DevBlog: The Passage

Dearest Elaine,
I’ve few breaths left. I die never having found a Passage, but then no glory awaits any servant of Sir John. He was certain the ice would not thicken around us in Spring. Fate of expedition now rests on circumnavigation of Terrier Island by short, perilous west shore, or by long, open east channel— fear I know what Sir John will prefer.
Farewell my Elaine.

The frozen north, a final frontier many felt it was their destiny to conquer, whether in the name of science, or for fame and riches. The “Northwest Passage” was a fabled sea route through the Arctic that promised to connect opposite sides of the Northern Hemisphere, conferring great wealth upon anyone brave enough to take an expedition deep into the ice.

From lush jungles to the frozen wastes – A chilling change of scenery
Our third and biggest Season Pass DLC, “The Passage,” tells a story of bravery and hardship, inspired by the valiant souls who risked their life in the name of progress, and tasks you to establish an outpost in the Arctic Circle. The sight of the eerie and beautiful wilderness invites everyone to follow in the footsteps of the Arctic explorers of the 19^th century, while seasoned Anno players can look forward to an exciting challenge with a worthy payoff at the end.

The Arctic biome is a welcome change to the milder climate of the Old World and the hot and humid islands in the New World. Frozen shores under a dark sky, this barren wasteland allows us to tell a different kind of tale than you might be used to in Anno 1800™, and the harsh weather conditions offer interesting new gameplay elements. Our goal was that conquering the Arctic session should be an exciting endeavor as it will require you to rethink your strategies, away from raising big cities to carefully maintaining an outpost in a seemingly hostile environment.

The new campaign chapter of The Passage will send you on a rescue mission of an Arctic expedition. Inspired by the events of the Franklin Expedition, searching for Sir John and his crew will unfold a dramatic series of events with an unclear outcome.

We need to keep our people warm – managing an Arctic outpost
With much potential for striking visuals and room for interesting gameplay additions, we knew that the Arctic biome would be a perfect opportunity to play around with new gameplay mechanics. The new region should be an exciting adventure for everyone but a true challenge for achievers who want to conquer the wasteland in order to reap significant rewards.

Harsh weather conditions are your dire enemy in the north and the new heating mechanic will challenge you to rethink the way you used to create layouts in order to keep your residents warm and healthy. The two new residential tiers, explorers and technicians, are audacious adventurers who, in the name of progress, turned their back to the amenities and comfort of the modern city life.

While their population needs reflect rather pragmatic necessities, the wasteful luxury goods got replaced by the much more urgent need for heat. Residential buildings as well as production facilities need to be connected to a heat source to function properly, with the new category of goods providing additional ways of keeping your residents warm and heathy. The new heaters serve here as the foundation, radiators which allow you to provide a basic level of heat for every building in the vicinity. Like the electric power plant, it automatically places heat pipes along the street network, and thus is relying on street distance rather than a radius. But as its effectiveness is limited, maintaining and expanding your outpost becomes a jigsaw puzzle of proper space and heat management.

The Northern Hemisphere is an icy wasteland, and construction space, as well as basic resources, are sparse. Heaters operate by burning coal, which is hard to come by and requires you to construct charcoal kilns in the sparsely populated woods on islands located on the south or to import coal from the Old World all the way back to your Arctic outpost.
New goods such as sleeping bags or parkas will provide an additional source of comfort and thus let the heat meter rise. If you won’t be able to connect buildings to a heater, or if your fuel support falters, goods can provide a sufficient level of heat depending how well you can or want to supply your Arctic residents.
But with decreasing temperatures, the risk for a dreaded disease rises: The Arctic Flu. Similar to the illness in the Old World at first glance, the Arctic Flu is a much more dire opponent for your residents due to the harsh living conditions in the North. It spreads faster, is more resilient and has the potential to not only paralyze your fickle northern infrastructure but will also take its toll on your Arctic population. So keep your toes warm to avoid a nasty surprise in the morning.

Adapted to the permafrost – new buildings and production chains
Other than constructing heaters,your outpost will give you access to several new buildings and production chains adapted to the life up north. The Ranger Station will not only keep an eye out for fires in your outpost, it also provides medical support for your sick explorers, while the Canteen serves as a social gathering hub but also replaces the marketplace by issuing food and other goods. The Post Office is a new cultural need, allowing your researchers to stay in contact with their friends and families back home.
Population needs are as pragmatic as the fight against the freezing temperatures. To support your researchers with a steady supply of jerky, hunting cabins send out rangers to hunt for caribous, whale oil fuels your brass lamps and bear and seal pelts allow you to produce parkas and sleeping bags. But it is hard to survive up there without help from the Old World, and you will need to import canned food provisions and, as you can imagine, Arctic explorers don’t like if their schnapps flask runs dry.

To keep things going, your technicians found a new way of transportation for your snow-covered streets: the husky sled. Your trusty four-legged companions serve not only as a need for your technicians, they also provide satisfying visual feedback in your outpost.
Over time, your outpost will grow, and what seems like a barren wasteland for us is called home by others. The Inuit, a new third-party trader, are willing to trade when your stock runs low, as well as offer a variety of new items especially useful in the Northern Hemisphere.

As soon as you overcome the struggle and the daily life on the ice becomes normality, you will find that the Arctic also has plenty to offer. The North can become a profitable hunting ground for precious pelts and there are some especially rich gold deposits, which promise a more efficient supply of the rare metal than your mines in the New World. You will also be able to collect new sets for your museum and your zoo to allow your residents back home to get a grasp of this strange and wild place.

But you are not alone, as news about the natural resources spread quickly and as such, second-party characters will follow you on your path into the Passage to start their own settlements.

Conquering the sky – the Airship Hangar
For the ones overcoming the challenges of the hostile environment, a big payoff awaits: the Airship! Inspired by actual historical efforts to building zeppelins in the Arctic to avoid the brash ice, the Airship Hangar is the new monument coming with The Passage. Building this technical marvel will be a huge undertaking, as it requires you to import a lot of construction material from your larger cities in the South in order to finish the four construction stages of the monument. Once you finish the Airship Hangar, of which you will be able to build one in every Arctic settlement, you can start to construct your first airship.

Airships are the ultimate endgame vessel for your trade routes, but they are costly to construct. It not only takes a long time to build one, you also need a new resource to fill their balloons during construction: gas. While your old companion Nate happily supports your first prototype with a shipment of gas, the resource itself exists only in the northern region of the Arctic: to be precise, on barren ice cliffs. Without any real beach for ships to land, and missing any fundamental resources to construct a settlement, these islands are out of reach for any traditional vessel. If you dream of your own fleet of airships, you must claim the icy cliffs and establish your mining outposts with the help of an airbridge.

Airships can safely avoid pirates, and can take direct routes just over islands instead of slowly maneuvering around them. They have also a total of 4 cargo and 2 item slots. However, they are also more strongly affected by wind, and their unloading and loading process naturally takes more time than with a traditional ship.

But airships are not the only new addition to optimize your endgame logistics. Once transported into the Old World, the gas comes in handy if you build one of the new progressive gas powerplants. More effective than their oil-running cousins, the gas powerplant can operate without relying on trains to constantly feed their burners. If you can establish a trade route ensuring a steady supply of gas, the new powerplant can free up important space in your metropolis. But beware: as the gas is a rare resource, you probably must make tough decisions where it makes most sense to replace your old oil plants.

And while talking about technical progress, your scientific endeavors inspired our old friend Nate to work in new inventions, which will expand the crafting list for items you are not limited to use in the Arctic session.

An adventure of epic proportion awaits
The Passage is not only our biggest DLC yet, it is also a true passion project from the team. From the atmosphere, to the details to the amount of content coming with the final Season Pass content, we are eager to see how you like our adventure into the frozen wilds. With hundreds of Union members playtesting the content, it is also a true community project and shows how much influence you continue to have on Anno 1800 and its extended content.

Our third Season Pass DLC, The Passage, will release December 10^th along with Game Update 6. The Passage expands the content of Anno 1800 with:
– A new Arctic gameplay session
– Rescue Sir Johns crew in a new story chapter for Anno 1800
– 2 new Residential Tiers: the Explorers and the Technicians
– 32 new Buildings, 7 new production chains and 13 new production goods
– Over 60 new quests
– Fight the cold with the new heating systems
– Construct your airship trade fleet in the new Airship Hangar monument

Until next time, when we will share the full list of changes and free content coming with Game Update 6!

By the end of the nineteenth century, the world was largely connected by trading networks, and the industrial revolution brought a spirit of enthusiasm that modernized society. However, while democracy replaced monarchy in many parts of the world, the general populace had limited ways to be a part of cultural and intellectual exchanges. Workers often shared newspapers after a long shift, and eventually museums, zoos, and botanical gardens were made available for everyone. These places were once exclusively for the aristocracy, but ultimately they served as cultural gathering spots for everyone, exposing more people to a larger and more diverse world. Society entered an exciting age of exploration, preservation, and cultural exchange.

Botanica, the second Season Pass DLC, brings an additional cultural building project to the world of Anno 1800. From inviting green avenues, to flowery compositions or as wondrous as colorful exotic plants from far away, the botanical garden is a feast for the eye in your thriving metropolis. Coming with various sets of flora from around the world to use in your decorative garden modules, we add additional ornaments for Anno players who want to live out their inner expressionist.

The Botanical Garden – Experience the Floral Wonders of Mother Nature

Botanica has a total of 21 unique botanical modules, an additional greenhouse, and 11 new ornaments,   including flowerbeds and topiaries, which can be used in all three cultural building projects. The new ornaments work as connectors between modules, which leads to more freedom and creativity when expanding the botanical garden, zoo, or museum. To allow all players of Anno 1800 to build more freely, we will also bring the old plaza tile connectors back as a part of the free Game Update 5. We are excited to see players’ creations of stunning vistas, centerpieces surrounded by fountains, and challenging labyrinth structures.

The new ornaments are available via the botanical exhibition in the world fair, but in addition to that, we decided to make them largely available from traders like Madame Kahina and Archibald. Players will also get them as rewards for quests and new expedition events. The new event encounters will let you experience stories of keen botanists willing to risk everything to bring Mother Nature’s floral diversity to the people.

Your large garden estate begs to be filled with floral wonders, and for that we added new sets for the botanical gardens, with 59 new plant items in total. While previous zoo and museum sets mainly affected the attractiveness of your city, we will change things up with Botanica. The sets, whose themes are based on various plant families, their natural biomes, or their use for medical or other purposes, will grant you specific fertilities for the island where the botanical garden is located upon completion.

This gives the garden more practical purpose beyond city attractiveness, as it allows you to strategically place the cultural building on a production island to boost your economy. The Andean set, for example, will add precious coffee fertility on new world islands, or make wheat grow in the old world. On top of that, the effects further boost the productivity of the farms tied to that specific fertility. They affect the island where the garden with the full set is placed, with five different fertility effects for each biome and a total of nine sets. And as we want you to freely play around with the new options, we increased the amount of influence free modules for the botanical garden from 10 to 20.

The Music Pavilion – Enjoy the Symphony Orchestra

You have created stunning museum areas and zoo grounds, but we thought that one piece was missing, a true highlight in your cultural wonderland. The new Music Pavilion is the perfect gathering place for tourists and residents to listen to an orchestra playing symphonies of classic Anno themes while the sunset paints the metropole in a scenic light. Once you’ve found the five music notes containing themes from Anno 1701, 1404, 2205, 2070, as well as the “modern” classic from 1800, you can play them at any time to listen to the orchestra while taking a break from extensive trade route management. The Music Pavilion itself is not limited to the botanical garden; you can build one in each zoo, museum, or garden. The music tracks will also provide an attractiveness buff to certain sets in cultural buildings.

And here comes our second Season Pass DLC: Botanica, in numbers:

• 21 unique botanical modules
• 1 glasshouse module
• 11 unique ornaments modules (such as flower beds and topiaries, usable with all cultural buildings)
• 9 new sets for your botanical garden, consisting of a total of 59 plants items
• The new Music Pavilion, which can be constructed in every cultural building
• The Music Pavilion comes with 5 music tracks from the classic themes of Anno 1701, 1404, 2070, 2205, and 1800

That’s all for today’s insights about the second Season Pass DLC, a true content pack for all beauty builders out there, before we take you on an adventure in the icy north this winter.

Botanica will be available from September 10 as part of the Anno 1800 Season Pass or as a stand-alone purchase.

As always, please share your feedback in the comments below and stay tuned for future updates and content from the Anno Union community!

The Queen has vanished! But you track her south to sunny Cape Trelawney, site of a great naval battle. In Sunken Treasures’ new Storyline, you will set out on a journey to resurrect the glory of an empire through one of its timeless symbols, the Royal Scepter, lost to the depths during the war. Only by building a vast territorial capital, and seeking out a flea-bitten crackpot by the name of Old Nate—being among other things, an innovator in deep-sea diving—will you be able to restore the empire to its former glory. But beware, you are not the only one hoping to claim the power of the legendary artifact.

Our first big content drop for Anno 1800, Sunken Treasures, will set you on a quest for glory and riches, in which you make history, erecting a new capital to bring a dwindling empire back to its former glory.
We do not want to spoil the fun yet, but can say that an epic new questline will expand on the world of Anno 1800 and the background of its characters. In today’s DevBlog, we will put Sunken Treasures under the looking glass and reveal the first details of this sizeable first DLC (which is both available as part of our Season Pass, as well as stand-alone come release day).

Crazy inventions, lost treasures and dreams of a mega-city

Sunken Treasures’ epic questline, which will become accessible as soon as you reach 700 artisans for save games both new and old, will give you access to a whole new European session: Cape Trelawney.
Space in Anno is precious, as it is the most valuable resource in the jigsaw puzzle of growing a prosperous metropolis. While finding layouts for your production chains and space for your citizen to thrive is part of the fun, many of you always dreamed of something bigger.
With the new continental island, we want to give you the sandbox to toy around with your wildest ambitions. Three times as large as the biggest islands of the main game, this colossal landmass comes with 300 grids worth of coast and more natural resources and fertilities than ever before. While the session itself comes with additional big, medium and small islands to allow the AI to settle or to create your own outposts, the earth on the continental islands is fertile and its mountain ranges rich with resources. You won’t have to worry about keeping your Beer production running with cargo loads of imported hops, as the continental islands fertile ground will allow potatoes, wheat, hops and many other things to grow.

“The present is theirs; the future is mine” Old Nate

Rumors spread among your crew about a hermit living on an isle of wonders, a shabby-looking scavenger and inventor who prefers the company of his own automatons. But don’t let the cock-and-bull stories of your crew fool you; Old Nate may just be a genius— a genius who is willing to share his ground-breaking inventions with all comers, so long as the price is right…

Anno 1800 offers a huge amount of items to optimize your economy and to customize your playstyle.
While traders, expeditions, quests or city attractions provide you with various ways to get your hands on items such as precious specialists or machines, there is always a game of chance attached, as the rarity and type of item depends on loot tables.
With Old Nate, we not only introduce another Third Party character, but we are also giving you access to a new game mechanic, revolving around the inventions of the quaint inventor: crafting.

Armed with one of his groundbreaking inventions, the new diving bell steam ship, he will sent you on a hunt for sunken shipwrecks to bring him the construction materials needed to finish his experiments. Following your instinct, quests or the literal X marked on a treasure map (turns out X does sometimes mark the spot), will lead you to the wreckages of the old battle of Trelawney.
Once you found a wreck, you can launch the diving bell, which allows you to sink down to the bottom of the ocean floor to uncover its lost treasures.
The ship itself is quite an astounding invention. It comes with a unique combination of 6 cargo slots and 3 item slots, which makes it perfect for dangerous expeditions. It functions similarly to your flagship, which means you will only get one ship during the questline and if the diving bell ship gets destroyed, you will be able to replace it.
You can also enhance the ship’s special abilities with wondrous gadgetry such as the sonar, which will be your most powerful when looking for shipwrecks.

Once the bell is hoisted back up the surface, you can see what your courageous crew found down below. While precious spoils such as gold, or pearls, can be sold for a huge profit, the new scrap items show their worth as soon as you bring them back to the eccentric Old Nate, as they serve as crafting material for his inventions.

While the Cape is famous among soldiers of fortune, you will also be able to extend your hunt for Sunken Treasures to existing sessions like the New and Old World!

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” Crafting

Once your ship is all loaded up with scrap of various quality levels, you can return your cargo to Old Nate’s island. In his workshop you gain access to a large variety of item blueprints for powerful devices such as automatons, which will come in handy when creating a larger-than-life city.
However, as you have total control and the freedom of choice to pick which item you want to create in his workshop, it is up to you to work out which combination of items work best for your production pipelines. Furthermore, every item needs a variety of different scrap materials to create, with increasing scrap costs based on the rarity of the item.
With the new crafting system, we wanted to provide you with a tool to create the items you truly desire. As you have full access to Nate’s blueprints, you can also plan ahead and work towards more powerful creations further down the road. Combined with the general pool of items in Anno 1800, the new crafting system becomes especially valuable in the endgame and we cannot wait to see how veteran Anno players will take advantage of the new possibilities to maximize the potential of their empire to levels previously impossible.

Expanding the world of Anno 1800

For the first big DLC, we wanted to work with as much player feedback as possible to expand the world of Anno 1800. With the large continental island, we are giving you a chance to create a true mega-city, and with the new crafting system you will have the agency over items that many of you asked for. We cannot wait to see your reaction to new storyline as many of you stated that you wish for more tales to unfold after finishing the campaign. There is even more than we mentioned today, such as new animals for your zoo, items for your museum or all-new secrets to unravel.

Last but not least, here is Sunken Treasures in numbers:
• A new storyline to experience, with up to 6 hours playtime plus dozens of new additional quests

• A third session including new small, medium and large islands as well as a continental island which is three times as large as the previously biggest island in the game.

• The additional third party trader “Old Nate” who provides access to a brand new crafting and diving bell feature.

• Over 100 new items, including new quest items, dozens of inventions to craft, additional specialists and new sets for your museum and your zoo.

How and when to get Sunken Treasures

We will see you again next week, when we will not only show you the DLC during our AnnoCast Live-Stream on Tuesday, July 23 at 4.30pm CEST, but also share the details about all quality of life features and other changes coming with Game Update 4. Spoilers: You may see a thing or two that the community has been waiting for, which will be coming free to all Anno 1800 players.

So how and when can you get your hands on Sunken Treasures? You will have three options to join us on this latest adventure:

– Buying our Season Pass: It includes our three planed DLCs Sunken Treasure, Botanica and The Passage, at a rduced price versus individual purchases. You will also get access to some exclusive goodies in the form of two company logos, and an additional player portrait, which are only available as part of the Season Pass.

– Buying it à la carte: Each of our three DLCs will be available as a stand-alone purchase at launch, though buying them this way will be more expensive than via our Season Pass.

– The Anno 1800 Gold Edition: If you haven’t joined the industrial revolution yet, we have a new option for doing so in the best way possible, thanks to our new Gold Edition. This digital purchase will be available on the Epic Games Store and Uplay, and will include both the Anno 1800 Digital Deluxe Edition and the Season Pass, giving you the full Anno 1800 experience in one handy package.

All of these options will be available to you when Sunken Treasures launches alongside Game Update 4 on July 30.