Greetings, Adventurers! The first update of the year brings a magical new Season, a more spacious way to celebrate the first event of the year, and updates to Sky’s annual Days of Love celebration. Read on for more updates and bug fixes.

 

Season of the Nine-Colored Deer

On January 15th, enter the story of Season of the Nine-Colored Deer to confront the chaos unleashed by a traitor in the realms—and take it upon yourself to undo the harm they caused.

Join this adaptation of an ancient tale and meet four new Spirits, each with new expressions and lessons to share! Together with the Season Guide, they offer cloaks, masks, capes, hairstyles, and more. Complete a series of seasonal quests to take part in the legend, from a peaceful beginning to an urgent mission to restore the fractures left in the Spirits’ wake.

Specially-themed items will also be available, created as a collaboration for the adaptation of this story:

  • Gift of the Nine-Colored Deer: $14.99 (all prices USD)
    • Includes iridescent antlers and a separate matching mask with an opal-colored painted moon.
  • Radiance of the Nine-Colored Deer: $19.99
    • This iridescent cape will receive an added special teleport ability in the 0.24.5 update. This becomes usable after completing all of the Season’s quests, directly transporting the wearer and friends they hold hands with to a tranquil location and allowing them to view the magical creature.

These will be in the in-game shop while the Season is active. The deer's location within the seasonal area is permanently available to all players, although the deer will be visible only to players using the special abilities of the Radiance on the Nine-Colored Deer cape.

 

A collaboration item will be offered for IGC (in-game currency) in the Season Guide’s Friendship Tree:

  • Mask: 120 Candles

 

All collaboration items will be available while Season of the Nine-Colored Deer is active. Please note that since these are part of a limited collaboration, they are not currently planned to return in the future.

 

A themed hair accessory will also be permanently available from the Season Guide:

  • Hair accessory: 50 Candles

 

Season of the Nine-Colored Deer begins at 00:00 January 15 PST (UTC -8) and continues until 23:59 March 31st PDT (UTC -7). The full Season can be enjoyed for free by all players who have at least progressed to Vault of Knowledge and started the 4th quest from the Hopeful Steward in Aviary Village. Season Pass holders will also have the opportunity to unlock additional seasonal cosmetics, including three Ultimate Gifts.

To read more about the Season and get a peek at some of the cosmetics it will offer, see our recent blog post!

 

Days of Fortune

Celebrate a gathering time with friends, and express your inner dragon—Days of Fortune is back from 00:00 January 29th until 23:59 February 11th PST!

The festivities this year will be in the social area of Valley of Triumph. Teleport with the help of the event guide Spirit who will be in Aviary Village, or travel directly to the area. There a group of Spirits welcomes you, and Social Light will fall like soft snow.

At the top of every hour, a familiar felicitous dragon (not a Dark Dragon, we promise!) will appear, ready to share both some Light and a friendly race—at the countdown, join a festival of Sky kids from across the game servers to race down the slope towards the ice rink. There, the dragon will share a party’s worth of fireworks for everyone to enjoy under the night sky.

A platform in the Valley of Triumph social area also gives spells to create a dragon with other Sky kids! Tap on the prompt that appears over the platform to put on a dragon train costume. Find other Sky kids wearing one, and you can form a train of up to eight players.

Don’t forget, the Secret Area accessible from the ground floor of Vault of Knowledge will be open too. Stop by to enjoy the snowy space.

The Fortune Gift Envelope will be back. This will be in the Friendship Trees of friends with whom you’ve unlocked the carry (piggyback) interaction and allows you to use 14 Candles to gift 5 Hearts. The Fortune Gift Envelope can be given once a day per person, like regular Heart gifts.

(Note: the Fortune Gift Envelope feature requires manual enabling, which means it will become available at approximately 00:00 on the day Days of Fortune begins until approximately 23:59 the day the event ends. Thank you for your understanding!)

Five coin-shaped event currency can be found each day: four placed around the social area, and one from interacting with the Spirits. Use these to unlock new IGC items:

  • Fortune Dragon Mask: 14 event currency
  • Fortune Drum: 34 event currency

 

To keep the dragon theme of the event going, several new IAP will be on offer:

  • Days of Fortune Dragon Bangles earrings: $1.99
  • Days of Fortune Dragon Vestment outfit: $9.99
  • Days of Fortune Dragon Stole cape: $14.99

 

And if you’re looking for items from the previous years of the event, swing by the event shop in Aviary Village:

  • Days of Fortune Bull Mask: 56 Candles
  • Fortune Tiger Mask: 58 Candles
  • Fortune Rabbit Mask: 62 Candles
  • Days of Fortune Lion Headdress: 66 Candles
  • Days of Fortune Orange: $0.99
  • Days of Fortune Fish Accessory: $1.99
  • Days of Fortune Muralist's Smock: $9.99
  • Days of Fortune Wool Hat: $9.99
  • Days of Fortune Enchanted Umbrella: $14.99
  • Days of Fortune Fish Pack: $19.99
    • Includes a themed cape and hat
  • Days of Fortune Pack: $24.99
    • Includes a cape, hairstyle, and mask

 

New and returning IGC items can be unlocked in the event guide’s Friendship Tree. New IAP are available in the in-game shop menu, while returning IAP are offered in the event shop in Aviary Village. Free trial spells for all items (and more) can be found in the Valley of Triumph social area and the event shop in Aviary Village.

Days of Fortune content is available to all players who have at least started the 4th quest from the Hopeful Steward in Aviary Village.

 

Days of Love

Revel in all the different kinds of connections that are at the heart of Sky, and beyond—Days of Love returns with new updates and experiences to share!

From 00:00 February 12th until 23:59 February 25th, a heart-shaped event guide waits for players in Aviary Village. Talk to them to teleport to the location for the event: the Jellyfish Cove area in Starlight Desert. There, Social Light will fall gently from the sky, and every two days, Spirits from past Seasons will arrive to greet Sky children—and even offer the chance to play music together as the end of the event approaches!

Five bow-shaped event currency can be found each day:

  • 4 placed around the event area
  • 1 after interacting with the Spirits there

 

Throughout the event, there will also be double Hearts—every Heart gift and partial Heart gift sent during Days of Love will be doubled! (Note that if a gift is sent before Days of Love begins but is then collected during the event, it will not be doubled.) Home keeps its snowy appearance, and the Secret Area accessible from the Vault of Knowledge will be open for everyone, too, with snow and ice to enjoy winter-themed games and skating moves.

New items are also being introduced for the event! Find IGC items by talking to the event guide in Aviary Village. IAP can be found in the in-game shop menu, or in the event shop in Aviary Village where the event guide waits.

2024 items:

  • Days of Love music sheet: 7 event currency
  • Love Heart Plushie: 14 event currency
  • Love Heart Beret: 27 event currency
  • Days of Love Meteor Mantle: $17.99

 

Items from all previous years:

  • Days of Love Flowery Archway: 100 Candles
  • Love Flower Crown: 15 Hearts
  • Days of Love Mask: 15 Hearts
  • Days of Love Classy Cravat: $4.99
  • Days of Love Serendipitous Scepter: $14.99
  • Days of Love Gondola Pack: $19.99
    • Comes with 35 Seasonal Candles
  • Days of Love Seesaw Pack: $19.99
    • Comes with 35 Seasonal Candles
  • Days of Love Swing Pack: $19.99
    • Comes with 35 Seasonal Candles

 

Free trial spells for all event items (plus other themed spells) are available from the spell shops in Jellyfish Cove and the Aviary Village event shop.

Days of Love content is available to all players who have at least started the 4th quest from the Hopeful Steward in Aviary Village.

Developer Note: This year, Days of Love started with layers of questions: "How do we express love? How do we perceive it? How do we speak of love? What is love to us?" Our answer was that love is a reflection of yourself—of each player's heart. Our goal was to share various ways that love is expressed in our world, and to create an event that touches your heart in a way that’s meaningful to you. I hope you can sense connection through this event, and remind yourselves of times when you were wrapped with love. 💙 - Days of Love Lead Designer

 

Other Updates

New Expression to Use With Friends

A new friendship ability has been added to unlock with friends: the “cradle carry” interaction! Level 2 of the interaction will become available for Season Pass holders to unlock once Season of the Nine-Colored Deer begins.

 

Home and Aviary Village

Thank you for the feedback you’ve sent about the changes introduced to both Aviary Village and Home in the past few weeks. While we’re excited to bring more features to Aviary Village and help it thrive as a hub in Sky, we also know that players enjoy Home, and we want to be sure that players feel like it’s a meaningful place in Sky even as Aviary, Home, and Sky itself continue to evolve.

There aren’t new updates to functionality in Home or Aviary in this update—though, the update does allow us to bring these changes to Switch that were first introduced with the 0.23.6 hotfix:

  • [Switch] Daily Quests can be accessed from the shrine in both Home and Aviary Village.
  • [Switch] In Aviary Village, the pickup location for the daily Seasonal Candle (for Season Pass holders) and Hearts from Player Creations is moved to the front of the Friendship Constellation statue in the village plaza area, for quicker access.
  • [Switch] Game loads to Aviary Village for players who have selected it as their preferred load point.

(As a general note, once Switch players update to 0.24.0, they’ll have crossplay with players on other platforms on 0.24.0.)

 

In the meantime, we continue to work on ways to polish and improve these spaces in future updates. If you have feedback, please be sure to share it in our #live-feedback channel on Discord!

 

A Central Location to Travel to Special Seasonal Areas

A special location was added to Vault of Knowledge in a recent update that allows players to easily teleport to the areas created for past collaboration Seasons—Season of the Little Prince and Season of AURORA.

Once Season of the Nine-Colored Deer begins, a new meditation portal will become available to allow players to teleport directly to Sky’s newest seasonal area. (During the Season, of course, there’s also the option to teleport there through the Season Guide’s Friendship Tree.)

 

Improvements and Bug Fixes in this update include:

  • Players can practice with the Mellow Musician in Harmony Hall once more.
  • Rain may drain our capes but it cannot drain our music: Sky kids can now play instruments in rain or Dark Water, as long as they are being led or carried by someone else.
  • Fixed a bug in the hairstyle shop where spells would conflict with hairstyles a player tried on before unlocking them.
  • UI update to replace the in-game shop shortcut in the upper right corner of the screen with a shortcut to make a friend invite code. We hope this will make it easier to create and send invitations to friends, without having to go back to the Friend Constellation to do so! (The in-game shop can still be found in the settings menu, which is accessed by tapping in the upper right corner of the screen as well.)
  • Tweaks to the UI for interacting with Player Creations that someone else has placed, including a player’s ability to follow that creator or see the creation’s like count once that player has liked the item.
  • Fixed a bug that caused iPhone players to skip over specific Friendship Constellation pages whenever the "next page" button was used.
  • The friend statue in Aviary Village should now be usable for a player even if they haven’t made any friends yet.
  • Fixed an issue where the reactions menu would overlap with the constellation menu during the Aviary Village fireworks show. (Don’t forget, on the first day of each month, the fireworks show replays in Aviary Village every four hours!)
  • Filled in a gap in Golden Wasteland and between the walls of the Temple which was a pit that could trap hapless moths who didn't have enough cape energy to escape.
  • Fixed some other gaps in the terrain in the Shipwreck area of Golden Wasteland.
  • Players being carried with “piggyback” no longer get relocated when transitioning between levels.
  • No more bug that made it possible for chibi players to run out of breath and drown if they went AFK during a quest in Aviary Village.
  • Updated the background music in Sanctuary Islands to play the correct song when entering the area, rather than the finale music for the Season of Sanctuary quests.
  • Added ambient creature sounds to different times of day in the Aviary Village.
  • Bell towers in Home and Aviary Village now chime according to a player’s local time zone.
  • Audio tweaks and new sound effects for the race prop.
  • When using the race prop's edit mode to build a race, checkpoints that are placed now rotate to face the previous checkpoint.
  • Players on surf boards should no longer be able to read chat from strangers.
  • Fixed cases of the Season of Sanctuary ultimate cape appearing warped when avatars used certain stances.
  • Gave the Hopeful Steward’s (non-Ultimate Gift) hairstyle a touch of volumizing spray.
  • Sky kids now put away any prop they may be holding when activating a spell before the spell animation begins.
  • Avatars' hands now touch a candle while holding it.
  • Speaking of holding things, crabs can now be picked up and carried without having to manually drop or put away the object you’re holding, such as a candle or a prop. Avatars will automatically drop the object or put it away when picking up a crab.
  • Fixed a bug that removed a player's closet prompt when someone else started using the footbag item near that closet.
  • Expression menu UI polish to make recently used emotes, abilities, and list of all emotes more distinct.
  • Updates to snowboard animation.
  • When the weather gets cold, there's nothing better than visiting Grandma's snow hut and sitting by the fire. Cozied up in their scarf, the traveling rock talked to Grandma about all the new things they'd seen and all the changes the children were bringing to the world. Their hearts were warmed by good company and hope for the new year.

 

Please refer to this page for known issues ongoing or introduced with this patch: Known Issues Patch 0.24.0

 

As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback, and encourage you to join the community discussion on our official Discord server at discord.gg/thatskygame!