Horticular News

Hello keepers!

This is a small in-between patch that prepares for the upcoming holiday event (coming December 18th!) but also includes a couple of bits and bobs:



Added:
Lore image for the runic resonator.
Setting for if variation is copied when copying items (defaults to on).
Setting for toggling musical stingers.

Polished:
Council member asset polished to be on par with other gnomes.
Slug Disco logo updated.

Fixed:
Visual glitch when the merchant has less than 9 available slots.
No sound on Steam Deck OLED without running with Proton Compatibility.

Modding:
Ability to spawn items when interacting with an object.
Ability to spawn objects when interacting with an object.

What's the holiday event I hear you ask? I shall just leave this here as a little tease!

Hey Keepers!

Happy Halloween! And welcome back to another monthly community update!

October has been a busy month for Horticular – we’ve joined an event, got ready for a new platform and even had a festive update! Let’s jump right in and see what we’ve been up to.


[h3]1.2 Halloween Update[/h3]

Autumn is ending and the spooky season is here. Horticular is joining in on the festivities too and our 1.2 update features brand new Halloween content! Decorate your garden with new items and attract bats (new creature!) to settle. We also introduced a myriad of improvements and fixes in the update. Check out the full patch notes here.


[h3]Steam Deck![/h3]
That’s right, Horticular is verified on Steam Deck. This means you can now take Horticular on the go and keep working on your garden anywhere. To celebrate this occasion, we gave out 5 keys to players with the best gardening tips! Congrats to the winners!

In the meantime, a Mac version is in the works so please look forward to seeing Horticular on more platforms!


Animal Week

Last but not least, at the start of October, we got to participate in the Animal Week Steam event organised by Games Incubator in support of WWF Poland. Playing games AND helping out a charitable cause is always a great combo!


Phew, a lot has happened in October. That’s going be all for now and it’s time to work on the next update. If you want to get the latest news for Horticular, be sure to join us on Twitter, Facebook, or Discord to keep up with all things Horticular! See you next month!

[h3]Hey Keepers! It’s update time![/h3]

That’s right! Horticular 1.2 is here for the spooky season! In this update, we are bringing Halloween to the gardens of Horticular, featuring brand new festive content. The event will be active throughout October 25th to November 8th, and can also be manually triggered any time throughout the year!

Here are some highlights of this patch:

• New animal!
  
• Themed main menu
  
• New letter introducing festivities
  
• New lore book
  
• Four new decorative items
  

Alongside festivities, we are also introducing a myriad of fixes and improvements to the game. As usual, the full changelog can be found below. Feel free to dive in, and then decorate your gardens with all our new Halloween items. Hope everyone has a fantastic Halloween!



[h3]Content[/h3]

• Added Bat: This flappy little thing is a bit particular in its requirements and should be accessible midway through the game.
  
• Added Abandoned Cottage: A run-down version of the council's cottage, well suited for the season.
  
• Added missing statues: That's right, you can now unlock golden statues of the contacts that didn't have one.
  
• Added festivity item. Used to manually start the Halloween event and any upcoming future festivities.
  
• Polished Jack-o'-lantern assets.
  
• Polished council cottage asset.
  

[h3]Gameplay[/h3]

• Added Untrack species: There is now a key binding for this and on gamepad there is a button from the planner tool.
  
• Some items now cost gold to use.
  
• The copy function now copies the item variation, too.
  

[h3]Gamepad[/h3]

• We've polished gamepad inputs to make it more precise with the left stick.
  
• Movement: Made input more fine-grained at the lowest movement speed. This essentially fixes the sudden jump from zero movement by making it gradual all the way.
  
• Targeting: Gamepad now have double the distance to target creatures and objects compared to before.
  

[h3]Fixes[/h3]

• Lots of items with 0 height now have a height.
  
• Sandbox titles didn't fit in German.
  
• Flyers could get temporarily stuck in air when lifting them.
  
• Randomized placement wasn't kept when moving an item.
  
• Moving an item to another tile would reuse the randomized placement from any previous items on that tile.
  

[h3]Modding[/h3]

• Lots of modding changes this time that were introduced to support the update. WARNING: The game is backwards compatible but old versions of the game will obviously not pick up the new modding features.
  
• Item effects can now have a cost.
  
• New "Ruin" item tag.
  
• New Non-collectable usage for items and surfaces. These can only be accessed in creative mode and do NOT count to collection stats, useful for if creatures drop items that shouldn't be seen in lore or affect balancing.
  
• New IdleAir animation type for animals. While they still fallback to IdleGround, you can now specify one to specifically used when in air (including perched on items).
  
• Idle animation frequency can now be adjusted per animal.
  
• All flyers now respect preferred item tags in their behavior data. Previously, only erratic flyers did.
  
• Both entity spawn commands now also have a "-habitat" flag that creates a habitat and settles the creature in it. This is just for debugging and useful if a habitat is needed to test something.
  
• Animation rows can now specify secondary types. In other words, you can reuse animation rows for all other animation types, saving some space/load time/development time.
  
• Animal behavior data now has a home object that, for now, can be used to specify specific item tags they want to find to visit their home.
  
• Animation rows can now specify a rendering height offset for if needed.
  
• Height and Variations have been moved to a Variation Data list. Each element of the list denotes one variation and currently has its own height. This mean items now can have individual heights per variation. This setup may get additional variation-specific data in the future.
  

1. NOTE: For animated items, you still need one variation to set the height, but additional variations won't be usable.
   
2. NOTE: The game auto-migrates to the new data automatically. If you load the old format with the editor and re-save you will find that both Height and Variations get cleared and replaced with the new Variation rows.
   

• With the new variation tech, the "dataprops" command currently doesn't work to set heights. As a workaround for now, there is an item_height command taking an item id and variation to inspect or set its height for.
  

This is a minor hotfix for exceptional states mainly caused by console commands such as "entity_spawn".

• Fixed: Game crashes when creatures without a home try to return home.