Birch Starts a Racing League

You can race the villagers now. Birch decided the valley needed a racing league and made himself president of it, so once you've finished his storyline, anyone in town is fair game. There's a Completion Book on your profile keeping score of how much of the valley you've worked through. Villager hearts take longer to fill and mean more when they do. And you can move your farm to a different plot without losing anything you've built.

The Valley Racing League

A race covers one full day. You pick who to race and how hard: Friendly is under your usual day, Fair is about your usual day, and For the Ledger asks for more. The exact step goal is shown before you commit, so you always know what you're agreeing to. The race runs the whole of the next day, and the result comes in the morning after.

Beat them and they owe you a favor for a day.

• Craig knocks up to a quarter off the gold he charges for smelting and crushing.
• Hazel's forest spares extra wood while you forage.
• Reed brings the legendary ones closer to your line.
• Maple's standards rub off, so your harvests come up a finer quality more often.
• Olive makes everything you do teach you a little more.
• Birch sends Sir Pebbles' cousins your way, so spare stone turns up while you mine.

You gain friendship with whoever you raced, and the harder the race, the stronger the favor. If you lose, nothing is lost. Ask for a rematch, or concede gracefully.

You get three races a week, so it's meant to be a treat rather than something to keep up with daily, and you can't race the same villager twice in a row. Birch keeps a ledger of every result, which he'll happily show you.

The Completion Book

There's a new tab on your Profile, next to Stats and Records. It answers a question I've wanted the game to answer for a long time: how much of everything the valley holds have you actually done?

It counts across the whole game. Fish caught, crops grown, things crafted, mined, foraged and aged in the cellar, villagers befriended, festivals joined, main quests finished, tools worn smooth, skills mastered, your coop and barn filled, farm technology built, and every item you've ever gotten your hands on.

Two things worth knowing about how it counts.

• Everything is forever. The book records what you've ever done, so nothing in it can be taken away. Sell your whole pumpkin harvest, sell your last piece of cheese, empty your gem pouch at the market. The pages stay filled.
• You have to do it yourself. Things you buy from the marketplace or receive as gifts don't fill the records. A fish counts when you catch it, a gem counts when you dig it up.

Since we're still in beta, new content lands often, and when it does your percentage might dip a little. It just means there's more in the valley than there was the day before.

Friendships run deeper

Villager hearts were climbing too fast. Between quests, gifts and now racing, you could max someone out in a couple of weeks, and 10 hearts stopped meaning much. Early hearts still come quickly, but the later ones take real time and care now.

Your friendships have been recalculated to match. If you were at 10 hearts you'll land around 6, and lower counts barely move. Your friendship points are all kept, the road just goes further.

Villagers send gifts on their own now, too. From 2 hearts up, every villager has a daily chance to mail you something, and the odds climb steeply past 5 hearts. A 10-heart friend sends something every other day without you gifting at all. Gifting still matters: a gift they like doubles that day's chance, a gift they love triples it, and from 8 hearts a loved gift always comes back. Until now, only max-hearts villagers ever sent anything.

Moving farms

You can change your farm type. If you picked Riverside on day one and have been eyeing those Hilltop gems ever since, there's finally a way over. It's in Settings, under Farm and Privacy.

• Your first two moves are free, so an accidental move, or deciding you liked your old plot best after all, costs you nothing. Moves after that cost gold, and the last one costs the most.
• Your farm needs a week to settle between moves. Four moves in total, which is enough to try every plot and still come home.
• Everything you own comes along: crops, animals, buildings and progress. Only the land and its perks change.
• Meadow farmers, your bonus field stays with the meadow if you've unlocked it, safe and waiting in case you move back. Harvest its crops before you go.

The farm picker shows the exact numbers for every plot's perks now, so you'll know just what you're trading.

The Tide Crate

There's a crate on the fishing screen. Boots, bottles, trash bags, socks, anything the sea hands back that nobody wants goes in it.

One tap recycles what you're carrying, and you see the list before anything moves. Every piece counts toward your own total and the valley's, and the more you recycle, the better the prizes get.

The cellar fills itself back up

The Collect button collects and refills in one go now. Choose what to collect, choose Best value or Fastest, and every empty keg gets filled from your bag.

• Before you confirm, the sheet shows what the refill is worth, the profit over selling the milk and eggs as they are, and when the batches will be ready.
• Better kegs are filled first, matching products stay side by side, and kegs already aging are left alone.
• With Grab and Pour both on, tapping a finished keg collects it and pours the next batch in the same tap.
• Keg notifications arrive one per product now, rather than one per keg.

More small touches

• The mines keep a Mine Log now, so you can see every ore and gem you've found and what's still waiting down there.
• Fishing and foraging hauls show item quality, with the most valuable finds listed first.
• Animal feeding resets at your own midnight, along with everything else.
• The background session recap splits your haul and your bonuses into two tabs, so a long list of buffs no longer crowds out what you brought home.
• You can choose between twigs and wood for cookpot fuel, so more of your wood can go elsewhere.
• New farmers get a proper send-off after the tutorial. Maple walks them toward a guild, a neighbor, the mailbox and consumables instead of leaving them to it.
• Pet expeditions have a new look, and the foraging, fishing and mining views are cleaner and more unified.

Bug fixes

• Fixed races counting as lost if you hadn't opened the app that day. Those have been marked as won and the favors granted.
• Fixed seeds from pet expeditions occasionally landing in a separate stack that showed up twice in the planting list and refused to plant. They're merged back in with the rest now.
• Fixed the "Visit farm" button appearing when you tapped the host of the farm you were already visiting, which stacked screens and made you back out several times to leave.
• Fixed a rare hiccup where refreshing the guild screen could briefly act like you'd left your guild, hiding your guildhall until you restarted.
• Fixed the barn and coop exit sitting under the Manage and Decorate buttons on taller phones, and the farmhouse, coop and barn doors sometimes needing a second tap.
• Fixed tapping a keg in a stacked column opening the wrong one, and the aging ring on ready-keg bubbles sitting a couple of pixels off the edge.

Eleven weeks in

That's week eleven, and a full one. A racing league, a book that counts everything you've ever done, hearts that take longer to fill, and a way to move to a different plot. If you race someone, let me know who you picked and how it went. Thanks for the reports and ideas, as always. On to week twelve.