Attention Keepers! The Frozen Frontier is upon us!
This first DLC of Horticular takes us to the long-lost research world Glacialis. Rescue the frozen Keepers of the Cold Council, and uncover what happened to these poor gnomes.
Introducing the overworld, where you can travel between gardens and bring items and critters from your adventures back to the main world! Find out what's coming in this brand new expansion, alongside our 1.4.0 update:
Brand new mechanics unique to this adventure – thaw and bring life to this frozen world!
Over 100 new items and 15 new animals adapted to the chilly climate
New Upgrades and spells to help you fight off the cold
New friends and enemies – meet the unique Keepers of Glacialis!
And of course, new achievements for you to collect!
Before we go into the patch notes, we'd like to give a massive shout-out to everyone supporting us along the way. Thanks to you we are able to bring this glorious winter season to Horticular with all the new content! We hope you all enjoy exploring the frozen frontiers of Glaicialis and designing the winter gardens for our new Keepers and critters!
1.4.0 Patch Notes
While this update prepares the game for the DLC Frozen Frontier, it is also packed with improvements for the base game. Notably, we have the new particle system that breathes new life into your gardens, as well as the much-welcomed snow!
At one point in the storyline, Mercury will give you a small quest, unlocking our new cooling items. Use them to chill your garden and turn rainfall into fluffy white snow!
Improvements
- Snow accumulates in sufficiently cool (hehe) garden areas.
- New particle system with some existing items getting some polish.
- The UI now shows offending tags and missing ones when placing items.
- Hovering objects, such as nectar or cones, now shows their names.
- Water reflections have been polished.
- Rainy weather fog polished for ambience.
- Moving an item now shows the adaptation loss next to the cursor, not in the item information area.
- Main menu saves will now be sorted by last played.
- Magic UI improved to be more clear when the spell has charged fully.
- Day change UI polished.
Content
- Add 1 introduction quest for temperatures.
- Add 1 new animal.
- Add 3 new plants.
- Add 2 cooling items to alter temperatures.
- Pine tree unlock point changed and it now drops cones.
- Mud visuals changed to look different than flower soil.
- Larger plants have two new sound effects.
- Log now looks better. And it’s walkable for your creatures. A twofer!
Design
- Difficulty level now affects upkeep. Relaxed becomes less punishing in what you choose, and intense requires more optimizations.
- Objects now try to drop primarily in the foreground, not behind objects, to make them easier to find.
- Creatures aren’t evicted anymore if a habitat capacity decreases. However, all inhabitants will turn sad.
Fixes
- UI system polished to fix some issues with elements showing a frame after it was expected.
- Flying creatures would sometimes always be hidden behind some objects they land on.
- Objects didn’t fully respect world time and would break when not expected, such as when the game is paused.
- Some letters were never receivable but still counted as completion for contacts.
- UI now better follows animal heights.
- Locked creative mode was cut off on larger UI sizes.
- Surface layouting improved for less odd edge cases where your surfaces look strange.
- Shiny hunty quest triggered close to a new day, not “the evening” as the letter stated.
- Borders (e.g. habitat tool) rendered during cutscenes.
- Garden details could not be seen with gamepad in the overview mode.
- Opening a tool on gamepad would not start with the last used one.
- Stats page doesn’t update while playing.
- Habitat marker could have a lingering error message.
- Quality is shown for non-learned species when their habitat forms by chance.
- Hopefully, an issue hiding the cursor when using OBS has been fixed.
Modding
- NOTE: Corrupted don’t automatically spawn red nectar anymore. It’s controlled with a new OnDeath property. Make sure to update existing mods if they add new corrupted!
- World Objects can now be marked as collected (by keepers).
- Items can now have special effects.
- Campaign worlds (like the DLC is).
- Heat mechanic for items.
- Power mechanic for items.
- More control over UI features in the game mode (e.g. disabling overlays).
- Quest deactivation conditions.
- Rewards can now bypass pooling and vice versa. Recommended flow now is to set the correct store for an item and then use ForceDirect if a quest specifically wants to directly award an item.
- Items can now require other items underneath as an override. Same goes for ground.
- Contacts can now reveal information a bit at a time (per level).
- Enabled spells are now configurable per game mode.
- Animal height property that helps the UI where to place markers.
- Adaptation rate can be changed by a constant.
- Items and surfaces can now be usable but not count as collected for completion.
- Fixed issue where multiple mod development folders at the same time didn’t work.
- Custom quest categories.
- Custom game mode textures.
- Better inclusion/exclusion control for game modes.