Hey folks,
I’m happy to finally add some quality-of-life changes to the game! Thank you for your patience, I know this took a little longer than expected, and it’s because I took a well-deserved 2-week break from the game to recharge my own biofuel-filled batteries.
1. Move buildings one tile!
So many people reached out to me to ask if I could add the functionality allowing you to move buildings one tile across. I even had personal friends reach out to me to ask for this feature - so yeah, it was a big one!
You can also move bushes and decorations now.
2. Move animals (and destroy empty feeders)
I’ve added a new button to the ‘Animal tab’ that allows you to move animals between feeder slots. Also, if a feeder is completely empty then you can now destroy it if you so wish.
3. Improved bees and butterflies
Bees received a rework and I will briefly explain how they now function. All bees on the farm are evenly spread across beehives and they will only visit bushes in range of their designated beehive. If you place a new beehive, bees will automatically migrate to the new hive. Beehives still produce biofuel, and berry bushes now have a maximum capacity of bees that can visit at the same time.
Butterflies essentially work the same way minus the capability to produce biofuel at a beehive.
Those are the 3 main big things,
but I’ve also added a bunch of small features too:
- You can now use the arrow keys to move around the farm. Tip: hold down Shift + Arrow key to speed up the camera panning.
- You can also use the trackpad scroll to move around the map.
- Golden Metal Pumpkins are now harvestable. You just have to click on it a lot to pop it.
- You can disable/enable bot stations. This will prevent the bot from recharging and consuming biofuel. This is a bit of an advanced feature so I decided not to make the button too obvious.
- Bot biofuel consumption after upgrading has been lowered slightly. Capacity upgrades still add 1 biofuel but speed upgrades now add 0.5 biofuel (the total is rounded).
- Splunk has a new sign available in the shop. The ‘Do not seed’ sign will prevent Splunk from planting crops.
- Splunk will now plant on empty crop patches that are occupied by a giant crop or a fossil.
- The inspect function will now show you how many waterings a crop still needs and how many harvests a crop has remaining.
- I have also added a notification icon to some of the tabs, so you can quickly see if you have anything new to unlock without having to cycle through all the tabs all the time.
- And lastly, I gave the remove crops button a new icon so it wouldn’t be confused with the demolish buildings icon.
(The green light next to the recharge cost is the disable/enable button - very subtle)
Performance improvements
Thank you everyone for helping me to test the performance branch. To minimize the impact on existing players who are enjoying the game without any problems, we’ve added a new dropdown under Settings > Graphics, where you can choose how the transparent background is rendered.
- Colorkey - sets the background color to black and then converts any black pixels into transparent ones.
- Alpha - sets the background transparent and is overall more performant but the only drawback is that it does not work well with overlays.
- Green screen - sets the background color to green and converts any green pixels into transparent ones. This setting is mainly used by streamers.
Most people will remain using Colorkey but if you are having performance issues with frame rate, then please try switching to Alpha. In the future, we hope to add a plain ‘windowed mode’ which is a failsafe for everything that could possibly go wrong and it will probably benefit Linux users as a bonus.
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That's it for today folks, I very much look forward to developing new content for the game now that this stuff is out of the way. As always, don't hesitate to let me know if there are any bugs or any features you'd like to see improved/added ːorange_heartː