Hey folks,

I’m happy to finally add some quality-of-life changes to the game! Thank you for your patience, I know this took a little longer than expected, and it’s because I took a well-deserved 2-week break from the game to recharge my own biofuel-filled batteries.


So many people reached out to me to ask if I could add the functionality allowing you to move buildings one tile across. I even had personal friends reach out to me to ask for this feature - so yeah, it was a big one!

You can also move bushes and decorations now.


I’ve added a new button to the ‘Animal tab’ that allows you to move animals between feeder slots. Also, if a feeder is completely empty then you can now destroy it if you so wish.


Bees received a rework and I will briefly explain how they now function. All bees on the farm are evenly spread across beehives and they will only visit bushes in range of their designated beehive. If you place a new beehive, bees will automatically migrate to the new hive. Beehives still produce biofuel, and berry bushes now have a maximum capacity of bees that can visit at the same time.

Butterflies essentially work the same way minus the capability to produce biofuel at a beehive.


but I’ve also added a bunch of small features too:

• You can now use the arrow keys to move around the farm. Tip: hold down Shift + Arrow key to speed up the camera panning.
  
• You can also use the trackpad scroll to move around the map.
  
• Golden Metal Pumpkins are now harvestable. You just have to click on it a lot to pop it.
  
• You can disable/enable bot stations. This will prevent the bot from recharging and consuming biofuel. This is a bit of an advanced feature so I decided not to make the button too obvious.
  
• Bot biofuel consumption after upgrading has been lowered slightly. Capacity upgrades still add 1 biofuel but speed upgrades now add 0.5 biofuel (the total is rounded).
  
• Splunk has a new sign available in the shop. The ‘Do not seed’ sign will prevent Splunk from planting crops.
  
• Splunk will now plant on empty crop patches that are occupied by a giant crop or a fossil.
  
• The inspect function will now show you how many waterings a crop still needs and how many harvests a crop has remaining.
  
• I have also added a notification icon to some of the tabs, so you can quickly see if you have anything new to unlock without having to cycle through all the tabs all the time.
  
• And lastly, I gave the remove crops button a new icon so it wouldn’t be confused with the demolish buildings icon.

Thank you everyone for helping me to test the performance branch. To minimize the impact on existing players who are enjoying the game without any problems, we’ve added a new dropdown under Settings > Graphics, where you can choose how the transparent background is rendered.

• Colorkey - sets the background color to black and then converts any black pixels into transparent ones.
  
• Alpha - sets the background transparent and is overall more performant but the only drawback is that it does not work well with overlays.
  
• Green screen - sets the background color to green and converts any green pixels into transparent ones. This setting is mainly used by streamers.

Most people will remain using Colorkey but if you are having performance issues with frame rate, then please try switching to Alpha. In the future, we hope to add a plain ‘windowed mode’ which is a failsafe for everything that could possibly go wrong and it will probably benefit Linux users as a bonus.

---

That's it for today folks, I very much look forward to developing new content for the game now that this stuff is out of the way. As always, don't hesitate to let me know if there are any bugs or any features you'd like to see improved/added ːorange_heartː

• Achievements will try to trigger more often. If not, then please check that Steam is connected otherwise they will not trigger.
  
• Backups of your savefiles will happen automatically every minute. I hope this will help in case a savefile gets corrupted.
  
• Made some improvements to the Japanese and Chinese-simplified translations.
  
• Added credits for the translators

We plan to switch to a different transparency method to improve performance on high-resolution and high-refresh rate monitors. This new method now looks at transparent pixels and keeps them transparent. The previous transparency method looked for pixels with the color key (#000000 black or #00ff00 green) and then turned them transparent resulting in a poor frame rate.

If you’re interested in testing the new method, then please enable the performance test branch under Betas (password: performancetest). You’ll know if you’re playing the right build because in the game it will say 1.0.13++.

Please test as many things as possible, such as switching monitors, changing the taskbar/sidebar size, etc. Remember that if the game gets stuck on a weird resolution, you can use R or T to reset the camera and UI. And I encourage non-big-monitor-people to try it as well. You can join the discord server to leave feedback: https://discord.gg/PbshYaU8Mr

Known issue: Overlays on top of Rusty’s Retirement become translucent so please refrain from using overlays on the game.

I look forward to your feedback, thank you!

Hey folks,

Here are some more fixes and additions to the game:

• Fixed: Echo no longer gets stuck if you delete the bot station while he is working on it.
  
• Fixed: Move/build building no longer checks the mouse position, but rather the tile that was clicked on. -> face palm moment. This should lead to more reliable placement, no more overlapping buildings or accidentally placing stuff out of range.
  
• Fixed: You can no longer accidentally upgrade, demolish, or move buildings with a right-click or middle-click. Left-click is now the main button action.
  
• Made some improvements to the ‘move’ function so that it works more reliably.
  
• Fixed: Biofuel bots will 100%-most-definitely ignore the lowest crop that’s available in your inventory (unless they have no other choice)
  
• Added: Removed the strange computer from peoples farms. It will spawn when you create a new farm but it is now treated as a decoration so that means you can demolish it if you’d like. (This should also help people trigger the Architect achievement)
  
• Added: You can now inspect berry bushes, no more guessing which ones you have already planted.
  
• Added: Berry bushes now also appear under Pinion’s statistics tab.
  
• Added: Splunk now ignores giant crops, and Slate who might be digging up a fossil on an otherwise completely empty crop patch.
  
• Fixed: After using the demolish function in the bees tab, clicking to place a bush maintains the bulldozer icon.
  
• Added: When focus mode is enabled, in other words, when crop/biofuel production time is doubled, the crop growth times will also double in the UI window that pops up when hovering over a crop.

I just wanted to quickly clarify that the ‘black screen bug fix’ actually fixes the game for people who couldn’t interact with it in any shape or form. You may occasionally encounter a black screen, and if the game is responsive, restarting should fix the issue. We’ve noticed that if the game is not in focus when it loads then it might not trigger the transparency correctly. We’re working on fixing this too but at least players can now interact with the game!

Thank you!

Hey folks,

We might have found a permanent solution to the black screen bug which was making the game non-interactable for some players - this thing has been haunting me for days now.

The temporary fix was to disable fullscreen optimizations on the exe file. As expected, most players didn't know what was causing the issue and just closed the game (potentially forever). I tried my best to communicate the temporary fix in the forums and updates, but to be fair it's not the player's job to check these all the time.


That means we had to enable a setting on Steam's side to install .NET 4.7.2 before running the script/game. When the pop-up from 'Steam Client Service' appears please click yes allowing Steam to add the changes.

After that, you will see Steam running the install script for Microsoft .NET before opening the game (this might take a short while but don't worry it should only happen once).

After that, you should be good to go!

I hope that this is the end of the dreaded bug, but I will be keeping a close eye on the Steam forums for any issues. Thank you!

---

Edit: I should clarify that the biggest issue with this bug was that the game was completely unresponsive for a lot of players. Now you might still get a black screen but if the game is interactable then you should be able to restart to fix the problem.

We've noticed that a black screen appears if you click onto another application while the game is loading. I'm still looking into fixing this issue, but for now, players that were having problems can at least interact with the game.

---

A big thank you to NauM, a professional Unity Developer! We've partnered up to work on more technical issues like these, and he has been a huge help over the last few days. ːorange_heartː

And to the developer of Outcore who also made a desktop game! He encountered the same issue and kindly shared his code to help us get this fix out as soon as possible. ːorange_heartː

Make sure to check out Outcore, it's free and it has Overwhelmingly positive reviews!

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/1275670/Outcore_Desktop_Adventure/

[expand type=details]
Black screen fix!

Go to Rusty's Retirement in your Steam library > Gear icon > Manage > Browser local files

Select Rusty's Retirement.exe > Right-click > Properties

Go to the Compatibility tab > check Disable fullscreen optimizations > you should be good to go!

[/expand]

We are still investigating the black screen bug on Windows. We have found a fix but it’s a bit tricky to get it working. For now, please follow the guide above to fix it!

—

Hey folks,

Here are some tweaks that have been made to the game. Hopefully, it will ease some balancing issues and frustrations.

• Splunk no longer wanders off the screen.
  
• Splunk will wander around less if there is work to be done.
  
• Splunk also received a bit of a speed boost + 25%
  
• Feeder bots were still causing a lot of frustration among players, so they will now take the lowest crop that is available in your inventory.
  
• To remove further frustration, Biofuel bots will now ignore the lowest crop available in your inventory. However, they will still use said crop if there is no other option available - this is to prevent the early game from breaking.
  
• Animals will eat less crops and roam around the farm more. They should still poop roughly the same amount.
  
• Added a check to retroactively fix any unlocked lands that were still acting as if they were blocked.
  
• Fixed an issue where the game was getting stuck on Mac when switching to another desktop or fullscreen application.

Idea:
Splunk currently seeds a crop patch if it is entirely empty. I was thinking of changing it to > Splunk will seed a crop patch that is half empty. The only problem with this approach is that he will run around the farm a lot more and as a result it may lead to him becoming even less efficient from constantly walking back and forth.
Let me know what you think!

Thank you for all your continued support! :orange_heart:

Hi everyone,

Thank you for all the incredible support you've shown the game during its first week of existence!

It's been a crazy week. I've had lots of support from all different corners of the world, including congratulation messages from Devolver, Among Us, and McDonalds lol

• Collectively, you have earned 105 BILLION Spare Parts and produced 52 BILLION Biofuel!
  
• You have also grown 5.4 billion giant pumpkins, 5 billion giant cucumbers, and 2.9 billion giant tomatoes. A lucky few have spawned over 4000 super rare GOLDEN PUMPKINS!
  
• Combined you've collected over 13.8 billion poop from animals.
  
• You've watered 44 billion crops and harvested 32 trillion crops.
  
• And spent over 21 billion on decorations for your farm!

I honestly wasn't expecting these numbers to hit billions, so you have no idea how proud this makes me!

[expand type=details]
Real numbers:
Spare parts earned: 105,487,574,857
Biofuel produced: 52,103,705,662
Giant Pumpkins: 5,415,112,070
Giant Cucumbers: 5,027,133,796
Giant Tomatoes: 2,914,193,749
Giant Golden Pumpkins: 4487
Poop collected: 13,821,582,822
Crops harvested: 32,265,433,740
Crops watered: 44,537,802,906
Money spent on decor: 21,548,000,565
And I didn't track how many times people spun the cog, I'm sorry!
[/expand]

(Update: Now 200,000 copies in 2 weeks!!)

This has honestly been a life-changing experience and I can't wait to continue development. I have a few quality-of-life features that I'd like to add and I'm also looking forward to expanding the game with more content.

Right now I'm focusing on fixing bugs as there are a few tough-to-crack cases with performance on big monitors, and now the sudden black screen bug (which can be fixed by following this guide).

[expand type=details]
Black screen fix!

Go to Rusty's Retirement in your Steam library > Gear icon > Manage > Browser local files

Select Rusty's Retirement.exe > Right-click > Properties

Go to the Compatibility tab > check Disable fullscreen optimizations > you should be good to go!

[/expand]


A few people have asked us if we could upload the official soundtrack for the game onto YouTube, we have also uploaded it to Bandcamp in case you'd like to support the composer as well.


Thank you for all the kind words you've left on social media, in the reviews, and in the forums! I'm working as hard as I can to fix any remaining issues, and then I'll start on general gameplay improvements - thank you for being patient with me ːorange_heartː

This part of the code has remained untouched since launch but there has been a sudden influx of people experiencing no transparency since yesterday.

----

Hey folks,

Apologies for the rollback yesterday, 1.0.8 was live for 1.5 hours, and people were immediately reporting issues with the transparent background, so we rolled back to the previous 1.0.7 build. For now, I’ve removed the performance improvements with the transparent background until we figure out what’s causing the issues.

• Improved performance for bigger resolution / high refresh rate monitors. We’ve updated Unity to a much newer version (2022 LTS) and we’ve removed some unnecessary computing tasks around how the transparency was being drawn. Please let me know how this works, it might not be perfect but it should be a lot better.
  
• Credited the people who spent three whole days helping me with this issue!
  
• With the improved performance implementation, some of the UI elements had to be shuffled around.
  
• Save file improvements! After talking with the folks who made the save file plugin, we have improved the code, added checks to catch errors, and lastly added automatic backups which will load if the original file is corrupted.
  
• The new save code only writes once to the file when needed so hopefully power outages and sudden crashes will no longer affect save files. While I cannot restore previously corrupted files, I hope this update will prevent files from being wiped in the future.
  
• In-game timer should now update correctly and according to real-time. Previously it would either go faster or slower than real time depending on the frame rate set in the graphics settings.
  
• The first piece of the blocked land on the right side is now actually blocked lol.
  
• Previously, saving while Rusty was clearing a piece of land would lock that piece of land when loading the game back up. This should be fixed now!
  
• Restarting the game should automatically detect your monitor's resolution and set the game to that resolution. Before you had to physically press R or T to reset the camera/resolution.
  
• Added more checks for achievements like 10 Million Spare Parts, 1 Million Biofuel, 1 Million Watered Crops, and 1 Million Harvested Crops. There are now 3 different places in the game that can trigger these achievements (on every load) so hopefully they will work more consistently.
  
• Speaking of 1 Million Harvests, I have decided to lower the achievement down to 250,000 Harvests. This was a miscalculation on my part and to me 1 Million seems a little too far out of reach. Running the game for days on end is not fun - especially when the game’s content does not currently match the hours needed to reach those numbers. I think lowering it to 250k still makes it a grindy-idle achievement but it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

What I hope to tackle next:

1. Performance on high-refresh rate monitors
   
2. Balancing patch for bees, butterflies, and berry bushes. Currently, how they behave is too confusing and not very reliable.
   
3. Adding more quality-of-life features and content!

Thank you! I was supposed to make a week 1 recap today but that will have to wait until tomorrow now ːorange_heartː

[REVERTED TO 1.0.7]

Reverted the update because people were reporting completely black screens, and missing save files on Mac. Luckily, only the folder where the save files were stored changed. This rollback should restore them.

------

Hey folks,

Here are some more fixes and improvements to the game!

• Improved performance for bigger resolution / high refresh rate monitors. We’ve updated Unity to a much newer version (2022 LTS) and we’ve removed some unnecessary computing tasks around how the transparency was being drawn. Please let me know how this works, it might not be perfect but it should be a lot better.
  
• Credited the people who spent three whole days helping me with this issue!
  
• With the improved performance implementation, some of the UI elements had to be shuffled around.
  
• In-game timer should now update correctly and according to real-time. Previously it would either go faster or slower than real time depending on the frame rate set in the graphics settings.
  
• The first piece of the blocked land on the right side is now actually blocked lol.
  
• Restarting the game should automatically detect your monitor's resolution and set the game to that resolution. Before you had to physically press R or T to reset the camera/resolution.
  
• Added more checks for achievements like 10 Million Spare Parts, 1 Million Biofuel, 1 Million Watered Crops, and 1 Million Harvested Crops. There are now 3 different places in the game that can trigger these achievements (on every load) so hopefully they will work more consistently.
  
• Speaking of 1 Million Harvests, I have decided to lower the achievement down to 250,000 Harvests. This was a miscalculation on my part and to me 1 Million seems a little too far out of reach. Running the game for days on end is not fun - especially when the game’s content does not currently match the hours needed to reach those numbers. I think lowering it to 250k still makes it a grindy-idle achievement but it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

What I hope to tackle next:

1. Save files are magically wiped if the game quits unexpectedly. From reports, this seems to be coming from either an antivirus or a power outage on the PC. Unfortunately, the backups I implemented a few patches prior are also wiped, so it's not how the files are saved or loaded, but something else. I use a well-known plugin for saving and they don't understand what could be causing it either.
   
2. Balancing patch for bees, butterflies, and berry bushes. Currently, how they behave is too confusing and not very reliable.
   
3. Adding more quality-of-life features and content!

Thank you for all your continued support! Tomorrow I hope to make a nice recap on how week 1 went because it's been pretty amazing!

This one is only a short one because I’ve mainly spent the day investigating the hi-res / high refresh rate monitor issue with some developer friends (more on that below).

• Fixed: Some houses were unmoveable because sometimes another collider would block the ability to click and select the house. Now no colliders are blocking this action so it should work as intended.
  
• Fixed: You can no longer upgrade a building that is still being built which would cause Echo to get stuck.
  
• Fixed: Steam cloud saves for Mac.
  
• Not entirely sure about this one because I couldn’t replicate it on my end but people have reported that connecting to Twitch could be creating an infinite loop in the code. I’ve added a 5-second buffer between connecting and checking whether the game is still connected to Twitch. It’s a bit of a shot in the dark but hopefully it’ll keep the game from crashing.
  
• Added: Crop/building information panels now move to the right when setting the vertical farm to the left side of the screen. Zooming is still a bit wonky but I hope this helps in the meantime!

Regarding performance issues on hi-res monitors, we’ve spent the entire day testing and looking into different potential causes, and we’ve narrowed it down to two or three things that look promising. This week we will continue with testing and we will try to get it fixed!

It seems like the issue is easily replicated on high refresh rate monitors (i.e. 144hz), so I would appreciate it if you could send me your specs here in the thread so that we can identify a common pattern. For now, some people have reported that lowering the frame rate and setting the on-demand rendering to 3 helps.

Thank you so much! :orange_heart: