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.
Overview:
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Exoworlds: This release introduced the new Exoworld system. This allows us to add temporary worlds to the Boundless universe. These worlds will be the platform for future gameplay not possible on the permanent worlds. Exoworlds are automatically spawned by the universe. We don’t know when they’ll arrive. Only the mighty Oort know.
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Blink, Rift and Umbris: New Level 7 worlds, materials, creatures, blocks and gear can now be collected, crafted and forged. What did we say about these in the latest roadmap ?
Special Worlds: Exoworlds will shortly start visiting the Boundless universe. These are worlds that enter the universe temporarily, orbiting around another world, before vanishing never to be seen again. Expect a constant stream of new worlds to explore, filled with resources to harvest, unique colours to snag, and a playground for future features. There’ll be no regen or beacons on these worlds so once they’re exhausted you’ll be ready for another. Exoworlds will also include the first Level 7+ Rift, Darkmatter and Blink worlds. A new challenge awaits, but only until you or they expire…
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Prestige: As proposed and debated we’ve done a balance pass over the Prestige system and block values. All materials now generate prestige proportional to the effort of production.
Overview Video:
Thanks @Jiivita 
Release 219:
Exoworlds:
- New roaming worlds, called Exoworlds, are accessible from some of the existing worlds in the game. They are accessible for a number of days before moving away from the known worlds never to be seen again.
- Exoworlds are identified by their trails and aura, as well as the path they take in the sky.
- They are mid and high level worlds, and provide new ground for exploration, mining and hunting.
- Exoworlds cannot have beacons or campfires placed on them, so nothing can be protected. Regeneration does not occur, so anything built on them will remain; however, it is accessible to all citizens, and will be lost when the exoworld goes out of range. Be careful what you put there!
- Atmosphere level slowly increases in the last 30 minutes on exoworlds so level up your protection, eat some food or get off the world.
- Distances to exoworlds are based on the world level that they orbit, when on lower level worlds the distances are relatively small, but the higher level worlds they are very far.
- Exoworlds are a platform for future new gameplay unrestricted by player beacons and new world themes.
Rift, Blink, and Umbris:
- Some exoworlds are similar to the known worlds, but some are more dangerous and special than anything seen before. These “special” worlds contain new resources: Rift, Blink and Umbris, as well as creatures made of these materials. These creatures are incredibly powerful — approach with caution!
- Harvesting special resources allows the creation of higher tier weapons, tools, tech and blocks — the most epic yet seen!
- Added a new set of Rift, Blink, Umbris and Oortstone block: Refined, Compact and Decorative.
- Rift, Blink and Umbris creatures and weapons each channel two elements: Rift channels Shock and Chill, Blink channels Blast and Burn, Umbris channels Corrosion and Toxin. When damage is applied it uses the element type that does the most damage. Special creatures can sometimes apply debuffs from both their channeled element types at once!
- Special worlds have even more dangerous atmospheres than existing elemental worlds Rift is Potent, Blink is Volatile and Umbris is Caustic.
- Added a new set of visual effects for special materials: explosions, creatures, impacts, and item effects.
- All instances of Darkmatter updated to match the new naming convention ‘Umbris’. Reduces Player confusion when using the term Dark elsewhere.
Prestige:
- The prestige system has had major work in rebalancing both prestige rewarded per block type, and by the total calculation of prestige within a beaconed area.
- The main aim was to rebalance the prestige values for all blocks so that they are more accurately related to the cost of collection and production. This brings them up to date with changes to the rarity of blocks since the prestige system was added to the game.
- The prestige calculation has also been updated to better reward sufficient variation.
- All blocks will now give prestige, including: Soil, Rocks, Foliage and Trunks, which will now count towards your total.
- All meshes will also give prestige: machines, doors, poles, beams, torches, storage, flowers, etc.
- The only items that don’t give prestige are Air, Mantle, Water and Lava.
- Prestige algorithm changes:
- The old prestige system calculated prestige as the sum of all block prestige for placed blocks in the beacon, combined with a percentage bonus of that prestige based on variation of blocks, otherworldly colours and chiselling, and the amount of built vs unbuilt space within the beacon. The problems were that users were able to spam high prestige blocks in a solid block and get massive prestige, whilst the percentage bonuses often meant that placing a block could actually reduce your prestige instead due to the bonuses fluctuating and having a much larger negative impact than the small positive increase in the base prestige.
- The new prestige system works such that prestige will never, ever decrease as a result of adding a block, chiselling a block, or adding a plot to the beacon and works to prevent spamming a single category of block from providing large prestige boosts; the increase in prestige may be minuscule or even 0 (eg, spamming a single category of block too much), or may add more prestige than it normally would do (eg, if you previously had spammed a single category of block, but the changes now being made are evening out the distribution so that those blocks that previously gave little to no prestige are now permitted to provide more), but will never reduce the prestige.
- The system of percentage bonuses is reworked into instead providing extra prestige without respect to the base prestige of the beacon, again in such a way that adding a block, chiselling a block or adding a plot to the beacon will never reduce prestige, but may provide little to no extra prestige, or more than would normally.
- The chiselled bonus now takes variation of chiselling into account so that the maximum prestige requires a decent variation of chiselled shapes so that spamming the beacon with a single chisel shape type will not produce a large prestige boost.
- Some beacons may find that they now get a prestige boost compared to before, but others prestige will be reduced, sometimes greatly should the old system have been abused too much. However in general prestige will remain fairly constant across all beacons.
- Fixed a bug in prestige where metal doors would be classified as otherworldly in colour.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Added “dug-up” variants of the base soil types closing an exploit loop for their drops in-line with all other natural blocks that have additional resource drops like rocks etc. Can still plant grass into dug-up soil so building/interaction wise will behave no differently.
- Made changes to a few XP rewards on crafted objects to better reflect the effort to gather and craft the input material and taking into account market surplus of input items.
- Compact Soft Coal: was 10 XP, now 12 XP
- Bucket of Fortified Water: was 16 XP, now 18 XP
- Buying Plinth: was 32 XP, now 35 XP
- Gleam Lantern: was 16 XP, now 18 XP
- Silver Alloy: was 10 XP, now 11 XP
- Super Brew Container: was 15 XP, now 16 XP
- Basic Torch: was 2 XP, now 0 XP
- Ancient Vital Essence from Small Fossils: was 6 XP, now 4 XP
- Plain Wood Poles and Beams: were 6 XP, now 4 XP
- Stone Door: was 8 XP, now 6 XP
- Igneous, Metamorphic & Sedimentary Stones: was 2 XP, now 1 XP
- Made changes to forging balance to take into account the introduction of special material gear:
- Reworked item flexibility so that values can go up to 150, to allow the new more powerful gear to have lower values.
- Rebalanced existing gear values so that the resulting effectiveness is almost identical to what they currently are given the same Intelligence and Power, but may vary slightly in some cases due to the way the maths works.
- Setup the new tools and weapons to have lower flexibility to make them challenging to forge to high levels.
- Enabled XP multiplier for discovering regions (and give extra XP for regions already discovered).
- First region discovered is worth 50 XP, second 100 XP, third 150 XP, etc.
- Discovering all regions on a 50 region world will return ~63,750 XP.
- Discovering all regions on a 35 region exoworld will return ~31,500 XP.
- Guild Control now Gives 8 XP for placing them within a beacon, up from 0.
- Basic Torches have been set to 0 XP to match the XP of other instant handcrafted recipes.
- Increased XP on surface resources. We were finding gatherers were collected XP on harder worlds at a much lower rate to other activities, the new values should better reflect the rarity and effort to collect higher tier Surface Resources.
- Trumpet Root: was 24 XP, now 100 XP
- Traveller’s Perch: was 32 XP, now 160 XP
- Twisted Aloba: was 24 XP, now 40 XP
- Spineback Plant: was 28 XP, now 80 XP
- Oortian’s Staff: was 28 XP, now 44 XP
- Rosetta Nox: was 22 XP, now 22 XP
- Stardrop Plant: was 32 XP, now 100 XP
- Desert Sword: was 16 XP, now 20 XP
- Basic Boulder: was 16 XP, now 20 XP
- Boulder Ring: was 32 XP, now 160 XP
- Boulder Chip: was 28 XP, now 60 XP
- Boulder Tower: was 20 XP, now 40 XP
- Tapered Boulder: was 20 XP, now 22 XP
- Beanstalk Boulder: was 24 XP, now 80 XP
- Mottled Tar Spot Fungus: was 24 XP, now 40 XP
- Clustered Tongue Fungus: was 28 XP, now 100 XP
- Branch Funnel Fungus: was 24 XP, now 100 XP
- Weeping Waxcap Fungus: was 32 XP, now 140 XP
- Glow Cap Fungus: was 28 XP, now 100 XP
- Tinted-Burst Fungus: was 20 XP, now 22 XP
- Changed the way Teaching Foods work. Teaching foods will give bonus XP on a fix amount of XP (sort of like a reverse defeat penalty) and will last until it has given bonus XP for that chunk. There is no longer a time limit on the buff. Most players should see an increase on the bonus XP they gain from each bit of food, especially on slower activities - such as building, surface resource gathering and hunting.
- Teaching Porridge: 1.1 times bonus XP on 70,000 XP
- Teaching Pudding: 1.2 times bonus XP on 70,000 XP
- Teaching Loaf: 1.5 times bonus XP on 70,000 XP
- Teaching Pie: 2 times bonus XP on 70,000 XP
- Longer lasting portal fuel added: “Oort Amalgam”. Crafted from Oort Shards, and a new drop “Meteorite Ichor” which can be collected from meteorites on Lucent worlds. Oort Amalgam is three times as potent as Oort Shards as a portal fuel, and so a maximum fueling will last three times as long as before. The fuel bar behaves as before, but when the amount of fuel goes above the Oort Shard maximum and new green bar shows the extra fuel.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Elemental creatures have significantly higher attributes than before. Watch out for them! These stack with the exotic buffs which make exotic elemental creatures incredibly potent.
- Exotic creatures are now less likely to appear on lower tier worlds.
- The number of exotic buffs that a creature has is dependent on the world—an exotic creature on a lower level world is more likely to have only one or two, an exotic creature on a higher level world is more likely to have three or four.
- Balance pass on the Level 7 creatures and combat.
- Lower tier Wildstock charge less times in row to make them easier to fight. The lowest tier will only ever charge once to help new players the most - as they’re often surprised by the multiple charge sequence.
- Added 2 new Skill Pages (pages 4 and 5). This should allow level 50+ characters more options to diversify their character’s skill sets without needing to rely on multiple alts.
GUI + HUD:
- Added world blinksec distance to the world details shown in the HUD when targeting a world with a totem.
- Added world atmosphere type and level to world details.
- Added exoworld time remaining to world details.
- Added atmosphere and exoworld time remaining to warp locations.
- Disable snow ground-covering effect when in builder / beacon mode (B).
- Updated cleanse bomb effect text to make it clearer what they’re doing.
- Simplified atmosphere types in text to always be Volatile, Caustic or Potent. This was duplicated across the skills, foods, character stats, world and warp information.
- Corrected spelling error in ‘Desconstruction’, in the title Deconstruction, is Fun.
- Removed full stop from Objective title Sapphire, So Good in all languages.
- Updated impulse to Impulse in Shielding Loaf and Shielding Risotto for capitalisation consistency.
- Added missing error text when booted from an expired exoworld, and text on the warp trying to lead back to that expired exoworld.
- Stopped Oortstone gear appearing in request baskets when requesting Blink, Rift or Umbris gear.
- Added actions to the Sanctum Editor to allow rapid colouring of all blocks in the world. Target a block and then change all matching instances by selecting a new colour.
SFX + Music:
- Added new music themes for the Level 7 worlds. These are already in the Original Sound Track but will now be accessible in game. Can you find and trigger all the themes per world?
Engine:
- Optimised entity saving in some cases to reduce the chances of performance issues.
- Updated SSL libraries for stability/performance improvements, with the aim of improving portal opening performance.
- Added option to the World Builder to control the world size during generation only execution.
Server:
- Some improvements to world server performance.
Bug fixes:
- Corrected spelling error in all Shielding Food descriptions - impluse to impulse.
- Fixed a bug with beacon alignments not being properly reset when leaving and then rejoining a guild.
- Fix for advanced locked shop stand and request baskets not allowing deposits or withdrawal for players with access on the lock.
- Fix rare crash when using the d-pad while viewing a tooltip in a smartstack.
- Fix for places screen sometimes showing the wrong current world.
- Fixed filters on the knowledge screen so that ever item appears in exactly one filter and they are sensibly categorised.
- Fixed a bug where Healing Boon 2 & 3 forged Bombs were not counting towards collecting Healing Bomb Combat Objectives.
- Fix for controller dpad down not working on the character screen overview dropdown
- Fixed rare crash when viewing a plot with an active buff machine.
- Fixed issues here beacons couldn’t be aligned to Guilds and Factions.
- Fixed augment position for special slingbows.
- Fix client and server crash for level 11 atmospheres.
- Fixed crash when placing augmented items into Request Baskets.
- Fix for occasional client crash when returning to sanctum.
- Fixed request basket item visibility to include tax.
Release 219.1:
- Fixed issue where scaling of effectiveness to enable new gear had made gem gear crafting harder with the forging epic.
- Fix for occasional client crash updating compass directions on the new Exoworlds.
- Fixed loss of active guild buffs that required power on a server restart.
- NOTE: Coin and Endeavour for guild buffs lost will be reimbursed automatically within a week.
- Fix for occasional server crash when spawning creatures on “Rugged” worlds.
- Fix to the bot protection system that was flagging regenerated blocks as dug-up.
- Fix to the XP protection system that was incorrectly flagging the backdated region XP awards.
Comment:
The exoworlds hit performance issues when initially launched. This was due to extreme numbers of drops getting generated which were multiple orders of magnitudes higher than normal server metrics. The server was spending over 50% of processing time handling drops alone. When profiling and optimising systems you will always focus on hotspots. We have looked at these systems and have already implemented optimisations. However, we have chosen not to hotfix these into the update today as they would introduce changes that could destabilise the game. We have chosen the stable path of reducing the player limit. In the next update we will include the optimisations, test them on Testing, and then return the player limits to the original level. We’re choosing stability over performance here.
Release 219.2:
- Fixed additional cases of clients crashing when connection to the server is really horrifically bad.
- Fixed client crash when shooting a creature with a Rift slingbow with the Let 'em Bleed Boon.
- Fix bot-protection system for XP from manipulating the resource drops from recently mined blocks; this interacted badly with regen bombs to prevent resource drops from regenerated blocks that were recently mined. This is independent of the previously fixed issue where regen-bombs were flagging blocks as “dug-up”.
imagine! Would add a whole new element of survival haha
