By Zynga Community Manager Stumpgrinder

We hope everyone had a great holiday season and we’re really looking forward to 2012. So many great things are in store for you!

We are starting this week off with a bit of a bang. We know a lot of you have been working on both Holiday Hollow but wanted to get finished up with the Pioneer Trail maps of Beaver Valley, Avalanche Pass, and High Plains before we closed it down. Plus there was the new Native American stuff, and gears for Holiday Hollow were really hard to get…

Anyway, we made some changes based on your continued feedback. Starting today, Gears in Holiday Hollow should be much easier to get. We’ve been giving away cool new items every day on our Facebook fan page, and in the near future we’ll be giving away even more Gears to help you out. Plus, as you may know, we haven’t closed off the maps to Fort Courage yet. We decided to give y’all the rest of the month to finish them off, just in case!

Over the last few months we’ve been taking your comments about space on the homestead, about the use of buildings, how there are too many buildings, that you can’t store some buildings, and the lack of space generally. As you know, over the holidays we released the new Monumental Homestead expansion for early adopters that wanted it right then and there for Horseshoes. Okay, so many of you don’t want to spend HS. Don’t worry, the ability to get the new expansion via questing is coming soon.

However, just expanding the homestead is only a minor solution to the problem and, from a technological point of view, the homestead can only get so big before it gets really slow on your computer. So we’re planning on debuting a bit of a new technology for buildings. Well, it’s a new building. Before you start groaning about yet another new building, let me explain: it’ll let you store certain kinds of buildings inside of it–many of which you weren’t able to store before. In addition, you can interact with those buildings inside of this new building. Crafting menus, bonus collection, etc. It’ll all be available for you, stored away inside the new building.

You’ve also wondered what in the world happened to Hank and Fanny. They went off on their honeymoon to Yosemite and, uh, kinda hung out there for awhile. Or something. Well they’re back, and they need a new home! Apparently the General Store is no place to start a family. Look for a big return of quests involving the newlyweds soon!

That’s all we have for this very minute so stay tuned for more upcoming features and improvements on the Pioneer Trail!

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