Release 209: LED Blocks, Forge++, and Oortmas!

This update is accessible via the “Live” release of Boundless on Steam.

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.

The update should automatically download on PlayStation 4.

Please close and restart Boundless on PS4 to encourage the system to check for an update.

Please report all issues discovered with the update with a new post in the Community Support thread.


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Overview:

  • Iteration and balance pass on the Forge - development notes and discussion thread 1.
    • Quirks are no longer negatives, many have been changed to provide the weapon with positive and negative Effects.
    • Entry level ingredients have had items removed from crafting recipes to allow players easier access into forging.
    • Reactive Lamella can now be found on Level 3 Lush and Coal Worlds.
    • 100% Efficiency cap removed, so boon points can go even higher with skills and Power Coils. Making early gear much more powerful in the Forge.
    • Upped the Flexibility and durability of some gear. Will help even more with the changes to Efficiency.
    • The Forge Epic Skill now adds four Deck slots (increased from two).
    • Deconstruction Resins give the original item back unforged, ready to be forged again.
    • Draining Compound now adds Quirk points, but with a reduced vigour loss turn count (a positive change to people using the compound as it was originally intended).
  • Winter is coming. Snow is falling around the universe. The outlook is for more chilly weather over the next few weeks. Preparation for the Oortmas Winter event is live in the Exchange.

Video Overview:

Checkout an overview of the release in this player made vide:

by the ever awesome @jiivita - support him!!


Release 209:

Oortmas Winter Event:

  • Oortmas is here! Revel in the festivities and holiday cheer in this time limited event, featuring new items, props, masks and a brand new seasonal Snowball Fight Meteorite event!
  • Look out for Snowball Fight Meteorite Events spawning on Placid and Temperate worlds. Collect up some Ice to handcraft Snowballs to throw at the new Snowspitter enemies while avoiding their own snowball attacks. Every Citizen is on a level playing field to tackle the Snowspitters as conventional weapons have no effect, and watch out for the stacking “Embarrassment” debuff. Take too many hits and your embarrassment will cause you to be defeated and loose your Meteorite Life, but fear not, you will not be be given the Defeat Penalty. Win the fight and you will be rewarded with Red Candy Canes and other festive treats. Will you be lucky and get a Mega Fast Brew? Or have you been naughty this year and find yourself with a lump of Coal?
  • Three new Head Gear items available from the Exchange, Rudolph the Red-Nose Wildstock, Farther Oortmas Beard and Snow Citizen mask.
  • All new Props to craft: Snowcitizens featuring three unique head types, Oortmas Trees and five different Presents.
  • Craftable Snowballs to throw at your friends for fun, or to join in the Snowball Fight event. These will only be craftable from Ice and Glacier blocks during the Oortmas Event.
  • Red and Greed Candy Cane items, used to craft the seasonal props. Hunt down creatures sporting an Oortmas hat to gather Green Candy Canes, and complete Snowball Fights to win Red Candy Canes.
  • Find and search snow covered regions of the world to increase your chance of finding am Oortmas hat wearing creature.
  • Snow will surround a Snowball Fight Meteorite.

Art + Animation + Assets:

  • Added a new animated LED Block.
    • LED Blocks are crafted in a dim “off” state.
    • LED Blocks take their colour from Gleam ingredients and required Decoration 3 crafting skill.
    • LED Blocks have 16 different blinking patterns that can be used to create 4 frame animation.
    • Use a Chisel centraforged with Transformation Boon to cycle through the different animation patterns.
    • Use a non-forged Chisel to sculpt the blocks.

Crafting + Resources + Equipment + Forge:

  • Made it so the initial set of Forging Compounds are easier to craft for players getting into the forging system for the first time. While the first tier of compounds are not the most efficient way to forge the best gear, these changes should encourage players to play around and start crafting items.
    • Pure Boon Compound 1: Removed Spitter Eye, increased Fresh Vital Essence to 2.
    • Imperfect Boon Compound 1: Removed Adrenal Gland, increased Fresh Vital Essence to 2.
    • Unstable Boon Compound 1: Removed Wildstock Eye, increased Fresh Vital Essence to 2.
  • Increased the flexibility on Copper tools and weapons from 50 to 60.
  • Increased the flexibility on Gold tools and weapons from 30 to 40.
  • Draining Boon Compound was clearly unbalanced, meaning it was either completely ignored, or abused along side catalysts to easily create max tier forged items with no repercussions. We have some changes which should add more usability in forging while taking back the abuse factor.
    • Draining Boon Compound 1 now adds 160 Quirk Points, Vigour Drain now only lasts 3 turns instead of 5.
    • Draining Boon Compound 2 now adds 400 Quirk Points, Vigour Drain now only lasts 3 turns instead of 5.
  • Deconstruction Resins now saves the forged piece of gear (but strips it of any Boons/Quirks/Defects) along side the chance to recover forge ingredients. This should be a major improvement to all players in the forge!
  • Wooden Tools now have 600 Durability, up from 300. This is to let players experiment and try out early game forged creations using maximum Effectiveness before investing skill points and Power Coils into Forging.
  • Mottled Tar Spot Fungus will now spawn on Level 3 Lush and Coal worlds, meaning Reactive Lamella can now be found earlier.
  • Forging Epic now grants 4 additional Centraforge slots in the ingredient deck, up from 2.
  • Quirks no longer reduce the Rank of an item.
  • Various changes to Quirks:
    • Carpe Noctem Quirk now provides +100 Damage and 10% Damage increase during the Night, and reduces damage by 100 and 10% damage decrease during the Day. It no longer reduces the forge effects during daytime.
    • Carpe Diem Quirk now provides +100 Damage and 10% Damage increase during the Daytime, and reduces damage by 100 and 10% damage decrease during the Night. It no longer reduces the forge effects during nighttime.
    • Best of Health Quirk now provides +10 Action Speed at high Health, and reduces Action Speed by 10 at low Health. It no longer reduces the forge effects at low Health.
    • In Poor Health Quirk now provides +10 Action Speed at low Health, and reduces Action Speed by 10 at high Health. It no longer reduces the forge effects at high Health.
    • Fully-Filled Quirk now reduces energy use by +10 when the players Hunger is low (as in full up), and increases Energy use by 10 when Hunger is high. It no longer reduces the forge effects at high Hunger.
    • Ravenous Quirk now reduces energy use by +10 when the players Hunger is high (as in needs to eat), and increases Energy use by 10 when Hunger is low. It no longer reduces the forge effects at low Hunger.
    • On Icy Ground Quirk now gives +40 Falling Armour.
    • That Sinking Feeling Quirk now lets you hold your breath for an additional 50%.
    • Slow-Mo Quirk now reduces your walk/run speed by 25%, but increases your sprint bonus by 50%.
    • One Jump Ahead Quirk now also grants the user Double Jump, even without the skill.
    • Wonky Trigger Quirk now also gives 400 Durability to the item.
    • Nutritionally Challenged Quirk now also increases Max Energy by 30%.
    • Bleeding Edge Quirk now also increases Max Health by 30%.
    • For Quirks; “Day time” now starts 10% later, and “Night Time” Now starts 10% earlier. Day and Night for the sake of quirks are now of equal timing.
    • For Quirks; “Hungry” is now 45% hunger and lower and “Full up” (for quirks) is 55% and above.
    • For Quirks; “Low Health” is now 45% Health and lower and “High Health” is 55% and above.
  • Reduced Defect points on Imperfect Compounds to make them more competitive with other compounds now that quirks can be desirable.
    • Imperfect Boon Compound 1 was 100 Defect points, now 80.
    • Imperfect Boon Compound 2 was 200 Defect points, now 160.
    • Imperfect Boon Compound 3 was 500 Defect points, now 400.

Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:

  • Updated “Down with the Elite” objective to reflect that the Player needs to collect Trophies specifically not Items as previously suggested. Players should now be able to complete the Objective.

GUI + HUD:

  • Updated character info in the character overview drop down.
    • Character Level.
    • Character Total XP.
    • Spend Skill Points.
    • Total Skill Points.
    • Skill Pages.
    • Skill Page Reset Tokens.
    • Skill Cleanse Points.
    • Appearance Change Tokens.
    • Tint Kits.
    • Gleam Club Membership.
  • Added Spanish translation for “Boundless username” to aid understanding for Spanish-speaking Players.
  • Game will present English versions of text strings for context whilst localisation versions of missing.
  • Updated Character Overview to include details of Total Spent and Total Skill Points.
  • Updated Character Overview to include outstanding Gleam Club membership duration.
  • Updated Shop and Character Overview to present Gleam Club membership consistently.
  • Updated TimeLimitedEvent system to get event date from the discovery server.

SFX + Music:

  • Added audio for Snowballs and winter event.
  • Fixed audio issue where the system could run out of voices.
  • Fixed audio dropping out on Tier 4 worlds.
  • Fixed audio dropping out after prolonged tools use.

Engine:

  • Reduced size of some large data packets from the game server sent when connecting to portals to do with chunk requests by about 3x depending on terrain detail settings.
  • Includes a bug-fix for lighting simulation which erroneously allowed too much light to pass through certain configurations of sloped leaf blocks.
  • Resolved some server side issues that resulted in lodded-chunks in the distance being able to diverge from their correct state over time due server crashes. This also improved the server-side performance of lod-chunk updates allowing them to be updated much more quickly so that they will visually be more responsive to changes, though this may be very hard to notice as a player.
  • Change the PS4 memory layout to reduce the out of memory crashes.
  • On PS4 when memory is very low reduce the amount of data for other world portals.

Bug fixes:

  • Fix a crash when the user despawns from a world while projectiles are being fired.
  • Fixed a bug causing Level 1 Roadrunner drops to sometimes not pick from their full range of drops.
  • Fix for crosshairs not showing grapples ranges correctly when they had been forged with extra range or the character has grapple mastery
  • Fixed “World Gatherer Challenge 1” objective text grammar.
  • Fixed a bug in the exchange where the XP progression bar would display incorrect information when over level 50.
  • Fixed an issue in the way weather-effect wind values were used that could cause jerky grass animations in periods of still wind, and which caused wind to often be much stronger than it should have been for the given activity levels of the weather systems.
  • Fixed client crash during day/night transition whilst holding items with forged quirks
  • Fixed issue with healing bombs reading healing value from the currently held item instead of the bomb item.
  • Fix a crash on Windows when the the windows resized.
  • Fix memory leak on Windows when the game was not visible, e.g. minimised.
  • Removed unused spark from handcrafted Snowball recipe.
  • Re-export character textures and meshes to fix some issue introduced with a change to skinning.
  • Fix mesh distortion on Wildstock heads when grazing.

Release 209.1:

  • Snowballs sounds for Snow Spitter, Snow Meteorite and bag of Snowballs
  • Fixed client crash on PS4 if you get disconnected from a world with the chat window open.
  • Fixed client crash on PS4 when getting PSN id’s as you get disconnected from a world.
  • Fixed client crash in ClientPortalSystem::CreateWormHole.

Release 209.2:

  • Fixing server crash when using transmute boon ingredient on forging.
  • Fixed Snowball fight Ice and Glacier drops from event complete prizes not stacking.
  • Fix for occasional server crash when a meteorite lands.
18 Likes

For anybody curious how to craft LED blocks, it’s not too complicated - here’s a guide.

9 Likes

Making my first 10 LED blocks as we speak!! XD :grimacing:

1 Like

Is there a site that explains, really explains, what some of these effects are, how they work and such? I’m talking about the changes made to tools and weapons or mentioned in conversations and in the update.
Quirks, effects, boon, flexibility, durability, deconstruction resins are just a few that has me going this is “Greek” to me, I have no idea of what is being said and how it effects the game and me. The Boundless crafting doesn’t give any info on what exactly they are, how they work, how to get them on tools or weapons.

“Greed is the best color!”
- The Grinch, 2018

3 Likes

Oops, I’m guessing that I need the transformation chisel to activate them as well? :no_mouth:

1 Like

Thank you devs.

If you haven’t tried forging, it’s basically the game’s enchanting system. All those terms apply to forging, so if you aren’t doing it yet you don’t have to worry about them. If you are interested there are some Youtube tutorials, but honestly it’s a little hard to grasp until you actually do it yourself.

Luckily, they just lowered the barrier to entry by making some of the lower level mats easier to craft.

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I thought the winter event didn’t start until the 18th? Confused[.]com :thinking:

If it’s starting early, Great! If not then… Something to still look forward to. :slight_smile:

EDIT: Nevermind. I just saw the ingame countdown. Something still to look forward to then I guess. :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Found a bug (intentional?) - @James. With crafting the new LED blocks, if you have two of more colour types of gleam and do a mass craft, it just picks the first colour and the rest are the same (no more than one colour, if that makes sense)

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Isnt that how every recipe works if you use different colours?

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I’m mostly sure this happens with everything crafting with colors, refined gleam, shop stand, refined wood, door ect.

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Its the same thing with refined rock etc. If you have some on machine inventory machine uses it first abd makes that color blocks. Old thing. Not a bug i believe… if it is… its very old one lol

Never noticed before - Just picked it up when I tried to be a smarty pants and do demo single blocks in some bulk crafts… :slight_smile:

Oh wow very nice, thank you for letting us know about that, amazing update also :grin:

It’s interesting because most colors of gleam are somewhat hard to obtain but white gleam is plentiful on Kada I. So if this works and isn’t nerfed, you can mass craft harder to obtain colors using just one of that color and the rest white gleam.

2 Likes

I can’t imagine that is not how it is supposed to work, the alternative would be to not allow mass craft without all one tint.

If you did take into account each individual piece of gleam then you would end up with a single mass craft creating multiple different outputs, which is sort of the opposite of what a mass craft is supposed to do.

I believe the current behavior is to ignore colors if there is not a sufficient amount of them (I think they have to be a majority of the recipe)

At least, I’ve greedily tried what you’ve mentioned on several occasions (playing with order, in machine, out of machine), and it doesn’t behave that way thankfully :stuck_out_tongue:

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haha, last week I experimented with it too, was stones and brick mixture, but indeed it picks the colour that you have the most of, at least that is the case with stones/bricks…

1 Like