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Disney Dreamlight Valley patch fixes a quest that cursed me

Dream Shards are no longer scarce, Gameloft says

a disney dreamlight character with red and pink hair and glasses pointing at a room full of grilled fish and fruit cups Image: Gameloft/Disney via Polygon
Nicole Carpenter is a senior reporter specializing in investigative features about labor issues in the game industry, as well as the business and culture of games.

Disney Dreamlight Valley’s biggest problem was its Dream Shards — a resource so scarce that lots of players, including me, were getting soft-locked out of the game for days on end. However, developer Gameloft says it’s fixed the problem by tweaking the game’s resource balance issues and fixing other problematic bugs.

Dream Shards, a key resource, will now spawn more often — as a reward for feeding animals, clearing thorns, and digging up sparkling dirt.

Dreamlight Valley is an early access game, and there are technical problems that have just recently hindered some of that enjoyment. I’m playing on Xbox Series X via Xbox Game Pass, and based on what I’ve heard and read, it’s in much better shape than the Nintendo Switch version, which is apparently constantly crashing or glitching out. I haven’t experienced technical snags more often than once or twice in the 19 hours I’ve played, which doesn’t feel irregular to me. But I have been held up by that imbalanced resource spawning.

I’ve reached one quest line that unleashes a curse onto the village — one that locks all the villagers inside their houses, except goddamn Kristoff, Merlin, and Rapunzel’s mom. To progress, I need five Dream Shards, which are incredibly rare. For reference, after 19 hours, I have none. You need to clear thorns for a chance at finding them, and only a few thorns spawn a day — unless you’re unlocking a new area. The respawned thorns have provided no Dream Shards for me, so I grinded cooking and fishing to unlock Dreamlight points to open a new area instead.

See above: My house is filled with cooked fish and fruit cups. (With everyone locked in their houses, I couldn’t sell any items either, which means I had to drop everything on the ground.)

After a few hours, I had enough Dreamlight points to unlock a new area filled with thorns. Unfortunately, these thorns gave me coins and seeds — not a single Dream Shard. And so I had to start the process of grinding Dreamlight points again, in hopes of one day finding five Dream Shards. At that rate, it would have taken more than a week, which wouldn’t have been horrible if I could do literally anything else in the game.

But it didn’t take me more than a week, because I found a solution by trawling the developer’s Twitter account: Gameloft sent all players 25 Dream Shards to make up for the balance issues; my issues are solved now, and my town is free. So if you’re having this problem, check your mailbox — even though there’s nothing in-game indicating you have mail. It’s a Band-Aid on a design problem, even if the Band-Aid is invisible to anyone who isn’t checking Twitter.

Thanks to this update, which Gameloft said is rolling out over a couple hours, Dream Shards shouldn’t be much of an issue. But if they are, know that your mailbox is hoarding Dream Shards, too.

Gameloft hadn’t mentioned whether it’s tweaked spawn rates for any other items — flowers and other foraged resources had been spawning slowly, too — but the Night Shard adjustment will give a lot of players plenty more freedom.

The next level of puzzles.

Take a break from your day by playing a puzzle or two! We’ve got SpellTower, Typeshift, crosswords, and more.

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