Settlements.

I'm currently taking care of settlements for the Forest biome. Bellow, is a screen shot taken directly from the editor, so it lacks a bit of quality: 

Settlements will allow players to access a series of services, including training skills and abilities, access quest givers and naturally, selling and buying supplies. 

Settlements will also be procedural generated, so players will never know which services will be available at a settlement. In future, houses will be identified with the type of service they provide. Some will just be sleeping houses but most will provide something useful. 

Procedural World Design:

The world generation algorithm, allows me to tune their spawning gap occurrence. Bellow, we see that the settlement gap is set to 5, meaning that, for each (more or less) 5 regions, a settlement will be created, represented by the blue houses.

The left panel is the world map preview, while the right panel represents the preview of the currently selected region in the world map, which in this case is the 'S' (start point). I can also control the size of the settlement itself with the minimum and maximum parameters. 

My end goal, is letting players access a similar configuration panel so they can shape the worlds they wish to play in, which will drastically change the difficulty level and campaign time. Let me know your thoughts. I'll make sure I respond each one of them.