Welcome to Gaia! ::

Intro + Tutorial. Gigi and Gabe greet you, you name your garden, then the shopkeeper teaches
plant → water → pick → sell. Arlo and Casper introduce themselves when you meet them.

Starter tools. New gardens begin with only a watering can. Buy the axe, rod, pickaxe, and shears at the shop.
Older saves get the full set automatically.

Sound. Music changes with the time of day. Farming, fishing, chopping, mining, shopping, and chat all have sound effects.

Levels + Emotes. Farming and fishing level separately. Level-ups bloom peonies. Chat has emotes and a smile picker.

More fish. Bass, Striper, and Catfish join Bass'ken Lake.

Accounts. No invite codes. Prove your Gaia profile with a PM to the garden keeper. One Gaia profile = one garden.

Travel + Cover. Travel places look up locations when needed. Bodies fade under trees so the canopy stays clear;
you can still be found by name.

Small fixes. Build music fades with the tray. Chop and mine sounds play while you work. Coming home restores your
city’s sky after a visit.

Original NPCs. Gigi keeps the General Store by day; Gabe takes the night counter. Casper deals land expansion,
and Arlo runs the open gardens. Same jobs as before - land and travel - under their own names.

Autumn. The garden turns with your home city's calendar. Grass, crowns,
and fall tints follow spring through winter, Guests see the host's season, not their own.

Fishing. The rod hangs a hook, the line can land a koi, and the fight window is painted with the garden's own sky
- rain, overcast, and fall included. Reeling keeps going while the card still counts, and the cast snaps through Gaia's five rod poses.

Weeds & fish. Clumps and sprouts are drawn from sprites now, and weeds from the bag plant the same way seed
packets do. Guppy and goldfish get the same treatment; the koi joins the Basken pool.

Visiting. An open garden is one sky: the host's hour, weather, clouds, and season are the place's. Your Time /
Weather / Date controls stand aside while you're away. Walking under a canopy still leaves you findable, and other
visitors ease between the poses the wire sent instead of snapping.

Mobile. Held upright, the tool cards stand on end as a rail up the right edge, above the thumb keys, instead of a row
along the bottom. The hook picker runs out beside the rod, the fight window centres for thumbs, and the Controls
page stays folded away until a keyboard is back.

Accounts. An invite stays held until the email answers. Verify before the code is spent; the rest of the gate (forgot
password, admin-minted invites) stays as it was.

Graphics. A Graphics tier sits beside Shadow quality. Low steps the scene down - rain, leaves, lamps, breeze -
without flattening the face folds Shadow still owns.

Smaller things. The fishing postcard and the outdoor hour agree. Coming home drops any pins you scrubbed
while visiting, so your garden is your city's evening again.

Bushes. Strawberries and hibiscus grow as proper shrubs rather than stalk crops, and boxwood shrubs turns up in the
wilds as fruitless decoration.

Visiting. Edmund can take you to multiplayer gardens, and you walk around in somebody else's place together.
The host's farm is the real one - guests don't write anything to their own save, so placement and chopping stay with the
owner, while lighter help and chat still work. Going home reloads your garden clean rather than trying to undo the visit.

Weather. Sunny, rain, and heavy rain. Rain waters for you, so a shower overnight is a free pass on the can.
The overcast sits on top of the hour's color wash rather than replacing it.

Land Expansion. Ian stands a few tiles off the shops and sells five expansions at a time: 20×20 up to 50×50.
His window shows the map as it will look the next day, with the new land on preview, and the ground itself
opens on the next day.

User Management Registration has been polished, invite codes implemented and only generated by the admin. Verify email
and forgot password is also functional.

New land arrives overgrown: wild oaks and pines, weeds past the sprout, boxwood where an orchard trunk wouldn't fit.
Clearing it is the work you already know: axe, shears, bare hand, pickaxe.

Smaller things. A fresh garden starts with the shops in the middle of it and a couple of rocks already out in the
open, so the first afternoon has something to swing at before the next day.

Multiplayer Users can register using their email address and link their Gaia UID without giving the game access to
their actual Gaia account. The linked UID can also be changed anytime in the settings.

Mining You can gather about 6 resources from each rock - or 7 if you don’t mind breaking it! A new rock will spawn
somewhere in your garden each day, so no worries if you crush them all in one go.

Avatar Sync Players are now able to sync their avatars without the trouble of refreshing! This works in multiplayer
as well!

Fruits Fruit trees are now implemented! When watered, each tree will reward you with 4–5 fruits the following day.
Currently, I’ve added four types:

Apple
Lemon
Mango
Pomegranate

If you’re extremely lucky, the tree may even give you a special crystallized version of its fruit!

Build mode. if you've ever played the sims it pauses time, during build mode, and you're the omnipotent being that
terraforms and buy furniture for your sims. It's similar to that here, your avatar disappears from the map, and they
peak up on the build menu!

Trees. Oak, pine and coconut palms now grow from seed through five stages, and each stage only advances once the
tree has been watered. Grown ones block your path, sort correctly when you walk behind them, and rustle when you brush
past. Shaking one occasionally drops a twig; most shakes give you nothing.

Axe Tool. A grown tree can be knocked - three swings in a day - leaving a stump to clear. It will also drop
wood (timber) materials. There are three grades of it so far, and yes, this is mostly so I can eventually build
furniture out of my own trees.

Painting the ground. I wanted to implement the same path tool from ACNH, but that one is strict with the tile
they're at. The Sims on the other hand has an airbrush terrain tool. I wanted something more sharper but with lesser
restrictions, so I thought might as well make it a vector pen tool! A vector pen draws paths in curves rather than tiles:
click to drop anchors, drag to pull curves out of them, close the shape and confirm. Dirt, dark dirt, sand and cobblestone
so far, plus a pool tool that paints actual water. Paths can be reshaped later by clicking them, and undo goes back a
gesture at a time.

Furniture that does something. A log table, and some log stools you can actually sit on (they dock to the table's
sides, similar to the sims!), lily pads, and a mug. The mug is the piece I've spent the most irresponsible amount of time
on: you pick it up, carry it at your side, and you can drink on it too!

Real world time. Shadows sweep around at the correct 15 degrees an hour, stretch at dawn and dusk, dissolve together
at sunset, and casts a shadow on objects - stand under a tree and the avatar visibly darkens. The colour of the hour washes
over the whole world, from sunrise rose to night blue. A new in game day starts at 4, so nothing changes under you mid-session.

Night. After dark, the shopkeepers turn the van lights on: its glasshouse, its counter, its headlamps. The beams lie across
the grass, and standing in one lights you from the feet up and cuts a hole in the beam behind you. This took an embarrassing
number of attempts to stop looking like a bedsheet hung in front of a palm tree.

Two shopkeepers. Rina runs the general store out of a hand-drawn van by day, and Moira takes the counter at sundown.
They lean out from behind the shop card while it's open, turn to face you for the whole conversation, and have different
things to say depending on the season.

Seasons. Currently only summer is implemented, leaves, petals and ash drift through the scene depending on the time
of year, riding the same wind as the grass and the crops. On nights they're replaced by fireflies.

The bag. Inventory is one card with Tools and Items tabs. Stacks can be dragged from slot to slot and the arrangement
sticks, taking the last turnip out leaves the hole where it was instead of shuffling everything up. Which number key reaches
which tool is now something you assign yourself.

Smaller things. A proper loading screen that waits for the entire first frame to be drawn, so you never watch the world
assemble itself. An Esc menu with a shadow quality setting for slower machines. A button that fetches a new outfit without a
page reload - the avatar twirls and comes back changed.