You may have thought that our recent DLC announcement meant that we were done with patch notes. Au contraire! (That's French for "nuhuh"). In fact, the DLC will launch with our biggest patch yet, which will include fixes and suggestions that we've been working on since launch.
Here's a little sneak peek of what's to come:
Greenhouse expansion
Closing old mine-holes
Inventory management improvements
Adjustable day length
...and that's just to start! We have way more exciting stuff in the pipeline, but you'll have to wait until next Friday (27th October) to find out!
This is just a reminder that you have until today at 10:00 AM PT/1:00 pm ET/19:00 CEST to grab yourself a cute-as-cuss Fishbo plush! Once our crowdfunding campaign on MakeShip ends, they'll be gone for good!
It's HALLOWEEN SEASON, BABY. You know what that means, don't you? What's that? Dressing up like sexy corn? No, that's not a thing. How can corn be – you know what, never mind. You just sit there and be quiet and listen, because it's time for...
MORE DLC!
To celebrate everyone's favorite festivities, we've put together the Eerie Items DLC, which includes all sorts of spoopy decor that are designed to make your house look as Halloweeny as possible. We've got pumpkins! Skeletons! Cobwebs! In fact, let's just look at the individual items:
Five (FIVE!) different types of cobweb
A new rug that's a big nasty tongue
Two Jack-O'-Lanterns
A clump o' candles
A beautiful carved pumpkin house skin
Wow! That's so cool! Wait... there's more?!
YEAH. We didn't want folks to miss out on the Halloween vibes, so all players will be getting some haunting items for freeee:
Two skeletons (their names are Marigold and Crunchboi)
One teeny tiny skull
A gravestone
A spoooooky iron archway
A rug in the shape of a very bloodshot eyeball
You can get all of these items (plus maybe more exciting things, hmmmm) on October 27th, just in time to decorate your Moonstone Island home and town for Halloween night. Just 3.99 USD/3.99 EUR/3.49 GBP will get you all the paid content, and it'll be 10% off for the first week when it launches!
Also...get ready.... are you ready?.... you must be ready because... NEW SPIRITS FOR FREE!
See you soon for CANDY!
And now onto our amazing creators! Hooboy, we have a few amazing artists for you this week!
Check out this landscape by @fabi_adg - you can really get a sense of scale! It really gives you some perspective (that's an art joke. I'll see myself out.).
@Coromon really kills it with this animated piece O_O Wowowowow
Moewy meow meow. ME-OW. Meow meow meow. Meow.
Translation: Orange cats should be celebrated this time of year - we match pumpkins and that's pretty cool if you ask me.
Until next time when we are back on the eve of DLC launch! DLC launch Eve!
~ Studio Supersoft
Updates & Bug Fixes - Oct.18, 2023
Ring ring! You are receiving a call from Patch Notes Inc. Ring ring!
Hello! This is Patch Notes Inc. We have a small delivery for you, just a couple of things, here you go! And just sign for it here... thanks. Bye!
Holo hunters didn't like our egg stats change because it messed with their techniques, so we changed it back! Our ap-holo-gies
Wild Spirits will no longer have GIGANTIC decks when you catch them – they now skip a card every second level
That's it for now, but there's a beeeeg patch coming soon... so make sure your door is unlocked for the next delivery!
Kate, Community Manager and sole employee of Patch Notes Inc.
Updates and Bug Fixes - Oct 12, 2023
Hello, Alcehmists!
We're already on Patch Notes 5! I like 5. It's an honorary round number, you know what I mean? We're already halfway to 10, and 10 is also a nice number. Anyway. Number thoughts out of the way, let's get into it!
The fire tree no longer jiggles
You can't grow crops on top of other crops in the greenhouse anymore. Sorry, but in the gardening world that's called "not how gardening works"
Toddler Chaddle Tidd Taddle's name is now consistently spelled
Y'all JRPG lovers really love seeing damage numbers, so we made sure that you can now see your condition and damage amounts in the thousands, millions, billions, and trillions. Enjoy, you wonderful weirdos
You can use the D-Pad to control character movement for that retro SNES feeling
Minoot's passive (which gives you energy when you shuffle your discard pile into your draw pile) now works with Reconsider (which shuffles your discard pile into your draw pile). A NEW CARD SYNERGY EMERGES
The Yellow Cushion has been fixed – it was doing a thing where it would be placed down WAY further away for no reason. Turns out it was just shy
If you had the bug where temples weren't being marked as cleared, Magic Man would not give you the Rift quest. Turns out he was looking at the game code, so we had to tell him to stop breaking the fourth wall and just give you the quest (it works now)
Soak+ is now correctly classified as an attack, so it will work with Regroup. Side note: Soak & Regroup sounds like a bubble bath company
AAAND that's it for Episode 5 of The Patch Notes, the sitcom that everyone loves to watch. Tune in next time to find out if FATAL ERROR and [file not found] ever get together!
~ Kate, Community Manager, and Shipper of FATAL ERROR and [file not found]
Updates and Bug Fixes - Oct 8, 2023
Hello, Alchemists!
A small update today to help you make the best of your time in Moonstone Island!
We turned down the dial on the title menu music
Starting XP for wild and hatched Spirits is now slightly random, so some are just naturally more buff
Moonstones now have a chance of respawning on islands each season
We made some stuff more random (recipe unlocks, Spirit hatching, Magic Man's shop, and statue gifts)
We figured out how to retroactively mark the Spring Temple boss as "banished" (see the last patch notes) and we ALSO fixed the Temple Tamer achievement. Look at us go
We made the dungeon and wilderness run way better than before (especially on Steam Deck!). The boring patch notes just say "significant performance increase" but I'm saying "we painted go-faster stripes on the side of all the code and it actually worked"
There was an issue where sometimes you couldn't till soil in the greenhouse, which is like, its whole purpose. So we fixed it
Bridges are no longer slippery in winter
Spring Temple boss is cool, but his minions were really mean, so we nerfed them just a lil' bit
Got an egg that won't hatch? We fixed it! If you currently have unhatchable eggs in your Barn, they should come out just fine after you sleep. Who can blame them, though? It's warm in there and no one is making them fight
We taught Magic Man the virtues of accessibility, so he should stop turning up in places where you can't actually get into his house, like at the top of staircases and on cliffs, or in the freaking sky somehow
Fixed some of Ferra's quests – she used to get confused if you did them in the wrong order, but she gets it now. Anyone who has done her ingots/furnace quests should have this fixed in their game too
No more identity crisis: the PlayStation controller will no longer show Xbox control hints
The fireworks now happen on the correct day. This was an issue with Ferra getting overexcited so we just patched that out by telling her that fireworks are dangerous, but then she was all "I work with fire every day" so we just hid the fireworks from her and that worked great 👍
Stopped the Spirits in the barn being able to push the player out of bounds. This was a bug where their affection meter was set to "AGGRESSIVE" so we just turned it back down to "cuddly"
In BR-PT, DE, and ES, "Spiky Plant" and "Prickly Plant" had the same name, so we changed "Spiky Plant" to be more differentish
But that's not all... stay tuned for some exciting news stuff around the corner... 👀
~ Kate, Community Manager and Keeper Of Many Secrets
The Village Post, Oct 5
Greetings, Alchemists!
We've been toying with calling Moonstone Island fans "Moonstoners" just because it's very funny to me, personally. Until someone comes up with something better, though, it's Moonstoners. Let's get into what we've been up to, two weeks out from launch!
We've always wanted to have an accolades trailer. These are videos made specifically to show off all the nice things people say about you – well, your game – and it's so exciting to have enough nice things to be able to turn it into its own trailer. All it needs now is one of those Hollywood-style deep manly voiceovers saying things like PLAY THE GAME CRITICS ARE CALLING "A GOOD GAME". But I guess that's not really the ~vibe~ of Moonstone Island. We'll probably keep it as it is.
Another exciting thing is that we're MAKING A PLUSH FISHBO. We've been calling him "Squishbo". This kind of creativity is why they pay us the big bucks.
Squishbo is being made by Makeship, a plush company that works kinda like Kickstarter, which is to say that he won't get made for realsies unless we hit a goal. As of writing, he's 80% funded with 14 days to go, - if you wanna slap your credit card down to get a Squishbo of your own, then here's the link: https://www.makeship.com/products/fishbo-plush
We've been hard at work fixing bugs, glitches, and issues and implementing suggestions from the community, which is going pretty well!
Here are the highlights:
We realized that the description on the gems (which told you they were just for selling) wasn't technically true – they were used to craft Mailbox and Crystal. So, we changed the recipes, and now it IS true. Gems are just for selling!
There was a really frequent soft lock that popped up if you used a card that drew from a discard pile, but the pile was empty. We fixed it! YAY
People were amassing so much Energy in battle that it broke the display, so we had to cap it at 99 (which is still a LOT)
We made it easier to target placeable objects with both mouse AND controller
We taught Ossono and Tobin to count
We taught Rowan the meaning of capitalism
But there's more work to do. You can catch up on all our patch notes so far on our other Steam posts, but for now, back into the bug mines we go!
If you find anything you need to report, you can do that here!
First off, a pair of fan art pieces from Reiyh Feh, who is a HUGE fan of our boy Tobin:
And secondly – you know we love Fishbo fan art, so here's a gorgeously-styled '90s fan art piece of Fishbo, Longlog, and Capacibee from MiguiMonkey:
Meeeeooowww. Mew mew mew. Purrrr.
That's all we have for you today, but... oh? What's this? A little piece of paper has just landed on our desk... and it says "More DLC coming soon". Seriously?! Do these guys ever take a break? No. No, we do not.
So, in summary:
Thank you for your support
Buy Fishbo plush
Send us your fan art
Bye!!!
~ Studio Supersoft
Updates and Bug Fixes - Sept 29, 2023
BEEP BEEP there's a patch notes truck backing into the Steam page hold on BEEP BEEP
*loud noise of patch notes being dumped on the ground*
Ah, good, just a small batch for today. Let's see...
Mines no longer spawn exactly where the dungeon entrance is (this was apparently a health and safety violation, our apologies)
The Impatience+ card now works correctly. Thanks for your... patience
Skills that upgrade cards actually do the thing they are supposed to do, i.e. upgrade other cards (TL;DR, we fixed Transmogrifier)
The Spring Temple boss now properly shows as "banished" when you beat him! We're still figuring out how to make this apply retroactively for folks who've already done so
...and that's it for now! But three patch notes sessions in one-and-a-half weeks is a lot, eh?
We'll keep you up to date on what's next, and make sure to submit your bugs and suggestions here: https://rawfury.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1
Kate, Community Manager and respecter of health and safety codes
Fishbo Plushie!!
🚨 Alchemists! 🚨
Have you ever wondered what a hug from a real-life Moonstone Island Spirit would be like? Well, wonder no more because you could help us bring a super cuddly, wonderfully weird version of our favorite fish in a bowl to life!
We're partnering with MakeShip to crowdfund the creation of the above Fishbo Plushie! The campaign runs from Sept 28 at 10:00 AM PT/1:00 PM EST/19:00 CEST.
Haha, I kid. This is an announcement, not a microphone. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Moonstone Island newsletter! It's just like the newsletter in the actual game, except I am not Ossono, I am Kate. Although I am the writer, so I did write Ossono. So maybe I am Ossono. Woahhh.
In this newsletter, we're mostly going to be talking about how the launch went and the reaction that people have had to the game!
It's our first game launch as a team – can you believe that?! We've been reading every since review, watching as many streams as we can humanly manage, and sharing all the love with each other in DMs. And then crying a lot. In a good way.
So, thank you. We couldn't have done all this – and had such an amazing response – without all of you. Let's get to the reviews and the fan art already!!!
Moonstone Island's reviews came rolling in on launch day and they were so good – lots of 8s, and even a few 9s?! We're currently at Very Positive on Steam, but we're hoping to get up to Overwhelmingly Positive, which means we need more reviews! You can totally help us with that goal if you want to leave a review. I'll just pop the link right here. No pressure.
‘Moonstone Island is an addicting blend of various genres that still maintains its own identity. The monster-collecting, card-battling life sim brings aesthetics and inspiration from beloved games while still offering fresh gameplay. There’s a vast world to explore that’s different with every game file. It’s a gorgeous title that shows off crisp pixel graphics for a wholesome experience.‘ - Hardcore Gamer, 10/10
‘It's the type of game that's really easy to fall into and lose hours… I cannot recommend this enough, especially if you want something different from Pokémon, Slay the Spire, or Stardew Valley.’ - GameGrin, 4/5
It is an unfortunate fact of life that no game releases without a few lil bugs to fix, especially in the indie space! Despite our best efforts (and lots of testing before launch), a few buggies made their way in, and so we're working on squishin' em all ASAP.
If you missed the recent patches and updates, here are some issues we’ve addressed since launch:
Drawing from the discard pile with an empty discard pile no longer softlocks your game 🙏🎉🙏🎉🙏🎉
Reduced delay between button press and using hoe/scythe/watering can (for speedrun farming% players, obv)
We capped your energy at 99 (sorry if this breaks your OP strats)
Ossono finally learned to count, so her quest now only completes when selling the correct amount of stones
Tobin also finally learned to count, so his sell prices are now consistent with what it says in the fish's description
Holo Spirits will now STAY HOLO when moving them around in the Spirit Barn. Turns out they were just having an identity crisis, sorry
Gifting divided stacks will no longer make the UI invisible
We fixed a bug with Dusty and Lookachoo where their abilities weren't working! The card energy cost now refreshes correctly
Okay, that's a wrap for this newsletter! The news is just WE LAUNCHED A GAME CAN YOU BELIEVE IT, we hope you enjoyed this little pile of gooey gushing about how cool this all was. We're gonna go nap all of this excitement off now. Zzzzz.
~ Kate, Community Manager, and V. Tired Studio Supersoft
