November 2026 dev log, part one: sick cows, compost and a lighter Equestrian

There’s a lot more I want to do before the next big update, but some of these fixes have been waiting too long, so they’re going out now with everything that’s ready alongside them.

Equestrian 0.2.3: the crash on load

Someone playing on an iPad told me the game closed every time their world loaded. The cause was the carriages. Every paint colour of every vehicle was a full copy of its whole texture, and a texture takes far more memory once it’s loaded than the file size suggests. All together the resource pack came to about 293 MB in memory. Each paint layer now gets its own small sheet, and the pack is down to about 83 MB. The vehicles look exactly the same.

Also in 0.2.3:

• Foals stay grown. A foal that had grown up could turn back into a newborn. Fixed.
• The white block standing up behind a foal’s neck (a screenshot from the Discord) is gone.
• The Arabian’s face is smoothed: its dished profile used to be three flat steps.
• Round pen panels and gates can stand in water.
• The Vet Kit now shows a horse’s whole record: ancestry, coat, bond, and its stamina, health, gallop and jumping.
• A cart that won’t pack up because there’s something in it tells you what and where. Use the Driving Lines again and it packs up anyway, and the load comes to you.
• Message Board meat quests take graded meat too.

Farm Sim 0.7.0: livestock that need looking after

The cows, pigs and sheep get the horses’ stable care, with Equestrian’s own tools:

• Droppings soil their bedding, and the Muck Fork clears it.
• Hooves grow out (a sheep’s fastest, a pig’s slowest) and the Hoof Rasp trims them.
• Illness: a cough, foot rot, a lame leg, or bloat in cows and sheep. It comes from rain, mud, dirty bedding, missed meals or water, overgrown hooves, and a hungry animal gorging the next day. A sick one coughs, groans or lies down more; worse, its head hangs and it limps. Equestrian’s four remedies treat them.

The big difference from the horses: livestock can die of it. One that’s laid up and gets no remedy for three days dies, or one day with bloat. A horse never does. The chickens get their own version later.

They also keep together in herds now, each kind its own, and cows and sheep only graze where there’s grass, eating it down to dirt. It grows back.

No more wild cows

Vanilla cows, pigs, sheep and chickens don’t spawn in the wild any more. Farm stock comes from the vendors, and the room in the world’s animal cap goes to foxes and rabbits. For wild meat and leather there’s the Wild Berkshire, roaming in pairs and threes. It can’t be tamed. It’s wearing the Berkshire’s body for now, until the wild boar gets a model of its own.

Compost, Black Gold and crops with stars

• The Compost Bunker (3×3) and Small Compost Bunker (2×2) look like the bottom half of a Crossbuck stall wall. The menu works like a furnace: wood and leaf litter on top, manure or crops underneath, Black Gold out the side.
• Black Gold is farmland that never dries out and needs no hoe.
• Crops come up 1 to 3 stars: 1 or 2 from plain farmland, 2 or 3 from Black Gold.

The pile dries out a day after it’s turned, and four clicks of the Muck Fork turn it again. All the numbers (how much goes in, how long it takes, the star odds) are a first go, and I’ll tune them from what you tell me.

Livestock that slip past a fence get put back, and the game notes how they got out, so I can find the real cause.

Missing Blocks 1.3.2

• Fences and gates take water, so a fence line can run through a stream, and sliding barn doors stay put in it.
• The Euro Steel and Western Iron trims turn corners: an L where two walls meet, a stub to fill an outside corner, and a rod out to a Night Lite lamp post stood on them.
• Swinging windowed doors place properly.

Night Lite 1.5.3 and Equestrian Decor 0.3.3

• Night Lite: with the borders showing, every Safe Anchor sends up a tall red column, so one buried under a field is easy to find again.
• Equestrian Decor: stall walls built into a slope no longer reach into the dirt, grass or mud beside them.

Tell me what breaks

The compost and the livestock health are brand new, so this release is their first real test. If a bunker’s menu looks wrong, an animal falls ill too often, or one dies when it shouldn’t have, say so on the Discord.

What’s next

• Sounds: the rooster’s crow, and the bull’s and boar’s charges.
• Vendors with their own looks, and prices tuned with the community.
• The Shire, and jump poles in more colours.