Howdy, cowpokes! 🤠
We are happy to announce that the highly anticipated farming update has arrived. The “Growing Greens - Farming Update” features the first iteration of farming, a revamp of the construction mode, a combat update, and lots of improvements!
Introducing: Farming
As one of the most requested features, we are excited to bring farming to Don’t Die in the West. With this update, we are laying down the basics of how it will work, and with your feedback, we will continue building on this foundation in future updates.
To begin your farming empire, you’ll first need to meet with Tallulah, who can show you the ropes.
After you’ve helped her out, Tallulah will teach you how to make garden boxes. You can plant seeds in these boxes to grow vegetables. If you water them every day and give them some time, soon they will be ready to harvest by hand!
Once you’ve harvested your first crop, you can eat your fresh veggies raw, or use them in the new recipes coming with this update. To further expand your farm, make sure you stock up on fertile soil, which is crafted from straw and a stinky new ingredient.
Revamped construction
Based on your feedback, we are adjusting the construction mode. The goal is to improve the flow and offer a more tactile feeling to construction that puts you at the center of the experience.
We’ve introduced a new tool, the hammer, which you can equip to enter construction mode. With the hammer equipped, you can edit structures and navigate through menus.
One of the most requested features for the construction mode has finally made its way into the game: Camera control. Specifically, we’ve added camera rotation, and more dithering options while you have the hammer equipped in a construction zone. We hope this will help with item placements and visibility.
Improved combat
One of the main issues we noticed with combat was enemy awareness. In some cases, enemies didn't notice you even if you were punching them, while in other cases they could spot you moving behind a mountain.
Because of that, we’ve focused on improving enemy awareness states and behavior. The list of changes and tweaks is quite long, but in short, enemy behavior should now be more consistent when interacting with them. For example: Showing suspicion when detecting you at range, before attacking, thus giving you time to hide (which you can now do in tall patches of grass!)
To make this clearer we’ve added new status icons above enemies (and animations) to show if they are suspicious, attacking, or afraid of you. Together with the behavior changes we hope this will make the combat more fun and readable.
We have created a new outfit to match the start of your farming adventures, added auto-collect, and many other improvements, tweaks, and fixes.
As we mentioned in the beginning, we are very excited about this big update and hope you will enjoy it. The team has been hard at work nurturing these new features, but in order to grow them, we need to water them with your suggestions. Share your thoughts, feedback, farms, suggestions, or just a "hi!" with us on Discord, X, or the Steam Forums.
Best of howdies,
The Don't Die in the West team