Dev Blog: Looking Ahead

Howdy, Palians! We love that you all are enjoying your adventures in the whimsical world of Palia while taking the time to provide us with excellent and essential feedback. We’ve been busy behind the scenes, and it’s high time for us to give you all a sneak peek at what we’ve been working on!

Let’s Get Creative

Since debuting Home Tours in the Summer Serenade update, we’ve learned a few things:

• The Palian community is incredibly talented and creative (although we already knew that!).
• Many of the community’s creations put our development team’s designs to shame, especially our Chief Chapaa Officer.
• Players love visiting new homes! Palians embarked on more than 1 million tours within the first 24 hours of the Home Tours feature’s launch!
  

These points confirm that your creativity is as important to you as it is to us! And we want to foster that creative spirit by making decorating, designing, and showcasing your home plot as seamless and fun as possible.

We’ve seen some useful feedback around Home Tour discoverability, and we’re working on a ‘featuring’ system that will place your home plot front and center to help your friends and other players find your awesome designs.

The team is also working incredibly hard to raise your plot's overall decor limits. However, there are some tough engineering challenges related to performance and stability; and we need to ensure that we’re delivering the best gameplay experience for all Palians.

If performance limitations weren’t an issue, we would place no limit on the number of decor assets you could place on your home plot. Unfortunately, we need some more time to consider bandwidth and optimize our gameplay that will give players even more creative freedom. Alas, while the current (and future!) decor limits are in place to ensure stability, the team is dedicating a whole lot of effort into reducing points of friction between the home plot and your creativity. We’ve been working hard to further improve performance as players maximize our 3,000 object/decor limit.

We’re making some meaningful changes that give Palians more crafting and design choices. Please read below for a brief overview:

• We’ve created a new optimization system for decor, such as Building Blocks, that allows us to remove the individual Building Block limit. Now Building Blocks are inclusive of the overall 3,000 limit!
• Some other optimizations have allowed us to increase the limit for Flowers from 500 to a total of 1,000! So if you have a particularly green thumb and want to maximize your Flower placements, you will be able to host a total of 1,000 Flowers on your designed plot!
• We’re making the decor limits visible in placement mode and from the housing menu to help you keep track of how close to the limit you are.

Patch 0.183: Sunset Soiree

Since we’re delivering all the dang spoilers, we might as well shed some light on planned content for the upcoming Sunset Soiree update (Patch 0.183). In addition to our home plot sub-limit changes, we’re including a much-requested quality-of-life feature that gives players the ability to seamlessly search for specific items in the player’s workbench and storage!

We’re also debuting Potato Pods! What are Potato Pods, and how do you get them? We’re planning an entire line of these sweet, tuber-ular, and spud-tacular collectable plushies. There will be a significant number of Potato Pods to collect, and you’ll have the opportunity to get a random Potato Pod periodically 🤫, adding an element of surprise to your collection.

But the best way to ensure you complete your collection will be to trade with your friends. That’s right – a trading system is planned for a future update (not currently planned for Patch 0.183), and the system will not be exclusive to Potato Pods! Stay tuned for more deets.

An Outfit for Every Member of the Pack

And we’ve heard that many of you Palians would like to see more masculine-presenting outfits. You’ll go feral when we debut the Wild Howl outfit! Although, the outfit looks great on feminine–presenting body types as well, so no need to feel left out of the pack.

Introducing Elderwood

Our well-known best kept secret is the development of our next Adventure Zone, Elderwood. Elderwood is an expansive, gorgeous, and potentially somewhat devious new zone set in the world of Palia that will challenge player’s conceptions of Flow, the Majiri, and the role humans play in the whimsical world of Palia. Elderwood will introduce new mainline quests, gameplay elements, and many hours of adventure for you and your friends to enjoy! While we’re incredibly excited about the possibilities for Elderwood, we don’t want to give away too much right now. In the meantime, check out some concept art below:

And if you’re as excited as we are – we know that you’ll want to get in and explore Elderwood as soon as possible. But we’ll all need to wait a little bit longer, as we expect to ship Elderwood in early 2025.

However, you all can expect several gameplay updates between now and Elderwood’s launch. These updates will focus on new gameplay features, in-game events (Maji Market?? 👀), experimental content, quality-of-life improvements, and… new quests! Our team is making it a priority to deliver as many new quests as we can that will appeal to both new players and stalwart Palians.

We know that you all want more gameplay content and new quests (especially as part of Palia’s evolving world story). And that content is coming! But of course, all new content will vary in size, especially as we continue building towards larger gameplay beats. A lot of thought and effort goes into each individual patch, especially the larger updates; and we want to make each update as meaningful and impactful as possible for the Palian community. Rest assured that we’re building towards these larger beats, such as the series of areas planned for Elderwood’s rollout. Stay tuned for a whole lot more!

As we continue expanding the world of Palia, you can expect to see a mix of content updates large and small… including the highly-anticipated conclusion to Palia’s Prologue quest. We’re also prioritizing bug fixes, feature improvements, and the overall questline player experience. Our goal is to make the best version of Palia we possibly can with each gameplay addition, new quest, quality-of-life improvement, or mechanical tweak as we ramp up toward the launch of Elderwood and beyond. In short – there will always be something new to discover.

Thank you for being a part of the Palia community. We appreciate your continued feedback and support as we continue shaping the game’s future. In the meantime, we’ll see you in-game.

Thank you,

Singularity 6