Hello everyone! At last I have an update for Jade Spring ! Apologies for the wait; I got bogged down with life, then happened to get pretty sick on top of it all. It’s no fun not being able to sit up and make games, so I was so happy to be able to get back to it. And though this is a fairly modest update, some big changes had to be made behind the scenes to accomodate DirectX support and multiple decoration files.

That’s right! You can now have multiple decoration templates and switch freely between them. To access this feature you will need to complete the clearing out of the garden. Once finished, an orb will appear next to Ratchet – interact with it and you’ll be taken to a special room where you can not only swap templates, but reset and clear your garden, too. I made a development log video on the update a little while ago – you can get an idea of what’s going on by checking it out!

There are some features and information you might notice is missing, like any kind of indication or tutorial for this new feature. I’ll be updating Jade Spring some more in the next little while to add these kinds of things, as well as to fix the inevitable bugs that will crop up in the next few days. I was just itching to get the update out, so that I could get some feedback (you guys are the best!) and continue moving forward. We have couple of really good decorations from areyoshi[bsky.app] coming soon which I’m excited to finalise putting in! I also want to give a big thank you to anari[bsky.app], who has extensively tested the game and especially the design templates feature.

• Added the Otter's Enclave.

  • Enter the Enclave using the portal which spawns next to Ratchet after the entire garden has been cleared of bugs, weeds, and Dragonvoid.

  • You can use the banner there to clear or reset the garden to its default state, all in one go.

  • The design panel is also accessible from the Enclave, which lets you manage and swap between designs – decoration layouts which can easily be changed and shared.

• Added new decorations.

  • Lowland decorations: ‘Kodan Roof Window Piece’, ‘Kodan Roof Piece’ (two variants), ‘Kodan Corner Roof Piece’, ‘Kodan Foxglove’, ‘Kodan Patio Roof’, ‘Kodan Support Column’.

• Added settings.

  • Added depth of field, which can be enabled or disabled in settings.

  • Added the ability to cap FPS at 144 while keeping Vsync enabled.

  • Added a ‘draw cap’ setting which allows smaller decorations to not be drawn out of certain distances, increasing performance.

  • Added a brightness slider in addition to the saturation slider.

  • Added DirectX support. You can enable this by adding --rendering-driver d3d12 as an argument when you run the game. On Steam you can do this under launch options.

• Gameplay and visual improvements.

  • Ratchet has been updated with an improved design.

  • A new featured pane in the decoration manager highlights new decorations and features, as well as cool parts of Jade Spring that you may have missed.

  • Added a grid which appears when in ‘snapping’ mode, useful for visually aligning decorations.

  • Your Jade Bot will become a salmon when on the ocean with gravity mode enabled.

  • Added some small hints for handy features, like collecting Karma from fish after the tutorial is complete.

  • Reduced the snapping increment from 0.5 units to 0.25 units to make adding details according to a consistent grid easier.

  • Many small improvements and performance enhancements.

(10/1/2025 fixes)

• Fixed an issue which would cause your current design not to save properly upon starting a new story.

• Fixed a bug which would crash the game if you tried to make an empty multiple selection.

• (Debug only) removed extraneous camera information from the debug HUD.

I’m hoping that we can call Jade Spring’s next update ‘1.0’ and have it in a pretty stable position! I really like the idea of continuing to add periodic decorations (maybe on schedule) in addition to other development. Maybe we could vote on Bluesky as to which decoration’s we’d like to see in the game next. I can’t thank you enough for all of your support and kindness over these past few months. Please enjoy the update!

Hello everyone! It's been a little while since the last Jade Spring update[www.slyllama.net] in June, but I've slowly been chipping away at additions and improvements to the game, and now 1.3b will be coming out on the 27th of September. I made a video about progress on this update a couple of weeks ago! (You can also read a bit about it here[www.slyllama.net].)

One of the main additions to Jade Spring will be the Otter's Enclave, a special room which allows you to create, manage, and swap garden designs. You can share your layouts and import designs that your friends have made, too. I'd like to give a huge thanks to anari[bsky.app], who has been doing some really comprehensive testing of what's been a very spicy feature to add!

I've been enjoying putting some Kodan decorations into the game. Actually, I was going to add a lot more decorations before releasing 1.3b, but I decided to go for a release as soon as possible for two main reasons:

• AMD recently released a GPU driver update which caused big issues[github.com] for all Vulkan games, the graphics API which Jade Spring is built on. I recently added DirectX support so that AMD users can continue to play the game without having to roll back their drivers, and I'd like to get that out as soon as possible!

• I found a very small bug which makes the performance cost of the default garden home (and any build with lights in it) like, more than three times as high as it should be. I could have done a patch, but I like the idea of getting this all out together. When you play this update, you'll notice a big performance improvement.

Which leads to what's coming after 1.3b! The place I'd like to get Jade Spring into is a very stable state where I can do regular small decoration updates, as a sort of side-project and continuous testing ground for future developments (I've been thinking a lot about a full-fledged architectural simulator). So the next update after this one will be 1.0 (woohoo), and subsequent updates will be for adding different decorations from various expansions.

As always, thank you so much for all of your support. It has been so fun developing Jade Spring this year, and it makes me excited to make more architectural stuff!