Iron Village — patch notes and updates
Stored observation / content update:
Dated developer announcements recorded from Steam. Open the source for the complete update.
| Update | Date | Excerpt / source |
|---|---|---|
| Diary #74 - 1.3.05 Release Notes | 2026-10-06 | Just a small update for Iron Village in the midst of Project OY production.Fixed a misspelling of a name in the credits. 🏳️⚧️ |
| Diary #73 – Don’t Worry, I’m Still Around | 2026-07-09 | Hi all, so it's been awhile since the last dev diary... I've still been working on Project OY, but there's been a bunch of personal & family things going on over here so there hasn't been time to communicate much about the project. (That'll likely be the case for the next month too, FYI.)(An in-engine shot of something being worked on.)I did make a start on one dev diary, which was going to be a structured rant about how I hate "AI", but there's just so many reasons that it became a bit of a mess. It was either going to become a disorganized manifesto, its own project that sucked up all the negative free time I had, or both. In lieu of actual |
| Diary #72 – 1.3.02 Release Notes | 2026-03-24 | To celebrate a whole year of Iron Village being available to the public, the 1.3 update is releasing today! (March 24th, 2026) The biggest feature is tree planting: once you get the Full Agricultural Permit, you can start planting your own trees. I haven’t personally run into a situation where I’ve completely run out of trees, but if you want to replant some of your deforested regions, you now have the power to do so. They do take awhile to grow though, so be prepared to wait.The other big part of this update is a fix for the Android Demo. As I’ve mentioned before, there are 16 different builds I make per release of Iron Village. For minor up |
| Diary #71 - Yet More Games I've Played (Part 3) | 2026-03-20 | In this dev diary I’ll be wrapping up my 2025 games played review. But first, a quick announcement – Iron Village 1.3 will be releasing on March 24th, the one year anniversary of 1.0’s release! It’s not a huge update, just some bug fixes and a small tree feature I’ll go into detail about next time, but it’s still something! Iron Village is currently on sale for 35% off, so if you don’t have it already go ahead and snag it now. Anyway, now for your scheduled programming:The Wandering Village The Wandering Village is a city builder with a twist: you’re building on top of a giant wandering creature called an Onbu. On top of handling the needs of |
| Diary #70 - More Games I've Played (Part 2) | 2026-02-24 | Project OY development continues (I'll have another update on Patreon soon), and there's an Iron Village update in the works (!), but for now, we're going to continue with my 2025 games recap.Paradise KillerI barely know how to describe Paradise Killer. To put it dryly, you play "Lady Love Dies", summoned from exile to investigate the murder of the island's council. You go around and gather evidence to provide in trial at the end of the game.Describing it like that would do the game a huge injustice though. It's a completely surreal experience, from the setting (a regenerating island meant to eventually resurrect fallen deities, but gets corr |
| Diary #69 - Some Nice Games I Played (Part 1) | 2026-01-30 | With Project OY development fully underway (and still unannounced), there's not really so much actual game development for me to talk about in these dev diaries. After the Steam Replay for 2025, I did think of an idea: why not write a little bit about it and make that a dev diary post?So, why post this almost a month after 2025 is done? Well, (1) I was busy during the holiday season, including everyone getting sick, (2) there's something about leaving out 2 weeks of data in December that really bugs me, and (3) the start of this year has been... a lot.I'll be going through my own Steam Replay semi-chronologically and giving a few of my though |
| Diary #68 - 1.2.14 Release Notes | 2026-01-13 | Surprise, it's another update for Iron Village! Iron Village got a big bump in sales recently, which initially looked like an end-of-sale spike, but turned out to be driven by this video by the Geek Cupboard:It's awesome to see Iron Village popping up still, but of course more players means more opportunities for bug reports! There were two bugs reported last week:On Android, the foundation for the Magick Transformer was missing, so the player couldn't build it.On the Steam Deck (but also PC), the controller would stop responding when going back to the menu, even though the menu was in focus.I'm still not 100% sure what happened for #1, espec |
| Diary #67 – A Look Back on 2025 | 2025-12-31 | I know, I know, you’re looking at that title and thinking, why on earth would I want to look back on this year?! And yes, the world is uh, not doing so well, but we’re at least going to take a look back at the year from the perspective of Lunar Chippy Games.But first, if you’re reading this and haven’t bought Iron Village yet – it’s 30% off for the rest of the year!Iron Village at BostonFIG back in December 2024The biggest date of course was March 24th, but I’ll backtrack a little bit first. Iron Village was at BostonFIG on December 15th, so after that and holiday shenanigans, the year started off with implementing the crazy amount of feedbac |
| Diary #66 – 1.2.09 Release Notes | 2025-12-04 | So thanks to a bug report on some missing achievements, we have a new release of Iron Village coming your way! There are two main fixes here:#1: Achievement Synchronization: When you load a save file, the game will manually check everything and unlock achievements as appropriate. For some reason somebody’s game didn’t unlock the Artificer’s Guild and Deep Mine achievements when they built them, and prior to 1.2.09 the game would never go back and try to unlock them again. This fixes that problem by adding a redundant layer to catch these sorts of missing achievements on a regular basis. (In fact, this logic was already in use for a few achiev |
| Diary #65 – 1.2.08 Release Notes | 2025-11-22 | Hi all, so our big “Puritans & Capitalism” sale started yesterday, which I would’ve announced beforehand, but rather fittingly I came down with a fever and was barely able to flip the switch on the associated 1.2.08 update, let alone post anything coherently.Anyway, I’m starting to do a lot better now, so, let’s get in to the massive list of new features:Replaced the Wishlist button with a button linking to Patreon (a.k.a. a “give me more money please” button).Did a bunch of code cleanup and hopefully didn’t break anything.…and that was it for this update. I actually thought there was at least one more related to localization, but it must’ve |
| Diary #64 – Patreon | 2025-11-07 | An expanded version of the teaser shot I posted earlier. Note the beautiful default UI.Well, it’s finally here: the Lunar Chippy Games Patreon has launched! I kept procrastinating it because I’m still really bad at self promotion, asking for money, and generally dealing with self doubt, but I’ve finally pushed the button! If you want to go ahead and support our development, as well as get sneak peaks at the development of “Project OY”, then go ahead and jump aboard!The player, shown inside with the walls cut away. They’ve forgotten their clothes. 🙃$4/month gets you access to regular screenshots and the occasional early dev diary, while $8/mo |
| Diary #63 - Semi-Automation | 2025-10-27 | One thing that comes up a lot in any sort of software engineering is the concept of automation: how can we take repetitive, error-prone tasks and automate them? This is where you get things like automated testing and automated build systems. It's also part of why the LLM nonsense known as "AI" has taken over billionaires' brains: the idea of replacing their "entitled workers" with slop is just too enticing, apparently. There's also the idea that in a lot of projects, especially programming and game development, that the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time. (Sometimes it's 80 out of 100, sometimes it's an additional 80%, but either way |
| Steam Deck Compatibility Info | 2025-10-26 | Hi all, for whatever reason Steam says that posting an "event" is the best way to document Steam Deck compatibility, so I figured I'd make this post so that it's properly documented. (Sorry, nothing new in this "announcement", but there'll be another dev diary soon!)As of the 26th of October, 2025, Iron Village is still listed as "Unknown" Steam Deck compatibility. This is just because there haven't been quite enough sales to get it on Valve's review queue. However, I can assure all of you:Iron Village has been designed from (nearly) the beginning to work well on the Steam Deck, and we regularly confirm that it works as part of the update rel |
| Diary #62 - 1.2.06 Release Notes | 2025-10-17 | Surprise, another update has landed! Just a couple of days after submitting 1.2.01 to Google Play, a new deadline popped up: Submit a version that supports 16kb memory page sizes by the end of October, or else! Luckily around the exact same time, Godot 4.5 was released, which had the necessary support for the memory page size update. Since I needed to make an update anyway, I squeezed a couple of bug fixes in as well:Fix an issue where you sometimes couldn’t move a building to a position that overlaps its prior position, even though the cursor correctly rendered in blue. (Thanks to a bug in the code, you could only do so if moving the buildin |
| Diary #61 – Sale Retrospectives | 2025-10-03 | Yes, the Autumn Sale isn’t actually over yet, but I was looking for something to talk about in this dev diary, and thought it might be interesting. First though, a huge thank you to everyone: Iron Village has now surpassed 50 reviews (54 as of time of writing!), making it “Very Positive” in Steam’s eyes. I literally couldn’t have done it without you all – I mean, I didn’t write any of the reviews, so *I* didn’t actually do any of it.So as you may or may not know, discounted sales are a huge chunk of total sales. Outside of the initial launch, they are the vast majority of sales. If you look at the graph below of net sales over time, you can s |
| Diary #60 – 1.2 Launch & The Future | 2025-09-26 | So it looks like the Iron Village 1.2 launch has gone pretty smoothly! Apart from the bug that caused 1.2.03, there haven’t been any significant issues, and the launch sale has gone well so far. (As long as you say it’s “25% off” instead of “$2 USD off”, it sounds like a decent discount, haha.)\ Side note: if you’ haven’t ‘ve bought Iron Village, but haven’t left a review, please take the time to do so! Iron Village only needs two more reviews to reach the magic 50, which puts the word “Very” in front of “Positive”. I’m not entirely sure if it has a direct algorithmic impact, but it definitely has an impact on people when viewing the store pa |
| Diary #59 - 1.2.03 Release Notes | 2025-09-19 | As is tradition, we have another post-release patch! Nothing game-breaking this time, but a couple of issues were reported, and I uncovered a separate minor bug along the way.Fixed an issue where the tutorial bubble informing you of the HQ's upgradability would not disappear after actually building it. (Additional code has also been added to fix it in old saves.)Fixed the Grand Headquarters achievement to actually unlock upon building it. (Additional code has also been added to unlock it in old saves.)Fixed an issue where villagers entering the HQ (base level) would disappear at the cliff rather than taking the time to actually walk up the st |
| Diary #58 - 1.2.02 Release Notes | 2025-09-18 | Iron Village 1.2 is now out! Here's a full list of features, changes, fixes, etc:Show an icon over a building when it is being demolished/chopped down.Add charts for current and maximum production rates of resources, unlockable via levels of the Railway Headquarters.Created new icons for farm fields that are rotated from their base option.Stopped minecart animations from automatically playing, regardless of whether or not workers are present.Target SDK on Android has now been set to 35 to comply with Play Store requirements.Some resource piles now have upgraded graphics.The City Status Permit now contains a line referring to the palace that i |
| Diary #57 – Iron Village 1.2 Features | 2025-09-05 | It’s been almost 3 months since the last major update, and it’s time to give a full preview of what’s coming in the update. The plan is to release the 1.2 update on Thursday, September 18th – all of the major features are done, it’s mostly just some minor bugfixes I’m trying to squeeze in, plus some more thorough testing, so I don’t see a reason why the date will change. Here’s what you can expect in this update:UI UpdatesThe lower right corner of the user interface with the new graphics applied.Probably one of the first things you’ll notice. I’ve implemented the updated Minifantasy UI (with some modifications), giving the panel textures a mo |
| Diary #56 – The Iron Village Cinematic Universe | 2025-08-27 | When I stopped working at my corpo tech job, I assumed that I would magically get the time to put out some sort of dev diary every week. Maybe that’ll still happen, especially if I do start a Patreon, but that has definitely not been the case recently. Instead, it’s been the two weeks between my two oldest kids going to summer camp, and them going to school. Some highlights include:Trying to get my oldest to not spend all of his time on the computer without being a hypocrite.A reintroduction to Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease, this time in my youngest kid.Moderating interpersonal conflicts between the three of them. (Yes, it is frustrating deal |
| Diary #55 – Turning Points | 2025-08-11 | Disclaimer: Not in game footage. No curved tracks are planned for Iron Village, sorry.\\So things are changing over here, and I’m going to potentially overshare personal life things that are relevant to Iron Village & Lunar Chippy Games as a whole.First off, the job at the global megacorp, or whatever I called it back at the start of these dev diaries, is coming to an end. There was a “voluntary exit program” with severance pay offered, and I figured it was time to make the jump. I’m not going to go into all of the details (personal privacy reasons mainly; everything I’m talking about is discussing working conditions and is therefore protecte |
| Diary #54 – Workers and Resources: Iron Village | 2025-07-30 | The theme of the 1.2 update. Original logo ©3Division. I hope you'll forgive my very dumb visual gag 😅. I had an idea and it stuck in my head.I haven’t put one of these dev diaries together in a bit, life has been a bit hectic, but I wanted to talk about the infrastructure behind the new UI windows that let you get a closer look at your… workers and resources.I showed the maximum production rates in the last diary, but compared to implementing the current production rate charts, that was pretty easy: check the building counts (how many of each building we have), look up the inputs, outputs, and production times, and calculate the maximum out |
| Dev Diary #53 – OK, What’s Next? | 2025-07-30 | Developer's note: apparently this has been sitting as an unpublished draft for two weeks - sorry about that!OK, so the latest patch has been out for a bit, and is mostly stable. It feels like it's been awhile since my last dev diary, but apparently it's only been around 2 weeks? Blame that on mental health and work shenanigans I guess? (That'll probably be a separate dev diary, but I'm not ready to write that just yet.)So what's happening now? First of all, the 1.2 update. The star feature of 1.2 will be... data analysis! Sounds super exciting, right? But really, one feature that was requested by some players was a way to better see what's go |
| Diary #52 – 1.1.06 & 1.1.07 Release Notes | 2025-06-30 | So uh, sorry about that everyone! I managed to create a new bug in 1.1.05, so a fix went into 1.1.06, but then another bug was reported the next day which warranted the release of 1.1.07. Now that those are sorted, I’m back on feature work, but I wanted to talk a bit about what happened and why.1.1.06So you may remember my long explanation of the color bug fixed by 1.1.05, and maybe you thought, “wow, this guy went into a lot of detail about this bug, he seems to know what he’s doing”. It turns out, nope. While fixing the problem, I decided to go ahead and write some code to manually write out the color, rather than relying on the default ser |
| Diary #51 - But what about second [bugfix]? | 2025-06-23 | Alternative Title: "Oops, I did it again!"So uh, I have yet another bugfix update that just dropped (except on Google Play, 1.1.04 didn't even get approved there yet, so we'll be going straight to 1.1.05 once I get a payments "issue" sorted). There's two bugs fixed, so I figure I'll explain a little about how they happened, and what the fixes entail.Bright White Hair & Train CarsSo this one seems simple enough to explain: in some situations, loading a save will cause some of the villagers to have bright white hair, and some of the train cars to be bright white. However, the cause has to do with commas, periods, and (parts of) Europe*. The mai |
| Diary #50 - Not That Bad of a Screw-Up | 2025-06-22 | As tends to happen with major releases, a couple of new bugs managed to crawl in. Nothing game-breaking, but they're prominent enough that I figured I should deploy a new update. Since I was also working on new features/tweaks, there's a couple new things here as well! The full release notes:Allowed non-demolishable buildings to be moved, as long as they are marked as moveable. Among other things, this allows you to move the storage buildings you start with.Fixed an issue where one of the two squares reserved for the logistics office was allowed for building, but an adjacent open square was blocked.Adjusted the camera bounds to make it easier |
| Diary #49 – 1.1 Released! | 2025-06-19 | It’s out! About 2.5 months of part time work has led to the 1.1 release, with a bunch of new features, “content”, and bugfixes. To celebrate, Iron Village will be available for 20% off on Steam and Itch!An image summary of the new features in Iron Village 1.1.A full set of release notes will follow, but in summary:Русский & 한국어 Translations: Iron Village now has options to play in Russian and Korean.Android Release: The full game of Iron Village will be available for purchase on Google Play and Itch.io for Android devices!Construct a Fortress: Later in the game, you can construct an imposing fortress at the exit of your town. This will improv |
| Diary #48 – What About Revenue & Profit? | 2025-05-25 | This is the counterpart to Diary #45 – How Much Does an Iron Village Cost to Make?, let’s talk about how much money Iron Village has brought in, and then do the obvious comparison with how much has been spent. Don’t worry, more Iron Village 1.1 content is coming soon – because most of the content is done! Since the day job has been getting a bit crazy recently (in more ways than one), progress has been sporadic, and I’ve avoided giving any release dates. That trend will continue (I’m still avoiding release dates), but my bug and feature tracking list is quite a bit shorter than when I started – the end of this update is in sight! A preview of |
| Diary #47 – Vacación, Deadly Pollen, and Conventions | 2025-05-10 | A literal anti-fascist locomotive at the Museo del Ferrocarril de Madrid. (Full description in the image below.) Alt text for this available at https://bsky.app/profile/mgruar.bsky.social/post/3lnfxgflins22 It has been a properly insane three weeks since the last dev diary. Somehow I have actually got a bit of work done on Iron Village (more on that in a bit), but I felt like sharing a least a little of what’s happened: A pretty great family vacation to Madrid. Horribly bad pollen allergies that made me legit need to take sick days from the day job and this job. GodotCon & PAX East The first two are fairly self-explanatory, I hope. On Tuesday |
| Diary #46 – Mid-April Status Update | 2025-04-16 | Hey everyone, I just wanted to pop in with a little status report before I’m off on a family vacation for a bit over a week. As I’ve mentioned before, the first main update to Iron Village is to give it a “soft ending”, tying up the (light) story of why you are building this village and signaling to players that there’s no more “content” beyond this point. For Iron Village, this takes the form of a City Establishment Ceremony. Monarch Faearn shows up in their Royal Train, conducts a ceremony, attends a feast, and then officially designates your town as a City. All of the preparation, as well as the train and the monarch themselves, have been |