Blog Post 5: Anniversary Update

Hello everyone!

As you have probably guessed from the letter above, today we are celebrating our anniversary - exactly 1 year ago Bellwright was released into early access. This year was neither easy nor boring. Through several major updates, multiple smaller ones and dozens of patches with bugfixes we resolved early stability and performance problems, added lots of important quality of life improvements, introduced new mechanics and overall improved the game in so many ways that it’s impossible to list all of them in a single post.

And all of this would be impossible without you: your relentless support, feedback and suggestions, videos and streams, mods, discord discussions... All of this provides invaluable help in development and constant motivation for making the game better. Saying that we are happy about the game's community would be a severe understatement. Special shoutout to our preview players - thanks to your help most of the gamebreaking bugs never make it into the public build.

Anniversaries are a time to look back, but also to keep moving forward. So what’s new in this Anniversary Update? By far the biggest addition is animal husbandry, bringing chickens, pigs and cows into your settlements. Whether you want just a few animals for your cozy homestead or you're planning to breed and trade livestock for profit, we hope that you’ll enjoy animal husbandry as much as we do.

Fishing, consistently one of your top feature requests ever since the Bellwright demo at Steam Next Fest in 2023, also makes its long-awaited debut, alongside traveling merchants, a library structure to automate book reading by your villagers, the ability to save squad rosters, and much more.

And as a special anniversary surprise… We’re excited to open signups for Bellwright Modkit testing!

After a year of working on the game alongside you, we can't wait to see the new adventures that you'll bring to life on your own. The test will begin within a few weeks and spots are limited, so be sure to sign up soon and help shape the future of Bellwright modding!

Sign up here: https://playbellwright.com/modkit