Wild Woods News

Meow!

It's time to face new challenges! The new update, including the third biome, is now live.

Once you've proven your bravery, we'd love to hear your feedback on Steam or on our Discord (which is also a great place to find new play buddies).

With that, our roadmap definitely needs an update too. A new version will be released at the end of March.

Stay wild and pawsome!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Full Patch Notes[/h3] (English only)

[h3]New[/h3]

• New Biome: High up in the mountains, the frosty new Snowsickle Peaks biome awaits you. This includes a new mechanic to help you overcome the cold up there, new enemy variants, a new boss, Ixe - The Hermit, and new music.
  
• Enemies: 5 new enemy variants. The variants were divided among the current biomes, but you can encounter them anywhere in Endless Mode.
  
• Soundscape: The entire soundscape in the game has been adjusted to be even more immersive. The sounds no longer come from everywhere at once, but instead correspond to where the sound originates on-screen.
  
• 4 new Steam achievements.
  
• 2 new unlockable cat skins.
  
• New destructible crates along the road.
  

[h3]Quality of Life Improvements[/h3]

• You can now place gold in the center of the Ancient Root.
  
• Totems can now be found directly in the world and no longer only in chests.
  
• Your character will now be highlighted when behind certain objects, so you can still see them.
  
• Rain will stop after defeating a boss, and stay stopped until the end of the chapter.
  
• If there are values that change based on difficulty, these can now be seen in the challenge descriptions.
  
• The Thunderbird Totem can now appear in the tutorial chest.
  
• If you are defeated in the tutorial, you will be revived an infinite number of times.
  
• Attack telegraphs are now only drawn on the ground and should no longer color characters and enemies red.
  
• You can now read the description of what happens when you reset the challenges in the camp.
  

[h3]Balancing[/h3]

• The maximum number of challenges at the crossroads has been increased. You can now be offered several challenges for one direction.
  
• The badges you receive for some challenges have been changed. Some were increased, others decreased, depending on how well the number corresponded to the difficulty of the challenge.
  
• Squirrels without loot now flee only when they have lost 50% of their health.
  
• Thunderbird totems now drop more frequently and duck totems less frequently.
  
• The cold protection provided by the “Warm Clothing” upgrade has been reduced from 15% to 10%.
  
• The amount of gold per night has been reduced by 20% to match the new game length due to the new biome.
  
• Warm Clothing can now only be purchased 7 times instead of 10 times in Endless Mode.
  
• The time available to throw at a target after it has become invalid has been slightly increased.
  
• After “Extra Chance” has been triggered, you will now receive an invulnerability effect for a short period of time. This should help when “Extra Chance” is triggered in boss battles.
  
• The queen's sweeping attack now deals damage to the entire marked area at once, instead of dividing the area into four parts and dealing damage to each part clockwise in succession.
  
• The time before the queen strikes with her tongue has been slightly increased.
  
• The composition of enemies has now been adjusted per biome, rather than simply scaling with the total number of nights.
  
• This means you will no longer be immediately overwhelmed by hordes of enemies in the biomes.
  
• The health increase of enemies in Endless Mode has been reduced.
  
• The number of simultaneously activated plates at the shrines now scales better with the number of players.
  
• The movement speed of enemies in Hard Mode has been slightly reduced.
  
• The turret's damage now scales throughout the game so that it remains useful later on.
  
• Herbalist: now deals slightly more damage.
  
• Herbalist: increased the slow amount by 10%.
  

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• If you quickly navigate back in some menus after opening them, you could get stuck in the navigation. In most cases, the only solution was to restart the game.
  
• Some of Marsh Queen Sydd's attacks did no damage if you had armor equipped. This led to immortal players in that fight.
  
• When playing with a mouse and keyboard, movement on higher terrain levels was often very imprecise.
  
• In some languages, font artifacts could appear, especially at lower resolutions, resulting in boxy outlines around text characters.
  
• It was not possible to leave the join view when attempting to join a non-existent room, because confirming the error message immediately triggered a rejoin.
  
• Shrine buffs were not reset after you started a new game right away with the same group.
  
• The Kingslayer title sometimes was granted despite not having had the last hit on all bosses.
  
• It was possible to get stuck outside the camera frame.
  
• Resources should no longer be able to float in the air sometimes.
  
• When you rerolled an upgrade, sometimes there was no visual effect to indicate that the reroll had taken place because you rolled the same upgrade again in the same spot.
  
• The planks in the river would make a constant noise as they disappeared.
  
• The wrong sound was played when walking through water. In addition, sound is now also played when walking through deep areas in the second biome.
  
• In the second biome, water effects should also be played when jumping into deep areas.
  
• The character user interface was still visible while sleeping in the camp.
  
• When your device was disconnected and you reconnected it more than twice, your character could not move.
  
• You should now be able to reliably receive the 'Cozy Kitties' achievement again.
  
• Achievements that were given at the end of the game were incorrectly only awarded in Endless Mode.
  

[h3]Known Issues[/h3]

• On clients with a bad connection, it sometimes looks like enemies are healed when hit.
  

See you on the Snowsickle Peaks!
Octofox Games & Daedalic Entertainment

Meow adventurers,

After many dangerous fights in the Ever-Emerald Forest and Razorleaf Marshes, it's time to face the icy heights of the Snowsickle Peaks!

The new update, which includes the third biome, will be released on Monday, 9th of March.

Are you ready to guide Rosie over the high mountains?

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[p]Hello everyone,[/p][p][/p][p]Before we start our Monthly Dev Log, let's address the most important question: When will Snowstickle Peaks be released? 🙂[/p][p]We will announce the exact date, along with our brand-new trailer, this Friday! ✨​🥳​[/p][p]
We can’t wait for you to play the new biome and hear your feedback! 🥰​🤗​[/p][p][/p][p]And now, let’s head into the Dev Log for February:[/p][p][/p][h2]A lot of Playtesting 🎮[/h2][p]The final stage of creating new content always includes a lot of playtesting. This allows us to balance the game and identify bugs. After a play session, we try to fix and polish everything. And then, rinse and repeat 😅

Alongside the new biome, we’ll introduce new game mechanics that will increase the difficulty in a different way and extend your adventure. At the same time, the balance of resources, health points and new enemy variants should still feel fair and be enjoyable.[/p][p]To get more feedback from different players, we have received diligent support from our playtesters, moderators, and external partners 🙏​💚​[/p][p][/p][h2]Enemy Variants 🦡​🐇​[/h2][p]The upcoming update will introduce new enemy variants. Although they may look familiar, they behave differently and bring new challenges 😮[/p][p]Creating a completely new enemy would require developing a new gameplay concept, 3D model, 2D texture, sounds, animation, effects, AI behaviour, and much more. [/p][p]A lot of tasks and time for only one new character. For example, every character needs a walking animation, which is complex to implement but necessary. However, this wouldn't introduce new gameplay. With the enemy variants, however, many of these tasks had already been completed. And, the time saved could be used to design 3D models for the third biome.[/p][p]The adjustments were intended to make the familiar biomes more interesting for both new and experienced players. The latter meant that we had to adjust elements that strongly affect gameplay, such as new attacks and enemy behaviour ​⚔️​🛡️​[/p][p]Our goal was to create five new variants with the new update, and we can’t wait for you to see them all in action. We think that this improves the gaming experience much more than introducing only one new enemy 🙂
[/p][p][/p]

• [p]Final sprint for the third biome: preparing everything for the release, coordinating with our publisher and marketing.[/p]
• [p]Once the upcoming update has been released and we have received your feedback, we will sort and prioritise the plans for the rest of the year.[/p]
• [p]Once those plans are finalised, we will update our roadmap. We hope to present the new roadmap to you at the end of March.
  [/p]

[p]Wishing you all a catastic week! 🐯​🐼​🦁​[/p]

[p]Meow adventurers,[/p][p][/p][p]Welcome to our first Monthly Dev Log of 2026! 🎆[/p][p]Since all our work currently revolves around finishing the third biome, we’re breaking our usual “What we’ve been working on” and “What happens next” structure and dedicating this entire log to the biome and its evolution ☃️[/p][p]We also hope you don’t mind that this one’s a bit longer than usual, we just had so much on our minds to share with you 🙂[/p][p][/p][p]Back in May, we asked you for ideas for a cold biome. Many of your suggestions were surprisingly close to our own ideas, and that’s exactly what encouraged us to plan the third biome on a much larger scale. Snowsickle Peaks is meant to feel like the top of the world: dangerous, freezing, and far above everything else 🥶 From a gameplay perspective, it also needed to clearly distinguish itself from the first and second biomes. For the first two biomes, we had plenty of ideas as well, but often we simply didn’t have the time to turn them into truly new mechanics (something we want to change going forward).
[/p][p][/p][h2]From idea to implementation💡​➡️​🎮​[/h2][p]Originally, we wanted the third biome to be cold at all times, forcing you to rely on fire permanently. In playtests, however, that felt more like constant stress than an interesting decision. The idea isn’t gone, we see it more as an option for a later challenge, when you can deliberately choose “I want to suffer” 🥶[/p][p]Next, we experimented with fire bowls: scattered heat points that you can light, so warmth forms a kind of network of safe spots along the route. In practice, this quickly turned into a balancing nightmare: too many bowls and the cold doesn’t matter; too few and it becomes frustrating. With our procedural world generation, it would also have created a placement problem.[/p][p]So we needed a tool players can truly control: the torch. You take it from the wagon, carry it with you, and can place it wherever you want. It provides warmth and can thaw frozen resources. In an early version, the torch was a real temporary weapon you could swing. But playtests showed that many players prefer fighting with their own weapons. The torch wasn’t meant to replace your weapon, so we fully focused on warmth and placing it in the world. [/p][p]Once we committed to the torch, we could design the world more freely again. Initially, we had two concepts on the table: traveling along the side of the mountain with a constant drop on only one side, or traveling along the ridge at the very top. The first option turned out to be much harder to implement than expected and didn’t give us the freedom we wanted. In the end, it made more sense to drive along the mountain ridge, because it let us convey the illusion of height and vastness much better 🔝​🏔️​[/p][p][/p][h2]Time sink: (multiplayer) testing 😺🐯[/h2][p]Wild Woods supports local co-op, online co-op, and combinations of the two. All mixed setups need to work: two players local, two online, different latencies and effects, sounds, animations, and the world still has to stay as synchronized and clean as possible. That’s why we test new mechanics briefly in Unity first, then locally by running the game twice on the same machine, and at least once a week in a real online session with the entire team, because that’s the only place you’ll see the issues that slip through in smaller setups. Before bigger releases, we also get support from an external team that tests the entire game for several days. On top of that, we’re helped by a few community members who have found major bugs so many times before anyone else even noticed them 🙏🏻🥰[/p][p]What people often don’t see from the outside: as a small team, we rely on external support for sound, animation, VFX, and writing. That means many building blocks come together at different times and require a lot of coordination. Mechanics and level layout might already be in place, but it’s only when sound, animations, and the final visual details come together that it truly feels “finished.” Those are the moments we love most: when everything suddenly clicks, and individual parts turn into a real biome ✨[/p][p][/p][p]Of course, there were still several other mechanics we would have loved to implement for Biome 3. For the torch alone, we also built an entirely new system that lets us temporarily swap out weapons, and that’s exactly the kind of system we want to expand and bring to life more in the future.[/p][p]In the end, a large part of the mechanics had to bow to the realities of production, we already mentioned the extensive multiplayer testing. On top of that, there were recurring topics outside of the third biome as well, like the Anniversary Update we implemented spontaneously, or the security vulnerability in the Unity Engine that we had to fix immediately, which unfortunately triggered additional follow-up work, and many more things. With the Anniversary approaching in December, we made a deliberate call: rather than rush the third biome, we chose to put our energy into a dedicated in-game event and give Snowsickle Peaks the time it needed 🙂[/p][p]Still, we believe we achieved our main goal: Biome 3 should feel clearly different, not just visually, but also in terms of gameplay. With the torch and the melting mechanic, we have something that defines the biome and gives it a distinct character of its own 🌨️🔥[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Since this January, the core team has also grown by 25%, which means we’re back to four people 🥳 Right now we’re in the final stretch, putting the finishing touches on the new biome so you’ll be able to play it yourselves in March 🔥​😯​💯[/p][p][/p][p]With the third biome nearly finished, we’ll be updating our roadmap in the next few weeks.[/p][p][/p][p]If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading, have a great one! 🤗​🥰​[/p]

[p]Hey there,[/p][p][/p][p]The year is almost over, and we’re getting ready for our holiday break! 🎄​🥳​
[/p][p]Before we start recharging our batteries, we want to say thank you once again for your active participation during the community event 🤗[/p][p]We also truly appreciate all the feedback you share, whether it’s on Discord or Steam. And yes, we see the negative comments as well. In many cases, we even agree with you, we also want more content, more replayability, meta progression, skins… basically, more of everything 😅[/p][p]With all the energy and time we have, we’re doing our best to deliver as much as possible as soon as possible. At the same time, we’re only three people (read on for an update on that), trying to find a healthy balance between working hard, avoiding crunch, and, most importantly, not losing quality. That’s why we prioritize one task after another, while still aiming to give you a good mix of new content, QoL improvements, and relatively short update cycles.[/p][p][/p][p]To keep you updated on our work until new content is ready to share, we try to give you as many insights as possible through our Monthly Dev Logs. So before we head into our break, we’d like to share the final Dev Log of 2025 with you.[/p][p][/p][h2]Community Event 🫂​💝​[/h2][p]With the event, we wanted to bring you a bit of extra joy and try something different. We briefly had to pause work on the third biome for it, but we think it was absolutely worth it. Seeing you smash the goals so quickly was incredibly fun - and once again, much faster than we expected! 🔥[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h2]Biome 3 🏔️[/h2][p]The rest of our time was dedicated to the third biome, with a focus on improving the boss fight. Slowly but surely, everything is coming together, and more and more elements are reaching the stage where they can be polished and refined ✨[/p][p][/p][p][/p]

• [p]Our main focus is on preparing everything needed to start external testing for the third biome in the beginning of the new year. The first tests already begin over the holidays 🎮[/p]
• [p]We’ll also be taking some time to recharge and gather the energy needed for the final steps of Biome 3. Because of that, things will be a bit quieter on our end until we’re back. Feel free to keep sharing feedback and reporting bugs as usual, just please be patient with our replies.[/p]
• [p]Last but not least, starting in January, the core team will become a quartet again! We’re excited to welcome a new programmer to the team 🤗[/p][p][/p]

[p]Thank you for an amazing year together. Without you, Wild Woods wouldn’t be as pawsome as it is 🤗​🥰​ If you’re celebrating, we wish you a wonderful Christmas. If not, we hope you have a lovely time as well! 🤶​💚​[/p][p][/p][p]And with that, we already wish you a great start to the new year. See you next year! 👋🎆🐈‍⬛[/p]