My Time At Portia, the colorful crafting adventure game, has released what it calls the Romance Update in celebration of China's Qixi Festival. For what the developers call "Valentine's day in China," the game is getting additional side missions for a few different characters.

Romance isn't new to the small island of Portia. Players have long been able to woo and date characters while on a mission to run the best workshop in town. Reaching a certain heart level with datable characters by interacting with them or giving them gifts allows you to go on a cute date event with that character. You can take your beau for a chat by the sea, a soak in the hot springs, or stargazing, among other activities that you'd expect from a laid-back and pastel island. 

Side missions for other romanceable characters include special events and quests specifically related to that character. With these new side missions for Nora, Oaks, McDonald, Albert and Sonia, developer Pathea says you can unlock "new NPC shops, a relationship between NPCs and the opportunity to build your relationship with NPCs too!"

This update also fixes a number of bugs, which Pathea lists in its news post about the update.

My Time At Portia is slow. Achingly slow at times. So slow, in fact, that it sometimes feels like it should be an idle game and I have to fight the urge to tab away and check back later. The game is a sandboxy life sim in the mould of Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing. It sees you take over your dad’s dilapidated workshop and attempt to restore it to prosperity, one commission at a time. 

So far so familiar. But My Time At Portia oscillates between being just enough of an engaging take on a comforting genre to draw you in, and an infuriating me-too whose glacial pace steals more of your time than it deserves.

After the usual tutorial-type gubbins, the first significant commission you receive from the mayor is for a bridge to connect Portia to Amber Island; a little spit of land near your workshop. You’ll need 2 Wooden Bridge Heads (basically the on and off ramps for the bridge) and 1 Wooden Bridge Body. You can construct one segment at a time using a crafting platform called the Assembly Station.

But the Bridge Heads need 3 copper pipes and 5 hardwood planks each. Hardwood comes from the big trees nearby, but the axe you crafted for the tutorial isn’t strong enough so you must smelt copper and tin (obtained via mining trips to the abandoned ruins or hacking away at stones) to make bronze bars and buy an expensive (for this stage in the game) upgrade kit from a local store. You now have the ability to get hardwood!

But you need hardwood planks not hardwood, so you’ll need a cutter. Cutters need 2 copper blades and 5 stone bricks. You go back to the furnace to make the bricks, but the copper blades come from a grinder, and a grinder requires 2 old parts, 3 copper bars and 2 grinding stones. So it’s back to the ruins for old parts, copper ore and stone, then to the furnace and worktable to refine some of the materials into a usable format. Don’t forget you’ll need extra copper ore to refine into the copper bars which can then be ground to form the copper pipes. Oh, and you have to fuel the furnace and the grinder so you’ll need a whole lot of wood (as distinct from hardwood) and power stones (from the ruins). 

After this, the Bridge Body is relatively straightforward, although still a slog in terms of the time and energy it takes to actually craft everything. Obtaining each of these parts teaches you how the game’s production loops work, but calling it one mission instead of about eight separate missions is the problem. It means spending hours and hours in the early game, chipping away at a monumental task without a drip feed of encouragement.

Outside the crafting missions and commissions, the systems are a mixed bag. The fighting is dull - slash, slash, slash, dodge roll is pretty much all you need. The villagers aren’t very engaging, so I have no desire to cultivate friendships or romances. The farming is… fine? Seasonal celebrations are fun but involve minigames of variable quality. And the home decor and fashion are too tied to stats boosts for a decorative approach to really work. 

By being so slow, My Time At Portia both repels and appeals. It offers a kind of gaming oasis, making few demands and just pootling along. That type of thing can be a place of respite for the right player or the right mood. But when I wasn’t in the right mood progress felt artificially slow - like it was being throttled by resource requirements, forcing you to play longer than feels good. 

To give you a sense of this, I’ve put about 40 hours into my save and I think I’m less than a third of the way through the main questline. I’ve spent some of that time completing secondary quests, taking on workshop commissions and so on. For the right player, that will feel like phenomenal value for money. For everyone else I suspect the busywork will eventually prove too much of a bore to stick with it.

My Time At Portia left Early Access this week, working its way up the Steam charts and netting some pretty positive reviews—keep an eye out for our take on the game soon—but shortly after launch, voice actors not associated with the game and Twitter users started criticising developer Pathea Games, alleging poor treatment of voice actors and issues with payments.

The allegations go back to October, when post appeared on Steam, from a third party, listing complaints that the OP claimed came from the voice actors themselves. The list includes originally asking the voice actors to work for free, missed payments, and poor communication.

Pathea responded in the thread in October, acknowledging that it paid voice actors $50-$100 and there had been some miscommunication, but the developer disputed that payments were ever missed. It also said that voice actors had agreed to be paid more retroactively, and that everyone had already been paid the amount originally agreed. 

The thread was closed soon after, following Pathea saying it would reach out to voice actors to clear up any confusion and address any concerns they had. In light of the recent accusations on Twitter, Pathea’s released another statement, clarifying the situation and admitting that there was actually an oversight and payments were missed.

A longer post was also published on Steam. 

“We are still an inexperienced and ambitious studio, and did not have a solid structure in place to maintain adequate links to our actors and maintenance thereof,” reads the post. “This caused several issues. It started from volunteer work, to paid work, then to contracted work. From 11 voice actors to 60+.”

It looks like the issues stem from actors submitting lines but not being credited or the lines not being implemented, leading to them not getting paid for their work. 

“Over this last weekend, we have been addressing this as best as we can. We sent out payments to all actors whether we had implemented their lines or not, but this still left some people not receiving pay, due to that 'credit'. After interacting with a few of those in question, it was made clear that this just wasn't fair. We removed that credit/deduction, and are currently in the process of getting out the payments as due.”

More voice acting is being added to the game even now, and Pathea says its main priority now is making sure voice actors got what they were expecting rather than what the developer had in mind. 

“We appreciate all the voice actors that have supported and helped better our system, and My Time at Portia,” the post concludes. “They have given us patience, advice, suggestions, tips, and encouragement, when they were obligated to do none of those, and we will continue to return that appreciation the best we can.”

Cheery crafting sandbox My Time At Portia has escaped from Early Access today. The full game is available now, and there’s a launch trailer to give you some idea of the shenanigans you’ll get up to when you take up residence in the disconcertingly happy seaside town. Take a gander above. 

Launch trailers aren’t usually all that informative, but My Time At Portia’s covers just about everything that goes on in the Harvest Moon-inspired sim. There’s plenty of crafting to do, a town and world to explore, dungeons for fighting in, people to date, festivals, weddings, a zeppelin that occasionally drops a shower of gifts—you’ll be busy. 

It’s irrepressibly chipper, which might end up grating, though I found the tone and aesthetic to be exactly what I needed when I played it in Early Access. Portia itself is a quirky little town with a colourful cast of residents. They've all got their own routines, jobs and families, and you can marry one of them if you fancy. I remember wandering into town one rainy day to find all of them sporting umbrella hats, which tells you everything you need to know.  

I wasn’t quite convinced by the crafting system when I last played. There’s was far too much standing around. Almost everything I was tasked with constructing needed a bunch of components crafted and resources refined first, and then another chunk of time had to be wasted waiting for the finished product. While I waited, jobs piled up, but I couldn’t tackle them because I couldn't use my machines. And feeding them the required resources involved quite a lot of gathering grind, to boot. Between the waiting around and the busywork, my holiday in Portia started to get a bit frustrating. 

That was an early game issue that I suppose could have eventually been tackled by making more machines, but it was enough to make me wait until it left Early Access to take it for another spin. Despite the crafting issues, however, I had enough fun to make it worth a second look. 

Here are some My Time At Portia tips to get you started.

My Time at Portia is out now on Steam, the Epic Games Store and the Humble Store for £25/$30.

My Time At Portia is a Harvest Moon-inspired farm life sim RPG that hit Steam Early Access in January 2018. One year later, almost to the day, it will leave Early Access and go into full release, and that means we've got a new trailer to watch. 

Your time at Portia will be spent restoring your Pa's broken-down workshop by gathering resources and using his handbook and workbench to craft what you need to make it the best workshop in town. You'll also have to grow crops and raise animals, because you're on a farm, and since all work and no play makes Homer something something, you'll also have a chance to make friends and solve mysteries in a "charming post-apocalyptic" world. 

Because, yes, My Time At Portia is apparently a post-apoc game: Nothing like, say, Metro, but it takes place in a world "where humans are few and relics of the past are scattered throughout," according to the wiki, and that tends to imply that something, somewhere went terribly wrong a long time ago. The trailer also shows off what appears to be a spot of robot-fighting, which is generally not the sort of thing that's associated with happy outcomes and a positive state of existence. 

That said, My Time At Portia looks like a serene, pleasant place: You can even put the smooth moves on the sweeties and then go for a pony ride if you like. And who wouldn't like that? 

My Time At Portia will come out of Early Access on January 15, and will increase in price from $20/£16/€20 to $30/£25/€30. Prepare yourself for its arrival with Chris' list of seven things he wishes he'd known before he started playing.

Early Access farming sim My Time At Portia gained several new features in a major update last week, namely the update's namesake: livestock. That's right: you can now keep, raise and breed your very own sheep, chicken, ducks and cows. 

The update also added the option to ride horses, though for now you have to rent a horse from MacDonald Farm. Developer Pathea Games says a future update will add the option to raise and ride your own horses. But hey, at least you can also ride your rent-a-horse with your romantic partner, which leads us to the livestock update's lovey-dovey additions. 

My Time At Portia is something of a distant cousin to Stardew Valley, and like Stardew Valley it lets you romance the locals. Thanks to the livestock update, you can now romance them by stargazing and chatting in the meadow, and once you've wooed your sweetheart—perhaps one of Portia's newly added new partners, like the buff furniture maker Paulie—you can now hug or kiss them anytime you want. 

Other, less romantic additions include a new desert dungeon and a museum where you can sell and showcase relics. Just as importantly, the update contributed some strong contenders for the strangest patch notes of 2018 (check out 2017's wonky list here), including such gems as: 

•  Cat bed for Pinky. 
•  Your spouse can sit on a chair at home. 
•  Chicks and chickens will help Emily during sparring.  

You can view the full patch notes here.

My Time At Portia will launch from Early Access later this year. Lauren dove in last year and enjoyed her time in Portia despite making a total fool of herself—more on that here. 

My Time At Portia is a farm-life sim RPG that arrived in Early Access this week, and so for the past two days I've been harvesting, crafting, building, farming, exploring, and adventuring. And most importantly, learning. While at times Portia can be a bit of a grind, it's quickly proving to be a colorful and absorbing world to spend time in.

Below, I've come up with a few tips to make your early hours a bit easier to navigate while you bring your own workshop up to snuff. They're all things I wish I'd known before I started playing.

Keep an eye on the clock

In Portia, the clock is always ticking, and ticking very quickly. In a lot of sandbox crafting games we're used to staying up all night, hammering away at stone walls or hacking down stubborn trees. despite how late its gotten.

Not so in the world of Portia: when it reaches 3:00 am, you will quite literally fall asleep wherever you are and whatever you're doing. This isn't always problematic—you wake up fully rested at home, so in some ways it can occasionally be convenient—but if you're in the middle of something it's decidedly a nuisance to suddenly slip into a coma. If you're planning an excursion to a distant area, or have some specific goals for the day, keep in mind that when the day ends, it really ends. Leave early if you've got something major to do.

But don't leave too early. If you get out of bed and sprint into town to visit a shop, you're going to discover the shops are still closed. They open at 8, so give the owners time to get out of their beds and get to work or you'll be standing around tapping your foot.

Mining costs money, so plan your spelunking

Mining is not only my least favorite activity in Portia, but it's also something you have to pay to do. Using the starter mine costs you 80 gold per visit (the game calls currency gols, which feels to me like a typo, so I'm just gonna call it gold), and with so many crafting items requiring copper and tin, you'll need to be spending a lot of time in the uninteresting, gloomy mine smashing a pickaxe against the floor.

In your early hours, gold won't be the easiest thing to come by, and you'll want to be saving it for certain expensive items like upgrade kits or, well, mine visits. Which means your trips to the mine should be as fruitful as possible. When you find yourself needing just a couple more units of copper for something, it's tempting to just pop in and pop back out, but doing that too many times will be a drain on your finances. So, when you're going to mine, make a full day of it and get as much as you can on each trip. Free up room in your inventory and prepare to spend the entire day grinding for relics and resources.

Read your mail, even if you don't want to

Outside your workshop is a mailbox, and just about every day there will be something new in it. I kind of ignored it for a while, simply because I had my own to-do list I was working on (and who needs more mail in their life?), but not only will you find new jobs in the mail, but also news about special events.

For instance, I was wondering why there was a little icon that looked like a present blinking on my screen. Turns out, there's a holiday in Portia where airships fly over the town and drop presents.

I'd have known that if I'd read my mail, but I hadn't, so I didn't, and thus was late to the festival and had to run around like a madman trying to grab the remaining few presents before all the kids did, which left me feeling like some kind of desperate, greedy jerk. Which, quite frankly, I am.

Workshop jobs get complex almost immediately

To prove myself as a builder, first I had to make a hatchet of stone and wood. Then I had to craft a pickaxe. My third job was to put together an entire multi-section bridge made of copper pipe and hardwood, which required several new workbenches and resources (including a different hatchet capable of cutting down the proper tree for the hardwood). My current gig is to build an entire friggin' car. So, there's quite a sudden leap in complexity going from making a hatchet to taking on a massive construction job.

Luckily, there are lots of smaller jobs you can nose around for while you're waiting for days to pass and your copper to melt into bars that you can then turn into pipes. If you take on a job that seems a little too complex, don't feel like you have to get it done instantly. You can still find other, smaller commissions that you can tackle in the meantime, sometimes something as simple as fixing someone's fence or crafting a fishing pole. 

Spend money to increase your inventory

With only 16 slots in your inventory, and another 8 on your hotbar, you'll fill up your pockets pretty quickly. I assumed there would be a way to unlock all the locked slots, perhaps by finding a backpack or possibly by leveling up, but it's simpler than that. Click on a locked row, and you'll have the option to spend gold to pay for more slots. I had no idea it was that simple until I actually did it.

Stamina is weird

I was running around at top speed, leaping over fences, and gathering berries and sticks, when I suddenly noticed I couldn't gather berries and sticks anymore. That's because I was out of stamina which, oddly, doesn't stop you from running around at top speed and leaping over fences.

Think of stamina almost as special action points, since you can still move and run like the energetic kid you are while at the same time you're so exhausted that you'll be unable to, say, pick something up, or kick a tree or swing a sword. You can't even go fishing when your stamina is drained. There's something frustrating about having an object in front of you that you're simply too tired to pick up, especially if that object is an apple that would give you a few points of stamina.

Simply standing still won't recover your stamina (though it will replenish your sprint meter). Recovering stamina can be accomplished by eating certain foods, so keep something to munch on in your pocket at all times. But mostly you'll want to sleep in your bed to completely refill your stamina meter.

You can win certain fights by running away

At one point, in order to gain access to a particular mine, you have to best one of the other characters in a sparring contest. I had not had much luck sparring at the time—in a fight with a newspaper reporter, I punched her roughly 100 times, and then at the end of the fight she knocked me out cold with just a couple jabs. So, I wasn't too keen on getting my butt handed to me again.

So, when it came time to prove myself worthy of entering the mine, I simply spent a minute running away from my opponent. I just ran in a big circle like a coward. And it worked! In a regular sparring session this would be considered a draw, but here it was a successful bout of survival. See, you don't always have to put fist-to-face to get what you need.

Crafting RPG My Time at Portia is now available on Steam Early Access. It goes for $20, and according to developer Pathea Games, already contains 25 hours of content with more to come. You can also download a free demo to sample before buying. 

Pathea Games expects My Time at Portia to remain in Early Access for around nine months, putting its full release around this fall. The studio says they're "planning on increasing the price when we leave Early Access," though they didn't specify amounts. 

The list of in-progress features is a long one, and includes more areas, quests, story content and mini-games, as well as entirely new skills like taming and riding animals. You can learn more in this Steam post from publisher Team17. 

If you're quick, you can also catch a livestream on the Team17 Facebook page at 12:30 p.m. Pacific (3:30 p.m. Eastern), where the developers will showcase various features and take questions from viewers. 

Our own Lauren Morton gave My Time at Portia a try last year, where she found it difficult to be a productive member of society. That said, she says she still had fun. 

My Time At Portia is a breezy, whimsical crafting sandbox that calls to mind the likes of Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing. It’s idyllic and bright and I want to start building my workshop there right now, escaping the chilly Scottish winter I’m trapped in. Unfortunately, like the rest of you, I’ll need to wait until January 23, when the game launches on early access. In the meantime, we’ll have to content ourselves with a new, but brief, trailer. 

In My Time At Portia, you’ll venture to a small town at the edge of the world, taking over a workshop left to you by your dad. The goal’s to create the best workshop in the world, but beyond that there’s a world to explore and new pals to make. NPCs have their own lives, school, jobs, but they’ll also have time to become your new bud, go on dates and eventually get married. 

And when you’re tired of seducing NPCs and working in your workshop, you can tend to your farm, chill out in the house you built, or run off to some ruins and get in a scrap with some monsters and deadly bosses. 

For a more in-depth look at the game, mosey on over to our My Time At Portia preview. Lauren spent six months holidaying in Portia, and it didn’t go very well. 

“My own time in Portia, though enjoyable and initially well-intentioned, was mostly a condemnation of my ability to be a productive member of society, even after society has collapsed and been rebuilt.” 

My Time at Portia is an open world crafting RPG about running a workshop in a charming little town—a town that exists in a pastoral idyll because technology has caused the downfall of civilization. Also, there are talking rats and bright pink cats. It's a very cozy post-apocalypse. 

My own time in Portia, though enjoyable and initially well-intentioned, was mostly a condemnation of my ability to be a productive member of society, even after society has collapsed and been rebuilt. 

Week 1 (Spring 1-7) 

My arrival in the city of Portia was inauspicious. After hopping off the boat, a man named Presley walked me to the workshop that I’m apparently taking over for my father. Waiting for me was a letter from dear Dad with a few vague excuses for his absence. I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and took stock of the place anyway. It was empty but for a bed and a bunch of holes in the floor. Thanks, Dad.

Presley, the local Commerce Guild Commissioner, gave me the task of earning my Builder’s License by accomplishing a couple basic crafting orders. Just my luck, Dad left me a workshop that was not only falling apart, but dead last on the competitive ladder. At the top of the food chain is a jerk named Higgins who literally snatched my first potential commission out of my hands. 

Watching Higgins sprint to the Commerce Guild at eight every morning and then waste his life pacing outside until it opens makes my wounded spirit feel slightly better.

Week 2 (Spring 8-14)

A fat, pink cat appropriately named Pinky walks by my house every morning, rain or shine. I desperately want to be friends with Pinky. I give her a worm and she hisses at me. It isn’t the thought that counts when it comes to cats.

The rocky start to my relationship with Pinky gave me an idea. Maybe I would do better giving gifts to Higgins. Instead of competing with him to run the best workshop in Portia, I could date him, take over part ownership of his workshop, and sabotage it from within! 

But after a few wasted mornings making sure to greet Higgins outside the guild, it became pretty clear that he wasn’t interested in having any kind of human interaction with me, dating or otherwise. Jerk.

Week 3 (Spring 15-21)

Mayor Gale announced his plan to bring a bus system to Portia. He rounded up the money to commission five buses. Naturally, I saw Higgins there at eight the next morning when we both went to snag a contract. "I’ll show him!" I thought. "I’ll finish four of the five buses myself!" I would be the Bus Queen! To my dismay, the parts list was full of things I hadn’t learned to craft yet. Hubris is the killer of workshops.

This week was also the Day of Bright Sun, one of the seasonal holidays sims like this are obliged to have. Caught up in my bus problem, I neglected to donate a gift or even to pay attention to the holiday’s purpose. 

I showed up in the town square on Friday morning to find the entire town in a mob. An airship dropped donated presents onto the ground while we ran around like spooked cattle beneath it, scrabbling for gifts. I didn’t manage to snag a single one.

Week 4 (Spring 22-28)

I followed Pinky around town today, determined to find out what she does like, when we passed by Best Brother, the furniture store run by a buff dude named Paulie. Having struck out on my revenge romance plan with Higgins, I decided to woo Paulie, the strongest man in Portia. A relationship with the local furniture dealer could only improve the state of my still-empty house. 

Week 5 (Summer 1-7)

By Summer, I’d managed to fall into a routine of mining ore in the abandoned ruins, cutting down trees, and fulfilling commissions. In case I’d forgotten my place in the food chain, a letter arrived reminding me that Higgins remained #1 in the workshop rankings while I was still #5. 

I ran back to the commission board and noticed that the other contracts for Dee Dee buses had been snatched. It was at this point I wondered if my ineptitude was holding up the city’s entire bus project. I carried on out of pure vindictiveness, determined to take my sweet time. 

Week 6 (Summer 8-14)

I spent an entire week trying to figure out what kind of gifts Paulie likes. On the list of failures: milk, bread, roasted meat, pumpkin pie, and dried apple snacks. Paulie’s stomach was apparently not the direct line to his heart. 

As a last ditch effort, I made the man a scarf. Still no. The only thing he showed mild interest in was raw hardwood. I’ll chalk that up to him being a carpenter, I guess. 

Week 7 (Summer 15-21) 

At Mayor Gale’s request, I dove into an abandoned cave this week. He has some hare-brained idea to turn the place into a tourist attraction. Funnily enough, it was infested with rats who had stolen random items from all my fellow Portians. The loot was guarded by a fork-wielding rat king, because of course it was. My fellow citizens’ lukewarm gratitude didn’t inspire me to try much harder on that Dee Dee bus though.

In a desperate moment during my pursuit of Paulie, I decided to gift him a small wooden chair I had crafted. Guess what the strongest man in Portia loves? Plain small chairs. Take a goddamn vacation, Paulie! Stop thinking about furniture! I crafted about seven more small chairs, despite how disgusted I was by Paulie’s single-mindedness.

Week 8 (Summer 22-28) 

In the last week of Summer, I continued to wallow in mediocrity. Although I’ve made a point to fulfill several contracts specifically for the renown it will earn me around Portia, I can already see my name remaining in the fifth and last spot on the workshop rankings list. Pinky is still largely indifferent to me. I keep spending money on clothes. I’ve gotten decent at finding relics in the old ruins, though I’m still running about with a wooden sword. 

It is on this day, the twenty-eighth of Summer, that I noticed Paulie’s relationship meter is composed of stars, not the hearts that indicate potential love. In my own heart, I know that can only mean one thing: I’ve made a huge mistake. Perhaps I’ll manage to turn over a new leaf in Autumn.

You can play a version of My Time at Portia’s alpha for free on Steam.