Whispers in the Woods update

Howdy Partners!

The new update is here. It's called "Whispers in the Woods", and it's the final chapter in the mystical side of Cowboy Life Simulator. Ghosts, altars, midnight fern flowers, and a strange old peddler living across the river. After this one, we’re leaving the magical thingies behind and going back to the Wild West classics: horses and farming.

This is THE major update we've been working toward since The Late Shift, so there's a lot to dig into.

A new questline!

The day after you blow up the dam with Ruff, Reverend Boswell writes to you. He's been corresponding with an old friend across the river and wants you to go check on him.

That friend turns out to be Percival Templeton, a peddler with some unusual hobbies. Five quests follow. They take you across the river, through a stone circle, and eventually into the spirit-catching business.

Ghost catching!

Yes. Templeton hands you a lamp and a pouch of pearls and sends you to hunt ghosts.

Pearls find the ghost. The lamp reveals it, but only in a limited range. Once it's visible, you can shout at it to herd it toward the catcher. Shout too little and it slips away. Shout too much and it gets offended and disappears. Get it just right, and you collect ectoplasm.

A new crafting station!

Ectoplasm fuels the altar. The altar lives by the stone circle in the new area and crafts strong sera and tonics that go far beyond your herbalist table.

A little tip: visit it around 6:30 in the morning. The sun lines up with its eye!

A whole new area!

A new piece of the map opens up as you progress. You'll find Templeton's camp, the altar, and fern flowers. And a buyable plot of your own near the altar for chests, a cabin, and whatever else you need.

Oh deer!

Deer now roam the new area. They're skittish, so sneak or come prepared. They drop meat, hides, bones, fat, and sometimes antler, which you can grind into powder at the Quern.

New potions!

Four new potions, all with quality-scaling effects:

• Pour one on a field to boost the quality of everything you harvest there.

• Drink one to soak up less damage from falls, bandits, animals, and bleeding.

• Drink another and your hammer might finish half a building in one swing.

• Drink the last to heal statuses and top off hunger, thirst, energy, and HP.

The better the ingredients, the stronger the effect. Brewing well pays off.

Watermelon, level cap, and a few extras

Watermelon is a new crop. It unlocks in Amelia's shop at Frontier Level 13 and goes into one of the new potions.

The level cap goes up to 14. There are new challenges..

Unreal Engine 5.7

We've finally finished moving the game over to Unreal Engine 5.7. This is the big lift behind a lot of the stability and performance work, and it underpins everything we're planning next.

We also added a save backup system. If the game spots a corrupted save, it falls back to your previous working save automatically. Hopefully far fewer lost runs from here on.

Unfortunately, this will not fix the corrupted saves you may already have. So if after update you are still stuck on the loading screen, the only thing you can do is delete the saves and start a new playthrough. Sorry about that, we couldn’t figure out how to fix that :(

A word on the bumpy ride

The engine move was rough on some of you, and we know it. Freezes and performance issues are still surfacing, mostly tied to how buildings spawn and unload. We're actively reworking that.

Thanks for sticking with us. We promised we'd land 5.7 and we have, and now we're focused on making the most of it.

That's it for now. Join the Discord, drop us a comment, and if you're enjoying the game, please leave a review. They help us more than anything.

Happy trails,

Przemysław Stański Studio Head | Odd Qubit

New content added

• Mysticism questline with five quests, featuring Reverend Boswell and a new character, Percival Templeton

• Ghost-catching mechanic, including pearls, the Liminal Engine, and ectoplasm

• New area across the river, including Templeton's camp and a buyable plot of land

• New mystical crafting station (the altar) for strong sera and tonics

• Four new strong potions: max crop quality, damage resistance, fast building, heal all statuses

• Deer as a new level animal

• Watermelon, a new crop unlocked at Frontier Level 13 in Amelia's shop

• Level cap raised to 13

• New challenges

• Map (M) expanded with the new area

New mechanics and fixes

• Unreal Engine 5.7.4 migration

• Save backup system: corrupted saves now auto-revert to the previous working save (wont work with already corrupted saves)

• Search zones added for quests that require finding something in an area

• Updated Drop Chest UI

• Improved key tooltip display

• Honey is lighter

• Potion recipes updated, high-quality ingredients are now more rewarding

• Deer, and fixes to deer behavior

• Failed animal breeding prompt now states which animals were involved

• Fixed incorrect quest markers above animals after a roundup

• Fixed horse durability not being consumed properly

• Fixed bandits appearing near Aunt Amelia's house

• Fixed Seeder blueprint item

• Fixed sound class issues that caused some sounds to ignore volume settings

• Fixed Mail Lookup / Escape inventory bug

• Herbalist table, weaponsmith, blocked drag-and-drop, and white inventory slot fixes

• Dragonfly wings rendering pipeline fix

• Environment fixes: sinkhole, Templeton lake, torch in a rock, and more

• Deconstruction fix

• Fix for duplicated fields caused by hoeing or potions

• Fix for automatic workstations when resources are in slots other than 1 or 2

• More shader compilation fixes

• Removed some debug lines