There’s nothing more annoying than watching a mouse snack away on an apple in the warehouse when you explicitly built them a charming little bistro just down the street. Literally nothing. I don’t want to hear about your neighbour who puts the bins out before the sun’s up, nor your colleague who microwaves fish in the office, or the pimple on your bum that flares up whenever you’ve a week of working late and having to sit in that horribly hard and uncomfortable office chair. It’s the mice in Whiskerwood eating in the warehouse thing, that’s got top billing on the list of annoying things.

Well, good news for your grievance rankings, because the latest Whiskerwood update gives you the option of banning mice from eating in the warehouse. Finally, your bum spot can get a look-in at number one.

As you can read about in Sin’s latest Rally Point, where she shared her Whiskerwood impressions, this is a city builder where you build a colony for mice who are toiling away under the yolkish oppression of a cat monarchy. Much inspired by the relationship between Britain and the pre-independence American states, the cats demand regular tithes from the mice settlers and you’re frequently caught in a struggle to produce enough resources to both expand your colony and pay your masters.

When you first arrive in the new land, the first two buildings you construct are a dock and a warehouse. In those early days, the only place your mice can eat their daily meal is the warehouse, where they lift foraged berries and fresh fish straight from the shelves. While a necessity, it does make your mice populace a little sad to have to eat in a storage room and this is reflected in how much Approval you earn each day. As Approval is the resource you spend to pass laws and recruit new mice, you want to build a cafe or a dining hall relatively quickly, as it’s a much more pleasant place for them to eat.

However, sometimes, even after you’ve built a lovely little diner, on a lovely little street, and staffed it with two charming mouse waiters, the wretched vermin still insist on waltzing into the warehouse and snaffling their food straight from the stock cupboard.

With the latest Whiskerwood patch, there’s now a toggle in cafes and dining halls that lets you ban mice from eating in the warehouse. However, developer Manakata Dynamics warn “this is a powerful law that when implemented can result in hunger and unrest. Make sure you have ample dining facilities to accommodate your population.” Hungry mice are, after all, unproductive mice (and can become dead mice).

The update makes other significant changes, too. You can now spend your approval moving your warehouse and dock. These are the first buildings you place when you set up your colony and, as the settlement grows, you may find a better spot later in the game.

The other, other big change and the one that I was sorely tempted to make the headline feature is that your mice can now pilot their rafts through the arches beneath bridges. Once you begin expanding your colony to neighboring islands, bridges and rafts become key for ferrying mice and goods between landmasses. Previously, however, your bridges would act as a wall that your rafts couldn’t pass. Now, so long as you make the bridge tall enough, the rafts can pass beneath like gondola in the canals of Venice.

When I said I was going to make a Venice for Mice, James rained on my tiny mouse parade by saying “Venice for mice already exists, it’s called Birmingham”. As a proud midlander, born and raised in Birmingham, I can’t fault him. We always had mice in our cupboards. Sadly, we didn’t have a toggle to ban them. Just a humane mouse trap and a garden in which to deposit them.