AI is reshaping nearly every part of the enterprise, from how employees work to how organizations compete. Increasingly, it's also reshaping the data architectures that underpin those efforts.
New global research from Cloudera suggests organizations are reassessing the data architectures that support AI. As AI expands beyond pilot projects and into core operations, enterprise leaders are reevaluating the architectural decisions that will shape how AI scales across the business.
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The Great AI Re-Architecture captures a broader shift in enterprise AI: AI has reached a point where enterprise data architecture has become the determining factor in whether organizations can scale it. Organizations are redesigning their data architectures to support the operational demands of AI, from governance to increasingly distributed workloads.
AI Is Reshaping Enterprise Infrastructure
Many organizations are reaching the same conclusion: their existing data architecture has become a limiting factor.
What’s driving that reassessment extends well beyond compute. Security, governance and compliance rank as the leading driver of architectural change (42%), ahead of improving performance (35%) and scaling AI initiatives across the business (33%). Meanwhile, 84% of respondents report that AI workloads have increased infrastructure costs. The survey suggests enterprise AI is changing the priorities behind infrastructure decisions. Security, governance and compliance now outweigh performance as the leading driver of architectural change, emphasizing how closely AI strategy has become tied to data protection and regulatory requirements.
Cloudera
"Security and compliance increasingly shape the way organizations design their AI architectures," said Sergio Gago, CTO at Cloudera. "Enterprise leaders want to expand AI without creating new risks for their most sensitive data."
Supporting enterprise AI increasingly requires architectures that can evolve as business requirements change while protecting enterprise data wherever it resides. The architectural decisions organizations make today will influence how easily they can expand AI as technologies and business priorities continue to evolve.
Governance Is A Driving Force For Scaling AI
Governance is becoming a defining factor in how quickly new initiatives move forward. Nearly all respondents (95%) say they delayed or canceled AI projects in the past year because of data governance, compliance or regulatory complexity, while more than half (55%) report delaying six or more projects.
The survey also suggests that governance is becoming more difficult as AI becomes more deeply embedded across the enterprise. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents say AI integration has made data governance more complex and harder to maintain as organizations manage data across increasingly distributed environments.
Cloudera
"AI changes the scope of governance," said Gago. "As organizations expand AI across the business, they need a consistent approach to managing data regardless of where it resides. That consistency gives organizations the confidence to scale AI without losing control."
Governance challenges increasingly intersect with security. As enterprise data becomes more distributed, organizations need a consistent approach to protecting sensitive information across every environment where AI operates. As enterprise data becomes more distributed, organizations must maintain consistent policies across environments without slowing AI development. That balancing act helps explain why governance is emerging as one of the defining operational considerations for enterprise AI.
For many organizations, governance has become a prerequisite for enterprise AI. The ability to apply consistent policies across increasingly distributed data environments can determine whether AI initiatives continue to expand or stall before reaching production.
AI Workloads Are Becoming More Distributed
Enterprise AI is prompting organizations to take a more deliberate approach to workload placement. Rather than relying on a single infrastructure model, they're evaluating where AI workloads will deliver the greatest value.
One of the clearest signs of this shift is workload mobility. Two-thirds (66%) of respondents say their organizations have moved AI workloads from public cloud back to on-premises or private cloud environments within the past year. At the same time, hybrid environments have emerged as the most common location for AI inference workloads, narrowly ahead of public cloud. Looking ahead, planned investments span public cloud, on-premises, edge and hybrid architectures, showing how organizations are expanding their options rather than converging on a single infrastructure model.
“Organizations want the flexibility to run AI wherever it delivers the greatest value. That requires an architecture that supports changing workload requirements.”
"Organizations want the flexibility to run AI wherever it delivers the greatest value," Gago said. "That requires an architecture that supports changing workload requirements without forcing a fundamental redesign every time priorities shift."
That flexibility allows organizations to align AI workloads with business requirements instead of infrastructure limitations. Some AI workloads prioritize performance and low latency, while others are constrained by where sensitive or regulated data can be stored and processed. Those competing requirements are encouraging organizations to design architectures that support multiple deployment models without sacrificing security or governance.
Enterprise AI will continue to evolve, and the infrastructure supporting it has to evolve with it. Organizations are designing architectures that let AI workloads move as business needs change without requiring a fundamental redesign.
Building The Foundation For Enterprise AI
The Great AI Re-Architecture is already underway. Organizations are redesigning the data architectures that support AI to meet the demands of enterprise-scale deployment.
The gap between AI leaders and everyone else will increasingly be shaped by architecture. Organizations that build data architectures capable of bringing AI to their data, wherever it resides, will be better positioned to scale AI as the technology continues to evolve.
Learn how Cloudera is helping the world's leading enterprises build the data architectures needed to scale AI. %!s()
This summer, America celebrated the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, widely recognized as the formal founding of our nation and one of the early stages of establishing a democratic government.
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Over the past two decades, in particular, democracies all over the world have struggled with a lack of clear support. Democracy scholars have referred to these challenges as evidence of backsliding, in which political institutions slowly erode from within by backing away from democratic rules and norms and abandoning pro-democratic behavior. This phenomenon has many political and social scientists concerned.
One indicator of a democracy's health is how satisfied a country's citizens are with their system of government and how committed they are to making it successful. Depending on how happy citizens feel about it, they will behave accordingly—either by participating in democratic processes and living out democratic ideals or not.
On this point, a study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that dissatisfaction with democracy resulted in lower support for democratic behaviors in Mexico, according to development economist and co-author Enrique Seira Bejarano of the University of Notre Dame. Seira, the Joe and Deborah Loughrey Professor of Economics, studies how malfunctioning political institutions can cause economic issues and how democracy benefits and spurs economic growth in a country.
Surveying more than 50,000 Mexican citizens across 6,300 electoral precincts during Mexico's 2017 state elections, Seira and his research team found that low levels of satisfaction led to a reluctance to participate in three democratic activities: attending poll worker training (a requirement for citizens during elections), staffing a polling station on Election Day and voting in the presidential elections a year later.
"We find that dissatisfaction with democracy predicts lower democratic engagement across all three behaviors," Seira and his co-authors wrote. Rather than relying on self-reported behaviors or country-level comparisons, the researchers studied the link between satisfaction with democracy and democratic behaviors at the individual level, merging administrative measures and analysis to create original data.
The research indicated that the more dissatisfied citizens were, the less they engaged. Those who reported the lowest level of satisfaction (in other words, surveyed as "not at all satisfied") were 4.6% less likely to attend poll worker training, nearly 12% less likely to staff their polling station and 2% less likely to turn out to vote.
Based on data from the Integrated Values Surveys, Mexico ranks 54th out of 75 democratic countries in average levels of dissatisfaction with democracy, according to the study. This suggests that numerous other countries are struggling with the same challenges—if not more so—than Mexico.
"Both globally and in Latin America, citizens' satisfaction with democracy has decreased by 10 to 15 percentage points since 2010," the researchers wrote.
Relatedly, in the United States, the share of citizens who think it is essential to live in a democracy is 71% for those born in the 1930s versus 29% for those born in the 1980s, Seira and his co-authors noted.
"Support for democracy as measured in surveys—which has been on a more than decade-long decline—is worrisome, since it is associated with a decline in civic behaviors," Seira said.
How corruption erodes trust, diminishes support
But what causes citizens to lose favor with their system of government and way of life?
According to Seira, who is also a faculty fellow at Notre Dame's Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs, there are several potential reasons. One is that American voters and those in other parts of the world are growing impatient with gridlock in Congress and how government struggles to accomplish goals and objectives.
Another possibility is that the welfare state has been retreating worldwide since the financial crisis of 2008, and citizens place blame on their democratic governments for causing some of that downfall. A third possibility is the influence of social media, which causes polarization in societies both in the U.S. and abroad, making it harder for democracies to function.
Yet another possibility—and one that has received less attention—is that citizens increasingly perceive corruption (the use of public office for private gain) as endemic. "The fraction of Americans who think the U.S. government is corrupt has been increasing and is now close to 70%—and, surprisingly, it is on the same level as democracies in Latin America," Seira said.
This statistic led Seira and his co-authors to conduct a second study on democracy—this one looking at whether and how government corruption leads to further civic disengagement. Seira and fellow researchers from MIT and Stanford studied 17 Latin American countries using both a field experiment and tens of thousands of surveys collected over a decade.
In their working paper, Seira and his team found that when citizens were exposed to high-level politicians' scandals, individual voter turnout causally decreased by 10 to 20 percentage points. In addition, contributions to support elections and honesty and trust between individual citizens all suffered. Furthermore, voting was affected most when incumbents perceived as honest were implicated in corruption cases close to election time.
"When they hear about these scandals involving high-level officials such as presidents, cabinet members, prime ministers and justices, voters are less likely to turn out to vote by 20 percentage points," Seira said. "When a president steals, citizens don't just lose faith in that president—they lose faith in democracy itself.
"And we show it causally," Seira explained. "Watching real footage of top politicians taking cash cut actual voter turnout by up to 27% and lowered support for democracy. Democracy is built on the promise of political equality, and corruption undermines that very promise."
Citizens' willingness to donate time to support the organizations of democracy—by volunteering to be an electoral observer, for example—decreased by 43% (relative to the 4.9% who volunteered on average). It similarly reduced their willingness to donate money in support of election activities by 16% (relative to 22.8% who donated). Even more worrisome, the researchers discovered, is that when top-level politicians participated in corrupt activities, explicit support for democracy declined in favor of authoritarianism.
Seira said the media plays a big role in highlighting political scandals. "The number of news stories about corruption has tripled in Spanish and doubled in English in the last 20 years, which just means that more of these events are in the public eye than they used to be."
This visibility creates an unfortunate trade-off, one for which a solution needs to be found, according to Seira. On the one hand, public disclosure forces accountability and denunciation of such behavior, which is needed for democracies to work. On the other, when citizens see that the system is corrupt at the highest levels, it can be very damaging to the credibility of the system itself. The culprit may not be that corruption is disclosed, but that it goes unpunished, as is often the case in Latin America and other developing countries.
In the field experiment part of the study, Seira and his colleagues found not only that corruption undermined citizens' trust in democratic institutions, but that trust in one another also suffered, with citizens less willing to entrust neighbors with money in incentivized lab-in-the-field experiments. In addition, exposing citizens to footage of their politicians taking bribes made it seem as if such behavior was acceptable, prompting individuals to steal money the researchers had endowed them with.
Can better civics education help?
Providing ample and relevant civics education to the next generation may be one way to strengthen democracy while combating dissatisfaction and corruption, Seira believes. Because the effectiveness of civics courses has not been widely tested, Seira and his co-authors are currently conducting research through a multi-country study of the effects of civics education on democratic behaviors.
"What we want to know is how effective these courses are," Seira said. "Do they generate more informed citizens? Do they allow citizens to critically assess the alternatives to democracy? Are citizens more willing to donate time and effort to support democracy? And to what extent can we make better citizens through education?"
Seira noted that even though the first two studies were conducted in Mexico and Latin America, respectively, and were not specifically reliant on U.S. data, parallels can be drawn between the regions and in how survey participants would have responded. The third study is ongoing.
Publication details
Andrés Santos Vargas et al, Satisfaction with democracy predicts democratic behaviors, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2517671123
Working paper: Apex Corruption Erodes Democratic Values
Bachelor's in mathematical biology, Master's in creative writing. Well-traveled with unique perspectives on science and language.
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Can better civics education restore voter dissatisfaction over political corruption? (2026, August 11)
retrieved 12 August 2026
from https://phys.org/news/2026-08-civics-voter-dissatisfaction-political-corruption.html
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After 130 hours in Fields of Mistria (so far) and getting married thrice (so far), I've learned a lot about how romance and marriage work. In some ways Mistria has a super permissive romance system (plausible deniability polyamory) and in other ways it's a bit restrictive (you must confess your feelings, or else!). This is your exhaustive walkthrough on heart events, scenes you won't want to miss, and exactly how dating around works before and after marriage.
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Fields of Mistria romance walkthrough
Meet the marriage candidates
At first, there are 10 eligible singles among your new neighbors. There's a whole lot more dialogue in Mistria than most farm sims, so you'll want to talk with all of them regularly, even multiple times per day, to really get to know them. You can refer to my Mistria marriage candidates list for a little hint on what each of their personal storylines are like. Two other singles are revealed later in the story that you'll often see other players refer to as the "secret bachelor/ette."
Give gifts
Like other farm sims, you can give items to characters to earn Friendship Points. You can give one gift to each character every day. Use my Mistria gift guide to earn points with each marriage candidate fastest.
Don't neglect quests
You'll need to keep up with the main story to get the most out of romance. Work on Adeline's town upgrades so you can go on a once-a-yea Shooting Star Festival date at the end of summer.
See their stories
At certain friendship point thresholds you'll unlock heart event scenes with each marriage candidate. They've all got their own cute character arc and at the end you can become best friends or begin dating them.
Date around
After reaching 8 hearts, you can confess your feelings and begin dating a marriage candidate. You can date multiple characters at once without consequence, so I recommend getting close to a few for fun!
‼️Quests, seriously
I'm not joking about keeping up with the main story! You'll be in for a rude awakening when you want to get engaged if you haven't spent time in the mines. Getting to 8 hearts with Eiland and Juniper and reaching level 100 of the mines are both prerequisites to proposing.
Get married
When you reach 10 hearts with a character you're dating you can craft an engagement ring and then get married. Wedding days in Mistria are so detailed. It's such an indulgent payoff for folks who love romance in farm sims. You'll make choices about decorations, food, and your outfit to personalize the day. There are also some great cameos by family members of certain characters.
FAQs
Can you date multiple people? Yes! You can date all 12 marriage candidates simultaneously until you choose one to propose to.
Do they get jealous? No, characters will comment on who you're dating but in a sort of parallel universe way where nobody realizes you're in multiple relationships.
Are there rival marriages? No, marriage candidates don't express interest in each other, regardless of who you are or are not dating or married to.
I heard there are breakups? There are breakup letters, yes, but NPCs only send these if you have proposed to someone else while dating them. See the breakups section below for info on turning these off in the settings.
Divorce? There is no divorce in Mistria (so far) so be extra sure before you lock in a spouse with a ring!
How do I choose who to marry 😭😭😭? I dunno, but tell me when you figure it out because I'm still torn and rocking multiple save files.
See also
Friendship points
The pink meter shows your current friendship points towards the next heart. (Image credit: NPC Studio)
Friendship points are essentially experience points for your relationships that you earn by talking to characters or giving them gifts. In the heart tab of your journal you can see your current heart level with every NPC and the pink meter showing friendship points earned towards the next heart. You cannot lose friendship points with NPCs. They do not decay over time (animals are a different story) and giving someone a gift they dislike or hate does not subtract points.
All NPCs have friendship points for you to earn, but only marriage candidates (listed as "single" in the relationship tab) have heart symbols and heart events.
How to earn Friendship Points
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Action
Points
Talk
+7 points (earned only once daily)
Loved gift
+20 points
Liked gift
+10 points
Neutral gift
+3 points
Disliked or Hated gift
+0 points
Birthday gift
+10 point modifier to above point totals
Invite on date
+70 points* (❗approximate, unconfirmed)
*The total friendship points earned by going on dates will likely be uncovered by modders and dataminers soon. For now, 70 points is my approximation based on an embarrassing amount of pixel counting and math in an image editor. It sure sounds like a lot but it's definitely worth more than a loved gift!
Disclaimer
If you give a gift to an NPC after midnight on the in-game day prior to their birthday they will react as if it's a birthday present. When I tried it, this didn't appear to give the friendship points bonus for a birthday gift though, so it's only superficial.
Gift giving
Silver Ingot, shown in pink, is one of March's liked gifts. (Image credit: NPC Studio)
Each character can receive one gift per day. Most items are giftable (flowers, produce, ores, food, etc.) and you'll be able to intuit some preferences like how Celine likes many types of flowers, March enjoys ores, and Balor likes expensive gems. Refresh your memory on what they like or love in the relationships panel of your menu.
There's no penalty for repeating gifts, so if you want to grind Friendship Points with a specific character, just keep giving them something they like that's easy for you to stockpile. There is a Steam achievement called "Thoughtful Gifter" for giving any one character all of their different liked and loved gifts. They react differently to gifts they like, dislike, love, or hate, with some pretty cute character details often coming from loved gifts, so that's a little motivation for seeking out all the different things your favorite singles love most.
Gift hints and lists
Gossip from Elsie will reveal a new liked or loved gift which will be greyed out in the menu until you first give one to them. (Image credit: NPC Studio)
If an item is mentioned with pink text during a conversation, that's something that character likes or loves.
You can also get in-game hints by asking Elsie for "gossip" starting from the request board in your first summer. She'll reveal a liked or loved gift for a character once per day which is added to your gifts list in the game menu.
Check my Fields of Mistria gift list for a guide to the easiest gifts for each marriage candidate.
You get to make multiple dialogue choices in most heart events. (Image credit: NPC Studio)
Heart events are special cutscenes with marriage candidate NPCs (other characters have friendship points but not heart events) that you can attend after reaching heart levels 2, 4, 6, and 8. After reaching the appropriate heart level, a character will send you a letter inviting you to meet them somewhere. You can check the details in the quests portion of your journal.
Heart events are scenes that explore each character's personal story and each new scene with a character will build on the ones before. Heart events don't award any friendship points, so you don't need to worry about choosing specific dialogue choices during these scenes to gain more points. Just roleplay how you like!
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Heart event thresholds
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Heart level
FP Total
Unlocks
2 💙
180
First heart event
4 💚
390
Second heart event, Shooting Star Festival date and Harvest Festival dance, NPC will send you a birthday letter with a gift
6 💛
705
Third heart event
8 🧡
1125
Fourth heart event, unlocks dating
10 ❤️
1755
Can offer an engagement ring to see a fifth heart event
*Friendship point totals via the Fields of Mistria wiki. Point totals are not visible in game, so these are just info for doing your own math, if you're curious.
Exceptions:
Juniper's 2 heart event begins at the request board outside the general store, not from a letter in your mailbox.
The secret bachelor and secret bachelorette (revealed by story spoilers) begin with 6 hearts unlocked, so you'll only have an 8 heart scene and, if you choose, proposal and wedding scenes with them.
Speedrunner math:
Mathematically, you can reach 8 hearts by Summer 14, Year 1 by talking to an NPC and giving them a loved gift every single day. If this is possible to achieve at all, it would likely be with Celine by foraging spring flowers.
(Slowrunner math) You can unlock 4 hearts with a character on exactly Summer 28 (to attend the Shooting Star festival date) just by talking to them every single day without giving any gifts, if for some reason you want to do that.
Shooting Star Festival date
Don't miss out on the Shooting Star Festival! Going with someone includes a pretty long scene with dialogue options so it's more like a heart event than other dates (below). The conversations really add to the romance arc for each character, so be sure to reach four hearts with your fave so you can ask them to join you. In the days after, your date will comment on having gone with you (their friends or family may too) and there will also be some (very minor) dialogue changes in their 8 heart event if you saw the stars with them.
Disclaimer
You must unlock the summit to take a date to the Shooting Star Festival. Unlock it by completing Adeline's town beautification quest which comes after you've repaired the bridge, stocked the food stores, and restored the mill in town. Get that done before Summer 28.
Dating
Dates are short cutscenes without dialogue. (Image credit: NPC Studio)
You can begin dating any (or all of) the marriage candidates by reaching 8 hearts. During their 8 heart event you will choose between becoming best friends or confessing your feelings. You must confess your feelings if you want to date someone. You can't be best friends and start dating later, sorry.
After confessing your feelings, Elsie will come to your house the next morning to give you a tutorial on dating. Basically, you can only go on dates on Saturday and Sunday and you can only take each person on one date per weekend. After each date, you get a commemorative photo that you can hang in your house.
Initially you'll just have the meal at the inn as a date option but you can find or buy other "date inspiration items" (unlock by using the same way as cosmetic items). You can only find date inspiration items after you've begun dating at least one person.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Date type
Obtained by
Inn meal
Inn menu given by Elsie during dating tutorial
Beach
Lovely seashell found by fishing
Deep Woods picnic
Picnic set given by Elsie in a letter after unlocking the Deep Woods
Gem cutting
Rough gemstone found in treasure chests in the mine
Park
Dollhouse bench found in dig spots on the eastern road
Bathhouse
Buy bath soap from Wheedle's stall for 100,000 at the Saturday Market
Shooting star festival
Invite a date (with more than 4 hearts) by giving them the Shooting Star Brooch that Elsie gives you on Summer 28
Harvest dance
Press a button shown on screen to invite someone to dance during the festival.
How dates work
Your date photo will capture the actual weather and time of day, so plan accordingly! (Image credit: NPC Studio)
On any Saturday or Sunday, walk up to a character you're dating and press the button (same button as giving a gift) to invite them on a date. You'll choose from a list of date activities you've unlocked and they'll have a couple short lines of dialogue to accept. Each date is a tiny little scene without dialogue (unlike a heart event) showing you and your date on your outing.
Afterwards, you'll get a photo of your date showing the day and the setting. You can hang the photo on the wall like other pieces of decor in your home and interact with it to view the picture any time. You'll only get one of these photos per date type for each character, so think twice before taking them on a park date in the winter! Unless that's the aesthetic you're going for. You'll also receive an item from your date like a flower, gem, or a meal, depending on the activity.
Dating around
(Image credit: NPC Studio)
You can date all 12 of Mistria's marriage candidates simultaneously if you want to. Reach 8 hearts and confess your feelings to absolutely everyone. I'm not judging; that's what I did. Here's what happens:
Two dates per week: You can only take each character on one date per weekend but Saturday and Sunday are both valid date days. So if you have multiple beaus you can invite two on an outing per week. Gem cutting for March and a picnic with Reina, maybe!
No jealousy: Characters will all comment on who you're dating but none of them acknowledge you being in multiple relationships. (So Adeline may comment on you dating Eiland without referencing that you're dating her as well, for instance.)
No player-initiated breakups: There are breakup letters initiated by NPCs (see breakups section below) when you propose to someone else, but you cannot choose to end a relationship with a character you've confessed to otherwise. Sorry, you're dating forever until they say so.
Marriage
(Image credit: NPC Studio)
You can propose marriage after reaching 10 hearts with someone you are dating and crafting an engagement ring. Elsie will come to your house to give you the engagement ring recipe the morning after you reach 10 hearts. Be warned: You need to have reached level 100 in the mines in order to craft it, so don't neglect those quests!
How to get married TL;DR:
Earn 10 hearts with any marriage candidate you are dating
Craft an engagement ring
Offer the engagement ring to your partner to begin a proposal scene
In your proposal scene, choose the heart dialogue option when offered
Choose your wedding date when prompted
You won't be able to miss your wedding, the day begins with a cutscene
Proposals
You can begin the proposal heart event by offering an engagement ring to a character you are dating and have 10 hearts with. During this scene your partner will give you a gift to show their feelings for you—March forges a shield, Ryis gifts you a potted tree, etc. You can reciprocate by choosing the red heart dialogue option to propose marriage. You can also choose to put the conversation off by saying you want to wait and discuss things later and then come back to initiate the scene again later.
Disclaimer
You can cheese wedding proposals by offering the engagement ring and then, during the cutscene, telling your partner you want to discuss things later instead of proposing. You can do this with multiple characters to get all the proposal gift items before committing to just one person. The recipe for an engagement ring disappears from your blacksmith station after you've completed a proposal, so you can't go craft another ring after getting married.
Wedding planning
March really likes chocolate. (Image credit: NPCStudio)
The first day after you propose, your partner will have a cute little line about being excited to get married. On three other separate days leading up to the big day, they'll ask for your input on details about the wedding. For each decision, all fiancees offer three choices: two that are the same among all spouses and one choice that reflects their personal preferences.
Elsie and Josephine bring tons of wedding attire options for you to freely pick from.
Wedding ceremony
You'll talk with your spouse at the altar before Elsie officiates the ceremony.
Inn reception
Everyone gets to eat the meal you chose, and someone close to your spouse will make a toast.
Welcome home
After the big day, you and your new spouse arrive at your farm house after dark and you can welcome them home.
On your wedding day, you don't get to do anything other than attend the festivities. Pro: Watering your crops and feeding the animals is handled for you, Elsie and Josephine promise. Con: You lose an entire day, so avoid scheduling your wedding for a Friday or Saturday so you don't miss the market or the night at the inn. You may not want to schedule it on the same day as another NPC's birthday (or your own!) either because you won't get a chance to give them a gift.
Wedding gifts
Juniper's wedding gifts are her desk, cauldron, chair, and Dozy's bed. (Image credit: NPC Studio)
The morning after your wedding, Elsie sends you a letter with furniture unique to your spouse as "wedding gifts." Juniper has a desk, cauldron, chair, and a bed for Dozy, for instance. March has a desk, chair, and a forge station. You also get a wedding photo of your spouse that you can hang in your home like other date photos.
Breakups vs "Polyamory"
All the breakups are a little sheepish but amicable. (Image credit: NPC Studio)
If you date more than one character and do want to marry one of them, one of two things can happen: Your other partners break up with you and become your best friends instead or you go on dating everyone alongside your spouse. Aside from getting engaged, NPCs will not autonomously break up with you since there is no friendship point decay if you ignore your partners for a period of time.
There are two toggles related to breakups in the "gameplay" section of the menu. Here's how the three possible configurations work:
Default settings
By default, both boxes are unchecked and you will receive breakup letters. (Image credit: NPC Studio)
The day after you propose to someone, any other characters you are dating will send you a letter in the mail saying that they want to end your relationship but remain friends instead. The next time you talk to them they'll ask if you got the letter and how you felt about it. They're all pretty much bittersweet but leave you on good terms. In the relationships menu you will still have the same number of hearts with that character but their label will change from "dating" to "best friends."
Breakup letters off
If you toggle breakup letters off, any characters you were dating outside your fiance will still revert to "best friends" status the day after your proposal. You just won't receive a breakup letter or see any dialogue related to ending the relationship. So you get to have your cake and eat it without the sting of consequences.
The breakup letters range a bit from cordial to cold. (Image credit: NPC Studio)
Breakups off entirely
If you turn breakups off entirely, you will continue to have the "dating" label with all other characters you'd been dating. You can continue taking those characters on weekend dates, kissing them whenever you want, and having daily chats with them that refer to your being in a relationship even after you're married. Like with dating multiple people, no one references that you're married while still dating. It's not really polyamory and more like plausible deniability non-manogamy.
Lauren has been writing for PC Gamer since she went hunting for the cryptid Dark Souls fashion police in 2017. She joined the PCG staff in 2021, now serving as self-appointed chief cozy games and farmlife sim enjoyer. Her career originally began in game development and she remains fascinated by how games tick in the modding and speedrunning scenes. She likes long fantasy books, longer RPGs, can't stop playing co-op survival crafting games, and has spent a number of hours she refuses to count building houses in The Sims games for over 20 years. %!s()
The Jaguar Type 01 EV is inching closer to production.
Jaguar has now revealed the production car’s interior, and it’s a clean break from the past.
The production car will be fully revealed on October 6.
You had to know the interior of the Jaguar Type 01, the company’s new brand-redefining EV, would ditch the English drawing-room look long associated with the brand. Indeed, the just-revealed four-seat cabin borrows nothing from Jaguars of the past.
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The minimalist appearance, with straight lines and little in the way of switchgear, is prevalent in many current EVs, from Teslas to Volvos. Within that aesthetic, however, Jaguar stakes out some new territory with the Type 01.
Jaguar
The repeating theme is horizontal lines, but running longitudinally from the front of the car to the back. That’s most prominent in the long, straight center console that bisects the entire cabin and has a groove running down the center. The door armrests and door panel trim have a similar horizontal design. Straked elements on the top of the dashboard connect with similar pieces outside the car just forward of the windshield. They also appear at the bottom of the steering wheel hub, and the wheel’s two-spoke design is another horizontal bit.
Jaguar
Overhead, the single-pane glass roof is somewhat narrow but extends far rearward. The four seats are sculpted forms with little in the way of pleats or piping and provide what Jaguar describes as a “GT driving position.” Instead of burl wood and chrome, the trim on the doors and the console has a metallic brass finish.
Jaguar
The Type 01 uses a camera-fed digital rearview mirror, with its display at the base of the windshield. A large digital display sits in front of the driver, but the central touchscreen (shown here with the climate controls) is small. The steering wheel's wide spokes are home to what appears to be a pretty standard array of haptic-touch buttons, and two column stalks can be seen too.
Jaguar will be showing off the Type 01 interior—with the car’s exterior still camouflaged—this week during the Monterey Car Week festivities. We’ll see the rest of the Type 01 in early October.
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Joe Lorio has been obsessed with cars since his Matchbox days, and he got his first subscription to Car and Driver at age 11. Joe started his career at Automobile Magazine under David E. Davis Jr., and his work has also appeared on websites including Amazon Autos, Autoblog, AutoTrader, Hagerty, Hemmings, KBB, and TrueCar. %!s()
HBO‘s Harry Potter series has locked in a key role for season two.
Nicholas Hoult (Superman, The Great) has joined the series as Professor Gilderoy Lokckhart, who comes to Hogwarts in Harry’s (Dominic McLaughlin) second year as the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. Lockhart is a key character in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the second book in J.K. Rowling’s series and the source material for season two of the show.
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The character is renowned in the wizarding world for his many heroic deeds, though he’s later revealed as a fraud who took credit for the acts of others after erasing part of their memories. Kenneth Branagh previously played Lockhart in the 2002 Chamber of Secrets film.
HBO gave an early season two renewal to Harry Potter in May. The show’s first season, officially titled Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, is set to premiere Dec. 25. Along with McLaughlin, the show’s core cast includes Arabella Stanton (Hermione Granger), Alastair Stout (Ron Weasley), John Lithgow (Albus Dumbledore), Janet McTeer (Minerva McGonagall), Paapa Essiedu (Severus Snape), Nick Frost (Rubeus Hagrid), Rory Wilmot (Neville Longbottom) and Lox Pratt (Draco Malfoy).
Francesca Gardiner is the showrunner for season one and executive produces with Mark Mylod (who also directs multiple episodes); Rowling, Neil Blair, and Ruth Kenley-Letts of Brontë Film and TV; and David Heyman of Heyday Films, who produced the eight Harry Potter movies. Jon Brown (Succession) is co-showrunner with Gardiner on season two.
Hoult broke out in 2002’s About a Boy opposite Hugh Grant. His credits also include Nosferatu, The Menu and four X-Men movies, starting with 2011’s First Class. He’ll next be seen in Amazon MGM’s How to Rob a Bank and the Disney+/Hulu series Mosquito, from The Great creator Tony McNamara.
Hoult is repped by UTA, 42, Sloane Offer and Relevant.
