They do, yes. Since they can still be consumed, preventing decay would turn them into super cheap fridges 
They will decay a lot slower than if on the floor, however!
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Fair enough, they also increase the storing capacity 
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Hello there, fellow hearthlings!
Yes, you know why I’m here… It is time!
(A little late, actually… Sorry about that!)
Anyway, for this week we have one main objective and two secondary objectives to be found!
As usual, if you know what you’re looking at - please no spoilers - and if you don’t, try to not only spot what’s new but also guess what it is!
Are you ready?
Surprise Sunday!
Have fun and see you soon! 
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That’s a neat pot over that there campfire in the background.
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how now, brown cow?
also are those new crops in the background??? 
there seems to be a pot in the background too, maybe it’s related to early game cooking? (man i hope so)
also it looks like weaver baskets hold food items now?
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Brown moo-moos have been in the game since moo-moos were added
It always could - weaver baskets are “input bins” and can hold whatever any other input bins can
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That looks like a new wood chopping animation if I’m not mistaken, though admittedly I haven’t played a lot of Stonehearth for quite some time.
There’s a lot of things I want to comment on but many of them are due to me again not having a lot of exposure to the game recently. 
I’m not sure what those two crop fields are closest to the water, and it looks like there might be a new small bushel basket model?
Oh, and yes, the campfire and spit-hanging pot looks like a wonderful addition.
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Is it just me, or is the box content on the lower left looking more realistic placed?
By the way, congratulations to the team !
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I see some smaller & different baskets .
And the road - was it done manually? Seems very good.
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Maybe it is?! This is one of the secondary objectives! Good job
And here’s the main objective!
And here’s secondary objective number 2!
Alright then! Let’s begin this desktop thursday talking about…
Veggies & Farming
That’s it! Some of you that have been playing the game lately probably noticed the addition of Garlic and a new type of vegetable called savory vegetables, which also includes the tomato heirbloom fruit!
Well, this was just the beginning - or should we say “the first half”? - of a bigger and more meaningful change which is all about vegetables and, by extension, farming!
Before I continue, however, I want to go over the reasons for this change. As you know, this whole time one of the main goals of ACE has been to build upon, improve and extend the base game experience, and while we completely reworked farming very early on, we never really gave much thought to what farming itself produces. As time passed, we started noticing more and more how “easy” the game can be with farming. Most players with a farmer will usually overproduce, having sometimes hundreds of baskets of produce rotting on the fields themselves. We tried mitigating this over time by adding some features like the ability to toggle harvesting (so you can stop harvesting when you have too much) among other things - and there’s other things we might do, of course. But this time we’ve decided to look at the products themselves…
And the first thing we’ve noticed is that a lot of the vegetables in the game are the same. You have several options: carrots, turnips, pumpkins, sweet potatoes… But they’re essentially the same. Other than faction changes, if you have different seeds learned, there’s no incentive whatsoever to plant different vegetables.
Of course, we know that a lot changed with ACE and we now have several uses for the most diverse resources that were previously overlooked - and we’ve decided we can do the same with our beloved veggies! At the same time, we know changes are better when they’re easier to adapt to, so we tried to look for what most vegetables already in the game have in common and then add what we feel was lacking!
So, in summary:
- Crops (especially vegetables) are all the same, sort of
- Farming is too easy/you’re always overflowing with food
And so we came up with three vegetable categories: Hearty, Savory and Leafy Greens
Hearty vegetables
These are the majority of the vegetables in the base game, and you can think of them as the chonky, starchy or plumpy veggies that you can slice and dice, make cubes out of, etc. Carrots, pumpkins, sweet potatoes - all of these are hearty veggies. And as you can imagine, most recipes that used veggies before will also require hearty veggies, so here we cover the “easy to adapt to change” part. Not a lot will change, but a lot will open up!
Savory Veggies
Then on the last ACE update you were all introduced to the savory veggies! These are the more spicy veggies in the sense of not really being starchy but actually full of flavor, unique in taste. We introduced the garlic, which can be found and learned by all the kingdoms in the game, but also made tomatoes heirbloom a savory veggie due to its very unique flavor and context.
And finally, with the next update, we’ll be completing the whole “vegetable paradigm” with the leafy vegetables. There will be four vegetables fitting that category, three of which will be coming alongside entire new crops!
I present you the cabbage, lettuce, turnip greens and beet greens!
Leafy Greens
Leafy vegetables were definitely missing from Stonehearth! Especially if you consider that the cabbage was such an important, staple vegetable for a lot of the places and times that inspire most of the kingdoms in the game. So they are coming now!
The new crops are Cabbage, Lettuce and Beetroots. Turnip Greens, as you can imagine, are a by-product of turnips! Which means that these will actually be the most readily available greens for The Ascendancy.
As for lettuce, it will be available to Rayya’s Children farmers. Lettuce fields are very nice and shiny, and they’ll also be a bit different because they’ll be the first crop to tolerate flooding in the game! While paddy (rice) requires flooding to grow, lettuce will grow without it - but won’t mind it if you flood it! So they’re a great rotation option for rice fields!
Finally, the Northern Alliance will have cabbages, increasing their amazing crop collection to… 3 options!
Beetroots are a bit more special! Like turnips, beetroots will provide two types of veggie at once: hearty and leafy! The difference is that - unlike turnips - beetroots will have a much greater yield of leafy greens, becoming a very efficient option to maximize your food production! They are not known by any kingdom by default, however… So, like garlic, it must be tamed!
That’s right! You can finally have your salad!
By the way… Talking about salad - of course if we’re adding a new delicacy it must include its own traits, right? Well, of course it does!
Disgust works just like the intolerances but without the “Upset Belly” debuff. That’s because they don’t have an actual intolerance to it - they just hate it… After all, what good stories begin with “I was eating a salad when…”?
So, by now you must be wondering… What about farming? We talked a lot of veggies - but what about farming?
Well, farming is the last bit of our change! And it’s a boring - but important - one!
All the crops have been tweaked somehow to be more unique in some sense! The tweaks are mostly about growth time and yield - some crops will now provide more (or less) products when harvested!
Overall, all the growth times in the game have been increased. This is one of the attempts of dealing with the “excessive production” issue and also with the difficult scaling (and how easy food is to be acquired with a farmer). This change won’t be perceived a lot by some crops, especially crops that were already relatively longer to grow - they’ll be slightly tweaked - but it’s more evident to crops that were too fast, like carrots or turnips - literally growing to ripeness in a day. They’ll now take at least a couple of days, if not more!
However, with the yield changes, options become interesting! Here’s a couple of examples on how the yield changes will work:
- Pumpkins take longer to grow but will provide 3x more baskets of veggies!
- Wheat grows slower than Millet, however Millet also produces fiber.
- Rye grows slower than Wheat, but produces ~25% more
- Cotton is slower than Silkweed, but also produces more
We’ve gone over all the crops in the game to add balance under this new time x efficiency formula, which (we hope) should make farming a lot more interesting (and with lots of options more!)
In-game descriptions for all crops have been updated accordingly, and the “Crop Properties” icons will now display the growth time in much more detail!
Basket Overhaul
Now, the first secondary objective!
The keen eye probably noticed (from the pictures above) that some baskets seem… a bit different!
Well, you’re not wrong! We’re reworking all the baskets as well! The reason for this is very simple!
The basket has always been an easy to identify sign of “food stuff”. You see a basket in SH and you know it is food-related.
However, with all the new types of resources and different kinds of foods added by ACE, just baskets was not enough anymore. We needed more visual cues and - trust me - visual cues are great because you learn them over time, naturally, and they just make everything easier in a glimpse!
So the solution we came with - without removing the “basket aesthetic” (so keeping the colors) - is to create new bakets and use these to identify the products!
So here’s what we’ll have from now on!
Veggies get the bigger baskets, most of them with smaller handles on the sides! Each type of veggie has a slightly different basket, with hearty veggies keeping the original SH basket!
Fungi and nuts, both being quite associated with “foraging”, get the baskets with larger handles, typical of foragers.
And ingredients that used to come in baskets but were not foods (or good as foods) like sugarbells, fish roe, paddy… Will now come in a smaller, flat and round basket like the one used by tea leaves!
For all the modders out there that wish to adapt to this new “standard”, you can find the .qb files for these baskets in our Discord server
Now, if all this talk about food has not made you hungry… Then prepare yourself because the last secondary objective will definitely do it
Pottage
Pottage has a lot of meanings in different places, but it also (and perhaps originally) refers to a very creative dish that was made by entire communities or households. In simple terms, pottage is a stew - usually made of veggies, grain and meat (if available) - that was consumed, added to and heated indefinitely, over time, across multiple days.
So imagine this - you eat some of it, your parents eat some of it, your neighbor comes by and eat some of it. But they also add some carrots, and you pour some grain on it. The next day you all eat it again, and your cousin throws some rabbit meat in! And so on, and so on…
That was very common in medieval times and it felt like the perfect opportunity to adress a much requested feature: earlier, better food!
So, how does ACE’s pottage works? Well, Pottage will still require a Cook (to craft the Campfire Pot and the Broth needed to “start” it)… However you can start the game with a Campfire Pot depending on the loadout you choose! So Pottage is actually an early option that is not always available depending on your choices, but is there to complement your game should you need!
Once placed, the Campfire Pot is used by everyone in your town, however, and no Cook is needed!
Essentially, there is a series of ingredients that can be added (the campfire pot’s description will inform you!) and every time an ingredient is added, the Pottage levels up. Each level has its own appearance and will provide better food than the previous level.
Whenever sufficient food is consumed, however, the Pottage levels will go down, requiring more ingredients to fill it up again! Once the level is maximum, it will never go down again - only when the food runs out, in which case it will be empty and ready to be restarted!
Here’s a little video showing a hearthling preparing the pottage all the way to the maximum level!
That’s it!
Phew! That was a huge one!
I hope y’all like it!
Stay warm and have fun! 
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Great changes, I am already hyped for the release!
How do all of the ACE Team come up with such good ideas?
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Great! I have always felt leafy greens were missing in the game; and stimulating variety feels rewarding.
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Absolutely love the new pottage concept! Such a great addition to early game communities - I never was super happy with forcing my Hearthlings to eat raw veggies and meat for many days until they got a proper cook. Did they never have any little cooking experience of their own before they left? What lazybodys!
Love the basket variety as well. I can already see the visual benefit storage will get by having variety not just in color, but shape and size as well. Something I always thought was kind of strange, though, was how weaver supply bins - which are big baskets themselves - got filled up with a bunch of smaller baskets. That doesn’t seem super space efficient, so my question is, has there been any thought to making basketed items in single-item holding bins like the weaver bins come out of their baskets when placed in said storage bins?
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Yes, and this is true to many other things in the game. Unfortunately this happens because items have “fixed” graphics and while we could implement a mechanic to dynamically change these graphics under certain circumstances, that could be potentially very expensive or just a lot of extra work. One of the reasons why we implemented “closed” containers for fluids (barrels, etc…) was exactly to prevent this issue on regular storage - we wanted a single barrel to hold multiple units of “beer”, for example, but we didn’t want lots of mini barrels or jugs inside the barrel or jug - and there would be no way to make it look otherwise… so we scrapped any potential alternatives and just made all barrels and such closed.
So unfortunately there isn’t much that can be reasonably done about that. We’ll have to make do with baskets inside baskets
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Okay, that was sort of what I figured was going on. The thought never crossed my mind about barrels, but that was a really clever way of handling it.
There’s something quaint about baskets full of other, smaller baskets. It’s like having a plastic bag to hold all your other plastic bags, haha
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I am so hyped for this! You guys are awesome!
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Hey everyone
Due to some unforseen IRL events, I might not be able to post today’s Sunday Surprise 
I’m sorry 
However, worry not! If that’s the case, then it might be a Monday or Tuesday surprise - but it will come!
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Greetings all!
I’m really sorry for the delay…
It sort of pushed everything back a bit so - likewise - Preview Thursday might be out Friday or even Saturday But I’ll try to aim for Thursday!
Anyway…
We have one main objective and one secondary objective! So without further delay…
Surprise Sunday Monday Tuesday Almost Wednesday?!
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The planters on the right, for an expansion of the crops expansion?
And that’s a lotta bones, I don’t remember there being a graveyard with quite that many
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First off, I don’t recognize that church building, so maybe new landmark? But that’s not what we have to find in this picture.
The farmers have different hats and the soldiers wear armor that I’ve never seen before. So maybe somethink like mercenaries? Or maybe those damn travelers finally decided to help out once in a while.
Or maybe the adventurer guild makes it appearence.
Aaaand those new … nets? Boxes? on the right side, with … leaves? in it. Looks like it’s something that dries.
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