Happy New Year!

I’ve prepared a new build. It’s mostly a bug-fixing build, although there are also some cool new additions and improvements, too.

“Aw, that’s it? Just a small bug fixing build? I’m disappointed…”

I hear you. There are some words for you at the bottom of this blog post.

But first, enjoy this gorgeous artwork of Chigusa by seinachan01110!

Choca Collab

Recently, I learned that a music artist named CHOCA is a fan of Yandere Simulator! She contacted me and asked if there was any way that we could collaborate together, such as by including her music in the game. I’m always delighted to learn that someone with a large following enjoys my work, and always willing to collaborate when offered the opportunity, so I immediately began brainstorming ways for us to somehow work together.

At first, I couldn’t think of a good place in the game a for Mexican Reggaeton track – but then, I remembered something: the dance machine minigame!

A new music track has been added to the dance machine minigame in the Gaming Club; Choca’s song “Loli Pop.” Coming in at 2 minutes and 36 seconds, it’s the longest song on the dance machine by far! I hope you’ll enjoy it!

Reduced RAM Usage

I recently discovered that hundreds of files in the game were uncompressed, causing them to take up much more RAM than necessary. I went through each of these files and compressed the ones that didn’t need to be full-size and full-quality, which reduced the game’s file size and significantly reduced the amount of RAM that your computer has to use in order to run the game.

This might help the game run on computers with lower RAM! (Tests still need to be run to determine this for certain.) So, if you’ve been unable to run recent builds of the game because your computer was running out of RAM, I urge you to please test out the latest build and confirm if your computer is able to run the game now.

Amai Week Improvements

Amai and Taro now ignore distractions while they are having a picnic with each other. They’re just enjoying their picnic way too much to let anything take their attention away from each other. D’aw, how romantic.
The Cooking Club now waits for Amai to enter the Home Ec room before they begin preparing food. This prevents situations where Amai is completely alone and vulnerable in that room.

Improvements

The curtains in the Photography Club now block a student’s vision when they are closed. (Previously, they didn’t – oops!)
There is now a sound effect for stealing the cooking utensils in the Home Ec room.
There is now a sound effect for picking up a jug of bleach.

Fixes

If the player eliminated Osana without killing her or removing her from school, lowered Osana’s reputation beneath -33, and killed Raibaru so that the bullies wouldn’t be afraid to bully Osana, it was possible to put a note about “bullying” into Osana’s locker to make her agree to a private meeting. This, by itself, was not a bug – but, if the player did this on Week 2, when Osana’s hair was short, it was possible to perform the “get Osana’s long hair tangled in fan blades” elimination, even though her hair wasn’t long enough for it. This bug has been fixed.
If the nurse witnessed a corpse while she was walking to the medicine cabinet to get headache medicine for a student, the nurse would fail to exit the “getting medicine for student” routine, and would be in the “reacting to corpse” and “getting medicine” states simultaneously, causing her to perform the “inspecting corpse” animation at the medicine cabinet, or in front of the student she was getting medicine for. This bug has been fixed.
The “kill student by trapping them in freezer” method is only supposed to work for one student at a time. If the player attempts to kill two students in the freezer room simultaneously, one will be shoved out of the room. Previously, when this happened, the shoved student would stop animating indefinitely. Now, that bug should no longer occur.
If the player interacted with the “Spread Garbage” button prompt in the Home Ec room while holding tarp that was wrapped around a dismembered limb, the game would think that the player was holding garbage and would spread garbage around the room. This bug has been fixed.
If the player sent Student A to distract Student B, and Student B got distracted by a weapon on the ground before Student A reached them, it would become impossible to speak to Student A again for the rest of the day. This bug has been fixed.
If the player killed a student while they were in the process of picking an item off of the ground, saved the game, and then loaded the game, that item would teleport to the student’s hand, even in death. This bug has been fixed.
If the player sent Student A to distract Student B, and along the way, Student A got distracted by a weapon on the ground, it would become impossible to speak to Student A again for the rest of the day. This bug has been fixed.
If the player aimed their camera at a student who was interacting with Amai’s bake sale, the student would stop interacting with the bake sale. This was not desired behavior, so this is no longer possible.
If the player stole Amai’s phone and ended the day with it, the “end of day results” screen would claim that Ayano had stolen Osana’s phone, not Amai’s phone. This bug has been fixed.
If a student died while wearing a gym uniform and then the player saved and loaded the game, the dead student would not be wearing the correct clothing. This bug has been fixed.
When a low-sanity hallucination of Osana or Amai appeared, they could be seen using their old hair models instead of their new hair models. This oversight has been corrected.
If the player saved the game, put a corpse into the freezer in the Biology Lab, then loaded the save, the corpse would clip through the nearest wall. This bug has been fixed.
Amai’s “staring at food, confused, trying to figure out what went wrong and made people puke” animation was not looping properly. This bug has been fixed.
If two students in a relationship witnessed the player commit murder, they would freeze indefinitely and never run to safety. This bug has been fixed.
If the player interrupted Osana’s Monday phone call and then saved and loaded the game, the phone call would happen again. This bug has been fixed.
It was possible to access the “Whip Game Test” in 1980s Mode. This was unintentional (and a time paradox) so the ability has been removed.
At the end of the 1980s Mode genocide ending cutscene, the subtitles clipped through Ryoba’s head. This bug has been fixed.
In the 1980s Mode Genocide Ending cutscene, Ryoba was not wearing the right stockings. This oversight has been corrected.
When the player looked at the school map, the label for the Student Council Room was missing. This bug has been fixed.
Text labels that were too close to each other and were clubbing into each other on the school map have been adjusted.
Fixed some inaccurate subtitles for Amai/Taro interactions that have voice lines.

That’s It?

Yeah, I know, it would have been cool if the January 1st update was a huge, epic event with a ton of exciting new features…but, I wasn’t able to get as much work done as I wanted over the past 2 weeks. This is partially due to the holiday season re-directing my time towards my family instead of game development, but that was honestly not the biggest contributing factor.

If you’ve been thinking, “All of these updates are so small!” or “I’m impatient, I want to see huge progress on Amai!” or “It’s been 12 years, when are Ayano’s other rivals coming?” then you and I have been thinking the same thoughts. I usually just say, “Well, Yandere Simulator is the type of game that is periodically updated with new content…” and that’s true, but there’s a lot more going on than just that.

Since the start of a new year is the best time to review the previous year, I plan to write a blog post to discuss the speed of the game’s development, the factors that are slowing it down, what potential actions could speed up the game’s development, and the pros and cons of those actions. It’s basically going to be my annual “Patreon Transparency Report,” except I’m going to be doing it here on my blog instead of over on Patreon.

I’m thinking that I’ll probably split it into two blog posts. One blog post will be like, “Happy new year, let’s take a look back at 2025 at all the amazing, fun, incredible stuff we did last year!” which will be followed by a second blog post with a very different tone – “Here’s what didn’t go as planned, here’s what could have been better, and here’s how can we improve next year…” I think it would be better to separate my thoughts into two blog posts, so that we don’t have one blog post that constantly flips back and forth from positive to negative, optimistic to pessimistic.

In that secondary blog post, I plan to be brutally honest, discuss some stuff that I normally never discuss, and lay out the truth no matter how ugly or hard to swallow it is. If you’ve been thinking, “Grrrrr, I’m so disappointed, where are the big updates?” then, this will be the blog post for you.

Bottom Of Blog Post Fan Spotlight

A content creator named JasonMM created a video telling the history of the Aishi Family!

I think it’s hilarious to see this long, grim, dark story that I wrote being communicated with a bunch of absurd memes; the editor has an uncanny knack for always find the perfect meme for any given situation, and I love it!

(The part at the very beginning about the Aishi Precursor is slightly inaccurate, because I haven’t revealed very much information about her yet, but the rest of the video is very faithful to what I’ve shared on the Characters page of the official website.)

I got a kick out of it, and I hope that you do, too!

For the first time in 2026, thank you for following the development of Yandere Simulator!