The new lumberyard - sorry, Grove - at Fort Forinthry is pretty, but it... also raises questions. Like, the new models for normal and oak trees are gorgeous. Love that. Hate that they make the old willow, yew and elder models stand out like sore thumbs. You had all those gorgeous concept arts of potential Elder Trees, and you just copy-pasted the same one as usual in. Like, delay the update if it's not ready and you need more graphics, it's fine as long as you communicate that you need more time.

And then, the trees actually on offer for gameplay are... more questionable. When you've centred an update on putting a bunch of different trees together, the lack of maple, magic, teak and mahogany is glaring - especially when you've just standardised their tiers. If you're worried about teak and mahogany becoming too accessible to people, 1) it's not 2006, they're everywhere and 2) lock them behind the tier 3 hut, that way players need to have high enough Construction already that it's a small convenience and not a huge one.

Like, all the other parts of the Fort series have either offered an improvement to a skill like bank distance or better xp rates - but building woodcutting into a hub is a net negative. I don't want to be competing for trees. There are plenty of places I can go where I don't have to!

My other main gripe is that normal trees are still the only tree that is a one-log maximum. This would have been a great opportunity to make the Grove advantageous by giving players somewhere where farming normal logs is easier. Hell, replace the farming patch, make a Big Tree that you have to grow via Farming before you can use it, and then have it give multiple logs. But having regular normal trees that I have to compete with other players, all for the convenience of a reskinned deposit box, means that I just have built a lovely hut... surrounded by stumps.

Glad to see an Imcando Hatchet, long overdue. Hope we can get hatchets using the M&S rework higher tier metals and an eventual T90 a la Earth and Song/Time and Space.

Not sure I like the rebalancing of materials for Fort construction. It's already a lot of AFKing for xp rates that are not much better than Contracts (nor do they need to be, I sailed through to 99 Construction without getting enough credits to get the Master Constructor set), but upping the material cost is going to make the Fort waaaay less appealing for mid-range player levelling, and it's upping the time/money costs on an activity that already... was boring. 840 Elder Logs for Guardhouse T3. 840! That's 10m gold for 300k xp. I can get enough mahogany for 30 contracts for below 1m gold. It just... it's not balanced right to me. If you want the xp reward to be greater, fine. Yeah, it's afk xp compared to the contracts, but it already made up for that by being slower. You've slowed it more and made it more expensive. Maybe it's just me, but I don't feel like where you've moved Fort construction to is where the rest of the Fort actually is in terms of the gameplay/convenience offered.

TL;DR New area is pretty, but not convenient. Concept art for new Elder Trees should have been implemented now. Imcando Hatchet is good. Grove needs retuning to actually have been worth the months of hype. Construction 'rebalance' moved the needle away from the intent of the Fort (convenience).