Come Inside

Most of week eight happened indoors. I've been rebuilding the insides of your buildings for a few weeks now, and on Sunday evening I finally got the first chunk of it out the door: every interior redone, decorating that goes much deeper, and animals that actually live in the coop and barn. Collection Posts went out earlier in the week too, which rounds off the farm technology set.

A new look inside every building

The insides of the Farmhouse, Coop and Barn have all been redesigned from the ground up. This isn't a fresh coat of paint on the old rooms. The layouts, the furniture and the small detail work are all new, and every building tier has its own interior rather than the same room with more space bolted on.

• The Farmhouse grows room by room. Bedroom first, then the kitchen, then a second bedroom downstairs.
• The Coop and Barn get roomier inside and are rearranged completely at every tier, with more feeding stations to match the animals you can keep.
• Your character walks around the furniture properly now, behind the tall wardrobe, in front of the rug, the way you'd expect. Tall pieces hide you as you pass behind them, so rooms read as spaces rather than flat floors.
• Windows, doorways and wall art are part of the design in every building, so even a room you've never touched looks deliberate.

Decorating, in depth

Tap Decorate and the room is yours to arrange. This works in all three buildings now, not just the house.

• Items on top of items. The big one. Tables, shelves, counters, nightstands and drawers have real surfaces, so you can put a lamp on the nightstand, a trophy on a shelf, a plant on the table. Green dots show you exactly where a small item will sit.
• Walls are usable space. Paintings, shelves, windows and hanging plants mount on the wall. A few pieces are happy anywhere, so festival trophies and some plants can sit on the floor, perch on a shelf or hang on the wall.
• One shared storage. Anything you put away goes into a single collection you can pull from in any building, so a chair from the house can end up in the barn.
• Nothing is a one way decision. Most pieces have several facings, and rotation is remembered when you store something and bring it back out. Placing a piece has a bit of weight to it too, settling into position with a small puff of dust.

Wall colors can be changed section by section, in every building, and there's always an option to put the original color back. Floor painting is a Farmhouse feature: you paint tiles with a brush and drag to fill an area. Upgrading the house unlocks extra wall colors and floor styles on top of the starter set everyone gets for free.

The catalogue behind all this runs to hundreds of pieces and is still growing. Not all of it is obtainable yet, and there's more on that further down.

Furniture that answers back

Some pieces do something when you tap them. Light the fireplace and a warm glow spreads out from the firebox, or switch on the lamps and lanterns. Lit lamps and fires tint the room around them, and a fire glows lower and warmer than a lamp does.

A few others work the same way but aren't in your rooms to begin with, so you'll need to get hold of the piece first: the televisions, the arcade cabinet, the range cooker that fires up, the bathtub that fills.

Two more change on their own rather than by tapping, because they're showing you something real: the feeding trough fills with hay when its animal has been fed, and the silo barrel shows whether your silo is stocked for the next feeding.

More interactive pieces are coming.

The coop and barn are alive

Animals aren't decoration in there anymore. They wander the building on their own schedule, keep out of each other's way, and settle down at night.

• Feeding stations are real furniture now. Every animal has a trough, it fills with hay when they're fed, and you can move the troughs around to lay the building out how you like.
• Chickens and ducks hop up onto their trough to settle in, and hop back down again, rather than walking through it.
• Cows, goats and pigs bed down beside theirs, since a cow doesn't fit in a trough, and they're drawn at a size that finally reads as livestock.
• Eggs, milk and the rest wait in the trough. Tap to collect, even if the animal is sitting right on top of it.

Your farm technology has a home too. The Cuddle Post and Collection Post now physically stand in the coop or barn once installed, and pulse gently while they're loaded with steps and running. Tap either one to manage it on the spot, and the silo barrel turns up once you own a silo. Every so often an animal wanders over to the Cuddle Post, hops inside, disappears for a few seconds under a flurry of hearts, and hops back out. That's the post doing the petting, and it's worth standing still for a moment to catch it.

Festival trophies

Finish in the top three of any festival leaderboard and you get an engraved trophy: gold, silver or bronze. It's real furniture, so it can sit on a shelf or any other piece with a surface.

• Every trophy is personalized. Tap a placed one and a plaque shows the placing, the festival, which leaderboard it was, the year and season, the score it was won with, and the name of whoever won it.
• It counts past or future. Everyone who has ever placed top three already has their trophies sitting in furniture storage right now, so nobody has to wait for the next festival to have something to show.
• Most festivals have two leaderboards, so a strong weekend can earn two. Ties are treated generously, and a genuine tie for second means two silvers.
• Leaderboards are opt in, so these only come from festivals you were competing on the boards in.

A few of you have quietly stacked up a shelf's worth of history without saying much about it. One player took gold at three separate festivals. Another has five trophies across four.

Upgrading comes with perks now

Upgrading the Farmhouse changes how you play, not just how it looks. Both of these are permanent.

• Home Cooked Meals, from the kitchen upgrade. Every consumable you craft comes with one extra use, on top of the crafting bonus you already had.
• Well Rested, from the bedroom upgrade. Farming, fishing, mining and foraging all cost 10% fewer steps, forever. That's real walking saved on everything you do out there.

Each upgrade also unlocks new wall colors and floor styles, and the upgrade screen spells the perks out before you spend anything.

Upgrading a coop or barn gives you that tier's own layout rather than the old one with extra room added on, so anything you placed yourself is moved safely into your furniture storage to put straight back where you want it. The game tells you so before you confirm.

Collection Posts

Earlier in the week, the farm technology set got its last piece. Your coop and barn can now collect animal produce for you.

• Load a Collection Post with steps and it picks up eggs, milk and the rest on its own while you're away, at 5 steps per animal per collection.
• Collecting by hand stays free, and pausing the post hands the rounds back to you any time without losing the steps you loaded.
• The coop post opens at farming level 6 and the barn at 8, and both want a good pile of cut stone blocks, so those spare stones from the mines finally have somewhere to go.

You'll find it on your farm under the arrow in the bottom right corner, then the gear. Together with the Silo and the Cuddle Post, that completes the set. Feeding, fussing and gathering can all run on their own now, so a well stocked farm keeps humming along even on the days you never open the barn door.

A few more touches

• The Farm Technology view got tidier while I was in there. With three inventions on the shelf now, it opens on a category menu instead of one long scroll. Everything is where it was, just easier to find.
• Performance improvements in the crafting tab.

Bug fixes

• Fixed a rare issue where thin lines could show up across the forest map, most noticeable in winter.
• Fixed a very rare bug with animal feeding.
• Made feeding and collecting sturdier when several things happen at once.

Where new pieces will come from

The catalogue holds far more than what's handed out today, and filling it in is the next job. New furniture, wall colors and floors will arrive the way everything good in the valley arrives.

• Festivals. Taking part is what counts. Join in and you'll pick up pieces you can't get any other way.
• Quests. Some new ones are on the way with furniture as the reward.
• Patreon. Active supporters will be given pieces periodically, as a thank you for keeping this going.

However a piece reaches you, it stays on your account. That holds through the eventual reset when the beta turns into the full release, so anything you collect between now and then is yours to keep.

The road from here

This is the foundation, not the finished picture. The other half of it is social. What I'm building toward is a valley where you can invite your neighbors over to a home that's unmistakably yours.

Go and have a look at your rooms. If you've ever placed top three at a festival, check your furniture storage first. Thank you for all the reports and ideas, as always. On to week nine.