I am always so excited to share new updates with you.
We are getting close to 4 years of working on Farlands, and being able to keep adding new content and improving the experience is great. This time, we are also bringing you the biggest update Farlands will ever receive.
Version 1.2 comes with more than 70 new items, machines that change how some familiar items are obtained, changes to rewards and progression, and a complete rework of the upgrade costs for tools and the ship. There is a lot to explain, so let us go through it step by step.
MACHINES
We have introduced 11 machines in Farlands that process resources and turn them into other resources:
Furnaces will allow you to obtain ingots, a new material introduced in this update.
The Biocompressor, Energitron and Trienergitron will allow you to obtain fuel cells.
The Polymerizer is used to obtain plastic and silicone, two new items that will be used to upgrade the ship.
The Preserver will allow you to turn your fruit and vegetables into juices, jams and pickles, increasing their value.
The Seeder will allow you to turn harvested vegetables into seeds, so you will not have to buy more if you do not want to.
The Recycler will return the materials from furniture you have crafted but no longer want.
The Researcher is the new way to obtain furniture set chips. It will sequentially request resources from every planet, and delivering them will unlock the corresponding sets.
Finally, the Dimensional Exchanger is a strange portal to another dimension that will give you random items in exchange for large amounts of resources. It can even unlock the new Golden Furniture Set, which can only be obtained through this strange machine.
UPGRADES
These machines introduce new items that will be used for upgrades to both tools and the ship: ingots, silicone and plastic.
This change addresses feedback from some players who felt that upgrades were too simple, that the experience felt a little too vanilla, and that everything could be obtained using money alone.
Money will still remain an option because it has always been a design decision that you should be able to complete Farlands in whichever way you enjoy most, without being forced to engage with systems you do not enjoy. However, doing so now requires a little more exploration across the planets and some mineral processing, adding an extra layer of management that this playstyle did not originally have.
PROGRESSION
Many of these machines change the way you interact with progression in the game. Some elements will be harder to obtain while others will be easier. As a result, the way these machines and their crafting chips are obtained is spread throughout the entire game.
Some are obtained by exploring the mines, while others are rewards from the Ark. We will continue making adjustments so that progression feels as smooth as possible, but everything is already set up to unlock naturally throughout a normal playthrough.
WHAT IF I HAVE ALREADY COMPLETED THE GAME?
If you have progressed far enough in your save to have missed some of these rewards, you will receive an email containing the machines you should have obtained. This way, we make sure nobody is left without essential items required to keep playing properly.
Even so, given how extensive the changes in this update are, we believe this is a very good time to start a new save and experience how the entire progression of Farlands changes with this update.
MORE STUFF
As a small bonus in this update, we have added buttons to sort chests and send all duplicate items to the chest. It is a small feature, but it slightly improves the user experience, something we are always trying to refine.
For more advanced players, especially those with chests full of resources and no idea what to do with them, the Dimensional Exchanger will become your friend. You will be able to throw in all those resources and receive useful rewards and items intended for the very end of the game.
If you have hundreds of spare stones, stored minerals or chests full of items, absolutely everything can be thrown into the Dimensional Exchanger. Using a tier system, you can overload it so that the following day it gives you a random item.
This can include cooked dishes, machines or the new Golden Furniture Set, a small tribute to the classic Harvest Moon games and a way to make use of all those resources. This set does not have a crafting chip and can only be obtained through the Dimensional Exchanger.
Over the next few weeks we will continue balancing all of these changes, while also working on update 1.3, which should arrive relatively soon and improve one of the systems that currently needs a little extra attention. We will talk more about that when the time comes.
For now, thank you very much for your continued support. I hope this update encourages you to return to your existing saves or start new ones.
Best wishes!
