When survival city builder Farthest Frontier launched into early access in 2022, players noted a pretty big omission. City building games, especially those inspired by the medieval period, typically have religious buildings like churches or chapels that can be built near homes to provide a satisfaction or happiness bonus for citizens.
The lack of religious buildings in Farthest Frontier was deliberate. "If we ever incorporate a faith system of some kind, I think it would be best if it was a customizable system where you name the faith and decide its bonuses/features," Crate Entertainment designer Zantai said at the time.
You can now dispel the "if" in that statement, because the new system is coming to Farthest Frontier in August, as revealed in a Twitch stream hosted by rummy golds Zantai earlier today. In the 0.9 update, players will be able to build a massive temple in their city that will let you "customize your faith" by filling it with religious relics that give various bonuses (and in one case, a dangerous debuff) not just to local villagers but to the entire city.
You'll be able to find these relics by exploring the world and locating ruins (another new feature in the update) which can be excavated by workers to reveal a hidden relic. Merchants may also occasionally bring relics into your city that can be traded for at your market. Once your temple is built, you can select any two of the relics you've found to be active (or three relics if your temple is fully upgraded) and provide your city with whichever bonuses those relics generate.
During the Twitch stream we got a look at several of the relics that will be available. There's a fertility relic that makes your villagers' health and birth rates improve by 10%, and a nature relic that makes trees grow faster and orchards produce more fruit. Two relics involve food, one making your villagers less hungry and one making food spoil 25% more slowly. Two more relics focus on making your soldiers, guards, and defensive towers deal more damage to enemy raiders.
And there's one specific relic for any city building masochists out there. It's called Ark of the Vengeful Dead, and it actually makes enemy raiders and wildlife more deadly and aggressive. If you can't get enough of your town getting relentlessly attacked and pillaged in Farthest Frontier, this is the relic for you.
There's more coming in the update, like a guild hall you can build and staff to make a chosen industry in your city more effective—and that can include your clothing industry, food producing buildings, woodworkers and blacksmiths, or even your mining operations. Those guild halls will take a lot of paperwork to operate, so a whole new industry is entering the game: the paper industry. A papermill can create paper from flax, and a book-binder can create books that serve both as a luxury item for upper-class citizens and to fill the new library, which will join the theater and pub as entertainment.
The stream even gave us a look beyond the 0.9 update at some future features in the works, including new livestock like horses and chickens, plus raiders who will drag catapults up to your city to batter down your walls. (Don't worry, you'll be able to build catapults to fire back at them.) There are plans for Farthest Frontier to begin supporting rummy master the Steam Workshop, so there may be mods in our future.
That's a lot of cool stuff on the way for a survival city builder that is already pretty great. You can check out the full two-hour 0.9 update livestream yourself here on YouTube.