I’m a little early this week, but I wanted to push this out as soon as possible. As some of you reading this probably know Verdant Village was featured on itch this week. I couldn’t be happier about that. It means a ton to have someone else put stock in something I’ve made.

In any case, since the game is featured, for the moment at least, it’s getting far more attention than it was. That sort of thing can be a double-edged sword. I’m definitely excited but at the same time I don’t really want all the bugs in the game to come to light. That being said I’m tossing out this patch a day early to hopefully mitigate some things in the game and make it a smoother experience for anyone seeing it for the first time.

As usual there is a full list of changes below. There is one massive thing that I have the displeasure of explaining now however. As some of you may be aware this will be the fourth (there was a 0.115) patch to be released. After posting the alpha the first thing I did was put together a patching system so that people could play the game and keep their saves while it updated. As of this patch I am pulling that system temporarily.

Obviously, there will come a time when the game will need to be patched without everyone losing their saves so I plan to start looking into this system in my free time. I don’t think the problem lies with the patching engine itself. In many cases the system seems to work fine. The issue is this, as the game currently stands much of the world isn’t implemented. Due to how the game is composed in one massive layout it becomes extremely difficult to throw data at an old version. Usually, pre-existing elements break or new ones are incorrectly added.

The main issue is building more areas of the map into the game. Adding more zones to the world has proven to be do-able but also volatile. For instance, I recently patched up from 0.11 to 0.13 and walked into Remi’s house and all the furniture bar a few pieces were missing.

What this ultimately leads to is a cluttered experience full of bugs for the player. On my end of things, it leads to me trying to track issues through multiple patches and instances of the game with no firm idea of where the bug is exactly coming from. This problem would only stand to grow larger the more patches I put out.

That’s why as I said before I’m putting the system aside for now, which means each time you download a new version of the game you will be forced to start over. I obviously feel bad about this so I did make a small addition that I hope eases some of the pain.

If you try to load a save that is out of date the game will inform you and then ask if you would like to start a new save file but with a few things to boost you through the initial process. These things include finishing the first few quests automatically, setting the game to start in any season, raising your skill progression levels slightly, giving you a lump sum of gold at the start of the game, and upgrading all your tools to bronze. When you choose this route, you can pick and choose which things you want enabled. It isn’t much but I hope that makes it a little easier to come back each time.

As for my plans I think I will focus on putting in as much of the game world as possible. Once the zones of the game are there it will be far easier to consider a patching solution instead of having to wipe saves. Adding systems like archeology or hunting shouldn’t be hard as they are all code. It really only seems to be adding areas that is an issue.

One other thing to note that I at least find to be a bonus. Managing patches and making sure the game was holding together through multiple patches was taking up huge swaths of time. Without having to manage that aspect I should be able to make far more progress each week. I think that’s it for now. Hopefully next week will have more positive news. To any who are getting their saves wiped I’m sorry for the inconvenience.

Version 0.13 Changelog

-Fixed a bug which made making bricks cost the wrong amount of material

-Fixed a bug that misaligned the surface collision of the dark desk

-Fixed a bug that allowed the player to harvest berries from a bush that had none if it had fully grown in the previous season

-Fixed a bug with certain surface checks being visible

-Fixed a bug where Simeon would sit the wrong way in his kitchen on rainy days

-Resized the hotbar making it smaller to take up less room

-Changed how surface mining nodes spawn so that they will no longer disappear at midnight, now more will spawn based on how many remain at the end of the day

-Fixed a bug with placing new wallpaper in your house not altering the ceiling tiles completely

-Fixed a bug where deconstructing an object in your house that had an object placed on top of it would not delete the object on the surface

-Fixed a bug that allowed animals to leave the pen in the east side of town and roam free

-Fixed a bug where under certain circumstances objects that generate light would not stop generating light even if it was the wrong time of day

-Added a quest to unlock the basement of your house

-Added all other schedules for Remi

-Removed Sheds from the game (the basement is the replacement for these)

-Added a sprite for glass in the forge

-Altered the Z ordering engine to fix a few bugs where the player could appear behind various things such as hanging paintings or tapestries

-Fixed a line of code that was running constantly and likely draining CPU (should make a considerable difference on performance)

-Fixed a surface collision misalignment with the simple center table that the player placed

-Fixed several instances of ore spawning on top of walls in the mines

-Fixed several parsing errors in the opening cutscenes that would make dialogue appear in place of the name of the character

-Fixed a bug that disallowed the player from chopping down fruit trees they had planted

-Fixed an issue with “The Far Cove” quest which would fix the bridge but still not allow the player to cross

-Added a button to quests that allows the player to forget a quest, it can be picked up again at any time from the NPC

-Fixed a bug where clicking the “topics” button in conversation would still allow you press another button thus overlapping text

-Fixed a bug where some trees would not load during the initial cutscenes

-Replaced buff icons with more readable versions

-Added a button to the sleep menu which will make your character sleep until they have full stamina

-Replaced selection outline in the cooking menu with a new version

-Fixed a bug that would set NPCs to their first schedule action immediately at midnight on rainy days

-Fixed a bug where if an NPC was sitting on the lower end of a two-person seat they may appear below the upper half of the seat

-Fixed a bug that may have resulted in seeing an occasional cloud while inside

-Fixed a slight z ordering bug with some bushes near the castle