Hello everyone!

Today I'm announcing Alpha 11, a new build of Kemoverse Online! I've been hard at work implementing some social features, and also adding a new area - the kitchen - as usual, I'll plug our ko-fi here first. If you like the events, development, and game plans and wish to see us work for a long time on this game, then we would really appreciate sending us money (or be a subscriber)! It would be a fine token this early on in development, and would help us get on our feet and give you a genuine and wonderful social experience. That's a rarity, you know... there are many who promise grand ideas and big rewards on kickstarters... but I build this with my own hands and deliver on the few things I promise. Just so you know.

Anyways, let's recap what's changed.

Kitchen: There is now a kitchen in the game! You can find it as the building next to the Sanctuary (where the collection boxes were at). Go in there, and you'll see quite a few new things. A pot, cutting board, prepping tray, smoker, slicer, grinder, etc etc etc. So what's this all about?

Well, basically, I added new game mechanics for the food making gameplay loop (you can read my previous post about it here) - you can now cook your veggies, fishes, bugs and mushrooms in the pot and make some delicious soup. Well, why would you like to have soup? Because it's delicious, of course, and it looks really nice. You should try and see how it looks ingame! There's a small guide on the Kemoverse wiki - more about that site later. Get yourself some food ingredients from the outside, come in here, grab a prepping tray (the cutting board near the water), click on the bugs/veggies/mushies in the pack inventory to place it on the tray, then wash it, cut it, and put it in the boiling pot. The pot might need some water first though, so just grab that bucket next to it to fill it up. After a while, the soup you made is done, and you can grab a bowl at the opposite side to get soup. Yummy! Helps with gnawing hunger and fatigue.

Yes, your character now feels two moods, hunger and energy, two different but related mechanics. Basically, you slowly get hungry the more you play, and it can be replenished either by making the soup and eating it, or just snacking on foods you find in the wild. Energy however is a separate thing, where if you move around and do activities, you get tired. If you're hungry, you get tired faster. You can recover energy by just sitting down (Ctrl+G) or sitting on a chair.

Gives a bit of consequence for existing in the Kemoverse, but hopefully, not too distracting. And motivating to make some soup. Ah, that steamy, warming, flavorful water... with bugs?! Hey, don't knock the Kemoverse cuisine off your bucket list yet.

Anyways, I also finally got around to implementing the plant seed system. I had previously locked it because, well, you could in theory plant as many plants as you wanted... putting a strain on the server and players. Well, planting now requires seeds, and you can get seeds in that tiny box (you can see it in the left corner of the image). It's most likely empty, because a limited number of new seeds are generated every friday when the foodraise resets and they are quickly grabbed!

Similar to the seeds, you can now also take resources from the collection boxes that's in the kitchen. Unlike seeds they reflect the amount of player contributed foods! So if no one collects and deposits, there's nothing to withdraw. By the way, your foodraise statistics are still counted by the server, and both your personal contribution to foodraise and contributing cooked meals to NPC are meant to give you rewards in the future. 

That's the kitchen: a basic gameplay location to prepare for many tasks and rewards in the future! Hope you like it!

First person view: you can now enter first person view in the game by zooming all the way in! It's quite the immersive mode and for me, at least, it gave me a refreshing perspective on everything we've built for the past few years. The environments, the weathers, everything - it's all so gorgeous... anyways, it should be compatible with all things you can do in the game (fishing, planting, spraying on wall, etc). Not much to say, other than, gosh, you have to try this out.

Slingshot: There's a slingshot now in the game. You can have very funny fights with other players (as long as they also equip a slingshot!). You can find it in the library, it's hidden somewhere there! Similarly, the bug net (and metal pipe, but that's an item not yet found in the world) can knock other players down if they also are holding one. Just playful fun when you don't feel like standing around and doing nothing. 

Eventpad: I've added a little calendar in the game that connects with the discord server, so new players can see upcoming events even if they aren't part of the discord. The plan is to use this for discord events of course, but also for future lore-themed events that are held by NPCs. So it's basically a rough prototype, but hopefully it will give some of you some ideas of what to look forward to. 

And aside from that, a new NPC was added - Retakatekt, you can find him wandering the campus during the night - as well as plenty of other little features: cards can now be sorted in to subfolders for organizing, the occupied switch in the planner now works (for now it blocks fighting even if you're holding a slingshot/bugnet/etc), fixed you sliding down slopes when animating... stuff like that. So all in all, a substantive, meaningful, and fun update! Holding the community events were a blast, and the new players were a good sign of awesome things coming up ahead.

Oh, and one final thing, the Kemoverse wiki - since a long time ago, I self hosted a wiki for writing out various ideas of lore, but I though it would be better used if I remade it in to a Kemoverse Online related wiki with player written guides. I, unfortunately, do not have the time or patience to carefully write out every gameplay mechanic out in detail (nor do i want to), so, I'll leave it up to active players to contribute whatever they want. I thoroughly enjoy reading everyone's interpretations of the Kemoverse world. Account creation is limited however, because I've had big problems with spambots. If you'd like an account, feel free to reach out to me in the discord, and I can temporarily enable account creation again for you.

See you in the Kemoverse!