Blog

Welcome to Thornfeld 1.0

This is the biggest update to Thornfeld so far — a complete rework of how time and pacing flow in the game. Every animal, every crop, every tree on your ranch now follows a brand new rhythm: your ranch only ages while you are playing.

The New Time Model — Online Time

Inspired by the Stardew Valley daily cycle: 1 hour of online play = 1 in-game day. When you log out, time freezes for your ranch. When you (or any subowner) returns, the clock picks up exactly where it left off.

• Animals do not age, get hungry, get sick, or progress through pregnancy while you are offline.
• Crops do not grow OR die from drought.
• Cisterns do not drain (sprinklers do not fire when nobody is home).
• Rain still falls — and still tops up your cisterns. The bonus is waiting for you when you return.

You can take a vacation worry-free. Your ranch will be exactly as you left it.

Plant Cycle Reborn

• Water once, harvest once. A single watering carries a plant through every stage to maturity. No more daily watering chores per stage — just water at planting, then water again after each harvest.
• Cycles fit in one session: wheat, fruit trees, and pines all complete a full cycle in 1 game day (1 hour online). A casual session is enough to plant, water, and watch a tree mature.
• Stumps regrow: water a chopped stump → 1 hour online later the tree is back. Pine returns as a mature tree; fruit trees return as a young tree (water once more for fruit).
• Fruit refilling slowed: after harvest, fruit trees take a full game day to fruit again. No more 20-minute farm loops.

Animal Pacing Refresh

• Pregnancy: 1 game day (down from 8 real hours).
• Breeding age: animals reach maturity at 1 game day old.
• Sickness: an untreated sick animal dies in 3 game days.
• Mount age: horses can be ridden at 2 game days old.
• Milk & shear: one milking, one shearing per animal per game day.
• Trough capacity: reduced to 100 units. Each Feed Bag or Water Bucket fills the trough to the top. A full trough now sustains an animal for about 4 game days.
• Hunger & thirst: 25 per game day (17 on planted grass). 1 game day takes an animal from full to the hungry threshold.

Quality of Life

• Pet Records and the Pet Book now display "Horse" instead of "White Horse" for unnamed horses.
• Ivy is now the sole seed vendor — pine seed removed from Hank's shop.
• Cedric's parcel labels now use the correct item.
• The placeholder "White Horse" outfit was removed from the player outfit menu.
• 13 leftover Tibia boss raids were disabled — no more periodic "Giant spiders gathered on the plains of havoc" broadcasts and no more Zone errors in the console.
• The Character page on the website now has uniform box widths.

Wiki Updated

Every cooldown, growth time, and timer in the in-game wiki has been rewritten in game-days to match the new pacing. There is a new Time & Pacing section explaining the model in detail. The Animals and Plants sections have been refreshed end to end.

Please report any pacing oddities, stuck timers, or balance feedback in our Discord!

🚰 Irrigation System

Running a watering can through every wheat field twice a day is old news. Build yourself a cistern, run pipes out to your crops, drop a few sprinklers — and every server save, your fields water themselves.

How It Works

• Cistern — stores up to 1000L. Use a bucket of water on it to add 100L at a time (the bucket is not consumed, same as animal troughs). Rain automatically adds +300L to every cistern on the map.
• Pipes — connect the cistern to your sprinklers. Nine visual variants (straight, corners, junctions). Must be adjacent along N/S/E/W — no diagonals.
• Sprinkler — on every server save, waters the dry wheat and trees in the 3x3 around it. 10L per tile. Sprinklers also conduct water, so you can chain Cistern → Pipe → Sprinkler → Pipe → Sprinkler.

Building Requirements

• Cistern — 15 planks, 30 nails, 3 iron bars
• Pipe — 1 iron bar each
• Sprinkler — 4 iron bars

Place them via the Building Book under the new Irrigation category. The hammer deconstructs for half materials back, like any other furniture.

New Achievements

• Pipeline Pioneer — build your first cistern
• Master Plumber — lay 50 pipes
• First Drop — pour your first bucket of water into a cistern
• Auto-Farmer — have your irrigation system water 500 tiles

Bug Fixes

• Tree visuals — fixed the duplicate-sprite stack that could show up on some orange/mango trees after yesterday's rain system went live. Stage advance is now idempotent, and a cleanup sweep also runs on server restart to tidy any existing duplicates.
• Livestock Yard boot restore — fixed a database cursor bug that stopped the restore loop after the first stored pet, leaving some pets stranded at their pen positions. Every stored pet now restores correctly on startup.
• Client auto-updater — follow-up to yesterday's updater fix: the base otclient.exe is no longer deleted during cleanup. If your desktop shortcut broke as a result, reinstall the client once from the download page and you are good to go.

See the Wiki or the in-game Cyclopedia (Irrigation tab) for the full reference.

🔧 Client Auto-Updater Fix

Some of you reported that the client was closing itself once or twice during the update check on startup, forcing you to relaunch until it finally reached the login screen. That was an engine bug in the auto-updater.

What was happening

After downloading a new version, the client was restarting into the old binary, which then had to spawn the new one a second time. Two restarts in a row — and sometimes one of the spawn calls would drop on Windows, which is why a few of you had to relaunch manually.

The fix

The client now spawns the newest version directly after an update, so there is only one automatic restart instead of two. You will see a single quick close-and-reopen the next time the updater runs.

Heads up: because this fix is itself a client update, the first launch after this patch will still show the old double-restart behavior one last time. After that you are good.

🌧️ Rainy Weather

Thornfeld now has real weather! Every few hours a rainstorm may sweep across the land.

• Free watering — every dry surface plant (trees, stumps, wheat) is watered automatically as the rain hits.
• Frequency — rolls every 3 hours with a 15% chance, and storms last 5 to 10 minutes.
• Mushrooms are spared — they grow underground, so you still water those yourself.
• Visual — the sky darkens and rain falls across your screen during the storm.

The Cyclopedia (Ranching tab) and the Wiki both have a new "Weather & Rain" section with the full details.

🔧 Small Changes

• The old shader picker hotkey (Ctrl+Y) has been disabled. It was a development tool — the entry is removed from Options > General Hotkeys.

Your basement just got a new purpose. Brown mushrooms now grow in the dark, damp floor you dug out with a pickaxe. Also shipping: a long-standing wheat harvest bug is finally fixed, and a roof-placement regression is patched.

Brown Mushroom Farming

• Underground-only crop — mushrooms grow on bare cave floor, inside your ranch, at z > 7. No more planting anything you want in the basement; this one belongs there.
• Ivy sells Mushroom Spores for 5 gp each. Cheap on purpose — each spore produces one harvest, then you plant again.
• Three growth stages, ~2 hours each. Water with your Watering Can to advance, just like wheat. Unlike wheat, mushrooms don't die from neglect — they pause until watered again.
• Rare red variant — when a mushroom matures there is a 5% chance it grows into a Stuffed Mushroom instead of a Brown Mushroom. Worth 3× as much to Marta.
• Harvest — drag the mature mushroom into your backpack to earn XP, or right-click to eat it in place (it's still food). Either way, the tile clears afterwards.
• Selling — Marta buys Brown Mushrooms for 20 gp and Stuffed Mushrooms for 60 gp. Both have been added to Marta's order board rotation.
• Full walkthrough in the in-game Cyclopedia → Ranching tab and on the Wiki.

Wheat Harvest — No More Double Watering

• Fixed a long-standing bug where, after harvesting mature wheat that had just been watered, the regrown young wheat would appear dry and require a second watering to start the next cycle.
• The system now correctly detects whether the last watering was instant (caused the mature advance) or scheduled (fired automatically hours later). If instant, that same water carries over to the next cycle and the field stays healthy. If scheduled, the water was already consumed and you water again as before.
• Same logic that fixes orange trees back on April 13.

Roof Placement — Back to Working

• The April 20 guard that blocked placing roofs outside your ranch was too strict and ended up blocking every roof placement, even inside your own ranch, if the target upper-floor tile didn't already exist.
• Now roof placement (and any z < 7 construction) validates directly against the z = 7 house footprint from the map editor — same approach the basement digging uses. If the floor below belongs to your ranch, the roof goes up. If it doesn't, it's blocked.

Small Polish

• Boot logs cleaned up — fewer "loaded OK" messages on server start.
• Harlan the Livestock Auctioneer now wanders one tile around his spawn instead of standing perfectly rooted.

Down into the dark. Watch where you step.