Aside from releasing Swirl Watch and putting together another content update for Hyperspace Dogfights I've also make some progress with the spring update.

Here is an overview for what has been happening:

Suit Mods

You can now create suit symbionts that modify your player character. These are geared towards the combat portion of the game. Suit symbionts will be your main way to increase health and shields for example.

As you can see there is also a framework for buffs and debuffs now to support certain suit mod mechanics.

I'm also still experimenting with the mod systems, trying to see what sticks. Suit mods don't use a combination of mods to create their item, they just need a single base mod. They also have fewer mod slot types than weapons or crops, but can have multiple slots of the same type. Skin is or health/shields, muscles is for speed, strings is for dodging and blood affects suit energy usage. The base mods for your suit all grant different amounts of these slots, so the resulting suit symbionts will favor specific aspects of your character stats.

As shown, suit mods won't just affect stats though, they can also augment your moveset in various ways, grant temporary effects, or change some overarching mechanics of combat.

Seasons

After that I worked on a lot of additional sprites for the different seasons. In the current design, the (Re-)Birth, Life, Decay, Death cycle of the whales roughly corresponds to a temperate earth-like climate. As you might expect this will affect which crops you can grow and which life forms you can encounter in the wild. It might also affect which areas of the world you can access, right now death season removes low feather shrubs and makes water traversable for example (not shown on on gif).

Weather

To further differentiate the seasons I then added in the weather system that features stuff like causality rain, necrotic particle fall and dust storms among other things. The different weather conditions all come with their own ambiance sound.

Vetai also gives you some athmo data at the start of the day so you can plan ahead.

Tool Mods

Then I went back to finally finish up the baseline for the mod system, with your multi tool becoming the final piece of gear you can modify ingame.

Tool base code defines what grade of trees/rocks you can exploit, which will also gate off some parts of the world. So tool base mods will be hard to acquire. But on the bright side, tool base mods are anomalous and do not get used up when creating a tool. This basically makes them permanent upgrades once you get your hands on them. Tools again come with multiple mod slots of the same type, so you can specialist your tool into various directions simultaneously. Submods can affect all kinds of farm activities, irrigation and parasite fishing included.

Options menu, title screen, tree cut rework and tutorial overhaul are the remaining things I want to accomplish before the spring update.

For the title screen I'm considering focusing on save slots that show little vignettes made in spritestack.

These would have a couple variants and change depending on what you last did in the game.

I'm not entirely sure if I'll release the spring update to the public, since the game still has tons of problems and reworking the tutorial and tree cutting is really only just the start. The game also still needs way more content to be viable. Additional crops to fill those seasons, resources to make use of those tool mods, tool mods that interact with farming, parasite variants for different weather/seasons,- there is a lot still to be done. So maybe Summer/Life will be the next release, with much more content than what is in now. Let's see.