Bug Fix Log 2020

Hi StarFam!

When developing a game, you often come across things that don’t quite work like they should or look like they are supposed to. We’re always working hard trying to solve these so-called bugs, and every month we share some of the many flaws we’ve corrected.

November Bug Fixes

★ You may have noticed yourself floating eerily above a bench when you tried to sit by the Valedale paddock. Maybe you have been holding on to the Halloween spirit a little too tightly? In any case, Halloween magic has made way for winter fun, and you will once again find yourself sitting firmly on the bench.
★ A couple walls and fences were also feeling ghostly and you were able to run right through them! We couldn’t have your poor horses thinking they could run through every wall. They have now been fixed.
★ Someone else forgot to stay grounded – an NPC in Silverglade! Now he has been practicing his meditation in order to keep his feet rooted to the Earth.
★ More benches, more problems. The benches by Jorvik Stables were so slippery that you slid right off of them and into the flower beds. They have been cleaned up and made as good as new.
★ The map had trouble finding some of your home stables. We’re not sure what your home stables were hiding from, but we’ve taken them out of incognito mode. If you look at the map now, your home stable marker should be back in its proper place.
★ Some magic horses were feeling extra shy. If you entered a shop with your magic horse, then clicked the toggle button to make your horse non-magical, you might have noticed your horse stubbornly refused to go back to their magical form. We had to coax them with extra sugar cubes, but they will now return to their magic form when you click the toggle button again.

October Bug Fixes

★ Poor Connemaras! They had some weird twitching in their hind legs when jumping recently. Now they jump as gracefully as ever!
★ We found that Courtney at the Rooftop Café was floating. We can’t have that, so we gave her heavier shoes. Problem solved!
★ Some of Farah’s deliveries have been difficult to deliver, but now you’ll be able to deliver packages to Rami and Leonardo in Jorvik City again!
★ Itsy bitsy spider, sitting on a bag. Cold was the spider, and hid inside the bag. Up came the sun and warmed up the bag. Itsy Bitsy spider, again sits on the bag.
Long story short, the spider pet which hid inside of your saddle bag now once again will cling on the outside of the bag so you can see it properly.
★ The Golden Horseshoes from our latest birthday celebration can now be moved in your inventory!
★ Some of you have had issues getting your own Rune Runner horse due to a network error. We’ve now fixed this, and if you ever encounter issues picking up your own Rune Runner, make sure to tell us about it!

August & September bug fixes

★ We’ve fixed several bugs with text and translations.
★ During the summer, something happened with the Goldenleaf racetrack in reverse. We’re not entirely sure why it suddenly closed down and wouldn’t let anyone participate in the race, but after some investigations it’s now open to the public again.
★ We’ve done some fixes to the pet owls, to make sure they flap their wings every once in a while when you are standing still, and that their glorious feathers look their absolute best.
★We’re currently looking into the placement of the spider pet in your saddlebag, and hope to have it fixed soon! While we’re also highly amused by the Birthday Balloon pet making seagull noises, we’ll update it to make sure it uses its own sounds.

June & July Bug Fixes

★ Some quests don't show the correct location of their quest giver in the quest log, but we’ve managed to straighten some of them out!
★ You may have noticed that some clothes from Madam Asp’s shop in Govenors Fall had been left out of the Global Store by accident! Now you can finally access them all from the Global Store!
★ Now that we’re talking about Farah, it seems that sometimes making a cup of tea is more difficult than it sounds. We heard back from some of you who couldn’t brew your own tea in the workshop. Farah had a look at the workstation and now you’ll be able to brew tea at any time!
★ When the cafés and restaurants of Jorvik updated their menus recently, the café in the Mall stopped selling the coffee with milk, which is needed to unlock the rest of Jorvik City. Having to go on a search around all of Jorvik for a single cup of coffee seems unreasonable, and the café now offers coffee with milk for all of you coffee lovers out there.
★ Some of our chickens at Starshine Ranch recently went cuckoo! Their legs grew like Pinocchio’s nose and we had to put a stop to it! Our hens are now back to normal, which they seem to be very pleased about.
★ A couple of bugs stopped some of you from talking to quest givers and therefore being able to complete quests. We’ve squished the bugs, and if you ever find yourself in a situation like that - please let us know!

May Bug fixes

★ Throughout May, several quest texts with typos in them have been updated.
★ Since the release of the Trakehner, we have received a lot of feedback regarding its trot animation. We’ve now updated it to a new version! We’re still looking into updating the Trakehner’s walk animation.
★ Well, well, well, what do we have here, well, if it isn’t a well! (Alright, we’ll stop now) Starshine Ranch has been in dire need of a water source, and now a well has been placed close to the stable, for your convenience. All is well! (Sorry)
★ Upon the release of the American Quarter Horse there was an issue with the placement of your character while trotting. Fixed!
★ A bridle mysteriously went missing from Farah’s shop in Valedale, but now it’s back!
★ Sindra seems to be quite the gymnast, as many of you have reported sightings of her standing up on the back of her horse. For some reason she has decided that she would rather sit on her horse again now, so no need to worry about her!
★ Sonja’s horse Kasper has been looking a bit wonky lately, but now he’s back to normal.

April Bug Fixes

★ This time we’ve done a lot of small rewrites in quest texts, to make sure they make more sense in regard to how Jorvik looks and works today, in comparison to when the quests were released.
★ Talking about quests, we’ve fixed a few where the quest giver previously seemed to have donned an invisibility cloak.
★ Holy cow, in the quest “Grange rovers” many of you had some issues with a lost cow. The good news is that we found her, the bad news is that we found her… underground. That’s some social distancing gone wrong! Thanks to some help from our Jorvik Rangers, we were able to pull her up again and you are now able to finish the quest!
★ We’ve done a small tweak to the Jorvik Warmblood to ensure that when NPC’s are traveling on the horse behind you, they are placed in a better position than before, when it looked like they were about to fall off at any time. If you’re gonna give someone a ride, you kinda want them to stay on until you get to your final location, right? Well, at least if they made sure to wash their hands before they got on your horse.
★ For those of you playing on Macs, one of the special effect powders you got as a reward in the Soul Riding looked a bit off. No, we didn’t mean for it to look like tiny sugar cubes were flying around your horse, we swear. If you really liked the cubes we might be able to work something out for you, but for now, the effect looks like it should again!
★ When we updated the level requirements with the Horse Trainer from level 10 to level 7 for the lead horse feature, the Horse Trainer kinda misunderstood us and suddenly revoked everyone’s official horse leading permission. Yeah, we didn’t really know there was one, either. We made sure to talk it through with the Horse Trainers and when they realized the mistake, they handed out the permissions anew. You still can’t see them, but now you can lead your horse again!
★ Thanks for giving us a heads up about the races - for a short period of time the pop-up which let you decide when to start the countdown of a race disappeared. Now it’s back again and the races work as they always have!

March Bug fixes

★ After our grand Quest Dependency Revamp, hundreds of quests were affected in some way - either by getting the updated versions of the Soul Riders inserted, or by being moved around to fit better in the storyline of Jorvik. Thank you for continuing to make us aware of bugs which may arise due to all the changes - we’re still at it working hard to make sure everything works as it should again! If you find anything wonky with a quest, don’t hesitate to reach out so we can investigate as soon as possible!
★ This past month we have been updating some of our horses to newer file formats to prepare them for the addition of upcoming, new tack models. With great changes come great bugs - in the best way possible, judging by your reactions to our poor Brinicle! The Floe Unicorn was a victim of a bug that warped its body into weird shapes, and after a day of hilarious social media content arising from many of you, we released a hotfix to restore peace to the island of Jorvik.
★ The updated file formats mentioned above also affected some other horses, and we’ve pushed several fixes for them. If you do find anything that looks out of the ordinary, make sure to tell us so we can run our investigations!
★ While not mentioned in any weekly update posts, we’re continuing to tweak the Soul Riding! Keep checking back - we’re updating assets and gameplay as we see more of your feedback rolling in!

February Bug Fixes

★ The New Hillcrest race has had some issues with tide water sweeping in, making it a bit too difficult to cross some parts of the race. Thanks to a delivery from the Firgrove sandpit, this issue is now solved and it will be easier to finish the race!
★ Isn’t it nice sitting by a campfire, letting it warm your back…wait, back? Oops, it seems like we accidentally placed one of the log benches by a new Firgrove campfire so you couldn’t face your friends. We did not mean to. We swear. Please come back and sit on the newly replaced log again.
★ Shine bright like an Akhal-Teke! We had a bug with the shiny coat shader on the horse, which gave its tack items weird colors. The bug is fixed, which means that the horse shines and the tack does not.
★ BAAAAH! Well, that’s what the sheep of Jorvik said when we asked what they think of their new look. They went to the hairdresser and got a new texture on their lovely coats, and some of them also got some new colors! Fancy!
★ Itsy bitsy spiders, never will you find them where you’d expect! We’ve corrected a spider placement in Firgrove so you can click on it after it tried to enter the mountain and unfortunately got stuck.
★ One of the NPC’s around Dundull tried her skills at some vaulting, but she only managed to get stuck with her head…inside…her horse… Yuck. She’s very grateful for your concerned reports now when she’s back to normal again!
★ Ghostly things were going on in Firgrove after the latest terrain update of the area - Mrs Hill, who you have to talk to in order to complete a few quests, disappeared when we accidentally placed a new mountain right on top of her. Luckily, getting a mountain dropped on your head isn’t a big matter when you’re already dead and haunting Jorvik as a ghost, so all we had to do was to lure her out and now she’s back in the open again.

January Bug Fixes

★ Oh no, what happened to our poor Connemara? Maybe it partied too hard during our winter celebrations because when we returned in early January its legs flipped and flopped in several gaits. We sent all the Connemaras of Jorvik to a vet check and they’re now back to normal.
★ We’ve tweaked the interface in the Global Store and all shops that use similar interfaces to make sure that the “owned” icon doesn’t overlap with the text that marks new items.
★ During the winter we noticed that the icons for your magical horses loaded slower than usual when you opened up your horse sorting menu in your Home Stable. Fixed!
★ Token the traveling dragon hasn’t yet grown up to be Token the flying dragon, but after our latest update of Fort Pinta he did hover above the ground for some photos. We tweaked his position a bit, so now you wont find any mysteriously airborne dragon plushies around anymore.
★ In the new Mayor Peanut race, you’ll run into some sheep. Unfortunately, we ran into an issue where the sheep popped up out of nowhere and stuck halfway into the ground, which was difficult to solve since our developers fell asleep when they tried to count the amount of sheep they had to fix… Luckily, they figured it all out in the end and got a good nap while at it!