Ahoy!
It's time to grab your scissors and prepare to create some brand new friends in our Glow Up Update, available now.
The final building in the game is ready: The Salon. Once built, you can dive into the brand new Create-A-Critter system and design your very own islanders from scratch. Your custom Critters will arrive via the next tour boat, ready to settle in and become part of your community.
You can edit your creations later, but choose their personality carefully, because that's locked in for life! The Salon also brings some quests, and of course a new job and tourist hotspot.
You can have a max of ten custom critters, so that the game doesn't explode :)
It's not just the town that's getting a glow up, but the game itself! We've put serious work into performance for this update.
Overall this should improve FPS by about 15-20% on lower-end systems and the Steam Deck, a boost which can make a big difference later in the game when your town gets busier! This should also create faster loading times, and players on more powerful machines should notice less stuttering and drops in general.
We've also added new particles for fire, water, and various SFX, and we've added new higher-end anti-aliasing options for higher-end systems.
Woolington needs your help to search for a mysterious relic! The museum is at the heart of an all-new questline that you can start by checking in with Professor Woolington. (If she’s not ready yet, keep an eye on the bulletin board, she’ll let you know when she has your first task!)
Seven new critters will be joining the roster, these are the winners from our latest Critter Creation Contest on Discord! Please welcome Arco the boar, Katnip the plant cat, Quanta the lizard, Cobran the green heron, Ollie the opossum, Shae the ball python & Opalite the unideer.
We've also added monkey and pony heads, and tails for monkeys, opossums and gators, as well as a bunch of new nose options.
A bunch of small quality of life improvements landed too:
Sickness rebalances: If you give it to a Critter directly, medicine will always heal them the next day. Sick Critters will now visit the Clinic for a chance to get better. These two changes combined make sickness a little easier to manage overall.
Customizable autosaves: Choose when the game saves, which can be helpful to reduce stuttering on some machines.
Smarter crafting: No more "inventory full" messages if/when the crafting action frees up a slot, plus you can finally make slop in bulk.
We've also squashed dozens of smaller bugs in this patch, from bread pretending to not be an ingredient to fish escaping aquariums. You can now rename save files, sell the starter hat (you monster!), and will find that Renard stays visible on the map at all times.
Happy glowing up!