The updates for the cozy social MMOPaliajust keep coming. On September 26,Singularity 6 released Patch 0.169forPaliawhich comes with some pretty interesting changes. First, four new Outfit Bundles have been added to the Premium Store. I personally felt the original outfits were a bit lacking, but the team has definitely bumped it up a notch with these new outfits.
The update also officially brings the Maji Market to a close. Zeki’s Underground Black Market has also been revamped, and how has a much cleaner feel to it. Finally, the Celebration Cake has been rebalanced and bathtubs and sinks can now be interacted with to get water flowing.
We’ve included the primary parts of thePaliaUpdate 0.169 Patch Notes in their entirety below. For the full list including over 100 bug fixes, you cancheck them out here.
New Premium Outfits
Four New Outfit Bundles have been added to the Premium Store.
New Features and QoL Additions
The Maji Market has come to an end. Thank you everyone for participating in our first event!
Rest assured, the Maji Market will be back one day! 🌝
⚠️We are also aware there are several issues related to individual- and party-based Stamp Cards (Accomplishments) that unfortunately were not able to be fixed by the time of its closure. For players that have met the requirements and did not receive the reward, we are looking to grant the missing items to you soon.Additional updates will be provided in a separate notice.
**Overall, we learned a lot from our first game event during Open Beta, and for what Themed Events should be like for Palia. We plan to use this experience to make our next event even better. Thank you. **🙇
The area for the Grimalkin Underground (Zeki’s Black Market) has been completely revamped!
We hope to create a space where players can gather and socialize, because who doesn’t love to hang out in a shady cave? 😉
If you’re wondering what the significance of this location is, the stars of this show are Reth and Zeki! 🌟 Make sure to fulfill their friendship quests for more background information.
In the workbench, tool recipes have been moved out of the “Equipment” tab and will now have its own tab.
Adjustments
As we mentioned in our intro, the theme of this patch is “change,” and adjustments to our skills are no exception. This is the moment where we address the topic that many have been waiting on: how we plan to balance Cake Parties.
We knew with how cooking was designed that the ceiling for profit, especially with other players, had the potential to be very high. But for the most lucrative and scalable recipe, seeing how the community has come together to embrace what would come to be known as “Cake Parties” was truly a sight to behold.
We wanted to see it for ourselves — and as we participated in many parties, we saw firsthand the magic that’s made when players come together, work toward a common goal, and reap the rewards. From that experience, we knew that this was the kind of thing that needed to be preserved for the social, multiplayer game that we want Palia to be.
But then the bad news: 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.
With these two main considerations in mind, we set out to make adjustments that, ultimately, should create a healthier and more sustainable cooking experience for the long run. Below are the changes we made, and we will do our best to explain our reasoning behind each one.
Cooking
TLDR:Celebration Cakes now sell for about 40% less. Reaching this number required some adjustments to cooking overall in an effort to bring Celebration Cakes more in line.
The following changes are made in an attempt to target the Celebration Cake recipe directly:
It’s important to know that the sell value for Cooked Dishes is determined through a formula that is based on the value of the ingredients used. Thus, the ingredients for Celebration Cake in particular made it exponential in the value gained in light of what was put in. This is what we focused on in our balancing.
Even with these changes, though, we realized that co-op cooking was still generating value several levels higher than all other activities. This unfortunately meant we had to adjust the value of all dishes collectively in order to complement the changes we had for cakes.
We know this will be a major change to the cooking experience, especially in how it impacts those who’d prefer to cook solo to earn gold.
Because a Dish’s Focus value is directly tied to their sell value, this also resulted in the following changes:
The most noticeable example will likely be Macarons, which went from 225 → 100 Focus, because this particular recipe was actually being calculated incorrectly on top of the changes we made. This resulted in notably higher Focus values than other dishes of comparable value, and thus the steepest reduction we had to make out of all the dishes.
That said, we hope these changes will really set a good foundation for Cooking moving forward, especially when done with friends. 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. 🎂
Gardening & Fishing
We noticed comments from players who weren’t certain what the intended behavior of SpeedyGro was supposed to be. Note, the behavior remains the same (we haven’t touched that), and we realized the description needed updating to be more accurate.
These adjustments to SpeedyGro actually go hand-in-hand with changes we have to the Worm Farms, which is outlined below. 👇
The reasoning for these changes started as a part of our research in how to tune Cake Parties. We noticed that of the population participating in Cake Parties, some were taking their Celebration Cakes and adding it to the Glow Worm Farm for maximum profit. This led us to identify two issues:
One, was that what the farms produce should be relative to the added item’s sell value. The bug was that a cooked dish of the same exact value as a crop would actually produce more, so we had to fix that.
Two, we also noticed that the results would be the same regardless of whether you added in a Star Quality or Normal Quality ingredient, which was not intended. Again, this was another bug that we took to fix. We believe this will benefit a majority of players as it should increase farm outputs overall.
We also want to call out that the changes to SpeedyGro in particular should come out to a net neutral: the sell value was halved, but the output from farms was doubled. Overall, utilizing fertilizer (including SpeedyGro) should be a net benefit to your gardening output for most cases.
Mining
These were both bugs we noticed and fixed, which should help improve the mining experience a bit. Happy mining! ⛏️
Foraging
Another area we wanted to target was Foraging. We noticed that the income brought in from this skill was a little below expected targets. We don’t expect Foraging to produce the same amount of income as more active skills such as Fishing or Hunting, but want to nudge things in a more positive direction.
By increasing tree seed values, we think this should help out players especially during the mid-to-late game progression. Previously tree seeds were priced to incentivize decoration as its main usage, but have now provided a more viable alternative to sell them if you wanted to. With the increase to pearl values, we think it’s a useful universal buff that directly adds gold value when foraging. Though we know newer players don’t always adventure out to Bahari’s beaches — hopefully this will be a bit more of an incentive.
