It is once again patch time. To be honest, I was a little worried I wasn’t going to hit this deadline. I had what I thought was a huge problem on my hands just a day ago. Turns out it was poor optimization on my part that looked like it was a bug. In any case, that has been fixed.

Admittedly, this isn’t exactly the patch I wanted to put out. Originally, this was meant to be a content patch, with more well, content. Through a combination of the holidays and other issues and suggestions cropping up this turned into more of a quality-of-life patch.

There are a few additions but things focus pretty largely on QoL as well as bug fixes. Hopefully the next patch will lean more heavily into content. I feel like I think that every time, but stuff inevitably gets in the way. I suppose its all in service of making the game more complete in one way or another. I don’t think there is anything that stands out hugely from the list of changes, but I think together this patch does a good deal to make the game a little more polished.

One thing that I want to mention just blatantly here. There were some changes made to fermenting and as a result fermenting recipes needed to be wiped for this patch, apologies. In short the calculations were wrong so recipes that already existed would be horribly miscalculated, this shouldn’t happen in the future however. I also wanted to mention that I know various people have spotted issues or suggested changes. If you don’t see something you mentioned referenced in here just know that it is probably still in my list of things to look at. I had to cut this patch off somewhere (as I usually do) and as there are a few larger issues plaguing the current release of the game I didn’t want to drag it out much longer.

Anyway, as usual thanks for your patience, I hope you enjoy the patch. The full changelog is below.

Verdant Village Patch 0.4.5.5

Additions -Added Malcolm to the game

-Added Lauren to the game

-Added Malcolm’s house interior

-Added the second floor of the castle

-Added 6 quests to the game from the afore mentioned NPCs, these are quest gated so they may not be available -right away to players

-Tree seeds can now be cooked into a small snack, this recipe is available from the start

-Added small bee sprites to apiaries, so now you can be afraid of getting stung while collecting honey now

-Added a visual movement to water in the world so it now moves up and down slightly

-Barley and Rye seeds are now available in the general store year-round, minus winter

-Placing fishing traps in the ocean now has a chance to yield shrimp

QoL (Quality of Life) -Barn and Coop animal UI (the book) will now darken slots to show how many total spots are available in the building for livestock

-Added a tooltip to the Watering Can and Hoe to explain that they can be charged when used

-Chests can now be picked up with the carpenter mallet, however they still need to be empty to do so

-Trees will no longer allow you to plant them if they are too close to another tree where they wouldn’t fully grow

-Cooking station now shows your totals for what ingredients you are using next to the cost of an item

-Cleaned up the code around the object placement UI so that it is no longer overlapping other UI elements regardless of its position

-Stack limits for all items in the game have been raised to 99. The exception to this is stone and various woods which remain at 200

-Removed the “Topics” button from the dialogue menu. This was done mostly because the current button doesn’t really do anything and its probably more misleading to new players than anything. It will reappear once that system is implemented properly

-Extended the discovery notification background for alchemy to more fully fit all the text that appears on it

-Added currency values to the descriptions of items. Gold was already shown but now uses the icon, and the archeology currency will appear on the appropriate items

-The silo will now check if feed needs to be distributed when the silo UI is closed. In short if your silo ran out of feed and then you added more to it that day to compensate you now won’t have to manually feed the animals that day as well -Silos will now automatically add extra feed to a tier 3 building if you buy and place an animal in such a building

-Changed dirt tiles to turn back into grass after one day regardless of their watered status

-Added a small effect to keysprites in the mines to make them slightly easier to find, this will hopefully also compensate for those who are hard of hearing or just play without sound

-Added a meter to the fishery UI to show how close fish are to spawning an egg and how close eggs are to hatching

-Chest inventory search functions now search chests based on distance to the player instead of via the arbitrary array indices. In short, this means if you cook something at the cooking station and it needs to pull ingredients from a chest it will pull those things from the chest that is physically closest to the player instead of potentially from some random one on your farm

-With the addition of Lauren to the game the inn now has two different menus you can order from depending on who is currently running the inn

-When scrolling your hotbar a small text prompt will now appear above the hotbar to indicate what you have selected

-Changed objects that you pickup manually to disappear as the player reaches down to pick them up

-Made a very small visual change to the interaction guide

-Changed object placement to round to 1px for objects that don’t adhere to the grid. This still allows creative freedom but if you want to line things up to look nice it is no far easier to do

-Changed the collision on the bottom wall of the player house to match other interiors

-The shipping chest now operates on all of your chests as well as your inventory

-The forge now operates on all of your chests as well as your inventory

-Cleaned up the forge UI slightly

-Added the pickup sound to all objects in the game not just the ones you pick up manually. This is something I was sort of back and forth on, if you have an opinion on it feel free to let me know

-Animals will now stop walking when being milked/sheered

Balance Changes -Oil and Stock have been increased to 60g and 80g respectively to balance out being able to craft them

-The mines have had ore spawns rebalanced. Coal should now be far more abundant and it exists in every level of the mines. Other ores have also been balanced to be easier to find in their respective levels

-Planted berry bushes have been calibrated to be more profitable. Each bush regrows more quickly now, listed below. Also the sell prices for each of the seeds have been reduced by 30g Strawberries regrow in 2 days Raspberries regrow in 1 day Blueberries regrow in 2 days Cranberries regrow in 2 days Blackberries regrow in 1 day

-Lowered construction time of most buildings by a few days

-Lowered upgrade time of barns and coops

-Increased the drop rate for animal fat from all animals

-Fishing XP has been modified to give more XP per fish given the time it takes to catch one

-Fish traps now grant minimal XP when a fish is retrieved

-Slightly increased Hoe XP to compensate for the tool not being used that often

-Irrigation Pipes now water all 9 tiles around themselves as opposed to the 4 directions (up, down, left, and right)

-Irrigation Pipe orders have increased to 8 pipes per order

-Tree tapping restrictions have been lifted and trees on your farm can now be tapped in all seasons outside of winter

-Watering Can charge patterns have been changed to be square instead of diamond shaped

-The Watering Can now has more charges at each level to compensate for the new watering patterns, charges per level are 15, 36, 48, 64, 80, and 100

-When hunting, the tracks left by a fleeing animal last longer

-Hunting animal spawns have been rebalanced to be more even across the board, also a bug was addressed which was making the spawns lopsided towards particular animals

-The “Close Shave” perk will now always grant the player a 3rd wool when sheering a sheep

-The Profit buff from fermenting is now, well, more profitable. There should be a much larger gain when fermenting drinks for profit,

-Dynamite rooms in the mines will now spawn chests instead of other random objects like stamina crystals or buff pillars

-Stumps that are dug up now fade faster as the animation was a little strange before

-Decreased the material cost of fences and paths by about 5 of the required material

-Dark furniture recipes now require pine sap to be made

-Removed spice plants from spawning in any area that isn’t grassland

-Modified additional forage spawns given via the forager perk, you now get fewer

Bug Fixes -Any existing fermentation recipes have been deleted, this is due to a bug with the calculations which is addressed in this patch, a brief explanation is the 4th paragraph in the patch notes

-Fixed a bug where pigs had a chance to disappear or shift barns when finding truffles

-Fixed a bug where dialogue lines would get mixed and interchangeable in the first and second floors of the inn

-Fixed a bug that would cause patching to take multiple minutes depending on how many irrigation pipes you had placed in the world

-Fixed an issue where food that gave the “Sure Strike” and “Prospector” buff would mince the two buffs, with the cooking station reversing them in the effects listing

-Fixed an issue where cooking recipes that were crafted instantly wouldn’t subtract the required heat

-Fixed a bug where the player couldn’t add animals to a barn or coop when it was being upgraded

-Fixed a few bugs relating to the crafting of fish fillets

-Fixed a bug where plants in the swamp cavern were giving cotton as a resource

-Fixed a bug where pine trees could be tapped but not give anything while consuming the tap

-Fixed a bug where you couldn’t place specifically Desert Flooring in any room with specifically a controller

-Fixed a bug where the silo wouldn’t feed barn animals

-Fixed a bug where cranberries were considered a catalyst in fermenting

-Fixed an issue where certain light sources would turn on/off before/after others

-Fixed a bug where Isabel wouldn’t actually sit at the bar in Summer, she’d just walk into it like a broken Roomba

-Fixed a bug where carrots wouldn’t provide the dark vision buff when used in fermenting despite saying they would

-Fixed a bug where wall objects could be placed half way into the walls due to a collision error

-Fixed a bug where NPCs weren’t running the proper schedule when it snowed

-Fixed a bug where cantaloupe seeds would grow more quickly than they were said to. The seeds now take 9 days to grow as the tooltip states

-Fixed an issue that would cause much of a marine décor to be hard to place. The fix unfortunately will move any placed piece to the right, these will have to be manually picked up and moved back

-Fixed a few bugs with marine décor hitboxes

-Fixed a bug where the wool count in the barn book for sheering sheep was incorrect as it wasn’t counting the amount gained properly

-Fixed an issue where truffles could still spawn under objects in the barn

-Fixed a small issue with cow animations

-Fixed an issue where cracked ring, pottery shard, dull knife, and crude etching couldn’t be traded in the artifact shop

-Fixed the Fireblood Potion sprite in the alchemy UI

-Fixed a bug where items in alchemy that you had already discovered all the recipes for would still appear in the discovery listing causing cascading problems

-Fixed a bug where alchemy recipes weren’t paging correctly and they were skipping recipes

-Fixed an issue where certain tiles in the swamp were not shifting correctly with the seasons

-Fixed a bug where the message about the silo running out of feed was running off the message box

-Fixed a bug where archeology fragments were not being distributed properly causing certain fragments to be far more common than others. Namely Divine and Fae fragments should be much easier to find now

-Fixed a visual issue where items in the recipe section of the brewing UI would overlap the UI awkwardly once you got enough of them

-Fixed an issue where selecting fermenting recipes wouldn’t delete the ingredient sprites from the previous recipe selection

-Fixed a bug where flavor compliment multipliers for fermentation wouldn’t calculate correctly

-Fixed a bug that caused fish in the fishery to take an extra day to lay an egg when initially put in the fishery

-Fixed a bug that made all fish eggs hatch at the same rate

-Fixed a bug where ore would spawn awkwardly from seams

-Made changes to the inventory system in the hopes of alleviating a softlock bug. Unclear if this has fixed the problem as I can’t seem to trigger the issue

-Fixed a bug where placing objects too close to doors would cause them to incorrectly z order in the world

-Fixed a bug where chopping down trees in winter could trigger them to come back in a different seasonal state

-Fixed a bug where perks and level meters in the “Perks” tab of the inventory screen would show the description box as huge for a tick before displaying the appropriate information

-Fixed a bug where lightning would still flash even when the game was paused

-Fixed a cascading bug where certain sections of the mines wouldn’t generate the proper tiles to cap walls off the correct way

-Fixed a bug that would create an extra text box depicting your HP in the center of the screen

-Fixed an issue where braziers would lose their shadows when they were lit

-Modified shadow positions for several different objects in the game

-Fixed a bug where minecart tracks in the mines would hide the player’s shadow

-Fixed a bug where the angler buff was not augmenting the fishing minigame as it was supposed to

-Fixed a bug where fermentation barrels would always spawn a drink after a patch. This fix will not take effect during this patch but will work for future patches

-Fixed a bug where Simeon is standing the wrong way when building a fishery

-Cleaned up the fishery construction sprite so the grass will always match the season

-Fixed an issue where the silo wouldn’t hold its animation frame through a patch, I.E. it would have feed inside but show as empty in the game world

-Fixed a bug that was causing all food in the snacks section to have the incorrect sell price