Clockwork Empires dev update introduces hunger, biomes

Clockwork Empires has progressed significantly since we last checked in with Gaslamp Games' steampunk colonisation sim, adding a number of new features and attendent hilarious bugs.

The latest additions detailed in a new developer blog include a hunger system. Gaslamp apparently plans to implement starting loadouts, but for now, settlers need to start harvesting food as soon as a new colony is founded.

Unfortunately, in a recent test, only one settler managed to find a food source, and as his priorities were a little skewed, he composed a poem to the berry bush and starved to death. Which is pretty great.

Once Gaslamp got its AI to behave more sensibly, it had to deal with more issues - characters trying to eat food others were holding, invisible food, food someone else was eating, and so on. Which also sounds pretty great but will probably be fixed.

Elsewhere, Gaslamp has implemented a biome generator to create terrain of various kinds, including marsh and forest. It's also put in a wood gathering system, which resulted in a poet having his chopped off somehow, which makes three great things in one update. The developer has also been spending time on networking, and will soon move onto filling the environments with animals.

Clockwork Empires is a pretty ravishing-sounding sim with all sorts of fantasy and historical influences, generated buildings, supernatural forces and other ridiculously sexy stuff. It's Gaslamp's second major project following the tongue-in-cheek rogue-like Dungeons of Dredmor.