This one was a bit hard to title, since it's got a wide variety of changes that sort of make up the whole "ah, we made the game feel less grindy". The short of it is, we've increased the scope of what you can do and how you can achieve these goals, instead of "wait for 30 Turnips to grow". However, since these are still paced with the intention that an unguided play-through can be roughly one season per Obelisk and MIAO, they still require some elbow grease! Paw grease? Ew...
There's also some quality of life additions and bug fixes, so feel free to jump between headers if you'd like to skip something!
So, I'd say they're broken down into three parts:
- Obelisk offering changes
- MIAO changes
- Fertilizer and Seed Maker changes
I'll go through those three first, then at the bottom, touch on the QoL, balance, and fixes we've also included with this patch.
🌙 Obelisk Changes
This is something we've had an issue with both the Obelisk and MIAO: they ask for specific, arbitrary items that sometimes feel like they overlap (GP Obelisk asks for 30 turnips, MIAO1 asks for 30 potatoes, etc.)
We want to stick by Snacko's whole "there should be a lot of player choice and agency" core concept, so the Obelisks have been changed to reflect that.
- Obelisk slots now have slots that are a choice between different options
- Hovering over one of these "optional" slots will stop the auto-cycling
- Each optional slot has 3 options that span a variety of different activities or ways to obtain them (ex: fishing, cooking, resource gathering, farming)
- If you had items inside your Obelisk that is still a work in progress, they were refunded to your overflow storage
The kind of gameplay we'd like to encourage is looking through the options and weighing what you'd rather do: "I can try my luck and get 3 gems! I'm not interested in the Amethyst's effects on my tools anyways!" versus "Hmm, maybe it's just easier if I get a bunch Cobalt and wait for my furnace to make some Glass"
🔖 MIAO Changes
To go along with the Obelisk changes, we've also reworked the MIAO goals to better align with natural gameplay and ways to nudge you to try different things, rather than grinding for arbitrary items, like shipping corn.
Now, the MIAO will offer a variety of subtasks such as:
- Cook 5 times (like, anything. Even Dubious Dishes.)
- Donate 20 items to the Cultural Center
- Earn 500,000 Cocoa Beans
...and so on
We've tried to think about ways that different people would like to play the game, and included activities that would allow you to complete the goal in different ways. If you hate fishing, you can always just donate furniture or cooked dishes to the Cultural Center! Stuff like that.
🌱 Farming Changes
For the longest time, 1 Fertilizer application = 1 Star level.
That, uh doesn't seem right, does it? And the Seedmaker as well. 1 crop = 1 seed. Wait a minute...
So now, that's fixed!
- You need to fertilize your crops at least three times
- Just because you've fertilized it 9 times doesn't mean it'll grow even better! Once you hit 3X, the rest is just overdoing it
- A combination of fertilizing and adding to the Seed Maker is key to raising the quality of your crops!
- Seed Makers now give 2 seeds for every crop, at +1 quality
- Adding a Myst Crystal to the maker will give you a chance of getting an ✨extra✨ seed from a crop.
- Adding a Cat-a-lyzer in the maker will reduce the time to generate each batch of seeds. Of course, you can also whack the maker with your tools
NEW ✨ New crop to grow: Myst Flower
Myst Flowers can be crafted into 3 Myst Crystals per flower. They take a while to grow, but they'll regrow several times. It's a more passive way to obtain crystals without having to run down to the mines
Old players will get the quest automatically added to their save file. New players will unlock the tutorial and the seeds when an alchemist moves to the island
Myst Flowers can be also placed as a decoration
🤓 Balance/QoL
- Removed gems from pinball machine, you can still have a chance to get shards
- Gem shards are now more expensive when bought at the Alchemist
- Removed Myst Crystals as a buyable item from Alchemist shop
- Removed tools and gems crafting recipe from blueprint shop; tools are now unlocked by default and gems will be learned during the newly "tool upgrade" quest
- New quest "Them Apples" for new players to help nudge towards the Grassy Plains to start the MSQ
- New quest that gets posted early game to let players know how dyes are obtained and give a couple of colors to play around with
- New quest that gets posted early game to give players the basic bush and flower crafting recipes instead of inside the blueprint shop. Nobu also mentions how a sword is an easy way to gather petals and Plant Material
NEW ✨ Save files will now show you a screenshot of where you saved. If it's an autosave from sleeping, you will be loafed
🐛 Fixes
- Mine doorways were only destroyable using un-upgraded tools or bomb arrows
- Townhouses did not retain buildables placed inside
- Specific inventory bug where moving two storage containers with a gamepad twice resulted in an empty inventory generated (items are still there, save migration to fix those affected coming later)