0.5 Winter Update coming soon (probably tomorrow!)

Hey folks! It's been a while since I've posted here! We've been really hard at work caring for the baby and getting some fun new stuff out for Ooblets.

The next big update is coming out tomorrow, which brings new winter features. It was supposed to be a small visual update only, but once we started adding things, we realized it was going to be pretty substantial.

You can play it right now if you want to install the Experimental branch on Epic (it works with your existing saves) or you can wait until tomorrow when we hope to launch it on Xbox and the main Epic branch.

Here's what our public announcement will look like (some content spoilers):

v0.5 Coldyrain (Snow/Winter) Update is out now!

For December, our plan was to do a big Wildlands update and possibly some small winter thingies if we had time. As we got further along in the design phase of everything, we realized the winter features we had come up with were becoming pretty substantial and a lot of fun, and so we figured we’d make them a major release on their own. That’s this! We’re still hoping to release the Wildlands stuff later this month as a separate big update.

We’re really glad we put in the extra effort on the winter features because they’ve added a lot to the gameplay. Here’s what’s new:

• Snow weather system
• Frozen crops system
• Meltilizer, a cold-defying fertilizer (sold at Meed’s)
• Heaters you can place on your farm to keep your crops warm (blueprint in Wishywell)
• A set of heater/sprinkler hybrids to water and heat your crops simultaneously (blueprints in Wishywell)
• Snowplops, a resource you can only find in the snow
• Delislush, a craftable treabie (recipe in Wishywell)
• Wuddlin! A new ooblet only found when it snows

Besides the big visual overhaul to get things looking snowy, the new snow weather system works a bit like the rain system. Instead of watering your crops, though, it freezes them! Frozen crops won’t grow (but aren’t dead either). But fear not, once the snow leaves, your crops will unfreeze and start growing again. Snowfalls last a random amount of time, but usually between 1 and 4 days. If you don’t want to wait for your crops to unfreeze, you can pour Meltilizer on them (which will keep them unfrozen for the duration of the snowfall) or place heaters nearby, which thaw crops around them.

We’ve made it snow pretty often so you’re not waiting around for weeks in-game to see it (and because it’s winter where we are!) but we’ll lower the frequency of snow after January.

We hope you like the new weather system and everything else we added in this update! More stuff coming soon!