When: Thursday 22nd, 4-6pm EST

Why: you're cool

Despite (or perhaps because of) the heady rush of time flowing past us, we're working harder than ever on getting the beta into your hands. It's proving a slippery eel of a deadline, always slightly out of reach, but we're hoping we can host the first window in November.

That's right, a beta window ! It won't be 3 solid months of testing. We're going to be giving you a build for 1 week (5-7 days) at a time and then asking you to cool it while we fix it before the next window. Each window will include more and more folks, and we'll have a different survey each time to get your new feedback. This will help us focus and cut down on duplicate reports.

We'll start with the higher-level backers, then work our way down eventually to all the backers, plus maybe a few lucky random drawing winners. Marcelo and Jongwoo will make a special bug report tool for you, built right into the game. So maybe we'll get overwhelmed with amazing reports, or maybe we'll need to scramble and find more beta testers so that we can make sure we have a smooth launch. We'll seeeeee!

Chop Chop Pow!

Generating Issaria

Mina from Battle Chef Brigade has been contracted as a caterer for the mountain tribe's First Moon Feast, all the way from Victusia. As her cuisine reigns supreme, she's got some important tips for cooking novices... assuming you're not vegetarian. This lovely little animation sequence by Mike Horowitz shows Mina's precision and poise.The talented folks over at Trinket Studios are also inviting a Moon Hunter to enroll in their Kitchen Colosseum, though they're undecided as to whether the dark arts of Enheduanna the Ritualist or the fiery temper of Sargon the Sun Cultist will better-suit their barracks. If you want to give them your opinion, drop them a tweet Issaria, so named after the Moon Goddess Issar, is the land our heroes journey through. And due to a recent round of optimizations, we can now see almost every step of the map generation as it goes! Obviously we'll hide this in the final game, but we thought some of you might be nerds like us and enjoy seeing how the world gets put together on-the-fly to be different every time:

We're only sharing 1 gif per biome, but obviously there could be thousands... millions... each with a different configuration! If you're curious about the details of what's going on, here's a link to our Reddit post explaining thestep-by-step of the algorithm by Mike Ditchburn. Although he's no longer at Kitfox, his world-generating skills live on in the game.

Fan Art Contest Results

We got a bunch of amazing works of art from our fan art contest last month, so I'm sure the Super Blood Moon goddess (and whoever eclipsed Her) was appeased. At Kitfox HQ we read poetry, admired drawings, and drooled over the most creative submission yet, in which a chef created a new cake recipe based on Moon Hunters canon ingredients!