Rusty's Retirement news & patch notes

Hey folks!

I'm happy to announce a new Autumn mini-update coming to Rusty's Retirement on October 1st, just in time for Halloween and the falling leaves.

What's new?

• A new Autumn map where mushrooms spawn randomly across the map. They will be harvestable by your harvest bots, and they can be used to produce biofuel!

• Small note: mushrooms will only spawn on unused tiles

• More berry bushes (finally!)

• We've added plenty of Halloween decorations for you to get your spook on

• All pumpkins will be converted to Jack-o'-lanterns for the month of October, with several different variations, including a giant version!

• Oh, I almost forgot! Rusty will also be dressing up as a ghost :laugh_rusty: :laugh_rusty: :laugh_rusty:

See you on October 1st!

Hi folks!!

I'm super excited for today's update, so let's jump straight into it!

Introducing the new Balatro-themed map!

In other words, Rusty's Jimbo's Retirement!

The new map has complete character swaps, new houses, and a brand-new mechanic: harvesting crops spawns poker cards that can be played for spare parts.

Just like in the previous crossover, I wanted to take a specific mechanic from Balatro and try to squeeze it into Rusty's. I had to do something with poker cards and the joker effects!

How does it work?

Normally, when you harvest a crop, you are rewarded with a small amount of spare parts instantly.

Now, when you harvest a crop, those spare parts are automatically played in a poker hand, and the joker will apply its effect to the result.

It's pretty OP, so we had to adjust some prices from the normal base game.

Create a new savefile to access the new farm!

I'm super pleased with how this collab turned out, especially with how the poker mechanics are implemented into the game ːorange_heartː

If you haven't played Balatro yet, I wholeheartedly recommend it. It is truly one of a kind, and it actually has nothing to do with gambling (if you were worried about that!)

If you own Rusty, you can get an additional -10% off of Balatro, and vice-versa.

My little brother made a game all by himself!

Okay okay, I might have helped here and there with a few things but he did do like 95% of the work! I'm very impressed with how fast he picked up coding in Unity's game engine, plus the visuals look absolutely amazing - it really makes you want to decorate.

Skatehouse is a simplified version of a shop simulator with some idle mechanics. It's his first game, and I'd really appreciate it if you showed him some love and checked it out ːorange_heartː

Proud big brother moment!!

That's it for today folks, I hope you enjoy the new Balatro map!

Introducing the new Vampire Survivor-themed map!

Create a new savefile to access the new farm!

Mini Morris has entered the chat

The future

• Setting a massive Taskbar height would launch the game completely off the screen. This should be fixed now (I accidentally broke it with the Winter update :sigh_haiku: )
• If you accidentally hit the spacebar to pause the game, you can now click on the pause icon to unpause. It's a small thing but people reported that they were getting stuck.
• Rusty/Haiku were glitching out when trying to move a box that had been deleted. This one was hard to reproduce on my end so I just added more checks to make sure that they wouldn't get stuck.
• Upgrading bots immediately gave the upgrade even if Echo was still working on the building. This should also be fixed now!
• And I've also fixed a few things which were mainly cosmetic :happy_splunk:

I'm happy to announce that we finally have Steam Trading cards for Rusty!

Trading cards

Badges + Foil

Emoticons

Stickers

Frames

Profile pictures

Other news: we have our first "bottom-of-your-screen" game to release after Rusty!

• Improved the odds slightly in the Reaper’s shop - now you have a higher chance to get a chip for a crop that doesn’t have any chips equipped.
• I’ve added a double confirmation when buying chips so you don’t accidentally overwrite an existing chip with a misclick.
• The crop information panel is now displayed when hovering over a chip allowing you to compare what chips you have equipped more easily.
• Added visual feedback for when you don’t have enough biofuel, spare parts, or fossils.
• Chickens, cats, and dogs should now appear correctly in the Statistics tab.

• Moving a chicken coop or a pet house would contribute to the "Cluck, cluck" and "Have a few pets" achievements. It should be fixed now!
• The !plant command for the Twitch integration was causing viewer bots to plant "ghost" crops. This should also be fixed!

What's new?

- New map: Snowy Fields

- New animal: Deer

- New decorations: Christmas decorations

- New character: Reaper's Outpost

- New animal: Cats and Dogs

- New animal: Chickens

- New polish: Characters talk to each other

- New polish: Pinion's Goldcrests

- New polish: Rusty wears a Christmas hat

What's improved?

• New achievements have been added to support the new content!
• Slate’s fossil cap has been increased. New formula = maximum needed fossils * 3.
• Fertilizer now has a cap of 999 which should stop animals from endlessly consuming crops and pooping.
• Splunk will now seed crop patches that are 75% empty and he will also pick the closest crop patch instead of randomly choosing one across the farm.
• Bulbhives have been renamed to Beehives to avoid confusion between the two words.
• Beehives also show a line between the hive and Forbic indicating that the character is coming to harvest the biofuel.
• Beehives also need to be harvested less often. Don't worry though, they still accumulate the same amount of biofuel as before.
• Disabling a bot will now make said bot return to their station after they have completed their ongoing task.
• Added 8 new crops to unlock, plus three new giant crops.

What's fixed?

• Fixed an issue where a green dot would appear on top of the crop/berry tabs at the beginning of the game.
• Fixed a bug which would cause Splunk to freeze if you placed a 'Don't seed' sign right before he starts planting seeds.
• Fixed a bug where disabled bots would accidentally take a 'task' after loading the game.
• Added a second method of getting an OAuth token in the Twitch Integration guide.
• Fixed an issue which would cause Twitch viewer bots to freeze when planting seeds on a 'Don't seed' crop patch.
• Added a bit of leeway to the Architect achievement.

What are the Steam Awards?

Why nominate Rusty's Retirement?

In case you missed it:

Personal life

New Winter Update! (work-in-progress)

My little brother is dipping his toes into game dev!

• Zoom in and out was incrementing the camera's scale by multiples of 2 - it is fixed and will now increment by 1 as intended.
• Moving the camera in vertical mode with the arrow keys was also zooming in and out due to some old code still being active, this has also been fixed now.
• Fixed some weird camera clamping issues that were causing the camera to jump around.
• Trackpad scrolling only works in horizontal mode for now until I fix some of the issues that popped up on vertical farms.
• Golden pumpkins were popping with one click when they should have been popping after 36 clicks. Now they pop after 36 clicks and this should help prevent harvesting giant golden pumpkins by accident.
• Splunk’s new ‘Do not seed’ sign should be fixed.
• Moving houses or buildings on top of themselves would free up the land beneath them allowing people to build where they shouldn't be able to. This has been fixed because it was causing all sorts of bugs and issues.
• And... Estonian has been added to the game as a language option! (let's hope it doesn't break anything)

Build 1.0.15+ hotfix

• Moving crop patches would block the ability to plant seeds on top of them and sometimes you could even build on them. Fixed!
• Disabling and enabling bot stations should now save correctly.

1. Move buildings one tile!

2. Move animals (and destroy empty feeders)

3. Improved bees and butterflies

Those are the 3 main big things,

• You can now use the arrow keys to move around the farm. Tip: hold down Shift + Arrow key to speed up the camera panning.
• You can also use the trackpad scroll to move around the map.
• Golden Metal Pumpkins are now harvestable. You just have to click on it a lot to pop it.
• You can disable/enable bot stations. This will prevent the bot from recharging and consuming biofuel. This is a bit of an advanced feature so I decided not to make the button too obvious.
• Bot biofuel consumption after upgrading has been lowered slightly. Capacity upgrades still add 1 biofuel but speed upgrades now add 0.5 biofuel (the total is rounded).
• Splunk has a new sign available in the shop. The ‘Do not seed’ sign will prevent Splunk from planting crops.
• Splunk will now plant on empty crop patches that are occupied by a giant crop or a fossil.
• The inspect function will now show you how many waterings a crop still needs and how many harvests a crop has remaining.
• I have also added a notification icon to some of the tabs, so you can quickly see if you have anything new to unlock without having to cycle through all the tabs all the time.
• And lastly, I gave the remove crops button a new icon so it wouldn’t be confused with the demolish buildings icon.

Performance improvements

• Colorkey - sets the background color to black and then converts any black pixels into transparent ones.
• Alpha - sets the background transparent and is overall more performant but the only drawback is that it does not work well with overlays.
• Green screen - sets the background color to green and converts any green pixels into transparent ones. This setting is mainly used by streamers.

• Achievements will try to trigger more often. If not, then please check that Steam is connected otherwise they will not trigger.
• Backups of your savefiles will happen automatically every minute. I hope this will help in case a savefile gets corrupted.
• Made some improvements to the Japanese and Chinese-simplified translations.
• Added credits for the translators

Looking for people to test the performance beta branch!

• Fixed: Echo no longer gets stuck if you delete the bot station while he is working on it.
• Fixed: Move/build building no longer checks the mouse position, but rather the tile that was clicked on. -> face palm moment. This should lead to more reliable placement, no more overlapping buildings or accidentally placing stuff out of range.
• Fixed: You can no longer accidentally upgrade, demolish, or move buildings with a right-click or middle-click. Left-click is now the main button action.
• Made some improvements to the ‘move’ function so that it works more reliably.
• Fixed: Biofuel bots will 100%-most-definitely ignore the lowest crop that’s available in your inventory (unless they have no other choice)
• Added: Removed the strange computer from peoples farms. It will spawn when you create a new farm but it is now treated as a decoration so that means you can demolish it if you’d like. (This should also help people trigger the Architect achievement)
• Added: You can now inspect berry bushes, no more guessing which ones you have already planted.
• Added: Berry bushes now also appear under Pinion’s statistics tab.
• Added: Splunk now ignores giant crops, and Slate who might be digging up a fossil on an otherwise completely empty crop patch.
• Fixed: After using the demolish function in the bees tab, clicking to place a bush maintains the bulldozer icon.
• Added: When focus mode is enabled, in other words, when crop/biofuel production time is doubled, the crop growth times will also double in the UI window that pops up when hovering over a crop.

SOLUTION: We've added a small script that will run and add this option for you before the game is opened!

If you are experiencing a black screen and restarting doesn't help, please follow this step-by-step guide on how to fix it: https://imgur.com/a/7LOAktG

• Splunk no longer wanders off the screen.
• Splunk will wander around less if there is work to be done.
• Splunk also received a bit of a speed boost + 25%
• Feeder bots were still causing a lot of frustration among players, so they will now take the lowest crop that is available in your inventory.
• To remove further frustration, Biofuel bots will now ignore the lowest crop available in your inventory. However, they will still use said crop if there is no other option available - this is to prevent the early game from breaking.
• Animals will eat less crops and roam around the farm more. They should still poop roughly the same amount.
• Added a check to retroactively fix any unlocked lands that were still acting as if they were blocked.
• Fixed an issue where the game was getting stuck on Mac when switching to another desktop or fullscreen application.

In one week, the community has achieved the following in-game milestones:

• Collectively, you have earned 105 BILLION Spare Parts and produced 52 BILLION Biofuel!
• You have also grown 5.4 billion giant pumpkins, 5 billion giant cucumbers, and 2.9 billion giant tomatoes. A lucky few have spawned over 4000 super rare GOLDEN PUMPKINS!
• Combined you've collected over 13.8 billion poop from animals.
• You've watered 44 billion crops and harvested 32 trillion crops.
• And spent over 21 billion on decorations for your farm!

Talking of big numbers, Rusty's Retirement officially sold more than 100,000 copies within the first 5 days!

We have uploaded the official soundtrack to Bandcamp and YouTube!

And here is some cool stuff that people have sent me!

If you are experiencing a black screen and restarting doesn't help, please follow this step-by-step guide on how to fix it: https://imgur.com/a/7LOAktG

• Improved performance for bigger resolution / high refresh rate monitors. We’ve updated Unity to a much newer version (2022 LTS) and we’ve removed some unnecessary computing tasks around how the transparency was being drawn. Please let me know how this works, it might not be perfect but it should be a lot better.
• Credited the people who spent three whole days helping me with this issue!
• With the improved performance implementation, some of the UI elements had to be shuffled around.
• Save file improvements! After talking with the folks who made the save file plugin, we have improved the code, added checks to catch errors, and lastly added automatic backups which will load if the original file is corrupted.
• The new save code only writes once to the file when needed so hopefully power outages and sudden crashes will no longer affect save files. While I cannot restore previously corrupted files, I hope this update will prevent files from being wiped in the future.
• In-game timer should now update correctly and according to real-time. Previously it would either go faster or slower than real time depending on the frame rate set in the graphics settings.
• The first piece of the blocked land on the right side is now actually blocked lol.
• Previously, saving while Rusty was clearing a piece of land would lock that piece of land when loading the game back up. This should be fixed now!
• Restarting the game should automatically detect your monitor's resolution and set the game to that resolution. Before you had to physically press R or T to reset the camera/resolution.
• Added more checks for achievements like 10 Million Spare Parts, 1 Million Biofuel, 1 Million Watered Crops, and 1 Million Harvested Crops. There are now 3 different places in the game that can trigger these achievements (on every load) so hopefully they will work more consistently.
• Speaking of 1 Million Harvests, I have decided to lower the achievement down to 250,000 Harvests. This was a miscalculation on my part and to me 1 Million seems a little too far out of reach. Running the game for days on end is not fun - especially when the game’s content does not currently match the hours needed to reach those numbers. I think lowering it to 250k still makes it a grindy-idle achievement but it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

• Improved performance for bigger resolution / high refresh rate monitors. We’ve updated Unity to a much newer version (2022 LTS) and we’ve removed some unnecessary computing tasks around how the transparency was being drawn. Please let me know how this works, it might not be perfect but it should be a lot better.
• Credited the people who spent three whole days helping me with this issue!
• With the improved performance implementation, some of the UI elements had to be shuffled around.
• In-game timer should now update correctly and according to real-time. Previously it would either go faster or slower than real time depending on the frame rate set in the graphics settings.
• The first piece of the blocked land on the right side is now actually blocked lol.
• Restarting the game should automatically detect your monitor's resolution and set the game to that resolution. Before you had to physically press R or T to reset the camera/resolution.
• Added more checks for achievements like 10 Million Spare Parts, 1 Million Biofuel, 1 Million Watered Crops, and 1 Million Harvested Crops. There are now 3 different places in the game that can trigger these achievements (on every load) so hopefully they will work more consistently.
• Speaking of 1 Million Harvests, I have decided to lower the achievement down to 250,000 Harvests. This was a miscalculation on my part and to me 1 Million seems a little too far out of reach. Running the game for days on end is not fun - especially when the game’s content does not currently match the hours needed to reach those numbers. I think lowering it to 250k still makes it a grindy-idle achievement but it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

• Fixed: Some houses were unmoveable because sometimes another collider would block the ability to click and select the house. Now no colliders are blocking this action so it should work as intended.
• Fixed: You can no longer upgrade a building that is still being built which would cause Echo to get stuck.
• Fixed: Steam cloud saves for Mac.
• Not entirely sure about this one because I couldn’t replicate it on my end but people have reported that connecting to Twitch could be creating an infinite loop in the code. I’ve added a 5-second buffer between connecting and checking whether the game is still connected to Twitch. It’s a bit of a shot in the dark but hopefully it’ll keep the game from crashing.
• Added: Crop/building information panels now move to the right when setting the vertical farm to the left side of the screen. Zooming is still a bit wonky but I hope this helps in the meantime!

• Feeder bots will look at your inventory and choose between the 3 lowest crops available. This should help push out low-level crops from your inventory, and that way biofuel bots are more likely to use better crops. Biofuel bots choose at random to evenly distribute crops.
• Added an extra check for the Play for 1hr/24hr/48hr achievement.
• Moving a house, saving, and then reloading would lock their respective features. Now when moving a house, it should keep the features you’ve unlocked.
• Fixed random individual crops from never getting watered! Thank you ArtificialColors for finding out how to reproduce this one because I had been scratching my head all weekend.
• If you moved a bot, the game would think that you demolished it and as a result, their upgrade cost would be reduced (which is expected behavior for demolishing, just not for moving). Now, moving a bot doesn’t affect the upgrade price.
• Updated “How does Splunk work?” Help description.
• You can now use the middle mouse button to drag the camera around while moving or building without it triggering the placement.
• Pressing “R” should resize the game to your monitor. I have also added an alternative shortcut “T” which does the same thing but this code checks other monitor parameters. If the game is locked into some weird resolution, please try using these two shortcuts.
• Biofuel converters should now complete regardless of their visual indicator, hopefully, this will stop biofuel converters from getting stuck.
• Slate will now dig more fossils!

• Fixed unlocking the last crop in the list.
• Adjusted some colors in the Blossom Forest map to better match the vibe.
• Fixed decoration prices.
• Feeder bots will now prioritize low-level crops and ignore berries.
• Fixed an issue where fertilizer bots after a while would only fertilize one crop tile and return to base to recharge.
• The game will now save when loading an existing save file or when creating a new one.
• I’ve also added backup save files just in case. Occasionally, some Antivirus softwares would just wipe the save file. Now you can check if there is a backup (.bac) and copy-paste its contents over. Also, please mark this folder as safe in your Antivirus to prevent it from happening in the future: Paste this into Run: %USERPROFILE%/AppData/LocalLow/MisterMorrisGames/Rusty's Retirement/ to find the folder
• I accidentally gave giant golden pumpkins a 100% spawn rate, this change was only live for 10 minutes before being reverted, so I hope it didn't affect many people 🤞

• Fixed the maxed bot achievements. They were triggering when simply building a bot for the first time.
• Fixed the blocked lands on the right side. Previously, they would load in already unlocked.
• Fixed the non-pixel font on the blocked lands and house buttons.
• Fixed an issue with loading save files. They occasionally got stuck on trying to load buildings with no animals. This only happened if a feeder was previously built in the exact same location.
• Fixed an issue where if you had the move option selected and Rusty completed a task of moving another building, the move option would disable and act weirdly. It should behave as expected now.
• If you unlocked a new map but left the game without saving then you would be softlocked into the first map until you completed that map again. I’ve added a check at the beginning of the load to see if you’ve unlocked the next map.

Giant crops

Moving buildings

Splunk, our Savior

Vertical mode

Priority List

I hope you enjoy the game, it's been really fun to make, and I can't wait to see what the community thinks!

Decoration Competition Winners

"Am I doing this right" haha this one made me chuckle - MattGesetzt

My wife's favorite, aka the optimizer spreadsheet - numa_smells

A bit of everything (plus Rusty chillin') - z41b3

A beautiful balance between machine and life - Marine_Yanyan

Loving the use of paths combined with robot stations - nattydew

And the winners are...

ːorange_heartː ksss0929!

ːorange_heartː acaogoesmoo!