Six Weeks in the Valley

Week six was about giving you your time back. Farm Technology arrived, so parts of the daily routine now run themselves, and I spent a whole update making the game genuinely faster to play. Five updates went out between Monday July 27 and Sunday August 2.

Farm Technology

This is a new system that lets you install upgrades to automate parts of your farm work. Two arrived this week, and more are coming.

• Sprinklers. Install one per field and load it with steps, and your crops water themselves until they're ready to harvest or the sprinkler runs dry. They grant the same XP as watering by hand and use your consumable watering step reduction, which you can switch off if you'd rather they didn't. A loaded sprinkler also waters crops the moment you plant them, and installed sprinklers now show up in the corner of the field.
• The Cuddle Post. Same idea, but for petting your animals. Load it with steps and it keeps everyone on the farm happy without you making the rounds yourself.

Cared For

Alongside the Cuddle Post, petting now does something concrete. Animals that get attention feel cared for, and cared-for animals have a better chance of producing higher quality goods. Pets from the Cuddle Post count toward it too, so automated farms keep the bonus.

A performance overhaul

I gave one whole update over to making the game faster, and it should feel noticeably nicer to play.

• Planting, watering, and harvesting keep up when you do them rapidly, instead of falling behind your taps.
• Opening your bag no longer slows the rest of the game for the whole session. If the game felt worse the longer you played, this was why.
• Scrolling a full bag is far smoother, a fast scroll stops the moment you tap it, and the Sell tab opens right away.
• The app should feel faster and more responsive overall.

The bigger your farm and the fuller your bag, the more of this you'll feel. If you've been here since launch, you should notice it straight away.

Guild bounty balance

Pet expedition bounties now count the steps invested into expeditions rather than the number of expeditions. The old design accidentally rewarded running the shortest trips possible, which got tiring fast. Bounties already in progress were converted to the step-based version.

Quality of life

A batch of smaller comforts across the week.

• Villager cards now show at a glance whether you've already gifted someone today, and the gifting result screen has a "Next Villager" button so you can move through everyone in one pass.
• You can rename your farm animals. Tap one, then the three dots, and the option is there.
• Farm quick actions are collapsed by default now. There were enough of them piling up to crowd the view, so tucking them away gives your farm some breathing room.
• Added a shortcut to Maple's seed store in the seed picker.

• Added base yield information to the crops table on the wiki, plus a new Mystery Seed Pouch page.

Bug fixes

• Fixed watering glitching so a plot would show as watered, then unwatered, and throw an error when you tried to rewater it.
• Fixed foraging spots occasionally overlapping and becoming untappable.
• Fixed a rare bug where some maps wouldn't load and showed a plain background instead.
• Fixed a rare bug with NPC dialogue cutting off, and occasional wrong Birch race notifications.
• Fixed the consumables icon showing under the foraging rewards window, and added the missing growth time to pumpkin seeds.
• Fixed buttons not registering taps in the dead center on iOS.

Six weeks in

That's week six. Between sprinklers, the Cuddle Post, and a much faster app, the theme was cutting down the busywork so more of your steps go toward the parts you actually enjoy. Farm Technology is only getting started, so there's more automation on the way. Thank you, as always, for the reports and the ideas. On to week seven.