Blog

New Thornfeld Launcher

Starting today, the game is updated through a dedicated launcher. The old update system built into the client has been disabled — this means old clients will no longer receive updates.

To keep playing on the latest version, all players need to:

1. Download Thornfeld-Setup.exe from the Downloads page.
2. Install and open the launcher — it will download all game files automatically.
3. Click Play once the progress bar finishes.

From then on, every time you open the launcher it will check for updates and only download what changed — fast and automatic.

Why the change?

• Faster updates — the launcher only downloads files that actually changed, instead of checking everything from scratch.
• Fewer issues — the old system sometimes reverted files that were already updated, causing bugs. That no longer happens.
• Fresh look — the launcher now shows the Thornfeld farm scene as its background, with direct links to the website, wiki, registration and Discord.

Client Cleanup

• Discord and YouTube icons removed from the login screen top bar — cleaner and more organized.

Questions? Let us know on Discord!

Four New Floor Styles

The lone wood floor in the Building Book grew into a proper Floors category. The original is now called Wooden Floor 01 and four siblings join it:

• Wooden Floor 02 — 4 planks + 8 nails. Alternate wood plank pattern.
• Parquet Floor — 6 planks + 10 nails. Premium wood, finer pattern.
• Cobblestone Floor — 8 stones. Hard-wearing stone tile, no wood needed.
• Terracota Floor — 6 clay lumps. Warm-toned ceramic tile, no wood needed.

All four work with the storage deposits (use Lumber/Stone/Clay/Nail Deposit on the construction site to drain the bin and apply directly), with the hammer (full demolish + half refund), and with the original ground restoration on z=7.

Buildable Forge

You can now build your own Forge on your ranch through the Building Book under Machinery. Costs 6 iron bars + 8 clay lumps + 6 planks + 12 nails — generous, but the forge has been the single most useful machinery in the game and it deserves to live on every ranch. The village forge keeps working unchanged for anyone who hasn't built their own yet.

Street Light

A new Street Light joins the Furniture category. Costs 4 iron bars + 8 nails. Click the lamp to toggle it on or off — your choice when to light it, and the state stays until you click again.

Bug Fix — White Rooster from Non-White Parents

Players were seeing fully white roosters born from couples where neither parent had any white. Tracked down to a runtime-only field that wiped on server restart: the pregnant female was holding the father's species and coat colors in memory, and a restart between conception and birth cleared them — the birth code then defaulted to white_rooster with zero colors. The same fragility silently affected horse coat inheritance for years.

Fix: the father's snapshot is now persisted on the pregnant female (5 new columns on ranch_pets, auto-migrated on boot). Birth survives both server restarts and the father dying / being sold mid-pregnancy. Conceptions from this patch onward are fully protected; pregnancies that were already in progress with lost data won't be retroactively recovered.

As always, feedback on Discord!

Two More Storage Deposits

The deposit family grows by two. Same generic system as the others — bulk store one resource type, retrieve via the numeric window, supply construction sites by use-with, dump everything on the floor with a hammer hit:

• Clay Deposit — 8 planks + 12 nails. Holds up to 1000 Clay Lumps. Pair it with a roofing project and you finish a full Tiled or Thatched Roof without ever opening the bin.
• Nail Deposit — 6 planks + 8 nails. Holds up to 1000 Nails. Cheaper to build than the others (it's a small box, not a silo) and probably the deposit you'll use most — almost every construction needs nails.

Both buildable from the Building Book under Furniture, both work with all the existing deposit interactions out of the box.

NPC Quest Indicators

NPCs now show a quest icon above their head for each player individually when there is a pending interaction — a new mission to accept, or a finished mission to turn in. The icon is per-player: another player who already finished the quest sees the normal chat bubble on the same NPC. No more wondering which NPC has work for you.

• Greta Holloway shows the indicator at every accept/turn-in moment of the Earning Your Keep arc — and hides it during in-progress field work so you're not nagged while you're already busy harvesting wheat or rebuilding the fence.
• Bailiff Roderic shows it when you're carrying Greta's sealed letter and need to deliver it upstairs.

Future quest givers will plug into the same system as we add more content.

As always, feedback on Discord!

Use Deposits Directly on Construction Sites

Yesterday's storage deposits just got more useful. Instead of retrieving the materials first and applying them by hand, you can now use the deposit directly on a construction site:

• Lumber Deposit on any plank-needing build → planks pour straight out of the deposit and apply.
• Stone Deposit on any stone-needing build (walls, wells, cisterns) → same.
• Wheat Deposit on a Thatched Roof tile → bunches of wheat go straight in.

The deposit drains by exactly what the construction needs, with the same XP and completion path as if you'd applied the materials by hand. Place a Lumber Deposit next to your worksite and a single click finishes a wall.

Bug Fixes

• Greta's last mission no longer soft-locks if you load the sealed letter into Bramble's cargo. Some players were dropping both the letterbag and the sealed letter for the Bailiff into the bull's saddlebags — when Osric took Bramble at the castle stables, the letter went with him and the quest was stuck. Three changes: (1) the sealed letter is now refused at the cargo step (with a message telling you to keep it on yourself); (2) the Osric handover scans the cargo for the letter and returns it to your inventory if it's in there; (3) anyone who already passed Osric without the letter just needs to relog — the letter pops back into your bag with instructions, and you head straight upstairs to Roderic. You don't need Bramble back; his job at the stables is done.

As always, feedback on Discord!

Storage Deposits

Three new building items let you stockpile your raw resources in bulk without flooding your backpacks. Each holds 1000 units of one resource type, and the count is part of the deposit itself — pick it up, drop it elsewhere, the contents stay inside.

• Wheat Deposit — 8 planks + 12 nails. Stores Bunches of Wheat.
• Lumber Deposit — 8 planks + 12 nails. Stores Planks.
• Stone Deposit — 16 stones + 4 planks + 6 nails. Stores Small Stones.

Build them through the Building Book under Furniture. Once placed:

• Use the deposit on a stack of the matching resource — the entire stack goes in instantly.
• Use the deposit alone — opens a window with the current count, the resource sprite, and a numeric input to retrieve any amount.
• Hammer the deposit — demolishes it and dumps every stored unit on the floor, plus refunds half the build materials.

Blog Now Paginated

The news archive used to dump every post on a single page. Now it shows 5 posts per page with prev/next navigation and page numbers, and the home page links to the archive when there is more to read.

Bug Fixes

• Hoe XP exploit removed. Tilling soil with the Hoe used to grant 2 XP per use, and since the soil could be removed and re-tilled freely, this was an infinite XP loop at zero cost. Tilling now grants no XP — sowing, watering, and harvesting still do.

As always, feedback on Discord!