Heard of the Story? News

Important note: we've recently confirmed that the latest Steam client update causes slower loading, saving, occasional in-game lag and sometimes glitches. Please see this post for details and how to avoid this issue for the best experience.

[h3]Changes[/h3]

• Changed all flowers to slowly re-grow
  
• Fixed windows in house roofs not lighting up when villagers are inside to sleep
  
• Fixed camera being wrongly positioned when not talking to a villager head-on
  
• Fixed out-of-season vegetation from previous saves not also being destroyed
  
• Fixed villagers stopping one step too early to finish building goals
  
• Fixed villagers giving up on goals if their tools break and due to being oblivious to their crafting skills. Now they'll try to obtain the tool they need and continue
  
• Fixed game crash when destroying an uninhabited house
  
• Fixed time progressing during the loading screen, sometimes causing premature saves
  
• Fixed not being able to click on the same recipe when re-opening crafting
  
• Fixed changing crafting page not correctly updating the requirements and craft button if using the mouse
  
• Fixed out-dated settings hint
  
• Added an option to re-bind screenshot mode
  
• Fixed some interactions with screenshot mode
  
• Cleaned up the 'save and ...' flow by fixing buttons, adding a text hint, and waiting on save completion before progression
  

Happy New Year everyone! To kick off 2025, we have just a small patch to fix a few things :)

• Made villagers feel better after crying to prevent them from continually doing so
  
• Fixed merchants sticking to browsing only one market stall
  
• Fixed vegetation on and around buildings not being destroyed when it’s not in season
  
• Fixed out-of-bounds inventory items causing the game to soft-lock during loading
  
• Fixed being able to navigate the main menu banner options while in the settings
  

Working our way through the most requested features, we have finally added the ability to destroy completed buildings! There were various bits and pieces involved for this, like making sure to remove remnant garden objects villagers previously had behind houses, getting them out of buildings before destroying them, and many more small things. In addition, there are various ways that villagers can react whenever you destroy a building - don’t displease them too much!

This now means that you are able to upgrade your town over time by destroying old buildings and replacing them with bigger and better ones. As mentioned in the discussions, we will of course also be working on a real upgrade feature :)

[h2]🪳 Bug fixes[/h2]

• We also spent a fair bit of time on fixing various issues relating to villagers sometimes just stopping moving. You may have noticed that especially if you played the game for a while, more and more villagers would sometimes just hang around doing nothing. Hopefully this should be fixed in the vast majority of cases now - let us know if you still see anyone lazying around!
  
• Fixed immigration being limited to 25 villagers
  
• Fixed sometimes showing wrong interaction indicators and interactions when two objects would overlap
  
• Made stone colours more consistent with the general colour scheme
  
• Added a special dirt effect when digging with the shovel
  
• Improved the quality of some UI textures
  

[h2]🍂 Seasons[/h2]





In this update, we’ve implemented a small but sweet feature: seasons. Now, every 4 in-game days, the colours of the environment will progress from flush green to a cool white.

Different flowers will bloom during different times, and fields will no longer grow during winter. Villagers will also not give you quests for off-season items.

Although at this point, the seasons do not impact gameplay that much, we couldn’t resist bringing this to you during these cozy autumn and festy times! :) Of course, we do also plan to introduce additional season-based features and items in the future!

[h2]🪲 Improvements & Bug fixes[/h2]

• Added smoke effect to the crafting animations of the bakery and pottery
  
• Improved the look of building walls (boring white begone!)
  
• Added the screenshot mode button keys to the controller graphic in the settings
  
• Optimised market stalls
  
• Fixed ESC breaking when pressed during crafting animations
  
• Fixed changing pages in blueprints page reselecting without controller
  

We are pleased to announce controller support is finally here! :)

We apologise for the delays to get to this point. It took as a while to get to this point mainly because there are so many different interactions and interface elements in the game now - it has been in development for 4+ years after all!

[h2]🎮 Controller support[/h2]



As with most games, we decided to base our support around the Xbox-style controller, however, the main work of this update has been to support interactions and interfaces through controllers in general - this means you should be able to play with most types of controllers as long as you correctly map your keys (for example, through Steam’s big picture mode). With the big picture mode, we were also able to play and test the PlayStation and Nintendo Switch joystick controller.

There are a couple of additional things we’ve added for when you have your controller plugged-in:

• As you traverse the interface, we’ve added useful button hints in places to allow you to quickly see what you need to press to say, scroll to the next page or rotate a building.
  
• With the controller, you’ll be able to use a new interaction: your left and right triggers can quickly switch between different menus (eg left trigger to jump straight your last selected item in the book from the inventory)
  

[h2]❓ Interaction indicators[/h2]



Probably the second most requested quality of life feature has been interaction indicators so that you can see what you are about to interact with. Due to the new controls, we thought this would be as good as time as any to finally add them in.

[h2]↗️ Tutorials[/h2]



The tutorial system required an overhaul since there are now two control schemes, and we wanted to make sure the correctly fitted hints show up for each. At the same time, due the new interaction indicators, many were outdated and removed.

Another issue that existed with the old system was that if you re-bound certain keys, it would still show the old keys in the hints. That is no longer the case with the new system, and if you update your keyboard bindings you should see them correctly reflected in certain hints too. The mouse bindings will still be prioritised though since they serve as the primary interaction methods versus the secondary keyboard keys.

While we were here, we also gave the hints a much needed touch-up and now each unrolls in a cute little scroll :)

[h2]🐞 Bug fixes & Improvements[/h2]

• Added a screenshot mode which you can toggle by pressing the F1 key or SELECT on your controller. This will hide your toolbar and any indicators. Since interaction indicators are now omni-present, we though this would be a good time to add this to help with cleaner screenshots :)
  
• Fixed bronze and salmon pie not being unlockable
  
• Fixed starting a new game sometimes getting stuck on the loading screen
  
• Remember the last tailoring cut and colour when switching between different clothing
  
• Updated the look of setting sliders to be consistent
  
• ESCAPE now firstly cancels any building and decoration placement
  
• ESCAPE now returns to the Townsfolk view first from the double-paged view
  
• Fixed dropping items in storage container not refreshing that list of items
  
• Fixed camera mode not being correctly set as controller when loading the game for the first time with a controller plugged in