Release 199 is live!
Please report all issues in the Support category as individual threads.
Overview
New Props!
Starting your own Restaurant? Thinking of setting up a social space? Or maybe your feet are just really tired! Well, that’s going to be a thing of the past with the all new Table and Chair props!
Server Optimisation
You guys have been so patient with the server issues this week, we really appreciate it and we’re happy to announce we’ll be rolling out our first server optimisation which should help reduce the rubber banding some players have been experiencing. It’s important to note however, the server cap will remain at 70 while we examine the new fix; once we’ve confirmed the fix is working as intended, we’ll be bumping it back up to 100.
Resource Regeneration Fixes/Tweaks
We’ve adjusted resource regeneration to ensure it gets going faster, but steadily happens over a longer period of time depending on how many resources have been destroyed in a chunk. We also fixed a bug which was causing surface resources to not regenerate - this should make it easier to get those elusive Orbs and delicious Beans!
The Exchange
We had some really useful feedback during the release period about The Exchange. Some players felt Cubit purchasing was being forced on to them, which was never our intention. We’ve made some changes to the Tutorial which will get players focused on playing the game first and introduce The Exchange slightly later. We’ve also moved the real money items from The Exchange into a separate Shop GUI, with the option to hide the shop completely.
FIST FORGING!
Ever wondered what it’s like to see a Mighty Cuttletrunk cry? Well wonder no more! You can now forge your Explorer and Gold Fists to give them a whole range of Boons, Quirks and Defects!
Release Overview - by the ever wonderful @Jiivita 
Release Notes
Art + Animation + Assets:
- 1st person animation polish:
- Beacon plotter remove/add plots.
- Torch place and re-equipping.
- Atlas.
- Improved positive and negative status VFX. In the future they will correctly present the buff colour.
- Bloom post-effect reduced slightly to stop the glare from a white sky.
- Wooden table and chair decorative props added.
- Stone Chisel now actually looks like a chisel made of stone.
- Added better Basic and Improved torch VFX, now they really look like they’re on fire!
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Some crafting recipes have been altered. Context: Some items are in much higher demand than others. In an ideal world all items would be equally sort after. We have tried to give some “less useful” items more value.
- Forging recipes have been rebalanced to better reflect the power of certain ingredients.
- Sticks can now be used as fuel.
- Brew buffs now last 10 minutes, up from 2.
- Increased Healing Brews amount healed so they now heal more than Instant Healing Brews of the same level.
- Greatly reduced the crafting requirements for Rage and Focus Brews.
- Changed Super and Mega Brew Container ingredients to reduce the cost of crafting high end brews.
- Glowing mushrooms should spawn more frequently.
- Breaking blocks that are player placed will no longer drop the extra alternative drops.
- Change the way resources and beacon probe-maps work on Atlas globes to use a more consistent colour gradientation, so that resource densities are much more obvious especially when comparing one resource or globe to another, with low density being a dark blue going up through green and yellow to white for very dense regions.
- Fists can now be Forged!
Mining
We are attempting to keep the different types and techniques of mining in balance so that they are all equally productive and you can choose which technique you want to apply. There may be situations where one technique is better than another, but that difference should be not be overbearing. To this aim we’ve reduced the effectiveness of bomb mining, but as compensation we’ve increased the number of bombs you get in a bag (the durability) to lower the cost. We’ve also boosted the effectiveness of cave mining by increasing the chance of finding gems in caves.
- Bombs will now destroy resources at the same speed as they would destroy rocks, this means higher tier resources will not be left floating in mid-air when using bombs to mine.
- Doubled the durability of Bomb Bags! (to reduce the cost for bomb mining and make bombs more cost effective in combat)
- Gems should be found more frequently in caves.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- Reworked the early objectives to reduce the amount of times the player has to go into the Exchange and keep them more in the main game world.
- Increased the amount of XP you get for finding new regions. Each region you find will now grant you an additional 50 XP. Discovering the final region on a planet will grant you a bonus of 2500 XP. All players have been awarded any missing XP to bring them in line with the new balance.
- Increased the number of Skills Points received beyond level 50 from 2 to 4, so that levelling Skill Sets takes a similar time to levelling a new alt character.
GUI + HUD:
- Resource information added for planets under Character → Places → Worlds → World → Resources. The resources tab will display all Embedded Resources and Surface Resources on the world. You can use the per resource % values to decide which world is better to search for a particular resource.
- Improved performance drastically for planet-markers on busy worlds in the sky, the system was badly scaling when the marker counts were going into the thousands leading to terrible performance. As part of optimising this, you may notice that the markers will now also not be perfectly occluded by terrain any more, but have a delay on responses to the occlusion changing with a fade in/out to compensate.
- Rebalanced the selection of the coffer visuals so the types are more spread out.
- Improved damage visuals for starving/atmosphere/drowning to make them easier to spot.
- Increased frequency for starving/atmosphere/drowning to make them easier to spot (still the same DPS).
- Increased wobble on the health bar so all damage is easier to spot.
- Added a marker to the stamina bar to show when the player will start to starve.
- Changed full up status effect icon to green (to match other status effects from food).
- Added an options button to chat.
- Gleam Club members can change the character appearance (body size, head and face selection, and body colour) freely without using tokens.
- Adding actions to the Main Menu that will open the Boundless Discord and Forum in a browser.
- Separated the real money items from the Exchanges and moved them into a Shop GUI. This is accessible from the Main Menu instead of the Character Menu.
- Added a welcome message to the Shop GUI that is presented the first time it is opened. The message briefly describes the configuration of Boundless’ in-game monetisation. The welcome message also offers an action that will disable the Shop. It can be reenabled via the Parental settings.
SFX + Music:
- Exchange tweaks.
- Starvation tweaks.
Engine:
- Improved server-slot behaviour so that we prioritise players who are stood close to a warp/portal and actively looking into the warp/portal, over those that already had the warp/portal active but are standing further away or not looking into the warp/portal. This should make it more likely that you can get into the world you want when it reports the server is full as slots wont be hogged so much by those not attempting to go into the world.
- The game will now display player counts on warps/portals corresponding to the number of slots on the server that are taken, rather than the number of players actually “in the world” so that it better matches against when the server is shown as full.
- Refactored the server’s player progress protection system. This system atomically serialises the state of all players and entities every second to make sure that little progress is lost if the server fails. The progress would be reloaded when the server restarts. The original system was too expensive and could cause a busy world to generate server lag. It has been reimplemented achieving an order of magnitude performance improvement. We continue to focus on optimising the server.
- Regeneration
- Reduced the distance at which a chunk is considered “visited” to be much smaller, and reduced the time to a matter of seconds. This means that whilst regeneration won’t happen very near to a player it will happen a short distance away and pretty quickly after they have left an area. This will help ensure areas around towns are regenerated.
- Reduced the time after an edit that regeneration will start to four hours, this is hopefully quick enough to ensure that regeneration gets going promptly, but won’t see someone blocked by having their mineshaft regenerate while they’re underground.
- Made regeneration happen more steadily over a longer period of time, so that over minutes and hours small numbers of blocks at a time will be regenerated, and large changes will steadily return to the start state over many days.
Bug fixes:
- Fix for Deluxe Edition not triggering on Steam for some players.
- Fixed a bug which inhibited elemental creatures spawning from meteorite on non-elemental worlds. Allowing elemental creatures to spawn from these meteorites gives players the chance to create protection foods without having to visit elemental planets.
- Fix some graphical glitching most noticeable when near lava on held items, block drops and other non-voxel models.
- Fix for the virtual cursor (on controllers) not being clamped to the edges of the game window.
- Fix for PS4 controls not showing correctly for the grappling tool tip.
- Fix escape not working on the return to sanctum and quit game screens.
- Fix “change-block-type” forged chisels not correctly preserving the colour of the block when used on world-default-colour blocks.
- Resolve issues with surface-resources not being regenerated if “only” surface resources were harvested in a chunk, without making any other modifications. This also resolves some other more edge-case issues where you could similarly stop resources (whether embedded in rock, or surface resources) from regenerating if using a regeneration bomb to fully regenerate a chunk, or if plotting areas of a chunk where only surface-resources had been removed and later unplotting once the rest of the chunk had regenerated. The world data will be migrated in a such a way that any chunks that already experienced the problem will get their surface resources regenerated shortly without further user interaction.
- Fix rendering issues of fog-of-war on PS4 for Globes (caused them to be “inverted” in solid areas of fog/no-fog), and potentially in some more rare cases on some Macs.
- Fix auto-aim ignoring dead creatures when you haven’t yet harvested them for drops. Without this it would show that you could hit a creature when actually a dead creature was in the way, but will now show correctly that you will hit the dead creature and harvest it.
- Fix auto-aim ignoring players for collision checks when using a weapon that does not want to aim-assist, would show that you would hit a creature with your slingbow even if a player was in the way like with the dead-creatures-already-harvested issue. For healing bombs will continue to aim-assist to players.
- Fix interaction being blocked by dead creatures whose drops have already been harvested, which also prevents the reticule going red when highlighting the area of a dead-already-harvested creature too.
- Fix creatures not drowning
- Fix for “Meteorite or Meteor-wrong?” objectives complete a meteorite subtask not triggering.
- Fixed ? appearing in numbers in some languages.
- Fix client crash when some recipes where open on the machine screen.
- Fixed “Meteorite abandoned” sometimes appearing for a few frames after getting a meteorite life.
- Fix for triangle opening the inventory and the tooltip for the current item.
- Fix for unimplemented objects being seen in Request Baskets.
- Fix for incorrect tax rate being shown in shop stands and request baskets when outside of a beacon.
- Fix for opening tabs with the virtual cursor (with a controller) causing an extra click on where the cursor was last.
- Fix to Power and Spark costs showing max Overdrive reduced costs when not enough power is supplied.
- Fix world-to-world blinksec distance-flood algorithm in universe. This will fix issues with not being able to warp/portal between some worlds, and also resolve issues users reported where after new worlds were added the portal costs increased. This will now be resolved too decreasing the costs in these few cases back to their correct level and ensuring costs can never increase but only ever sometimes decrease (due to new shortcut links in the universe being added due to new worlds). This will also subtly effect which worlds are seen in the sky.
- Fixed an issue that would cause spurious impact damage with high agility and low impact-damage skills, even when running straight at a wall.
- Fixed an issue in the core physics solver where impulses were not included correct. Its possible this will largely resolve the weird fall damage issues people were seeing. Please let us know if you notice any improvements.
