Patch time once again. I wonder how long it will be before I run out of ways to say that and just go right into things. Work this week was a scattershot affair of things. Bugs were fixed, things were added, more bugs were made, etc. I’ll highlight a few things, but the full changelog is at the end if you want to skip to it.

First on a non-code related note earlier today one of the nice editors at Rock Paper Shotgun wrote an article about the game. I Felt I should share it here incase anyone wanted to give it a read. Also, to that editor I just wanted to say thanks if you are reading this. Always means a lot to get really just about any feedback on this project.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/04/17/verdant-villages-free-alpha-shows-massive-promise-for-this-fantasy-stardew-like/

Onto the things that were done this week. So first is probably something a lot of people have asked for. I don’t really know what to call it. Internally, I dubbed it precision aim. In short you can now determine what tile your character interacts with via the mouse. If your mouse is on a tile that is next to the player character your character will target that tile instead of what you are facing. I’m sure there are still things to work out with this but it seems to work based on testing.

The other actual feature from a gameplay perspective this week is tree taps. It’s pretty minor but something I wanted to add. There are a few caveats here that I’ll explain. Basically, you can order tree taps from the catalog. Once you have them, they are a one time use on a tree. They do not however just stick to a tree and give you things. I’m trying to avoid freebees in this game.

As a personal opinion I think it’s more entertaining to actually have to do something to get an item rather than just having it generate every few days. I understand how some people could see this as tedium, but I’d like to keep some things in the game manual.

As for how tree taps work just walk up to either a maple or pine tree and stab it with the tap to get some sap. A note that you’ll find out quickly, you can only tap maple trees in spring, and pine trees in fall. Also, you’ll have to forgive the art and lack of animation. Both will be adjusted as soon as they are made. Until then you are stuck with my “very professional” MS paint drawings.

Another thing that isn’t huge but might be noticeable to anyone who has been playing. I made a modification to the dialogue system so that now if you click while text is being written it will display the full text for that line instead of skipping ahead to the next line.

Two new zones have been added. One is above the castle, and the other is east of the path below the castle. These exist mostly because Lorelei has a schedule that takes her through them. In the case of the eastern zone along the path a lot of the details don’t exist yet.

I’ll fire off a few things of importance here so I don’t ramble. Lorelei and Elise have been given all of their schedules now so they should act accordingly in different seasons. Maple syrup has been added to the cooking menu, I’ll let you puzzle out how you make it. There is now a cap to the mines at 125. The room you’ll find yourself in is empty at the moment, but that is not the final version. NPC patching is being turned back on this patch, cross your fingers that NPCs don’t go crazy again. Animals should also move again now and not walk through objects. Ore mining values have also been adjusted because I think I was delirious or something when I wrote them originally. To anyone who spent entire stamina bars (yes barS) mining adamantium, I apologize.

Some other stuff was done as well but I’ll note that below. Last thing I wanted to mention. If you press the tilde key on your keyboard (the button above tab) the game will show you your CPU and GPU usage as well as your FPS. I imagine this isn’t needed for most people but I wanted to monitor things myself so I added it.

Lastly if you’re new and unaware, first off welcome, second off below is the official Discord for the game if you want some nice people to talk to and my twitter for updates. I’ve also been informed that there is a Facebook group now if that’s your jam. I don’t run it, but it seems chill, links below.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ExodusSoftware

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

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/VerdantVillage/

Patch 0.17 Full Changelog

-Added precision aim. You can use the mouse to aim at the tile you’d like to interact with assuming your character is next to it.

-Changed dialogue to only show the end of the currently printing text line on click instead of the next line of text.

-Added a toggle (bound to tilde) to show your CPU and GPU usage as well as frame rate.

-Added tree taps to the game, order them from the catalog.

-Added a zone to the east of the path below the castle (not all details are in yet).

-Added a zone north of the castle.

-Fixed the issue of no raindrops being shown during rain.

-Fixed a bug with the “Close Shave” perk where you could essentially get infinite wool as well as gain the perk without shaving a single sheep, you cheater you.

-Fixed a bug with feed trows in barns visually bugging if the day ended while you were inside.

-Fixed an issue with sheep not appearing correctly based on how thick their wool was.

-Hopefully (please god) fixed an issue with animals randomly growing into adults. I think I literally lost months off my life trying to figure this out.

-Fixed a z ordering issue with the sign on the blacksmith’s house.

-Gave fishing rod casts a much shorter range as it was causing issues.

-Fixed a bug where in a herculean feat of strength you could cast your fishing rod over a waterfall and off the screen.

-Fixed a bug where you could open your inventory while performing an action like tilling or mining.

-Increased Chili sell price to 40 from 20, they should now be profitable.

-Increased Tomato sell price to 60 from 30, they should be profitable.

-Increased Green Bean sell price to 100 from 80, they should now be profitable.

-Modified code on dismantling objects with the carpenter mallet. This should prevent you from pulling up paths when you don’t mean to or randomly getting extra items from dismantling.

-Fixed an issue with tilled dirt tiles breaking their patterns when digging a hole in a cluster of them. If you have tiles that are messed up try re-tilling them to fix it.

-Fixed an issue where if you tilled a tile, watered it, then dug a hole on it, then undug the hole, you could water the tile forever. How did I find this? I don’t know, as I write this, I can’t even remember fixing it so clearly, I blocked it out of my memory.

-Fixed an issue with the player being able to phase through buildings that they moved after building.

-Fixed a visual bug where the logs in Simeon’s home would still have snow on them in winter despite you know, being inside.

-Did some back-end work to crops and they should now be able to be watered regardless of being fully grown or not.

-Fixed an issue where Kiera would get a little too friendly with Mel when sitting on the couch at the inn…they would sit in the same spot, that sounded weirder after I wrote it.

-Added all of Elise’s schedules.

-Added maple syrup as a cookable item.

-Adjusted the barn interior layout to make it a bit more open.

-Adjusted where truffles can spawn in the barn (the open area at the front) so they are hopefully easier to spot.

-Added movement to animals again.

-Turned on new quest patching, which means next week I can start added quests again. (This should not affect your quest progress).

-Turned on NPC patching again so no more people standing around at midnight for the first day.

-Added a cap to the mines at floor 125. The final room is just a placeholder for now, there will eventually be a point to getting all the way down.

-Added a bit of code to this patch that should revert your deepest mine level if it was over 120. This was causing extra buttons to appear on the minecart travel system.

-Adjusted mineral veins (the ones that drop specific ores) to have a chance at dropping multiple ores.

-Adjusted the HP or just about all mineral veins to make them much easier to mine.

-Added remaining schedules for Lorelei.