Patch day has come once again. This week was fairly bug heavy (what else is new). While trying not to drown in the flaws of my own code I did manage to add a few things although admittedly it’s a bit light. There is also one important thing to discuss for anyone who patches.

The important thing first. This patch is modifying how NPCs are recorded for patching. From the user perspective you’ll only see a short amount of weirdness which I’ll get into. To explain, some players have noticed odd things, mostly NPCs travelling around seemingly out of time and space as they phase through walls or teleport around, or generally just do things that break the laws of physics.

From what I can tell this seems to be mostly limited to new NPCs that have been added in after the original six. From what I can gather this is stemming from a central issue with patching that was basically replacing good data with dummy data that was recorded unintentionally.

I’ve changed the system slightly, but in order for it to take effect I need a patch where NPCs essentially don’t patch. Before anyone gets too concerned this shouldn’t affect anything like quests. This will mostly serve to reset NPCs to their proper paths, that way anyone with bugged NPCs can recover. Along with that it will give the game a chance to wipe out the bad data it has accumulated. Next patch (or perhaps a few down the road) I’ll turn NPC patching back on and this will be behind us, I hope.

So, what does this mean for you? Well basically, regardless of what season you are in, day you are on, or anything, NPCs are going to revert to their spring time schedule for 1 day. The first day after the patch everyone is going to function like they would if you started a new game. This means if Remi is supposed to go to the shop that day, it isn’t going to happen, or if Simeon is building something, he’ll take the day off, etc. If you don’t want to be annoyed by this, I’d recommend playing 0.15.3 until your projects are done. Once the first day has passed the scheduling system will kick in and all NPCs should resume normal activity.

Also, on this first day you will start at midnight per the patch. All NPCs are going to be standing around waiting for their first events of the day. In short, since the NPCs aren’t being fed data they will be set up as if you just started a fresh game (which begins at 7:00 AM not midnight), while this looks strange it will also only last for 1 day, they should all kick into gear on their own, in the meantime you can talk to them with no issues. They’ll just be weirdly at the ready at one in the morning.

Since this is related to NPCs, I’ll mention it here as well. Kiera has been added to the game and is fully functioning. She only has one quest at the moment, but it will allow players to finish one of Lylah’s quests. People who have been playing for a while will likely find it easy to complete. Aside from Kiera I’ve also added Lorelei and Elise to the game. There is a condition to them being there however. In short, I had to include them in order for the NPC patching to work. That is mostly due to them appearing in the intro cutscene. In any case they exist and have dialogue, however at the moment they both only have spring schedules, which basically means for the moment they will do the same thing every day, year-round, rain or shine. I’ll be adding the rest of their schedules in as soon as I can.

One other thing to mention. Many people have said that the way the player interacts with the world feels off. As in, the tile you have selected doesn’t seem to match with where the player is standing. Most people reference Stardew as a good example of this system, which I agree with.

I played Stardew a bit today and from what I can tell, aside from being able to aim at a tile with your mouse (which I’ll be adding at some point), I have the same algorithm working to align the selected tile to the player. My guess is the issues with this stem from the differences in perspective.

I think Stardew tends to give a more vertical view of the world where Verdant Village is viewed at more of an angle. By request I made a setting that aligns the interaction box not to the feet of the player (which is what it has been) but to the player’s waist. Personally, I think this feels even stranger but I could be the odd opinion out on that. This alignment setting can be toggled in settings if you would like to try it. Any opinions on this would be welcome.

I think that is all the big stuff. As for other things I got around to a bit of balancing and bug fixing this week. For balancing I’ve heard your pleas, and I’ve reduced the difficulty of fishing slightly. Now this is based on my skill alone, so I can’t guarantee it is perfectly balanced or anything. The hardest tier of fish is likely still pretty difficult. In any case I’d be happy to hear feedback on it. Coupled with this I’ve reduced the sell price of all fish a bit because it was a pretty easy way to make money assuming you could catch them.

I think I’ll end things there and go to the changelog since a lot of the work this week was little stuff and I’ve already rambled about NPCs for more than a page. If you’d like to keep up with the game or have people to talk to my twitter and the game’s discord are linked below. I’d be happy to hear any feedback, hopefully this week’s patch will cause less issues than the last one.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ExodusSoftware

Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/TJ7FtQ3

Patch 0.16 Full Changelog

-Added building prevention to the entrance of your house making it much harder to block yourself in with furniture

-Fixed a bug where you could close a chest while having an item selected (being moved between slots) if you did this it would cause the entire game to bug and the next time you opened an inventory menu you would not be able to leave it

-Fixed a bug that allowed the interaction guide to show itself while the player is moving if you pressed movement keys in a certain combination

-Fixed a bug in Lylah’s quest description to match the new objective

-Fixed a bug that was occurring specifically with player planted cranberry bushes not reappearing after a patch. Sadly, I cannot bring back any bushes you planted and lost, sorry about the loss of gold

-Widened several of the collision masks on entrances to hopefully make getting through doors and entrances a smoother experience

-Nerfed the sell prices of most fish in the game, most were lowered by 10g, further changes may be made at some point

-Reorganized the fishing data so what fish you catch in each type of water based on season will likely change. The reason for this change is that I was alerted to the fact that I apparently, subconsciously alphabetized fish, spring with were named a-f summer g-n etc.

-Added Kiera to the game, with one quest intact

-Fixed a missing rock collision in the swamp

-Fixed an issue with some cliffs not appearing correctly after spring due to a tilemapping oversight

-Fixed an ore spawn in the mines that made ore appear on top of a wall

-Tilemap changes also fixed an issue with cliffs in the northeast corner of the plains

-Fixed a misplaced mushroom spawn point in the swamp

-Hopefully fixed a bug with fishing that would occur sometimes, when successfully catching a fish a snake like object would appear instead and not be pulled to the player

-Fixed a bug where you could go to another level of the mine while mining something which would break your interactions

-Fixed a bug where holes on your farm would appear as though they were a hole in the sand instead of dirt

-Fixed a bug where the advanced chest functions (buttons on the right side of chest UI) could still be used while holding an item leading to several different issues

-Fixed an issue with screen scrolling in certain areas of the game. This could cause jitter in the screen scrolling on rare occasions

-Fixed a few collisions on the cliffs at the northern end of town near Sven’s house

-Fixed a few instances of NPCs demonstrating their core strength by refusing to sit in chairs and instead sit in the air

-Altered the fishing system variables a bit to hopefully make it a bit easier. Hard to gauge based on just me playing, but it seems easier. The harder to catch fish still give me trouble at level 1 proficiency however

-Altered the quest patching system as it would have crashed once the database was altered further

-Added birds to the game that fly away when you get close, just cosmetic

-Added a tutorial on saving since some people were confused about when the game saved

-Fixed a bug with light wood not dropping from stumps, made wood always drop from stumps

-Fixed an issue with the house near the pond in town not z ordering properly

-Fixed a bug allowing you to place chests somewhat on top of chicken coops due to a collision issue

-Began reconstructing animal code. This is unfinished but animals should be more stable, the current issue seems to lie with cows, sometimes when you walk into your barn they will simply be grown up even if they shouldn’t be. This seems to be random chance and is being looked into

-Added a collision to the rock near the chapel

-Added an alternate setting to align the interaction tile by request, read above for details

-Added basic version of Lorelei and Elise (Spring schedules only)

-Fixed a bug with the quest button continuing to light up despite no new or interactive quests being available

-Fixed a bug that allowed you to infinitely water a tile with a crop on it given a very specific set of circumstances

-Fixed a bug where sconces would not properly delete their lighting effects upon destruction

-Increased the amount of heat wood and coal give to the oven slightly

-Modified fishing tutorial slightly to be more informative