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 contains the following significant changes:
- The Centraforge for customising your weapons and tools.
- The Exchange for collecting and spending rewards.
- New Epic Skill system supporting multiple skill sets per character.
- New range of Doors.
Thanks Jiivita!! 
Release Notes:
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Art + Animation + Assets:
- Updated weather effects.
- Reduce the obnoxious glow particle effect around gem torches.
- Projectile trails are now coloured based on the elemental type of the projectile.
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Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Fixed the Atlas so that it only accepts a single augment even if you drag an entire stack on to it (The improvements for ejection help alleviate side-effects caused by this when working with largely saturated inventories).
- Beacon Plotters now have durability.
- Added the Centraforge:
- Please note: this is an early-pre-release look at this feature, and there is still polish and balance to be done. Please feed back on all aspects of the feature, but allow leeway for the fact this is not a final feature.
- The Centraforge is a machine used to enhance and modify any item of Gear (weapons, tools, grapples, spanners, chisels) to make them more powerful and have different effects and capabilities.
- After using the Centraforge the result is Gear with one or more Traits applied to them. Traits come in three flavours: Boons (positive Traits), Defects (negative Traits) and Quirks (strange Traits which are normally negative).
- After placing a Centraforge you will need one or more items of Gear and some Centraforge ingredients to start the process.
- The only ingredient you have to have is Setting Resin, which ends the process and Sets the Traits onto the item of Gear. You are also very likely to want one or more type of Boon Compound to apply Boons, unless you are wanting to create something very strange! There are numerous other types of ingredients you can use to control what Traits you get and how powerful they are.
- All Centraforge ingredients are crafted in an Extractor.
- There are various attributes which affect your chances of success in the Centraforge: your Intelligence, Vitality and Power. The Gear’s Flexibility. The Centraforge’s Power.
- Your Intelligence, the Gear’s Flexibility and the Centraforge’s Power all influence the Effectiveness of the Centraforge session. The higher the Effectiveness the more Boon points get added and the better the Boons will be. Getting a successful result with low Effectiveness will demand high-quality ingredients and a steady nerve.
- Your Vitality determines how much Stability the Centraforge session has. Using ingredients will reduce the Stability, if it ever reaches zero the Gear and all used ingredients are disintegrated. Keep an eye on the Stability!
- Your Power determines how much Vigour the Centraforge session has. Vigour is used up when using some ingredients. There is no penalty for running out of Vigour, apart from not being able to use ingredients that need Vigour.
- All the attributes that affect a Centraforge session are captured at the beginning of the session based on the person who started the session. Increasing the attributes during the session will not have an effect until the next time Centraforging is started.
- You can Centraforge a smart stack of Gear, in which case all the items get the same Traits (good or bad).
- Weapons and tools have been rebalanced to be less extreme in their original form so there is more fun to be had adding the extra features in the Centraforge. This also means that there is more choice of the type of weapon you want. For example it used to be that if you wanted to do Blast damage you were stuck with the 5 shot pattern of a Diamond Slingbow, whereas now a standard Diamond Slingbow is pretty standard, but using the Centraforge you can make it multi-shot, do damage over time, apply status effects, do more damage, fire quicker, or some combination of all of those things.
- Right-click menu of items now shows the stats including the characters attributes, and breaks down what things have affected the final value.
- Please note: the weapon and tool balance is still work in progress, and will change further with the new skills and skill balance. Please bear with us while we get this right. Feedback on balance is always appreciated.
- New doors and trap doors with recipes added. Material progression for wood, stone, metal and gleam. Each has a plain, stylish and ornate version. All the non-metal doors are fully tinted, whilst the metal doors are constructed from copper/gold/iron/silver/titanium and will be coloured to match the metal they are created from. You can continue to mix doors of different colours together, but doors of different “type” will not merge or interact as a single door (and thus can be stacked on top of each other instead!).
- Tweaked the drop attraction for the forge, including removing the lag in picking things up.
- Reduced the number of Beacon Fuel types to 3 (from 5) with the basic one giving 28 days / 4 weeks of fuel. The aim of beacon fuel is to maintain the activity of the world and clear away retired players. The intention isn’t to punish anyone. Based on feedback we’ve increased the minimum duration from 2 to 4 weeks.
- When a block drops a bonus item (e.g. flint) the block no longer drop itself too. This is to better protect against macros placing and harvesting the same block repeatedly.
- Clamped the biggest portal needed to be 24 blocks.
- Added the Forge:
- Improved explanation of Centraforge Effectiveness.
- Re-balanced Flexibility, Vigour and Stability.
- Added tooltips to Centraforge GUI to help explain what all the elements mean.
- Fixed trait names and descriptions.
- Speed up animations.
- Centraforge ingredients now show correctly in the Knowledge screen.
- Gear now has a rank value which shows how powerful it is. This goes up and down based on it’s forged traits so that you can compare forged gear against basic gear.
- Additional logging added to help diagnose miss-prediction in the forge. If you see it please send in your log file in.
- Gear Balance:
- Re-balanced slingbow ranges and speeds.
- Totems now have durability. This was done to make the Totem less useful to scripting game input. No tool should last forever.
- Early tools now do more damage to creatures to help new player who are attacked before they have a Slingbow.
- Totems, hammers, axes and shovels can now damage all blocks (i.e. the concept of “Hardness” has been removed from tools). Lower level chisels can still only affect common blocks. We’ve done this because the system is currently quite confusing for new players, and also to make highly Forged lower tier tools more useful.
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Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Creature projectile fix that stopped them hitting you when you were at too different a height to them.
- Cuttletrunk rapid homing attack speed is been reduced.
- Tier 3 Spitters now use their shotgun attacks.
- Added a starvation status effect. When the hunger bar is at its lowest point the starvation effect is applied. During starvation the character will take damage. Eat some food to remove the starvation status effect.
- The skill-based player light source has been positioned away from the players head a short distance infront and above (but forced to never go into the world geometry) to provide better lighting results.
- The skill-based light will now automatically scale its strength so that it is disabled when the player is already in a bright enough environment (eg outdoors in the day time) to help prevent unnecessary extra lighting from over brightening the scene or hand-held items.
- Lava:
- Can now swim (try it!) in lava, with movement roughly half the speed of in water.
- Lava will be correctly rendered from the underside now, and includes a dense fog when under the surface.
- New Skill System
- The skill system has been overhauled to be more understandable, streamlined, have more meaningful choices and overall be more EPIC.
- Skills are laid out on the screen in a clearer and more concise way, so it’s easier to find things.
- There are now two types of skills: basic and epic. All basic skills cost 1 skill point and all epic skills cost 5 skill points.
- Basic skills can have a number of levels (i.e. you can buy them more than once to increase their effect), whereas epic skills you either have or you don’t have.
- Some epic skills force you to make a choice – if you choose one skill, it locks out another skill. (e.g. if you choose the Rage Epic skill then you can’t choose the Focus Epic skill).
- Some of the Skill changes:
- Removed the basic early skills: Compass, Entity Info, Can Creep.
- Mastery streamlined, so there is no more difficulty and it is purely additive.
- Crafting skills now categorised more understandably and interim ingredient recipes are available to all. Recipes are gated based on a Skill “Level” which can be increased by both basic skills and epic skills.
- Rapid Fire and Charging are now purely based on skills and not the weapon type. So if you buy the Rapid Fire skill then all slingbows will rapid fire.
- There is now a skill which allows you to dig up surface resources (i.e. Plants, Fungi and Boulders) and replant them.
- KNOWN ISSUE: Rage and Focus are not currently working after the skills change, this will be fixed soon.
- Skill sets allow characters to quickly switch between the most appropriate set of skills for the current task.
- A maximum of 100 skill points can be spent in each skill set.
- Skill sets can be purchased for Cubits in the Exchange.
- Each character may have up to three skill sets unlocked.
- Skill sets can be switched once every 15 minutes, or freely whilst inside your home beacon.
- Updated exotic creature. Exotic creatures now have extra stat buffs. In addition all creatures can now be exotic.
- Defeated penalty changes:
- Your items are no longer damaged when you are defeated and return to the sanctum.
- Defeat Penalty no longer reduces your character’s stats or abilities.
- Instead Defeat Penalty applies an XP debt of 10% of the total XP required to reach your next level.
- Whilst you have debt 50% of the XP you earn goes to paying off the debt, the other 50% is earned as usual.
- Debt is reflected in the Defeat Penalty status effect. Instead of decreasing over time, the bar will decrease as your XP debt is paid off.
- Once the debt is fully repaid Defeat Penalty is removed and you no longer suffer the 50% XP penalty.
- When defeated your warp will open at a random distance from the point at which you fell. Returning to the Sanctum normally will open the warp at the position you left from, as before.
- When defeated your default warp back from the sanctum will now open a short distance from the point at which you fell. The purpose to respawn players back into the environment outside of the location where you fell. For example, you’ll now respawn away from the meteorite event. Manually returning to the sanctum will continue to open the warp at the location you left from.
- Reviving ignores the XP penalty. It is applied when returning directly to the sanctum from defeat.
- A hunger penalty is now applied on defeat.
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Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- Adventurer backing tier now get a lifetime 10% beacon plot bonus.
- Wayfarer and higher backers can now craft a special Founders’ totem in the workbench. The tool is designed to be a helpful quality of life improvement without being overpowered. The totem is as effective as similar material hammers, axes, and shovels - so you get 1 tool that is as useful as 3. But it’s not overpowered as there are still higher material versions of the individual tools available. It’s basically the Boundless Spork.
- 150+ new Objectives have been added. There are now 25 objectives for each category which aims to showcase all areas of the game to players. The aim of the objectives is to guide the player through everything the game has to offer.
- 60 new Steam achievements have been added. These are visible on the Steam page, although some are hidden for players to discover themselves.
- Rewards for objectives and feats have been adjusted.
- Earlier feats are now more rewarding and higher tier feat rewards have been reduced to balance out the earning rate.
- Objective rewards have been adjusted due to the amount of new objectives.
- Beacon Plots are no longer awarded when you level up. You’ll receive Cubits instead which can be used to purchase plots in the Exchange.
- The number of plots in a beacon no longer contributes to prestige. In past releases adding plots would directly increase the prestige of a beacon. This is no longer the case. However you may still notice the prestige changing up and down when additional plots are added, this is because natural resources can sometimes contribute to prestige and the number of plots can also change the overall balance of the beacon contents.
- All Objectives have been reviewed, tweaked, polished and fixed.
- Increased skill point cap for each skill set to 100.
- Skills points given changed to 4 at level 2 and 2 each level beyond that. This means that 100 skills points are collected by Level 50, 200 skill points by Level 100, and 300 skill points by Level 150.
- New characters now start with zero plots.
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GUI + HUD:
- Quick move and augment-ejection improvements:
- When ejecting augments from an Atlas/Totem/Slingbow, the augment will try to stack with existing items, or stack inside existing smart stacks, or create new smart stacks, before ever trying to fill an entirely empty slot in the inventory.
- When quick-moving items between inventories, this will also apply, as well as ensuring that whenever possible the entire item or smart stack of items that is being quick-moved, will be entirely moved rather than only partially. This makes quick-moving especially much more useful as it will prevent the inventory getting too spread-out, keeping it as compact and flat as possible.
- Improved quick-moving in furnace and portal GUI screens so that you can quick move into either inventories (automatically picks the correct one), machine outputs will also quick move into the machine inputs when the backpack is full instead of just failing.
- Fixed the beacon-colour screen hiding the item that is referenced when dragging it onto the colour slot.
- Stop some news flashes from queuing up (entered world, entered settlement and meteorite discovered).
- Added action logs for entering a world, entering a settlement, and levelling up.
- Quick use auto-switch on modify is disabled when modifying the quickuse bar of a hand that has a deployed grapple, except when modifying the grapple item explicitly.
- Contextual messages have been added to the Knowledge panel.
- Contextual messages (or tips) can now be learned by holding the corresponding button when the tip is on the screen.
- This removes the tip and prevents it from appearing again.
- The tip is added to the Knowledge menu in the Tips section.
- You can select the tip to see more information and allow the tip to appear on the screen again if you need.
- New contextual messages have been added for the Forge, Chat System, Compacting Fuel, Fuel Types, Beacon Fuel and many more.
- Added phrases to chat.
- Increased height of expanded chat.
- Fix incorrect lighting and effects when picking up torches in to smart stacks.
- Improved visuals on the loading screen.
- Added splash screens at the start of loading (game is loading while showing the splash screens).
- Added full D-pad support to the GUI.
- Fixed the knowledge screen scroll bar to not be so small.
- Fixed escape/back to work for all GUI screens and popup windows.
- Fix for clicking on a button in the GUI sometimes going through into the game and placing a block.
- Added placeholder credits and licenses tabs to the support screen.
- Improved performance when playing with many other characters names on screen.
- New Hints and Tips have been added to highlight new features and some existing features to players. These include tips about the Exchange, how to unlock plots, health bar colours, eating food and many more. Gotta learn them all!
- Chat now has a selection of fixed phrases to save typing, or to communicate with someone who doesn’t read your language (when we add translations of the text). Please let us know which phrases you think are useful and what would be helpful to add.
- When you complete an objective or feat you no longer automatically receive the reward. Instead you now need to collect the rewards from the Exchange. If you have multiple rewards you can use the quick collect option to collect all available rewards.
- Now when you level up, you no longer receive plots. Instead you receive Cubits which you can use to spend on plots or other items in the Exchange.
- When you level up after 50, you’ll now receive Skill Points which can be used to upgrade a Skill Set when Skill Sets are available.
- Fix objects vanishing in some locations.
- Split the game menu into 2. Game menu and character menu.
- With keyboard open the character menu by pressing TAB.
- With PS4 controllers open the chat window with touchpad left and the character menu with touchpad right.
- With Xbox controllers open the character menu with back.
- Added Exchange screen where players can:
- Collect the rewards they have earned
- Buy extra beacon plots with Cubits.
- Buy extra skill tree sets with Cubits.
- Buy extra character slots with Cubits.
- Buy appearance tokens with Cubits to customise the character appearance.
- Item and block tints are now displayed in the tooltip and expanded details text in the GUI. The tints have all been assigned names separating them into families of base colours and shades thereof.
- Quick move and augment-ejection improvements:
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SFX + Music:
- Added underwater audio.
- Added grass effects.
- Added wind effects.
- Added additional music.
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Engine:
- New weather and clouds system. There is a new environmental weather system (data setup still ongoing) which enables weather and ambient effects to differ across both worlds, different biomes of a single world, within caves and the fluids of a single world.
- This is all driven by a weather simulation on the server driven by the biomes and distributions within the world itself so that all worlds will have their own unique weather patterns.
- The weather simulation also drives the new cloud system which will tie together with the weather effects allowing overcast skies and fluffy clouds that evolve dynamically and appear the same to all users, but varies around the world.
- If the weather looks overcast to the East, then if you head East the weather will get worse.
- If the weather looks clear to the West, then if you head West the weather will improve.
- If you see elemental clouds to the North, then GO SOUTH!
- As part of this (once data is fully set up) we will have new elemental effects on higher tier elemental worlds as part of the atmosphere damage system and new per-biome sounds.
- The clouds are volumetric and ray traced, and fully procedural with semi-realistic lighting effects especially as the sun or moon shines through them.
- Ambient effects will also vary by biome and time of day.
- The full weather system requires additional world data that will only be available when we generate new worlds. (Coming soon!) For the current worlds which don’t have the per biome information the simulation still runs but without the specialisation per biome and hence will continue to seem thematically out of sync, ie. snowing in deserts.
- Further HDR lighting tweaks.
- Rendering pipeline update for proper sRGB support. Visually, this gives us more accurate lighting and HDR which now uses a filmic tone-mapping operator, but has required world lighting to be rebalanced.
- All the day/night cycles now have brighter lighting. This makes the worlds feel richer and means light sources, especially gem torches have improved lighting balance in daylight.
- All particle effects are now lit by the world correctly including hand-held and block-lights, with the exception of some gigantic effects like those of the meteors which are rendered too far away, and too large to be correctly lit. With the much larger dynamic range of lighting in the worlds now, it was no longer possible to fake good lighting for the effects across the day/night cycle leading to effects either being too dark during the day or far too bright at night or in the darkness of caves etc.
- Fix the horrible looking artefacts around foliage in trees/grass around the foliage fade distance and improve the way the foliage “fades in”.
- Improve foliage rendering to mostly remove the obvious discontinuities in the lighting of tree foliage geometry (foliage now has per-vertex normals). Additionally, the grass-foliage will now blend well with the ground lighting-wise even if “Smooth Normals” is disabled in the graphics options.
- General ray-testing has been tweaked so that in most cases, you will ray-test “through” non-collidable meshes like plants or torches, so that when placing blocks, or interacting with objects or chiselling, you will not have these non-collidable meshes getting in the way. When using a melee-item like the totem or shovel etc, then you will of course ray-test against these meshes as otherwise you’d not be able to break them! This also applies to HUD displays of blocks which will ray-test with these non-collidable meshes too so that you can actually see what mesh you are hitting. This is more-so a performance improvement now that the ray-testing is much more expensive for these kind of meshes, but hope you would agree is a gameplay improvement too in general.
- Allow water/lava to flow into open-warp/portal block spaces so that underwater/underlava portals wont look stupid any more, now that water/lava have independent fog it is now fairly clear that you “are” about to walk into water/lava even without seeing the water/lava plains so is okay to allow this now. “existing” portals will not suddenly have the water/lava flow into their spaces, but if you place/destroy blocks above the portals it will trigger the simulation and it will flow into them. Water/Lava will not flow “through” the portal into the other side (that would be crazy!) but will flow through the backside of the portal at the same location as though the portal was not there at all.
- Fog:
- Volumetric fog now works correctly in dark areas (deep underwater, deep in caves) to correctly “black-out” the world when the fog is dense.
- Transmission properties of the fog corrected to ensure fog falls off correctly, and that the non-volumetric and volumetric fogs work together correctly and that volumetric fog can correctly occlude god-rays/lens-flare.
- Artefacts visible in water around obstacles in the foreground during heavy fog largely resolved.
- Fix for some particle effects using additive blending to correctly fade into the fog.
- Fix for some rendering (beacons/translucent props) not fully sampling fog correctly.
- Portals/Physics:
- Fixed a physics issues in continuous collisions that was able to force you into the geometry sometimes.
- Prevent impact-damage in the few frames following a jump to prevent getting damage from slamming your head into corners with full skills unlocked.
- Fix issues with portals that caused non-smooth transitions when moving quickly through portals that have walls behind them in the original world and some other internal issues that could lead to jerky transitions.
- Improve water through portals, so that oceans don’t recede massively into the ground as you approach a portal, its not 100% fixed, but far improved. A side-effect is that more complicated setups of water with slopes/crafted blocks will z-fight more than before when looking at them through portals.
- Fix issues with items in your hands popping out for 1 frame as you go through a portal.
- Fix some edge-cases in portal transitions where when moving very quickly or interacting with steps, or during mispredictions, you could easily end up on the wrong side of a portal (transition when you shouldn’t, or vice-versa).
- Fix crazy rubberbanding caused by going through a same-world portal/warp with grapples attached.
- Fix some minor misprediction issues if moving through water or on slippery surfaces like ice, at the moment as you come to stop where the server would stop you earlier than the client due to sleep logic only applying server-side.
- Fix some internal issues that would cause the player physics to not idle correctly whilst hanging from grapples.
- Fix rubberbanding caused by grappling a charging wildstock.
- Fix some rubberbanding that was possible if moving very quickly through the world due to chunk-meshing blocking resources from physics-mesh creation. If you have a very very complex chunk on a slower computer, it will still be possible, but should generally not be a problem for any hardware good enough to play the game at all.
- Fix for a bug on the server that could cause certain blocks to not be collidable on the server but still collidable in the client that could cause weird mispredictions and falling through blocks.
- Fix a bug in the server that could cause physics to get out-of-sync if water/lava was flowing at a reasonable distance from any player/creature.
- Further improvements/fixes made to the stepping behaviour, you should find you can more accurately go up steps even at more shallow angles and lower speeds now. This also fixed behaviour on ice when “hugging a wall” where you would move too quickly and sometimes pop up and down a bit as you moved. This also had a slight impact on the auto-climb behaviour, but not in a way that is hopefully noticeable at all.
- Improve behaviour of slippery surfaces so that when transitioning between 45-degree angles from slopes to flat ground and vice-versa the speed of the player will be largely retained. This is a pretty unrealistic change to the physics, since a 45-degree collision should realistically reduce your speed by a factor of ~30% purely from the collision itself, but this change makes slides way more interesting to work with and also actually improves behaviour even on non-slippy surfaces so that as far as the players speed is concerned, the world behaves as though its actually smoother than it really is in the geometry when transitioning slopes. This change is reflected in the impact-damage calculations too, so that even if you hit a 45-degree transition at high speed, if the surface is slippy enough (like the special Slide block or Ice blocks to a lesser extent) then you will also not receive impact damage so slides should damage the player less too! This does not mean that slippery blocks have no impact damage at all, if you land vertically onto a flat slide then you will still end up with impact damage and lost speed, you have to hit the slippy surface at a shallow enough angle to trigger the new behaviour.
- Little bit of polish for the buying-plinth to have half-block physics and for doors to have thinner physics extents making it easier to walk through single-wide doorways.
- Removed terrain-saturation/brightness noise for gem/metal blocks, looks more sensible to only have the noise on natural blocks, and means these blocks now look much more visually similar to gem/metal tools and weapons.
- Improved the terrain-saturation/brightness noise so that it can accurately reproduce the original colour in-world as well as the two additional shifted shades, a deficiency in the implementation prior meant that it would never actually produce the original colour leading to inaccurate shades in the world.
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World Builder:
- Block colours and world palettes have been fully revamped to enable the generation of extremely varied worlds.
- Instead of individual colour palettes distributions per block, there is now a single global root palette of 255 colours generated to evenly cover all hues with a wide range of luminance and saturation. This means there will no longer be 2 colours of a block that look exactly the same but wont stack, and allows us to assign all the colours sensible names in a future. The root palette is then customised per material.
- This structure will also enable in the future extracting pigment from one material and transferring it into another. If Red Gleam is hard to find, then extract the red pigment from some Red Foliage which are bountiful and dye another plentiful gleam red. This system would also support mixing pigments to synthesis hard to find pigments.
- This doesn’t mean that Red Gleam will be visually identical to Red Foliage. Each block material is still customised to make it’s individual interpretation of red unique, interesting, and fitting for the material.
- This system introduces a large amount of new logic to the World Builder with new nodes to define recipes to generate a palette of colours for a world that will then be assigned out of the 255 base palette instead of manually picking colours (this will be used to get ‘procedural’ coloured worlds for all new worlds in future) and also now drives creature colours so we have a way in future to have coloured drops from both blocks and creatures if we wish.
- Existing worlds and inventories will all migrate automatically to the nearest colour in the new palettes so you will find all colours subtly change.
Resolved Known Issues:
The following items were known issues in previous releases and have now been resolved.
- Breaking any machine during crafting will destroy the ingredients in use.
- Machines sometimes stop crafting after reaching 0s from the Currently Crafting list.
