Three Weeks in the Valley

Week three had a clear theme: making the stuff you gather actually worth something. Too many items were piling up in bags with barely any use, so a lot of this week went toward giving them a purpose, from a new cookpot that eats almost anything to a market overhaul that gets you more for what you sell. Five updates went out between Monday July 6 and Sunday July 12, plus a fishing hotfix during the weekend Derby.

The Gemwright's Ladder

Gems were the first target. The old elixir recipes were buried too deep and needed ingredients almost nobody had, so nobody crafted them. I rebuilt them into a ladder you can actually climb.

• Attuned Quartz Charm (new): tune a quartz charm with amethysts and fiber to make gems surface more often and every swing feel lighter. No unlock needed, it's in the Workshop's Mining tab.
• Ruby, Emerald, and Sapphire Elixirs: each builds on an Attuned Quartz Charm plus its own gem and year-round ingredients. Craig teaches them at 2 hearts.
• Diamond Elixir: the top of the ladder, needing a whole Emerald Elixir, a diamond, wild honey, and a fresh tuna. Craig shares it at 5 hearts.

All four last longer and are worth their cost: the Ruby raises your haul without scaring gems away, the Emerald is the best gem-hunting aid in the game, and the Diamond keeps your harvests gleaming.

The Hearthfire Cookpot

The other half of that update is a bubbling cauldron that moved into the Workshop, and it's always hungry.

• Toss in nearly anything from your fields, the water, or the wild (crops, fish, eggs, milk, flowers, mushrooms, nuts, herbs) to earn hearth tokens, with richer and finer ingredients paying more. Every item cooked burns a twig or a piece of wood, so all that clutter finally has a use.
• Tokens can't be bought, sold, or traded, only cooked for.
• Every couple of days the pot craves a featured ingredient. Feed it while the craving lasts for double tokens.
• Spend tokens on hearth blessings, day-long boons you climb through three stages: Emberpace trims the steps your work costs, Hearthlight Lessons teach you more from everything you do, and the Full Ladle gives your finds a chance to come home finer.
• Keep a blessing fed to strengthen it, or stretch it up to three days ahead. Let it fade and the climb restarts.

Buy orders

The Market got the feature I'm probably most excited about: buy orders, in a new Orders tab.

• Place a buy order by picking an item and setting your price. Your gold waits in the order while other players deliver, you get a mailbox note when someone fills it (even partially), and you can cancel anytime to reclaim whatever's left.
• Even if you rarely open the Market, instant sell now checks player offers first. When someone's paying more than the store, your sale goes to them automatically. Same tap, more gold.
• Watch for a market badge on your items, which means someone's paying extra for them right now. A new Offers filter in your bag gathers everything players are after in one place.
• Placing an order is never far away. Missing an ingredient for a craft or tool upgrade? There's a button right where it's listed. Want more of something you already have? It's on the item's page too.

Guild updates

A few guild improvements landed across the week.

• Leaders can now appoint officers from the members tab.
• Invite codes can be rotated: tap "Get a new code" to generate a fresh one and retire the old.
• Players removed from a guild can no longer rejoin that same guild.
• Sending random gift baskets to neighbors now earns a guild material per gift, up to your guild's daily limit.
• The bounties view now explains when the weekly bounty budget is exhausted and how to raise it, and the members tab no longer undercounts farming in "steps worked".

Fishing and the Derby

The pier was busy this week thanks to the Derby, so fishing got some attention.

• The long-standing fishing timing bug should be fully resolved now, though it still needs more testing, so let me know how it feels.
• Improved framerate during fishing, so it stays smooth even when the pier is packed with anglers.
• Fixed legendary fish not showing under the Fish category in your inventory.

Thanks to everyone who took part. It was great seeing the pier that full.

More quality-of-life touches

Plenty of smaller comforts too.

• You can now pay for Craig's services like smelting and crushing with steps instead of gold, whichever suits you, with the ratio tuned so both stay viable.
• Open all neighbor gifts in one tap, and skip the opening animation next time to save a few seconds.
• The consumable picker during activities stays visible even when you have none.
• Improved game speed and lowered data usage on poor connections.
• Your character now sits properly among tall crops instead of always drawing in front of them.
• Tidied some confusing wording (the generic "crush" in Up Next, and a listing prompt that suggested undercutting your own lowest price), and added wiki pages for seed prices, crafting recipes, and instant sell pricing.

Bug fixes

And the week's fixes.

• Fixed graphics glitches on the Riverside, Forest, and Meadow farms.
• Fixed the strawberry's final growth stage displaying wrong, and a confusing +/- description on negative perks.
• Fixed "Smelt your ore" appearing in Up Next when you had no ore.
• Fixed interior furniture placement bugs around rotating and positioning, with more work coming there.
• Fixed the animal produce hitbox so eggs and the like are easier to collect, and added the missing relic fragment icon.
• Fixed icons vanishing after minimizing and reopening the app, a visual buff counter that ticked down and back up, and quick marketplace buys from the crafting window needing a restart to show up.

Three weeks in

That's week three. StepHarvest turned three weeks old on July 12. The through-line this week was turning clutter into value, and there's more of that coming, since the Cookpot and the gem ladder are just the first steps. Thank you, as always, for the reports, the ideas, and for packing the pier during the Derby. On to week four.