Good evening and welcome to a new surprise Bell Tree Direct! As you can already see, our long-awaited theme update is now live! We're dedicating this entire TBT Direct to the new theme, but first we have an announcement about our upcoming summer event, Camp Bell Tree.
Camp Bell Tree Event Delayed - But Signups Now Open!
We previously announced that Camp Bell Tree will start this Sunday, but we have now decided to delay it by a week in order to spend more time getting it ready. Camp Bell Tree will now take place from August 8th - August 29th. We hope to see all of you then instead!
In the meantime, we have now opened early signups for the event! Since Camp Bell Tree will be separated into teams (cabins), signing up ahead of time will help us organize them. You can sign up by going to Preferences and selecting "Opted In" in the Camp Bell Tree field.
We will be advertising the upcoming event more over the next week. For those of you who may have missed our previous Direct, Camp Bell Tree is a new event that will be similar to TBT Fair, with small events and tasks that allow you to get rewards. However, you'll also work with your cabin against other cabins. We're excited to get started on Sunday, August 8th!
Introducing Our Theme Update
Finally, the wait is over and our time-based theme update is here! After upgrading our forum last year during the New Horizons surge, we unfortunately had to postpone the season and time changes some of you may remember from our previous version. Hopefully the wait has been worth it, because our new theme is now far more elaborate than ever before!
Time Changing Features
Starting with the daily 24-hour clock, we have ten main time changes throughout the day. However, there are also smaller differences that take placing during some of these phases. In addition, the entire forum will gradually get darker as it turns to night and brighter as it turns to day. I'm only going to include six very small screenshots though, so don't worry, there won't be any spoilers in this post! You'll have to see them for yourself when they happen, or feel free to share your screenshots in this thread if you want to explore the new theme together.
Looking at each of these phases may not be quite as simple as it was on the old forum. You can try changing your timezone setting, but it may not line up perfectly anymore! In real life (and in Animal Crossing of course), the sun rises and sets during different times throughout the year. TBT will now follow this same schedule, changing every day throughout the year, with phases lasting about as long as they do in the real world. At least for now, these times are based on an estimate of New York City's sunrise and sunset, which seemed like a pretty good middle latitude to use. However, perhaps in the future we'll add an option that will allow you to match these phases to your own location.
Speaking of changes throughout the year, we have twenty-four different seasons. Some of them may share the same grass or tree colors, but they are all modeled after the grass and trees from New Horizons, both with how they look and with when they change. It will obviously take much longer to see all seasons live on the forum, so hopefully you can wait almost a year to see them all in action!
If you're viewing the forum at night you might see the moon, but probably not if you're reading this on August 8th. That's because we have eight moon phases that follow the real moon. Sorry to those of you who live in the southern hemisphere though, the moon will look backwards sometimes. The seasons are backwards for you too! We want to address this in the future, but I'll explain more at the end.
More Features
In addition to the time and season changing aspects of the forum's theme, we also have two small new options some of you may be interested in using to adjust its layout. Under Preferences, you'll now find these new settings under layout options. "Reduce page width" makes the forum (in desktop mode) more narrow. This might be useful to those of you who like to see the forum's content in a smaller width, similar to the previous version of TBT. It may also make sense to pair this option with the other setting called "remove sidebar," which will remove the sidebar from the forum's home page.
Behind the Scenes
Almost all of the components of the forum design were created by @Laudine including the grass, wood patterns, suns, moons, clouds, etc. Big thank you to her for creating such beautiful art that is now helping bring TBT to life! We worked together, with her making the art and me layering it into the forum and coding in the time/season/moon changing logic.
We also had help with research done by @Chris who took dozens of screenshots of grass and trees in New Horizons. I then organized them together and categorized them into blocks that would make sense for the forum, which Laudine later used to base the colors of our grass backgrounds on. I also used the dates from the game for the season rotation on the forum.
Laudine and I then went back and forth (very gradually) since last year with various versions of the theme components and ideas about how they could work. She definitely went above and beyond with the art, which pushed me to add even more to the theme. For example, I casually mentioned that a moon with different phases might be something cool to do in the future. She then made seven versions of the moon for the night sky, so I knew I had to write a formula to make that work for this update!
Thanks also to the other staff for their input during this process! We are already talking about even more updates, so we might have some more of our artists help with that, but for now I think we'll need to take a break for a bit...
Coming Soon?
I mentioned even more updates, but I don't want to announce anything big because we're not even sure it's all feasible yet! However, I think it's safe to say that something for southern hemisphere seasons (and the moon) will be added eventually! In the meantime, you southern hemisphere people will have to pretend you're up here in the north with us.
I hope you all like our new theme! Feel free to give input or even your own ideas!
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and Camp Bell Tree now starts on my son's 2nd birthday! 
