Dev Update: August 2023

Welcome to the first of many Dev Updates for Palia!

Dev Updates are regular check-ins from the Palia development team where we cover your most requested features and hot topics of the day. We aim to have these out to you at least monthly, with respect to our current development status.

While we won’t be able to cover all of the excellent and helpful feedback we’ve received across Discord, Reddit, and our socials and surveys, we are excited to kick this off by talking about some of the frequently requested features players have been asking about that are already in the works.

Coming Soon

Decor Interactivity: Sitting, Lying Down, And Generally Interact-able Furniture

What players are asking for: More things to do with all of the decor you’re collecting, particularly being able to sit on chairs, lay on beds, etc.

Decor interactivity has been on our wishlist for a long time and we’re finally jumping in head first. While we know the top request is for sitting on chairs, some technical hurdles have caused it to not be the first addition we’ll be making in this area, but we’re focused on overcoming those and delivering that feature soon.

We’re actively working on:

• Sitting
• Laying Down
• Turning Lights On/Off
• Opening & Closing Cabinets & Drawers
• Turning Water On & Off

To help hold you over until we deliver sitting on decor, we will be adding a /sit and a /kneel emote to your default loadout in the upcoming patches.

Improvements to the Crafting Workbench

There have been a lot of requests for menu and interface improvements to the Crafting Workbench. As players learn more and more decor recipes, it can get pretty tedious to scroll through the menu if you want to make a few dozen candles, arrows, or smoke bombs.

Robust workbench filtering and crafting in stacks is currently in development, and we aim to have this out in the next two months. Live issues could delay release, but these features are currently a priority.

The Request System

The request system is intended to be a quick and easy way of altruistically helping out other players in your area or that you have an established social connection with. It’s a gifting system. Our current assessment of this iteration of the system is that it’s not living up to its potential, and so we’re making the following set of changes over the next several patches.

• Allowing request fulfillment from storage anywhere
• Increasing the clarity on request cooldowns
• Reducing the cooldown sharply
• Adding the ability to request star quality items
• ...And very likely more to come

Note: The request system is not meant to be a replacement or stand-in for an open trading system in Palia, which we discuss more directly in a future blog post on economy.

New Character Customization Features

We’ve already announced that beards are on our list in the GD letter a few weeks ago. We’ve verified that some of the performance concerns with adding these for lower end machines have been brought within budget, so look forward to a world full of furry faces in a Palia near you very soon!

Lighter skin tones are also a very popular request and are very much on our short list. They have actually been blocked for a while due to lighting concerns. Specifically, lighter skin tones appear blown out by our current lighting at various times of day. Luckily, we have an experienced lighting artist looking into not just enabling these lighter skin tones but also a variety of lighting improvements across the play experience that will be coming in over time.

Of course, you wouldn’t even be able to make this change without another hotly requested character customization feature add: the ability to customize core aspects of your character, post character creation. We will add this feature alongside the first new feature or content that requires it in order for existing players to experiment with the new options.

Gardening: Ability to Destroy Crops To Rearrange Soil Plots

Did you plant a seed in the wrong plot? Or maybe you just earned a new crop and want to try it out right away? Well, another quality of life feature currently in development is the ability to destroy your crops so you can rearrange your plots right away. We’ll be sure to share all the details of how this works in the patch notes when it releases. We don’t currently have a hard date attached, but it is in the works.

Finishing the Temple Quests

For folks who have been playing through, you’ve probably completed one of the first temples that Jina wanted you to investigate and are thirsty for more. If not, don’t worry, take your time getting there! But for those who have, you’ll notice that there are a couple more spots in the Night Sky Temple that haven’t been activated. You’ll be happy to know that we’ll be continuing to add onto that story as we update the game. We hope you’ve enjoyed what you’ve seen so far, and we’re so excited to give you more!

You can think of what we’ve delivered as simply the Prologue to a story that we hope to bring to players for as long as you’ll have us. We’re so excited for you to experience the things we have in store!

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And of course, we all know you want to [REDACTED] [REDACTED], and [REDACTED] [REDACTED]. More on this Soon™! 🧩⛏️💖🔥🐕‍

On The Horizon

We still have a lot of work to do to prepare for the upcoming release on Switch (exact date TBD), and continuing to improve our server stability and queue times. We’ve made a lot of strides in these first 3 weeks since Open Beta started, but we know there’s still a lot to do. Here’s just a few additional features we have on our radar for release in the coming months.

• Proximity Text Chat
• Maintaining chat history across map transfers (Tomorrow!)
• Deeper permission controls for friends on your housing plot
• Community Progression, Activities, and more
• Updates to Flow Tree availability
• More things to do multiplayer

Hot Topics & Notable Bugs

While Beta is expected to come with a fair amount of stumbles, there were some notable issues and missteps that impacted a lot of players; namely, a bug where housing plots overlapped, and a bug fix that impacted many player’s storage situation in a highly unintended manner.

Merging House Plots & Missing Items

A major bug that came up was causing players’ crops and other items to merge onto a fellow player’s plot, which then allowed those players to harvest the wayward crops. The frustration with this bug was heightened by reports that some players could come to your housing plot uninvited and mess with your items.

Palia is meant to feel like your home away from home, and any instance of an unwanted visitor to that home immediately takes away that feeling of safety. This goes against the very foundations of what we want to achieve in Palia, and was treated as a high priority internally.

Both of these reported concerns were addressed in a hotfix during Patch 0.166 which we have observed fixed the issues reported. We’ve also kept the security work going to ensure we are preventing instances like this happening in the future. But if you were affected by this, or you encounter an issue like this in the future, be sure to report it to Player Support: https://support.palia.com

The Storage Bug Fix

Storage in Palia has broadly been a hot topic in the community, and it is something that we expect we’ll be making some notable updates to in order to address some of the core points of feedback. In this post, we specifically want to talk about a bug fix to our storage system that greatly impacted a lot of players.

It has always been our intention that a player only has to go through the storage progression arc a single time on their character. To support this alongside our multiple house plot feature, we set things up so that your storage items still contribute to your storage capacity even when you’re not using the plot you’ve actually placed them on. Specifically, we wanted to enable the freedom of decorating a housing slot with as few or as many storage access points on it as you desired.

This opened us up to an unfortunate miss in our validation process followed by a miss in how we rolled out the fix into the live game. We shipped with a bug in which players could subvert the storage placement limit by placing storage chests on other plots. We then fixed that bug, but many players had already utilized the bug to place a number of additional wood tier chests on other plots. When we ‘fixed’ the bug, many of these players were suddenly in a state in which they had far more items in their storage than the limits allowed them to have. This forced players to figure out what to do with items in their storage to get themselves back under their current storage capacity. Additionally, obtaining the copper tier storage upgrade is very expensive, so wasn’t an option for many players at that time.

Even though you could pick up the storage items while over capacity without issue, it was a mess and severely impacted the player experience.

We then rolled that fix out to players without support to help the players that would be affected by the change and without sufficient alerting to players that they would be in a difficult state. We also should’ve provided better clarity for how players could get out of this situation, or better yet, created a way to adjust the live game without putting those players into a broken state to begin with.

Sharp lessons were learned in this process and we sincerely apologize to those affected. Expect upcoming changes to take better account of the live player experience in the future.

This doesn’t put a dent in the hundreds of other features and improvements we have planned (and that you’ve asked for!). Like our Game Director says: As a player, you can take it as a commitment to you that the best version of Palia is always in front of us. That’s why we’ll be pulling back the curtain by providing more updates like this regularly. In the meantime, keep letting us know what you want to see, whether it’s in Palia’s Discord, Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook.

Hope to see you there!