Equinox: Homecoming News

For our fourth patch, we focused on fixing a variety of crashes to ensure the game is a more stable experience for as many people as possible. We also continued our optimization efforts by lowering texture sizes and overall performance load. In addition to bug fixes, we’ve added one new race and an accessibility feature that allows players to toggle on and off the sprint effect.





New Race Track - Forest Weave: This challenging race takes you up a winding path through the forest full of tricky turns and jumps. The starting board is located right outside the Rose Manor!

Sprint Motion Blur Toggle On/Off: The Sprint Effect can cause discomfort and nausea for some users. This can now be turned off from the Options menu under Gameplay Settings.



More Racing Sign Posts: To make race navigation easier, we’ve added more additional sign posts to all races.

Improved Error Handling: Our error messages when encountering login issues are now more descriptive and helpful for investigating bugs and issues.



Graphical Polish: We’ve continued to improve our graphics by fixing a large variety of issues; examples of the most commonly reported issues we’ve fixed include…

• Your horse’s tail no longer stretches out during the “Warm Welcome” cutscene.
  
• Markings on the bay horses now appear white as intended.
  
• A variety of sign textures have been replaced, fixing issues where they were stretched out or displayed temporary art.
  
• Player hair colors have been corrected to display correctly.
  
• Champagne horses no longer have a visible tail bone nub. (🚫 🦴 )
  
• Player horse colors and markings will now appear correctly in cinematics.
  
• The chat window’s scroll bar no longer lingers.

Player hair color and Bay markings have been fixed.

Player Profiles Now Display the Correct Data: Incorrect player data (e.g names, levels) used to appear in player profiles; this data is now displayed correctly.

Weekly Goals Rewards Award Properly: Completing Weekly Goals now gives players the Completion Reward as intended.

Ride Island Invisible Walls Removed: Nav mesh on the Ride Island has been tweaked; invisible walls that prevented player movement have been removed.

Inverse Kinematics Added to Player: To improve the sense of character groundedness, we have added IK to player.

Compediums Show Correct Reputation Level for Factions: Previously Faction levels displayed as one higher; this has been resolved and the correct Reputation Level can be seen in your Compendium.

Horse Equipment Now Changes Stats Correctly: When equipping and swapping gear, your horse’s stats change accordingly. This UI was not updating correctly; changing equipment now updates the inventory UI stats correctly.

Weekly Tasks Reset Mondays at 2am UTC: We updated when Weekly Tasks reset! Moving forward, tasks will reset every Monday at 2am UTC. The next reset will be
Monday, June 2, 2025 at 2am UTC.


This is not an exhaustive list. Rather, this is a list of known issues players often ask us about…

• Users cannot ‘Speak with Emily’ to complete the ‘Flower Basket’ quest. We’ve spent a lot of time investigating and developing a fix, but weren’t able to address the issue. We are still working on a fix!
  
• Switching to lower settings, especially from Epic or High, causes objects to load in much slower for a five minute period of time. We recommend waiting to see if the issue resolves itself; after five minutes, most users have objects load in faster as intended.
  
• The player barn icon disappears from your map until you’ve entered it for the second time.
  
• Player feet may now occasionally look uncomfortable when in specific situations (e.g standing with one foot elevated on a rock)
  
• Light brightness doesn’t display correctly at times when you are in the middle of dialogue or while riding around in the world.
  
• Players cannot select voice over options, causing all players to have a default actor that sounds more femme.
  
• Player-placed map markers are clingy and cannot be removed, only relocated.
  
• Areas occasionally suffer from moderate deforestation with missing foliage and trees.
  
• Other player’s horses eat quite loudly, especially while in town or the player barn. (How rude!)
  
• A specific tree type has a broken texture.
  
• Occasionally, when completing a race, your final time does not appear in the completion screen. This can be resolved by exiting the race and starting again from the race board.
  

Our third patch is now live!



Character Reset: We heard y'all loud and clear! One of our most requested player features so far has been the ability to start over or recreate your character or horse. We have implemented a temporary solution that allows players to restart the game with a new character during our Early Access period. After you have created a character and enter the main menu, you can select the "Character Reset" option.



If you do this, please read the warning message that appears! This will irreversibly delete your current character and wipe your progress.

• Adding Player Time-Outs: Fixed issue where players that were spending too much time in the character creator or main menu screens would have trouble connecting to the game and chat.
  
• Unlimited Sprinting: We discovered that some players were getting stuck in the sprint state even if they should have run out of stamina. We have issued a fix and infinite sprint states are no longer exploitable.
  
• Horse Incorrect Names: Occasionally horses would display an incorrect name. We have identified the culprit and issued a fix. Now your horse should be properly named!
  

Our second patch includes several bug fixes to improve the play experience. We are going to deploy these at 12:00 CEST today (Sunday the 11th of May.) Downtime will last approximately 30 minutes until 12:30 CEST today (Sunday the 11th of May.) Players will be unable to log-in during this time.

Thank you for your patience as we investigate issues, develop solutions, and strive to improve the experience!

If you need help, please reach out to our Support team by visiting our Support Portal here.



Race Gate Progress: We discovered an occasional issues with races where gates do not recognize your progress. We believe we've identified the culprit and are applying a potential fix.

Server Crashes: We are deploying fixes to resolve some of the ongoing server crashes.

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From our earliest stages of testing, involving the community has been key to our plans. Early Access was the natural next step, and we are grateful to have more folks join us on this journey. Our first day was a whirlwhind and many of you have been asking: where do we go from here?

In this developer blog, we'll share what you can expect in our Early Access build, how we'll be moving forward, and what we're already developing improvements for. Let's get into it!


At the launch of Early Access, the entire of the first chapter of the first Act of the game's first story arc is fully playable. This includes around two hours of gameplay complete with cinematic cut-scenes. During Early access we intend to have updates that make other chapters of the first Act available to you.

This area of game development is more resource heavy and time consuming to produce. It is an important part of why we want to run a good, stable early access. We plan to continue developing this content while getting feedback on both our content and approach. The team is currently polishing the Second Chapter of Act 1, preparing it for a future update in Early Access.

The game is designed as a social multiplayer experience. In addition to Riding Clubs, there are a series of weekly repeatable tasks and side quests (that will expand as we continue through the EA period) as well as a Weekly Goal system that rewards you for completing content over the course of a week.


There are ten races available around the island. Search out the race boards scattered around the map to find them. Each race has a leaderboard; check your best times and see if you can reach the top!

You can also do all of these races as a group. If the group leader starts a race, all members of the group will get an invitation so that you can race with each other to see who wins!


There are collectable items available around the island. These won't be immediately useful as the systems to put them to use will start to appear with Chapter 2, but you can start collecting them now!


You can also access the first of our new riding locations that we call Scenic Rides. You can visit the pier in downtown to access this new system. These maps are designed to provide alternate riding locations for casual exploration and stunning spots that provide a picturesque location to enjoy a trail ride. We intend to continue to add new locations like this as we proceed.




You can expect two different types of updates as we move forward: smaller fixes and larger content drops.

We will alternate between doing regular small bug fixes / QoL updates, with larger content drops coming every few months. What do we mean by content drops? Expect things like new quests, new races, new scenic ride locations, and a few other surprising systems we aren't quite ready to talk about just yet.

With that in mind, we also need to say that we don't have a specific length planned for Early Access. How long we stay in Early Access will depend on the progress of the game.

This is an Early Access period. There will be bugs! While we always try to ensure our release versions are as stable as possible, it will be likely that you will encounter issues - especially at this early stage. We have specific sections in Discord for you to report issues and an in-game tool to quickly submit reports.



This is an important element to Early Access for a studio of our size (a little over 20 folks!) Players will find issues faster and in more volume than we could ever hope to find with the QA we can do ourselves. Having more players allows us to find issues, get more information, fix them, and make the experience more polished and enjoyable with each update we do!


We really want to deliver something that feels intuitive to play and looks good. While we will never be a 100% accurate horse simulation, we are striving to provide a high quality experience in this regard. So you'll see a constant flow of animation improvements for both horse and rider. The first Early Access version already has the start of these animation improvements for the riding experience. You'll see new mounting and dismounting animations. This is just the start of the animation polish that is in motion, we expect this to be an ongoing process as we continue to polish the riding gameplay experience. This was something we heard loud and clear during the previous playtests, so know that it's an area we're focusing on.


We are a social game with a multiplayer world, so it is important for us that players have ways to express themselves. We intend to add a regular stream of new emotes and social interactions into the game. This is an area that we are currently working on and expect that this work will continue throughout the early access period.



We're ecstatic to welcome all of you to this important stage of our development. It's been a wonderful community so far, and we hope to see that continue as we grow. There is still a long road ahead of us with lots of content to add and things to polish. This is just the beginning and we're excited to partner with the community to create the best game possible and build a game that becomes a home away from home for many years to come.

A quick notice: in order to improve our servers for the heavier weekend load, we are going to deploy a fix. The server will be down for 20 minutes: players will be unable to log in, but currently logged in users can remain playing.

When the maintenance is over and service has resumed, we will delete this notification.