This update is accessible via the Steam Beta “Testing” release.
Today we’re finally releasing the first version of Storage, Locks and an updated GUI. Have a play and let us know what you think. We’ve reimagined how storage works in a sandbox game. Instead of presenting a chest where everything is logically storage within the chest and hidden from view. We’re presenting an open storage solution, where items are visible on shelves or the Boundless version of chests. Remember that you need to include locks on the storage if you don’t want people to help themselves. But if you don’t want to lock each storage unit, consider locking the room that contains the storage instead! When you access a storage entity, the GUI will give you access to the storage units surrounding it so that you can quickly move items between the different units. We’ll be reusing this system to offer many more alternative storage props, for example, allowing item placement on tables.
The GUI is the first release of a major update that prepares the GUI for all the functionality we have coming in Boundless: guilds, professions, titles, beacons, friends, wearables, maps, furnaces, power cores, forges, machines, trading, locks, selling, portals, warps, and citizen creation! A huge amount of work have gone into these foundations, it’s visually scaleable and still needs a lot of spit and polish.
The first stepping stones for crafting are also included, although it’s very early. There is a small set of recipes, all of which are currently using the hand crafting interface because the machines are not yet ready. It’s all a bit rough around the edges, but the rest of the crafting will be built on these foundations.
Release Notes
- Added basic network performance check. If the latency of your connection to our servers spikes (or is consistently) above the level the game is designed to cope with a “Slow network” message will appear at the top of the screen. If you regularly see this or suffer rubber banding issues consider contributing to the forum thread.
- New lodded meshes for most hammer types.
- Fixed a meshing case where gaps in terrain remain indefinitely when moving across the world.
- Added storage blocks. Up to 4 items can be stored in one storage block but 3x3 storage blocks can placed adjacent and interacted with.
- Added lock blocks. Locks will lock any items that are directly adjacent to the lock or the block that the lock is connected to. For a lock to work it must be placed inside of a beacon. Only users with access to the beacon can interact with locked objects. Locks can lock storage, doors and trap doors.
- Ported old selection for props that are not a full block. Torches and locks now have a selection box smaller than a whole block.
- Made portal transitions smoother by creating a player predictively and preemptively building physics chunks on the destination world.
- Improved rendering through portals and on reflections (normal textures are now rendered).
- Fix for doors not interacting while damaged.
- Fix for players sometimes spawning stuck inside of blocks.
- New GUI for player inventory and quickuse items, with a new tab for hand crafting some new recipies.
- GUI for interacting with new storage blocks.
- Fixed some crash bugs in the worldbuilder due to bad older migrations.
- Fixed crash bug in worldbuilder when using certain blocktype selectors in custom nodes on world load.
- Fixed shader bugs leading to bad normals on foliage and characters.
- Added a temporary set of recipes only using hand crafting, and including a small set of objects.
- Fixed the names of wooden crafted blocks.
Please be aware that we’re going to start announcing known issues with each release. These are issues we discovered whilst testing the update but decided to fix after the release, rather then delay the release.
Known Issues:
- When picking up blocks that have been broken the block automatically goes into the quick use bar. Items in the quick use bar cannot be used for hand crafting and so every picked up block has to be moved into the inventory before it can be used for crafting.
- Breaking stone without a tool breaks the block, but nothing is dropped. Breaking it with tools works fine.
- No colour highlight shown to indicate beacon area when holding a beacon block.
- Beacons and locks cannot be shared among friends as the friend’s token cannot be added to beacons.
- The inventory screen is limited to 24 slots but no error message is displayed when adding more than 24 items.