Vikings! We’re so thrilled to roll out our first major update for ASKA including the highly requested and anticipated custom world settings.
Thank you for your patience and support as we’ve been building this system into the game for you as well as some new buildings, features and a whole bunch of fixes & improvements that you’ll see below too.
We can’t wait to see how you all customise your worlds and look forward to hearing all about them! Remember to share your screenshots in the pinned Screenshot Saturday thread too to get a chance to star on our Twitter!


Custom World Settings
We're rolling out the custom world settings, giving you the ability to tweak a variety of world generation settings and giving you more control over how challenging a session is.
Some of the features covered by the custom game mode include the ability to turn off invasions or intensify them, the ability to increase or decrease monster and animal presence, influence weather events and adjust landscape features. A full list of features can be found below and this is something we are keen to develop further over time, so your feedback on this is invaluable.

Game Mode selection
Players will be able to opt between creating a normal or a custom game world when starting a new game.

Custom Game Mode Controls

• Landscape height
  
• Landscape aspect
  
• Invasion difficulty
  
• Monster biome frequency
  
• Monster population per biome
  
• Structure decay rate
  
• Starting season
  
• Year length
  
• Day length
  
• Climate
  
• Animals biome frequency (Deer/Smolkr, Wolves and Bears)

New Features & Buildings


Outhouse
Characters will now be able to support your farming efforts by using the new outhouse.
During their leisure time, villagers will visit the outhouse and produce compost. Players will be able to do the same, limited by a buff that prevents overusing the outhouse.
Villagers will also dispose of spoiled food and compost at the outhouse.

Beauty Pit
The Beauty Pit allows players to change their character's appearance whenever they like. This is a Tier Two building and requires carpentry materials, thatch and iron. Give yourself a fresh new look for Summer or grow a beard for Winter perhaps?

Metal Part Collector
This structure acts as a recycling bin for metal parts. Villagers will automatically drop their broken metal parts and workshop workers will prioritize reusing them over forging new metal parts.

New Resource: Compost
Compost is a new resource used in farming that is produced at the new Outhouse building.

Improved Wall Building System
Added new variants for the various wall types for different angles. Placing walls will now automatically select the correct wall angle based on the terrain the player is trying to build on.

New Addon: Spiked Walls
Walls can receive a spiked barricade addon which damages attacking enemies. Turn your defence into offence!

Multiplayer and Network
Traffic optimization for positions & rotations

AI Improvements

• Fixed animals and enemies being able to phase through closed gates and doors after traversing an open gate.
• Fixed Villagers sometimes sleeping under their beds.
• Villagers will not teleporting to shore from their boat.
• Enemy AI will now keep aggro on Players and Villagers if while they are actively engaged in combat.
• Fix Two-Handed Skeleton sometimes equipping his weapon in a loop when trying to chase its target
• Fixed villagers getting stuck in Longhouses if a Longhouse module was built with its door facing another module's wall.
• Fixed Villagers remaining stuck in the air after dismantling a Watchtower (again).
• Fixed Villagers sometimes getting stuck behind the destructible wall inside cave corridors.

Invasion Improvements
Random Invasions (Blood Moon, Wolves, Smolkrs) will now scale with villager count and time played.

A Very Long List of Improvements and Fixes

• You can now sort villagers in the assign page.
• Fix Disconnection message not being displayed.
• Hoeing in cave no longer teleports the player above ground
• Fixed stone golem boss not fighting after regenerating in stage 2
• Fixed archers not finding arrows but grabbing two bows instead
• Upgrading to Guard Tower no longer keeps old addons
• Using recall last building keeps rotation
• Increased max search range for villagers to 300
• Added whitelists to all workstations that have storage
• Improved cart interactions
• Cart's storage can be accessed from structure menu
• Stone Jotun spells can damage structures
· Made player characters not be culled on the network (movement, animations, attributes)
· Dead monsters no longer get revived if loaded in a spike wall
· Villagers no longer wave if they are in a hurry
· Pets get more food from uncooked items and no longer scale with durability
· Kennel workers always stay up to feed the starving dogs
· Dog perks are stronger and give more health
· Fixes marker discovery on clients
· Fixed addons being placed multiple times with recall last
· Wood cutters no longer break carpentry items for firewood
· Lower tier resources are prioritized for decomposition by harvesting
· Added feathers, bones, junk and bait to settlement resources tab page
· Fixed cooks not being able to do skinning
· Fixed recall last sometimes not working
· Fixed winter invasion being announced incorrectly at the end of the first Autumn.
· Fixed Bear invasion scaling with difficulty
· Fixed very high enemy counts on Viking invasion difficulty due to a configuration mistake.
· Fixed players not being able to rebuild walls anymore after they were destroyed.
· Fixed unlocalized strings at rest and runestone interactions.
· Fixed Invasions still occurring even if the difficulty was set no "None"
· Fix Jotun Blood (Item) not spawning in biomes.
· Fix load page gamepad highlight now showing.
· Added toggle sprint setting.
· Added toggle crouch setting.
· Fix whitelist UI breaking the game.
· Added option to show all structure's ranges on the map at the same time.
· Changed map icons to show a green eye when they are visible on the compass instead of a red eye when they are not visible

Phew, that was a big list! We hope you enjoy the new features and look forward to hearing about your new customised adventures!
As always, your feedback and bug reporting is invaluable to us so please keep the information flowing 🙏

Be sure to follow us on social media @askathegame for fun posts, helpful tips & other updates too.

Thanks again,
Sand Sailor Studio