to be a more historically grounded and engaging mechanic than the one currently implemented. At the moment, the Burh system only accounts for governor loyalty, giving buffs and penalties based on the number of loyal characters. The new system is a more refined version, meant to represent the real system implemented by Alfred the Great.
### New Mechanics
These are subject to change.
**Building Score**
The player must now build from a long predetermined list of buildings (such as warehouses and guardhouses) across each province. Each building increases the raw Burh integrity (0 to 100) of that province. All provinces' integrity scores are then averaged into a single raw integrity value.
**Treasury Cost**
Once the system calculates the raw integrity, it deducts a flat 150 gold from the treasury plus a certain amount per integrity point each turn. For example, at 30 integrity the cost would be 150 + (5 × 30) = 300 gold per turn. If the player cannot fund the system, integrity will slowly drop, giving penalties to defences, logistics, and the overall state of your garrisons. If the system is sufficiently funded, the player receives bonuses to defences and logistics.
**Governor Influence**
Finally, the system takes into account the presence of a governor, their loyalty, governance, and influence, further adjusting the final Burh integrity of your faction. Unlimited governors will also be introduced alongside this.
### The Intent
This system is designed to:
* Force the player to expand thoughtfully. A new province with a lack of defensive structures will drag down your total integrity.
* Create an additional late-game expense for English factions, helping to curb snowballing.
* Make managing your kingdom significantly more interesting.
Screenshots attached are a prototype and are subject to change. Feedback welcome.
***
## Gaelic Legitimacy: System Rework
I am officially back and work on Thrones Reforged is slowly resuming. I have started by diving deep into the cultural mechanics. While working on this update, I discovered that the Legitimacy system for Gaelic factions was fundamentally broken due to the original script being unfinished. I am currently halfway through a complete recreation of that system.
### How Legitimacy Will Work
The goal is to make the Gaelic experience feel unique to their historical struggle for the High Kingship.
* **Blood Ties:** Legitimacy changes only trigger during diplomacy between two Gaelic factions.
* **Oaths of Loyalty:** Gain Legitimacy by forming Declarations of Friendship, Defensive Alliances, or Military Alliances.
* **Betrayal:** Lose Legitimacy for every alliance or friendship that is broken.
* **Reclaiming the Homeland:** Gain Legitimacy for every settlement captured within Gaelic lands (Ireland and Scotland).
* **The Cost of War:** Lose Legitimacy for every settlement lost anywhere on the map.
* **Dominance:** Gain Legitimacy by successfully raiding enemy territories.
* **Time:** Lose Legitimacy over time while at war.
* **Fate and Fortune:** Future updates will include various scripted events that can improve or lower your Legitimacy.
### The Road Ahead
This is just the start. My goal is to eventually revamp and clearly explain all cultural mechanics to ensure every faction feels distinct and polished. Currently almost all cultures have some form of system in place.
I have also added a tutorials section for future explanations of game systems.
Thanks for sticking with the mod while I work to bring it to its full potential.
***
## Culture Mechanics Update
Here are a few more examples of culture mechanics being revamped. Campaigns should now feel more interesting and diverse based on which culture you play. Campaign balance has also shifted significantly, paired with the population system rework. Feedback is always welcome.
Welsh factions should now feel a bit stronger in combat due to fatigue being lowered. Gaelic factions will have a somewhat easier time managing food.
Thanks for everyone's continued support. The mod still needs a great deal of work to reach completion, but progress is steady.
Faction-specific mechanics will be revamped over time, starting with major factions and gradually moving to minor factions in the future.
***
## Culture and Faction Features: Rework Overview
Today I want to share an update on what is currently being worked on: culture and faction features.
The current iteration of faction-specific and cultural mechanics is lacking in several areas. Many features do not work as intended, are not historically accurate, and can be quite overpowered.
### What This Rework Is Meant to Do
* Improve the historical accuracy of cultural and faction-specific mechanics
* Make every campaign more interesting and challenging
* Create a more complete system that rewards active engagement from the player
* Flesh out minor and major factions for better replayability and differentiation between cultures
In short, the goal is to completely rework faction traits and mechanics. The first faction mechanics to receive this treatment are those of the English factions, specifically the Burghal system.
### How the New Burghal System Works
The Burghal system is designed to represent the health of your realm's governance. If your governors are loyal and effective, your burhs thrive, reducing corruption, improving taxation, speeding up construction, and strengthening your army's morale and supply.
If governors are disloyal and ineffective, the system begins to break down: corruption rises, public order declines, and recruitment becomes more costly and logistically inefficient. It is designed to work hand in hand with the new population system, creating a meaningful distinction between a well-maintained, thriving government and a barely functioning society.
The mechanic is designed to reflect how Anglo-Saxon administration, tax collection, and military readiness depended on the stability and honesty of local rulers.
*Screenshots below showcase the new Burh system for English factions. Please keep in mind that some elements are subject to change.*
***
## Population System: Rework Overview
Starting from today I have decided to post updates on the work happening behind the scenes to keep everyone in the loop. Today I want to share progress on a full rework of the population system.
The current population system of Thrones Reforged is lacking in both historical accuracy and gameplay importance, hence the rework.
### What This Rework Is Meant to Do
* Improve the historical accuracy of population effects
* Make managing population far more important and impactful
* Prevent the player from expanding too easily without consequence
* Give meaningful bonuses for maintaining large and healthy populations
* Create a more difficult starting situation for all factions, making the early game more interesting
*Screenshots below show the new effects, which are a work in progress.*
### What Is Next
The next update will be focused on introducing new dilemmas, new events, and improvements to the character system, alongside bug fixes. More updates on ongoing work will follow.
Thanks for your ongoing support. It really makes a big difference.
---
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