It was a bit delayed this week, but Palia’s 0.169 patch did indeed roll out last night, bringing with it a theme of change – just not always welcome change.
For example, the Maji Market is over and gone, and the cash shop has been refreshed with a bunch of new outfits, but Singularity 6 has also taken the moment to revamp the Grimalkin Underground to give players a new hangout space. The patch further includes a new emote, running water animations for inside player homes, the ability to destroy your own crops (oh no), some icon tweaks, better UI for housing addons, and new recipes. Moreover, crops now grow while you’re online even without your visiting your plot – so you don’t need to check on it every in-game day.
But the real heart of this patch is how S6 aims to address the cooking system and its associated Cake Parties. As MOP’s Chris explained it to me, Cake Parties amount to a group activity where everyone bakes, like, a crapton of cakes for huge profits. “It’s one of the prime endgame activities,” he says, and he is not joking.
“[S]eeing how the community has come together to embrace what would come to be known as Cake Parties was truly a sight to behold,” Singularity 6 says, talking up the social element of cooperative cakery. But… “Celebration Cakes were simply just too profitable. Based on the data we saw, it wasn’t just outscaling every other dish — Celebration Cakes were making more profit than with any other gold-generating activity, in any skill, by a large margin.”
That means nerfs – kinda big nerfs, and not just for you cake people. S6 is addressing the cake recipe itself, plus the value of butter and milk, and hitting all cooking dishes with a 25% reduction in sell values. There’s also been a rebalance of focus from food (some better, some worse). “We hope these changes will really set a good foundation for Cooking moving forward, especially when done with friends,” the team says. “Our goal is for there to be a variety of recipes to choose from, so that it’s Cooking Parties, not just Cake Parties. You can also be on the lookout for new recipes coming soon that we hope will be just as fun and worthwhile to cook. For now, though, Celebration Cakes still reign at the top — just not as high as the tower they were on before.”
The end of the patch post also notes that the studio is considering what to do about fighting over rare nodes and how to monetize the game going forward:
“We need to make money to keep developing Palia and have it be the game that we (and our players) dream it to be. Selling Premium Outfits is currently the only way we are making that money, so expect this to be the case for a while. Of course, we are always open to considering other ways to monetize based on feedback from our players.”
