When survival city builder Farthest Frontier launched in Early Access in 2022, players noticed a rather large omission. City-building games, especially medieval-inspired games, usually include religious buildings such as churches and chapels, which can be built near homes to give citizens a bonus of contentment and happiness.

The lack of religious buildings in Farthest Frontier is intentional; Crate Entertainment designer Zantai said at the time, "If we were to incorporate some kind of faith system, like naming the faith and determining bonuses and traits, I think a customizable system would be best," he said. [Because this new system will be implemented in Farthest Frontier in August, it was revealed in a Zantai-hosted Twitch stream earlier today. 0.9 update will allow players to build a huge temple in their city. By filling that temple with religious relics, they will be able to "customize their faith" and provide various bonuses (and in some cases dangerous debuffs) not only to local villagers, but to the entire city.

These relics can be found by exploring the world and finding ruins (another new feature of the update). Ruins can be excavated by workers to uncover hidden relics. Merchants may also bring relics to your city. Once a temple is built, two (or three if the temple is fully upgraded) of the relics found may be selected and activated to provide the city with the bonuses they produce.

The Twitch feed showed some of the relics. There is a fertility relic that improves the health and fertility of villagers by 10%, and a nature relic that speeds up the growth of trees and makes orchards bear more fruit. There are two relics related to food, one that alleviates villagers' hunger and the other that slows food spoilage by 25%. Two more relics focus on allowing soldiers, guards, and defensive towers to inflict more damage on enemy raids.

And there is a special relic for city-building masochists. It's called the "Ark of the Vengeful Dead," and it actually makes enemy raiders and wildlife more ferocious and aggressive; if you're tired of your town being relentlessly attacked and looted in Farthest Frontier, this relic is perfect.

The update further allows you to build and staff guild halls to make your city's chosen industries more effective. Running these guild halls requires a lot of paperwork, which brings a whole new industry into the game. Paper mills can make paper from flax, bookbinders can make books to fill new libraries as a luxury for upper class citizens and as entertainment alongside theaters and pubs.

The stream also told us about future features that will be implemented beyond the 0.9 update, such as new livestock like horses and chickens, and raiders that can drag catapults to knock down castle walls. (Farthest Frontier will support the Steam Workshop, so we may see mods in the future.

Lots of cool stuff is on the way for the already pretty awesome Survival City Builder; check out the two-hour 0.9 update livestream on YouTube.