• The first chitchat with an NPC each day will grant you +1 affection with them.
  
• The NPC Diary's affection meters now grant milestone rewards, which come in the form of a private message from that NPC with gifts attached! If you already have a high amount of affection, simply chitchat with the NPC to receive their reward.
  
• Affection milestone rewards can vary from quests, to currency, items, and even chance shop unlocks. If you didn't unlock an NPC's shop from your story choices during the main quest line, you can now do so by earning an NPC's trust!
  
• This update contains 12 new quests to unlock, in which players get to learn more about the NPC and build their friendship.
  

In balancing this feature, our goal is that it should feel like it adds some minor daily perks and a few aesthetic-only perks for premium upgraded players - but it should not feel like it provides significant gameplay advantages over normal players. We're eager to hear what our testers think about how the current premium perks are balanced to fulfill these goals, so please let us know!

QUEST-RELATED ADJUSTMENTS

• Daily quests now award conecakes according to each NPC's affiliated virtue.
  
• Player options in daily quests have been re-ordered to be more consistent.
  
• Dialogue in some daily quests has been condensed so that it requires less clicking.
  
• Item hand-in tasks should now accept any color of a clothing item!
  
• Alternate task options are now available for newbies with no pets in all Louise Hill daily quests.
  
• Trade transaction tasks in quests now work as intended.
  
• Redirections have been cleaned up on all quests.
  
• More NPC expression errors were fixed.
  
• Included an alternate option to posting in forums in the Old Farmhand's main quest.
  
• Trout's side quest released, will be unlocked for everyone who has finished the 3's Forest main quest line.
  
• Added an alternate player option for players who hatched their first pet too early in the "Your First Pet" quest.
  

For the past month, we've been primarily focusing on addressing major bugs, implementing balance updates, and introducing various "quality of life" updates. Moving forward, we'll be expanding our focus to bigger feature updates as well as new content releases! The following are some features that we'll be rolling out very soon, presented roughly in order of priority.

Quest Dialogue UI
Our quest dialogue interface will be getting a facelift for better functionality and accessibility, based on feedback that users have provided about their experience with it thus far! This update will include non-shifting speech bubbles, the ability to toggle text scrolling, new back/next buttons, a new fast forward button, and keyboard compatible shortcuts!

Wardrobe Update

• Your wardrobe will soon feature an "equipped" section for each drawer, which will display the current item equipped from that drawer. You'll be able to click on empty equip slots to quickly move between drawers and equip clothing, as well as the ability to instantly unequip an item from any drawer slot without having to manually open that drawer to unselect it.
  
• Seven new premium undergarments will also become available to premium upgraded accounts when we release our premium feature for testing.
  
• After these updates make their debut, our next coding project for our wardrobe feature will be adding in a "saved outfits" function!
  

NPC Affection Expansion
We're very excited to announce that NPC's will be getting affection milestones in the near future! This new feature rewards players as they reach new levels of affection with an NPC, which will include a cute little message from them to you and rewards such as currency, items, quests, and even the ability to unlock their shop if you weren't able to during the main storyline!

Premium Accounts
During our Kickstarter campaign, our awesome backers unlocked the premium account badge stretch goal - this meant that every backer was awarded a beta-only premium badge with their pledge, and afforded us the ability to ensure that premium perks would get the coding resources to make them available for testing during beta!

What perks do premium accounts get?

• Increased daily feature caps.
  
• Increased town hops.
  
• Citizen account rank.
  
• Access to premium underwear selections in your wardrobe.
  

Site-wide Event Testing
Our Kickstarter backers also unlocked a site-wide event test run during beta! Meeting this stretch goal allowed us to implement the coding framework required for a huge feature of this type, which we are now in the process of refining for our first test run. It'll most likely be a co-op style event, where the community gets together to do tasks that contribute to reaching an end goal for the event. Some rewards will carry over to official launch, so stay tuned for more details!

We're expecting this event to take place either just before the release of Silvie's Mine, or a bit after, depending on how long it takes to ensure that the coding is release-ready.



We're currently inputting and testing out quests for our next town release, Silvie's Mine! We expect that this update will be ready to release sometime after we roll out the upcoming NPC affection expansion. Our writing team is currently hard at work writing the rest of the quests for Aviar Cove and are on schedule. The release of our two new towns will likely be later than projected due to needing to divert our attention from content creation to balancing and bug fixing for the better part of this month. To accommodate this delay in our original schedule, we're more than willing to extend beta to give everyone time to play and thoroughly test all of our new content. If it's looking like we'll need to extend the beta testing timeframe, we'll be sure to keep everyone updated!

As night falls on your first day in Sharkvolk, you find yourself inexplicably drowsy and quickly fall asleep atop the makeshift raft that you cobbled together out of fence planks from what used to be Bearnard's farm. When you awake, your eyes are greeted with the same vast, blue sky as the day before - but as you look around, it seems as though the endless ocean of water has suddenly vanished without a trace.


In fact, you're actually no longer laying on your raft, but in the middle of a very familiar road surrounded by rolling green hills... You think that you hear chatter in the distance, so you wearily crawl over toward the voices. To your surprise, you find Lilia and Fantasia laughing together just outside of the training grounds. You can hardly believe your eyes, as you vividly recall seeing the two of them struggling to make a raft out of training dummies just the other day. Fantasia had been doing their best to fight off the sharks that had surrounded them by that point, but you feared the worst...


You're not entirely sure, but the talk of the town is that anyone who was lucky enough to obtain a Sharkvolk Post Border still has the ability to use it. But if that's true, then...

At approximately 11:00 PM Dappervolk time, our coders are going to implement an update to the site that should streamline the deployment process of the site and remove the need for users to hard refresh/wait for bug fixes to start registering on their browser. While the site is rebuilding files related to this update, you may notice that most functions onsite will become unresponsive or not work for about 2-3 minutes. This is expected, so don't be alarmed!