Hello Birders!

Today we have another patch that includes a variety of quality of life features, requested tweaks, and more bug fixes! We just wanted to give everyone a heads up that things might slow down a bit until mid-June, as now that the game is in a stable state for the vast majoirty of players, the team is going to take some much needed time off. We'll still be monitoring the server and steam discussion forums, but don't expect us to reply with the speed we have been the last few weeks.

Patch 1.0.31

Major Feature: Warp Totems!

• Each biome's shop now has a new section. Currently the only item in each section is a Warp Totem that will teleport you to that biome.

Major Feature: Shiny Bell!

• This item can only be bought in the Snow Biome. It's a consumable item that spawns a Shiny Bird instantly! Shiny hunters rejoice!

Fixes

• Pressing the Guidebook key while Identify Birds Upgrade is active will open the page for that bird only while that bird is targeted by the camera (was persisted longer than that)

• Seeds now float in the water

• Water birds no longer get stuck while doing their eating animation

• Camera and Binoculars are no longer affected by your FOV.

• Items no longer make a UI click noise when left clicking.

• Fixed obscure UI bugs in game session window, namely: kicking 2 players consecutively works.

• Fixed bug where "Is There Fall Damage" achievement was obtained by getting snagged in world geometry.

UX Changes

• Cosmetics Menu buttons are no longer animated and instead use static thumbnails. Technically a visual downgrade but should prevent the cosmetics menu from crashing on some computers.

• Seed Bag thumbnails are rotated towards the camera.

• Seed Bag designs are updated to be more visually distinct.

• Beige Seeds are now Blue Seeds (functionality unchanged, just making them easier to tell apart)

• Whistle thumbnails are more centered

• Whistles now show up in the guidebook for each bird page.

• Latin name in the guidebook is now italics (I had to write a shader for this because our font doesn't have an italics variant, I hope you appreciate my hard work)

• Selecting a photo to be swapped out now shows the current photo as the first photo in the camera roll.

• Swapping out a photo will now append that photo to your camera roll.

• Adjusting an audio slider now plays a sound on the relevant audio bus so you can gauge how loud it is.

• Changed the Shiny Spawn Sound... again!

• Adjusted some colors in Develop-o-tron UI

Misc Changes

• Replaced the "Missing Image" that shows up if a photo is not available.

• [c]redevelopallphotos[/c] debug command no longer runs the develop cutscene (so you don't need to page through all 1000 photos or whatever)

• Camera shutter sound is now audible to all players (ie: you can now hear when other players are taking a photo)

• Add diagnostic telemetry when Steam fails to initialize and when a loading screen sits for too long.

• You can now access the cosmetics menu from the Outhouse by pressing the interact button.

• Changed ordering of Camera upgrades so Scrapbook Pages are last on the list.

Also! The whole dev team was interviewed on DevDive, where we talk about games that inspire and Flock Around's development cycle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNw89wWTOuA

Hey Birders,

We have fixed the duplicate-host bug that a lot of you have been seeing. We've decided to package the fix with a bunch of other tweaks that we had in the hopper. Hope you enjoy!

1.0.28

Small Features

• Proactive Save Backups: The game now makes rotating backups of your save data, so if you lose power or something while the game is mid-save, you should still have a backup to fallback on.

• Retroactive Save Backups: There is now a debug command [c]redevelopallphotos[/c] that will read every photo you've ever taken and instantly runs it through the develop-o-tron. This will recover a good chunk of lost save data, it won't re-buy your upgrades or re-assemble your scrapbook, but it should return your stars and money you've earned.

• Clicking the button to ban a Player now has a confirmation dialogue

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug involving "duplicate hosts"

• Whistles are now affected by "SFX Volume" (was considered a "Bird SFX" before)

UX Changes

• "Highlight Lifers" upgrade works a little differently, any bird with zero photos in your guidebook is considered a Lifer (Lifer Bonus is still issued to the first photo that contains that bird, even if it's in the background)

• "Show Completed Poses" upgrade changes the color of a square if it's 3-starred, just so you can tell at a glance what poses aren't 3-starred.

• Develop-o-tron shows you the previous stars for all poses, not just the pose you're currently looking at.

• Fixed jitter in develop cutscene

• Bird names are now linebroken on dashes and other non-whitespace characters (makes bird names legible in pt-BR on Steam Deck, and probably other languages too)