Horticular News

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.
  

Hello Keepers!

Yes, you read that right, Update 1.1 for Horticular is now available for all players, after a successful open beta!

This update largely focuses on community feedback we received, with huge changes to how you build and manage habitats in your garden. As always, the full changelog will be at the end of the post, but let's take you through some of the biggest changes you'll notice in-game.



Habitat Updates

We saw a lot of feedback around the way that habitats work post-launch, and have made some exciting changes that should make them easier than ever to build and manage for the curious creatures that show up in your garden. Now, habitats will still spawn as per the whim of the creature in question, but they no longer automatically move around when a habitat is destroyed. You will be offered a replacement habitat in your garden, but you'll be required to move the creature in question yourself, allowing you more control over where your inhabitants end up.
Your creatures will also let you know much earlier on if they're unhappy with their habitat, giving you more time to fix it!

There have also been some changes to habitat borders, allowing you to clearly see where a creature has come from when it's selected, as well as clear colour differentiations for uninhabited, inhabited, and poor habitats.

UI Changes

There's now a larger interface available when playing Horticular - this will be the default for those of you playing on Steam Deck, and we've reoptimised the mod browser and tutorial page layouts to better accommodate the new option.

You'll also notice a brand new camera zoom level during gameplay, so there's one additional zoomed-out view prior to the map overview. This should make it easier than ever to see your garden clearly and plan out any new areas you're looking to create!

Additionally, the notebook been reimagined to work better with more UI sizes and monitor sizes, with some additional changes to how data is displayed. This includes things like automatically focusing your tracked creatures when opening the creature page.

Full Changelog

Habitat/Creature changes

• Creatures don't automatically move by themselves but instead stick to their assigned habitat, allowing you to fix whatever problems it has without having to figure out where the creature lived before. Poor habitats may get overlapping alternative habitats that the player may choose to move their creature to.
  
• The habitat tool now allows you to create overlapping habiats so you can move existing creatures. Note that overlapping habitats are invalid, so it isn't a good long-term strategy.
  
• Invalid habitats from overlap, not being traversable, or other issues not related to its conditions don’t automatically turn 0%. This is to preserve the creature slots and not evict creatures.
  
• The habitat guide marker has been visually merged with the habitat overlay. Gone is having two habitat UIs at the same time. Additionally, hovering a habitat with the overlay active displays the same information as the habitat marker.
  
• Placing the habitat guide on an existing habitat center now marks it for constant tracking regardless of which species you have selected.
  
• You can now unhome creatures from their habitat using the action wheel.
  
• You can now send creatures away from the garden using the action wheel.
  
• New curious creature block item available from the nectar store.
  
• New curious creature speed-up item available from the nectar store.
  
• Species/Habitat tracker has gotten a visual overhaul.
  
• Holding a creature now always shows its habitat details in the habitat tracker.
  
• Homeless creatures (or those with poor habitats) now report their unhappiness much earlier to give more time to fix the situation.
  
• Creatures now get unhappiness damage slower on easier difficulty levels.
  
• There is now sticky icons over inhabitants of hovered or marked habitats to quicker see which creatures live there.
  
• Creature thoughts now are more dynamic and have additional contextual lines that can be said.
  

Steam deck changes:

• Added more UI sizes, specifically ones that make the UI bigger. The largest one is now the default for Steam Deck and all parts of the game has been overhauled to support it.
  
• Added glyphs for more game controller vendors, including Steam Deck ones that are automatically selected.

Feature additions:

• Added an item selector filter for unused items, so you can see what you haven’t tried yet.
  
• Added an item selector filter for item tags, letting you show only basking, only shading, etc.
  
• Added a new upgrade level to keeper healing that makes the keepers heal creatures preventively, effectively reducing the risk of creatures going ill at all.
  
• Photo mode now has a mega screenshot button that captures the whole garden at full resolution. Warning for 30MB screenshots!
  
• Photo mode now has bindable keys and the defaults have been changed to work better with more keyboard configurations.
  
• Setting to disable screen shake.
  
• Setting to adjust speech audio level.
  
• Added a “secret” hortic day quest.
  
• Added a Jukebox item.

Feature changes:

• Gameplay camera now has a new zoom level just before the overview.
  
• Photo mode camera’s last step is now much more zoomed out.
  
• Some Hortic Day quests don’t trigger when they can’t be completed (this could be improved more, but it’s a step in the right direction).
  
• Level 3 seeds no longer provide level 1 items (making them much better and their drops less painful to get).
  
• Keeper pathfinding improved which solves some situations where they could get lost while tending the garden. This also makes them faster at addressing issues.
  
• Corruption waves slowly increase in size as you progress through the game. Not by a lot, just to slightly increase pressure, make the advance notice upgrade more valuable, and make the corrupted events take less time.

UI changes:

• The diary has been fully remade for future-proofing, with lots of little QoL changes.
  
• Interaction prompts have bespoke text instead of just "Interact", such as “Pet” or “Lift”.
  
• Interaction prompts now show what holding the button will do, too.
  
• Made paused indication clearer with a large, non-intrusive icon.
  
• Upkeep and other expenses now have minus signs for clarity.
  
• Tool icons have been polished for consistency.
  
• UI should be more stable.
  
• The surface selector now has a scroll bar (hello modders with loads of surfaces!).
  
• Mod browser has been polished and now show better numbers for each mod.
  
• Tooltips now have a high-contrast background to be easier to read.
  
• Tutorial UI streamlined to conserve space.
  
• Tutorial menu option shows how many tutorials have been unlocked.
  
• …and loads of little polish here and there while adding Big UI support.

Bug fixes:

• Mod browser was scrollable after opening the action popup for a mod.
  
• Keepers could get into a state where the next one would take a long time to spawn.
  
• Signpost text wasn't transferred when the signpost was moved.
  
• Hortic Day competitors could get a score over 9999.
  
• Oak tree had 0 height.
  
• Sick creatures wasn't shown as green.
  
• Pets insta-healed sick creatures.
  
• Watermelon can't go on raised beds.
  
• Barrier prevents flying creatures from traveling home.
  
• Barrier in the center of a habitat prevents creatures from being settled there.
  
• Crash when opening the mail archive and having no mail yet.
  
• Games by friends widget didn’t remember that you closed it when clicking the cross icon.
  
• Fixed exploit where you could place items on leaf litter and then move the litter wherever while keeping the stack of items.