Dev Diary: Valentines Event

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The upcoming Valentine 2019 Event: New specialists, new buildings, new buffs and more

Dear Settlers,

Love is in the air - can you feel it!? Valentine's Day has always been a time to share your affection for those you hold most dear: family, friends and even total strangers if you have an abundance to go around. For this year, we'd like to celebrate this event by encouraging you to play together with your friends in jolly cooperation; those that do can expect to reap many bonus rewards! But even if you're the more lone-wolf kind of player, we've still got some love-themed content for you to eat your heart out.

EVENT SCHEDULE

Event Start: 14th of February, ~10:00 CET 21st of February, ~10:00 CET
Start of removal phase: 24th of February, ~10:00 CET 4th of March, ~10:00 CET
Complete deactivation: 28th of February, ~10:00 CET 11th of March, ~10:00 CET*
Level requirement: 16+

*Important Update 14/02: the Valentine Event will not be started this week. The reported issues since the latest game update require us to look further into it before we activate additional new content. We will post an update on the event next week and until then keep a close eye on the game performance. Thank you for your patience during this time!

*Important Update 13/02: We are aware of a latency issue with the current Valentine’s Event game version and are working hard to troubleshoot it. At this moment we cannot tell when the event will be started but wanted to share the event info with you anyway so you can prepare.

All relevant quest chains will be triggered upon reaching level 16; if your level is below 16, you will receive a quest tasking you to reach level 16. So hurry up, you surely don't want to miss out on all the fun!

QUICK LINKS TO FEATURE TOPICS

• Flowers & Farms
• Quests & Adventures
• Buffs & Items
• Buildings
• Specialists & Achievements
• Deactivation steps

We implore you to confess your feelings in our
dedicated feedback thread.

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• Availability: Only during the Valentine Event
• Benefit: You can acquire special items for Flowers in the Valentine shop category
• Trade: Flowers are tradable like regular resources
• Removal: Check removal phase details as event resources and Valentine items are available only for a limited time!

You can get the event resource by...

• Sending Explorers on a Treasure search
• Completing Valentine tutorial quests
• Producing them with Flower Farms
• Trading with other players
• Item gifts from friends
• Buying Flower packages in the Shop

FLOWER FARMS

Flower Farm: Costs 50 Stone and 100 Hardwood Planks
Production: Each Flower Farm produces event resources (Flowers) over time - starts with 100 Flowers, and takes 20 minutes to perform a full production cycle.
Limit: 3 per player

You can build them on your island: not only do they provide Flowers, but they also help set that romantic mood!

The Flower Farms can only be refilled with "Flower Refills". If you're wondering how you can get those precious refillers, you should play any co-op and multiplayer adventures; basically, any that are designed with more than one player in mind. You can find the complete list in the in-game Event window.

There's another thing that can happen to your Flower Farms: they can deplete if you let them run out! If that is the case, you can purchase Fertilizer from the in-game merchant to revive them. It costs 75 Flowers and it revives the depleted Flower Farm with 10 Flowers. This might look like a bad deal at first, but you will be able to use refillers and buffs again on a restored Flower Farm, leading to more Flowers!

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If you're level 16 and above, you will begin a small introduction quest chain that will explain to you the base mechanics of the event. You will aid Flora, our lady of love, be reunited with her significant other so that they can spend this romantic season together. You'll need to start with building your Flower Farms to grow her signature roses, forming them into buffing bouquets and applying them to your friend's population buildings.

Later into the quest chain, you'll start exploring a new type of buff which requires certain conditions to be met in order to trigger powerful effects!

With this event being themed around helping out your fellow Settlers Online players, it's the perfect time to join together and tackle the various cooperative adventures we have in the game. Doing so will earn you Flower Refills, which are a great way to sustain your Flower Farms and collect those beautiful red roses to spend in the shop!

The list of adventures that award Flower Refills for Valentine's 2019 is:

• Aladin and the Oil Lamp
• Ali Baba and the Second Thief
• Ali Baba and the Treasure of Knowledge
• The Betrayed Little Tailor
• The Black Knights
• Buccaneer Roundup
• The Dark Brotherhood
• Gunpowder
• The Heroic Little Tailor
• Lakeside Treasure
• More Secluded Experiments
• Motherly Love
• Raiding The Raiders
• Roaring Bull
• Secluded Experiments
• Sindbad and the Besieged City
• Sindbad and the Sea Snake
• The Sons of the Little Tailor
• Sons of the Veld
• Stealing from the Rich
• Surprise Attack
• The Clever Little Tailor
• The Dark Priests
• The Nords
• The Siege
• The Valiant Little Tailor
• Tomb Raiders
• Victor the Vicious
• Whirlwind

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This event has a new type of buff: Conditional Buffs. These are activated by first fulfilling certain conditions, and stay in effect so long as the conditions remain met, only stopping when you fail to maintain the condition. First, though, let's take a look at the main buff that you'll need to use in order to achieve these special objectives:

Name: Flower Bouquet
Effect: Activates heartily buff effect
Target: Population building
Duration: 3 hours (22 hours on friend/guild members)
Price: 3 Flowers

Flower Bouquets can be made in your Provision House and Rarity Provision House by using Flowers. On their own, they provide a pretty love-filled buff effect on population buildings, but don't let that fool you into thinking they're just shiny fluff! If you have a certain amount of these buffs running concurrently on your home-island, you'll gain access to powerful zone-wide effects:

Name: Heart Lockets
Effect: +200% population growth
Targets: Mayor's House, Village School, University
Condition: Five (5) active Flower Bouquet buffs

Name: Family Day
Effect: +200% recruitment speed
Targets: Barracks, Elite Barracks
Condition: Ten (10) active Flower Bouquet buffs

Valentine Cards are another precursor buff that can be used to create lucrative effects:

Name: Buddy's Valentine Card Box
Effect: Rewards one of the Valentine Cards randomly
Production Time: 36 hours (Provision House), 6 hours (Rarity Provision House)
Cost: 4,400 Hardwood Planks, 780 Simple Paper, 660 Nibs

Upon making Buddy's Valentine Card Box, you'll be rewarded with one of 9 Valentine Cards, picked at random:

Name: Valentine Card
Effect: +300% Flower Farm production
Target: Flower Farms
Duration: 1 hour (3 hours on friend/guild members)

At face value, these appear as short but powerful buffs to your Flower Farm production, but something special happens when all three of your Flower Farms are buffed at the same time:

Name: Valentine
Effect: +100% to resource and refill rewards
Targets: Completed Co-op & Multiplayer adventures
Condition: Three (3) active Valentine Card buffs

As long as this conditional buff is active, the owner (and any friends that join them) will be able to take advantage of increased loot from their cooperative adventures, including Flower Refills! So be sure to spread the love, and the reap even more rewards while you tackle some group-content!

This isn't the last method of activating the new conditional buff effects: you can also do it with the new Love Garden building, but more on that below on the next page!

Name: Recipe: Normal Star Chart
Effect: Reduces General travel time by 50%
Duration: 2 hours
Price: 399 Flowers

Name: Recipe: Detailed Star Chart
Effect: Reduces General travel time by 75%
Duration: 2 hours
Price: 599 Flowers

Name: Hugs & Kisses
Effect: +200% recruitment speed for Barracks & Elite Barracks
Duration: 32 hours
Price: 189 Flowers

Name: Love-crazed
Effect: Double effect of all active productivity buffs
Duration: 2 hours (3 hours on Friends)
Price: 399 Flowers

Name: Celebration of Love
Effect: Replaces buff sparkles with hearts
Duration: 7 days (10.5 days on friends/guild members)
Price: 199 Flowers

Name: Flower Rain
Effect: Lets flower petals rain from the sky
Duration: 7 days (10.5 days on friends/guild members)
Price: 199 Flowers

Name: Bottled Innocence
Effect: Replaces wild animals with unicorns
Duration: 7 days (10.5 days on friends/guild members)
Price: 29 Flowers

Name: Grout
Description: You get 200 Grout
Tradable: Yes (Resource)
Price: 199 Flowers

Name: Small Flower Package
Description: +100 Flowers
Tradable: Yes (Resource)
Price: 199 Gems

Name: Large Flower Package
Description: +1,000 Flowers
Tradable: Yes (Resource)
Price: 1990 Gems

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The Love Garden

The Love Garden is public building with a very similar function to the Christmas Market we released in last year's Xmas Event. It can buff population buildings in an area around it with a default buff effect but when enough are affected by this, it can trigger various conditional buffs:

Buff name	Description	Cost	Cooldown	Icon
Love Garden Buff	Effect: Applies default buff effect, used to trigger conditions Targets: Population Building Duration: 12 hours	500 Water 500 Bread	21h	N/A

The first conditional buff triggers once you've buffed at least fifteen (15) population buildings concurrently:

Buff name	Description	Condition	Cooldown	Icon
Heart Lockets Level 1	Effect: +200% population growth Targets: Mayor's House, Villiage School, University	15 Love Garden Buffs Active	N/A	N/A

Upon first building the Love Garden, you might notice a quest which asks you to buff twenty (20) population buildings, and wait one hour! After one hour has passed with the condition met, you'll obtain a random Love Garden quest. These quests can ask you to do various things: complete a certain type of adventure, find a deposit, go on a treasure search etc, and you will be rewarded with a relevant buff. Once you've completed a quest, you won't receive it again until you've gone through the entire pool, so you'll avoid getting the same quest back-to-back. And once another hour has gone past after completion, so long as the conditions are still met, you'll receive another quest!

Note that if you demolish the Love Garden during one of these quests, you'll be able to complete it, but won't be offered another quest until it's placed again.

There's one final conditional buff to unlock for those who are dedicated, unlocked when you've buffed at least twenty-five (25) population buildings concurrently:

Buff name	Description	Condition	Cooldown	Icon
Heart Lockets Level 2	Effect: +300% Population growth Targets: Mayor's House, Villiage School, University	25 Love Garden Buffs Active	N/A	N/A

For more information on the reach of the area buff from the Love Garden, please check out these screenshots showing where the exact grid of each population building needs to be within the area of effect to be eligible for the buff.

Name: The Love Garden (Limit: 2)
Type: Building 2x2 (Not giftable, but tradable)
Description: A public building starting buffs, which are used as conditions to trigger zone effects and additional content.
Price: 1,990 Flowers

Observatory

The Observatory allows a player to greatly speed up the travel time for Generals going to and from adventures. It can produce three different types of Star Chart buffs to accomplish this:

Buff name	Description	Cost	Cooldown	Icon
Rough Star Chart	Zone Effect: Reduces General travel time by 25% Target: Home and Adventure Islands Duration: 2 hours	820 Simple Paper 20 Map Fragments	47h
Normal Star Chart	Zone Effect: Reduces General travel time by 50% Target: Home and Adventure Islands Duration: 2 hours	750 Intermediate Paper 30 Map Fragments	47h
Detailed Star Chart	Zone Effect: Reduces General travel time by 75% Target: Home and Adventure Islands Duration: 2 hours	810 Advanced Paper 40 Map Fragments	47h

The buff works for adventures started while the buff is active. Once Activated the buff will remain on the adventure even if the initial buff on your home zone is not active anymore. Propagated buffs are active on adventures as long as the adventure is running. Travel time for generals is impacted by the buff running on the same zone the general is travelling to. Buffs that are propagated to the adventure also impact other participants, reducing the travel time of their generals to adventures as well. However, the buff on the home zone only impacts the owner of the zone, reducing the travel time of their generals back from adventures. Do note that Star Charts are exclusive to one another, and cannot be combined for a greater effect.

This makes the Observatory a perfect building for those who love to do adventures as their main activity, and even more so if it involves doing cooperative adventures with their friends; especially during this event!

In combination with the "Navigation Crash Course" skill the travel time reduction is applied to the travel time value already reduced by the "Navigation Crash Course" skill. The final value is rounded mathematically.

Example:

Default Travel Time * Navigation Crash Course * Star Chart.

900 seconds * 55% * 25% = 158 (157,5) seconds

Name: Observatory (Limit: 1)
Type: Building 3x3 (Not giftable, not tradable)
Description: An intelligence building which can craft star charts
Price: 2,990 Flowers

Weather Station

Buff name	Description	Cost	Cooldown	Icon
Weather: Hard Frost	Zone Effect: When weighty defenders throw a punch in such frost, every surrounding unit will be swiped of their feet. Zone Effect: All defence units (including enemy defence units) gain splash damage! Target: Adventure with difficulty 1 - 15 Duration: 2 hours	600 Iron Ore 750 Marble	47h
Weather: Bright Sunshine	In such beautiful sunshine everyone feels reinvigorated. Zone Effect: The HP of all units (including enemy units) are increased by 20%! Target: Adventure with difficulty 1 - 15 Duration: 2 hours	750 Titanium Ore 2500 Wheat	47h
Weather: Heavy Fog	In such dense fog sneaking up to your enemies is no challenge. Zone Effect: All units (including enemy units) gain flanking! Target: Adventure with difficulty 1 - 15 Duration: 2 hours	250 Steel 500 Water	47h
Weather: Hurricane	Fighting within a Hurricane gives an extra force to every hit. Zone Effect: The minimum and maximum damage of all units (including enemy units) is increased by 20%! Target: Adventure with difficulty 1 - 15 Duration: 2 hours	600 Salpeter 2000 Copper Ore	47h

The buff works for adventures started while the buff is active. Once activated the buff will remain on the adventure even if the initial buff on your home zone is not active anymore. Propagated buffs are active on adventures as long as the adventure is running. Buff propagated to the adventure also impact other participants, changing combat values of their units.

Since these buffs affect not only you but all enemy units as well, the Weather Station really allows you to shake up the meta strategies when it comes to dealing with adventures. You might choose to build your unit composition around one of the buffs and its bonuses, on an adventure where the specific enemy units would not gain as much of an advantage. When combined with the Observatory and Scouting Post, you can now test out new and interesting compositions and tactics while being even more effective at tackling even the hardest of challenges!

Name: Weather Station (Limit: 1)
Type: Building 2x2 (Not giftable, not tradable)
Description: An intelligence building which can influence combat on adventures via special weather conditions
Price: 3,990 Flowers

DECORATION: FLOWER FARM

Description: Decorative version of the Flower Farm.
Limit: unlimited
Cost: 299 Flowers
Trade/Gift: All of them are tradable and giftable

DECORATION: VALENTINE PAVILLON

Description: A pavillon, where your settlers can meet and be together.
Limit: unlimited
Cost: 499 Flowers
Trade/Gift: All of them are tradable and giftable

DECORATION: CUPIDO STATUE

Description: The patron of Love reminding your settlers of the most valuable thing in the world.
Limit: unlimited
Cost: 149 Flowers
Trade/Gift: All of them are tradable and giftable

DECORATION: HEART TREE

Description: What a lovely shape for a tree.
Limit: unlimited
Cost: 149 Flowers
Trade/Gift: All of them are tradable and giftable

DECORATION: VALENTINE FOUNTAIN

Description: Some people say throwing flower petals into the fountain grants a wish.
Limit: unlimited
Cost: 149 Flowers
Trade/Gift: All of them are tradable and giftable

DECORATION: VALENTINE VEGETATION

Description: Every town can use some more vegetation.
Limit: unlimited
Cost: 149 Flowers
Trade/Gift: All of them are tradable and giftable

DECORATION: VALENTINE BENCH

Description: Settlers can relax on the bench from time to time.
Limit: unlimited
Cost: 99 Flowers
Trade/Gift: All of them are tradable and giftable

DECORATION: FLOWERBED HEART

Description: The shape of this flower bed is really unique.
Limit: unlimited
Cost: 99 Flowers
Trade/Gift: All of them are tradable and giftable

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This Valentine Event brings with it two fantastic specialists to add to your roster! The Charming Geologist is great at not only hunting out deposits of Iron, Titanium and Salpeter, but he finds double the deposit size. He also has a chance to find those deposit types that can be mined faster than normal, which is a nice bonus when it procs! Meanwhile, the Lovely Explorer is sure to be love at first sight: her special trait allows her to not only conduct treasure searches with great speed but will always bring back the highest possible haul of resources back with her, no matter how many variables or possibilities!

Name: Charming Geologist (Limit: 1)
Description: His handsome looks help him gather information about the easy to mine deposits
Effect: Charming Deposit: Finds 100% bigger deposits for Iron, Titanium and Salpeter. In addition, there is a 50% chance to find deposits of those types, that can be mined 100% faster.
Price: 799 Flowers

Name: Lovely Explorer (Limit: 1)
Description: Always brings highest possible resource amount from treasure search tasks.
Effect:Lovely Treasure: +100% task speed and always brings the highest possible resource amount from treasure search tasks.
Price: 1,490 Flowers

The Valentine Achievements promote sharing the love with your fellow Settlers, friends, guild members and receiving some love in return! You can unlock them during this event only.
Various buffs are rewarded for successfully completing achievements; with more powerful buffs being awarded the higher the achievement's difficulty.


The Achievements deal with many aspects of the event:

• Having friends buff your buildings
• Completing co-op adventures with friends
• Receiving one of every Valentine card (9 total)
• Maybe even being a bit selfish!?

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WHAT HAPPENS AT THE START OF THE REMOVAL PHASE?
(24th of February ~10:00 CET 4th of March, ~10:00 CET)

The core mechanisms of the Event are turned off at the start of the removal phase.

• Info Widget/Countdown
  The event countdown gets replaced by a new countdown.
  The new one indicates the remaining time of the removal phase until the event gets completely deactivated.
• Valentine adventures
  The event currency reward for adventures will be deactivated
  Adventures already in-progress will not reward event currency
• Buffs
  Conditional buffs from both Flower Bouquets and Valentine Cards will no longer trigger.
• Production
  Event-related item productions inside the provision house will be deactivated.
  Event-related item production, which is already running will continue until they run out.
  Flower Farms will still be able to produce Flowers during the Removal Phase.*
• Quests & Achievements
  The event Quest chains and Achievements will be deactivated.
  Only completed Valentine event achievements remain visible.
• Treasure Search (Explorers)
  All treasure searches started before the start of the removal phase and returning before the deactivation have the chance to reward event currency. All treasure searches started during or after the start of the removal phase will not reward event currency anymore.
• Misc
  The event shop remains active and Flowers can be used to get special items until complete event deactivation.
  The event window will no longer be accessible.
  Event-related loading screen, UI skins and music will be removed/set to default.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE DEACTIVATION?
(28th of February ~10:00 CET 11th of March, ~10:00 CET*)

• Trade
  New trade offers containing event currency can't be set up anymore.
  Active trade offers containing event currency are set to invisible.
• Shop/Event currency
  The Event shop category is not available anymore.
  Event currency is not visible in the Mayor's house anymore and will be converted into Coins later.
• Explorer
  Explorers, who were sent before Removal 1 and checked after Removal 2 will not bring any event currency.
• Buffs
  Flower Bouquets remain available and usable throughout the whole year but only provide a purely cosmetic buff effect.
• Production
  Flower Farms will be deleted at the time of the Deactivation Phase.*

EVENT RESOURCE CONVERSION

As usual, all event-related resources will be converted into gold coins.
We will also convert Valentine cards and Valentine Card Boxes into Employee of the month Badges.
No event resources are supposed to remain in the game.

A script will run during a future game update downtime to replace all event resources (especially Flowers) with gold coins.
The conversion applies to all items of that type, such as

• items in your warehouses and in your Star Menu
• items that remain in Flower Farms
• items included in public trades and friend trades
• items attached to in-game mails like loot from adventures or explorer searches

Conversion rates: The final amount will be rounded up.
1 Flower = 1 gold coins
1 Fertilizer = 75 gold coins

There is no action needed from your side, you will receive an in-game message with the corresponding amount of gold coins.

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Dear settlers,

We want to clarify the description of the Valentine buff because it was a bit misleading:

• While every player can get a bonus to the loot of a coop/multiplayer adventure, everyone has to have the buff active on their own island to benefit from it. It is not working for everyone in the adventure just because the owner has it active on his island.

Happy Settling,
BB_Sious

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Dear settlers,

We want to clarify how Flower Farms will behave once we enter the Removal/Deactivation phases:

• Flower Farms will still be able to produce Flowers during the Removal Phase.
• Flower Farms will be deleted at the time of the Deactivation Phase.

Happy Settling,
BB_Sious

[BB_Sious]

Dear settlers,

We will be extending the Removal Phase of the Valentine Event to the following time:

• Monday, 11th of March at 10:00 CET
• At this time, the Removal Phase will end and the Deactivation will begin, thus fully ending the Valentine Event.

We'd also like to clarify that the specialists sent out in today's gift package will not count towards your shop limits; you can still purchase them if you're yet to do so.

Happy Settling,
BB_Sious