Its been a little while since I last updated. I skipped last week since I was out of town and didn’t accomplish much during that time. As usual this patch is focused on bug fixing and QoL in preparation of early access. I’d like to think that we are reaching a pretty stable state of the game but I don’t want to jinx myself.

Most of the work is little details so I won’t mention a lot specifically. There are only three larger things that changed which I’ll address here. The first is that Steam support is being implemented. This obviously doesn’t affect anyone yet, but I thought I’d mention it as it took up a bit of my time this week. Second, and far more important, I’ve begun work on controller support. I’m hoping this won’t take too long to implement, but it’s a rather complicated and tedious process to be honest. When it is fully implemented the systems should also allow for keyboard only mode to actually work as well.

Last, and probably most game relevant, Remi has had her portrait updated. Her character was in a sort of limbo before. When creating her I bounced back and forth on her age. This resulted in a portrait that was pretty young looking. In truth she was always meant to be closer to the player character’s age. Her portrait has been updated to reflect that.

Last thing that is more related to an early access release is this. I’ve settled on August 4th for a release date on both Steam and Itch. Obviously, the game is already on Itch for free but come August 4th you will have to pay to play it. The price for the game is going to be set at $14.99. This is of course not a full release, but and early access one. There are still plenty of things to add to the game, but at some point, I have to cut it off start charging. As I’ve heard reports of people playing for 40+ hours I think there is probably enough content at this point to justify the cost.

Verdant Village Version 0.2.9 Full Changelog

-Fixed several bugs with the description box misaligning text, appearing blank, or just showing up randomly when swapping through menus.

-Fixed a bug with loading save games that may have selected the wrong save slot under certain conditions.

-Fixed an issue where the quest to unlock titanium from Sven may not have accurately tracked its unlock progress between patches.

-Fixed a bug that would cause NPCs to not always properly update their zone when the player is sleeping and they are sped up.

-Modified building patching code to hopefully stabilize Simeon post patch and not make him disappear for 5 days to construct a building that doesn’t exist.

-Fixed a minor bug with the horse collision box after moving between zones.

-Implemented Steam Overlay Support for the game.

-Fixed a bug where closing the building menu in a certain way could result in a mismatch of materials required for the specified building.

-Fixed a bug causing blink when initially hovering an object in the UI.

-Fixed a bug with pigs that would cause truffles to appear in the wrong barn.

-Fixed a bug with pigs where they could find truffles when they weren’t fully grown.

-Gave livestock descriptions in the shop.

-Changed signpost quests to only be available once you met the NPC associated with it. This will only take effect on new games, as retroactively changing this would be far more trouble than it is likely worth.

-Slightly increased the price of calcite.

-Changed chef perk so that cooking ingredients such as honey, or dough doesn’t count towards progress, you actually have to make recipes you can eat.

-Fixed a bug that may have affected a small number of players which made tier 3 coops and barns available prior to finishing the related quest from Mel.

-Fixed a database error that caused the maple syrup recipe to not require any sugar.

-Fixed a bug where using precision aim when charging a tool could lead to improper results.

-Fixed a bug allowing you to right click object into chests and under certain circumstances just get infinite items.

-Fixed a bug with birch trees not falling at the right position during winter.

-Fixed a bug where if you opened your inventory while riding your horse your horse would run in place and the SFX for the horse moving would continue to play.

-Replaced spritework for Remi, to more accurately reflect her age, she looked far younger than she should have.

-Fixed a visual glitch in the barn.

-Fixed an error in the mithril ore description text.

-Fixed a visual glitch with a willow tree in the western portion of the swamp.

-Fixed a bug where some items would show a blank “Effects” field in their description due to a bad switch statement.

-Changed the way player name is entered on character select, visually there is little change, but this was done to support controllers.

-Fixed a bug with the description box going haywire when using the archeology UI.

-Fixed a bug where the player could still move when confirming if they wanted to leave the mines.

-Fixed an issue where you couldn’t till multiple tiles next to irrigation pipes that had already been placed.

-Fixed a bug where you could place irrigation pipes essentially under fences.

-Fixed a bug where selecting another item on your hotbar while a passive ability was active (such as placing an object) would cause the passive ability to continue despite the item not being selected.

-Fixed a missing apostrophe in a particular artifact description.

-Fixed a bush that wasn’t z ordering in the plains.

-Moved a blackberry bush beneath the player farm due to it being unharvestable because of weird positioning.

-Made slight modifications to archeology fragment items and dig sprites.

-Fixed a bug where descriptions didn’t appear over the building UI buttons.

-Replaced many of the UI buttons with better versions.

-Redid sprites for dragonflies in the swamp.

-Replaced sprite for quartz.

-Added bits of broken path to the foothills to make it easier to navigate for newcomers.