Versions 1.154.1 through 1.165.6 add persistent regional serf tenure and deliberate routes to freedom, introduce six curated starts, expand family enterprises and ruler households, and refine household planning, saves, mobile sheets, and army control.
Serf tenure and freedom
Every Serf household now holds a persistent customary tenure tied to its home, local authority, and regional way of life.
- Tenure and custom: Station & home records the household's ordinary work, scheduled obligations, customary rights, current lord, steward, and next duty.
- Regional service: Coastal, woodland, pastoral, irrigated, manorial, and household-service customs use different work, dues, rights, and event language.
- Recurring local people: Named lords, officers, witnesses, and neighbors return across household stories instead of being replaced by anonymous characters.
- Authority reviews: A change of ruler or local authority can trigger a formal review. The household may accept revised custom, resist it, seek witnesses, or commute an obligation.
Serfs now have four deliberate routes to freedom. A household can buy its charter, petition for negotiated manumission, prove an Old Custom claim through a multi-stage case, or flee to foreign protection. Purchase and manumission terms account for the family members named in the charter, and later succession preserves whether each relative was freed.
Six quick starts
New Game now places six one-click Serf lives above the ordinary starting-date choices:
The gallery includes Christian, pagan, Sunni, and Shia households in Ireland, Scandinavia, North Africa, and Egypt. Each card shows the character, homeland, culture, faith, and date, then begins the ordinary campaign constructor with those choices already made. Starting roles unlocked through earlier lives remain available through the full New Game path.
Enterprise upgrades and household management
Family enterprises can now grow beyond a single-worker business:
- Enterprise tiers: Farms, orchards, workshops, shops, trading houses, boats, and other businesses gain technology-gated expansions with higher staffing requirements.
- Broader benefits: Fully staffed upgrades can add population capacity, levy, retainers, migration attraction, prestige, crisis protection, or county development alongside ordinary profit.
- Staffing controls: Assign eligible relatives directly, protect pairings from the staffing assistant, review a complete proposed plan, or hire a qualified local worker for an immediate and seasonal wage.
- Ruler households: Landed rulers can maintain guard, scholarly, and chancery establishments that support armies, research, and domain capacity at increasingly senior ranks.
Household Plan also gives clearer access to education policy, enterprises, living standards, and descendant matches. Royal families can arrange and replace marriages for managed children and grandchildren while reviewing the partner and terms in the same flow.
Other changes
- Deeds: Settings can group actions into direct deeds, personal decisions, and ruler decisions. Runtime mods may assign the same optional action groups.
- Saves: Continue repairs malformed enterprise and legacy records where possible, reports the failed recovery stage when it cannot, and preserves readable saves across isolated repair failures.
- Interface: Compact Household Plan controls retain scroll position, return to the correct sheet, and keep staffing actions available. Self and Kin sheets pause time on phones and tablets without resizing the map.
- Feedback: Event-result toasts dismiss without changing panels by default, with the Chronicle shortcut available as a setting.
- Warfare: Manual host orders resist event-issued movement, while automated hosts can return to friendly territory to refit when supplies run low.
- Raiding and fealty: Independent raiding requires a landed ruler with a personal raiding tradition. Swear Fealty now lists only neighboring sovereigns with a higher title.
- Preview languages: Bound relatives use faith- and sex-appropriate station names in family views, and recent English records have refreshed French, German, Italian, and Spanish Preview catalogs.
Fallowborn is a free browser grand strategy game by one developer, built openly with AI assistance. Source on GitHub.