It's finally patch time for Verdant Village again. I was hoping to push this out a little more quickly than I did honestly. I kept running into small issues or new bugs that prevented me from doing so however. It sort of turned into a situation of just one more thing, then Ill patch until, well, here we are. Thanks for your patience on the matter. For a brief summary, this patch isnt anything radical. There are a few changes and additions and some QoL for the most part. With everything in this patch taken care of Im hoping to focus more on adding some overdue content to the game. Its been a while since I added an NPC to the game and there are still plenty to add. Secrets were also something I wanted to start getting around to as they house some of the more interesting rewards. The compendium (a built-in mini wiki) seems like something people would like as well. Theres also a multitude of other things to tackle, but thats not exactly new. In any case, this is a patch not a news update so I wont babble on forever. Below is a full list of the changes made to the game. As usual if you encounter an issue feel free to report it and Ill look into the problem as quickly as I can.

Verdant Village Patch 0.4.5 Full Changelog

Additions

• Added a quest for Sven
• Alchemy has been changed in a large way. You will no longer receive recipes from quests, and any youve gotten will be forgotten post patch. Instead, alchemy items can be combined to discover alchemy recipes in the game
• Many alchemy items have been added to the game as a result of the previous change to the system. This was done as the basic code for these items was already intact in the game and coding the game to ignore these entries would have likely caused more issues in the future. A broad note is that not everything has a use right now, but will in the future
• Contrary to what I just said, Ive added several potions with new effects that can now be made via alchemy
• Added a silo to the game which will automatically feed animals housed in tier three barns or coops. This building is rewarded from the Ranchers Trial quest. If you have completed the quest already it will be unlocked for you. You can construct this building via Simeon as usual, and like the stable you can only have one at a time
• Added built in storage for barns and coops, each building now has a single small chest within it for storage
• Hunting animals will now produce bones as an item which can be turned into stock at your cooking station. TIL you can make stock from bones, who knew, not me, thats who
• Truffle system for pigs has been overhauled. Pigs will now find a truffle every day, but there are now several types of truffles with different rarities. Obviously, the rarer ones have less of a chance of being found. This should make pigs feel like a more worthwhile purchase
• Added both gates and large gates for placeable walls, these can be ordered from the shipping chest and are available from the start of the game
• Reset the quest Gardening Aid for Remi and made it temporarily unavailable due to the changes in alchemy rewards. This will be readded once the new reward is implemented
• Reset the quest Fishy Friends for Mattias and made it temporarily unavailable due to the changes in alchemy rewards. This will be readded once the new reward is implemented

QoL (Quality of Life)

• Recalibrated surface mining node spawns so that the game will no longer be stuck in a state where it cannot spawn any more nodes in a certain zone. If you failed to every see nodes respawn in the swamp, this change should fix that
• Recalibrated forage spawns in the world so that spawns will be more evenly distributed in the world throughout the various zones
• Updated animal status for pigs to show the types of truffles they have found
• The perk associated with truffle finding has also been modified to compensate for the changes to pigs
• Pigs will now always find a gilded truffle on their birthday
• Added a smaller complete image of archeology puzzle artifacts to serve as a helpful guide for completing the puzzles
• Updated fermentation buff descriptions to match buff names
• Added a fishery tutorial
• Modified Quents Alchemical Wonders quest to adhere to the new alchemy system
• Modified Petras rockslide clearing quest to adhere to the new alchemy system
• Modified Alices Dying for Dye quest to, you guessed it, adhere to the new alchemy system
• Put a character limit in place for names. The limit it around 20 characters, this is mostly just to prevent putting in something extremely long as it starts to make the dialogue look a bit odd in a lot of cases.
• Moved animal feed to be in the front of Mels store to make it more easily accessible
• Altered quest reward text for the Helpful Hunter quest to say Sconce instead of Wall Candle to match the object blueprints given
• Adjusted animal spawn rates for hunting to make some animals easier to find in different seasons
• Shrunk the barn interior to a more reasonable size

Balance Changes

• Added a few seeds to the starting chest when starting a new game, mostly as something to hopefully give a bit of direction for players new to the genre as unlike other games you arent really explicitly told to farm
• Changed the mines to spawn coal veins on every level, this chance is still far less than normal past floor 60
• Raised amber drop rate in the mines from floor 1-20
• Reworked fishing traps to always yield at least 2 fish before breaking, however they can catch up to 10 in total. Once the related perk is acquired these odds are more favorable as well
• Mildly increased ore seam spawn rate in all floors of the mines
• When archeology is unlocked more fragments are spawned initially to prevent the player from finding keystones as easily

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where fowl wouldnt drop feathers ever. Note that ducks and geese do not have a 100% drop rate so they will not spawn feathers every day
• Feathers are also tracked via the livestock UI now so you can play favorites based on who drops more
• Fixed a bug where the mine wasnt capping properly allowing you to go past level 125
• Changed the mines so that you cant dig for clay on the first floor anymore, which was a left over from a previous patch. Clay must now be gathered in the swamp via nodes, this I have decreed
• Fixed a bug where fishing traps wouldnt give the correct fish for where they were placed
• Fixed several instances of wild berry bushes overlapping each other which prevented the player from picking both
• Fixed the Buff UI not appearing correctly when on the right side of the screen
• Fixed a typo in the keysprite barrier examination text
• Fixed an issue where the horse galloping SFX wouldnt play if you held a movement key while mounting
• Fixed the portcullis UI not functioning if your player was in position to interact with a store
• Fixed Simeon not saying specific dialogue when constructing a building on your farm
• Fixed a dialogue parsing bug in the quest Archeological Crash Course
• Fixed a bug where items that give the Sure Strike buff in fermentation wouldnt give the buff
• Added cocoa bean sprite for when you shake them out of cocoa trees, because no one should be subjected to my severely lacking artistic capabilities
• Fixed a bug where certain surface mining nodes would spawn multiple nodes in one place
• Fixed the building GUI not listing buildings properly after removing or moving an existing building
• Fixed a bug where the adequate barn would not highlight when trying to upgrade it to a spacious barn
• Fixed an issue with the quest to fix the minecart not triggering if you spoke with Sven via his shop before speaking to him directly. The quest should also be unlocked for anyone who patches up to this version
• Fixed a rounding error that occurred when digging up artifact fragments, this would cause random bugged fragments to be given to the player
• Fixed an issue where trying to interact with Isabels shop before you met her would result in a message about how you need to meet her first, even if she was, you know, standing at the shop
• Added sprites to all archeology curios that you can dig up
• Fixed an issue where the portcullis button was still clickable even when in various UIs
• Fixed a bug where deer hides and hoofs could be broken down for aqueous essence in alchemy
• Fixed an alchemy issue where certain recipes in certain circumstances wouldnt consume all of the ingredients they required
• Fixed an issue with the buff UI not displaying descriptions properly
• Fixed a bug where interior doors in the player home would disappear. Any doors that had previously disappeared should return upon patching
• Fixed a bug with fishing trap spawns that still appeared in the swamp on land
• Fixed controller support bug that kept the player from placing wallpaper in their home
• Fixed a controller support bug that kept the player from dismantling rugs and certain objects
• Fixed a large bug that miscalculated where objects could be placed on surfaces, for instance placing lockboxes on end tables
• Fixed a z ordering bug with Isabels shop table that would cause her to stand on top of it like a mad lass
• Fixed another bug that kept players from interacting with the left most section of Isabels shop
• Fixed a controller bug where the player could spawn a cursor while performing other actions which would cause unintended consequences
• Fixed a text error in the Collapsed Roof Renovation quest dialogue
• Fixed another typo in Ethans dialogue
• Fixed a typo in Isabels introduction dialogue
• Fixed a bug where cooking food in your own stove would make every other stove in the game excited and display an ! prompt
• Fixed several slight bugs in the mine generation code that resulted in slight collision box and visual glitches
• Fixed an issue where the Unique Spices quest for Remi was giving a different recipe than what was said in the reward text
• Adjusted green and red peppers so that their descriptions accurately matched their growth rates
• Fixed a parsing error with the Lightfooted perk description text
• Fixed a bug where you could assemble artifacts without the keystone assuming you have enough fragments in your inventory
• Added a small amount of code that will make Mels animals only appear during the day as they need to sleep too
• Fixed a bug where you could still move if you were mounted when the day ends
• Fixed a bug where some of the archeology artifact names would run off the UI
• Fixed a collision error with the portcullis button where it was unclickable while on certain frames of its animation
• Fixed a bug where the swamp cavern wouldnt spawn plants past year one
• Fixed a bug where the swamp cavern wouldnt spawn plants in winter
• Fixed a small bug that caused music to play the same song far more often than the others