Sunless Skies' Wayfarer Update coming next month

This reworks the Albion map and introduces new narrative elements to the experience, aiming to provide variety to your journeys.

Sunless Skies launched back in January of this year, but developer Failbetter Games has revealed more details on the first major update to the game, which will rework Albion and add a whole load of narrative on April 9, as detailed on Steam.

The Wayfarer Update has changed the Albion map by "improving the general look and atmosphere of the region" - as you can see in the screenshots below - as well as adding more terrain to make navigation and combat more interesting. Albion will still be an open space compared to the Reach, except in a select number of places like the Ormswald. Below you can see a comparison of Traitor's Wood when the team were designing it (first image) and one of the new areas in Albion (coloured patches and letters in images being related to agent and discovery spawning):

Failbetter is also looking to provide more variety in the discoveries, creatures, and locomotives you can encounter, reducing how predictable some areas are and giving an incentive to revisit areas after you've been there once. If this works we can expect more of these measures for other regions, and the developer asks for feedback about this.

More narrative encounters that can happen during voyages will be added as well, with the aim being to include many new ways to encounter the gods of the skies for better or for worse; including a number of delayed consequences for suffering the attacks of certain enemies, especially Guests; introducing the possibility to investigate several "wonders and horrors of the skies" when you go near them; and making it so that sometimes you can deploy officers to pursue opportunities on the shore, being focused on Albion for now. Failbetter wants to deliver on all these points, but for now they're saying "most" are coming with the update.

Are you excited to see these changes in action?