The Ooblets devblog for March showcases some big additions and changes in the upcoming farming/RPG/Pokemon crossover, including four new characters, a closer look at the "grumboire" journal that tracks your progress and accomplishments in the game, improved flags and new Discord emojis, and a "player level unlock tree" that enables "personal development" alongside all the building, collecting, and growing.

"We decided to create a player level system where you meet different requirements to level up and then use your level points to unlock bonuses like faster crafting speed or more followbaby spots," the update says. "We’ll probably make either the levels or the bonuses take the form of badges since we’ve not really implemented many badges in the game and need to live up to Badgetown’s name."

Scavenging and weeding have been "totally revamped," and players can now discover "wild harvestables" that will randomly grow in certain areas. The in-game sales system is also undergoing some changes, and flags will apparently now flutter properly in the breeze—"a big step forward in Ooblets flag technology [that's] bound to revolutionize Badgetown."

Ooblets doesn't have a release date yet, but the current hope is to have it out sometime in 2018—"and not like, right at the start of 2018," as the FAQ states. I wouldn't be surprised to see that change, however: During a February interview with creator Rebecca Cordingley and her cohort Ben Wasser, Wasser suggested that target might be a little too tight.

"We actually have had to scale back a lot of our plans for farm automation, so it might not be as much of a balancing act anyway," he said about a planned system for farm automation. "At one point I had imagined a sort of sprawling Factorio-inspired farm automation progression, but as our release window swiftly approaches things like that have been pushed further and further towards the chopping block."