A brief aside for those of you that follow Verdant Village through itch.io. I have to apologize. There has obviously not been an update on the itch site for a long time. I have been posting monthly updates on the game via Steam but I have neglected to do so on itch. While its a bit of a lame excuse, I honestly don’t remember why I made that decision. That said I will resume posting updates to itch from this point forward starting with this patch.

Alright, this has been an extremely long time coming. I am happy to announce that there is finally a patch for Verdant Village. I’ve spent a long time on this so hopefully it lives up to the wait.

I feel I owe just a bit of explanation for those out of the loop. Prior to this long patching dry spell I had been updating weekly. This changed for two reasons. First, I can’t keep that pace and put out significant content once per week when working a full-time job. Second, Steam has systems in place that reward large patches over small ones. A lot of this delay was also just due to funding and having my artist play catch up. That shouldn’t become an issue again at this point.

So, what actually changed? Well, a lot. The aim of this patch was to sure up a lot of loose ends, squash bugs, polish existing systems, flesh out other systems, and add a few new ones. Sort of a grab bag of changes honestly. There is still a lot to do, but I feel the game is now in a much better state. In the future patches should be focused more on content. For instance, the next patch on the docket is combat. There is an entire combat system that still needs to be put into the game. Aside from this there are still a lot of missing NPCs, quests, and several other systems that I’ll piece in as I can.

I did want to mention as well that there have been calls for various different features to be added. I got to some things this patch and not others. While I can’t say I’ll add everything that has been suggested I just wanted to say here that I have been listening, and usually responding. Every idea that has been suggested I have written down for consideration so if you don’t see something you suggested in here just know that I haven’t forgotten and it may show up in a future patch.

So, I think I’ve made people wait long enough. Speaking of which, thank you to everyone who has reported bugs, and had patience with me for the duration here. Below is a changelog for this patch that I’ve separated into sections to make it a bit more readable. Last note, there are likely some bugs still mixed in, but I’ve done some pretty extensive testing so hopefully they aren’t anything major. If you find an issue, please report it and I’ll fix it as soon as I’m able. Hope you all enjoy.

Additions -Added new zone Harontin Estate

-Added new zone Glittering Grotto (finally a reason to fix the bridge on the beach)

-Added 4 Archeology artifacts to find and assemble

-Added new NPC, Petra, to the game

-Added Alchemist Shop (run by Petra)

-Added new NPC, Isabel, to the game

-Added new NPC, Graham, to the game

-Added the fermentation system to the game. After unlocking this will allow you to create custom drinks with a variety of ingredients and effects

-Added Buff System, the system already half existed, it has been expanded upon and been given a UI

-Added Fisheries

-Added Fish Traps

-Added hunting refinement. You can now refine meat you get from hunting. This includes drying racks, marinade pans, smokers, and recipes for 3 different marinades

-Added additional perks, increasing the total from 11 to 44. A small note, 5 or so of these are not available in the game as they pertain to combat which isn’t implemented

-Added exchange shop, an exchange shop functions on a separate currency that isn’t gold. Currently only one such shop exists at the western digsite

-Added minor artifacts that can be dug up via archeology, these can be sold or traded

-Added soulstones to the game, obtained via random chance when mining

-Added windmill interior, and millstone. Several ingredients now need to be ground at the windmill rather -than in your cooking station. Things such as wheat, spice plants, and sugarcane for instance

-Added additional potted plant variants

-Added additional pottery variants

-Added a new set of furniture

-Added a set of fish that can only be found in the various levels of the mines, each tier has a small set

-Added placeable boulders and shrubs for your home

-Added a Cocoa Tree that can be planted and harvested from

-Added recipe for chocolate

-Added Barley and Rye as all season (spring, summer, and fall) crops, mostly used in fermenting

-Added cloud save support if you are playing via Steam. This also resulted in having to move your save files. -Save files have been overhauled to accommodate Steam cloud saving, on itch saves will now store within the game files that you download. Unless you are on Mac in which case they will be in “~/Library/Application Support/VerdantVillageSaves”

-Completely overhauled the mines. In brief, floors are now randomized and filled with several different things the player can encounter and interact with. More variation and layouts will likely come in the future

-Added 9 quests, for various NPCs and signposts around the world

QoL (Quality of Life) -Added description text to the catalog categories to more easily identify them

-Homogenized tints when placing structures

-Changed fishing system once more (whatever number time is the charm, right?)

-Updated fishing tutorial to match the updated minigame

-Changed Blazing Snapdragon quest to unlock the recipe for “macaroni noodles” so you know, you can actually make the recipe he unlocks for you, 10/10 game design right there (if you’ve already finished this quest the recipe will be unlocked for you as well)

-Changed “Perk Gained” UI to be more consistent for all perks

-Made shovel upgrades have a purpose. Anything gathered via the shovel will now yield more if you upgrade your shovel

-Updated confirmation prompt sprite

-Added new flower tiles to the world

-Apiaries will now create non harvestable flower tiles around themselves, these will slowly disappear if apiaries are removed. (These tiles will NOT grow over other objects such as crops)

-Haggler perk renamed to “Merchant” to hopefully avoid confusion. This perk will apply to any item you sell via stores or the shipping chest

-Modified rain drop generation to appear more naturally when the player is moving

-Modified flower seed descriptions to avoid a bit of confusing information

-Updated popup message dialogue boxes to make them a little less unsightly

-Cleaned up the effects on some items that are generated in the world, things like wood and seeds appearing above tree leaves, etc

-Dirt patches that you have created, patches you can plant crops on, will now disappear at midnight instead of after a full day

-Altered the flooring tiles of the second tier of the mines for something that tiles better

-Altered several sections of code to reduce looping and give a slight performance boost

-Altered inventory manipulation to allow for pulling and placing of partial object stacks via right click. I.E. if you try to right click a stack into something like a chest and the chest can only hold part of the stack the game will move as much as it can into the chest instead of doing nothing

-Changed sugarcane to an all season crop (spring, summer, and fall). Sugar is needed for a lot of recipes this should keep players from having to rely on the store if they don’t want to

-Changed Wheat to an all season crop for similar reasons as sugarcane

-Altered several tiles around the map to ensure that archeology digs will not spawn on top of flower tiles as this resulted in a strange appearance

-Gave shoreline grass sprites in the swamp a once over, moving several into better locations

-Updated and added new buff sprites

-Modified the tree sway algorithm to make the effect a little more pronounced

-Slightly rebalanced some SFX to hopefully blend better

-Modified collision masks on several indoor environments to make them more accurate

-Made some forage objects not adhere to z ordering rules, specifically ones that don’t rise off the ground

-Added a recipe for animal feed that is available at the cooking station from the start of the game

-Modified bridge sprites for the swamp, beach, and ravine

-Added tutorial to explain saving

-Slightly altered one of Lylah’s paths to account for new terrain, also because I didn’t want her staring at a cliff like she was in Blair Witch

-Made several small UI changes to make UI cleaner, such as hiding the clock or tutorial prompts at certain points in the game

-Remi’s store will now sell crops that are out of season for a high price, this should make cooking more feasible, if a little expensive

-Swapped out crops on Narbell farm from wheat to a variety of crops to match the current season

-Changed the quest log to make it infinite, as a result the player is no longer able to drop quests

-Added mouse wheel scrolling to all sliders in the game

-The cooking station can now be picked up with the carpenter mallet and placed in a location of the player’s choosing

-Touched up animal naming UI to improve the look slightly

-Altered ending quest dialogue for “Archeological Crash Course” (the quest that unlocks archeology) to better explain how to find fragments and assemble artifacts

-Added a small section of code that spawns some archeology dig sites when you finish “Archeological Crash Course” to keep the player from only discovering keystones for the first few days

-Made alterations to the alchemy crafting UI to display how much of a resource you have at your disposal when crafting with it

-Updated the shop UI slightly

-Updated some text sections to display a gold coin instead of a “G”

-Changed the archeology artifact assembly minigame to something slightly different

-Added specific fleeing animation for deer as before they just sort of shuffled very quickly

-Modified many UIs to improve the look and feel such as the cooking, alchemy, shipping, archeology, sleep, chest, and blacksmith

-Updated the “Beginner Carpentry” quest reward text to make more sense

-Added a failsafe for NPC movement which should prevent any further instances of NPCs just walking through space and time. This should also fix any NPC that has broken already in your save file

-Updated currency display to show alt currencies in the inventory screen

-Altered the names of some stores to align more with the game’s setting and characters

-Added a system to the map to show shop hours when you hover the town (I have also had requests to show NPCs that are in an area. This may be added but it would be at a later date and probably be done as a game mechanic you have to earn)

-Implemented a temporary system to unlock the player’s inventory if they get soft locked in it because I can’t replicate this issue to save my life, but it is a pain when a player runs into it. Once this is fixed the system will be removed. An explanation of this system is on the inventory screen

-Recreated the snow weather effect to make snow fall more realistically

-Retextured the main game font and header font

-Added several more ambient SFX

-Changed the “Cavern Mapper” perk to have a more relevant effect given the new mines systems

-There is now a drinking sound effect for when you drink things, because last I checked you don’t chew milk, and if you do chew your milk, throw it out, its expired

-Chests can now be rotated when they are placed in the world

-Disabled the ability to press F12 to open the chromium dev tools in game. It wasn’t so much an ability I guess as a “why can I do this anyway” sort of thing

Balance Changes -Slightly lowered the upper limit of wood you get from chopping down a tree

-All food has been overhauled to include buffs and hp recovery instead of just stamina recovery

-Adjusted sell price of several hunting items

-Altered alchemy breakdown values slightly, some items will now break down for multiples of an ingredient making some more valuable than others

-Removed “Seed Rationing” perk as it was obsolete

-Decreased the sell price of honeycomb

-Increased the sell price of honey

-Slightly lowered the prices of several generic cooking objects such as stock, sugar, and oil

-Lowered the price of all fruit tree saplings by 2500 in an effort to make them profitable faster

-Changed requirements of “Extra Pockets” quest to make it slightly easier and smoother path to getting more bag slots

-Altered the ending dialogue of “A Bigger Bag” quest to point the player towards Alice to get more bag space

-Significantly reduced the amount of time it takes for, non-fruit, trees to grow and regrow (Because I deforested the woods before the end of Spring Yr 1 one time)

-Reduced material costs of several buildings

-Changed requirements for “Wanderer” perk from 100,000 steps to 80,000

-Changed cooking station to pull all items and ingredients, including fuel, from all chests not just the ones inside your home

-The alchemy station will now look at all chests for ingredients as well your inventory so you don’t have to carry everything you need to the station

-Reduced the stamina used by all tools in the game, because I was tired of having the stamina of a toddler. As a result, leveling your skills doesn’t reduce stamina costs by as much but the change is significant enough that you should still notice it

-Rebalanced mining veins to have consistent HP instead of HP that scales with your depth in the mines

-Made minor adjustments to fish catch rates to improve the variety of what you catch

-Adjusted the sell price of chocolate slightly to compensate for it being craftable now

-Changed ore nodes in the swamp to drop clay instead of stone when mined, paired with one of the new zones it is also no longer possible to dig up clay in the mines but this source should be more consistent and hopefully easier and more obvious to acquire

Bug Fixes -Fixed a dialogue error with one of the gravestones in the mountains

-Fixed player becoming stuck when drawing bow and quickly releasing it without firing an arrow

-Fixed a bug that would lock the player out of shooting the bow

-Fixed a bug that would allow you to have an indefinite and stacking strength buff

-Fixed an issue with stone path being misaligned upon placement

-Fixed a bug regarding dismantling paths giving multiple objects

-Fixed a variety of bugs with dismantling when using a controller

-Fixed small visual glitch with Caleb’s portrait

-Quent will no longer be bedridden, but seriously he should move around the world normally now

-Fixed visual bug with the description box appearing oddly

-Updated buff system to work with sleep, previously the system would halt all buff timers during sleep

-Fixed a bug where dismantling an object that had a notification box above it (box with !) would leave the notification box intact indefinitely

-Fixed a bug that caused the description display to half appear when specifying a stack split amount

-Fixed a bug where when changing from controller to keyboard and mouse in a specific situation you could temporarily lock the player’s movement

-Fixed a small visual glitch involving retracting a nocked arrow in your bow when using a controller

-Fixed a massive bug where certain invisible checks weren’t handled properly which caused them to accumulate within the game and eventually cause lag (If you played long enough you were probably being affected by this, excess checks will be disposed of when running this patch)

-Fixed a bug where holes dug on the beach the night before a season change would turn into dirt tiles after midnight

-Fixed a bug where you could plant seeds in holes dug in the sand on the beach

-Fixed a visual glitch where you could still interact with shop buttons when naming livestock you had purchased

-Fixed a section of Elise’s pathing schedule as she may or may not have been walking through cliffs, oceans, and other things that you know…people can’t walk through

-Fixed a bug where fowl would still spawn feathers when they hadn’t been fed the prior day

-Fixed a bug where feathers from fowl were not properly eliminated each day

-Fixed a bug where some hunting objects would try to list consumable effects despite them not being edible…I mean I guess you could eat a deer antler if you wanted but I wouldn’t recommend it

-Fixed a signpost near the lake that was missing a collision mask

-Fixed a bug with the error messages you would get when using an attunement stone, messages should now display properly based on what you are doing

-Fixed a bug with the shipping chest that could result in longer gold values being cut off

-Fixed a minor visual bug in the mines relating to rock sprites

-Fixed a long-standing visual glitch regarding the player shadow disappearing when mounting and dismounting a horse

-Fixed a bug regarding Simeon’s dialogue when he is in the middle of constructing a building on your farm

-Fixed a bug that kept the player from removing dark wooden fences

-Fixed a bug that left a text object in the center of the screen after sleeping

-Fixed a minor z ordering glitch with mining nodes in the swamp

-Fixed several missing shadows in the plains

-Fixed a bug that would temporarily freeze player movement when the seasons changed

-Fixed a small visual glitch on the character select screen

-Fixed a bug involving left clicking on an interactive object while trying to dismantle something with the carpenter mallet soft locking player interactions

-Fixed a bug that allowed you to place rugs outside

-Fixed a bug regarding controller support not working for the quest accept UI

-Fixed a bug where you could close out of the livestock shop while naming an animal, which, you know, resulted in some issues

-Fixed a bug where you could jump to the map screen via the hotkey even when you were specifying the amount to split from a stack in your inventory

-Fixed a visual bug that would size description boxes incorrectly for one tick when hovering certain UI elements

-Fixed a bug that prevented the game from booting in Linux in some cases

-Fixed a bug where you could still edit archeology puzzles after having completed the puzzle

-Fixed a bug where interior doors in your house wouldn’t change their style to match the wall styles you can apply

-Fixed a bug where dismantling an object that was holding another object such as dismantling a desk when a book is sitting on it, would result in the book remaining and defying the laws of physics

-Fixed an issue where the night vision buff could be applied infinitely, increasing your vision range an infinite amount

-Fixed a bug where large adamantium nodes couldn’t be mined

-Fixed a small bug with the shipping chest that would show the cycling arrows as usable when they shouldn’t be

-Fixed a bug where fruit tree saplings wouldn’t drop seeds when they were dug up

-Fixed a glitch with the interior of Graham’s house not aligning with the camera

-Fixed a glitch with Graham being stuck walking behind his bed

-Fixed a bug where some tiles in the deeper forests would turn into black squares in winter

-Fixed a bug where objects placed on hanging wall surfaces would not z order properly against them

-Fixed an inconsistent UI bug where some buttons wouldn’t play their animations when using a controller