News from Zynga

Quote Zynga

"Howdy everyone!

We wanted to chime in on an issue a lot of you have been complaining about over the last few months (well, longer for some of you): buildings. We use buildings in The Pioneer Trail for a number of reasons: they look cool and are generally (though admittedly not always) frontier-y and they're objects you can build and interact with in a variety of ways. Ultimately however buildings present a size vs. available space constraint, and that can be a problem when there are lots of buildings but no room to put them.

We're tackling this in a few ways. Today saw the release of the Civic Center, which is a building where you can store a lot of the recent buildings we've introduced in the past few months and still use them, like a few previous storage buildings. If you happen to have all of those buildings, like the Courthouse, Town Hall, etc., the space savings is pretty immense.

Second, we're re-examining all the things we can do to have a fully functional feature without a big giant building. Some upcoming features will utilize some fairly small buildings instead, such as the size of a crate for the next feature ("Lost Crate") or the potential use of a mailbox. There will be a couple of changes to the sideboards (the parts that are on the sides of the Homestead) for features like "Jack's Pay Day", and there might be a few more trap-like buildables such as what we did recently with Bess catching animals. Size-wise, after today I only count one largebuilding in the next month or so (this might be two but generally speaking right now it looks like just one).

Third, many of you have been clamoring to get the 43x43 and 45x45 Homestead expansion missions as you've waited patiently after the Horseshoe-only options came out. The good news is that they're about a week and a half away from release so more space relief is on the way.

In other notes, when we build features and rewards, we try to think of new and interesting things we can give to y'all. We look at what you say, what would make something easier, and how we can deliver that in a feasible manner. For example, many of you often complain about tree growth rates (especially the Willow Trees, which take five million years to grow) and the need to have tree space vs. needed space for other things. We thought about making a "forest" available, which is a large multi-tree object that can serve as thousands if not tens of thousands of chop-able lumber. The technology behind it was a bit much and we may still come back to that idea, but in the meantime we've happened upon something else that you'll be seeing very soon: Lumber Tree Serum. Just apply it to any lumber tree and it grows it full size instantly. It even works if the tree only has one chop left. This way you can pop up a lumber forest in no time for chopping.

If you've been paying attention, you've also been seeing that we've been giving away lots of goodies on our Pioneer Trail Facebook Fan Page. We'll be continuing to do so, so make sure you've Liked it and you'll get the updates in your Facebook feed.

That's about it, but stay tuned for more soon!"