Two Weeks in the Valley

Week two is done, and it might have been the busiest stretch of the project yet. Seven updates went out between Monday June 29 and Sunday July 5, including the full guild rework a lot of you helped design, a tool upgrade overhaul, and a fresh batch of features and fixes. Here's the recap from my side.

The Guildhall

This was the big one: the full guild rework from the "Rethinking how Guilds work" thread, shaped heavily by what you all wrote in there. Guilds are now a place you build together rather than a weekly step race.

• A shared stockpile. Every mining run, catch, foraging trip, harvest, craft, and pet expedition now drops Guildhall Materials into your guild's shared pile, on top of your normal loot. Auto mode counts too, so nothing you do is wasted.
• Tiers that only ever climb. Your hall's tier comes from everything the guild has ever gathered, so a slow week or a new member joining can't drag it down. There are eight tiers, each giving everyone better quality and cheaper steps. When the whole hall is busy there's a temporary "lively" bonus on top, but your earned tier never drops.
• A bounty board worth clearing. It refreshes as you clear it instead of making you wait out the week, and each finished bounty prompts everyone to collect their share. Upgrade the board building for more slots and richer bounties, up to seven at once, and step bounties now count every step you walk, with no pool math.
• Buildings instead of sagas. Materials (never gold or steps) fund permanent buildings: board upgrades, a Storehouse, a Trophy Hall, a Waystone, and hall cosmetics. Builds run on a timer and can be called off for a full refund before they finish.
• Your saga investment came back. Everything your guild ever put into sagas, gold and steps alike, returned as Guildhall Materials in the mailbox. Several guilds are starting with tiers already earned.
• An opt-in leaderboard. Weekly gathering and all-time halls, private unless the leader turns it on. You can peek at any guild to see who they are and what they've built.

The hall art itself is still being drawn, so for now there's a locked "Enter the Guildhall" button on your guild tab, as a promise of what's coming.

Tool upgrades, reworked

Tool upgrades used to ask for random, sometimes rare materials, which felt arbitrary. So I retied the whole thing to the activities they belong to.

• Requirements are now tied to each tool's own activity, so they feel predictable instead of random, with a full breakdown published for every tool.
• Added a new material, Kelp, as fishing's version of Fiber. Casts have a high chance of dropping extra kelp (scaling with mastery and rod level), and it replaces rare items like caviar in many upgrade recipes.
• Surfaced the requirements better, too: upgrade costs now show under Crafting → Tools, and your Profile shows current tool levels with progress bars toward the next tier.

Up Next, and a world clock

This one is all about cutting taps. The World tab picked up two additions.

• Up Next. Your next actions are surfaced in one place instead of you hunting for each spot: a quest ready to turn in, enough ore to smelt, crops ready to harvest, animal produce to collect, and so on.
• A world clock. It shows the in-game time, and the cooldowns tied to it (watering, NPC gifting and chatting, neighbor actions, farm daily drops, and more) all reset against it.

A consumables balance pass

Buffs were underwhelming to craft, so this update made them a much better deal. Anything already in your bag picked up the new counts automatically.

• Single-skill consumables give roughly double the uses per craft, with most now sitting at 10 to 16 uses. That closes most of the gap with multi-skill items like the Quartz Stride Charm, which already gave their full count in every skill. Compost, for example, now covers a whole field at 16 uses, one per harvest.
• A few recipes got cheaper or stronger: Angler's Field Snack no longer needs cheddar, and the Tiger Eye Angler's Draught now also raises rare catch chance.
• Villager shop buffs are cheaper across the board, though crafting is still the better deal and the shop is just for convenience.
• Four items (Rich Compost, Creamy Field Stew, Deep Catch Consomme, and Wildwood Brew) keep their current counts for now, since doubling them would retroactively supercharge stacks earned during the Egg Hunt. They'll come in line once those stacks are used up.
• Fixed how stacked consumables of different qualities pool their uses. Each copy now contributes its own strength, instead of the whole pool taking on whichever copy you used last.

Farm deliveries got a makeover

Your morning mailbox drop used to be a bit samey, so I gave each farm its own character.

• Forest Edge: no more endless wood. Now it's mushrooms, nuts, wildflowers, butterflies, and the occasional armful of wood.
• Hilltop: minerals and ores, with a small gem turning up now and then.
• Sunny Meadow (new): a seed packet each morning, sometimes for the season ahead.
• Riverside: keep an eye on your morning catch, because on a lucky day something genuinely rare might be in there.

Higher mastery tends to mean nicer surprises, so it's worth leveling up.

Balance and fishing tweaks

A handful of smaller tuning changes rounded things out.

• Loosened quick sell decay further, since the marketplace isn't ready to fully replace it yet, especially for new players.
• Bulk selling in inventory now respects the price decay too.
• Added more gem types to Crystal Node drops.
• Fishing got fairer: mastery and rod level now widen the catch zone, and I recalibrated the minigame for input latency, so a tap in the zone during a tough legendary catch no longer registers as a miss.

More quality-of-life touches

Plenty of smaller comfort improvements landed as well.

• Added lifetime stats to your profile under Profile → Stats, with more to come.
• Added a Leave button to mining and fishing (foraging already had one), so all three activities match and multi-runs take fewer taps.
• Reworked the NPC store buttons: "Max" now sits further from "+", and bigger purchases ask for confirmation, so you don't overspend by accident.
• Maple's store now shows how many of each seed you own and how many of that crop are already in your bag.
• Moved active consumables on the farm view to the left, matching the other activities.
• Improved festival text contrast and per-unit sorting in the inventory.

Bug fixes

And the usual pile of fixes across the week.

• Quests and progression: stopped quest items being giftable to players or NPCs, fixed daily quests occasionally not resetting, and fixed a completed villager request linking to the wrong place in Turn In.
• Fixed farm buildings showing as constructed when visiting farms that hadn't built them yet.
• Fishing and produce: fixed byproducts always coming out at base quality and, on iOS, steps from the previous day not syncing after a day away.
• Pets: fixed the ascension window not showing perks, plus the mailbox expedition report and its missing guild materials.
• Animals and drops: fixed two feeding bugs and an occasional multiplied farm daily drop.
• Stability and display: fixed a freeze when harvesting during festivals, a black screen during repeated foraging, watering XP not showing until a restart, and a few smaller display glitches.

Two weeks in

That's week two. StepHarvest turned two weeks old on July 5, and it feels like the game grew up a lot in seven days, between the Guildhall, Up Next, and the tool and consumable reworks. Thank you, as always, for the reports and ideas, and especially for the guild thread that shaped the Guildhall. See you next week.