I went to the Test Server (first time) and made a new character to try out this awesome update! I had forgotten the fear of running from a Lvl 1 Wildstock! 
Currently lvl 23.
The Tutorials have been very good, leading the new player to make their first crafting bench, tools, what to harvest etc. Having daylight the whole time was a plus! While a new player is probably too busy reading and learning to notice, they might as well see the beauty of Boundless from the start. And the nights on all three planets haven’t been that dark either, easy to navigate around. The only frustration (for me) arose from being given an objective but not being able to find how to make the resource (fuel for the beacon), simply because i had used up my skill points and hadn’t unlocked the required Skill. In the future of course new players will be able to tab-out to check up the excellent Boundless Crafting site and be able to plan ahead.
The different weather features are beautiful.
Stamina will the biggest mechanic to get a handle on, I think. No more endlessly chopping away at trees or pounding stone, and more planning is needed when using Slingbow attacks. I quickly learned cooked yams give much better stamina returns than raw eaten ones! At lvl 20 I was able to start mixing the new foods and I’m enjoying finding out the stat buffs etc.
Saltpetre drops, according to the tooltip it’s acquired from Sand and Sedemtary Rock. Over 1000 Sand/Sedimentary Rock (Vulpto+Solum) resulted in 5 ! Saleptre Fragment. This seems a bit harsh.
Smart Stacks in Shop Stands are unaccessible.
Do you have luck? and did you try the rock like surface resources? im not 100% sure on the surface stuff but luck “should” affect the drops if im not mistaken…
reading through this, i must say that i think that many of the developments are going to create more headache than theyre worth.
the skills potential is still too limited and too costly,
the layered levels of investment just to keep going on a basic level of operation is too high,
too much focus on ‘survival’ that is going to provide more delay and progress-buffer than actual interesting mechanic
food shouldnt be mandatory, it should be optional. inb4 ‘is food optional in real life’- to that sarcasm i suggest that food be automatically eaten, if needed, even raw, from items that are destroyed be them creature or resource. eating raw meats in the world is a real thing, perhaps not so much chicken and pork but beef and fish definitely. as such, i think that raw meat from enemies should be automatically consumed if food is needed, or perhaps even a low cost basic skill set that allows you to automatically eat raw meats and berries or whatever on pickup, and then as the skill progresses the effectiveness of the consumed resources is improved. Raw cuttletrunk was super effective!
this desire to stick to the whole ’ you need more than one character ’ business is still a turn off. just let players have all the skills at some point, with a relevant investment increase as they get higher in level. 50 levels didnt seem like much to begin with (its still 50 right?) and as it was the skill costs were too high to begin with. considering the general ‘upkeep’ of you character to simply do the basic things the game is built around (i.e. farming resources, building stuff, exploration) the return on investment is even less lucrative now than it was, which might i say was already nothing to get excited over. now, lets topple onto that the addition of focus and rage skills… i mean, am i (whenever the game gets to a point where i feel its worth my time again) going to need 1 character per skill set? as in, one for hammer, one for shovel, one for chisel, one for slingbow, one for lance, one for bombs, one for attack, one for defense, one for health, one for focus, one for rage, one for exploration, one for cooking etc…? in other words, the game is causing players time and investment into the various aspects of the game to be spread too thin in my opinion.
and, not only is there not enough points to go around per character, there is not enough time in the day to get all the characters im going to need to truly enjoy all aspects of the game to where they need to be, and because im going to need so many theyre either all going to progress so slow that im going to lose interest or im going to focus on one at a time then have to start over on another rinse repeat burnout.
i dunno, maybe im being too harsh, maybe its because im weary my heart temple has been dissolved since ive lacked the interest to actually log in an play and check my beacons to see if theyve ran out of fuel and all of my time and investments spent mining and building and crafting and designing gone down the drain due to the games lack of being able to keep me interested in all of its previous iterations over the last 9 months… maybe i just need to log in and give it a go and see how its going… oh wait but it seems like much of the time and investment has already been nullified by the changing of how resource requirements have been changed and tweaked.
eh i dunno.
id rather see the devs focus on combat, creatures, exploration, ruins or tombs or w/e they were, titans, and actually letting players develop a single character fully more than i want to see them add more stuff to make it harder on a player with limited time and interest to actually enjoy the game they want us to play. :<
oh well, the atlas sounds cool at least. #progress
Try playing it instead of assuming the worst from vague descriptions on the forums. It’s pretty unfair to write 7+ paragraphs condemning the latest update when you’ve not played for nearly 9 months.
But then, you’d know that there has been tremendous development on combat, creatures, exploration, even skills.
Wow, loads of great stuff introduced with this update.
Especially the introduction of hunger is a welcome surprise.
But now i can’t help but wonder what you guys are up to next.
Maybe you could throw together a rough mockup on what to expect for the next quarter of 2018? (#lance ?)
Sorry wrong topic. Lol
The Atlas
For this post I’ll be focusing entirely on the Atlas. I spent a few hours messing around with it the other day and set aside a few more hours today, to retest/explore everything it has to offer. Here are my thoughts:
Questions
First up, I have a few questions about usage, durability, and the long term impact these awesome orbs of beauty might be able to provide, aka feature requests.
Will we be able to see about how much durability loss is used, or how much total an atlas has?
Once an Atlas is fully used up and eventually decays, does the character still retain all planetary regional information that can then be used to action into a new Atlas?
Is this information transferable to alts?
Does using a fully unlocked atlas acquired from another player then unlock all of the Atlas’s known regions for the new player?
Some of the smaller regions are quite easy to unlock if you can work out about where the middle of the region is located as that seems to be the “unlock point”? Larger areas can take much more time to find the sweet spot for the unlock and do get a bit discouraging, especially when there are no other unlocked regions around it to help navigate your way. Is the region unlock set to a specific point withing it’s boundaries, or dependent upon exploring a percentage of the total area?
While roaming around exploring with Atlas in hand I had a good bit of fun locating random builds even without the use of a Warp Crystal. Visually locating them after rounding a small forest, or peaking a hill or mountain was quite exciting as they would often appear before I had unlocked the region. Had I of used a Warp Crystal during my exploration, would that of displayed the location of beaconed areas even without having the region unlocked?
Resource Finding
The heat maps provided from using a resource onto the Atlas are quite brilliant. I do so enjoy having what appears to be a different color pallet dependent of the resource selected. However, this is where my excitement for this feature starts to decline a bit. Here are a few issues the Atlas seems to struggle with:
-Once a resource is placed into the atlas, it can not be retrieved unless a new resource is added. Thankfully the resources are given back upon changing the Atlas’s functionality between resources, but there doesn’t seem to be an item stack limit put in place. I used coal into it once and it took all 91 pieces I offered it. They seem quite hungry?
-Once any resource is placed into the Atlas, it seems to become a resource only Atlas, meaning that a player would never again be able to use THAT Atlas for terrain navigation with the standard vibrant color pallet the planet would default to? Thankfully crafting them seems to be one of the new items with a fair and reasonable crafting cost, AND they stack!
-While the Atlas will give a player a rough idea of where to locate resources, generally speaking, once you discover a mountain, you’ve discovered where to gather most things related to mining. The major bit of key information new players would benefit from, would be an in-game basic understand of: “At what height/depth should I be spending my time to find a certain type of resources”? Lets face it, some of the mountains are quite large, have massive cave systems, and sometimes resources which are important are located either higher up then a player might think, or well below what would be considered a “safe” limit. So for the Atlas to lead a player to a mountain and say: “Here you will find coal”, although technically useful, is still a bit daunting.
Expandable Features
While traveling around with my new orb companion, I thought of a few neat things that could help to eventually expand upon the functionality of this awesome new mechanic:
-Players start with an Atlas that will unlock the first region for them either during the tutorial after placing their beacon, or after a bit of exploring themselves.
-Visiting the largest settlement within a region will allow for that region to become unlocked. Exploration for those locations will still have to take place, and although yes, some regions could just be auto unlocked via portal hopping, not every one would.
-Zoom, Spin/Rotate, Unfold features for partially or even fully unlocked planets. What an awesome reward that would be for taking the time to carry and use an Atlas!
-Additional Feats for completing one or more Atlases.
-Tradeable region unlocks during player interaction? (Maybe limited to only the region for which they are both within?)
-Named Atlases. Once you action an Atlas on a planet, it does not actually name the Atlas. Having the amount of planets we do now isn’t so difficult in trying to keep them organized, but when the known universe expands, things might get a little confusing.
-Marker functionality for saved locations/way points?
-Torch upgrades!!! Using a torch onto the Atlas could allow it to be viewed better in dim lighting.
-This one is a bit ridiculous but I’ll ask for it anyways: Atlas Stands! Having them displayed within storage is neat, but being able to display them through other means would be amazing. Maybe even with the ability to provide power or spark to the stand which would then allow for the Atlas to be expanded out like a hologram and rotated, zoomed, flattened!!! 
Issues/Bugs
After hours of messing around and enjoying these new orbs of joy, I can honestly say I’ve only found one major issue with them: Lighting.
-Using one in too bright an area will sometimes cause the Atlas to be flooded with light and just give off a very bright glare that makes it impossible to use. I replicated this a few times while holding different light sources, but not every time, nor at all times of the day.
-Of course attempting to use one in an area that, although lit, but with “dark areas” will cause the Atlas to darken almost completely. Not always able to replicate, but something that was noticed a few times so I thought I would mention it.
That’s it. No other weird or strange actions. Well done.
All in all, I have to say that these things are amazing and I can’t wait to start mapping out the universe and eventually build a monument or structure to house them all.
Cheers,
-Eld
Post Edit Notes:
Used Atlases with at least some discoveries appear completely blank within a Shop Stand. Sad.
The same as a slingbow or totem, you press “x” whilst hovering over the atlas to remove the equipped resource. (I dont think we do a good job of explaining that since it only shows up as a tiny piece of text at the bottom of the screen, but I assume that is something the tutorial does cover…)
Currently the durability has not been set up fully on the atlas, so no wear is being lost at all right now @olliepurkiss
the atlas/character discovered regions are completely independent, when you action the atlas it adds all your regions to it, but the reverse is not allowed, otherwise there would be little use for explorers to sell atlases, because as soon as you bought a fully unlocked atlas, you would have no reason to ever buy one again for that world.
The regions are small areas (of contiguous biome) in the world, the fog-of-war shows not just the region, but all the areas around the region that are closest to it. It should all match up with the hud-location data etc. Eg the hud says “south-east of [region-name]” or “south-east of XXX” when you havn’t visited the “actual” region yet.
Beacon heat-maps are the same as resource heat-maps, you cant see it in unfogged areas.
The colours on the resource/beacon maps are not a different colour per resource, but showing how much of the resource there is. The map itself is always nicely HDR adjusted so that you can always see where the resource is “most available” in the world, and then the colour tells you how much there actually is, so red maps show the resource is very rich in the world (like copper/coal in the home worlds) whilst a yellow map, down to green maps show the resource is sparse like say, surface resources which can never be dense the same way a ground-resource is.
Smart. Benefits the economy and encourages exploration. Players are still able to bypass the exploration aspect of it, but at a cost. Well played.
Ok, so it’s location point unlocked instead of area. Cool. I over thought this too much it would seem as I’m used to looking at a map with grid squares instead of a greyed out orb. The idea is still the same though, follow directions to your destination and you will arrive as intended.
Seems I overthought this as well. I read the patch notes but mistook it for color intensity instead of color coding. Well explained.
Thanks!
-Eld
Looks like I am not able to remove augments on test server (probably not also on live) augments (from totem or atlas) when pressing x. I also did try if it would be affected by what hand I have those items and did reset my keys to default but still couldn’t remove it 
EDIT: I got how to do it just after posting this, it had to be done on inventory 
and not while using item, sorry.
After 310+ hours of playing boundless I did hear this feature first time… or at least I think so.
Thanks, it was somewhat unclear when it was noted on patch notes and there wasn’t durability bar.
I would like to add Eldwens list some sort of shop stand scanner of manufactured items 
EDIT: added bolded part to message
This is just a bug. (Originally they actually crashed the server - so they were simply disabled until we worked out why.)
Selling an Atlas should correctly present the regions and any included resource.
Check out the unofficial roadmap:
Trello
Although at the moment it is mostly fixing bugs so we can release the update on live. 
It would be awesome to be able to search for an item you want, get a list of the items for sale, for how much and where they are on the current world. Unfortunately, this is a huge amount of data and isn’t as easy as it sounds to make.
First update in a long time that restores some of my faith in the game. Might jump back on for a bit after this releases.
I don’t know. The number of bugs written up for this release to Test disturbs me as a veteran software developer. Perhaps in the real world of discourse EA means “paid-to-get-in QA department” but I’d like to think it’s not so. It’s like some of the fundamental mechanics were bypassed by the team QA before pushing it. (QA isn’t about finding bugs–that’s what unit and integration testing are for. QA is about showing there aren’t any defects left.)
Hello @brook-monroe ! The Devs noted that they were pushing out this release much earlier then they would normally do (they called this out on discord). The community that saw the features coming, was happy to manage the bugs because of the hype surrounding the release.
I don’t know if I would call out this specific release as a concern, since they offered warning and noted it was a ‘very early release’ and folks voiced a want for it anyway.
Feel free to wait a few weeks before testing and you will be joining when it would normally have been released for testing.
I am sure someone else here on the forum can screen grab the dev posts/messages on it if you need verification.
All Boundless Testing and Live releases do not reach the defect standard you’re expecting. This will only happen when we release 1.0 and leave Early Access. If we attempted to achieve this production quality whilst in Early Access (and making regular releases) then the development time would increase beyond everyone’s sanity.
EA means “early access”. Whilst we value issues reported by players, we maintain the responsibility of testing and QA fully internally. This means that if we didn’t receive any reports from players we would still release 1.0 at sufficient high quality.
So umm… i seem to have misplaced… The WORLD =P… I could have sworn I left it laying about the sanctum somewhere O.o
can’t wait to see the changes/fixes =)
I really agree with about everything you said. I too have been messing with them every so often and I think they will be really cool to have. Other than the new chat, this is my favorite feature. I think having atlas stands that show the actual planet would be very cool. I do agree though that it should be a bit more specific. Overall it is a great addition and I can’t wait for it to come to the live servers.
We pushed an update, the worlds were migrating.