Here is the list of changes made to the game;

• Pet Food bowl, Trough, Slop Trough and Chicken Feed Area now give more food. (Now 5, 8, 8, 8 helpings respectively.)
  
• Added a lot of previous unsearchable items to the creative catalogue. As well as some to shipping catalogue.
  
• Shovel will now break blocks even if a tile is above them. Will not break blocks with plants on them however.
  
• Fixed Eris' liked items not giving more reputation.
  
• Added likes to Farm Fan.
  
• Aliza should no longer care if you have the Farm License in your inventory to start the Barn Build quest. (If you previously lost your License here, just talk to Max again to unlock this.)
  
• The dialogues for pointing the player towards farm fan should no longer play to people who can't complete the tutorial.
  
• Vorlen will now unlock clocks when you try to make the museum for him.
  
• Fix a case where the Prince, for Emilia's quests, wouldn't spawn if you went to Eris' castle.
  
• Added an extra Prince check to Emilia's Liked quest
  
• Fixed Daily quest items showing up in Jamie's fetch quest pool.
  
• Fixed some issues with NPC's not spawning at the Airship totem.
  
• Added /magicteleportreturn as a cheat command.
  
• Made duplicate key exceptions better for Character Designs and Character Outfits.
  
• Fixed Morel and Cirahna using 2 scripts at a time, and thus walking away from the player if they interacted with them.
  
• Fixed quotations not being escaped in mail, causing a crash when you tried to make mail.
  
• Fixed using a decimal point in the petals causing a crash.
  
• Increase the amount of starbits spawned on a server by 1 per player on the server.
  
• Fixed a crash after expanding a player's rights.
  
• Crafting dock Drawables are now more rigorously checked in validation. They also do not spam logs when invalid in game.
  
• Can no longer leave the world to increase the number of starbits that drop at night.
  
• Fixed an issue with Staxel net, not choosing specific relay servers.
  
• Fixed a bunch of models with wrong layernames.
  
• Fixed tabbing in content builder.
  
• Added more StaxelNet regions (germany, japan, texas)

It’s been a long road, but we’re here. We’re gleeful to announce that today is the official launch of Staxel! We’ve changed a lot about the game over the course of early access, so we’d like to sum up the most important changes for you all (with some gifs, we’re not animals).

The world of Staxel has been given a sprinkle of fairy dust! New Star Bits will fall during the night, a crucial item in the new Magic Crafting system (unlocked via a secret villager!). This Magic Crafting will prove very helpful in upgrading your tools and progressing certain quests, so make sure to gather up all the Star Bits you can, even if you can’t use them yet!



Since release we've added some intriguing new villagers and other NPCs to the world of Staxel. You can now also befriend villagers through daily chat, giving them gifts and completing quests for them, they'll even give you some neat items in return!

Once you've made best friends with one of the townsfolk, you can even choose to have them move in on the farm and become your roomie! Speak to Mayor Maximilian to find out if any new villagers are waiting to move in to the village.

Want to share the stacks of petals you've got from your recent harvest with your friends? You can now send mail (and attach petals) to your friends in multiplayer! Maybe write them some poetry, send them some junk or just gift them some well earned petals, either way, be sure to befriend Leif to set up the postal section of his store.

The world of Staxel has opened up! Throughout the game you’ll find new lands to visit, from the depths of crystal-laiden caverns to floating mushrooms in the sky; the world of Staxel will never be the same!



Befriending a certain game-loving villager will lead you to taking part in some fun and challenging minigames through the Arcade. Gather the 4 magic items of the Demon King’s Maze as you try to escape, and enter a digital world in which the only way out, is to jump!



We’ve added a very good boye and girlo to the pet roster, you’ll be able to get them at random as your starter pet, or at random by buying a dog house.



We’ve also added a whole new pet species! These little leaf chompers are found at the pet store, a village amenity you’ll unlock by befriending a certain animal loving villager.



Discover ancient relics of the past, seek out exquisite paintings and display your captured collections in the all new Museum. Unlocked via a questline with a mysterious blue villager, (no spoilers!), once you’ve built the Museum, you can fill it up with all sorts of intriguing new items.




We’ve beefed up the selection of Festivals throughout the in-game year. From hunting down rogue prank-playing fairies, to exploring vast new caverns full of loot for the taking - these new festivals will provide some interesting and fun tasks year-round.




Default tools are now a little less powerful, but we’ve made up for it by adding a slew of new tiered tools! You may need to venture out beyond your Island through the new Portals Festival to find some of the materials, but it’s worth it! Befriending a mysterious Caith villager (no spoilers!) will allow you to unlock the new crafting method required to upgrade your tools.

Between farming, making new friends and exploring new lands, there’s barely enough hours in the day! So we thought, why not add more! Staxel days are now longer than ever, and we’ve padded each calendar season to 30 days (up from 16) to give you more time to experience the best that each season has to offer. You can even check out the new Wall and Desk Calendar tiles to review the current season’s events.



Picture it; a relaxing cabin in the woods, some cool sap in the chiller, just you, nature and a fishing rod. That’s why we’ve overhauled the Fishing mini-game to prove more relaxing (but still challenging!), it should be more enjoyable to spend some quality time reeling in some big catches from the briny deep!

Exotic new items, mystery Lucky Boxes and flying merchants, yes that’s right, FLYING MERCHANTS! Once you’ve built a certain landing pad for these travelling merchants, you’ll gain access to an inventory of exotic new items, and a mysterious new Lucky Box that will always provide you with something new.

We’ve added a range of status effects that will affect gameplay in different ways. Some sleep (and caffeine) related effects will have you keeping an eye out while burning the midnight oil, and others such as jumpy and swift will have you hoping about the island like a pogo stick! You can always remove these buffs by sleeping or drinking Milk, but personally, we like the thrill of harvesting crops with the unlucky debuff, it’s a rollercoaster!

Staxel doesn’t have smart phones, but somehow, we do have selfies. Press X to flip your camera into Selfie mode to check out your look on the go, or catch some picture worthy moments with your friends!

Accessibility and custom controls are an important part of player experience. That’s why we’ve added new options to customise your controls. There’s some presets in there to get you started too. We’ve also added a sliders section to adjust the display settings of the game; brightness, contrast, gamma and saturation.

The Recipe Book has been given a long overdue face lift, you can now sort by category and search through your collection of recipes much more easily.



The Watering Can has been nerfed a bit, it now requires refills (which can be done at a range of water-based sources), but it has received some upgrade tiers along with the other tools, and we’ve also added some hi-tech swanky Sprinklers! These can be placed in your fields to automatically water your crops, freeing you up to pursue other hobbies.

Along with the above we’ve added a bunch of smaller changes to the game, along with buckets of bug fixes, optimisations and quality of life improvements, some of which are:

• Tools are faster overall
  
• Steam networking improvements
  
• StaxelNet option for improved multiplayer connectivity.
  
• Optimisations to FPS, loading, terrain generation and faster lighting.
  
• Ported to 64bit
  
• More options such as borderless window mode
  
• Extensive modding expansion to allow modders much more access to features.

We hope you enjoy your time in Staxel, we’ve worked hard over the last 5 years to realize our vision of a peaceful world full of farming, friendship and fun for anyone and everyone to enjoy.

Hey everyone, as promised in the New Year edition of the Staxel Reporter, today we’ll be giving you guys a little glimpse at one of the new features you can expect to see in the next content update. We’ve been getting back into the swing of things this week after the holidays, so without further ado let’s jump right in and take a look! (screenshots included)


As mentioned before, we’ve recently been hard at work developing the next update for Staxel but we haven’t actually spoken that much about it. We did briefly mention some of the planned features for this update in the last issue of the Reporter, so if you haven’t read it be sure to check that out here:

https://blog.playstaxel.com/new-years/

That said, this time round we’re going to touch on one of the new features specifically...

Islands!

Well... besides the main island at least. :P

Players will be able to travel from the main island to some smaller islands, each with their own particular uses and designs and which will provide the player with specific rewards such as materials for crafting.

We’re a good way through the first island, so let’s take a little peek at what it looks like below.




The ‘mining island’ is the first island we’ve been putting together. The island itself will be accessible by portal, and after a bit of exploration you'll find even more portals which will transport you to the different levels of the mine. Let’s have a look at some screenies so you can see what we have so far. (Keep in mind this is still a work in progress and changes are likely to be made!)



Only one part of the island will be accessible to start with. This will lead you to the first level of the mines where you'll begin to explore the branching caverns and underground lakes. There’s a lot to discover down here, so keep your eyes open, you never know what might find!



One very important aspect of the mines is gathering. Down here you’ll find ore which isn’t available on the main island. You’ll be able to use these ores to upgrade your tools!
Upgrading your tools can have a big impact on your workflow, making you much more efficient during your day to day chores, leaving you more time to relax… or to expand your farming empire.



The key to the mining island is to keep exploring, but do try not to get lost. It’s easy to get carried away when you see shiny things in the distance so keep your wits about you and you’ll be just fine.
With that said, I’m not going to share any more secrets for now, you’re going to have to go in and discover the rest for yourself!

We hope you’ve enjoyed this little sneak peak of the mines. We’ll be revealing more details about the different islands you’ll be able to visit (as well as some other new features we’re working on) in upcoming issues of the Staxel Reporter.
Remember to keep an eye on our social media pages, or better yet, join our Discord community to participate in some active discussion about the upcoming content!

• Twitter
  
• Discord

Take care everyone, until next time!

It’s that time of year again, and with the January now underway we’ll be picking up development again this week.

We just want to take this opportunity to wish each and every one of you wonderful community members a Happy New Year! Thank you all for making the past year such an exciting and rewarding experience for us and we promise that there’s plenty more to come!



Seeing as we’re all reminiscing about what we’ve achieved in the last year, and thinking about our plans for the year ahead, I thought it’d be a good time to have a look at these things for Staxel.

Firstly, a little look back at what we’ve got done.

Back in January last year, we launched Staxel on Steam as an Early Access title, woohoo! This was our biggest moment to date, and we’re so pleased and grateful to be able to say that it was absolutely brilliant. Even at such an early stage of content development Staxel was received well and it was great to see so many people showing their support and leaving kind comments on what they thought about the game. It really gave us the motivation to continue developing Staxel over the past year, which brings us to our next point.

Since release we’ve added quite a bit to the game, the village has undergone some major changes in particular.

• New NPCs
  
• Much more NPC dialogue
  
• New friendship levels (including the roomie aspect)
  
• More festivals
  
• New decorational items and building materials
  
• New tools, including novelty items and sprinklers
  
• More clothing and customisation options for player characters
  
• World generation changes
  
• Steam networking integration
  
• Journal feature
  
• More translations

And much more that I can’t remember off the top of my head.
The last few months however have been focused on the upcoming “Magic Update” which we’ll talk about a little below.


It’s been a little while since the “Friendship Update” went out, and since then we did take a couple of months to focus primarily on fixing some of the most widely-reported bugs people were coming across. There’s still a little ways to go on that front but recently we’ve been working on what we’re calling the “Magic Update”.



This update has quite a few surprises in store, although no prizes for guessing it’s going to introduce an element of “magic” to Staxel (more on that in a future issue of the Reporter).
Other things we’re working on specifically are

• Changes to the crafting system
  
• More of a progression-based experience
  
• Villager quests and storyline (for the ones who are currently missing them)
  
• Places to visit

To name just a few.

We’ll be covering the last point in a bit more detail with another (short) issue of the Staxel Reporter in just a couple of days! There’ll be some screenshots too, so make sure you don’t miss it.

That about wraps it up for this issue of the Reporter. Thank you all once again for all your amazing support, we wouldn’t have come this far without you!
Best wishes for the next year to you all, from your Staxel dev team! :)

Get your spook on with these creepy Halloween masks! Be the talk of the town, or the local boogie monster if that’s more your style.

These masks are part of the upcoming Halloween update that we're currently working on! The masks will be craftable at the pumpkin carving table, and will also be a permanent addition to the in-game catalogue during the Halloween update so you can still pick them up after the holiday is over! I don’t know about you, but I’ll be sporting the zombie chicken head. I just hope my chickens don’t mind too much...



A new scary furniture set is also in the works to celebrate this Halloween in style! Each and every room in your house will be decorated to celebrate the creepiest of holidays. Dine surrounded with cobwebs, and sleep in a coffin… what could be more festive than that?

Like the masks, this furniture set will be a permanent addition to the game so don’t worry about missing out!

That’s all I can share for now, but it shouldn’t be a long wait for these new goodies to go live. We hope you’re as excited as we are!
___________________________________________________________


Over the past year we’ve had a lot of people requesting a DRM-free option for playing Staxel.
We’re pleased to let you know that if DRM-free is your jam, you can now pick up Staxel from the GOG store!



The GOG version of Staxel is exactly the same as the versions you’ll find on Steam, HumbleBundle and our own website so you’re not missing out on any features by going DRM-free.

You’ll still be able to play multiplayer with your friends on Steam too! The only difference being that you’ll need to set up a dedicated server using the Server Wizard to play with your friends who are on Steam.
Servers are pretty simple to set up, but if you have any questions or are struggling to figure it out, you can always send us an email or head on over to the Discord and someone will be around to help :)
___________________________________________________________


Just to let you all know, Staxel’s next major update is in currently in the works.
We won’t be giving out too many details on this for the time being, but rest assured we’re all working hard to bring more interesting content to the game for you all to enjoy.

Keep an eye out for future issues of the Staxel Reporter where we’ll be posting updates and sneak peeks of what we’re working on.

After a lot of hard work, we're very proud to say that 'Staxel 1.3 - Friendship Update' is now live! Let's take a look at some of the new content you’ll be seeing in game.


The main aspect of this update is adding more depth to the villagers. You can now build relationships with your neighbours by talking with them on a regular basis, giving them gifts, doing them favours and completing their 'Friendship quests'!

Befriending a villager comes with certain benefits; when you get to know them well you might receive some special gifts, and if you take a liking to one villager in particular, you can even invite them to become your roommate! It's important to choose your best friend carefully though, as you can only have one roomie at a time!




Along with all their new dialogue, the villagers' daily behaviour has been upgraded too. You might find villagers doing more day-to-day activities like shopping in the local store, or having conversations with each other. We’ve found that these changes breathe much more life into the village, and Leif seems pretty happy about it too!




Villagers each have special 'Friendship quests' for you to complete, if you choose to. I certainly don't want to spoil the fun by going into detail here, but I will say you'll really be seeing your neighbors’ personalities come out with this update. Each villager's quests are unique to them, so by helping out you'll learn more about them and build a stronger relationship to boot!




We've added a new fully-fledged Springtime festival, along with a 'mini festival' of sorts. Of course, I'm not going to reveal too much about either of these, but what I will leave you with this cheeky sneak peek.




Along with all these new systems, we've also added a lot of new content too. New outfits, accessories, furniture pieces, toys, and even new pets! Some of the new gear can only be collected in specific ways (for example, completing friendship quests), so I'm sure all of you collectors will have a blast gathering all the new loot!

This isn’t all you’ll find in 1.3 though, for further information on the changes you can read the changelist below (note that this isn’t an exhaustive list). The best way to find out what's new is to update Staxel and give it a spin! We're all pumped with how it's turned out and can't wait to see what you all think of it. Have fun!

CHANGELIST

• Friendship system: Befriend the villagers by giving them gifts, conversing with them, or completing daily quests.
  
• Roomies: Help out a villager enough, become their best friend, and maybe they’ll agree to move in with you! All you need to do is given them a certain special item and make sure you set up your own home’s signpost!
  
• Gifts: You can now give villagers items by pressing the correct button with the item selected.
  
• New quests: More than 35 new quests spread across 11 villagers, spanning several friendship storylines (Leif, Eris, and Jamie will receive theirs in a future update).
  
• New pet type: Unlock an entire new species of pet through Rosemary’s quests! Not even the whole dev team knows what it is!
  
• New faces: New storylines bring with them interesting new individuals!
  
• New hats: Who doesn’t want more hats?
  
• New furniture and tiles: Even more ways to decorate!
  
• Quest items: These specially marked items are extra hard to lose:
  
  • They can’t be dropped or thrown away.
    
  • They will always end up in your inventory, even if it is full.
  • They’ll even throw out a random item to make room if necessary!
• Placeable quest tiles will always return to the inventory when broken.
  
• A new festival: Springtime brings with it a tiny disaster.
  
• New building tools: Tape measures simplify judging sizes, along with many other handy tools to make building a cinch!

Added:

• Reputation and reputation levels
  
• Reputation icons displayed in nametags
  
• Reputation can be gained by:
  • Talking
    
  • Giving Items
    
  • Completing daily quests
• The ability to invite villagers to be your roomie upon completing their questline
  • Roomied villagers will hang out at your house
    
  • Roomied villagers will have extra special dialogue
• A new species of pet
  
• A new festival
  
• Dozens of new quest items
  
• New hats
  
• Conversations with Murmurs (Merchants)
  
• Postboxes and signs can have extra criteria:
  • Must be away from town
    
  • Must not overlap with another totem
• Villagers can go shopping in the village
  
• Villagers can converse with each other (only used in quests for now)
  
• Dialogue can be used to spawn villagers, tiles, and more.

• Allow all numpad buttons to be mapped; some were missed by mistake
  
• Fix pets colliding with doors while following their owners
  
• Fix some cases of Journal entries duplicating
  
• Fix an issue where postbox/totem sale pools couldn’t be expanded with new tiers
  
• When checking for an item in a players inventory, the clothing slots were skipped
  
• Fixed some dialogue issues, which resulted in getting stuck in conversations

• Added a large number of extra Dialogue Commands
  
• Added functionality to fishables to be active during certain quests, or while certain totems exist
  
• Added functionality to plants to drop seeds when broken at certain stages
  
• Allow villagers to be farm animals
  
• Added village global variables for dialogue
  
• Added personal cross-villager variables for players in dialogue
  
• Add the ability to defer dialogue commands, limited to a small handful of commands for now
  
• More extensive dialogue validation
  
• Regards are now included in villager npc files
  
• Dialogue pools blocked by friendship levels are included in villager npc files
  
• Fixed an issue where a misnamed dialogue command could still be validated
  
• Fixed an issue where farm animals, and pet models were not checked
  
• Fixed bodytype layers in some animals
  
• When creating translation files for dialogues, the content builder will now filter to .dialogue and .npcconversation files.

Plus countless other minor changes lost to the wind.

You've asked about it a lot (and we've done our fair share of teasing)! We can finally say that Staxel's 1.3 Friendship Update launches the 20th of July -- that's Friday next week!

There's something for everyone with new villager friendships, summery items, a pet store and a new festival!

What's the first thing you will do when the update hits?

Hey everyone, I think it’s about time we gave you some insight into how development of our next major update is going. Spoiler alert: It’s going great!

Just to remind you, this update is not live yet. This update contains some ambitious plans, the main features we mentioned before are:


Our next update mainly concerns Staxel’s quirky villagers. We’re adding tons more dialogue content and progression to them and you’ll be able to get to know them all a whole lot better.

If there’s a particular villager you’re getting along with super well, you’ll even be able to roomie up with them!




This will be the main hub for anything related to your fluffy companion. The store will sell pet accessories, tools, and even some new pets - sorry Fido!
Pets are one of the aspects we’ve received an overwhelming amount of requests to add on to. Having this system in place will mean we can easily add new pet breeds to Staxel without too much fuss.


As development continues we’re trying to add more and more festivals. The 1.3 update includes a mysterious new Springtime festival, but I don’t want to give away too much on it just yet. We’re sure you’ll all love it though!

So now that we’ve covered what you’ve got to look forward to, let’s talk about the current stage we’re at with everything.
All of the new dialogue and quests have been written up and are currently with the translators. There’s a whole bunch of new text in this one as you’d expect, we really wanted to put the focus on the villagers and give them a lot more depth. In the meantime, we’re busy making sure everything is implemented correctly and we’re about to enter the testing phase, (we need to make sure that absolutely everything is working correctly and that none of the new features could possibly end up breaking the game).

Besides being busy with that, we’ve been sprinkling in some all-new content along the way! While most of the team are busy with implementation and testing, others have been working on some fun new items you’ll be able to get in the game. (Particularly some Summer-themed ones!) Now, I have no intentions of spoiling all the new content but I can give you a cheeky glimpse at some of the new Summer stuff at least.



Along with these delicious summery treats, we’re adding swimsuits, beach gear, and toys! Take some time off from the farm and go enjoy the beach! Did somebody say water gun fight?

I’m going to stop it here though before I get in trouble.

We can’t wait for 1.3 to go live, we’ve all been working very hard on it! This update contains a lot of changes to how Staxel will be played, and we think everyone will enjoy what it will bring to the table. The villagers are much more fleshed out now, and with another festival in the pool you will all be able to celebrate the release of 1.3 in style!

Thanks everyone for giving this a read, I hope you’re all as pumped for 1.3 as we are! I can’t give you a specific release date, but what I can say is it’s not long now!

Hey everyone! Today I thought we’d do something a little different. This article is going to take us back to Staxel’s humble beginnings where we’ll take a look at some old screenies and concept art. Enjoy!



Staxel’s been through a lot these past 4 years. Starting in 2014 it was originally going to be a puzzle game until the team decided to steer it towards the farming, village-life game it is today!




Originally you were going to be based on a farm that was transported into the middle of a waste land, along with other ‘divots’ of land from other parts of the world. These ‘divots’ were going to contain a puzzle to solve. The reason we moved away from this idea was because creating these divots proved to be far too time consuming to create just one, where we wanted a lot more.



The first two years were heavily focused on engine work. Staxel uses a custom engine which has been developed in-house since the start of the project. While we’re constantly working and improving on our engine, the real content only started being put in a couple of years into development. As you can see above it was well worth the effort! We still have this server somewhere, and us devs boot it up once in a blue moon for a lil’ bit of nostalgia.



Here’s the first mockup we did for one of our original Staxel characters, “Jen”. It’s actually pretty close to the mark when you look at the style we finally settled on. The main differences being the upper body and the level of detail each villager has.



And here is the very first Staxel character, our mascot, Harry. I don’t remember exactly what we were working on when we were adding these but I think it might have been rendering. We had hundreds of these titans scattered across the game world, forever looming over the players. I must say, logging in was much less terrifying once these were taken out.




Here’s a screenie of when we were working on the render distance. This one was taken before we’d done any fine tuning on the world gen, and before we had thought of the idea of an island. Back then the world generated infitely. We decided to go with an island because we felt the player didn’t need an infinite amount of space and thought it would take focus away from the farming and village life aspect of Staxel.



I’m going to finish up with this old gem. This one was taken within the first couple months of development, where we jokingly titled it ‘Wardrobe Simulator 2014’. It’s always so bizzare going through these old screencaps and realising how far Staxel has come! While Staxel is all well and good now, I sure am going to miss all those wardrobes.