IT’S LAUNCH DAY! It’s been a long road, but we’re here. We’re gleeful to announce that today is the official launch of Staxel! A lot has changed with Staxel over the course of early access, so we’d like to sum up the most important changes for you all (with some gifs, we’re not animals).

Staxel is available on Steam, Humble Bundle, our website, or GoG.

Like Magic!

The world of Staxel has been given a sprinkle of fairy dust! New Star Bits will fall during the night, a crucial item in the new Magic Crafting system. This Magic Crafting will prove very helpful in upgrading your tools and progressing certain quests, so make sure to gather up all the Star Bits you can, even if you can’t use them yet!

Friends all ‘round

Since release we’ve added some intriguing new villagers and other NPCs to the world of Staxel. Make sure to speak to Mayor Maximilian to find out if any new villagers are waiting to move in to the village.

Also, you can now befriend villagers through daily chat, giving them gifts and completing quests for them, they’ll even give you some neat items in return!

Once you’ve become best friends with one of the townsfolk, you can even choose to have them move in on the farm and become your roomie!

Mail

Want to share the stacks of petals you’ve received from your recent harvest with your friends? You can now send mail (and attach petals) to your friends in multiplayer! Maybe write them some poetry, send them some junk or just gift them some well earned petals! Either way, be sure to befriend Leif to set up the postal section of his store.

New Lands to Visit

The world of Staxel just got bigger! Throughout the game you’ll find new lands to visit, from the depths of crystal-laiden caverns to floating mushrooms in the sky. Keep an eye out for the new Portal Festival and get ready to don your explorers gear, new worlds await!

Arcade

If you befriend a certain game-loving villager you might end up taking part in some fun and challenging minigames in the Arcade. Enter a digital world and gather the 4 magic items of the Demon King’s maze as you try to escape. Let’s hope your jumping skills are up to scratch!

New Pupper

We’ve added a very good doggo to the pet roster, you’ll be able to get them at random as your starter pet, or at random by buying a dog house.

New Leaf Chomper

We’ve also added a whole new pet species! These little leaf chompers are found at the pet store, a village amenity you’ll unlock by befriending a villager who’s a friend to all animals.

Museum

Discover ancient relics of the past, seek out exquisite paintings and display your captured collections in the all new Museum. Unlocked via a questline with a mysterious blue villager, (no spoilers!), once you’ve built the Museum, you can fill it up with all sorts of intriguing new items.

All New Festivals

We’ve added new Festivals that are celebrated throughout the in-game year. From hunting down rogue prank-playing fairies, to exploring vast new caverns full of loot for the taking – these new festivals will add a little extra spice to the day to day life of a humble farmer.

Upgrades!

Default tools are now a little less powerful, but we’ve made up for it by adding a bunch of new tiered tools! You may need to venture out beyond your Island through the new Portals Festival to find some of the materials, but it’s worth it! You will need to unlock the new crafting method required to upgrade your tools. (No spoilers!)

All Day Long

Between farming, making new friends and exploring new lands, there’s barely enough hours in the day! So we thought, why not add more! Staxel days are now longer, and we’ve padded each calendar season to 30 days (up from 16) to give you more time to experience the best that each season has to offer. Make sure to check your calendar to review the current season’s events.

Hook, Line and Sinker

Picture it; a relaxing cabin in the woods, some cool sap in the cooler, just you, nature and a fishing rod. That’s why we’ve overhauled the Fishing mini-game to provide a more calming (but still challenging!) fishing experience. Spending some quality time reeling in big catches from the briny deep just got a little more relaxing!

VIP Merchants

Exotic new items, mysterious Lucky Boxes and flying merchants, yes that’s right, FLYING MERCHANTS! Once you’ve built a special landing pad for these travelling merchants, you’ll gain access to an inventory of exotic new items, and a mysterious new Lucky Box that will always provide you with something new.

Buff it up!

We’ve added a range of status effects that will affect gameplay in different ways. Some sleep (and caffeine) related effects will have you keeping an eye out while burning the midnight oil, while others such as jumpy and swift will have you bouncing around the island like a pogo stick!

However, there are two sides to every coin. If you’re unfortunate enough to receive a debuff, don’t fret! All buffs and debuffs can be removed by either sleeping, or drinking milk. It all depends on the nature of the debuff.

Check You Out!

Staxel doesn’t have smart phones, but somehow, we do have selfies. Press X to flip your camera into Selfie mode to check out your look on the go, or catch some picture worthy moments with your friends!

Key Rebinding & Display Sliders

Accessibility and custom controls are an important part of player experience. That’s why we’ve added new options to customise your controls. There are some presets in there to get you started too. We’ve also added a sliders section to adjust the display settings of the game; brightness, contrast, gamma and saturation.

Overhauled Recipe Book

The Recipe Book has been given a long overdue face lift! You can now sort by category and search through your collection of recipes much more easily.

Water For Days

The watering can has been nerfed a bit, it now requires refills (which can be done at a range of water-based sources), but it has received some upgrade tiers along with the other tools, and we’ve also added some hi-tech swanky sprinklers! These can be placed in your fields to automatically water your crops, freeing up some of your time to pursue other hobbies.

Other Changes

Along with the above we’ve added a bunch of smaller changes to the game, along with buckets of bug fixes, optimisations and quality of life improvements, some of which are:

• Tools are faster overall
• Steam networking improvements
• StaxelNet option for improved multiplayer connectivity.
• Optimisations to FPS, loading, terrain generation and faster lighting.
• Ported to 64bit
• More options such as borderless window mode
• Extensive modding expansion to allow modders more access to features.

 

We hope you enjoy your time in Staxel, we’ve worked hard over the years to realize our vision of a peaceful world full of farming, building, friendship and fun for anyone and everyone to enjoy.

 

Hey everyone, as promised in the New Year edition of the Staxel Reporter, today we’ll be giving you guys a little glimpse at one of the new features you can expect to see in the next content update. We’ve been getting back into the swing of things this week after the holidays, so without further ado let’s jump right in and take a look! (screenshots included)

Magic Update

As mentioned before, we’ve recently been hard at work developing the next update for Staxel but we haven’t actually spoken that much about it. We did briefly mention some of the planned features for this update in the last issue of the Reporter, so if you haven’t read it be sure to check that out here.

That said, this time round we’re going to touch on one of the new features specifically…

Islands!

Well… besides the main island at least. 😛

Players will be able to travel from the main island to some smaller islands, each with their own particular uses and designs and which will provide the player with specific rewards such as materials for crafting.

We’re a good way through the first island, so let’s take a little peek at what it looks like below.

Mining Island showcase

The ‘mining island’ is the first island we’ve been putting together. The island itself will be accessible by portal, and after a bit of exploration you’ll find even more portals which will transport you to the different levels of the mine. Let’s have a look at some screenies so you can see what we have so far. (Keep in mind this is still a work in progress and changes are likely to be made!)

Only one part of the island will be accessible to start with. This will lead you to the first level of the mines where you’ll begin to explore the branching caverns and underground lakes. There’s a lot to discover down here, so keep your eyes open, you never know what might find!

One very important aspect of the mines is gathering. Down here you’ll find ore which isn’t available on the main island. You’ll be able to use these ores to upgrade your tools!

Upgrading your tools can have a big impact on your workflow, making you much more efficient during your day to day chores, leaving you more time to relax… or to expand your farming empire.

The key to the mining island is to keep exploring, but do try not to get lost. It’s easy to get carried away when you see shiny things in the distance so keep your wits about you and you’ll be just fine.

With that said, I’m not going to share any more secrets for now, you’re going to have to go in and discover the rest for yourself!

We hope you’ve enjoyed this little sneak peak of the mines. We’ll be revealing more details about the different islands you’ll be able to visit (as well as some other new features we’re working on) in upcoming issues of the Staxel Reporter.

Remember to keep an eye on our social media pages, or better yet, join our Discord community to participate in some active discussion about the upcoming content!

• Twitter
• Discord

Take care everyone, until next time!

Major Changes:

• Lighting fixes. Less black void.
• Show a warning prompt instead of kicking players with high amounts of lag.
• Signs… THAT YOU CAN WRITE ON.

Full List:

Additions:

• Allow journal bind to close the journal while it’s open
• Allow the “accept” button (Default: A on controller) to advance dialogue
• Prevent a case of accidentally closing the character creator on the first world load.
• Add a couple of lines to Farm Fan to stop her from referring to herself in third person.
• A prompt is displayed before stealing.

Changes:

• Made the scarf on the shaved pink sheep match un-shaved version.
• Made powerful refrigerator be recognised as a fridge
• Show a warning prompt instead of kicking players with high amounts of lag.
• Your view won’t be snapped back to your conversation partner all the time.
• Set the active inventory slot when moving items within hotbar. Instead of just between hotbar and inventory.
• Added a slight delay before getting the next hint in the night transition overlay.
• Changed arrows on dropdowns to a higher resolution version.
• Reduced delay in showing the dialogue progress hint.
• Use the randomized cobble tile when creating the town hall.
• Changed the mouse icon that showed up in dialogue.
• Changed some internal logic for key binding.
• Ensure that Steam Launcher brings Staxel to the front of all open windows.
• Hide the “allow friends joins” option on GOG version. Play with Friends button is also disabled.
• Moved the “Inventory Direct” keybind higher in the list. So it is next to other menu keybinds.
• Added Hay as a requirement to craft chicken coops.
• Allow multiple gog owners to play on a server using the same credentials.
• Unmappable key bindings are now more clear in the UI.
• Allow escape menu to be shown while in dialogue.
• Fancy chairs can be sat on now.
• Added a button that you can click on night transition to continue.

Fixes:

• Fixed some bad layers in Male Swimsuits, Bermuda Shorts
• Added some methods to quickly update lighting before full information is received from server.
• Added extra protection for weird ui scale values.
• The Tool area region no longer sticks around after switching from the creative shovel
• Fixed replaced tiles leaving behind compound fillers. This fixes some cases of invisible blocks.
• Fixed the screen growing past the monitor size, when switching from borderless to windowed mode.
• When a field gets assigned a null in json, ignore the field when parsing the blob. Fixes some weird issues.
• Don’t crash on CancelCharacterCreator if current design was not set yet.
• Track file access conflict issues on BinBlobDb with more detailed error messages. To find some unusual crashes.
• Fixed a crash for Docks when a dock is provided an item with no code or tile code.
• Fix some threading issues.
• Fixed a float precision issue causing animations to not play at 60fps after 2 hours of gameplay.
• Don’t crash when saving, while feeder has just been spawned.
• Don’t throw an exception when muting a player for a second time.
• Don’t trigger selfie camera mode when using ALT+F4 to close the game.
• Don’t leak sound effect instances when skipping sounds.
• Avoid cleaning up GameContext multiple times, and solved some race conditions concerning cleaning up GameContext.
• Fix an issue with reloading pets.
• Several hardenings of code surround chunks.
• Hardening against null item stack exceptions.
• A fix was applied to some failures to directly connect to a player.
• Removed the server list from the client and server wizard.
• Fixed Cecile’s Model showing a different skin tone on the shoulder.

Modding:

• Certain DLL’s are now blocked from loading. This is to stop issues with certain old mods crashing the game.
• By default, Mod Manager only asks to update mods if you own the mod.
• By default, Mod Manager does not ask to run content builder on new versions of the game.
• Both options above can be turned off by finding the file in the /mods/ folder.
• Mod manager’s command line parameters have been clean up. The only input changed is steamLauncherCheck (e.g. -steamLauncherCheck 10.0.0 instead of -steamLauncherCheck -version 10.0.0)
• Fixed villager definitions being outdated in Asset Manager.
• Fix Modmanager not detecting that some mods needed to be uninstalled before being reinstalled. Should fix cases of files being left behind.
• Added Mail definitions and Quest Definitions to the Asset Manager.
• Check if files are missing from the bundle after Mod Manager does its checks.