While technically this is January’s update, we decided to delay it to a couple days into February to make sure everything was ready. Better late than never, right? We hope you enjoy this update because we’ve worked hard on bringing new things to HoFa. 🤗

🌞 Happy Groundhog Day!

Macon Green thought it would be helpful to the environment to purchase and release a whole coterie of groundhogs. Unfortunately, she did not consider the influx new holes would have on the wilds (nor anything else). The wilds are overflowing with groundhogs and the locals need your help. See if you can catch those pesky groundhogs! From today until February 9th help catch all the groundhogs and keep a few for yourself!

Note: We are aware that the groundhog may disappear if the map is shifting. We are working on a fix for this, but we couldn’t fit it into this update. Please bear with this while we work behind the scenes to make the event generation within the explore better. Thank you!

🗺️ Explore Quests

It’s an exciting new day in HoFa and you better be ready to explore! After much preparation and community building, the locals have managed to work out a new system to help the town's economy.  Town locals are now confident in sending everyone on quests!

The Quests

While exploring, you may stumble upon any number of local NPCs who are in need of help through:

• Finding them an item in explore
• Collecting multiple items for them
• Crafting an item they need
• Delivering item(s) to someone for them
• Or capturing their next trusty steed!

You may only have 1 quest type active at a time. 

Difficulty

Each quest type has a difficulty of easy, medium, or hard (1 - 3 stars) which determines the minimum and maximum payout for completing the quest. Easy quests are considered able to be completed within 0 to 4 hours while hard quests can take up to 24 hours. However, all quests allow you 24 hours to complete them.

• Finding

• • 1* - These items are very common

• • 2* - These items are common

• • 3* - These items are uncommon

• Collecting

• • 1* - These items can be bought and delivered

• • 2* - These items must be crafted and delivered

• • 3* - These items must be found in explore and delivered

• Crafting

• • 1* - Requires dyeing

• • 2* - Requires cooking

• • 3* - Requires encrusting

• Delivering

• • 1* - These items can be bought and delivered 

• • 2* - These items must be crafted and delivered

• • 3* - These items must be found in explore and delivered

• Capturing

• • 1* - This only requires you to catch a wild horse

• • 2* - You need to catch a specific body type and gender of horse

• • 3* - You need to catch a specific breed of horse

The Benefit

When you meet an NPC, you have the option to accept or reject their request. Rejecting their request currently has no consequence, but accepting has great benefits! By accepting the request and completing it you gain:

• Bits 
• Ingots (% chance for only for 2* and 3* quests)
• Player level points
• Player traits
• Bits and ingots back from cost of buying and/or crafting items

If you find yourself unable to complete a quest or want to give up, visit the NPCs page to abandon the quest.

Help from a Friend

If you find a quest to be too difficult, you can open them up so a friend can help you complete it. If your friend completes a quest for you they are rewarded with the player points and one half of the quest payment. To view your friends’ open quests, visit their profile page and go to the Quests tab.

View of a friends profile page with active quests.

Explore Item Rates

Due to these changes, explore item rates have been adjusted in hopes of more varied item drop rates. The injury rate has been lowered as well.

Due to too many of them entering the market, Breed Coins are on a pause from being found in explore. They may make a reappearance some time in the future, but we won’t know until we observe if their market value improves.

🗒️ User Log

Want to know (almost)  everything you have ever done on HoFa? You can now see activity in your account by going to Account > User Log. This will track everything from explore events to money, horses, and items entering and leaving your account. This has long been needed for tracking how things move between accounts and will help us with debugging issues.  The player log is limited to the last month of activity, and we’ll be evaluating if that needs to be reduced in future updates.

Screenshot of the player log showing recent activity.

Note: We’re still working on adding in comprehensive logs for everything. We’ll continue to work on this behind the scenes and they will become more robust soon!

📒 Training Log

It has come to our attention that a feature of Training Manual II, the ability to see a training log was never transferred into our existing code base. This has been corrected! If you have the Training Manual II, you should now see the Training Log as a tab in your Training Center.

Screenshot of a player’s training log.

💕 Breeding Requests

As a QoL update, there is now a breeding requests tab in the Breeding Grounds. This allows you to see, accept, and reject any incoming requests. New notifications for breeding requests now go directly to that tab with the newest requests showing first.

🤗 Online Players

We wanted to tackle another QoL change in this update. The online players list is now arranged in rows to improve readability. A new section has also been added to the top so you can easily see which of your friends are online.

Friends who are working on requests from NPCs will show as “Actively Questing…” You can then go to their profile and see if they’re requesting any help.

🏘️ New Club Rule: Removing a President

In our last update, we announced that a new rule will be introduced to clubs: presidents will be automatically removed after 90 days of not logging in. This will go into effect tonight when crons run. Anyone can add their name to the ballot for president, and elections will last for 7 days. Once an election is won, the new president will have control of the club.

⚒️ Small Tweaks

• Somehow the profile icons reverted to older icons. This is now fixed with updated icons for breeding grounds, sales pen, and training center.
• When you submit a crossbreed campaign, it will now convert the club into a game owned club, meaning you can submit any horse into halter shows.
• Retired horses will now keep notes saved. Note that this is not a retroactive change and will only take effect moving forward.
• You will now only be charged club fees if you applied and were accepted into a club.
• You will no longer be charged fees for putting in an application for horses with clubs. You’ll be charged only once accepted.
• You no longer have the ability to kick yourself if you’re the president of a club.

🦟 Bug Squashes

• Bug #1288 - Presidents will no longer receive notifications for horses applying to their club if registration is set to public.
• Bug #1114 - Made improvements to pulling items into trades so it should load faster and not break for large inventories.
• Bug #1300 - You should no longer be able to explore with a frozen horse.
• Bug #1301 - Fixed AMH wester gems
• Bug #1297 - Fixed missing pad layer
• Bug #1296 - Fixed Paso Snowflake pads
• Bug #1294 - Fixed Mustang Holiday Red Pad
• Bug #1285 - Fixed IC Apatite harness layer
• Re-re-re-re-re-fixed Akhal Teke layers.

🎨 Artist Search

As most of you know, our horse artist Solo left last year and Curly has been working on the horse base art. The past year, we have tried out several artists but none have been able to match Solo's beautiful style. We’ve sustained the game by piecing together new horse bases from older horse bases to keep up new releases and update old bases (👀). To continue to grow the game, this isn’t a solution for the long term so we’re on the search for a new horse artist.

We’re opening up applications to our players and for suggestions. If you are or know of any artist who could match Solo’s style, email [email protected] and we’d love to take a look. 

The position pays $20/hr with 5 -10 hours weekly. When emailing, please  send your portfolio and we will be in touch to do a test run. All test runs will be paid for the time.

Applicants must:

• Be 18+ years old
• Use ClipStudio Paint, Photoshop, or similar software
• Have knowledge of greyscale drawing and coloring
• Have a portfolio or created examples for us to review style
• Access and use Discord
• Be willing to sign an NDA and artist contract

🎬 Livestream

Join us February 6th at 8PM EST/game time for a livestream as Bed and I chat with the community, show some special sneak peeks, and enjoy a few games. We will be streaming to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube so make sure to follow us on those platforms!

🔮 Future Plans

In December, we took down our road map Trello board because we needed to update it for current plans. It is now open again to keep track of what’s upcoming.

Disclaimer: Plans are always subject to change. There are no promised timelines for anything in the roadmap. 

Next Updates

Unfortunately, we did not get around to the auction house rebuild that was previously planned for this update. Some features in this update took much longer than planned so we focused on that. However, we’ll be moving that into future updates that could be in February/March.

Other things to look forward to in the update later this month… 

In February, we’re focusing on quality of life improvements. There are lots of little tweaks that could greatly improve the HoFa gaming experience. We’ll be reviewing the Player Development ideas forum and implementing some ideas.

Future updates will include:

Auction House Rebuild (Moved forward from Jan)

There are quite a few bugs floating around within the horse auctions and we’re going to sit down at the drawing board and rebuild how the auctions work to optimize the process and eliminate bugs.

Player Levels

With a way to gain more level points for players, we will be monitoring the speed of progression and start to lock down some areas of the game to specific levels. HoFa has quite a few features and could quickly be overwhelming for new players as we continue to add more content. Locking down some features is both a reward for older players and some direction for newer players.

More Explore Interactions

With the groundhog event, we’ve built a system where you can encounter and interact with different events. Each event will have custom actions and various responses. Some responses can be positive but some can also be negative and take away money, player points, and even trait points. 

Improved Map Building

As mentioned in the groundhog event section, we are working on rebuilding some bits of the map building. We’ll be pushing a mini update soon with this!

More Fables

Yes! They’re coming! We’re working on testing these and will be soon adding them into Horse Fable.

We hope you all have a fantastic time with todays update and enjoy your weekend!

Cheers,

Bedouin & Curly