Hey Villagers

Village Monsters v1.05 is now available, and it fixes exactly one bug. It's a terrible one, so I wanted to provide a longer explanation.

The bug occurs during the Cool Stuff event in the Summer. It's bugged, and it loads a cutscene with no dialogue. To avoid crashing, the game attempts to pull dialogue from another source - in this case, debug dialogue.

The dialogue it randomly chose is extremely inappropriate and contains offensive language. v1.05 disables the event entirely and removes all offending text from the game outright.

Why is this "inappropriate" text in the game at all?

There are two features in Village Monsters where I check for profanity and slurs.

Players can send letters to villagers, and villagers attempt to "read" what you send them. I have profanity checks in place to see if you're sending them awful things and they will respond negatively if so.

In addition, there was once a feature where villagers could reply back to your letters using the same words and language you used in the letter. It used a type of text generation known as a Markov Chain. I have further checks here to ensure that the simple AI used to create these letters didn't accidentally send something awful.

To test both of these features, I had ~40 lines of text that I used for sending letters. 10 of these lines of text purposefully contain inappropriate words to ensure the game handles them correctly. The line in the Cool Stuff cutscene is one of those.

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Even though this text was never meant to be seen by a player, I should have taken far better precautions.

To this end, I have deleted all offensive debug text I used for testing, and will use a different solution for this testing going forward.

I am so sorry. It's beyond inappropriate that people had to see this. I hope my explanation makes sense, but obviously I understand any damage has already been done. I can only hope to regain your trust.