Hey everyone, hope you're all doing well. Happy Stone Bay Day! I'm very pleased to announce a suite of updates, content, and improvements we're dubbing the Anniversary Update!

Included is a huge update with over 80 different food and culinary items, the introduction of custom armour, and the launch of pets on our store!

🍅 Culinary & Botany 🍋

We've added over 80 new items in these categories, from basic ingredients like strawberries to complicated dishes like the salmon fillet with asparagus. What we've noticed is that people want to start up cool businesses like bakeries, taverns, and restaurants - but the value proposition in-game usually isn't very good - "Why would I pay silver for something I can grow/craft so easily?" Good question! I wouldn't!

With a new crafting station, kitchenware and utensils, and tons of different ingredients - are you going to be the next Master Chef?

⚔️ Custom Armour! 🛡️

Custom armour present a huge challenge to implement on a technical level and I'm happy to say we've finally cracked it! We've started adding custom textured armour onto the server. Several of the larger factions are slotted to get custom armour, along with a bunch that will end up being craftable around the world. Custom armour opens up a bunch new doors for us in terms of immersion and character customization, get excited, it's finally here! One thing on this - you'll need some sort of optifine type mod to view custom armour, we recommend Fabric + CIT Resewn, but Optifine also works. If you don't have one of those you'll just see regular vanilla armour.

🐶 Pets! 🐱

On offer for launch is the most adorable Otter and a half-dozen vegetation based bulbs. Our hope with the implementation of pets (and maybe mounts and other things in the future) is to provide premium character customization options for those who want to take their experience to the next level whilst supporting the server. We plan on regularly adding more pets to the rotation, including seasonal and holiday limited edition options. Go take a look and support the server if you're able, we appreciate it! This is day 0 of release on this, if you run into any issues or your pets aren't delivered, please ⁠#📨-open-a-ticket and select Billing/Store Help. Once you have your pets purchased use /pets or /mcpets on the server to access them.

https://valence-smp.net/store/

In closing - as we celebrate one year of Valence tomorrow I wanted to thank all those who make it possible. There are a bunch of people at the foreground that the community gets to see and hear from all the time, but in the background there's tons of folks who put in huge amounts of work and rarely get recognition. People like @Red, who really should get some more sleep! As always, I wanted to thank @Star and the rest of the @Production Team for implementation, the @Content Team for their models and builds that make everything look immersive and epic, and the @Creative Team who breathe life into the work we do. Thank you.

I'll have another letter for everyone tomorrow for our proper anniversary but for now please enjoy the new content. See you server side!

Thank you @kayse for this banner photo!

Terence / Doc

General Manager

Valence SMP