This update is accessible via the “Testing” release of Boundless on Steam.
Please report all issues discovered with the update to this support thread.
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.
Overview:
Internally we’ve been calling this our “Creatures and Combat” release in which we’ve been focusing on adding to the excitement of exploring and hunting. We’ve been improving the feel of combat with making the responsiveness and physics of shooting better, as well as improving the way we deal with hits and damage in an online, potentially high-latency game. The creatures themselves are much more accurate and dangerous, and have a huge number of new attack types and special moves for you to deal with. We’ve also added a new feature - Conduit Meteorites - which crash down onto the planets ripping out uncontrolled portals through which waves of creatures pour. Defeating all the waves of creatures allows the meteorites to be harvested for large amounts of conduit fused Oortstone.
The next releases will continue to build on this work, with a full balance of damage and skills to ensure that different play styles are supported in combat and for other areas of the game. Also the addition of new features such as Rage and Focus, Stamina and reviving. We’re not just focusing on combat though – we’re also planning changes to the recipes in the game, and a lot more resources to collect from exploration, hunting and mining.
If combat isn’t your thing, then don’t worry - Boundless will be equally playable by players who want to avoid all combat.
Important 1:
This release contains a significant networking optimisation for sending player input to the game server. This optimisation was only released in Testing 183.1 and wasn’t enabled in Testing 183. The aim of these networking changes is to make the game more robust against variable and poor quality local network connections.
Please report how these networking changes perform for you in comparison to the Live version. Hopefully there should be reduced latency and rubber banding. We’re particularly interested to hear how the game performs for players who have experience consistently bad connections in the past.
Important 2:
Please share feedback on the balance. It’s a work in progress.
Release Notes:
- Art + Animation + Assets:
- Creatures:
- Added new spitter and cuttletrunk attack animations.
- Added new cuttletrunk beam attack VFX.
- Scaled down and reshaped the spitter projectile model so it’s more realistic.
- Conduit Meteorites:
- Added meteorite signal VFX so the meteorite site is visible from a distance.
- Creatures:
- Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Changed light cube so it can be shaken while the light is on and increased light time to 10 seconds.
- Slingbow projectile physics adjusted to allow make their flight travel through the cross hairs and be easier to aim.
- Master Beacon Controls:
- A Beacon Control can now be set as the Master Beacon Control.
- This defines the location of the Beacon for warping into. This allows players to control the entry point of their beacon.
- The location of a Settlement on the compass is now defined by the location Master Beacon Control of the Beacon with the highest prestige. Allows players to better define the “centre” of a Settlement.
- The Master Beacon Control can only be destroyed if there is only 1 plot left in the beacon. It’s now no longer possible to have a beacon without a beacon control.
- It’s not possible to unplot the plot containing the Master Beacon Control.
- Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Creature combat overhaul. Creatures are being updated to be more competitive in combat and to have a lot more variety between their tiers and worlds. Please be aware that combat is going to get a lot more challenging if you do not have the right attributes before entering the current moon or ring world. This is an initial pass on the spitter and cuttletrunk species and you can expect further changes to the other creatures, balance changes to player and creature attributes as we continue to make combat more fun and interesting. We intend to add options at a later date which will make combat easier to avoid for people who have no interest in it. There is a skill in the skills menu (Shadow Effect) which makes you harder for creatures to detect.
- New Creature Generation Rules:
- When a creature is generated for a world it is assigned a random bundle of attacks. This means creatures on world-A may not use the same attacks as creatures on world-B.
- Elemental spawning has been changed to a fixed percentage chance making it more consistent between the worlds and tiers.
- Exotic creatures distinguishable via the presence of decals will have different attacks to creatures without decals.
- Creature Behaviour:
- Spitters and Cuttletrunks have various weapons to select between and can perform different actions in combat such as dodging, attacking or flanking.
- Each power tier is now unique and has different behaviours and weapons for you to discover and conquer.
- Creatures can now apply status effects to themselves to improve their defence and damage potential. There are ways to prevent the creatures from using the status effect, see if you can figure out how to.
- The dodge speed and distance has been updated so smaller creatures move slower but larger creatures move faster.
- New Creature Weapon Types:
- Spread – Creatures can now fire multiple projectiles in a horizontal, vertical or spread format in a single attack like the player’s slingbow.
- Rapid – Creatures can now fire bursts of projectiles.
- Rate Of Fire - The speed of each rapid attack has been balanced with its own rate of fire time.
- Arc – Creatures can now fire any projectile in a sweeping horizontal arc from one side to another.
- Shotgun – A large projectile which deals damage and knocks the player back.
- Homing – A player seeking projectile which can move fast or slow and damages the player on impact.
- Beam – A continuous laser beam attack which deals damage to the player when they are in the beam. They can be used as a sweep or directly at the player.
- Bombs:
- Explosive Bombs – A projectile which explodes on impact and deals an area of effect damage to nearby players.
- Timed Bombs – A projectile which bounces off the surface and explodes after a period of time dealing an area of effect damage to nearby players.
- Sticky Bombs – A projectile which sticks to the surface and explodes after a period of time dealing an area of effect damage to nearby players.
- Cluster Bombs – An upgraded sticky or timed bomb projectile which fragments into multiple bombs on detonation.
- Lobbed – Creatures can fire their projectile along a vertical arc in addition to the current direct shot.
- Please note: Some weapons do not currently use the intended model or visual effects.
- Please note: Some of the attacks do not use the correct audio.
- Creature Combat Balance:
- Damage for Spitters and Cuttletrunks has been adjusted to account for the new weapons.
- Each creature weapon has been balanced individually for combat orientated players.
- Please be aware that further adjustments on player and creature attributes will be made during development, so you can expect to see big changes to your attributes and the creatures’ in future.
- Creature Attack Improvements:
- Creatures now have a cooldown for each attack to prevent them from using their best attack too frequently.
- Creatures have certain conditions which need to be met before they start using certain attacks. For example, the number of attacking players, the amount of health remaining on the creature, weapon used and a few others for you to discover.
- Creatures will sometimes perform a tell animation before they perform certain attacks. Look out for these if you want to avoid powerful attacks from a creature.
- Improved the shot accuracy of projectiles fired by creatures. The projectile attacks will now be able to hit you very accurately, so you need to be much more nimble to respond to the projectile once it has already been fired instead of being able to easily trick the AI into firing wildly far from you.
- Projectile sizes have been adjusted to match the new projectiles and to make dodging creature attacks easier because of the improved creature accuracy.
- Creature prowl:
- Creatures will now give up on a target that they haven’t seen for a while.
- They are still aggressive when prowling and if they see you they will attack straight away.
- While prowling creatures will make fewer sounds (so less annoying when you are inside).
- The Hopper will not whistle while prowling.
- Conduit Meteorites:
- Meteorites will now occasionally aggressively impact nearby to players.
- They can be found more quickly by exploring.
- Creature portals spawn around a meteorite and drop creatures who will try to protect the meteorite.
- Once all of the creatures have been killed the meteorite can be mined.
- Inside the meteorite blocks is a meteorite core that can be looted for drops!
- The more players in an area at the start of the event the harder the meteorite will be to beat.
- Harder meteorites will have better loot.
- Drop Rates:
- Removed Oort Stone from all creatures except the Roadrunner as the new meteorite system is intended to be how you collect Oort Stone.
- Lowered the drop rates of certain items as the items were being dropped too frequently and in very high quantities.
- Creature General Improvements:
- Hoppers will not explode on the other side of a wall to their target.
- Hoppers now have an additional delay on explosions they should always whistle for 1.5 seconds before they can explode.
- Creatures’ power level is now represented with a name rather than a number.
- Improved projectiles fired by creatures, its projectile attacks will now be able to hit you very accurately, so you must be much more nimble to respond to the projectile once it has already been fired instead of being able to easily trick the AI into firing wildly far from you.
- Improved behaviour of Hopper explosions and any other relevant damage that is not (and should not) be predicted by the client so that its effects are delayed and distributed to the client to coincide with the time-point in which the client observers the Hopper (or whatever is otherwise causing the damage) to be in the visual state where the damage would be applied… aka you receive damage when the Hopper explodes visually on your screen. This also means the Hopper cannot magically hurt you even if you had moved away from the point of the explosion from your perspective.
- Fixed an issue leading to rubber banding if a Hopper jumps at you just before exploding where you would be pushed away from the Hopper and then rubber banded back to where you were before once it explodes.
- Fixed a bug where the client would mispredict hitting a creature if the projectile hit the creature at the end of its range just before it would have vanished from travelling too far.
- Full support for creatures to throw timed bombs that can start their fuse on contact, and for projectiles that explode on contact, and that can be set to bounce off the ground and only explode on contact with entities.
- Projectiles and bombs fired by creatures will ignore dead bodies lying on the ground, firing/moving through them. But client projectiles will still interact with them so that you can gather the loot.
- Can now give entities different hitboxes when dead, stopping strange interactions with players who are dead on the ground, but also giving us scope to improve more interactions with dead creatures too. Prediction systems extended to support this.
- Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- Changed it so that you can warp any distance with any size of Warp (skill limit still applies). No more frustratingly large Warps required. The ultimate aim is to encourage Warps constructed in the worlds rather than using the emergency Warps in the Sanctum.
- Health gains from Vitality reduced to start slower, and then accelerate towards 100%.
- Threat and Aggression
- Shadow Effect is now a multiplier rather than a subtractor.
- Rebalanced Shadow Effect.
- Rebalanced Threat Modifier.
- GUI + HUD:
- Mastery effect on tool and weapon speed tweaked, and represented in the GUI.
- Fixed filter categories in machines and the knowledge screen.
- Recipe and item lists in machines and the knowledge screen are now more usefully categorised and filtered.
- Some GUI optimisations that reduce the cost of adding new combat messages.
- GUI buttons are more consistent in colour
- Unified Entity Health Bars 2.0:
- Modified the health bar presentation to improve health ranges and progression presentation.
- All creatures, blocks, entities and players now share a consistent and unified health bar across all worlds.
- The health bar gradually steps up to a higher scale as the health of the entity geometrically increases. This is to keep the presentation tight and more relevant to the scale.
- The scale is consistent across worlds to help players understand the relative vitality of new creatures they discover.
- As an entity’s health decreases the health bar will step down through the geometric scale.
- For players where the maximum health is relevant the health bar will not step down through the scale. This helps players understand how far their health is away from their maximum.
- Status Effects:
- Added a New Citizen status effect for new players. Players with this effect will not be attacked by creatures (unless provoked!).
- Added a new Interstellar Stasis status effect for players who are not authenticated by the server. This is to indicate when you cannot perform certain actions until the server has verified your character after walking through a warp or portal.
- New general icons and status effect icons have been added.
- Wear Update:
- Wear is now presented as total value rather than fractions of percentages.
- Different machines have different wear totals.
- Different spanners repair different amounts of wear.
- Contextual Messages and Notifications:
- A message box now appears on the HUD to display contextual messages and notifications.
- Notifications are presented to the player when important information needs to be displayed. These are mostly used to highlight the status of your builds and alerts you when your Beacon or Campfire is nearly out of fuel or it has expired.
- Contextual messages are general pieces of advice which are used to highlight information to the player.
- Contextual messages appear when certain actions are performed and are removed when the action is complete or after a certain period of time has passed.
- Contextual messages will appear a certain number of times before they are no longer displayed.
- Contextual messages have cooldown which prevents them from showing up repeatedly in a short period of time.
- Contextual messages can be disabled in the settings menu at the bottom of the Game tab.
- Damage Types Update:
- Renamed melee, projectile and impact damage to be kinetic, impulse and falling.
- Creature attacks assigned to kinetic or impulse.
- Engine:
- Fixed a couple of server and client memory leaks.
- Minor server tweaks to assist with performance diagnosis.
- Fixed a rare issue where a player could get locked onto a world and was unable to rejoin the game until a server was restarted.
- Fixed a potential server crash where a user was able to interact with a new character in an unexpected way before the server was alerted to the character creation.
- Rendering performance:
- Set level of detail distances for effects and meshes to improve performance in busy areas.
- Added graphics option to set object detail level, which scales effects and meshes draw distances.
- Added graphics option for ‘target minimum fps’ that will dynamically alter the detail levels if the frame rate drops too low. Defaults to 20fps.
- ~5% speed increase in complex scenes on all platforms.
- Additional ~10% speed increase in complex scenes on Windows.
- Bug fixes:
- Fixed an issue where it was not possible to complete all requirements for the objective ‘Add A Member To Your Beacon’.
- Fix for Cuttletrunk pull attack effect playing after the pull attack has finished.
- Fix for Hoppers exploding multiple times and not dying.
- Fix for camera flicker when sending chat messages.
- Fixed other players being able to grapple your item pickups from creatures.
- Fixed dead creatures with their items collected blocking player shots and grapples.
- Fixed mispredictions sometimes when interacting with the world if there were players/creatures walking around in front of you, and fixed the interaction with blocks to be consistent with the GUI, so that you cannot interact “through” players/creatures to a block.
Resolved Known Issues:
The following items were known issues in previous releases and have now been resolved.
- Choosing Return to Sanctum option briefly displays ‘wrap error’ text on screen.
- Clicking the Craft button very quickly may close the active recipe.
- Damage indicator circle can sometimes remain on screen even when no damage is received.
- Number of available feats is incorrect.
- Objectives & Feats - Some tasks are not being tracked correctly.
- When Beacon fuel is nearly full, adding extra fuel will display a message saying that there are no consumable fuel items.
- When selecting a skill, if the Cancel option is overlapping it, the skill will be unselected.
- Z-fighting with some items (workbench and other machines) when placed underwater.
Known Issues:
The following items are known issues in this release.
- (new) ‘Supply & Demand’ Trader feats are not working.
- (new) Breaking any machine during crafting will destroy the ingredients in use.
- (new) Camera is sometimes stuck after exiting GUI menus.
- (new) Cannot mine blocks when standing in the same position as a torch.
- (new) Creeping on top of chiselled blocks does not prevent characters from falling off.
- (new) Current world filter on Locations Tab includes other world locations.
- (new) Distance climbed feats (Mountain Climber I, Mountain Climber II, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough) are not working.
- (new) Drop shadow appears to be broken in places.
- (new) Explorer Feats ‘No Going Back’, ‘Collaborative Travel’ and ‘No Warp Too Far’ are not working.
- (new) Fog can linger inside closed buildings.
- (new) Grapple tools not working correctly when winding grapple up or down after grappling block drops.
- (new) Hitting blades of grass after hitting soil blocks resets block damage.
- (new) It’s possible to get stuck between two walls of blocks when using a grapple tool to swing through a portal.
- (new) Left hand sometimes constantly triggers input when inside the sanctum.
- (new) Machines sometimes stop crafting after reaching 0s from the Currently Crafting list.
- (new) Minus/negative XP may sometimes appear on screen.
- (new) Natural crystal base doesn’t have a mesh and can stick out from storage.
- (new) Other players sometimes appear to not be have any items in their hands.
- (new) Signs float after destroying blocks they have been placed on.
- (new) Sometimes it’s not possible to return to the sanctum after losing all health.
- (new) Sun effects are visible through planets.
- (new) Terrain Detail on lava is inconsistent depending on the setting used.
- (new) Text cursor goes off screen on signs after pressing the Up key when there is more than 4 lines of text.
- (new) The message ‘You have been defeated’ can sometimes remain on screen after returning to a world from the sanctum.
- (new) Torches on sloped blocks have the wrong hitbox.
- (new) Water can flow through closed doors.
- Entity rendering will not always work correctly when there are multiple warps very close together, or where a warp opens up to a location very near where the entrance is.
- GUI rendered incorrectly on Intel HD graphics (and some AMD / GTX laptop GPUs) on Windows.
- If the game (loader) fails to start on Windows 7 and 8 you may need to install Update for Universal C Runtime in Windows - Microsoft Support
- Item placed into Request Basket will disappear when placing the same item into storage.
- Item wanted is completely different to what was placed there before on the Request Basket.
- Items may unequip themselves after adding a stack of items to a smart stack.
- Items will occasionally be unable to smart stack with other items that belong in the same smart stack category.
- Menus may constantly reappear on screen after closing them.
- Opening or closing doors and trapdoors when standing too close to them will restrict player movement. To get out of the situation, interact with the door or trapdoor again.
- Region names may not be displayed correctly after discovering one.
- Request Baskets (previously Buying plinths) that had wanted items set before v151 have unset them. Sorry. Going forward they will be fine.
- Shift-clicking any inventory item on the Furnace GUI when ingredient slots are full will cause that item to disappear. To retrieve that item, break the Furnace.
- Skill descriptions are not final.
- Some interactive blocks (crafting table, machine, and beacon control) have become corrupted during the migration. This will result in at best those blocks not being able to be interacted with, at worst the game crashing when interacting with those blocks. To fix the issue the block(s) in question need to be re-placed. In the case of anything other than a beacon control the block can simply be broken, picked up, and then re-placed. In the case of a beacon control this will work, although it would result in all the plots having to be re-placed one at a time and during that process the contents being unprotected. A better workaround for a beacon control is to craft a new beacon control, place that, and then break the old one, which will keep the beacon’s plots placed throughout the process.
- Speech bubbles may still be displayed above players after going through portals.
- The recipes are not final.
- When expanding a smart stack offered by another player during trading, it will be empty.
Testing 183.1:
- Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Wildstock charge at their target multiple times. Added a short pause between charges.
- SFX + Music:
- New meteor sounds.
- Engine:
- Client now sends all game inputs to the server over UDP instead of WebSocket. This should hopefully mean that people suffering from packet loss can play the game much more smoothly. The “Disable unstable network” option is now defaulted to “on”. Data about this traffic has been added to the debug screens and to the latency screen.
- New version check code to spot client running on the wrong version.
- Fixed drop shadows sometimes looking incorrect.
Important 3:
The Mac OS X build of Testing 183.1 is currently broken and will be fixed ASAP. -
FIXED.
Testing 183.2:
- Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Raw and Cooked Starberries now recover an additional 100 hit points each.
- Food and brew consumption speed has been adjusted depending on the healing amount.
- Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Made spitter projectiles slightly less accurate.
- Spitter movement speeds have been adjusted. Low tier spitters are now slower and high tier spitters are now faster.
- Tier 1 spitters do not have the 3 shot rapid attack by default. A special spitter with decals is now required.
- Wildstock charge attack speeds have been adjusted, Low tier wildstock now charge slower and high tier wildstock now charge faster.
- Roadrunners now use their immense speed to help them run on water.
- Re-adding Oortstone to tier 5 Spitters, Cuttletrunks and Hoppers as drops.
- Meteorites have been adjusted:
- New drops have been added and the amount of drops depends on the size of the event and the type of drops depends on the world difficulty.
- The amount and power of the creatures spawned has been altered to make it easier for solo players and more challenging for groups.
- GUI + HUD:
- Added a new tool tip to explain meteorites and how you need a beacon to play certain blocks.
- New notifications have added to better explain how to remove the new master beacon control.
- SFX + Music:
- Further meteor sounds.
- Bug fixes:
- Fixed camera not resetting when creating a new character.
- Fixed missing held items on Mac version.
Testing 183.3:
- Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Meteorites will not spawn within 64m of a beacon.
- Oortstone has been removed from tier 5 creatures again, apart from the roadrunner. Initial data is showing Meteorites are providing a good amount of Oort Stone.
- Defeated text has been made more consistent.
- Bug fixes:
- Fix for hoppers continuing to play their steam whistle even after calming down.
- Fix for some effects not playing on the meteorite (flames, smoke).
- Fix meteorite crash landing audio playing multiple times.
Can’t wait to try this
