Wild Woods News

Hello adventurers,

We're back from our relaxing holidays and hope you all had a great start to 2025!

To celebrate the new year, we want to start with a huge update this Monday:

[h3]New Player Role[/h3]

The request for different player roles is one of the most upvoted ideas from you. And not just since Early Access, you brought it to our desk since the early days of playtesting :D But you also quickly won us over.
This is why we've decided that our first major update will include a ranged weapon!
This, along with our melee weapon, will form the basis of every role in the game. In the future, you will not only be able to distinguish between sword and kunai, but each character will have a special ability tailored to their role. This will include being better at certain aspects of the game and having different stats.
At the moment we’re thinking about Healer, Fighter, Lumberjack, Scout and Pathfinder. Feel free to dream about what each of those should be capable of on our Discord.



[h3]Endless mode[/h3]

Since we know that “Wild Woods” might not be enough for some of you, we thought we’d give you an early glimpse at some super experimental content. Highscore hunters listen up:

We’ve been listening to your feedback and decided to create Endless Mode because you’ve been so eager for it! To make it happen, we had to make some major adjustments, but we really hope you’ll enjoy it. Right now, the mode is very experimental, so we’d love to hear your thoughts. After finishing the second realm, the game will start cycling from that point on. Overall, the two chapters will have fewer crossroads than usual. However, from the moment you enter the endless mode, the difficulty is ramping up each crossroad. To prepare for this, you will be able to stack upgrades more often.
For the Highscore, you’ll get a multiplier for each crossroads you pass, making your progress even more rewarding!

In addition to these two big features, we worked on balancing, quality of life features and bug fixes.

We would love to hear your feedback on the additional role and endless mode. So please share your thoughts on our Discord!

Have fun in the neverending Wild Woods!
Octofox Games & Daedalic Entertainment


[h3]Official Patchnotes 0.1.0[/h3]

[h3]New Features[/h3]

• New Role: Ranged Fighter
  Exchange the sword for a hand full of daggers and experience a new style of fighting your way through the woods
  
• New experimental game mode: Endless
  Face a new challenge: Continuously increasing difficulty requires skill as well as elegance and will reward daring fighters with massive high scores

[h3]Quality of Life Improvements[/h3]

• Characters can now be controlled with mouse (hold right mouse button to move).
  
• Mouse/Keyboard input: Attacks are performed in the direction of the mouse pointer.
  
• Players can now press and hold attack for continuous attacking. This should significantly reduce fatigue.
  
• Jumping on ramps and slopes performs significantly smoother
  
• Enemy encampment can’t be encountered right after leaving the safe cam any longer
  
• Updated several textures and game mode icons
  
• Added custom art for the mouse cursor

[h3]Balancing[/h3]

• Increased score points for surviving nights from 20 to 40 per night
  
• The Mouse’s banners now self-destruct after 25 seconds
  
• Single player: Increased damage dealt to enemies
  
• Single player: Rosie now runs a little slower at night
  
• Single player: Increased amount of healing per herb
  
• Single player: Fire burns slower

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• The wagon was not affected by firelight in some cases and appeared almost black.
  
• We fixed a bunch of instances in the 2nd biome where players and/or thrown resources could land on higher ground that should not have been reachable.
  
• The second hit of the melee combo did not reduce the player’s movement speed
  
• Sometimes the game could stutter when bees attacked a target that had just been defeated.
  
• The buttons in the local lobby were sometimes not visible if players had previously come from the online lobby.
  
• In the event of a tie, Rosie decides. This was not currently visible.
  
• Players could fall out of the map in some cases.
  
• In some cases the 'extra resources' crossroads choice didn't have extra resources.
  
• Players experienced performance issues when being defeated frequently
  
• Porcupines were able to completely destroy armor with only one arrow.
  
• The squirrel shrine teleport ability should now be more precise in the second boss arena.
  
• Sometimes the collider of a leaf pile was not switched off correctly after being destroyed.

The first 2 weeks of our first ever game release - or rather its Early Access just happened and we are so flabbergasted, that we still kind of didn't realize it fully yet. It was a huge step for us – our debut in the world of game development!

Thank you so much for enjoying yourselves ingame and seemingly liking it :)

There is so much wholesome and constructive feedback coming in, amazing!
We tried hard to keep ourselves up-to-date with all you have been writing - but we are in the end only 3 active developers, which hopefully explains why some things are still unanswered at this point. Sorry for that, but none of your messages will be lost and we will come back to all of it at some point in the rather near future.


[h3]Community[/h3]
With the international release, we see so many new names on Discord , people from all over the world join, sometimes just to say "Hi"
A very warm welcome to all of you! Thanks for joining :)

More people means also more teammates to group up, we are very happy that the "looking for group" area brings together new friends. It is really active these days, why don’t you check it out yourself?.


[h3]State of the Game[/h3]
We’re still newcomers to this field and have so much to learn, but we’re doing everything we can to deliver the best possible experience. Bugs are more likely to sneak into more complex systems like an online coop multiplayer game, so everything needs to be tested in different combinations of players, networks... this takes a lot of time.
There may be bumps along the way, and we kindly ask for your understanding as we grow and learn from your feedback, tackle challenges, fix bugs, and work hard to improve the game step by step.


[h3]Amount of Content[/h3]
The current content represents what we’ve been able to achieve as a small team of three. It’s a solid foundation that we’re proud of and one we can now build upon. With this groundwork in place, we’re ready to expand the game with more challenges, upgrades, and events. We have plenty of ideas, and this is just the beginning of what’s to come.

Our goal was to create a Rogue-like experience that’s accessible to beginners, whether you're playing with your younger brother or your mum – we wanted everyone to have fun. As a result, more complex and harder-to-explain mechanics took a backseat, and we decided to focus on what works best. The main priority was to create an enjoyable and accessible experience, ensuring that players of all levels could jump right in and have fun.



[h3]Meta Progression (or: Progression that stays unlocked)[/h3]
Currently, we’ve intentionally designed the game without meta progression beyond visual changes. One of the main reasons is to maintain balance in the multiplayer experience. We want to avoid situations where one player outpaces everyone else just because they has played the game for more hours, diminishing the fun for the rest of the group. Fairness and an enjoyable experience for everyone are our top priorities.

That said, we can imagine implementing systems where some kind of average value is calculated to prevent issues like this. This could allow for meta-progression without disrupting multiplayer balance. Nevertheless, this is something we need to explore further before making any decisions.

Therefore our current shortened Priority list for the near future looks like this:

• Technical: Stability, HotJoin, Session Browser, Checkpoints.
  
• Gameplay: Role, Events, Challenges & Upgrades
  

But for now - after this exciting but justifiably draining release period and the first quick patches and fixes, we need to take a break for the winter holidays. The developers will be back in early January - but our Community Manager will be available from time to time (“oh, please note though, that I don't know how to fix bugs - those will have to wait until the devs are back”).

Get together with your loved ones in those cozy days and enjoy some Wild Woods (if you haven't got it yet, it's the perfect Christmas present *wink wink*).

Have a snowy Christmas and a happy New Year.

Octofox Games & Daedalic Entertainment

Hello adventurers,

Thanks for all your feedback and bug reports here in the Steamforums or directly on our Discord Server. We really appriciate your dedication!
Based on your submissions, we have taken care of some things:


[h3]Added[/h3]

• A small delay has been added in which you can throw into the wagon, even though you no longer have it targetted. That should significantly improve throwing ressources into the wagon.
  
• The third squirrel effect can now be collected at shrines.
  
• An UI indicator which displays the current difficulty.
  
• Auto region entry to network region dropdown. That finds the best region around you.
  

[h3]Balanced[/h3]

• Squirrels spawn further away from the wagon and are less afraid of players.
  
• Increased the healing you get at the cauldron by 2% (it always heals % of your max health)
  
• You can now heal from further away from the heal cauldron.
  
• Reduced the wagon speed by 10%.
  
• Increased characters heavy attack damage by ~10%.
  
• Reduced fire burn speed by 10%.
  
• Reduced bosses health for single player by 20%.
  
• Increased bosses health for hard mode by 20%
  
• Reduced the amount of extra loot you can get from an ancient root by 5%.
  
• Reduced "Follow Trail" shrine riddle length by 3.
  
• The "Tired Eyes" & "Expert Duelist" challenge now exclude each other.
  
• Players now take less damage and are immune to knockback while performing a heavy attack.
  
• The Porcupine's arrow no longer hits when performing a roll.
  
• We have changed the background color of the banner health bar so that it is easier to read when it takes damage.
  

[h3]Fixed[/h3]

• Sometimes the unloading of the world was visible.
  
• A crash that could happend when using some specific AMD cpus.
  
• A crash when you tried to enter the first boss arena caused by an internal unity error.
  
• A memory leak that slowed down the game the longer you played.
  
• Defeated characters should be able to move outside the camera and revive at the wagon after a short duration.
  
• Sometimes when "Extra Chance" was triggered it could lead to an error.
  
• Some colors of the highscore view were not correct.
  
• Incoming damage anticipation areas (the red shapes) now disapears immediately if you interrupt the enemy attack with the heavy attack.
  
• Charging enemies should no longer charge endlessly sometimes.
  
• The boxes in the first boss arena lacked effects when they were destroyed.
  

[h3]Other[/h3]

• USA East and West are now connected to the same connection server.
  
• It should be easier to open the emote wheel now.
  

Stay wild, stay pawesome and have fun in the Wild Woods!
Octofox Games and Daedalic Entertainment

Meow adventurers, 🐈

We just released our first title ever into Early Access - and you made it a fantastic start! We can't tell you how grateful we are for yesterday's launch 🥳 So many of you began your journey through the Wild Woods as soon as the game went live! 🤩

Even though we are still a bit overwhelmed by the positive reception (a bit below 90% positivity as we speak 🤗) we directly want to show you what Early Access means to us:

Here are our very first Early Access Patchnotes:

[h3]Balanced[/h3]

• Increased “Tired Eyes” challenge badge reward by 1
  
• Increased "Gun Turret" range by 25%
  
• Increased "Blessing of the Bear 2" duration by 1 sec
  
• Increased "Resting Stomp" range by 20%
  
• Reduced offensive mouse banner effect by 25%.
  
• Changed mouse banner health bar color to be more visible in fights
  

[h3]Fixed[/h3]

• The colored character ring was sometimes not displayed under the ground in the camp of the second biome
  
• Throwable planks and stones had missing visuals when hitting the ground
  
• The HUD interface was active during the boss reward camera transition
  
• "Gun Turret" did no damage to destructibles
  
• Mouse offensive and defensive banners should not stack
  

This is our first step in tinkering out the - luckily few - bugs you already found - More will be squashed soon. We for example are aware of your wish for some key rebinds and other "Quality of Life"-Changes. After that we can focus a bit more on additional content - for example a new role, for those of you who want to specialize their runs a little more - but since we are only a handful of developers working on Wild Woods, things need to happen one after another.

We are also happy to share that you can now take the adventure whereever you go as Wild Woods is officially Verified on Steam Deck.



Prepare yourself for an evolving adventure - and as always, so early in development the best way of supporting us, aside of giving feedback and maybe saying "Hi!" on our Discord Discord is leaving an honest review here on Steam - we can't tell you how much it is appreciated.

If you ever feel lonely, as already mentioned, you can always join our community on Discord. Tomorrow, wednesday (11.12.24 18:00 CET) we have a neat little gathering where you can not just make new friends, but meet some of us as well - hope we will see you there!

Spread the word - and have some fun in the Wild Woods! 🥰

Octofox Games & Daedalic Entertainment

Fixed an issue where the China region was not selectable in the options menu