Blog

Pet Idle System

Animals on your ranch now only act while their owner is online or somebody nearby is watching them. When you log out and nobody else is around, your pets enter a low-power state — no AI ticks, no roaming, no CPU spent on them. The instant you log back in (or somebody walks into view), they wake up. Zero gameplay impact: pets still feed, breed, lay eggs, and decay normally while you play. The server just stops chewing on idle herds.

Choose Male or Female at the NPCs

All six pet vendors now sell both sexes as separate items in the trade window — no more rolling the dice and walking home with the wrong one.

• Wick — Hen / Rooster (the trade preview shows the actual rooster sprite)
• Elara — Cow / Bull (distinct preview sprites)
• Rashid — Sheep (Male / Female)
• Grubb — Pig (Male / Female)
• Fletcher — Dog (Male / Female)
• Osric — Horse (Male / Female)

Egg Laying Refresh

Hens used to make several scattered nest visits in a way that did not quite line up with the new online-time pacing. Now each hen makes exactly one nest visit per game-day (60 minutes online), and drops exactly as many eggs as her Eggs Per Day genetic stat. A bought hen starts at 1 egg per session; through selective breeding she can climb up to 10. The number you see in the pet info card finally matches what actually lands in the nest.

Roosters Drop Loot at Slaughter

Roosters used to drop nothing under the butcher knife — fixed. They now drop meat and feathers in the same age-tiered amounts as hens, so a flock of unwanted roosters is finally worth thinning out.

Quality of Life

• Container windows stay put. Backpacks and other containers no longer auto-resize every time you add or remove an item — you size them once and they stick.
• Backpack at Barnaby for 20gp. Useful for fresh settlers starting out without one.
• Tree growth visual. Trees now show a small leaf puff when they advance through their stages — same effect Tibia uses for natural tree growth on the world map.

Bug Fixes

• Ranch gates locked to owners and sub-owners. Previously anyone standing on a tile adjacent to your fence (the road outside, for example) could click your ranch gate from a distance and open it, letting your animals wander out. Fixed — only the house owner and listed sub-owners can toggle gates inside a ranch. Guests still walk through freely once you invite them; they just cannot operate the gate themselves.

As always, feedback on Discord!

Metal Trough — End-Game Storage

A new 2-tile trough you can build from the Building Book's Furniture category. Holds 5x the capacity of the regular trough — 500 food or water — so you only top off once instead of constantly running buckets back and forth.

• Available in horizontal and vertical orientations.
• Costs 8 Silver Bars + 10 Nails — proper end-game upgrade.
• Each Feed Bag or Water Bucket adds 100 units (5 fills to top off).
• Use buckets/feed bags on either half — both update together.
• Animals eat/drink from either half just like the regular trough.

Quality of Life

• Hammer now demolishes filled troughs. Previously you had to wait for animals to drain it. Now you can break it down whenever you want, including the new Metal Trough — half materials refunded as usual.
• Machines lock in place while in use. Distilling Machine and Weaving Loom can no longer be dragged mid-process — same protection the saw + logs already had.
• Build on your pasture. 2-tile structures (Well, Metal Trough) can now be placed on top of planted grass, wheat fields, and other ranch floor decorations — so you don't have to clear the floor first.

Building Book UI

• Item cells are bigger, with sprites and labels centered properly.
• 2-tile structures (Well, Metal Trough) now show both halves in the preview — and they're laid out in the same orientation they're built (horizontal pair side-by-side, vertical pair stacked).

Launcher Stability

Defensive patches to the client's update checker to reduce the random 'client closes on launch' crash some of you have been reporting. The crash was rare but most likely on the first launch after idle time. Please report on Discord if it still happens — there might be more layers to peel.

As always, feedback on Discord!

Three New Fence Styles

The Building Book's Fences category just gained three new families on top of the existing Wood Fence, giving you more variety for animal pens, garden borders, and ranch decoration. All gates support open/close on use, just like the Wood Fence Gates.

• Plank Fence — six wall pieces and two swinging gates. Same cost as the Wood Fence (4 plank / 6 nail per piece, 6 plank / 8 nail per gate). Cleaner, more uniform look.
• Stick Fence — the cheap rustic option. Four pieces and two gates at 2 plank / 2 nail per piece (4 plank / 4 nail per gate). Perfect for chicken runs and quick garden borders.
• Small Wood Fence — a low-profile fence in four pieces with two gates. 3 plank / 4 nail per piece, 5 plank / 6 nail per gate. Looks great around small hortas and pet pens.

Website

• Sharing the Thornfeld link on Discord, X, or Slack now produces a proper preview card with the game's hero image, the Thornfeld title, and a tagline that actually describes the game (instead of the generic MyAAC text it inherited before).

As always, feedback on Discord!

Chicken & Rooster Breeding

The chicken family just got a full overhaul. Hens and roosters are now separate species with their own sprites, their own coat colors, and their own breeding rules — modeled on the cow/bull and horse systems.

When you buy a Chicken from Wick, the system rolls a sex like it does for cows: female stays a Hen, male becomes a Rooster. Most roosters are White Roosters with random coat colors; the remaining 15% are rare classic breeds — Gallus, Australorp Black, Rhode, and White Crested.

Coat Inheritance

Hens use a single red mask (body), White Roosters use four (mane, body, legs, feet). Every baby's color traces back to a parent — there are no random mutations at birth:

• Hen + White Rooster: female baby's body is 50/50 mother or father; male baby is a White Rooster with mane/legs/feet 100% from father and body 50/50.
• Hen + legacy rooster: female baby keeps the mother's body color, male baby is identical to the legacy father (breed-true).

To introduce new male colors into your flock, buy a fresh chicken from Wick. Legacy lineages stay legacy unless you bring in new blood.

Other Gameplay Changes

• Horses no longer leave a corpse. Using a Butcher Knife on your horse now plays a small puff and the horse "runs away" — no body, no loot. You still get the slaughter XP and achievement progress.
• Sprinklers must sit on top of a pipe. Adjacent pipes no longer count. The Building Book blocks placing a pipe over a sprinkler, and a sprinkler can only be placed where a pipe already exists. Existing irrigation networks may need a quick rearrange — the lever message tells you exactly what is missing.
• Logs are locked while you saw them. Dragging a log mid-cut is no longer possible — the saw animation finishes cleanly.

Quality of Life

• The phantom "You just lost your daily reward streak" login message is gone. Thornfeld does not use the daily reward system, but the engine was firing the message anyway every time you logged in.
• The chat panel no longer shows a dark background after toggling Hide Chat — fully transparent in every mode now.
• Greta's tutorial troughs in the corral are now reserved for tutorial players. Visitors can no longer top them off, which was preventing the auto-reset and leaving the next student stuck.
• The petbook now groups Hens and Roosters together under "Chickens" (same pattern as horse colors).

Account & Website

• Lost Account, Confirm Email, Logout, and Resend Email Verification pages all rebuilt in the Thornfeld pixel-box layout. The whole account flow finally looks consistent.
• New Cloudflare Turnstile captcha on the create account page, plus a server-side IP rate limit. Anti-bot defenses are now in place ahead of launch.
• The login error for unverified accounts now renders the resend link as a clickable link instead of raw HTML text.
• Wiki and Cyclopedia tab Ranching updated with the new Hen/Rooster sections, Chicken Coat Inheritance, and the irrigation pipe-under-sprinkler rule.

Performance

The site's hero, page background, and seven landing screenshots are now WebP with aggressive compression. The images folder went from 38 MB down to 2.8 MB — homepage first paint is now under 2 MB instead of ~10 MB. Should feel noticeably snappier on first visit.

As always, feedback on Discord!

A New Way to Start in Thornfeld

Brand new player tutorial — meet Greta Holloway, the widow on the north farm. She walks you through the first week of life as a settler with a five-mission arc that teaches every core ranching skill, hands you 10 platinum in starter capital, and ends with a personal recommendation to Bailiff Roderic so you can buy your first plot.

New characters now spawn directly in Greta's spare room. Talk to her about help to begin.

The Five Missions

• The Loose Chicken — Find Henrietta in the woods and walk her home. Teaches the halter system.
• Breaking Ground — Till, plant, water and harvest your first wheat. Teaches farming and the well.
• Feed the Animals — Mill the wheat into flour, distill it into a feed bag, fill the trough. Teaches machinery and animal care.
• Mending Fences — Mine ore at the rocks, smelt nails at the forge, chop a tree, saw planks, then use the Building Book to rebuild a rotten fence. Teaches the full construction loop.
• The Bailiff's Errand — Mount Brick the horse, halter Bramble the cargo bull, load Greta's sealed letter, and ride south to the castle stables. Teaches mounts and bull cargo.

Tutorial Cards

Key mechanics now show a one-time tutorial card the first time you encounter them. Halter, farming, animal care, machinery, construction, mounts and cargo — each one explains the system in two sentences. Read it once, never see it again on that character.

Achievement

Finish the whole arc to earn Earned Your Keep (5 points). Roderic accepts the letter, the county registry opens to you, and you walk out a citizen of Thornfeld.

Other Notes

• The old Settling Down tutorial (Captain Aldwin) is retired. Existing characters who already finished it keep their access to the registry.
• Polish on the M2 and M3 tutorial arrows — the well now pulses when your watering can or bucket is empty, and the feed and water pipelines guide you in parallel.
• New tutorial popup framework — future systems will plug into it the same way.

If you spawn into the world for the first time today, Greta is right there. If you're an existing settler, your old quest line is preserved — the Greta arc is for fresh characters. Feedback welcome on Discord!