Hearth: how large a city your land can feed, two new skins and an achievements leaderboard
Hearth: a city builder for worldbuilders and game masters
A new app joins the Toolbox. Pick a place (climate, terrain, water, the rocks underneath), a size from a hamlet of a hundred to a city of a million, and Hearth tells you what it takes: how much farmland, how far the carts go, how many villages and farmers around it, the wood it burns, what it makes and what it must buy.
The city asked for is always the one described. A city too large for its land is told what it costs: grain brought by river or by sea, harder lords, a strained countryside.
The sheet reads like a city, in plain words: its area and walls, households and parishes, the districts where trades gather (the market, the quays, the tanners downstream, the fire trades at the edge), thirty-one trades, most of them counted from the Paris tax roll of 1292, the market, the bad years, and what a plague or a famine leaves behind.
Power: the regime, what lords, tithes and taxes take, a public granary. Techniques and eras change the yields, the carts and the trades.
Fantasy: cities carved under the mountain and fed from the caverns below, forges on lava, hot springs.
Your universe: your own goods, cultures and food crops, computed like Hearth's own and kept on your account. One of each without Patreon; as many as you like with it.
Eight cultures give the sheet its words: European, Roman, Arab-Persian, Nahua, Inca, Song China, Mande and Dwarven.
A region: several cities, the roads, rivers and sea lanes between them, realms with their borders, tolls and tribute. Import an Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator map and its towns become a region.
Every sheet plays its sounds: an ambience for the town, its districts and its trades, from the MGS Audio catalogue.
Honest about what it knows: sourced figures and Hearth's estimates are told apart, and the sources are listed in the menu.
Copy a city as text for a wiki, World Anvil or Kanka, or send it to Foundry as a journal entry. With Patreon, its ambiences go with it into a playlist.
Two hundred reference pages in each language, by place, rock, trade, staple, regime and culture, linked to Crystal, Metals and Rerum.
Ten achievements, from a city fed by a whole empire to the plague, by way of the tribute you would like your own vassal to pay you.
Two new skins (Patreon)
Drow Me Like One of Your French Girls: obsidian and violet stone, magenta as the only vivid accent. The skin moves: the vein beats, a drop runs down it, faerzress rises off the floor, the fungal glow breathes, and a spider comes down over the windows. Nothing moves on busy tables, and if your system asks for less motion, the skin stays still.
Probing Uranus: night-blue ink, silver lines, a star chart and its instruments, stars turning in the rail.
Fixed: on both skins, buttons shaped as links are readable again ("Launch the application" on the Hub). The Probing Uranus rail is darker so its text stands out. The texture behind windows loads with the page: no more flat colour on the first menu.
Achievements: the leaderboard
The twenty accounts that have unlocked the largest share of the catalogue, and your own rank.
Only a pseudonym you choose is shown, otherwise "Anonymous adventurer".
Each achievement shows the share of accounts that hold it, once at least twenty accounts are counted.
Crystal
257 entries instead of 171: twelve varieties and materials (agate, onyx, jasper, moss agate, jadeite, nephrite, zoisite, orthoclase, lazurite, pearl, mother of pearl, coral), 41 ore minerals (tetrahedrite, acanthite, cobaltite, molybdenite, bauxite, native platinum…) so every real metal has its ores, and 33 rocks, from granite to gneiss, with their minerals, formation and uses.
Fourteen kinds of ore deposit have their own page (placer, vein, porphyry, skarn, laterite, kimberlite pipe, pegmatite…), with the metals they yield.
Every entry says what it is (species, variety, group, rock, organic material, trade name) and links to its varieties or members. Filter and search by kind.
The existing entries were read one by one against their sources (Handbook of Mineralogy, the IMA list, Mindat, GIA, USGS): over six hundred corrections, from formulas to known localities and French names. Every entry is now sourced or marked provisional, and every page has its Sources block.
3D specimens: the Forge offers new matrices (on a slab, sawn and polished with its agate bands, in a geode, cathedral geode, in a vein) and "Floater" for a crystal with no matrix. Nodules are round and smooth, crusts form grape-like clusters, and glowing cores finally show through the glass. A shadow sets the crystal on its rock, and exported cards are sharp.
The mouse wheel only zooms a specimen once you have clicked it: otherwise the page scrolls as usual.
Metal Encyclopedia
Every real metal lists its ores, dated historical or modern, and the deposits it comes from. Alloys give their composition and their history.
Rerum Natura
Every ingredient says where it is found: 97 ingredients that grew "everywhere" now have their places, from real ranges and the habitats of the DMG and the Monster Manuals.
New places: farmland, Gehenna, Hades, ley lines, planar rifts, karst, salt flats, inselbergs, and a family of ultramafic rocks (peridotite, kimberlite, serpentinite…).
Powders say what they are made from, and Crystal and Metals say what their entries are used for in alchemy.
Encyclopedia search ignores accents.
MGS Audio
The format picker only offers what your account may download, and a refused format says so plainly.
Bandcamp FAQ: why an album obtained with a download code does not show up (Bandcamp only shares actual sales with us).
Bearer
The Chinese excavation licence is now read off licence No. 1 of 1935 (Academia Sinica, for Anyang): its wording, its title, its numbered counterfoil. It is set in Kai like the original and carries the two ministries' real seals, white on red. New field: the head of the institution.
Fixed: the print PDF draws the inside cover as the screen does. With two desks open, the second one's contents and word lists no longer answer for the first. Errors say again whether you need Patreon or to sign in, and saving while signed out no longer asks for a photograph.
Crafting Table
Fixed: equipment with a socketed gem can no longer be deleted by mistake, gem crafting notes are shown, and only D&D 5e sheets can be used as characters.
The Hub
The Campaigns page is redesigned: one tab per campaign with Create and Join windows, the GM's invite code as a ticket, the system editable in place, one card per settlement with its Crafting Table, players alongside.
Sharing an app's address in a chat now shows a picture of the app (Bearer's booklet, a Crystal 3D specimen, a screenshot for the others) instead of the studio's icon.
Fixed: with Brave or an ad blocker, the first tab reloaded twice and lost its address (a Passage journey sent to Bearer landed on a blank passport).
MGS Toolbox for Foundry
1.5.0: Bearer's window shows authority and page names instead of raw ids, a full Polish booklet fits, and a refused passport tells the GM. At the Crafting Table, a player can no longer act as another player's character. Chat messages are no longer dressed twice on Foundry v13 and v14, and two tracks with the same title no longer overwrite each other.
1.6.0: Hearth comes to Foundry. A city sent from Hearth becomes a journal entry, and with Patreon its ambiences arrive in the "Hearth ambiences" playlist.
Update the module from Foundry's Add-on Modules page ("Update" on MGS Toolbox) or from the Hub page "MGS Toolbox for Foundry".