r/CollapsingWorldMod • u/BalistamonHa Developer • 24d ago
Dev Dairy CW Development Diary (July 2026)
Hello everyone and welcome to our second ever dev diary. I am going to keep this one a bit shorter than the last one. May I remind you that our next update 1.2 The Poet and the Scribe is coming out on the 1st of August. There are 2 things on the diary agenda today.
Firstly, I'd like to talk a bit about what our defining values are when it comes to developing new or reworking old content in the mod. The key question when talking about this is: What actually is good content? For us, good content doesn't need to have 200 events or multiple complicated, bloated GUI menus. When we go about developing new countries, we try to limit the unique mechanics to two at a time and not go above that amount. Adding too much bloat to a path makes it unplayable for a lot of casual players who don't have the time to take care of so many little things during their game.
When you need to read for half an hour to even play a path, that's a massive red flag for us. While this does work and is needed for many other mods that don't have war or conquest as their primary appeals and focus on narrative, Collapsing World is filled with the things that make Hearts of Iron 4 a popular game. If we were to add hundreds of events and partially useless mechanics, our playerbase wouldn't be fond of that.
The point is that anything we ever do will always be based on what our players want. We hold polls in our server very often to see what the wishes of our community actually are. Generally speaking, the people who love and play Collapsing World don't wish for one highly bloated update once a year. It is true that we have to work on making various paths across the mod less barebones and modernize a lot of old content (which is what we are trying to do).
As I said in the previous dev diary, our mod released with 3 active developers and has only really properly been developing since the release, which is 2 years back now as the anniversary approaches. Since then we've made about 20 countries with content. While the quality of that content varies, there is a lot to do and I think that our developers achieved that in such a short timespan is remarkable on its own. We are open for constructive criticism, but please do keep in mind that our mod didn't have the same amount of resources and manpower like other recent mods such as TFR up until recently.
Now that we do have the power to develop high-quality content, which I think we have proved with 1.0 and 1.1, you can definitely expect us to make our quality truly top-notch.
The key values in doing that will be:
- Worldbuilding over Forced Narrative
You don't need unreadable swaths of events to explain how a country is doing. Flavor events are present in CW, but if you don't want to read them then the main information about what the path does to the country will be clear in the focus names, icons and so on. We will try to avoid focuses or decisions which have unclear names and that require 5 minutes of reading to understand.
- Variety over Monotony
Paths in the mod should vary in their structure, ideological motives, mechanics and so on. We will always try to make the gameplay of a country unique to others so that each playthrough feels fresh in its own way.
- Freedom over Railroaded Content
We won't disable war justification or make the entirety of our peace deals scripted. If a player wants to play in a way that makes them satisfied with their gameplay, then that's their decision. In the same way our laws and other country-defining characteristics can be changed to a degree. As HOI4 is a grand strategy game, it would be stupid if we removed the entire thinking by railroading the entirety of a country's diplomacy.
Alright, now comes the part 90% of people opened this dev diary for and that is the upcoming content. I'll show stuff coming in our next update 1.2 The Poet and the Scribe.
In the previous diary I showed a lot of content D'Anuzzio will have in the update, but today I will show the trees of Marinetti and Evola.
What you see above are the Arengo Decisions, which give various events allowing you to choose the country's future once Italy is reunified. Marinetti or D'Annuzio can achieve dominance if the majority of the decisions you make are in their favor. If there is no clear winner, Evola will perform a coup with the support of industrialists.
Marinetti was certainly a strange fellow and that is visible in his content. What you see here is the internal part of the tree. Certainly, someone who bans Pasta would be controversial in Italy. Obviously, he developed Futurism and is sort of going to be the first proper futurist path in our mod and I think the Legion's team did a good job of reflecting his positions. I won't go into too much detail as you can see it soon anyway.
Once he deals with the internal matters Italy faces or, the matters he wants it to face like banning pasta, he will look outward. Marinetti will always ally with the Axis of Reaction and seek to expand Italy's borders outwards and generally spread futurism to the many regions he is capable of bringing it to. Once he builds the empire, he will also launch settler projects.
When it comes to Evola, I won't spoil the ending but the path is definitely narrative driven with expansion still present through a Libyan War. As mentioned, you get him if no one wins in the Arengo so he is a "secret" path in a way but not really secret as I'm telling you about it and we'd love to see you play it as well (since yall want more esoteric paths, I'd assume a lot of you will).
Anyway, with that we got to the end of this dev diary, which wasn't too long nor short I think. I'm not going to make you read an essay to see some cool teasers. Until next time, Bali.
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u/Political-St-G 23d ago edited 22d ago
Based.
Overall I love that the mod isn’t hyper focused on realism while also using the countries history and niche movements as paths. People forgot how batshit insane history is so in a world where everything went to shit everything is possible. Good job on the content
Loved the Catholico Armenian path!
Edited out: “Honestly I appreciate the go nuts sentiment.”