Ranch Simulator News

Hello ranchers!

We hope that you've had a wonderful start to the New Year!

In this patch, we've removed the temporary winter theme, including;
- The permanent snow and weather (note that light snow is still part of our dynamic weather system and will feature in the game)
- Christmas trees have been removed from the blueprints book
- Fireworks and Christmas tree decorations are now out of stock at the hardware store and unavailable to purchase

We have read everyone's feedback from the holidays, and understand that many players have not enjoyed the winter theme as much as we thought they would. Learning from this, we'll be aiming to make any temporary themes/events optional from now on if we decide to run them again.

Stay tuned for the February update where a hunting rifle and quests from hunters/other ranches are coming!

The Ranch Sim Team

Hello ranchers,

The December update is now live and available to download!

In our roadmap, we teased that a new cow breed was coming. We are here to announce that the breed is a beef cow and bull! These animals can breed with one another to produce calves.
We've also introduced a dairy bull, whose purpose is to breed with the existing dairy cows.

The dairy cows will produce more milk, but less meat. Whereas the beef cows will produce more meat when fattened and slaughtered, but will provide less milk.

The much requested milking machine is also being introduced. This will speed up the milking process by automating it. You'll still need to lead a dairy or beef cow to the machine and attach and remove the suction cups, but the milk goes straight into the milk can - ready for selling or turning into cheese.



It's time to get festive! We have some temporary Christmas and Winter themed in-game surprises, including snowy weather effects, and a Christmas tree that once decorated will give you a gift each in-game day! There's also fireworks temporarily available to purchase from the hardware store, so gather your friends together and have a blast!



New
- New dairy bull, beef bull and beef cow breeds
- Dairy cows can now breed and will produce a calf (dairy)
- Beef cows can breed and will produce a calf (beef)
- Updated glossary addition for cows
- Added automated milking machine
- Added fireworks
- Added pregnancy indicator on the animals UI
- In the character customiser: added a Christmas hat with two colour choices, added two types of winter jackets with three colour choices each

Temporary - these will be removed on 13th January 2022
- Temporary winter theme featuring snow and blizzards
- Added Christmas radio station
- You can build a Christmas tree from the blueprints booklet (up to 3 can exist in a single save)
- Christmas tree decorations can be purchased from the hardware store, when placed on a Christmas tree, a present will appear underneath every in-game day that you can open!

Fixes
- Fixed an issue where players were unable to join another's game after loading
- Fixed an instance of the game crashing when using screen capture software
- Removed nightmare wolves from the previous temporary update
- Fixed the lights previously not switching on in the retro farmhouse
- When selling milk in the milk can, the unit is now detected and displayed correctly



There's still more exciting new content on the way for Ranch Simulator. Check out our current Early Access roadmap if you haven't already:

Hey ranchers,

We hope you're enjoying Ranch Sim and that your ranching endeavours are paying off! We're incredibly grateful for all of your support so far, and we really do mean it when we say we couldn't do it without you.

We'd love it if you'd consider voting for us in the Steam Awards. To nominate Ranch Sim for the Better With Friends award, you can simply click on the widget above - to nominate the game for other categories, just head to the store page and look for the Steam Awards banner.



The team is still working away on the December update, so keep an eye out for news!

Hello ranchers!

We hope you have had a great Halloween this year. With the end of the spooky season, comes the end of our in-game event.
The atmospheric map, nightmare wolves and ability to purchase pumpkins are removed in this update.
Don't worry though, any pumpkins you have purchased up to this point you can of course keep.

We also have a few bug fixes in this update, listed below:

Fixes:
- Removed Oculus OpenXR plugin to prevent crashes
- Fixed entering certain keys into the session password swapping the menu tabs

Happy ranching!

Hello Ranchers!

Our biggest apologies for the issues since yesterday afternoon's patch.

It seems that a bug slipped through our testing that caused a crash when loading the game for some players. We have reverted to the previous version of the October update (0.581) and the game should no longer generate a Fatal Error on load. There is no difference in content between these versions.

For those that use Streamlabs OBS

When launching this version of the game, please select the second option 'Ranch Simulator, DirectX 11 for OBS' as if you launch the game with DirectX 12 it is likely to crash when you switch scenes whilst streaming.

Was it working fine for you before?

We have branched off the most recent version, that went live yesterday (0.582) onto the unstable branch. So if you weren't experiencing any crashes, feel free to swap over to the unstable branch:

You can access the Unstable Branch by doing the following:

- Load up steam and head to your library
- Right click on Ranch Simulator and then select "Properties"
- Head to the Beta tab and in the drop down select "unstable_branch" (no password needed)

What's the difference between the 2 builds?

When testing version 0.581, we received reports that a streaming with OBS was causing a crash, this is related to using DirectX 12, we have since discovered that running DirectX 11 doesn't cause this issue.
We patched this issue, and an issue where the game would crash on exit sometimes (which doesn't have any negative effect on your save or anything). Unfortunately this seems to have caused a separate issue where the game now crashes on load for some players, therefore we have decided to revert the main build back to the previous one.

Happy Halloween!
~The Ranch Sim Team.