Cornucopia · published · build 24045611
Entire farm zone rebuilt with all-new hand-painted art and reshaped land
A whole new beach and ocean you can walk to, no loading screen
Living world, plants, bushes and grass that fill the map and sway in the wind
New autosave system, so a crash never costs you a day again (hopefully, lol)
Big performance pass for smooth play on lower-end PCs, laptops and consoles (Switch coming soon)
One of the longest bug-fix lists in the game's history (most of it too small to name, but it adds up)
Your existing farm is safe. The build grid was rebuilt and expanded so you can place and plant across much more of the world, and your old farm, soil and crops all carry over onto the new grid. There is a new hand-pixeled parallax background behind the farm now, with 5 to 6 layers running from far-off snow-capped mountains all the way to a dense pine forest up close. Look closely and you will find a few hidden surprises in the rocks.
How It Works Follow the water down past the waterfall and walk right onto the sand. No loading screen from the farm to this new area!
Once you are down there you can build the same way you do on the farm. Place furnaces, saws, sprinklers, scarecrows and tumblers, and plant trees, bushes and crops across a much bigger area. You can fish in the new ocean, and you can dive down and explore the ocean floor with a breath meter. Something big lives down in the deep. We will let you find it yourself.
Custom water shaders now allow the waterfall to blend smoothly into the river instead of ending in a hard line, and new warp zones with glowing markers link the farm, beach, town and junction so the world feels connected. Hint: Enter the Cave beneath the waterfall, to warp back to your farm.
First published April 3, 2026 on cornucopiavideogame.com/devlog
Walking on my treadmill while writing this. I have ADHD so if exercise isn't the first thing I do in the morning, it's just not likely to happen, lol. I bought a cheap treadmill off Amazon and set up the hydraulic table I already use for my mouse pad when I'm sitting, raised it up to about belly button height in front of my PC with my mouse and keyboard on it. Monitors tilt up a bit so I can see them while standing. Something in the house is better for me than the gym or yoga which I tend to stop going to in a couple months after signing up, as is generally the case. I was walking 2-3 hours per day for about a week before flying to Boston to show the game at PAX East, but now I'm back at it after a couple days recovery.
I showed a little bit of the new farm terrain in the last post. But here's an interesting problem and solutions to the new terrain I've never mentioned before.
So my 3D modeler first started sending me terrain model tests back in November 2025 or earlier. He was actually a fan of the game originally. Redesigned the Cornucopia logo on his own almost two years ago just because he wanted to, after reaching out to me. Over time he's become pretty much the only active person working alongside me on the game. He has been working as a contractor for about the past 2 years on the game, and is now the most important person helping on the game. A player who loved what I was building and ended up helping build it. That kind of thing doesn't happen often.
In March 2026 just prior to PAX East he sent over a complete farm terrain redevelopment after we planned and brainstormed it for many months. The terrain is WAY WAY more detailed and interesting than before and includes a new connected oceanic zone. And every day he keeps sending more fixes and improvements as we work together. Flowers, bushes, ground cover, coral for the oceanic zones, little plants growing between rocks. He kept asking me in the past, "How much can I add?", and really kept trying to push the scope larger and more detailed than I thought was possible for performance.
And I kept looking at the designs thinking about the GPU, FPS, and performance on lower-end machines.
The Problem
Every separate object in a game is a request to the graphics card. Every flower, every bush, every little ground cover plant. "Draw this." "Ok now draw this." "Now this one." 2,583++ of them.
On a decent gaming PC, fine. But we want it running well on lower end PCs, laptops and consoles. Those systems care a lot about how many separate draw requests you throw at them. The bottleneck isn't the triangle count on screen. It's how many separate things you're asking the GPU to handle at once. And I'm looking at this beautiful scene that finally has the environmental detail the game was always missing, and I'm thinking... do I have to tell him to cut it back? Because the game can't handle it? I really didn't want to.
The Breakthrough
My first attempt was standard GPU instancing, where you tell the GPU "here's one mesh, draw it 500 times at different positions." Efficient. But it requires identical geometry and these plants are all unique shapes. Didn't compress enough.
Then I realized something. These plants are all stuff the player can't interact with. You can't pick them up, walk into them, nothing. They're purely visual. And they share the same texture atlas. If nobody interacts with them and they share the same texture... why are they separate objects? What if I just take all the nearby ones and literally merge their meshes into one big mesh? The GPU just sees one object. That was the moment everything changed.
The Process
The first problem was trees. Your character bumps into tree trunks, so trunks need collision. But the leafy canopy on top? Nobody needs to walk up there. So canopies can be combined, trunks can't. I wrote a tool in Unity that separates every tree into its two parts in one click.
Then I made the vegetation baker, the tool that does the combining. You select a parent object with all the plants underneath it, click one button, and it handles everything. It splits the world into a grid where each cell is 20 units across, roughly one screen width, so the GPU can skip entire cells that are offscreen. Within each cell it merges plant meshes together up to 60,000 vertices.
We ran actual density tests too, with a test file literally called GrassDensityCapacityTest, to see how much we could push before the frame rate died. Turns out the system handles way more than we expected. That was a really good moment.
The Wind
This is the part I'm most happy about. When every plant was its own object, each one swayed in the wind on its own. Easy. But once you combine thousands of them into a few big meshes, how do you make individual plants inside one combined mesh still move independently?
Before combining, I go through each plant and "paint" its vertices with a sway weight. The bottom of the plant gets painted with 0: don't move, you're anchored. The top gets 1: full sway. So the stems barely move and the tips of the leaves and petals move the most, just like a real plant in the wind.
Then I wrote a shader that reads those painted values and pushes the vertices around, using two overlapping sine waves at slightly different frequencies. That layering is what makes it feel gusty and organic. Some plants lean left while the one right next to it leans right.
And I thought carefully about what should and shouldn't sway. Coral sitting on rocks? Stays still. Ground cover flat against terrain? Static. The tree canopies got a different feel from ground plants too, more of a slow, subtle breathing kind of movement. Different vegetation, different personality.
The Result
I ran the baker and watched the draw call counter go from 2,583 to 3. A 99.88% reduction. This was pretty surprising, and I was very happy seeing this work properly.
The farm used to be just the interactive props sitting on kind of a bare surface. Now there are flowers growing between every rock, bushes along every path, ground cover everywhere. And when you're walking through it all and everything is swaying around you in the wind, each plant moving a little differently... that's a handful of draw calls doing the work of thousands. You'd never know.
And the most important thing: my modeler can add as much environmental vegetation as he wants now. I don't have to be the person saying "cut it back" when it looks this good. A fan of the game who ended up being the person making it beautiful. That's a good feeling.
There's a reason I needed all of this working before anything else. Can the new area connect to the farm without a loading screen? I didn't think it was possible before this. The modeler was really insistent that we have the lower new area connected straight onto the farm, and his dream of having so many details did appear to come true.
So I'm back for the second dev log! The first dev log on the environmental decorating optimizations did surprisingly well. I'm very happy about that :)
The big gameplay thing is you can now place refining fixtures, your furnaces, saws, etc, in the new oceanic area connected to the farm. I was originally not going to allow it because the ocean zone is just so large and I thought it was beyond the scope of having such a huge area with all placeable terrain. But I decided to do it anyways due to breakthroughs with performance, and figuring out the game can handle more than I thought. Originally this area was planned as being purely decorative, and we only hoped that maybe somehow it could all be placeable. Happy to see that we pulled it off!
Making the grid system so much larger, and making sure it was still compatible with people's old save files, there was a lot of coding involved, and careful adjustments. I also built an entirely new tool for painting the terrain, marking off the tiles where you can't place stuff because there's environmental things in the way. Rocks, flowers, cliffs, water, that kind of thing.
The New Background
The artist sent over the final version of the new farm zone background and it's pretty sweet. The old background was basically just a flat image back there, not much going on. This new one has a bunch of hand-painted layers stacked at different depths instead. You've got distant snow-capped mountains way in the back, then green mountains with cliff faces in front of those, then a treeline of oaks, and then a dense pine forest up in the foreground. Everything is pixel art and hand-painted by him. It even has personality, like dog faces built into the mountain rocks and other details.
There's 5 or 6 depth bands in total. The farthest mountains are this pale minty color because they're supposed to be so far away, and then each layer gets a bit darker and more detailed as you come forward. Here's what each of the layers looks like on its own, going from the back of the scene to the front:
Getting it to work properly with the camera was a bit challenging honestly, because the perspective shifts around a lot as you zoom in and out. What I did was angle the tree line downward and extend it way further. So when you're zoomed more top-down, you're mostly seeing trees. When the camera tilts more side-on, the mountain line shows through behind them.
Waterfall Blending
I also improved the blending where the waterfall meets the river at the top. It used to have kind of a hard seam right where the waterfall mesh started and the flat river water ended. Now there's a custom material on the waterfall that fades into the river surface instead.
Rebuilding the Placement Grid
The game already lets you place refining fixtures out in the open on your farm, anywhere you want. Furnaces, saws, sprinklers, scarecrows, tumblers, that kind of stuff, plus planting fruit trees, berry bushes and more. With the new ocean zone connecting to the farm, I wanted the same thing to be true down there too. Drop your furnace on the beach if you want, same as up top.
The problem is the old placement system wasn't really built for an area this big, and it wasn't built for handling old save files either, since players already have their whole farm laid out on the old terrain shape, with all their saved soil values and plant positions. So I had to redo the whole thing from scratch to handle the changes as well as old save compatibility.
I also built a new editor tool for marking off the spots where the player shouldn't be able to place stuff. It's like a painter tool where I paint red tiles directly on the terrain. All the decorative rocks, flowerbeds, stonework, water, cliff edges get painted red on a per-tile basis. I ended up hand-painting the blocked spots across the entire new terrain.
Another thing I had to fix was the blue grid line visual itself. When you're placing a fixture, the game draws blue grid lines on the ground so you can see which tiles are available and which are occupied in red. On the old mostly flat terrain that worked fine. But on the new terrain with all the cliffs and waterfalls, the grid was drawing on everything, including cliff faces.
The fix: the shader now figures out the actual slope on its own by looking at how the world position changes from pixel to pixel across the screen. Anything steeper than about 30 degrees from horizontal gets cut off, with a smooth fade near the cutoff so the grid doesn't hard-clip at the edge.
Warp Zones
I set up a bunch of warp zones connecting the new terrain to the other zones around it. Bottom cave up to the top cave, farm down to the beach, into town, the junction area. Makes the whole map feel way more connected. Sparkly indicators included so you know where they are.
The funny part is how I was measuring where the player should spawn on the other side of each warp. I needed a reference body roughly the size of the player, so I ended up just using Rufus the farmer's sprite, literally placing Rufus at the landing spot in each zone so I could eyeball whether the size and position and angle all felt right. He's the perfect size for it.
Farm Animal Pathfinding
All your farm animals, your cows, chickens, horses, use pathfinding to keep up with you. The problem is the old pathfinding graph only covered the old farm area. So when I extended the world down into the ocean zone, the animals would follow you right to the edge of the farm and then just stop. Sit there and watch you walk off into the ocean without them, which was kind of sad.
So I rescanned the pathfinding graph across the whole new terrain. Farm, junction, ocean zone, all of it. Big decorative props like cliff rocks and tree clusters now carve out non-walkable zones too, so the animals route around everything the way they should, and they can follow you anywhere in the new terrain without getting stuck. Much happier about how they behave now :)
Every bug we fixed in 10.0, in plain words. Many came straight from your Discord reports. Thank you!
Your saves and progress
Old save files work fully on the rebuilt, expanded placement grid. Farm layout, soil values and crop positions all carry over.
Fixed old saves showing soil errors and missing tilling decals after loading.
Fixtures or trees stranded on now-unusable tiles by the new terrain turn back into inventory items instead of getting lost.
Fixed old saves showing dark soil patches on grass where the farm shape changed. They heal themselves on load.
Animal happiness now saves properly. It was resetting on every load and secretly downgrading your product quality.
"Fed today" status now saves. You could re-claim the daily feeding bonus just by reloading.
The cooking stove now remembers each ingredient's own cook timer, burnt state and durability. It used to copy the first item's state onto everything.
Machines and fixtures no longer heal to full HP when you load. No more free repairs by reloading.
Fireplace fuel no longer resets to empty on every load.
NPC hat colors no longer reset to white.
Dropped weapons and ammo keep their stat bonuses after a reload.
Perennial plants no longer revert to destroy-on-harvest after a reload.
The special-ability tutorial no longer replays every time you load.
Fixed corrupted saves that made the whole world look underwater, caused by an interrupted zone change.
Perfectly-watered tiles keep their wet look after reloading.
Play time is tracked accurately now. Late-game saves could count up to double real time, which also mis-timed an item-drop bonus.
Every save keeps a rolling backup and repairs itself from that backup if a save file ever gets corrupted or the game closes mid-save.
Fixed a crash when deleting a save, caused by leftover backup files.
The world, terrain and placement
Blue placement grid lines and red blocked tiles no longer climb up cliffs and waterfalls.
Fixed empty tiles wrongly showing as occupied.
Fixed generated cave and mine layouts spawning objects and walkable paths in the wrong spots.
Fixed a hill terrain patch that was using the wrong shader, so the terrain lights evenly now.
Fixed the beach base texture sometimes glitching to white.
Fixed crops AND livestock silently freezing their growth when a season or year rolled over while you were in another zone.
Fixed a hidden calendar-corruption bug in the festival weather check.
Animals and pathfinding
Rebuilt farm-animal pathfinding across the whole new terrain, so cows, chickens and horses follow you all the way to the beach instead of glitching at the old farm edge.
Fixed indoor pathfinding not adjusting to interior zones.
Fixed animals and enemies spawning and instantly vanishing.
Big decorative props like cliff rocks now correctly block pet pathfinding.
Fixed pets playing their eating animation while walking.
Water and swimming
Fixed a visible diagonal seam in river water.
All farm waters now match: same color, texture and animated flowing surface, and they stay in sync through weather changes.
Swimming overhauled: gentle buoyancy instead of sinking like a rock, snappier sideways control, press Jump to swim up, and a proper swim pose instead of the idle pose.
Fixed being unable to swim up off the ocean floor.
Plants and wind
Reeds and cattails now sway in the wind. They were completely stiff.
Tall plants now sway more than short ones.
The baked greenery now darkens with the day-night cycle along with the ground. It used to glow at full brightness at night.
Starting a new game
Fixed the player falling through the ground when starting a new game.
Fixed the player free-falling or jumping in mid-air during a new game's first seconds. You now stay put until the world finishes loading.
Fixed getting stuck forever on "creating the game".
Fixed a spawn and camera-framing bug at the start.
New farms no longer start with a stray giant log sitting in the field.
Fixed a small visible drop when returning to the title screen.
Lighting and visual effects
Fixed the ground appearing to darken as you walked.
Fixed the night torch lighting up the entire screen. It is a believable torch circle now.
Fixed warp and teleport sparkles being invisible.
Fixed the Enlarge effect leaving a permanent screen blur after it ended.
Controls and combat
Fixed smart-interaction acting on the wrong tile. Your hoe, seeds and watering can now hit exactly the tile the preview shows.
Fixed controller tile-selection acting one row off from the highlighted tile.
Added a cooldown to the hotbar cycle, and the triggers no longer flip your backpack while the card menu is open.
Fixed rapid re-jumping, and you can now jump while pressed against a fence or ledge.
Menus and UI
Fixed ESC stacking menus on top of each other. One ESC now cleanly closes what is open.
Quick-send to storage now goes to the tab you have open.
Fixed white boxes where icons should be on several popups.
The beta build's "Last Updated" date now shows correctly on Steam.
Stability
Fixed the game freezing for up to a minute when taking a screenshot. The game now runs in borderless fullscreen, which also makes alt-tab instant and stops the old fullscreen crashes.
Fixed sound effects sometimes jumping way too loud when entering a new area or opening the menu.
Fixed the mouse cursor disappearing after leaving an arcade or festival minigame with a controller plugged in.
Fixed the mailbox cutscene getting stuck forever.
Fixed the mailed Throwing Ball endlessly following you when your inventory and shed were full.
Fixed NPCs walking in place or turning invisible during cutscenes.
Fixed a controller crash-spam during loading.
Fixed a spider boss softlock, a chicken-coop cutscene bug, oversized anglerfish, and an invisible collider behind the chicken coop.
Fixed repeating console errors from water and footsteps, a waterfall pond collider conflict, and a batch of build errors.
Footstep sounds now match the surface: water, ground or wood, and go silent while swimming.
Balance and economy
Item drop rates retuned across mining, auctions, mailbox and racing.
Energy and progression pacing improved.
Closed an early-mining overpay exploit and a free-money loop in the rock-paper-scissors minigame.
GPU The new greenery draws in about 3 draw calls instead of 2,583. That is what let us pack the world with this much detail while keeping it smooth on lower-end machines. We also tightened up how far shadows render, which cut the per-frame work roughly in half in testing (16.7ms to 8.4ms) and gives a good bit more headroom on laptops and lower-end machines, with no real change to how the world looks. CPU Faster boot-up and lighter pathfinding. Language files now load only English plus the language you are using instead of all 30 at once, which saves around 242 MB of memory, and switching language is now instant.
The game now quietly autosaves in the background into its own AUTOSAVE slot in the Load menu. It saves at the natural moments, when you change areas, when you sleep, and the instant you close the game or alt-tab away, so quitting without sleeping never costs you progress. It waits until you stop moving so it never causes a hitch, it never overwrites your manual saves, and it is saved per farm. Every save also keeps a backup now and will heal itself from that backup if a save ever gets corrupted or the game closes mid-save. If you have any issues with this new system let me know, it is always a big undertaking making everything backwards compatible with your old save files. Your saves now sync to Steam Cloud properly too. Play your farm on another PC or on Steam Deck and your progress comes right along with you. It happens quietly in the background, there is nothing to turn on.
Reworked item drop rates and energy and progression pacing.
Closed several money exploits.
The town is next. It is being rebuilt to match the new farm, with a green shop and a second-floor greenhouse, the general store, the bakery, a Japanese cottage, the water-wheel cottage, a new barn, and a wooden rope bridge across the river. This part is not playable yet, it is just an early look at some of what is coming.
We have started building co-op multiplayer so you can play the farm together with friends. It is much excitement and largely untested, but we wanted to show you a sneak peak.
Cornucopia is my dream game, and it exists because of your support, help and feedback. Thank you for playing, and for sticking with hardcore indie devs like us (through thick and thin). And thank you to our artist for making all the 3D models and new artwork in this update, including the art at the top of this post.
David ❤️
With a rebuild this big there may still be a few rough edges. If you run into any bugs, please report them on our Discord or in the Steam discussions.
Thank you!
David