Friends and Soon-to-be-friends,

As the cold wind starts to come over us here in Germany, we’re putting on our sweaters and getting cosy as we work on our next big update. Did you see our new roadmap? We’re also already showing off a bunch of stuff on our Discord[discord.com] if you're interested in seeing work in progress things!

However, there’s a very small update that we wanted to do now. It’s the start to a “seasonal event” system that we’re introducing to the game!

The Seasonal Event system is a small system that activates specific audio and visual content in the village depending on the time of year that you’re playing the game. It basically just looks at your system clock and changes things when it's the right calendar day.

These changes have no effect on gameplay. It only affects the village visuals and music, and not the game world itself. They’ll also be in the game forever, so you won’t “miss out” on anything and can experience it next year if you don't play the game for the next few weeks.

In general, we see automation games as something that you can play for a long while as you learn, explore and play with the systems. Some people play a single automation game for a concentrated period of time. Others play until they have their fill and then come back every once in a while. We added this seasonal event system to make playing our game feel a little fresher over time. For now, there’s only this autumn event, but we’ll add more as we develop the game.

This particular “autumn/halloween seasonal event” lasts three weeks, from the 17th of October to the 7th of November. This means during those dates, the village will look and sound a little different! There’ll be some lighting changes, visual effects changes, new autumnal models (like some 🎃Pumpkins🎃), and a variation on the village music.

Here's a little sneak peek!If you're enjoying the autumn village and feel like dressing up for the season, don't forget to take a screenshot when you're done! Maybe you'll find something on our Twitter [x.com]or Reddit this weekend about another little contest we're running between now and Halloween~

Separate from that, we're also fitting in some bugfixes!

• Fixed map interaction being stuck when dragging the map by a small amount.
  
• Fixed some items lost when picking up death backpack due to big inventory slots.
  
• Fixed different staff sounds not working in multiplayer.
  
• Fixed multiplayer desyncs related to the Spark Thrower.
  
• Fixed Loamy Spark sound being played in 2d.
  
• Fixed "Knock On Wood" achievement not requiring Arty Sparks.
  
• Fixed Boomy Spark token and Crashy Spark token having the same texture.
  
• Fixed Show Player Names option not being saved when the game was closed.
  
• Fixed some controller options appearing when they weren’t supposed to.

That's it for now. We'll talk later this month in our devlog about a feature that's coming up in the next big update. Talk to you very soon!

Update (30/10/24): Oh man, we're really busy this month! Unfortunately, we won't be able to write up a new devlog but we'll try to make up for it next month. We hope we can talk sooner than later!

Hikers, Miners and Spark-Extinguishers,

You’ve had our new update in your hands for a month now and it’s been amazing to see all of your train networks, your logic creations and your beautiful bases. We’ve been working on our next big update, and we figured that now is the right time to show you our new roadmap!

We have seen some of you already figure it out from the little symbols! We hope you’ll be excited for our next big update, titled “Hot & Cold” that we're planning to release on Winter 2024!

Things are still very work in progress (we already started showing off some things, like some new biome music and some gifs and screenshots, at our Discord[discord.com]) and we’re working on figuring out the details as you read this, but I think we can talk about them a little bit more so it’s a bit clearer what’s actually coming up. Of course, we will have more devlogs where we delve properly into the different features like last time.

But for now, we can talk a bit about the loose shape of these features and give you a better understanding of what’s coming next!

We didn’t add a biome for last update, so we’re making up for it by adding two this time. The two biomes are tied to other features, but separate to that, you can expect a large area to explore and expand on. (and we’ll be expanding the “building” area in the middle of the map for your megabase needs.)

And of course, new biomes means new enemies - these ones can freeze and burn your Sparks! You'll need to manage your Sparks in the heat of battle but also the actual heat of the battle itself.

Do you yearn for the mines? The Volcanic Cave is not just a cave in name. You will actually need to use your Sparks to dig tunnels in and out and through the cave. You’ll use different Sparks to clear up areas for you to build on, and find new resources in the cave.

As you dig, you’ll need to be careful - separate from the dangerously hot temperatures deep in the cave, digging indiscriminately might hurt you and your Sparks, or even cause a cave-in!

The hot and cold biome also means a new layer of optimisation for your production line! Some buildings and recipes love being in the heat, while others prefer it cold. You can build in the hot and cold biome for that extra efficiency, or manage temperatures in existing biomes with new buildings.

It’s easy to get a bit more efficiency from your existing production line, but for some buildings and recipes, you’ll need to really work and modify your production line to get it running at a level of efficiency you weren’t able to before!

Take what you’ve found from exploring the new biomes home and cultivate new and unusual plants in greenhouses! It’s a big automation challenge where you’ll need to continually feed items to the plants to make them grow.

The smallest plant might need something like 100 items in total over half an hour to fruit, but the biggest plant will need thousands of items over tens or even a hundred hours! However, with the larger plants, you’ll also be able to scale up how much you’re feeding it. You’ll be able to make it grow significantly faster and cut that time down, but you’ll need to tackle the building challenge of making that production line work.

We have a big list and we’re going to tackle it as much as we can. Our current priority is to make the build menu more useful, make equipping and managing Sparks easier, and make managing quests easier.

There’s also some more invisible work that needs to be done, like a Map rework. This doesn’t mean any visual changes, but at the end, it should feel nicer and work better. And when we do want to add new features on it, it’ll be much easier for us to do so!

We also wanted to tackle some accessibility features for this update, like putting in a screenshake slider and a misophonia mode that’s been asked for.

So that's just what we consider our big features but we also have a lot of smaller things that we'll want to try to fit in. We just will surprise you with them later, but if you want some hints, you can always check out our Discord[discord.com].

In general, we see completing the mountain as the marker that you’re ready for more challenging stuff and want to ramp things up and open things out, so please look forward to it!