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!