April Update! | Beta v0.20: Recruiting Cats, Museum of Curiosities, Achievements

Hello and welcome to the April developer update for Cattails: Wildwood Story! New features are now available for our Beta players, bringing the game closer to its launch state. Let’s get right into it!

Beta v0.20

Another month, another slew of new features and changes! In addition to the regular bug fixes and balance tweaks, here’s some of the exciting new mechanics:

Museum of Curiosities

Glimmer’s Museum of Curiosities is now open! Find Unidentified Curios in various places as you play (in interesting areas, in the mines, even in certain shops). Bring them to the Curio Identification Table in the Museum to discover what they are, then consider donating the identified Curios to the Museum by speaking to Glimmer.

There are 30 Curios to discover, and Glimmer will be more than happy to tell you all about each and every one of them when they are donated. Of course, there are plenty of rewards available for those who donate lots of Curios to the Museum. There’s even a Rainbow Power Paw up for grabs for the generous few who complete the Museum!

Achievements

Completionists, take note! Achievements are now available in Cattails: Wildwood Story. There’s currently a whopping 55 achievements to unlock!

View your progress in the all-new Achievements menu. You’ll also be rewarded with in-game XP when completing each achievement’s requirements.

If (for whatever reason) you’d like to clear your Steam account of all Cattails: Wildwood Story achievements, allowing you to start fresh, you can enter this special promo code in the pause menu: AGAINAGAIN (this will reset your global Steam achievement progress for Cattails: Wildwood Story, locking each achievement, but not your in-game achievement progress on a per-savefile basis.)

For existing savefiles created prior to Beta v0.20, you’ll find that many Achievements that you’ve already met the requirements for will unlock automatically when you load your existing file; however, some achievements track stats that we previously were not tracking, so these achievements will begin at 0% progress. However, all achievements should now be able to be unlocked on all files, regardless of when they were created.

The Gift Record

The Gift Record is a nice new quality-of-life feature!

Each NPC has their own Gift Record that will begin completely empty. When you give a gift to a particular NPC, if that gift is a Liked or Loved item, it will be added to that NPC’s Gift Record. View an NPCs Gift Record via the Social Panel by selecting their name to see which previously gifted items were received positively by that NPC. Use this knowledge to ease the burden of making new friends!

Recruiting Cats (new savefiles only)

This one is pretty big! We’ve been planning this for a long time and we’re so happy with how it turned out. New players (and new savefiles) will have a much smoother introduction to all of the many, many characters in the game now through the Pillar of the Wildwood.

When you start your file, you’ll have several cats already in your colony: Ember, Spark, Coco, Elli, Jag, and Krampy. However, the other possible residents must now be recruited before they will join up. You’ll find the new Pillar of the Wildwood in the central chamber of the Temple of the Forest Guardian. This powerful object can locate cats that live nearby and help you to meet their unique needs so that they will move into your town.

Each possible cat that you can recruit is represented by a Card that lists their bonuses and benefits, as well as their needs. You’ll have to collect the required items and donate them at the Pillar of the Wildwood, at which point they will immediately join your colony and you’ll be instructed to place their den via the Build Menu. The first few cats should be fairly easy and straightforward to recruit, so you can begin to expand your town’s population quickly.

Important note: Savefiles created in Beta v0.10 or earlier will automatically have all residents recruited for compatibility reasons. Your savefiles will continue to work as usual, but this new feature is for new savefiles only.

Balance Update

Players seeking a challenge will find that Hard mode is a bit harder than it used to be, and Impawssible mode is quite a lot more punishing than it once was. All other difficulty settings (Kitten, Easy, Normal) remain unchanged.

Phew, another month down and another major update released! We’re narrowing in on the last few big features that need to be added to the game prior to launch. We’ll continue to keep you updated as development progresses. Check back in May when we’ll have more info for you here. Until then,

-Tyler (@FalconDevelops)