Harvest time comes for Life is feudal: Forest Village

Town-builder and serf-bosser Life is Feudal: Forest Village [official site] will be leaving early access this month, all ripe and ready for consumption. When I last played it, all the women in my village died in a single unsupervised four year period, leaving the town slowly dying with six men. They all succumbed to exposure one day as they dismantled the roof of the tavern. The village of Scallyminster was no more. But maybe that won’t happen to you because some things have been added since then.

There’s bees now, for one thing. You can set a serf to become the hivemaster and make honey. There are crypts where you can place your dead (before you only had funeral pyres). You’ve got your scarecrows, your donkeys, your stables. You’ve got decorative objects and new crops to grow. We've also heard tell the soil quality now has an effect on these crops, and both droughts and rainy days will have to be battled with extra watering or ditch-digging to combat run-off. Not to mention all the fixes and bug-squashing done. For example: “Fixed an issue with toddlers dying and disappearing if they are left without a house” or “Villagers will eat honey in the same way as other food products” which makes me wonder how they were eating it before.

It’s set for an official release on May 26, joining the survival game from which it is spun-off, Life Is Feudal: Your Own, as a fully-grown corn cob of a game. Modding is also on the cards, say developers Bitbox. If you’re the moddy type you “will have access to AI, animations, task and resource management, navigation, sounds and many other game systems.” I wish this had been there before. Maybe someone could have modded me a way for the men of Scallyminster to get pregnant.