Everyone who has played Lantern Hollow so far has played as the same person. Same hair, same shirt, same everything, four of you round a fire looking like one wanderer copied out four times. That stops today.
Dress your wanderer
Appearance is a proper screen now, reached from the title. Tabs run along the top for your build, your hair, your top, your legs and your feet — the shoulder buttons on a pad, Q and E on a keyboard, or just tap them. Eight haircuts, five tops, three pairs of trousers and two pairs of shoes.
It is 1999 in the hollow, and the wardrobe knows it: hooped rugby shirts, shell suits, plaid over a tee, football tops, hoodies, baggy jeans, trackies with the stripe down the leg, cargos, chunky trainers and heavy boots. Pick a build, a skin tone, a hair colour and a shirt colour to go with it.
The preview turns on the spot while you choose, because half of what you pick is on your back and you should get to see it. Whatever you settle on, you wear it out on the moor — and so does everyone else at your fire.
Some of it has to be earned
Not all of it is yours on day one. The boots want three nights survived, the shell suit seven, the cargos fourteen. The trackies take an hour at the fire and the plaid four. The hoodie is for anyone who owns the game.
Locked pieces are still there to try on, with a line underneath telling you exactly what would unlock them, and what you have earned is remembered against your account rather than the machine you earned it on. Sign in on a phone and your wardrobe is already waiting.
Going down is not the end
Run out of health with friends around and you no longer wake up at the tent having lost the night. You go down, and you wait. A friend with a bandage brings you round; carry one yourself and you can bind it and get back up alone. There is a bandage by the tent when a run starts and the trader sells them. Only when everyone is down does the night actually end.
While you were away
The last post here was v0.0.14, and a fair amount has landed since.
- Four friends to find. Alex, Sam, Jamie and Rowan are out on the moor, each further from the fire than the last. Bring them home and they take a seat at the fire, take a job each by day, and swing at whatever comes into the light on siege nights.
- A map table you can craft and set down in camp, showing the moor at one pixel a tile as far as the fire reaches, filling in as you explore.
- Weather. Showers cross the moor, and rain makes the fire eat through wood half again as fast.
- The Hollow was redesigned. The thing that hunts you at night is no longer a spidery silhouette but a formless drift of shadow with a ragged crown, shedding pieces of itself as it moves.
- Phones and tablets. The game reaches iOS through TestFlight and Android through Google Play.
Odds and ends
- Sound has a page of its own, with a volume you can actually set, and Controls does too. Options is three doors now rather than one long list.
- Updates follow your account. No more copying an alpha key into Options — sign in and the game asks about new builds itself. Copies from a shop keep themselves up to date and say nothing at all.
- Linux is an AppImage rather than a deb, so it runs on Fedora and the Steam Deck as happily as on Debian.
- Traps catch supper when left set out away from camp, and shardbacks drop pelts the trader wants.
- Drop and Eat, in the bag. Drag a stack onto Drop to throw it out, or onto Eat when it is food. There is an eat button on a touchscreen at last — it was never there, which is why eating from the bag on a phone did nothing.
The full list is in the changelog, the new screenshots are on the screenshots page, and the build is waiting on your download page.
One thing worth saying plainly: everyone at the same fire needs v0.0.22. What you are wearing travels to the other people at your fire, and an older build has no idea what a shell suit is.
The free alpha closes on Monday 21 September, a week from today. £4.99 keeps every build coming after that, and locks that price for good.