After a lot of hard work, we’re very proud to say that ‘Staxel 1.3 – Friendship Update’ is now live! Let’s take a look at some of the new content you’ll be seeing in game.
The New Friendship System
The main aspect of this update is adding more depth to the villagers. You can now build relationships with your neighbours by talking with them on a regular basis, giving them gifts, doing them favours and completing their ‘Friendship quests’!
Befriending a villager comes with certain benefits; when you get to know them well you might receive some special gifts, and if you take a liking to one villager in particular, you can even invite them to become your roommate! It’s important to choose your best friend carefully though, as you can only have one roomie at a time!
Villager Behaviour
Along with all their new dialogue, the villagers’ daily behaviour has been upgraded too. You might find villagers doing more day-to-day activities like shopping in the local store, or having conversations with each other. We’ve found that these changes breathe much more life into the village, and Leif seems pretty happy about it too!
More Quests
Villagers each have special ‘Friendship quests’ for you to complete, if you choose to. I certainly don’t want to spoil the fun by going into detail here, but I will say you’ll really be seeing your neighbors’ personalities come out with this update. Each villager’s quests are unique to them, so by helping out you’ll learn more about them and build a stronger relationship to boot!
New Festivals
We’ve added a new fully-fledged Springtime festival, along with a ‘mini festival’ of sorts. Of course, I’m not going to reveal too much about either of these, but what I will leave you with this cheeky sneak peek.
New Content
Along with all these new systems, we’ve also added a lot of new content too. New outfits, accessories, furniture pieces, toys, and even new pets! Some of the new gear can only be collected in specific ways (for example, completing friendship quests), so I’m sure all of you collectors will have a blast gathering all the new loot!
This isn’t all you’ll find in 1.3 though, for further information on the changes you can read the changelist below (note that this isn’t an exhaustive list). The best way to find out what’s new is to update Staxel and give it a spin! We’re all pumped with how it’s turned out and can’t wait to see what you all think of it. Have fun!
CHANGELIST
Major new content:
- Friendship system: Befriend the villagers by giving them gifts, conversing with them, or completing daily quests.
- Roomies: Help out a villager enough, become their best friend, and maybe they’ll agree to move in with you! All you need to do is given them a certain special item and make sure you set up your own home’s signpost!
- Gifts: You can now give villagers items by pressing the correct button with the item selected.
- New quests: More than 35 new quests spread across 11 villagers, spanning several friendship storylines (Leif, Eris, and Jamie will receive theirs in a future update).
- New pet type: Unlock an entire new species of pet through Rosemary’s quests! Not even the whole dev team knows what it is!
- New faces: New storylines bring with them interesting new individuals!
- New hats: Who doesn’t want more hats?
- New furniture and tiles: Even more ways to decorate!
- Quest items: These specially marked items are extra hard to lose:
- They can’t be dropped or thrown away.
- They will always end up in your inventory, even if it is full. They’ll even throw out a random item to make room if necessary!
- Placeable quest tiles will always return to the inventory when broken.
- A new festival: Springtime brings with it a tiny disaster.
- New building tools: Tape measures simplify judging sizes, along with many other handy tools to make building a cinch!
Detailed 1.3 Changelist:
Added:
- Reputation and reputation levels
- Reputation icons displayed in nametags
- Reputation can be gained by:
- Talking
- Giving Items
- Completing daily quests
- The ability to invite villagers to be your roomie upon completing their questline
- Roomied villagers will hang out at your house
- Roomied villagers will have extra special dialogue
- A new species of pet
- A new festival
- Dozens of new quest items
- New hats
- Conversations with Murmurs (Merchants)
- Postboxes and signs can have extra criteria:
- Must be away from town
- Must not overlap with another totem
- Villagers can go shopping in the village
- Villagers can converse with each other (only used in quests for now)
- Dialogue can be used to spawn villagers, tiles, and more
Fixes:
- Allow all numpad buttons to be mapped; some were missed by mistake
- Fix pets colliding with doors while following their owners
- Fix some cases of Journal entries duplicating
- Fix an issue where postbox/totem sale pools couldn’t be expanded with new tiers
- When checking for an item in a players inventory, the clothing slots were skipped
- Fixed some dialogue issues, which resulted in getting stuck in conversations
Modding:
- Added a large number of extra Dialogue Commands
- Added functionality to fishables to be active during certain quests, or while certain totems exist
- Added functionality to plants to drop seeds when broken at certain stages
- Allow villagers to be farm animals
- Added village global variables for dialogue
- Added personal cross-villager variables for players in dialogue
- Add the ability to defer dialogue commands, limited to a small handful of commands for now
- More extensive dialogue validation
- Regards are now included in villager npc files
- Dialogue pools blocked by friendship levels are included in villager npc files
- Fixed an issue where a misnamed dialogue command could still be validated
- Fixed an issue where farm animals, and pet models were not checked
- Fixed bodytype layers in some animals
- When creating translation files for dialogues, the content builder will now filter to .dialogue and .npcconversation files.
Plus countless other minor changes lost to the wind.