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This will be the last feature update on Live until we launch the new universe. Feedback is still helpful.
World levels have be altered to:
Home / Spawn worlds have become Placid worlds.
Moon worlds have become Inhospitable worlds.
Ring worlds have become Fierce worlds.
Release Notes:
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
Energy use for Chisels reduced by half.
Natural Blocks on higher level worlds can have armour, which makes them more difficult to break. This is shown as litle shield pictures under the health bar. This is so that the harder-hitting, but slower, tools can be balanced against fast tools.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
Meteorite drops have been changed to give more variety, especially smaller meteorites.
Meteotire events are now far more varied. There are now 2000 wave variants up from 50 (this probably sounds more exciting than it is). Meteorite difficulty may have changed, particularly meteorites on lower tier planets. This will need more balancing soon.
Meteorites can now spawn exotic creatures.
Element boost is now applied before armour calculation to give a better damage on boost.
Added “Meteorite life” status effect:
Once the first creature in a meteorite event is killed all players who join the meteorite (at that time or afterwards) will get a meteorite life.
When players return to the sanctum they lose their meteorite life. Revived players get to keep their meteorite life.
If players go outside of the meteorite zone they have 10 seconds to return before they lose their meteorite life.
If there are no players with a meteorite life left then the meteorite is lost and the reward is reduced to the dormant meteorite drops.
If the meteorite is completed then all players get the full reward (so try to keep players with lives alive!).
Creatures in the meteorite will periodically target only the players with meteorite lives.
Reworked combat threat system:
Threat is now stored per creature in a “hate” list. Hate is scored as the average amount of DPS and scaled up by the “Threat Epic” skill.
Damaging creatures will add you to their hate list.
Healing players will add you to the hate list of creatures recently damaged by the healed player.
Creatures attack the most hated player in their hate list. The hate list is not cleared when players go through portals.
Tank characters should now find it easier to keep creatures attacking them.
“Mega Calming Brew” now clears you from all creatures hate lists within 16m.
“Mega Aggravating Brew” now adds 10,000 hate to all creatures within 16m.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
Campfires now expire after two hours, this is to reduce the risk that new players trust them to look after their belongings between sessions.
Fixed tutorial tooltip about looking up at the planet to choose starting location.
Preparatory changes for V1.0 game levelling and character balance
Removed free weekly (debug) skill reset. All skill resets must be purchased via the Exchange.
You no longer gain cleanse points when levelling up. All cleanse points must be purchased via the Exchange.
Reduced starting number of character slots to 1. If you already have extra characters you’ll incur a character slot “debt” and will need to purchase slots to cover the existing characters before you will unlock any new character slots. If you delete a character before repaying this debt it will not free up a slot and you will be unable to create a new character without purchasing more slots.
GUI + HUD:
Make the entire stamina bar flash when starving.
Added shields under creatures health bar to show how much armor they have and therefore how much the damage they take is reduced by.
Moved all chat/status text above player icons.
New default controls:
Change view is now on “M” or dpad left.
Added L2/R2 to quick move left/right on controller.
Added holster tools on “Z” or dpad down.
Added “L” for the exchange screen.
Places screen is now on “P”.
Character screen is now on “O”.
SFX + Music:
Further music mixes.
Fixed stone chisel.
Starving and suffocating.
Reworked grapple loop.
Engine:
Improved cpu-side performance of world rendering, especially when using the extreme/ultimate terrain-detail options, and especially for those with 4-core or higher CPUs.
Colors:
Adjusted Copper tint to be less similar to Ruby.
A new set of 255 base palette colors has been created that has a larger range of luminance (white being 9x brighter than black now, rather than just 4x brighter) that will allow creating more contrasting builds even without use of lighting. This has meant the color names have also had to be updated, and we also have had to do another migration to map the previous set of 255 palette colors as best as possible to the new set of 255, so colors of the blocks will again have subtely changed!
Bug fixes:
Fixed the skill-based light being multiplied in strength when not holding items in your hand (Was reported as the skill-based light being darker when holding things in your hand, but actually the opposite was true!)
Fix having to force re-equip slots when exhausting a sub-slot of an equipped smart stack, or unequipping an augment from a slingbow/globe/totem or stacking items into an equipped slot etc etc.
Fix crashes when trying to use the “change-block-type” forged-chisel on rocks to transform them into sedimentary rocks, if the original rock was “rotated”. Sedimentary rocks do not allow rotation, but we do now allow the conversion to work, and when it is sedimentary it will just not look rotated even though under-the-hood it is (so when changing back to another rock, the new rock will have the same rotation as the original rotated one that was turned into sedimentary would have).
Fix crash when hitting meteorite crates.
Fix items could not be moved inside smart stacks.
Fix forged items could not be put in smart stacks.
Fix character appearance not being respected for new characters after they leave the sanctum.
Fixed Founders Totem not functioning like a normal totem in allowing creating locations when shooting planets and showing location markers on planets in the sky.
Do I read this right? A new player with no cubits will have no way to fix their bad skill choices except by either spending levelling cubits (therefore giving up plots) or buying cubits? If so, this seems unwise.
It seems counterintuitive to me to tie up two essential systems to either restricting one by self choice or spending more money. They may have only just bought the game that day.
I do have one complaint, and this is something I had been worried about before when the exchange first came out:
Preparatory changes for V1.0 game levelling and character balance
Removed free weekly (debug) skill reset. All skill resets must be purchased via the Exchange.
You no longer gain cleanse points when levelling up. All cleanse points must be purchased via the Exchange.
This is a big way to create alot of frustration for new players. Especially those that are unsure what everything does or what direction they want to go. Frankly, this alone makes me very unhappy and feels like we may be nickel and dimed like Swtor. Having to spend cubits earned from leveling on this will leave many new and experienced players feeling cheated.
At the very least reduce the cost of a reset and cleanse points.
Does this mean of I’m running around solo and a meteorite drops on my head, all I need to do is get rid of the debuff status effect then I can safely walk near the active meteorite without being attacked by waves?
The refined looks like new copper the compact looks like traffic cone orange to me. . would never use it in a build unless a lighting change makes it look better to me.
Can we get clarification on this? It seems “lives” are not regained in any way after death which means that basically you are unable to do solo hunting of LIVE meteors because if you die you lose the meteor real rewards…
If so, bad decision that even more severely limits solo play and the ability for a single person to play the game. We have seen the game go from being able to hunt as a solo player for mobs across the planets and get rewards, to being forced to do a meteor to get rewards, to now not being able to get any rewards because of any possible death…
The drops that currently mobs in the planets have are really junk. Elites can drop 1 meat and bone… More balance is needed.
sounds good; whats the story with charge vs rapid fire slingbows? similar balancing problem there as well - is creatures armour making heavy/slow slings better choice than light/fast ones?
it looks like something that can encourage staying alive more than any defeat penalty we have come up with
I understand the change and it looks good from my point of view. It can be a trap for completely new player, unless they get proper tooltips on the subject and clear warnings about their campfire expiring (maybe better, big flashing warning upon ending a session, like “you have unbeaconed campfire area that might expire before you come back. are you sure you want to quit?”)
pre-exchange progression allowed 320 plots over 50 levels - with cubits and exchange it went down to 300 (effectively less than that due to other cubits transaction, more likely made by most players); with these changes it looks like its 250-ish plots available for an average player who, depending on needed skill resets/cleanse points during progression;
would you consider increasing cubits gain over 50 levels so that 320-340 plots are affordable if all cubits are spent on them (and so, with other cubits spending expected, it’s still possible to buy around 300 plots over 50 levels?)
Yeah, on second read it does sound more like that. I’m just sick of having meteorites falling on my head every ten minutes or so when I’m the only one running around on higher tier worlds. I know I can’t beat them, and far too often they fall smack dab between where I currently am and where I’m trying to get to. They’re supposed to be these fun events, but as a solo player I just find them annoying
the whole idea is to make players try to stay alive/go hunting prepared, rather than being able to finish any meteorite with enough retries (I did a lot of 3rd tier world meteorites solo whne not fully prepared, just becuase I could come back 5, 10, 15 times after dying and just kept going until I killed the last creature)
however, I do agree a solo player could do with 1-2 free defeats before losing that live status (like, die 3 times and it’s game over)
The next steps in the tutorial are to make a crafting table and then a beacon. Once they place the beacon they’re fine. Unless someone is going way off tutorial, they shouldn’t have anything significant to lose if their campfire went out between sessions anyways. At most they’d lose their crafting table, if they quit at that point.
When someone starts the game, the first notification should be, “In order to claim land so your items and buildings don’t disappear, first let’s build a beacon! Collect X amount of this and let’s get started!” or something like that. It’s the most important thing to know probably.
I know how it works, but i also know how lost some of the new players are because I helped a handful of them through first steps. Some get distracted by abundance of things to do around and don’t follow tutorial in one go.
I can even imagine an experienced player landing on a new planet, placing campfire to place a few basic things and go exploring, getting busy and forgetting about the campfire burning out soon, so a warning would be nice - not just when trying to quit the game, but also when exploring around and losing track of time (it could flash then somewhere on the side of screen like tooltips and tell you, hey go back to your campfire - its gonna burn out in 15 minutes!).
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