Len's Island News

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[h3]The Companions and Languages Update is now out! [/h3]

This major update adds four new pet companions to the game you can unlock, either with their own cool new abilities. Len's Island now has language support for Simplified Chinese, Spanish, German, and Thai. We've also scattered many new collectible decorations around the map for you to find!



[h2]New Features & Changes[/h2]

• New dog companion that can be unlocked by completing the first dungeon
  
• New cat companion in Bridgewater town that can be tamed using a bait box
  
• New wolf companion only spawns during harvest moons and tamed using a bait box
  
• New tiger companion that only spawns in desert biomes and tamed using a bait box
  
• Dogs and cats will retrieve items off the ground for you, this includes fetching glass bottles on the beach, collecting dark essence, fallen tree logs, and helping you mine
  
• Wolves and Tigers will attack nearby enemies, stunning them for a short period of time and damaging them
  
• New Bait box item which you can store various baits in to attract animals and enemies
  
• Explorers Hat now shows nearby collectible items on the map when equipped
  
• Language support for Simplified Chinese, Spanish, German, and Thai, with more languages to come.
  
• 12 new collectible decorations and pet items
  
• New farming planters (large pots that you can plant a single crop in)
  
• Hanging pots and window planter decorations
  
• Major memory usage optimizations across the game
  
• Various bug fixes
  

We're very excited to bring you these long-requested features. Happy holidays (or merry Festivus) to everyone and we will see you in the new year for a BIG year ahead of updates!

~ Julian

Hi all!

To celebrate the 2 year anniversary since our Steam release, we put together a special video showing how Len's Island started out 6 years ago as my solo project and transformed into what it is now.

It's been a crazy journey to make this game happen. I uprooted my life and dropped everything in an attempt to make my dream game. And somehow I managed to make it work.

Here we are 6 years later, with an awesome game that's getting better every day, and an awesome community to support it.

So thank you everyone, from the bottom of my heart, and from the rest of the team at Flow :)
- Julian

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Hello there,

We've been hard at work on optimizations and managed to make a couple of big breakthroughs.

The memory usage of the game has been significantly lowered.
Previously during stress tests I was able to get the RAM up to 8-9GB loading as much as possible.
After our recent changes, I was unable to get higher than 6GB RAM, with a usual standard of 4-5GB.
We are still working towards making this even lower, but this update carries a memory saving of around 2-4GB during gameplay.

This is a massive boost for older machines, and especially people with low RAM installed. As the previous builds could have led to game/pc crashes if it ever got too high.

We have also compressed a bunch of files. allowing us to reduce the game install size from ~6GB to 3.3GB.

~ Julian

[h2]! Performance Optimizations Made in this Patch:[/h2]

• Reduced memory usage significantly, lowering RAM taken by the game by 2-4GBs
  
• Reduced the the game install size from 6GB to 3GB.
  

Hey all,

A quick patch to fix two major issues, a bug with picking up backpacks and an issue with one of the desert dungeons causing people to get stuck in the loading screen. Both have been fixed and you will now be able to load into the dungeon and pick up any dropped bags.

I'm sorry for the bugs over the past week or so, the game hasn't been as stable as I would have liked after the Harvest Moon update. We're working really hard to fix issues, so whenever a bug is present, we will usually have it fixed within a couple of days.

As for the people experiencing game crashes and performance issues, this is a memory issue we are fixing now. Long story short, the game's memory usage is way too high and we are in the process of making major optimisations to lower it considerably. This will stop the crashes and freezing some people are experiencing. A patch to solve this will be up this week.

~ Julian

[h2]! Bugs and issues resolved in this patch:[/h2]

• Fixed one of the Act 3 dungeons not being able to load
  
• Fixed some dropped backpacks not allowing to be picked up
  

Hey everyone,

Just a quick couple of patches to address some performance issues and some rare loading screen/teleporting freezes and crashes.

We are still working to improve the performance and will have a patch out next week to implement some drastic changes to improve memory usage and overall game performance.

Because I'm feeling a bit cheeky, below are some totally unexpected screenshots from some early testing and prototyping of the next update coming before Christmas, which will include:

• Multiple pets/companions
  
• New collectible decoration items
  
• Two new languages being supported
  
• Big performance improvements
  

This is just showing a small few of the items to be added. Of course, all still early-stages work in progress.



[h2]! Bugs and issues resolved in this patch:[/h2]

• Fixed bugs causing rare cases of being stuck in loading screen after changing levels
  
• Improved performance of loading into levels
  
• Fixed issues leading to higher than normal memory usage after big play sessions, we are working on a massive overhaul to our memory system for the next update. As the game is still running too high on memory.
  
• Fixed foundation farms build height adjustment not working