May 28, 2024 — 0.180 Patch Parity
Changes Summary
- Apple & Blueberries Boost Change — Apples and Blueberries now give Harvest Boost instead of Growth Boost
Return
Hi folks! The Garden Planner now has a Ko-fi link for those who wish to send tips. I've had a few requests for this, but I wanted to hold off till I had something more substantial to show for it.
However, Garden Planner traffic has been increasing (woohoo!!). I'll soon no longer be able to host the server for free though, so I've decided to add the Ko-fi link now to help me cover the costs. Development continues when I can. I've got new plans for the crafters and how they'll fit in the planner that I hope will finally allow me to release them.
Regardless, thank you guys so much for your continued support and use of the planner. I'm glad to see it's been useful to so many of you and I'm proud it's come to a point I have to consider server costs (though stressful). I intend on maintaining the planner for as long as I can, and I hope to continue to improve it.
Have a great life everyone! Happy planning!
With the release of 0.179 comes the Courtyard building, a new housing add-on. Thank you to CauldronMorgana for confirming certain details about the Courtyard, as well as TinyDragon for the same reason as well as general housing information.
As of this update, the House Planner development is indefinitely halted. I've evaluated that the prototype needs to be reworked from the ground up to better simulate the in-game housing system as well as support the upcoming features (such as the Structure Blocks and 2nd Floor).
I've detailed the reasons for the halt on the bottom of the House Planner page. Overall, my prototype was just not feasible and I feel I do not have the time and resources to remake it in a way that fits my standards. For that, I've decided to halt development on the House Planner and simply maintain it for archival purposes.
Garden Planner development still continues and I have no plans to halt it.
New attempt at a level-based star-chance system, this time with a formula that can adapt to any level instead of just level 25. This change was originally intended to be part of the crafter update, but since that won't be out for a while (busy reasons, see Jan 30 update) I've decided to release that change now.
Formula: 0.25 + (0.25 * useStarSeeds) + (0.02 * level) + (0.5 * hasQualityBoost)
See Harvest Calculator Info > Assumptions for brief explanation
This new formula is arbitrary and based off player observations, and is still not the actual in-game formula. Level 25+ players using star seeds shouldn't notice any difference from the old system provided the same settings are used. Pre-level 25 star-seed layouts should expect the same settings as a level 0.
For players not using star seeds, the new system should hopefully provide a slightly more accurate representation of their star chance. Most notably, when you reach level 50, you should expect a 100% star chance with normal seeds. 100% is actually met earlier on at around level 38 as per the planner, whether that's accurate to in-game is debatable, but nevertheless should still be closer than the old formula.
Minor UI tweaks in preparation of an internal UI update, as well as minor experimentation with making the planner more compact.
UI changes are planned for the next major update (no ETA), with a specific focus to the harvest calculator. Many of my issues with the incoming updating has been the lack of space to fit everything in, so I'm making a smaller UI update to make the calculator more bearable to look at. In addition, I might look at better ways to display the crop/fertiliser buttons, as the increase of crops is going to make the buttons more cluttered.
If you notice anything wrong, please report it to me on Discord (.aisen)
Hello everyone! This was a bit of a quick addition. Huge thanks to Aschefield and Adain (Paliapedia) for providing information and assets on the new crops and by-products! Their help certainly sped up syncing the planner with the new patch.
There may be a chance I missed some values, so if you notice any discrepancies please do report it to me on Discord (.aisen). Those of you who are using the House Planner may note an issue with the Bay windows, I'll need to re-work how the planner handles housing add-ons to support it so it would definitely take awhile.
Apologies once more for the slow updates, I've been busy :( Please note that anyone willing to make alternative websites or improve on this one is more than welcome to do so. I'm currently searching for a job, so I'm not sure how much time I'll have to work on this. Consider updates to be much slower from now on until the situation changes.
Heya folks, small update this time round with a small focus on features unrelated to the garden planner.
I've worked on the layout for the planner a bit, hopefully to support larger gardens and smaller screens a little. I meant to add a fix to the screenshot feature but it did not pan out.
Crafters are under construction! Files for them exist somewhere in the background. they support having limited slots and can properly calculate time spent processing regardless of the different crops inserted into each one. Information with and without idle time is also available.
Not much work left on the crafters themselves as they're almost functional. The big problem is how they'll be managed and displayed. I intend to support the ability to calculate for total processing time given a number of crafters. Every crafter will support having different crops placed into each one.
I have been mind-blocked on both how to manage and configure the crafters in a way that can reflect multiple playstyles. Not to mention that on release it'll likely need configuration saving and sharing, which is a whole other can of worms. Overall though, work is progressing on them, I hope to release them in a state that's satisfying.
However, to make sure I implement them right, I plan on releasing them in an experimental page first. This was where the house planner came in, as a way to gauge how users react to experimental features.
The house planner is a proof of concept, and is not meant to be used regularly. Aside from being a way to gauge how users react to experimental features, it's also a highly demanded project that I've been wishing someone else would make. Since it's been months and I needed a change of gear to work on, I decided to make it myself.
It's currently in it's early stages, and is currently not a reliable source of information on housing. It has a lot of inaccuracies, and is missing a lot of information. That said, having this out there will let me test for bugs much earlier, as I personally do not have the resources and space to test for housing.
Hopefully, this will also encourage other developers to either improve on this or make their own versions. Otherwise, this opens up a new end goal of being the one-stop shop for simulating certain Palia mechanics.
You may try it out yourself here: House Planner
UI using custom layouts is not final, and will be changed soon.
This change is a major UI rework, with the aim of reducing scrolling and making the planner more compact. The initial design of the planner was added as an after-thought, and was not meant to be a long-term solution. Adding new features, and planning out future ones was proving to be a hassle with the current design, so I prioritised its re-work.
The rework is designed by an amazing friend of mine, frnkers, and was translated to code by yours truly. This change allows me to comfortably add new features, and plan out future ones without worrying about the messiness of the UI.
I've also added a couple new features, an in-game timer and growth boost support. Growth boost support is a toggle in the options menu as it's still bugged (and may work differently with fertilisers which is still untested), a lot of thanks to gazar for providing information regarding this mechanic.
The in-game timer is a small nifty addition that mimics the in-game clock. I've initially added a 6 AM alarm (for harvests) but it was proving to be buggy due to how web notifications work. The alarm feature will be kept on the shelf until I find a better system for alarms.
Overall, this update is late as I've taken a break. Health reasons and being busy with other stuff meant I couldn't follow my initial roadmap. I'm still working on the planner, but it'll be at a slower pace now and I'll be developing the planner at a more comfortable pace.
If you ever want to contribute to the project's development, just know that the website is open-source and can be accessed in the footer below!
Today's update adds a core gardening mechanic to the planner - Fertilisers! Important for covering tiles that lack necessary bonuses, fertilisers are a great way to enhance your garden.
Adding fertilisers required a mild overhaul to how saves function, so I've bumped up the save code version to v0.2 which shortens crop codes to allocate more room for fertiliser codes. Your v0.1 codes will still work, just load them in as usual and it'll be parsed correctly (if it doesn't, please report).
Added Fertilisers support, fertilisers apply their specific bonus to the tile it's on for every-day that it is active. The planner will assume that each tile will have its applied fertiliser daily.
Currently, there is no cost reductions for having fertilisers how fertilisers are acquired vary, and as such their costs are not consistent. It's highly likely I'll settle on their sell-price instead, but I'll take some time to decide on that fully.
New save version includes shortened crop codes, with all crops having their codes reduced by 1 character (except for Cotton). Fertilisers are indicated by the dot . prefix, followed by their code.
As a core feature of the Garden Planner is 'Shareability', v0.1 codes are supported to ensure nobody's gardens are lost during the upgrade. Ideally, all codes will not be invalidated in the future, and will only be unsupported if gardening mechanics change to the point it becomes impossible.
The garden layout has been shifted to the right to accomodate fertilisers. Most elements were mostly shifted to make the high amount of information more bearable to look at. The current UI/UX of the app is showing a lot of flaws. A graphic designer friend of mine has offered to work on a better design when available, so a UI/UX re-design might not be far in the future.
Outside of that, the new savecode-length makes it impossible to actually store the save in an image file. Due to this, I've removed it entirely from exported images.
I truly apologise to anyone using smaller screens and anyone who are struggling with the current UI. Ease of use is another core aim of the planner, and I'll be working hard to make it better.
Today's update doesn't add much in terms of the planner itself, just mostly nerd stuff that might only be interesting to a small amount of people!
For the rest of you though, I've added a roadmap and this new changelogs section so you can better keep track of what's going on! Accompanying it comes a new sidebar and navbar, which will create room for more pages in the future (Presets/Templates :D). Also, since the internal structure of the website has changed, I'd like to ask for reports on any performance issues you may encounter, especially on mobile devices.
I've mostly been announcing on the official Palia Discord server whenever I've made a new update to the planner, particularly the chill channel for its slow pace. It's not really the best place to share updates nor a fitting place for them at all, and I'm not interested in making my own Discord server for the planner.
These new changelogs and roadmap pages will allow me to better share what's changed and what's coming up in the future, not only will they be more accessible to everyone, but I can also write in greater detail. (I will though learn to be more concise in the future.)
The planner ran on Vue, the front-end framework I'm highly familiar working with that lets me develop this client app at a comfortable pace. Some of the ideas I have in mind in the long term though would likely benefit from having the planner have server-side capabilities, such as an internal link shortener, or an API for other developers to use.
Due to that, I've decided to save myself potential future troubles by migrating from Vue to Nuxt as early as possible before the planner becomes open to the public. This also lets me better analyse the website performance of the planner, allowing me to deliver a better experience for you all.
These changes took me a while though, I may have also caused some bugs in the migration, so please inform me of anything broke!