So, it's been a while, huh? Quite some time has passed since TFN's last update, or news about it. Well, I'm here to rip the bandage off now: what would've been TFN's Christmas update is now canceled. The plan was to push out this update, then begin work on a complete overhaul for the game. However, with how long it's been, I feel it would be best to put this update to rest, rather than try to workshop it into a playable state just to finally get it done. The rest of this page will be dedicated to what could have been. Do note I will be primarily going off of an old changelog document, rather than memory, so some things may be permanently lost.
To make everyone's life easier, skins would have been converted into fully fledged characters. At least the meaningful ones. Basically, you would start with the current roster, but when you reached a certain amount of wins with a character, you would unlock variants for them that behave differently. Toy animatronics would've been fragile but strong, Withered animatronics would be strong but slow, and Phantom animatronics would give their team boosts as the cost of not counting towards the animatronic total (meaning Purple Guy wouldn't need them dead to win).
The biggest quality-of-life change for the game would've been the shop. Rather than relying purely on luck to get the things you wanted, you could now simply buy what you wanted. You would get money by deleting items you didn't want, then heading over to the shop and buying items from there. Aside from some miscellaenous functionality, the shop itself was effectively completed.
Gifting was another big feature, allowing you to give things to your friends. To gift, you first needed gift wrap, which could be obtained at random or purchased. Gift wrap itself was cheap, to provide a low bar of entry to gifting. Once you had your gift wrap, you would select the item you wanted to gift, and it would be wrapped up into a present. From there, you just sent it to a person in the same server as you.
Yes, a lot of the upcoming stuff was a TF2 reference, and this is the most blatant. Items would come in different qualities, to reflect something distinguished about them. These qualities had no gameplay function whatsoever. In update log order, the qualities were as follows:
There was one more quality, but it gets its own section.
Gilded item would be a rare drop, similar to how paint cans are. However, the key distinguisher is that the supply of these wasn't infinite, and they couldn't be bought. So once stock ran out, it would be gone forever. The gilded items themselves were golden variants of pre-existing cosmetics, with a special particle effect as well. Bonnie, Chica, Cassidy, and Purple Bear would have all received cosmetics with this quality, as well as an even rarer version of the Paint Accident, made more elusive due to its ability to be worn on every character. The last note I have for these is that the changelog would not mention them at all, making it all the more special when one did drop.
During the period of time I was developing the update, I was feeling rather silly, so I made a variant of RTD for TFN. It would be off by default, meaning it could only be used in private servers unless an admin decided to enable it in public servers. Once enabled, any player would be able to type ;rtd to get a random effect. The effect list was as follows:
Aside from the new cosmetics, balance changes, and miscellaenous bug fixes, that would've been everything introduced in the "Christmas" Update. So what happens now? Well, the Lost Update has been preserved forever on TFN's old testing place, but I'm unsure if this will ever be public. As for TFN itself, this is not the end. As I mentioned at the very top, this update was simply a hold-over for the game's overhaul once it was complete. And now that it's out of the way, TFN can finally have its own rebirth. With that said, don't be surprised if this takes a while, there's plenty of other things that may need the dev's attention.
Thank you for reading, have a good day.
-DaReal (February 27th, 2025)