Hi Ranchers! 🐴🌷 We have a ton of new content packed in our fourth roadmap milestone, including discovering your horse’s personality traits, lungeing foals in the round pen, raising horses of different heights and fast traveling to key locations!
Round Pen
The round pen on your ranch can now be restored! Build it to lunge your foals and wild horses and prepare them for riding. While both foals and adults can use the round pen, foals learn twice as fast while they’re young.
You can train all four skills by changing your horse's gait, adding jumps in the round pen or shortening the lead's length to train your horse's flexibility. If your horse doesn’t respond to your command, make sure to calm them down to improve their tameness!
Horse Tameness
Wild horses and foals aren’t so tame anymore! You’ll now need to train a new skill for your horses: Tameness!
This skill will impact how well a horse responds to your commands. For example, an untamed horse might just rear or buck when you ask them to accelerate, but as they improve, they’ll listen to you more and more often until they are fully tamed.
Tame your horses by lungeing or by riding them and calming them down when they buck. Wild horses are untamed, but luckily, horses bought at the auction house are fully tame, so you won’t have to worry about them!
Horse Personalities
All of your horses will now have three unique personality traits! Each trait falls under a category:
- Training: This trait impacts how fast and where your horse can be better trained, for example by training in speed twice a fast or by losing less energy when training at home.
- Caring: This trait changes how your horse needs to be cared for, for example by always having a clean coat or being able to eat two treats daily.
- Earning: This trait allows you to earn gold in various ways with your horse, for example by finding gold while riding on the trails or by earning extra gold from the competitions.
Your current horses will all receive personality traits at random when you load up your save file! For future horses, you’ll be able to see their traits in the auction house and your foals will have a chance to inherit their parent’s traits.
Horse Height
Since this feature was highly requested, I decided to include it as a bonus in this update! All of the horses you’ll encounter in Rivershine will now have varying heights, from 14H to 16.2H. Your current horses will stay the same size and stand at 15H tall.
When breeding horses, your foals will have about the average of their parents, and you’ll see their height go up each day as they grow. Young adults will now also grow over time and reach their full height once they become adults!
Travel Stones
Mysterious stones have appeared in key locations across all of Rivershine… It might be useful to take a closer look at them, as they will allow you to fast travel around the trails!
Help the villagers of Rivershine to learn more about the stones and gain the ability to travel through them. The villagers will also shine more light onto the mystery of the town, but there will still be more left to discover…
Stone Circles
Along with the travel stones, you’ll find stone circles around the town and trails. These will reward you for exploring and grant money, potential, energy or statue fame as you pass through them.
General Changes
- Translated all new content to French.
- Improved the horse jump animations.
- Added four new shades of base black coat colors.
- Added more random colors for the NPC’s horses.
- Added coat genetic information to the fertility pasture interface.
- Fixed a game-breaking bug that caused the player to get stuck when trying to adopt a wild horse.
- Changed horse energy to be replenished after spending a night in the fertility pasture.
- Fixed a bug where the Rocky Mountain statue would charge up before the quest for it is available.
- Fixed a bug that caused the competition start and end gates to stay visible after finishing the race.
- Fixed the foal brushing hitbox.
- Fixed foals being able to reach 100% care.
- Fixed horses losing their dapple coat color when they are placed in retirement. This won’t restore dapples for previous horses but it won’t happen again with future horses.
- Fixed the jump training arena in Crystal Lake not unlocking correctly after purchase.
- Changed the indoor arena and grain descriptions to clarify how they impact training.
- Increased the foragable item spawn chance.
- Changed where grains spawn to match the trail’s training bonus.
- Fixed the Rocky Mountain music stopping abruptly.
- Reduced all tack cost by half.
- Increased the time required to break quickly to reduce instances of stopping by accident.
- Change the questline so that the Lupine Meadow and Rocky Mountain expert races don’t unlock at the same time.
- Fixed an issue where the horse’s energy bar wouldn’t visually increase after feeding a treat or resting at a hitching post.
- Added sound effects for the foal’s footsteps.
- Fixed the horses and foals not being led correctly out of the stable.
- Fixed issues with horses being duplicated when loading a save.
- Removed the ability to “ride” foals by resetting to the map’s entrance.
What’s Next
The next content update will be focused on opening the stylist’s boutique! Along with meeting a new villager, you’ll learn how to cut your horse’s hair in new styles… And more ways to make your herd look pretty!
Thank you for following the development of The Ranch of Rivershine!
Éloïse