
Originally Posted by
Citan
The next dev blog is still a week away, so I'll share a little info, sure.
We're never exactly sure when all of the assets we need for something will become available, and the pandemic has made some things take longer than expected. So this next update is different than I'd expected the April update to be. But it's something I've been excited to work on for a while: Animal Husbandry!
Animal Husbandry will let players breed Animal-Handling animals (and eventually rideable horses). We're modeling the genetics after a simplified version of real-world genes, with dominant and recessive genes, mutation rates, that sort of thing.
This means that Animal Husbandry is a long-term skill. Even with the special gene-viewing powers we'll give you, it can still take many hundreds of generations to get the "perfect pet", and each generation takes a few days. But when you have offspring you're proud of, you'll be able to sell pet-only offspring (without breeding rights) to other players, so you can make a name for yourself as e.g. the vendor with glowing-eyed cats, or the breeder who makes the super-tiny grimalkin, or the blue-bear breeder with the extra painful bite.
It's definitely not something every player will be excited about. But for a certain small percentage of players, I think this will be an AMAZING system, perhaps the best genetics simulation in the MMO space, which entertains for years to come. For everyone not excited by that... well, everyone will eventually reap the rewards of fancy pets and mounts when they're on the market.
We're busy building the artificial genomes of rats, cats, and bears, and it'll be another couple weeks before it goes live. We've replaced some animal models to give us more possibilities for appearance mutations.
Aside from Animal Husbandry, there's also various UI improvements, including a couple from the recent forum thread, some more fae stuff, and probably some more content in Sun Vale/Fae Realm if the timing works out.
One thing that probably won't get much attention in a dev-blog, but which I'm happy about: I finally managed to repro the "cursor is stuck in the middle of the screen" bug. It is indeed a Unity bug as suspected, but once I was able to reproduce it semi-regularly, I was able to find a workaround. So the next update should see the end of that one. (This also fixes some of the "cursor got stuck as a certain shape" bugs, but not all of them, I suspect. But we'll get there.)