Sorry if this is the wrong forum for this. I haven't been active here in a while, but I was just wondering why was Alegarten replaced with Neugarten and how/why is it different? I asked in the comments of a news post but I'm not sure it'll be seen.

Please move if this is the wrong forum. Thank you!

NPC Gunter became a vegetarian, and folks got tired of samey vaguely german stuff.

It was partly because the artists were running out of ideas along Oktoberfest lines.

It also helped to change it to a summer holiday instead of an autumn one, because autumn is typically chock full of holidays and Subeta wanted to spread them out a little more.

neugarten focuses more on a sustainable living theme and offers items such as vegan/vegetarian foods, low waste alternatives, and other stuff like that.

people were asking for those sorts of items, often for pet TCs, and the in-universe reason for introducing them was gunter becoming vegan (and later vegetarian, or partial vegetarian) after growing close with oatmeal the goat, and it expanded out from there to include other NPCs and themes.

it was also moved to the summer because there were a lot of holidays packed together in the fall (alegarten, subeta anniversary, keel hauliday, morostide, and fireside all one after the other) while summer always felt very empty.

aahhh I see!! Thank you so much all of you for explaining to me. Like I said, I haven't been consistently active in a while, so I completely missed all of this.

I was alarmed when I saw that Gunter was incarcerated. xDD