Hello Ranchers! 🤠💚
A new update is now available!
Make sure your game is updated to version 0.8.10.858.
🐄 Ranching
This update brings another major stability and balancing pass to ranching.
- Addressed all currently known cases that could cause farm animals to disappear. A huge thank you to ❤️ alfafreakgaming ❤️ and ❤️ jennoula ❤️ for helping me battle-test the ranching systems and track down some extremely tricky edge cases!
- When one of your animals becomes sick, you will now receive an alert on the End of Day screen.
- Fixed an issue where players could receive death alerts for animals owned by NPCs.
- Rebalanced animal sickness duration to make animal care more forgiving, especially for newer players:
- Chickens: now remain sick for 4 days before dying, up from 2 days.
- Cows: now remain sick for 7 days, up from 3 days.
- Goats: now remain sick for 8 days, up from 3 days.
- Rabbits: now remain sick for 5 days, up from 3 days.
🌐 Multiplayer
Multiplayer stability and solo play have received some important improvements.
- Adjusted multiplayer connection timeouts to make brief internet connection drops less likely to disconnect clients from the host.
- When starting a new game or loading an existing save, the game will now always ask how you want to play:
- PLAY SOLO: No internet connection required.
- OPEN TO FRIENDS: Your friends can join your session while you play. A stable internet connection is required.
- In both modes, you can still use the Subway to visit friends who are online and currently playing with OPEN TO FRIENDS.
These changes should make the game much more reliable for players with unstable internet connections, while also ensuring that solo players are never forced to maintain an online multiplayer session.
This is especially useful on handheld devices such as Steam Deck and ROG Ally. When playing solo, you can now put your device to sleep and resume later without losing your session because of an interrupted online connection.
🏠 Building
The building system received a major round of fixes and improvements:
- Fixed major issues that could prevent blueprints from being placed in certain situations.
- Improved roof snapping and placement.
- Added an improved building-part occlusion system based on the player's position.
- Added a new UI showing the current floor, with the ability to manually switch floor visibility.
- Fixed an issue where hidden roofs could remain interactable and block interaction with objects underneath them.
- When equipping a roof or ceiling piece, the building system now automatically switches to the appropriate floor visibility.
- When leaving Building Mode, either by unequipping the hammer or the current blueprint, floor visibility now automatically adjusts to match the player's current floor.
- Foundations, including garage foundations, can now be built over rivers.
🔥 Yes... you can build bridges now! 🔥
🐞 Other Fixes & Improvements
- Fixed an intermittent issue where rain audio could continue playing after the weather became sunny.
- Fixed an issue where NPCs could disappear when entering or exiting building interiors.
- Fixed an issue where players could not unload all animals from a vehicle when the trunk was full.
- Loading screens when entering or exiting buildings are now approximately 2x faster.
- NPCs will now flee when they are harmed.
- Added a new notification during the early-game tutorial explaining that police chases, vehicle damage, and criminal activities are temporarily disabled.
This should make it clearer to new players that these systems become available later, rather than being missing from the game.
Thank you again for all your bug reports, feedback, testing, and continued support. Every report helps us track down these difficult edge cases and make The Ranchers more stable and polished with every update. 💚
Happy ranching everyone, and stay tuned for more updates!🔥