The Black Death is a survival MMO game set during the medieval time period where the black plague spread like wildfire across western Europe. You play as one of the citizens in that area attempting to survive those harsh conditions.

There are a variety of classes to choose from ranging from militias, to thieves, to farmers and lowly peasants, utilizing your skills and natural resources as you travel the world to fight to survive the plague and deadly bandits. Last month, the development team released the Knights & Outlaws update and trailer which I linked down below, which added some new content to the game.

For a long time now, The Black Death has had mixed review scores on the Steam store page, ranging from players saying the game was loaded with bugs, to the game not launching, to poor quality.

For almost every (constructive) negative review about the game, the developers have made replies saying that they were either aware of the problem and working on it, or they had already released a new patch to fix the problem.

The Black Death however is still in Early Access, so the game is nowhere near being finished. However, the new 0.11 Providence Update which was released on November 15th, adds a ton of new features and fixes to the game, so it is clear the developers are hard at work to fix major problems with the game (especially since both of these large updates were only about a month apart). So here is a quick rundown of everything that was fixed or added in the newest update–

1. Farmers and animal tamers will be happy with the new “animal feed” skill that allows you to feed wild animals to tame them, such as cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens, so that you can gain resources from them such as milk, eggs or feathers. The animals will also follow you around as long as you continue to feed them.

2. Want to play as a scoundrel and a thief? Well now you can also become a gravedigger! The dig ability allows you to buy/craft a shovel and use it to dig up the ground from one of the randomly placed Graveyard dig sites. If you find one of them, you can dig up some buried loot and either keep it for yourself, or sell it to get rich.

3. NPCs were a bit stagnant before, but the developers have added more shops, more items, and more interactions. NPCs will turn to look at you, they have audio dialogue so that they will literally speak and have a few new animations to go along with it. There are also text dialogue boxes where you can talk with them and ask them questions, which the developers say will work as a guide to help players navigate the world to find specific things they are looking for.

4. As named above, new merchants were added to sell a variety of new items. New cooking ingredients were added for high level recipes, new seeds so that you can create a bigger more diverse farm, new weapons such as kite shields, Kopesh swords, scimitars and claymores were also added so that you can outfit your character with more gear.

5. You can now craft new items using the new crafting skills in game. To give a small overview,  Peasants can create new things like beehives and butter churners. Militias can now make ration food such as mushroom soup and pumpkin potage. Monks can craft Mortar and pestles for herbs and medicines, and can also create the much needed plague mask (shown in the header image). Obviously since the game is based around The Black Death, the mask helps to prevent you from catching the plague.

6. The settlement of Dunstead is now open for travelers again after having been closed down for reconstruction. The new and revamped settlement is now back on the map and you can explore the settlement and all its changes.

7. The area near “The Queen’s Crossing” has been expanded with the forest of Queen’s Province. But beware, Bandits and wild animals lurk in these woods. If you are a bandit or a tamer, then you’ll probably feel right at home here.

Last but not least, there were a variety of bugs that were squased and patches implemented to fix some of the more common problems with the game, so to get a complete list of everything changed in the new update, head on over to their official website where you can see more screenshots and even hear an audio sample of the new NPC dialogue.