What’s New in This Update

For Players

Wesnoth’s rendering has been completely overhauled, leading to a significant improvement in performance with our own tests showing a nearly 60% boost in FPS. This will of course vary depending on the computer you’re using to run Wesnoth, but will in all cases result in a much smoother and more consistent experience across all areas of the game.

All factions in the Default era have gone through major updates to ensure standard 1v1 games are more balanced and to allow campaigns to use the new variable recall cost mechanic. Higher level units have also had a variety of adjustments to better balance the Age of Heroes era as well as survival scenarios where high level units are common. Level three advancements for the Saurian Oracle and Saurian Soothsayer have been added and the Orcish Nightblade now serves as the default advancement for the Orcish Slayer.

Campaigns

Campaigns menu screenshot

A new campaign, Winds of Fate, has been added to the game! This is the first Drake campaign to be included in Wesnoth, showing their fight for survival and tumultuous return to Wesnoth’s Great Continent as they flee their sinking island homes.

Eastern Invasion — the first Loyalist campaign ever added to Wesnoth — has been fully remade with far deeper characters and greater scenario variety augmented by much more dynamic AI opponents. Several lore conflicts with other campaigns have also been resolved.

And lastly, the Quenoth faction in the campaign Under the Burning Suns has been given an overhaul to make them more interesting — hero units can now gain unique bonuses when advancing while regular units have new abilities and new weapon effects for their attacks, making this a unique experience among Wesnoth’s campaigns.

Multiplayer

In-game game history viewer

Players can now view a history of their own previously played games and can search the history of other players as well by clicking the Match History button in the on-line multiplayer lobby. This shows information on the game itself, the players in the game, the era used, any modifications enabled, and lets you download the game’s replay to watch for yourself. Additionally, there’s an on-line dashboard available with more general data about games played.

Animated waterfall

A clear separation has been made for auto-hosted games such as Afterlife vs custom games hosted by other players. Games hosted by players will be in the General Lobby tab, while auto-hosted games will be in the Matchmaking tab. To aid with reporting problematic players or games, the /report command now shows a dialogue where information about the issue can be entered. And to better handle server disconnects due to network issues, Wesnoth will now automatically detect when your connection is lost and alert you to the problem.

The King of the Hill map has been updated to encourage players to claim the centre keep — whichever side holds the hill gains significant bonus income and the first player to take control will obtain a treasure chest containing a tidy sum.

And, as a cherry on top, the waterfall on Isar’s Cross is now animated.

For Content Creators

Achievements

Wesnoth now has built-in support for achievements! These achievements are not Steam achievements, however because of that they are not limited to a pre-defined set of achievements available only to the base game — add-ons can define their own achievements and can even add additional achievements to other add-ons or to mainline. For this initial version, achievements are already implemented for the tutorial campaign, Descent into Darkness, Eastern Invasion, Liberty, and the co-op multiplayer maps Dark Forecast, Isle of Mists, A New Land and Team Survival.

For distributing your add-ons, Wesnoth now allows using your forum user name and password when uploading. When using this approach, the add-on’s passphrase is instead stored in the encrypted credentials file rather than plain-text in your _server.pbl, which is more secure, but it also means that if you lose your password you can use the forum’s password recovery to regain access to your add-ons. Additionally, this allows specifying other users who are allowed to upload updates to the add-on, for add-ons which are developed collaboratively by multiple people. Your _server.pbl will also be validated prior to uploading your add-on, so you will know of any issues before the upload takes place rather than afterwards.

Raise/lowered terrain

The scenario editor has received a major upgrade: instead of only being able to understand single scenario files, it is now capable of creating the skeleton of a brand new add-on as well as providing a UI for creating the required _server.pbl. This means it’s now possible to create an add-on, the add-on’s _server.pbl, its scenarios, and upload the add-on for others to play, all from within Wesnoth.

The map editor similarly has been given a significant improvement: it’s now possible to add cliffs and valleys, which can be used to add quite a bit of depth to your maps. Beyond that, there’s been a variety of new terrains and fauna units added from palisade walls, seashell embellishments, and seaweed terrain to fire ants, giant jumping spiders, and rocs.

A wide variety of units have likewise had their sprites improved and had various animations added, primarily Loyalists, Orcs, and Trolls but also some Elf and Undead units.

And finally, LuaCATS documentation has been added for nearly all of the Lua functions that Wesnoth defines, providing auto-complete when typing and documentation when hovering over the function. This was written primarily for Visual Studio Code, but should work with any editor that has a LuaCATS plug-in.

Contribute

The Battle for Wesnoth is constantly being improved and expanded upon by a multitude of international volunteers from diverse backgrounds. Since its inception in July 2003, hundreds of people have contributed to all areas of the game, from mainline content shipped as part of the official releases to hundreds of player-made projects available to download from our add-ons server. Whether you need help beating a particular scenario or adding a feature to your custom maps, Wesnoth boasts a massive community of players and creators always willing to help.

Besides creating your own add-on content, there are many other ways you can help Wesnoth:

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