Five Weeks in the Valley

Week five was a polish week, in the best sense. Pets got the attention they'd been waiting for, villagers started acting like they actually notice you, and a fair bit of work went into making the game's numbers honest and readable. Five updates went out between Monday July 20 and Sunday July 26.

Pets, properly

Pets have been sitting on my list for a while, and this was their week.

• Feeding. You can now feed your fish to your pet, both on the farm and in the Expeditions view. Every pet has a belly meter, a fish it dreams about each day, and a Taste Journal to fill. A well-fed companion learns more from expeditions and helps you harder across every activity.
• Animations. A full polish pass. Pets now stand up, sit down, and turn properly while roaming, face the right way when running and eating, and the frame skips and freezes around feeding and expeditions should be gone.
• Calling your pet. If yours has wandered off across the farm, a little button with its face appears in the bottom right. One tap and it comes running back to your side.
• Expedition XP. Expeditions now give XP proportional to the steps you spend, so ten 500-step trips are worth the same as one 5,000-step trip. Later destinations pay better than early ones, and you'll see exactly how much XP an expedition gives before you start it.

Villagers notice you now

Two small changes that make the village feel warmer.

• Villagers react when you hand them a gift.
• Once you've maxed hearts with someone and keep the gifts coming, there's a chance they'll send something back to your mailbox.
• Villagers also give a small themed buff on their birthday, and you can see the bonus in the calendar. (Birthdays weren't showing up in the calendar at all, which is fixed too.)

Seeing what your buffs actually do

With a lot of buffs running at once, it was getting genuinely hard to tell what bonus you were getting.

• Each activity now shows Active Bonuses, a summary of everything running, so you can read the totals in a few lines instead of digging around. If you want the detail, there's an optional breakdown of what's coming from consumables, mastery, and tool upgrades.
• Buffs during activities now collapse into "Buffs (number)" instead of listing every one. Tap to expand the full breakdown, or switch individual display back on if you preferred it that way.

Fixing bonus math that was snowballing

Related to the above, some bonuses were stacking in a way that ran away with itself.

• Crop yield bonuses from your watering can, mastery, and food buffs used to multiply together, which let late-game harvests snowball far past what any crop should give. Farming was starting to outshine everything else, so those now stack additively.
• The consumable XP boost had the same problem when multiple XP-boosting consumables were active, and it's now calculated the same corrected way.

Buffs work in auto mode now

Consumable buffs and Hearthfire blessings now fully work with background auto mode. If you're short on time, you're no longer forced to manually play through your buff stacks to get the value out of them.

Farm and inventory comforts

A batch of things aimed at cutting taps and preventing regrets.

• Seed picker. Tucked into the bottom right of your farm. Choose an active seed and it goes into the ground with a single tap on any empty plot, no confirmation each time. Leave the watering toggle on and plots get planted and watered in one go.

• Favorites. Mark inventory items with the heart icon and you'll get a nudge before selling them or dropping them into the Hearthfire Cookpot.
• Catch Log. A record of every fish that's ever come out of the water for you, working much like the Field Guide does for foraging. New catches also get a "New" label on the fishing reward view.
• Sorting. Sort your bag by most recent, so anything you just picked up is waiting at the top, and tap any sort option again to reverse it.
• Craig's rewards (a Crystal Node drop, say) now stay on screen until you're done admiring them and leave the view.
• The mine level picker shows which ores and gems are obtainable on each floor.

Patron badges

Added four badge icons that sit next to your nickname in multiplayer scenes: foraging, fishing, and mining. Each one is tied to an active Patreon tier, and your badge shows on your profile as well. Thank you, sincerely, for supporting StepHarvest.

Guild

For guilds whose leader has been inactive for a week or more, I've switched on "Officers can start builds" so the stockpile isn't stuck waiting on someone who isn't around. Leaders can always turn it back off in settings. I'm working on a better long-term answer for this.

Bug fixes

• Fixed the consumable counter ticking down multiple times in one run when tapping "Mine Again" very fast.
• Fixed farm plots occasionally looking locked when they'd already been unlocked.
• Fixed your character sometimes hovering while moving around the farm instead of playing the proper walk or run animation.
• Fixed the harvesting animation not showing every fruit when a crop yielded a lot of them, which was especially noticeable with berries.
• Fixed marketplace bugs that could leave expired listings lingering and unpurchasable.
• Fixed an occasional bug with finishing quests, and made zoom feel less accidental in the farm view.

Five weeks in

That's week five. A lot of this one was quieter work: pets that move right, numbers that add up right, and buffs you can read at a glance. That kind of thing rarely makes for an exciting changelog, but it's what makes the game feel good to play for hours. Thank you, as always, for the reports and the ideas. On to week six.