A face of your own, a first harvest

Today brought two ways to make a life in the valley feel a little more your own: choosing the traveller’s appearance, and turning a piece of ground into the beginnings of a harvest.

The first steps of character creation now have a screen of their own. Out in the meadow, wild turnips offer food and seed for Brightsite’s first farming loop.

A traveller of your own

The Appearance tab brings the camera round to face the traveller, with the choices beside them and the valley still visible behind. Pick a haircut, change its colour, and see the result on the character immediately. Turning the view and coming closer makes it easier to inspect the shape from another angle.

Hair, Skin, Eyes and Face have separate sections. Hair colours also colour the brows; skin tones and eye colours bring more variation to the same familiar traveller. The Face section adds choices for the nose, jaw and chin.

A contrasting look from the same creator: long red hair, dark skin, a snub nose and a softer, set-back chin.

These are preset features that can be combined: a different nose can go with a different jaw, while a haircut changes the outline around them. It is a working beginning for character creation, with the choices shown directly on the traveller.

Starting out in the meadow

Wild turnips grow in small patches across the valley’s open meadows. Each stands in a little bare earth, leaving its leaves and purple shoulder visible among the grass.

Walk close enough, aim at a ripe turnip and hold to pull it. The harvest gives one turnip and two seeds. Wild roots eventually grow back, so finding a patch can supply a first meal and the seed to start planting elsewhere. A turnip can already be eaten from the hand to restore a little food.

Making a place to grow

The hoe is made at the workbench. With it selected, holding over bare or grassy earth turns the ground for sowing, clearing the grass from that spot. Seeds in hand can then be planted into the tilled earth.

A field arranged for review, with several growth stages placed together. The crop art is temporary.

Ridges run along the field, with furrows between them and edges that meet the surrounding ground. Sown turnips pass from a pair of seed leaves to a young rosette and then a ripe root over a game day. Looking at an unripe plant tells you how long it still needs.

Keeping seed for later

Holding to pull a ripe root in the development test. Harvesting currently borrows the existing picking motion.

Pulling a grown turnip leaves the earth ready to sow again. One seed went in and two come back with the root, giving a small plot room to grow. Dig its soil away or build over it, and what was growing there is lost.

Farming is still early. The plants, soil painting and item icons use temporary art, the hoe is not yet visible in the traveller’s hand, and fields are not saved between sessions. Farmer jobs and a town fed from its harvest are still ahead.

---

Archive note: screenshots captured on October 23 from the unchanged October 22 evening checkpoint and its own assets. The character looks use its existing Appearance options. The planted field is an arranged development comparison of growth stages.