Crimson Desert's latest patch adds new difficulty options, lets you adopt a pet bird, and unglues cats from shoulders

Unfortunately, it also seems to have caused some issues with mounts out of box

Another Crimson Desert patch is upon us, with developers Pearl Abyss delivering more of the additions they outlined earlier this month. Though, they didn't get as deep into specifics on the likes of new difficulty settings and extra pets back then as they have in their latest notes, which also run down a raft of fixes for the red pudding.

Leading off the notes for patch 1.04.00 are the three new difficulties - easy, normal, and hard. As you might imagine, normal's been the default difficulty so far, while easy reduces the damage you take and gives you more time to react to incoming attacks. Hard, meanwhile, goes the opposite way on both of those fronts, as well as ensuring that you only get a health boost from food once your character's finished their chowing down animation. Can't be giving out healing to people who don't clean their plates and lap up every crumb mid-fight, can we?

Moving on to something far more important, this patch introduces pet birds. These can be found around Pywel, but you'll need to do a quest for an item called the Sotdae of Bond, which lets you feed these avian buddies and gain their trust. Pearl Abyss have also added five new types of cat, made the Abyss Heuklang pettable, and added the ability to change the names of pets and horses. So you can call your bird Cat and your cat Bird. Your cat named Bird also shouldn't get accidentally stuck to your shoulder going forwards, with that bug having been fixed, but also replaced with an item called the Sigil of Bonding that'll let your cat stay on your shoulder for as long as you like, since it turns out people enjoyed their shoulder cats.

As if that's not enough animals, this patch also adds in livestock sellers you can buy cows, pigs, goats, sheep, ducks, and chickens from if you fancy. I'll be honest, in my brief trek through Crimson Desert, I didn't stumble across anything you'd need the contents of Old Macdonald's farm for, but I assume they mill about your camp and produce some valuable resources when the mood takes them.

Beyond that, Pearl Abyss have made more tweaks to things they've been messing with for a while - controls, interfaces, storage, combat balancing. "Improved the rendering quality of distant objects and textures" means those sexy towers on the horzion should be even more beautiful. Tumbleweeds have also been added to crimson and deserty regions of Crimson Desert, so things feel more red and pudding-like.

Finally, something worth bearing in mind of you plan on grabbing this patch right away is that Pearl Abyss have acknowledged they're working on an issue it's caused with the summoning of mounts. Odds are that'll be sorted sharpish, but if you find your trusty steed isn't coming when called in the interim, you now know the culprit. Though, if Reddit's to believed, it might not be the only teething trouble brought on by this patch. "All Trust has been lost with the Greymane NPCs, which sounds poetic, but it's actually unfortunate," a poster on that site wrote, which is definitely a sentence.