Thank you to everyone participating in the Ashfield Hollow Playtest. The first two updates are now live, addressing feedback and bug reports from the earliest playtest submissions.
Survival and Onboarding
Nutrition and Hydration now decline based on elapsed in-game time rather than frame rate. During Days 1–7, players can claim one free Radish Salad and one clean Water Canteen refill per day from the Mansion Kitchen.
Sleeping now restores 15% of the player's maximum health.
Combat and Enemy Progression
Standard zombie attacks now have clearer windups, lunges, and opportunities to evade. Zombie melee damage has been reduced by 50%, attacks require physical contact, and Spitter attacks can be interrupted during their windup.
Spitters and burning zombies now appear later, while forest zombie populations increase more gradually during the opening days.
Controls and Gameplay Improvements
Controller and Steam Deck support has been improved across fishing, furniture placement, management mode, interaction prompts, and control rebinding.
The hotbar is now visible inside the backpack, items can be assigned through drag and drop, farming tools highlight valid targets, and crop growth information is easier to understand.
Crafting stations now display unlearned recipes without revealing their ingredients, stockpile objectives have been simplified, and relationship objectives now display progress using hearts.
Readability and Stability
Text-heavy windows now use stronger backgrounds for improved readability. NPC movement through doors has also been improved.
Several major issues have been fixed, including storage chests freezing the game, quest-bin deposits causing crashes, stockpile windows becoming unresponsive, and removed events continuing to be referenced by other systems.
As a reminder, you can leave direct feedback here: https://form.jotform.com/262115130477046
You can also join the official Ashfield Hollow Discord to share feedback, report bugs, and follow development: https://discord.gg/xfgDJDWdjU
Thank you for helping me improve Ashfield Hollow!