This update is accessible via the “Live” release of Boundless on Steam.
Please report all issues discovered with the update to this support thread.
Please restart Steam to make sure you get the latest version of Boundless. If the update happens whilst Steam is open it’s unlikely you’ll get the latest version.
Overview:
This release collects together the recent Testing releases:
- Testing 170: Multiple Characters and Compass Update!
- Testing 171, 171.1: Optimisations, Block Levels, and Angry Creature Spawning!
Release Notes:
- Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Adjusted experience received from ancient technology seams to be a fair amount, and flowers to be a small amount (to reduce the effectiveness of picking them up and placing them as a cheap XP gain).
- Blocks on moons (Level 2 worlds) now have more health than on home planets, and ring (Level 3) worlds have even more. This allows us to better balance the speed and progression of mining.
- Can equip specific items from within a Smart Stack.
- Moving held items in backpack should leave them still held.
- Rebalanced slingbows
- Added multishot variants.
- Removed cooldown to make repeaters better.
- Changed gravity effects for different types.
- Balanced damage, and speeds etc.
- Tweaked names.
- Removed gravity from grapples.
- Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Improved creature spawning so creatures should spawn much more often.
- Spawn creatures ahead of the player when they are traveling.
- Despawn creatures far away from players more quickly and decreased spawn in/out distances. This increases the number of creatures closer to players.
- Reduced creature counts so the game is not overly cluttered with creatures (after the above changes).
- Optimised the spawning system server for CPU load.
- Improved the hud damage indicators.
- Let the character look almost perfectly straight/up down again so that you can select planets directly above your head again etc.
- Re-balanced creature health, damage and armour values to make them much more challenging.
- Re-balanced creature variants spawning on each world.
- Different power creatures on some worlds.
- Rate of fire and projectile speed variations.- Creature names now display their level and if they are elemental.
- Elemental creatures now spawn, with different meshes, and applying status effects when they attack.
- Fixed the selection of meshes for creatures.
- Large refactor of the server and client to support users having multiple characters, GUI to enable this functionality coming soon. This change required a reset of the testing universe (updated to a new snapshot of the live us east servers), it will not however require a reset on the live universe when promoted to live.
- Rebalanced creature variants that are spawned on each world to show more interesting variation.
- Higher level wildstock have a random chance of being aggressive.
- Made high level hoppers be smaller.
- Rebalanced creature health and damage.
- Wildstock charge now only does repeated damage after half a second.
- Creature Threat
- The creature threat system has been overhauled.
- Creatures now detect players that are a certain range from them in all directions and act aggressive towards the player for a period of time before they start attacking.
- Players need to run away from the creature when it is in threatening mode if they want to avoid combat.
- Creatures now detect players if they use any projectile weapon near the creature.
- Certain creatures will start attacking players if they are too close to the creature.
- Certain creatures will not attack the player unless they are attacked first.
- Certain creatures will flee from the player is they are too close.
- Creature Aggro
- The creature targeting system has been overhauled.
- Players now accumulate aggro by performing certain actions like: hitting a creature or healing a player.
- Creatures will now attack the nearest player with the highest current aggro rating.
- A player’s current aggro is decreased the further away they are from the creature.
- Aggro decreases over time if a player is outside of combat for certain period of time.
- Wildstock combat behaviour has been adjusted
- Hit range for a Wildstock charge has been widened from 0.5 to 1.8.
- The number of Wildstock charges in a row with a break has been reduced from 3 to 1.
- The speed of the Wildstock charge has been increased from 6 m/s to 12 m/s.
- The range of the Wildstock charge has been widened from 10 meters to 15 meters.
- Improved creature spawning so creatures should spawn much more often.
- Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- Modifications in the objectives system:
- All the completed objectives have to be claimed to obtain the reward.
- Created new daily/weekly panel at the top of the feats screen.
- Now the feats can be tracked.
- Tracking shortcut with right click for feats and regular objectives.
- Moved Equipment crafting skills earlier in the progression unlock order.
- Removing level 35 level cap and going back to 50
- Removing the need to build a portal on another world to complete the objective
- Exploration: Light Source skill now produces a continuous dull light around the player. Be warned that it currently can’t be disabled without unlearning the skill.
- For every 500000 xp earned beyond level 50 players will be awarded an extra 40 beacon plots. This can be repeated infinitely.
- Swapped endurance and abilities skill groups around.
- XP rewards for machine crafting are given to the person who started the crafting (previously all crafting rewards went to the beacon owner)
- Rebalanced tool damage to make progression feel more pacy, and mining feel less grindy.
- Fixed the application of mastery to action time.
- Taken out the bonus for having more mastery than needed.
- Updated skill text to explain what recipes are in each recipe pack, as well as saying which features are not yet implemented.
- Modifications in the objectives system:
- GUI + HUD:
- Added hotkey (K) to toggle the social screen.
- Added new air bar in the hud.
- Certain Crafter feats have been repositioned in the GUI
- Certain Explorer feats have been repositioned in the GUI
- Fighter feats have been renamed to Combat
- Moved “chunk cache size”, and “chunk download rate” settings into a Network tab on the setting GUI.
- Added a new game option in the network settings tab which disables all of the bad-connection flow, including inputs being reset to 0 server-side when the connect falters, allowing people to play with bad-behaviour and rubber banding if they choose to do so, instead of being returned to the sanctum or prevented from playing on that server.
- Added segmented health bars to help communicate health and level variation of players, creatures and blocks.
- Added Quickmove (shift and click LMB or RMB) from backpack to quickuse in Inventory menu
- Improvements on the hud’s compass:
- Adding new compass entries: portals and settlements.
- Removing beacon entries.
- Improved the visualisation of enemy entries.
- Changed the compass entries scaling based on distance.
- Initial GUI for multiple character support.
- Updated the debug screen:
- Removed the debug screen from the DOT key. This now uses F1 and brings up a debug menu bar at the top of your window.
- Press F1 again or click on the close option to go back to playing the game.
- Added a latency graph showing the clients current server network latency.
- Added a frame time graph for debugging long frames.
- Added a debug information window with all of the old debug information.
- Added a “Copy Debug Information” menu option which copies all debug information.
- SFX + Music:
- New audio events in the GUI.
- Engine:
- Client inputs are now reset to 0 server-side when the client is unresponsive on the network. This will halt players when their connection is temporarily lost.
- The bad-connection screen is modified to prevent changing the camera view until only 10 seconds are left in the countdown, the character equally will not go into the logging-out pose until such a time.
- The bad-connection “return more quickly” button, is replaced with a “return now” button that will (pending server communications) return you instantly back to the sanctum instead of waiting another 10 seconds.
- The bad-connection logic is slightly tweaked to delay putting you into the bad-connection state by an extra second in the hope the network improves first. An extra second is also added to the recovery logic. This should help reduce flip-flopping between the states too often.
- Fix some short/long-term physics issues:
- Continuous collisions against unloaded chunks may have put you into the world, whilst we generally resolve that with auto-unstuck feature added recently, this should make it just happen less often. That unstuck feature also only occurs server-side, and this issue was causing players to sometimes be stuck in the ground when returning to the sanctum too.
- Fix in building the initial set of physics chunk data after optimisations to split physics on y-levels, this would only very rarely have caused any issues and only since the recent releases.
- Fix bug in the sanctum where you could fall into the floor beside the warp that opens when “returning” to the sanctum from a game world (initial play of the game was unaffected).
- Many optimisations for the game client that should, in particular, make portal transitions much smoother in terms of frame-rate, and being in areas with lots of portals much smoother in terms of frame-rate.
- Improved quality of the anti-aliasing in the game removing certain artefacts that can appear especially in areas like the characters eyes, and removing the majority of unintended “blurring” in the image.
- Reduced the maximum speed in physics achievable to be about 90mph, adjusting the drag to reach this speed asymptotically now instead of clamping. This is largely speaking an optimisation as the speed achievable in physics by any entity has a direct cost in unrelated server-side systems that need to work in a such a way as to take into account client’s point of views at varying latencies, as they need to “cast a wider net” as it were, to take into account entities which from the clients point of view may have been much closer.
- Tweaked some physics values and slightly how stairs work in the physics to help fix/counteract issues that came about from us dropping the frame-rate of simulation from 30fps to 16fps when sprinting at high speeds.
- Bug fixes:
- Fixed a bug where one side of an open portal could end up with bad data allowing the user to fall into the ground next to it.
- Fixed an issue where you could get stuck in the bad connection screen after recovery.
- Fixed client crash when trying to add more than 255 columns (not individual plots, but unique columns) to a beacon.
- Fixed completed warps/portals not having their breaking decals correctly removed when the damage is reset without being fully broken.
- Fixed footfall not being generated by players without permissions… a bug introduced meant the opposite was happening and users “with” permissions were trying to generate footfall instead. oops!
- Fixed issues in shader that could lead to weird colour artefacts around blackened areas of textures and the lack of specularity in those areas (eg the blacks of characters eyes).
- Fixed not being able to generally walk onto slabs/steps from a low-friction material like ice.
- Fixed showing a timeout bar on other warp in sanctum now that it does not close on a timer.
- Fixed crash walking out of the sanctum to a location at the top of the world.
- Fixed a rendering issues in the sanctum where sometimes the portal would only show the sky depending on where it exits into the world.
- Fixed an issue where you could overextend a grapple by running along the ground, and also now allow you to reel yourself in much more easily when standing on the ground without needing to jump into the air first. Running along the ground will still allow you to reel-out the grapple though, only that you will eventually hit the max length before being forced to stop.
Resolved Known Issues:
The following items were known issues in previous releases and have now been resolved.
- Beacons which are greater than 100 metres from the centre may not function correctly.
- Placing an item into the Crafting Table will somehow miss the intended slot and will drop instead.
- Some creatures may disappear instantly and drop items before their bodies hit the ground.
- World Builder currently does not work on Mac.
Known Issues:
The following items are known issues in this release.
- Breaking the Campfire during the initial tutorial will reset some objectives and display the ‘Build a Temporary Campfire’ objective again.
- Cannot close Inventory when Chat is used.
- Changing the Chunk Cache Size in fullscreen mode will disable game functionality.
- Choosing Return to Sanctum option briefly displays ‘wrap error’ text on screen.
- Clicking the Craft button very quickly may close the active recipe.
- Entity rendering will not always work correctly when there are multiple warps very close together, or where a warp opens up to a location very near where the entrance is.
- Game displays welcome message for a world through a portal without going through it.
- GUI rendered incorrectly on Intel HD graphics (and some AMD / GTX laptop GPUs) on Windows.
- If the Furnace does not have enough fuel, the game will state that basic crafting recipes are missing.
- If the game (loader) fails to start on Windows 7 and 8 you may need to install https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2999226/update-for-universal-c-runtime-in-windows
- If you spend a skill point before the tutorial asks you to, you will be required to unlearn and relearn the skill again.
- Illegal protocol message sometimes appears after going through a portal.
- Item placed into Request Basket will disappear when placing the same item into storage.
- Item wanted is completely different to what was placed there before on the Request Basket.
- Items will occasionally be unable to smart stack with other items that belong in the same smart stack category.
- Menus may constantly reappear on screen after closing them.
- Number of available feats is incorrect.
- Objectives & Feats - Some tasks are not being tracked correctly.
- Opening or closing doors and trapdoors when standing too close to them will restrict player movement. To get out of the situation, interact with the door or trapdoor again.
- Portal UI text overflows when the portal token name is very long.
- Region names may not be displayed correctly after discovering one.
- Request Baskets (previously Buying plinths) that had wanted items set before v151 have unset them. Sorry. Going forward they will be fine.
- Skill descriptions are not final.
- Some feats are not shown on the GUI
- Some interactive blocks (crafting table, machine, beacon control) have become corrupted during the migration. This will result in at best those blocks not being able to be interacted with, at worst the game crashing when interacting with those blocks. To fix the issue the block(s) in question need to be re-placed. In the case of anything other than a beacon control the block can simply be broken, picked up, and then re-placed. In the case of a beacon control this will work, although it would result in all the plots having to be re-placed one at a time and during that process the contents being unprotected. A better workaround for a beacon control is to craft a new beacon control, place that, and then break the old one, which will keep the beacon’s plots placed throughout the process.
- Speech bubbles may still be displayed above players after going through portals.
- The recipes are not final.
- Using D3DGear http://www.d3dgear.com/ crashes the game on start up.
- When Beacon fuel is nearly full, adding extra fuel will display a message saying that there are no consumable fuel items.
- When expanding a smart stack offered by another player during trading, it will be empty.
- Z-fighting with some items (workbench and other machines) when placed underwater.
Release 172.1
- Creatures drop more drops, especially at higher tiers. Also a range of extra drop types.
- When mining seams on higher rank worlds there is a chance to get more than one resource. This is effected by luck.
- Fixed Luck and creature drops, so that now the more Luck the more chance of higher drop numbers.
- Creatures have less health and slightly less armour.
- Topaz slingbow does more damage.
- Elemental creatures take varying damage based on the element of the damage done.
- Gem tools have move durability.
- Fixed a bug in the selection of creature variants to spawn.
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At least we agree 
