Little Hats update for 15 March 2023

A quick overview of fixed bugs, improvements, and new things added in this update.

Note: There are still a few bugs left to fix, and some things that need to be patched in this new update, but because everyone has been waiting a long time for an update I have decided to upload it, will try to patch the remaining bugs in the following days.
Tim : )

New In Little Hats:

• Gnome Hunter AI has finally been added to the game! One of the things which should have been added long ago! You will now have to face the gnome hunter when out and about in the forest, if he catches you he will take you to his hunter house, lock you up or sell you to one of the human towns.

• The game now has a spider! Big ones and smaller ones. They will spawn on certain occasions and hunt for the player.

• The game now has an owl! So keep an eye on the sky, he's not friendly.

• Faries have been added to the game also! You can talk to them as well and some of them can teleport you across the map!

• About five fairy towns have been added to the map, also some small fairy tree houses in some places.

• There are now gnome traps that will spawn every ten minutes or so, in them, you can find free coins, and you will have a 50/50 chance at taking the coins and getting away with it, or... Getting trapped means that the human hunter will come to take you to his hunter house or sell you to a rich villager!

• The game now has a Field of View slider, and the default has been increased from 90 to 100, making the slightly more visible and things a little less claustrophobic.

• Churches in human towns now have churchbell sounds for more and better ambiance and emersion.

• The game now has Guard AI. Guards will now spawn at certain places and go after the player and once he has lost the player he will go back to his original guard location. If he catches player he will put them in the sell box, the same one the hunter uses.

• There are now 6 underground gnome houses throughout the map, they will get NPCs added to them in future updates.

• Gnome AI has been upgraded, there are now gnomes that perform certain tasks and some gnomes who will walk around.

• You can now find gnomes in the forest that will have some valuable information.

• Your gnome hat will now fall off when jumping or falling from tall heights, once you hit the ground it will fall back on your gnome head.

• When running really fast using the speedplants, your gnome hat will now come loose and your character will grab it and pull it back so as to not lose his/her hat.

• A big storage box has been added which can be relatively cheaply built to store up to 4 items.

• A small storage box can now be built which can store 1 item, this box can be cheaply made from your mobile crafting inventory to easily save items.

• House Sparrow now has bird sounds.

• More music has been added for when humans are chasing you, and the existing soundtrack has been altered.

• 5 more small caves have been added.

• You can now find treasure chests in caves and other places.

• The slow-day troll has seen some updates, now is not always as slow anymore, and also shakes the player unconscious, then the player wakes up in a boiling pot of troll stew.

• Two new gnomes have been added.

• You can now buy inventory upgrade potions that will increase how much you can stack per inventory slot.

• The game now by default has a blur effect when in third-person, which makes everything look much better and the gnomes much smaller! It does come at a slight performance cost but can be easily turned off or increased using a slider in the settings. You can also enable it for first-person mode.

• You now get a refund of your materials and resources used to build objects when you demolish them!

• There is now a small piece of intro music that plays each time you re-enter the game.

• The game should now have near full controller support, but the controller settings will be improved soon, as they are now mainly set for Steam controller but also still not optionally set.

• The game now has a completely new epic intro, slightly changing the story, and making it closer to the original vision for Little Hats.

• Dying has been changed, you now return to a place called the Craterlands, which is also where you came from in the story, and where the intro takes place. Upon returning to the Craterlands as a dead gnome you simply have to take another leap of faith and jump back toward the world to respawn, this sequence serves as a new loading screen.

• Respawning has been improved, and will now take less long.

• There is now a gamma slider in the graphics settings.

• You will now see your house-building station, or workbench on the map with the same symbol used in the compass, allowing you to more easily find your base.

• You can now craft a candle in the simple workbench.

Fixed Bugs and Improvements:

• Humans not having any hitboxes has been fixed.

• The game colors have been changed and the look is slightly different now, should be less washed out, a little less saturated, and a bit darker.

• The NPC duplication bug should now be fixed but will require further testing to ensure it's gone permanently. If you are currently playing on a save that had the duplication bug pre-update, then I highly recommend starting a new game. I apologize for this bug and the loss of progress, but the number of NPCs per area is designed so as to not cause lag, having them be duplicated even twice could heavily decrease performance and allow for lag spikes.

• The landscape acting strange when going fast using the speed plant has been fixed.

• Human towns and castles now have glowing lights during the night at a distance also.

• The gnome furnace in the fireplace now has proper shadows at all distances.

• The player will now get a message telling to drop a small animal such as squirrel in order to interact, otherwise player might get confused as to why E key was not working.

• the combat system has been improved, especially on the player side of things, fighting should feel much better.

• Crouching animations have been improved.

• Looking up and down in first-person mode will now actually make the gnome bend forward or backward to look up, making checking boxes easier, and when looking up you will no longer see the gnome's forehead.

• it will now no longer rain when player is standing underneath something, so rain will also stop in player-built houses. The gnome will also not become wet anymore when it's raining outside, and will now dry up when going inside.

• Rain effects will now certainly disappear when rain is over, whereas before the rain particles sometimes kept existing.

• Player character will now get a wet effect when going into the water, and will slowly dry up upon leaving the water.

• Movement has been improved, and new animations have been added.

• Player will also now get a message when holding item and wanting to pick up item that he should drop or store held/carried item first, as to not confuse the player on why he/she can't pick something up.

• Not having enough coins but clicking on sleep anyway now exits the going to sleep menu properly before player was stuck or had to click left mouse button to regain control.

• A lot of small errors have been fixed which should make the game play more smoothly, also cause fewer lag spikes.

• The bug where you unlock a new part of the main quest and then go back and talk to a previous character, and he resets your quest to when you first spoke with him has been fixed.

• Friendly human male talking to gnome anim has been slowed down, before character seemed to breathe very rapidly.

• Bolderberg AI will no longer hide in garden areas but stay on the path.

• Intro level was not unloaded because of bug when beginning to play, now it is.

• See-through color for objects has been changed, this time for real from red to green.

• More frog people have been placed around the map, but they are still hard to find! They also have a bigger walking radius now, which means they won't likely stay in the same loc for too long.

• Items such as food and resources now despawn between 60 to 180 seconds after they are dropped on the ground to prevent lag by having too many items spawned around the map and being loaded all at once.

• Metal should no longer refine on a campfire without logs or fire.

• Resources and items should no longer fall through landscape nature assets or player build objects.

• No longer able to infinitely hit night trolls or humans without them fighting back and them remaining stuck in hit animations.

• First couple of times you are about to place an object you will now get a tutorial message that says how you can rotate it.

• Humans are no longer able to grab you through walls

• Humans have had lots of improvements AI wise, they no longer always know where you are and will now search for you when they no longer see you and don't know what way you went.

• AI navigation of the world has been enhanced, they should now bump into fewer things and also know their way around the world better.

• The intro part of the world has been improved and now looks more like a proper forest.

• Picking up in-game spawned items such as resources on the ground or items from the storage dresser has been made easier, now picks up the item instantly instead of spawning it first and the player then having to grab it once again as a spawned item.

• Gnome towns and houses have had further optimization.

• Ducks now spawn again...

• Candles fires and lamps now have flames in them that behave more like real flames, giving everything around them a more beautiful aesthetic feeling. The candle mesh has also been improved, had some lighting errors.

• Humans and trolls now have a slight delay before being able to pick up player again after dropping player.

• The trolls have been made a bit easier.

• You can now stack up to 20 items per inventory slot (And buy upgrade potions to increase this to an unlimited amount).

• Disabling DOF no longer gets rid of interact text when looking at interactive object in-game

• Bug where player returns to standing animation when eating while sitting has been fixed, player can now no longer eat while sitting.

• water pomps now have sound effects.

• Campfires were sometimes invisible, should now be fixed.

• Fire particles have been optimized for better performance.

• Player wasn't able to drop human dishcloth.

• Instruction for using dish cloth and cleaning human plates has been made more clear.

• Swamp fog has been made more realistic.

• swam fog no longer looks strange above the swamp water from certain angles.

• Key that was unable to be picked up in one of the klein kampen houses now can be picked up.

• Human footsteps hearable from everywhere has been fixed.

• Troll 1 and humans should no longer sometimes be invisible, yet the exact cause of this bug has not been found, the current solution might not hold up and might continue further fixing.

• Boats not showing up after reloading save has been fixed. Boats were previously saved but not spawned, meaning that they should all spawn again now, even on old saves. I do however recommend starting a new game in this update as much has changed and to ensure that all works well it would be best to start over, and we also have a new intro which is pretty cool haha.

• first few time food or certain item is dropped player will get notified that item or food will despawn in a minute or so, if despawn is enabled for that item or type of food.

• human houses now have better navigation data which means the human NPC's are better able to traverse around the towns, and won't be walking against walls.

• Third person camera has been positioned slightly higher, making things feel a bit better and also making the transition between the first and third person look better.

• Pressing e on an item while holding an item simply puts the current held item into the inventory and picks up the item on the ground making picking up lots of items a lot easier.

• when one inventory slot was stacked to the max, and you tried putting in another item of the same kind, even though there was another slot available it would say slot full, this no longer happens items no go in more smoothly, simply to the next slot.

• You can now decrease the number of plants, leaves, bushes small rocks etc, in the graphics settings to increase performance at the expense of the beauty of the world. Useful for people who play Little Hats on low-end gaming computers.

• Gnome towns have been better optimized, for CPU.

• Ravenwout in particular has been optimized much better for both cpu and gpu, lots of the old merged-together interior assets have been replaced with new ones, making the game also take up less space on your computers. The interiors have also slightly been improved.

• last of the merged assets which created big expensive meshes have been replaced, causing the game to shrink in disk size more and also increasing performance.

• The game had about 1200 tree saplings to cut down, all as loose objects which decreased performance, we now have 2210 tree saplings using a new system, which has increased performance!

• The metal rocks in the game have also been replaced and perform better now, but still remain at a total count of 220 to keep them rare.

• The game had about 500 rocks to mine, all as loose objects which decreased performance, we now have 725 at better performance

• Fox AI has slightly been improved and he should no longer be able to move around while sleeping!

• trees have better textures, more detailed.

• All of the hitboxes have been optimized further making the game run better and lighter on the CPU.

• Animals should no longer be getting stuck in the water.

• Gold spawn system has been changed in human interiors, further optimizing the game.

• Cave spikes have been nerved and have improved looks.

• Trolls spawning in caves have also been nerved.

• Speed plants are now easier to use, just running is now enough to activate them.

• you can now hear the golden horn sound every now and again from its hiding place.

• A few more road signs have been added along human road toward Witberg Castle.

• Some nature assets have been improved, and now look way better.

• part of the landscape texture such as the leaf ground and mossy textures are now 3d making the ground more detailed.

• A fairy has been added to the deepest cave, next to the golden tuning fork, so you won't have to walk all the way back once you've made it, and the same goes for the golden horn in the tower.

• Not being able to eat food from berry bush or other wild food should be fixed and no longer freezes to where you can't pick any berries anymore.

• Main menu has slightly changed, as well as the text that is shown when choosing Normal Mode or Passive Mode.

• No longer able to get stuck in human fountains.

• you can now drink from human fountains, they now also have water effects, and slash effects.

• Human outside water pomp now has sound effects and splash effects, player becomes wet when walking through water.

• rope plants have been made a little more rare.

• Player-built or bought candles now fade light at distance for better performance.

• invisible church inside in klein kampen no longer visible, church windows now work same as other windows in-game.

• floating knife no longer floats in steynstad house, hotel/inn.

• sleeping bag can now also be crafting from simple crafting station.

• gnome houses and bridges now look more detailed, higher texture res.

• What used to be the High option for view distance in graphics settings is now the lowest you can go and is now Low, to avoid NPCs and other things looking really bad. Other new options such as foilage percentage should allow you to increase performance to balance it out.

• Wooden doors now have a proper ghost look when preparing to place them.

• putting resources into working station now should sound little less loud.

• rivers have been updated, now are more optimized, and work slightly better, but will need further improvement in the future.

• keep holding E to destroy message no longer appears when trying to put all gathered resources into a crafting table at once.

• you can now mine metal ore from metal rock using the primitive pickaxe but it will not spawn as much metal as when using the other pickaxe.

• Fox no longer stays in wrong rotation when exiting riding fox on hillside.

• Some more loading screen tips have been added, and some have been replaced that were outdated.

• All gnome characters have had improvements, look better now, especially their lighting has been improved.

• Trolls should no longer be able to hold you inside walls, and other objects and will instead rotate away from it so the player doesn't get stuck upon being released.

• Human castle now has proper human ambiance.

• There are now fairies in the caves to tell the player of what they need to be able to make it all the way to the special steyndike keys.

• Putting on a new gnome shirt caused a lag spike, this has been fixed.

• Entering a gnome house that had within it a gnome shirt also caused a lag spike, this has also been fixed.

• Gerwini and king not despawning after saving and reloading the game before speaking to them has been fixed.