News

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1. All-new cats

We’ve completely redesigned how cats work, to make them as close to real life as possible. There’s not much to learn if you own a cat. They’re cats, and they behave as such.

This is a free upgrade for everyone who already has them, and the cats’ RC price in the Shop hasn’t increased.

Cats article here: https://clm.beetree.games/help/animals-and-pets/caring-for-your-cats

Cats key features:

• When they’re happy and well taken care of, they dart around the farm together, playing. Then, if they’re tired from all the sprinting, they take a quick power nap to regain their energy.
• When they’re hungry, they fight with each other. If they’re REALLY hungry, they’ll also chase you around the farm, meowing, until you feed them. They can be a real pain in this regard, just like real cats. If they’re only mildly hungry, they’ll just meow to let you know. Failing to feed them for a long while will make them feel neglected and will break their mood. Luckily, making them happy again takes just one click to feed them. After feeding, they’ll groom themselves and get back to their cat business. If you don’t want any of this, you can put the cats in the Warehouse.
• You can now water them. This means topping up a water bowl, and the cat will come to drink from time to time.
• You can now pet them (a simple click, 4 times a day) to strengthen your bond with the cat. You can also brush them. To brush the cat, select the Cat Brush from the third tab and rub it over the cat repeatedly, until you see “The cat is brushed!” If you’ve already brushed the cat (check the tooltip over the brush in the popup to see) and try to do it again, the cat will run away, or even hiss at you.
• Assigning a Cat Bed or a Bowl to them is about as useful as it is in real life. Meaning, they’ll eat from whatever bowl they want, and sleep wherever they want.
• If both cats are hungry, it’s first come, first served, and the winner will hiss at the other cat to guard the food bowl.
• We’ve removed the wake-up horn for both cats and the dog, and added a gentle bell instead.
• An all-new Care System for each cat, with Health Stats (Hunger, Thirst, Energy and Mood), Bond Stats (Feeding, Watering, Playing, and Petting & Grooming), and Toys & Homes (Cat Homes & Accessories, and Toys). This is part of our new Animal Enrichment feature, which will let you take better care of your animals, and will expand to more animals in the future.
• It’s advisable to place food and water bowls 5 Crop Fields apart, because in nature cats think food near water might be spoiled, and prefer them separated.
• For the Playing activity, you need either a Whisker Tree Haven or a Cat Cottage, so the cat can play with the Mouse on String Cat Toy.
• When all 4 Bond Hearts are full, the cat will slow blink at you (a cat’s kiss), and a heart bubble will appear over its head. This means the cat absolutely adores you.

Cats key technical changes / bug fixes:

• We’ve changed the Milk to some proper Cat Food (well, at least the best we had up until level 24, where the Bombay Cat is). You make Cat Food in your Kitchen, and 1 Recipe made adds 7 Cat Food to the Barn. So the food situation is easy to manage. Water is free — you just click on the bowl from time to time to top it up.
• Hundreds of small improvements to how they work.
• The Tabby Cat now only hunts in the Factories, the Water Sawmill and the Bellflower Meadow, as intended by the original code.
• If you place the Tabby Cat in the Warehouse, it will remain there when you go to the Factories. Them appearing in the Factories was a bug that didn’t make sense.
• If, while you’re flower-hunting with the Tabby, it gets exhausted from all that sprinting, it will take a short power nap to recover, and if the hunting time is up, it will run back home. So no more forgotten cats in random Map Areas.
• Cats are now loaded more efficiently, improving your load time.

Why the cat redesign?

The old way cats worked was confusing and robotic, and the cats behaved differently from each other. Now they behave the same, with the exception of the Tabby, which can also hunt for moles (flowers).

Usually you get this type of animal behavior in games that are dedicated only to this, not in farming games, where you normally get some basic things, or just an animal that sits and blinks.

This redesign was extremely complex, with lots of new code, but even in testing, when you often have to recompile for the 200th time to check the features, we found the cats tremendously entertaining. They often did something unexpected that made us laugh, and we ultimately did this as a way to get a daily laugh for you, and a way to feel more relaxed and calm. This is a game, and games should make you feel good. Caring for animals that reward you with their love in a visible way does that, we believe, in a small way.

The cat features are in Beta, and we’ll adjust them based on your feedback. We’ll also continue to improve their behaviors.

2. Control your Gear from everywhere

Controlling your Gear just got MUCH more powerful. The main issue with the Gear in the Factories was that you didn’t have a way to know what it was doing there. Also, always having to scroll to get to the Conveyor Belt was tricky. We’ve improved that in a few ways:

• A new dedicated button called Gear Remote Management, which shows you at a glance how many Gear are working. You can turn it on/off from Settings. This means you can control your Factory Gear from wherever you are.
• A new load bar for every Gear you have in the Factories.
• Extended info on whether the Gear is placed on Concrete Tiles or under a roof.
• An idle state on the Automation buttons for each Gear, indicating why it’s idle when you hover.
• The small computer in the bottom left opens the big computer screen with some nerd stats, such as the EFF — Gear Usage Efficiency — indicating the percentage of your Gear that’s working.
• There’s even a warning system for when your Gear goes idle (under the popup close button). From there, you can select below what percentage the load bar around the HUD button stays open.
• With these options, in Competitions you always know what your Gear is doing. And later, if you prefer to farm to relax, you can just turn everything off.
• You now open the Automation panel by hovering over the OP Bar and clicking on the Farm icon. This might be different for players who got used to old way, but we needed to make all Bars behave the same, make this panel have all data visible, and make it easier to use (once you get used to it). To get used to this, just hover over the Bar 3 times for 0.5 seconds, then click on the wheat icon. Then, double click anywhere on the Farm to cancel.

Gear article here: https://clm.beetree.games/help/general-gameplay/control-gear-factories-area-farm

These two features, the Gear Usage Efficiency and Animal Enrichment, are a preview of newer things to come, and of the direction the game is going. Gear is precision, perfect control. Animals are chaotic but easy to manage, and reward you with their love if they’re happy.

Other changes:

• There’s a countdown for when the Trees / Crops / Shrubs will be removed from the Farm Shop. Since we let them in the Shop WAY more than initially announced, the ulterior removal of Trees that you placed on your Farm will also happen sooner than initially announced.
• We soft-launched the multi-language version of the game, with 9 extra languages, for our international players. This was a monumental task, having to extract over 13.000 keys (bits of text) from over 700.000 lines of code and hundreds of FLA files. This also was a great opportunity for some English source hygiene, that our english-speaking players will benefit from. Over the years, the game evolved, and so the notions inside it. Thus, we had to fix lots of text inconsistencies, establish some in-world rules and stick to them. We developed a glossary, do-not-translate terms (Achievements), in some parts we did transcreation (adapt the text to a native equivalent), and hundreds of little things to ensure the best translation quality possible.
• In order to be as accurate to real-life as possible, we might switch the cows between them and their properties, because in reality, the Holstein is the cow that produces the most milk. So, if you bought 3 Montbeliardes, they will transform into 3 Holsteins, as a simple example. You will have the same 3 premium cows as before. Order will be: Ayrshire, Montbeliarde, Holstein.

Happy farming!