Release 192: Balance, Fixes and Polish!

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:

Unofficial release overview by @Jiivita :heart: :blue_heart: :green_heart: :yellow_heart: :purple_heart: :black_heart:

Consider supporting him here.

Important:

If you lost items in the 24 hours after Release 192 going live then please see:

Release Notes:

  • Crafting + Resources + Equipment:

    • Allow blocks to placed where a creature has died as long as the client placing the block has collected drops from the creature (for other people watching who have not yet collected the drops, the creature will be forced to move out of the way the way block drops already do when placing blocks).
    • Standalone sign pieces (the smaller, non-combining ones) will now act like torches, and longer remain in place when the block they were placed on-to is removed.
    • Open portal conduits now count towards a beacon’s prestige.
    • Crafting can now preserve input items (for example buckets of water are now outputted as empty buckets).
    • Fix for crafting input items, output items and spark being lost if the machine output inventory is full.
    • Equipment wear:
      • Tools now only take wear damage if they impact something.
      • Spanners now only take wear damage if they do any amount of repairing.
      • Buckets now take wear damage each time they are used as a crafting input.
    • Fix an issue that would cause 2 blocks to be placed for one mouse click at high block placement speeds.
    • Another fix for portals that wont close when one side of the portal has somehow become dormant.
    • Fix for grapples staying connected (to mid air) when looting creatures.
    • Beacon footfall is now affected by and additional two factors:
      • The prestige of the beacon itself in addition to settlement prestige. The settlement prestige sets the maximum potential footfall you can receive. The footfall you receive scales with your beacon prestige. After a threshold prestige you gain the full reward. Currently this threshold is 5000. This is designed to ensure players have to build something to gain footfall.
      • You will receive less footfall the longer you are away from your beacon. We allow 7 days in which your reward will not be reduced. After this time the footfall reward will reduce daily linearly. Your beacon will be classed as visited if you have entered the beacon or the settlement it is in.
    • Recipe Balance Pass:
      • Spark and Power:
        • Reviewed and tweaked spark costs for all recipes.
        • Reviewed and tweaked power costs for all recipes.
        • Rounded Spark costs to make calculations easier.
      • Brews:
        • Reduced some input requirements and doubled output for brews to make them more affordable.
        • Added missing oil input to luminous brews.
        • Increased effects of all healing brews.
        • Increased effects of all recovery brews.
      • Food:
        • Rebalanced food energy recovered to make sure cooking higher level foods is more worthwhile.
        • Fixed the elemental shielding food recipes.
      • Augments:
        • Reduced input requirements for level 1 and 2 augments to make them more affordable.
        • Increased the input requirements for level 3 augments, and made them more powerful.
      • Engines:
        • Made advanced engines more expensive so that instead of being a cheaper way to get additional power, they are used to unlock higher level recipes and get better efficiency out of the machines at the high end.
      • Furnaces:
        • Added flint as an ingredient of furnace bases and crucibles.
        • Made the iron furnace take half the time and half the fuel of the stone furnace, and the titanium furnace take half the time and half the fuel of the iron furnace.
        • Gave each furnace recipe a value for how much fuel it needs rather than a flat cost for everything.
        • Increased some higher end furnace recipe times to take into account the faster furnaces.
        • Rebalanced fuel values to make higher level and compacted fuels more worthwhile.
      • Drops:
        • Increased the drop chance of orbs from surface resources.
        • Decreased the drop chance of flint, opal and rock salt from surface resources and rocks.
        • Increased the number of drops and drop chance from rarer surface resources.
      • Wear:
        • Rebalanced the amount of durability that each machine and engine has to be lower for the early game and higher for the later game.
        • Rebalanced the amount of durability that spanners fix to give more contrast between the different materials.
        • Rebalanced the amount of durability removed by recipes to be higher for longer duration recipes.
        • Made Engines, which always have more durability, wear down over the same amount of time as the machine they are attached to.
        • Removed the need to use the right type of spanner on engines. All spanners work, but the matching gem type spanner is more effective.
      • Misc Recipes:
        • Rebalanced Fresh Vital Essence recipes from creature drops.
        • Reduced the copper needed to make copper weapons and tools.
        • Reduced the input requirements for Starberry pie.
        • Reduced input requirements for glue.
        • Added missing Fresh Vital Essence recipe for Wildstock Trophy
      • Misc Other
        • Increased the drop rate of seeds from grass, and made Luck have an effect of the chance of dropping.
        • Increased the max stack size to 100 from 99.
  • Creatures + Combat + Characters:

    • Creature projectiles (that are not homing projectiles) will feel the full force of gravity once touching water so that spitter projectiles shot from within the water will not just continue moving in a straight line slowly once they leave the water…
    • Fix for charging slingbows not charging if the mouse is clicked before the previous fire action is complete.
    • Removed knock-back from player healing and cleansing bombs.
    • Fix for still playing fuse audio when the player started throwing a bomb but changed items before throwing it.
    • Fix for fuse burn showing on bombs after the player started throwing a bomb but changed items before throwing it.
    • Fix ruby slingbow bolts turning backwards when fired in water.
    • Fix for bombs not showing damage/healing numbers if they explode more than a second after being thrown.
    • Fix for all status effect damage/healing (poison or drowning damage) being shown for other entities.
    • Fix for bomb damage to creatures not displaying if the player is looking at a damaged block.
    • Fix for damage not showing on creatures as they die.
    • Fix grapple reel-in not working after being revived.
    • Fixing various issues with creature animations and rotations with respect to beam and projectile attacks across varying latencies to the server:
      • Fixing projectiles to always come out of the “mouth” of the creature correctly between normal and lobbed shots.
      • Fixing the beam to allows come exactly out of the “mouth” of the cuttletrunk also.
      • Fixing the projectiles to always fire (ignoring pitch) exactly along the direction that the creature is facing, so projectiles will never shoot out from behind/the side of the creatures.
      • Fixing the beam to always be firing exactly in the direction the cuttletrunk is facing.
      • Fixing an issue where projectiles and beams could fire from “mid-air” when the creatures moved too quickly after finishing the attack.
      • Fixing an issue with the animation rates not being applied correctly in all cases for the clients animation of the creatures for various attack, and many issues to do with synchronisation of the animations with the attacks client-side or animations being finished too quickly during projectile attacks.
      • Fixing issues with ribbons from projectiles often rendering suddenly back all the way to the creature when the projectile is destroyed.
      • Fix issues with rapid-fire attacks from spitters that shoot projectiles one after another in an arc, so that the creature visually rotates for each of the distinct shots.
      • Prediction of damage from creature attacks fixed (not sure when broken…)
    • Augment loading improvements.
      • Smart stacks of augments can now be dragged onto a slingbow/totem. The first augment in the stack will be loaded as if you had dragged it directly.
      • Augments held in your hand can be loaded into the slingbow/totem in your other hand by using them.
  • Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:

    • Feats around travelling through portals have been disabled as players were using slides to grind them. New feats will be added at a later date.
    • Fixed not being able to warp to the temporary home you get during the tutorial before you place your first campfire.
    • Moved Core objectives to the top of the Journal.
    • Removed the task to receive a status effect after eating food in the tutorial. This is a temporary solution until the status effect is fixed.
  • GUI + HUD:

    • Added a wear bar that replaces the health bar of machines, furnace, spark core and forge power coil blocks if they are on full heath.
    • Fix for character briefly adopts first-person pose when opening a GUI menu just after exiting the Sanctum.
    • Fix for occasional client crash when opening a GUI menu just after exiting the Sanctum.
    • Fix for occasionally showing massive stamina numbers after walking through a portal.
    • Fixed details in places GUI for temporary home locations.
    • Fix an issue that could cause inputs to sometimes get stuck when moving from error screens / loading screens to the main game view.
    • Removing the ALL filter from the Journal and it now defaults to available.
    • The Beacon Console screen will now give a proper reason for why there is no settlement, rather than assuming it is due to lack of prestige. In addition the settlement algorithm has been adjusted to require a chunk to have a certain number of plots rather than a certain number of plot columns which caused towers to be biased against treating them as roads. There is likely to be further iteration here in future, but this should improve the feel for players.
    • All dialog windows now use a dynamic layout ready for changing text sizes with localisation.
    • Removed the trade complete dialog (the next screen now has trade status “Completed” instead).
    • Various clean up of the trading screen.
    • Fixes for incorrect spacing on some GUI screens.
    • Added support for the delete key in text boxes.
    • Improved the movement key input in text boxes.
    • Fix for showing ingredient recipes in the knowledge screen.
    • Fix for missing beacon fuel text.
    • Fixed an issue where a contextual message would cause a crash.
    • Added a contextual message which explains where beacon footfall comes from when you collect coin from a beacon.
    • Smart stacks are now accessible in shops.
    • Parental controls have been added, these setting include:
      • Filter profanity
      • Censer player text
      • Censer player chat
      • Allow player to add friends
      • Allow player to trade
    • Added a new report screen for reporting other players or locations:
      • In the game menu to report players, beacons, locations and other issues.
      • The report player dialog will autofill character name with the last player you looked at (it can still be edited).
      • The chat report button now uses the new report dialog.
      • All dialogs have an optional additional details to fill in.
      • Players and signs can now be reported by interacting with them.
  • SFX + Music:

    • Added elemental slingbow and charging effects.
    • Lowered the grappling volume.
    • Additional item sounds.
    • Make first person running footsteps faster than walking.
  • Engine:

    • Updated network connection initialisation to avoid a potential stall when a user has poor responses from name servers.
    • In cases where the client is unable to spawn correctly through a portal or warp (The only times this can really happen is with a flat portal where there is no space available on the other side to be able to stand), the client will now be kicked and sent back to the source side of the portal via the sanctum, instead of allowing the spawn to jump somewhere else… eg into lava or possibly very far away.
    • Fix a case where the world nearby would not load a quickly as it should.
    • Fix lava looking inconstant across different level of detail.
    • Optimisations:
      • Improve performance when many other players are around.
      • Improve performance around machines.
      • Avoid rendering reflections when water is not actually visible.
      • Added a dynamic occlusion system. Mainly helps around build up areas, usually > 10%, sometimes significantly more.
      • Decreased server to client network load by only sending damage data required by the client.
      • Decreased server to client network load by only sending region and settlement data when they change.
      • Decreased server to client network load by not sending entity hitboxes or scales.
      • Improve performance when there are many campfires/beacons in view for their particle systems to be shared.
  • Server:

    • Universe server re-written in C++ for much better scalability and ability to optimise even further in future.
  • World Builder:

    • Fixed an issue in the world builder when manipulating a prefab that is connected to the root of the graph that would cause the client to teleport into the middle and get stuck unable to move.
    • Fixing cross-platform issues in world builder, all folders/file paths within the config folder must now be lowercase, and a migration that will run the first time you open a file will ensure this including moving files/folders within the config folder on your computer, so be warned! from now on, the worldbuilder will not allow you to save files unless the path within the config folder is only lowercase.
    • Improve the way gradients work in the world builder to prevent areas on the side of extremely steep cliffs being classified as low-gradient.
    • Fix an issue in world builder computing the smoothed depths of surface elements which will have a minor effect on instance spawns that limited themselves to certain depths (depths were over-estimated somewhat before this fix)

Resolved Known Issues:

The following items were known issues in previous releases and have now been resolved.

  • Grapple tools not working correctly when winding grapple up or down after grappling block drops.
  • Natural crystal base doesn’t have a mesh and can stick out from storage.
  • Other players sometimes appear to not be have any items in their hands.
  • Request Baskets may indicate that there is not enough coin when the total value of sale is just less then the Request Basket Budget due to tax.

Release 192.1:

  • A number of description strings have been updated.
  • Fix an issue where PC’s which are very slow loading the game could fail authorisation via Steam.
  • Fix crafting output not saving.
  • Fix crash moving items in quick use.
  • Fix slow connections to Steam timing out
  • Fixed an issue where existing worlds were referencing the wrong creature configurations.
  • Fixed an issue where the tiers were 1 level higher than intended.
  • Pipes have been renamed to Links and Engines should now appear as Power Coils.

Release 192.2:

  • Fix elemental creature spawning
  • Fix crashes due to earthyam soup

Release 192.3:

  • Added support for gifting lost items.
  • Fixed an exploit where you could duplicate buckets.
  • Fix buff timers reset on portal transitions.
  • Fix incorrect orb sizes in storage.
  • Fix a crash tracking other players.
  • Fix a crash with legacy items.
  • Remove qubit / qbit references when levelling up.

Release 192.4:

  • Reduced the amount of Fibrous Leaves needed to make Sackcloth from 3 to 2.
  • Rebalanced wear amounts for recipes, so that small single crafts take more wear, but large bulk and mass crafts take far less.
  • Fix a crash with beacon plotters.
  • Fix a crash with rewards.

Release 192.5:

  • Fix tutorial progress sometimes being lost when exiting the Sanctum with a new character.
  • Changed amount of items required for the campfire tutorial to match the recipe.

Release 192.6:

  • Fixed left quickuse radial item placement issue.
18 Likes

Update OP with details of Release 192.1.

6 Likes

Nice update. Looking forward to the recipe tweaks ^~^

Updated OP with details of Release 192.2.

4 Likes

Just some feedback on fibrous leaves: based on my testing they are still much too scarce even with the increased drops. My motivation below:

  • They completely dominate the effort (and thus price) of farming starter tools - especially with the decreased other materials in these tools.
  • They are still at least twice as fast to farm from leaves than from seeking plants with an atlas. The time navigating between patches of plants is just too long for it to be effective.
  • The situation is going to get worse after this patch due to the increased ease of farming seeds. This is going to push op the demand for fibrous leaves much more than the drop rate will increase supply.

If you have a way to give us a better supply/demand (e.g. reduced materials when converting to sackcloth or reduced usage in copper/iron tools) that will really help the economy along alot - especially the experience for players just starting out. IMO making a copper hammer shouldn’t be 80% chopping leaves and 20% getting copper and coal.

6 Likes

That’s a good summary of the problems. They are definitely a bottleneck for me. Shimmering Orbs and Tech Devices too but I’ve not found any of those since the update so they may be sorted.

1 Like

love it it will erase the unused plots between hightraficed place

1 Like

cam upon a bug which is quite repeatable hard but it is. first a screenshot.

this is on epsilo. didnt had this problem on any other planet.

the bug is triggered by constantly walking into the wall while smashing with tunneler hammer. sometimes it either shoots you above the sky, below textures, or out of textures like on the screens. happened already 7 times during last 2 days. Only on epsilo.

dunny why it is happening if u want you can teleport to me right now.

@james

i don’t understand the “problem” of the fibrous leaf…
i mean, i don’t know if everybody agrees with you, but as it is for me… i don’t run a shop, i use them for myself, as a noob when you go out for f.leaves grinding you don’t go there for 3 leafs, you consume a full iron axe (1 hit, 1 foliage broken) in this way in 10 to 15 mins you get something like 20 leaves. it is enough. faster than this - buy them in a shop?
when you start FARMING fibrous leaves you do it with a diamond axe, and you get 600 to 800 fibrous leaves per hour (obviously, if you farm that much, you surely have a shop, you surely have mass craft). just breaking foliage in a lvl1 (home)world.
in the last 2 days i went in a lvl 3 planet and gathered raw exotic earthyam via ink plant (now called traveller’s path" or something like that…) well, while gathering more or exactly 1121 raw exotyc earthyam, that took me something like 4 hour and 30 mins, but i’m not that good/fast, i was also exploring the planet), i also gathered more than 500 fibrous leaves. (i have luck maxed, bonus stat maxed)

it doesn’t exist something like “starter farming tool”, if you are “farming” you are not a “starter”, spend your money for gems toll (axe), a starter will get fibrous leaves also with a free-to-make totem…

What i’m asking myself is: what do you want, fibrous leaves to be dropped from the sky? :smiley:
making fibrous leaves easier to get, what doeas it mean? 1000 per hour? 2000 per hour?

better to put it like this: hou much time (X) you want to use to get an (Y) number of leaves?
wich is for you the right proportion?

[sorry for the long post]

2 Likes

The problem with fibrous leaves at the moment is the same as it was with coal a while ago. Their relative effort to collect dominates the process to craft a significant amount of items in the game. This is a balance (relative drop ratio) issue.

I state that the time to gather (X) leaves required for a copper/iron hammer should be < the time to gather (Z) all other materials for said hammer.

My feedback has nothing to do with end-game farming. It has to do with relative drop ratios and their impact on the economy (and thus the activities that players are driven to do).

6 Likes

wich is exactly what i said in my replay:
case n°1: you need fibrous leaves only for yourself in 10 to 20 minutes you have enough of them to craft even advanced tools, and it is more or less the same time you will stay mining, as you will not go there to mine 3 iron ore or 3 copper ore… considering that gems tool uses leather (wich don’t has fibrous leaves in the recipe, but hide and bark)

case n°2: you have a shop, your activity is to farm enourmous quantity of items, you will use end game farming tools and will use bulk/mass craft

so the only reason a player could be driven to farm fibrous leaves, it’s to sell them, if the drop ratio get higher, the price will lower, you will stay the same time to gfet the same money… for what? to see that you have a bigger number? 2000 instead of 1000 just to get the same money?

[don’t misunderstand me, i have a language barrier problem, so maybe i seem to be too direct]

2 Likes

I see your point, I don’t see many people using the single craft option very often. However I seen conversations in regards to progress from single to mass crafts. So we gotta look at things in different perspectives a player able to get enough materials to get outfitted with good weapons and a shop/group/end game gathering when we want to mass craft everything and a balance in between.

It’s hard for me suggest any balance ideas when there a lot of features that are in the works that effect gathering in different levels of the game. I always wondered about feedback that is bias based on current meta versus the long term goal. With atmospheres, group play, tier planets and such.

2 Likes

a fix happening it seems so: 192.3 ?

1 Like

Updated OP with details of Release 192.3.

8 Likes

Hi, I’m new to the game, and the first thing I felt weird on the game was the fibrous thing. I had a lot of stones, but to craft a new hammer had to go outside with a wood axe and my skills at a very low level, just farming trees hoping for a little brown leaf to show of.
Is annoying for new players, mostly because on any other game like this, crafting low tier tools is easy.
Now, after 200 hs of gaming I can farm like 100 leaves in 15/20 minutes, but it was annoying at first.

(I also have a language barrier problem, so I hope you get the point)

5 Likes

Your language barrier appears to be almost non-existent. You You did great! :smiley:

2 Likes

[Ante Scripttum 1:i don’t think that is the correct thread to speak about this]
[A.S.2: just want to give my personal view, i will not say anything anymore about fibrous leaves after this one.]

sorry man but…
stone tools are better than wooden
stone tools and equipment does not require fibrous leaf
why you were so frustrated?
I’ve been probably really lucky, as i haven’t felt the need to run from wood to iron and then to gems in the first week, as other seems to do,
i just followed what it seemed to me a natural progression and fibrous has never been a problem for my own use… with a stone axe it possibly takes 5 minutes to gather a few… but hey, it’s the first time you are looking for them, why should you feel frustraed?
i know some people see “copper, i want all my tools in copper” and they want 21 fibrous leaf to make all tools and equip in copper, while going around wih stones, after 5 mins they see iron “iron, i want all my tools in iron”, than open discord and see people speaking about gem tools “gem tools, i want gem tools” and once they see a gem tool is affordable at lvl 7 because of money got via objectives&feats, they get axe lvl 4, no power bonus, no luck bonus, nothing.
a stickman with a gem axe, probably not even the good one for fibrous farming.

from my point of view that is wrong, i’m not sayng it’s your case, as i don’t know your case, but still with wooden tools you said you were looking for fibrous… and that is wrong. wrong idea, wrong tools, wrong needs :japanese_ogre:

if at the beginning you get something at a low rate (ston axe) and then it goes better (iron axe), and then it goes smooth (silver axe), it means you are getting better= satisfaction
if you get back to a low rate = frustration (you probably have done a step longer than your leg, tryng something you can’t afford, or not smoothly affordable)
if you get frustration cause you want to run to something you can’t actually get = wrong dream :japanese_ogre:
if you r dreaming wrongly, stop and chek what you are doing, find a better way, if it works = satisfaction as you have overcome a hard situation

with fibrous leaf you are not going to get “low tier” tools, those are wood and stone… with fibrous you craft all the tools/equip from copper to gold/titanium, gems tools/equip doesn’t use fibrous leaf, so fibrous is intermediate at the moment… and you need 3 fibs for low-intermediate, 6 for high intermediate. with silver axe you need 6 and at full consumpton on foliage you get at least 35 to 45 fibs, wich, for personal use, isn’t bad at all and it means that with that tool in 10 minutes you got enough fibs to craft 11 tools.

P.S: as said at the beginning: i will not say anything anymore about fibrous leaves.

4 Likes

I just want to get some numbers onto the topic for perspective. These are based on current market value (which is a fair approximation of relative farming effort post 192 in my testing):

Item / Total Cost / Fibrous Cost / %
Copper Tool / 137 / 114 / 83%
Iron Tool / 142 / 114 / 80%
Shop Stand / 338 / 296 / 89%
Bag of Rice / 134 / 103 / 76%

These recipes really need tweaking. Fibrous Leaves are currently 80-90% of the effort to craft many basic items - which basically comes down to spam hitting leaves with a diamond axe on a T1 planet at the moment. =

Tagging in @olliepurkiss - pretty sure this is unintentional?

5 Likes

This is not the intention. I had hoped that the balance changes we made to the plant spawning and the drop rates would have smoothed this out. The 1.0 homeworlds will have more biomes with conditions that spawn the plants needed to find fibrous leaves, so that will further improve things, but I’m not sure by how much. I’m tempted to make the Sackcloth recipe need 2 fibrous leaves rather than 3 because the main material in a tool (e.g. Copper or Iron) should be the most valuable thing in the tool.

9 Likes