Hey friends! Last month was mostly uneventful, mainly due to me being ill for a good chunk of it, however I did still manage to take some time to draw out a whole host of the new stuff for the 3.0 - so let's get into it! General heads-up that this post will contain spoilers of 3.0 content - if you're wanting to go in completely blind I totally understand but if so you might wanna skip this one! [hr][/hr]

Planning

From the last devlog I had planned out most of the general concepts I wanted to cover in the 3.0, however a lot of them were just rough ideas. What I wanted to do now was plan them out in more detail, and I'm a very visual person so really it was time to start sketching stuff out!
The only major difference I'd say between those plans in February is I'll no longer be doing the bug hotel stuff - as you're about to see the 3 main areas of fishing, coral reefs, and deep-sea diving cover a LOT of ground, so I don't want to give myself too much work over a "nice-to-have"! (RIP ladybugs) [hr][/hr]

Fishing

So first up is fishing - I'd already decided I wanted to do fly fishing, as I think the lure crafting side of things is very APICO, and I thought it would lead to some neat minigame ideas of luring the fish rather than straight up hooking them. To start off I drew a bunch of fish! At this point I was still a bit sick so I thought this would be a nice way to ease into things. Fishing would just be a nice little time waster, so I just wanted some cute collectibles and a fun shiny "bee" variant for each.
puffer is the indisputable king here To craft lures we'd need a crafting bench of sorts, and it's been a while since we had a mechanism so I felt like this would be a good place for it as we could re-create the winding of twine on the hooks in-game. The idea is you'll use lures, twine, glue, random bee produce, and a feather (dropped by scaring birbs) to form a lure - each lure has various stats based on the items that were used when it was created, i.e. luck, durability
the lure workshop! Once you have your lures you'll be able to cast them out with a fishing rod and start a small fishing minigame. I'm thinking of two parts, first a casting "click when meter is in yellow" classic, and then I'm thinking that you'll be greeted with a sort of menu that shows your lure and various fishy friends around it, and you'll have to try and net them when they get close enough.
altho items with no outlines? blasphemy I was originally thinking a sort of "red light green light" type reel in minigame, but think that would get annoying having to do that each time, and I think a little underwater scene would be cuter. Finally for the fishing mechanics I wanted one place where you could view your progress without creating yet another book - plus it wouldn't make sense to have a whole book for what is quite a small part of the game. My idea is to have a noticeboard-style menu that would give you hints and show progress.
who's that FISH! As part of this update I want to revamp both the bookshelves in a similar way, so I thought this would be a good way to reinforce the concept of these sort of menus as with the bookshelves there'd then be 4 of these types of info machines. Finally we have Skipper's Dad, a new character who you'll meet that will introduce you to fishing and crafting lures!
HOH HOH [hr][/hr]

Sea-Sides

On a related note, as part of the 3.0 update, Mothense will be returning to create 6 new tracks as part of the APICO "Sea-sides". Like the "Bee-sides" these will be additional tracks added in-game, 3 while you fish, and 3 while you explore the ocean depths! You also might be able to find some in-game playable versions of them through exploring the new areas too...
old and crusty, but still works - like me! :D [hr][/hr]

Coral Reefs

With the coral side of things, I spent a lot of time trying to work out how I wanted things to fit together. I wanted a focus on restoring the coral, but I didn't want it to get annoying. I also needed to make sure it still related to bees and also gave a decent reward for doing so - lots to juggle! Before I got completely overwhelmed I drew the different coral reefs and their flora/fauna/friends
the three different types of coral The idea is that there'll be 3 sets of coral in three different areas - each coral has a specific water quality it prefers (more on that later). At the start there'll only be small patches of bright coral, the rest will be the darker "dead" patches you see on the far left of the above image. You'll be able to scrape bits of coral off for samples, which you can then grow in tanks to turn into full coral - using different pH and salinity levels to match the requirements of the coral.
mudborne influence you say? i dont know what you mean Once you have grown coral, you'll be able to place it in sort of empty frames on top of the dead coral patches. The activity of beehives on the coral areas will then help grow the patch until it becomes a full coral tile. The idea will be that by growing patches you can link up all the seperate coral areas through the dead patches, until everything is connected. Once a coral reef is fully connected and restored, the flowers and flora will start forming/blooming, and then you'll have access to the butterflies and solitary bees that like coral but the habitat wasn't restored enough.
some new pastel friends I think this way it should feel like a nice side project to work on restoring the reefs, using your coral bees to help you - and then as a reward you can unlock a host of new flowers, butterflies, and solitary bee friends. As part of these new areas, as well as the ocean diving, you'll meet Director Bumblemore - a familiar name I'm sure to those who've been restoring their solitary bee populations!
what if Beenjamin, but not an asshole? Although he's the general director for MPCO he specialises in ocean conservation, so he'll introduce all the coral reef and deep-sea diving stuff. As part of the coral mechanics you'll be using acid / alkali / salt to manage your pH levels - at the start you can get this from Bumblemore but as you'll always come to find in the world of APICO the bees usually have an alternative solution. When it comes to salt, I wanted to solve another issue players often feedback which is wanting to remove grumpiness from bees. As a result, I present to you, the Degrumpifier:
yes the bees are grumpy becos their literally salty [hr][/hr]

What Lies Beeneath?

As part of the final of the three main sections, we then have the deep-sea diving, as the update name implies! For this section I had a rough idea on what you'd do and what it would look like, but it took me a while to decide on a purpose for the player while down there outside of "explore and collect some bees". The general idea is at a certain point Bumblemore will give you a diving helmet, which can be used on specific deeper parts of the ocean to travel to the ocean floor - a new biome that covers all the deep water of the world (basically the inverse of the map)
Down here you'll find some new, very strange looking bees, as well as a whole host of treasures to discover and new flora/flowers to find. You'll also find sludge - an unfortunate collection of goop that has formed from Mainland runoff. Using a special type of beehive, you'll be able to swap out your standard hive frames for hive filters - a special type of frame that stores the goop as bees get to work, and lets you clean up the patches of sludge over time.
a little twist on something you already know very well! Once filled you can extract these filters like you do your frames, but instead of honey you get less delicious sludge to be disposed off, plus any other little treasures the bees picked up!
maybe dont turn that stuff into mead While working on cleaning up the seabed, you'll be able to discover some new species of bees, some odd little solitary bees, and a couple of strange aquatic butterflies that appear to thrive down in the depths. Once you've cleaned up the sludge patches, you might even find the entrance to something even deeper below...
[hr][/hr]

Other Stuff

Outside of these 3 main areas there'll be a bunch of other QoL stuff too, some new a11y options, some better sorting for beeboxes, quick stacking to nearby chests, better storage options for butterflies - basically all the general feedback thats built up since 2.0!
unlimited butts!!! As mentioned I'll also be revamping the bookshelves to have a more interesting interface than just a ream of text, plus a few other tweaks here and there! [hr][/hr] Now that pretty much everything is drawn it's a lot easier for me to see how it'll all fit together, and in May I'll be sitting down to spend some time working through all the new mechanics, so hopefully come next month we should be able to see some of these pretty screenshots come to life! ~ Ell [This post was released early for Supporters over on Ko-Fi]