Early Access Update #1 - First day fixes!
It's been a wild day! We can't believe so many people are playing the game already and looks like most of you are enjoying the game! We can't ask for more than that :)
We're releasing a small update today fixing the most important and common issues reported so far. We'll also add our thoughts about a few of the most commented topics:
[h3]Rain[/h3]
As we said on a previous newspost, our initial intention for Farm Together 2 in relation to weather effects was to have them just for looks, but without gameplay effects. This was because in the first game, many people would get confused as to why they crops weren't watered, or why they would yield less money than expected, etc.
On top of that, weather effects couldn't be too strong, as otherwise crops taking whole days to grow would be affected by them too much. For example, if rain fully watered crops, and you get rain once every hour or two, you would basically never need to water long term crops! The opposite could happen as well if we had some kind of negative weather effect.
This is why we decided to remove the gameplay effects for the sequel.
However, it's clear that it wasn't a good decision. While no one has commented that snow does nothing, lots (I mean LOTS) of people have reported that rain does nothing to water crops.
So we've decided to bring back the rain effect, working in a similar way as the first game, but we probably won't bring back freeze, drought or any other kind of negative effect.
It will take some time until we add and check it's working properly, so until then we'll remove rain altogether to stop the flood of reports. Don't worry, it shouldn't take long until the rain is back!
[h3]Fuel[/h3]
We've noticed tractor fuel consumption is a bit too high currently. The new automatic mode helps with doing tasks really quick, but people just run out of fuel too quickly because of that (also because the automatic mode waters crops as well).
We'll probably increase base fuel capacity and regeneration rate a bit, as well as increase the rewards for upgrading the garage. Fuel depots should still be useful, but you shouldn't need as many of them.
This update will come at a later date, as currently we're focusing on bugifxes.
[h3]Flat farms[/h3]
Some of you have shared your concerns about the lack of a starting flat farm. In the first game, this was an option that came with an income penalty to compensate for the increase in available space and ease of navigation.
This is something we felt wasn't necessary in Farm Together 2 because you can now terraform the land to your liking, and instead of the income penalty, you'd have to pay the terraforming price (which isn't that high). Since you would do it as you keep unlocking chunks of land, it shouldn't be a tedious task (unless you want to flatten the whole unlocked farm at once).
We don't think we'll add a setting to start on a flat farm, however we might look into adding an option to flatten the whole farm, just like you can recycle it. Of course this would need to have terraforming unlocked and enough diamonds to do so, but it should be an acceptable alternative that would let people experiment without too much hassle.
[h3]Town shops[/h3]
People has always shown their concern about town shops limiting the amount of resources you can sell. Many people like that you can upgrade each shop with resources, increasing the variety of items you need to plant and harvest, but others have complained about how it limits how many resources you can sell, causing storage to run out of space.
The intention behind the limited sell rate was to encourage people to visit the town often, as well as adding more weight to shop upgrades beyond just increasing storage capacity. However, in a "normal" gameplay loop (one where players aren't exclusively planting and harvesting the same thing over and over), ideally you shouldn't empty out the shop as often as it currently happens.
To compensate for that, we'll probably increase the capacity and recovery rate from upgrades, or maybe reduce shop upgrade requirements so you can get them to higher levels more easily.
[h3]Ponds[/h3]
There has been some complaints about the income penalty of ponds based on their size. I think most are ok with some kind of penalty, given that you can harvest thousands of tiles with a single click, but they feel that it starts to be applied too soon.
We may look into a different solution, and change it so ponds are harvested by player position (so you harvest only the tiles near you), so having big ponds have no advantage (but no penalty either). But we would like to hear your thoughts on this!
[h3]Roadmap[/h3]
We'll prepare a roadmap with future updates soon. It probably won't be this week, as we're still focusing on the more urgent changes and fixes. But we should have it ready by next week.
This also gives us time to hear your suggestions and plan them out for future updates.
Nothing on it will be set on stone, and part of it can change based on your own suggestions, but it should give you a general idea on when to expect certain features, etc.
[h3]Update changes[/h3]
Improvements:
Bugfixes
Finally, we'd love to keep hearing your suggestions, comments and reports. We're really glad you're enjoying the game so far and we want to keep adding content and features to it.
[h3]Farm showcase of today: "First day" by LadyAlicja[/h3]
We're releasing a small update today fixing the most important and common issues reported so far. We'll also add our thoughts about a few of the most commented topics:
[h3]Rain[/h3]
As we said on a previous newspost, our initial intention for Farm Together 2 in relation to weather effects was to have them just for looks, but without gameplay effects. This was because in the first game, many people would get confused as to why they crops weren't watered, or why they would yield less money than expected, etc.
On top of that, weather effects couldn't be too strong, as otherwise crops taking whole days to grow would be affected by them too much. For example, if rain fully watered crops, and you get rain once every hour or two, you would basically never need to water long term crops! The opposite could happen as well if we had some kind of negative weather effect.
This is why we decided to remove the gameplay effects for the sequel.
However, it's clear that it wasn't a good decision. While no one has commented that snow does nothing, lots (I mean LOTS) of people have reported that rain does nothing to water crops.
So we've decided to bring back the rain effect, working in a similar way as the first game, but we probably won't bring back freeze, drought or any other kind of negative effect.
It will take some time until we add and check it's working properly, so until then we'll remove rain altogether to stop the flood of reports. Don't worry, it shouldn't take long until the rain is back!
[h3]Fuel[/h3]
We've noticed tractor fuel consumption is a bit too high currently. The new automatic mode helps with doing tasks really quick, but people just run out of fuel too quickly because of that (also because the automatic mode waters crops as well).
We'll probably increase base fuel capacity and regeneration rate a bit, as well as increase the rewards for upgrading the garage. Fuel depots should still be useful, but you shouldn't need as many of them.
This update will come at a later date, as currently we're focusing on bugifxes.
[h3]Flat farms[/h3]
Some of you have shared your concerns about the lack of a starting flat farm. In the first game, this was an option that came with an income penalty to compensate for the increase in available space and ease of navigation.
This is something we felt wasn't necessary in Farm Together 2 because you can now terraform the land to your liking, and instead of the income penalty, you'd have to pay the terraforming price (which isn't that high). Since you would do it as you keep unlocking chunks of land, it shouldn't be a tedious task (unless you want to flatten the whole unlocked farm at once).
We don't think we'll add a setting to start on a flat farm, however we might look into adding an option to flatten the whole farm, just like you can recycle it. Of course this would need to have terraforming unlocked and enough diamonds to do so, but it should be an acceptable alternative that would let people experiment without too much hassle.
[h3]Town shops[/h3]
People has always shown their concern about town shops limiting the amount of resources you can sell. Many people like that you can upgrade each shop with resources, increasing the variety of items you need to plant and harvest, but others have complained about how it limits how many resources you can sell, causing storage to run out of space.
The intention behind the limited sell rate was to encourage people to visit the town often, as well as adding more weight to shop upgrades beyond just increasing storage capacity. However, in a "normal" gameplay loop (one where players aren't exclusively planting and harvesting the same thing over and over), ideally you shouldn't empty out the shop as often as it currently happens.
To compensate for that, we'll probably increase the capacity and recovery rate from upgrades, or maybe reduce shop upgrade requirements so you can get them to higher levels more easily.
[h3]Ponds[/h3]
There has been some complaints about the income penalty of ponds based on their size. I think most are ok with some kind of penalty, given that you can harvest thousands of tiles with a single click, but they feel that it starts to be applied too soon.
We may look into a different solution, and change it so ponds are harvested by player position (so you harvest only the tiles near you), so having big ponds have no advantage (but no penalty either). But we would like to hear your thoughts on this!
[h3]Roadmap[/h3]
We'll prepare a roadmap with future updates soon. It probably won't be this week, as we're still focusing on the more urgent changes and fixes. But we should have it ready by next week.
This also gives us time to hear your suggestions and plan them out for future updates.
Nothing on it will be set on stone, and part of it can change based on your own suggestions, but it should give you a general idea on when to expect certain features, etc.
[h3]Update changes[/h3]
Improvements:
- Shopkeepers were complaining about how much their hands hurt, so they've stopped clapping.
- The tutorial will now check if you're too smart for it and had already placed the vegetable shop or the garage ahead of time.
- We're disabling rain effects until we can add some gameplay effect for them, to avoid getting flooded with questions about it.
Bugfixes
- Fixed beards not saving properly. Had we hired someone with beard, we would have noticed earlier!
- Did some tricks to try to detect how much time passed when the Steam Deck is resumed. It's not perfect, but it should work in the general case.
- Vsync on caused high GPU usage when the game is alt-tabbed out. Solved by disabling vsync in those cases (the Background FPS setting will be used)
- Fixed Korean, Japanese, etc. fonts not working in the chat window.
- Position checks weren't properly done when adding or removing ramps from hills. This should prevent people from falling below the ground when doing it.
- Contextual help popups could show while interacting with the town shops and break the UI. This shouldn't happen anymore.
- Should have fixed flowers not progressing while offline (not 100% sure, please report if you still experience this)
- Fixed farm and item experience partial progress not being saved properly.
- Removed a repeated flag.
Finally, we'd love to keep hearing your suggestions, comments and reports. We're really glad you're enjoying the game so far and we want to keep adding content and features to it.
[h3]Farm showcase of today: "First day" by LadyAlicja[/h3]