This update is accessible via the “Testing” release of Boundless on Steam only (we don’t have the option of doing this for PS4 users.)
Hi everyone,
We wanted to get this Hotfix out today but unfortunately it’s simply too risky to release before the weekend is here. So instead we’re going to put the changes on Testing, so you guys can check out some of the changes yourselves, tell us what you think and maybe even find a bug or two (no more than two though, ok?)
Today’s Hotfix aims to resolve some of the immediate issues players have been experiencing since Release 199 was put to the Live Universe. Thank you to those of you who have reported bugs and given us feedback so far.
Before we get into release notes, we wanted to address some of the most common bits of feedback we’ve had over the past day.
Bomb Mining
The Boundless servers record a vast collection of metrics and analytics about the different game mechanics, resources and player activity. This data is extremely useful when trying to understand what actually happens across the whole universe. It’s understandable for some players to be surprised and disappointed with the recent changes to bomb mining, it was a popular and effective form of mining; but based on the analytics it was also far too overpowered. The ratio of bomb mined resources to hammer mined resource was magnitudes out.
We want bomb mining to be a balanced part of the game alongside other forms of minings.
With that said, the last thing we want to do is break elements of the game which make it less fun for a significant portion of the playerbase, and we are absolutely open to feedback on any changes we make within the game. We’ll be monitoring the data over the course of the next week, so please do keep bomb mining and let us know how you’ve been getting on - if something needs to be changed, we will take the steps necessary to do so.
Boundless is a sandbox and the game should reward creative techniques for progressing within the rules of the sandbox.
Attributes Nerfed?!
Nope! Actually this was a bug with the GUI involving localisation. The Attributes have not changed in 199, but their presentation in the GUI can be presented incorrectly. Sometimes the Attributes are incorrectly rounded down, from say 0.99999… to 0.9 instead of correctly rounding to 1.0. There are a few different cases where this is happening. The internal attribute system is unaffected. Luck hasn’t changed. It just looks like it.
Adding Materials to Crafting
It is never our intention to make or increase the grind within Boundless. We want players to always feel like they’re progressing and going on their own adventure within the universe. We don’t want it to be boring, monotonous, a chore, a grind or too much like real life. It should be a pleasure, with some effort and commitment, and ultimately a feeling of achievement. The journey was worth it.
The game’s analytics shows that many players have large amounts of certain resources stashed away, and they’re unlikely to be used again. The aim was to give any unused materials a purpose and more value in the crafting hierarchy. Some of the recipes changed in 199 have had a slight increase in resources needed to craft (higher level furnaces for example) and some have had different resources added to them, like the Bricks. In the case of Bricks in particular, we’ve increased the output you get which we feel balances out the additional resources.
But we understand that this can be seen as simply adding more hoops to jump through. More grind. More shovels. More shoe leather.
We will carefully review the crafting tree before the next update and double check that the changes are an improvement to the hierarchy as a whole. Any areas that we conclude were heavy handed will be corrected.
Patch Notes
This particular release has been troublesome for patch notes to say the least. I explained in another post how patch notes are a completely manual process, which unfortunately means there is some room for error. We know this isn’t good enough and will be working on our internal communication and processes to ensure patch notes are delivered correctly.
Release Notes
- Increased player cap to 80 players per world. The server entity serialisation performance has improved dramatically. But this is only part of the execution time per server update. We saw a good improvements in the metrics and have increased the world cap to 80. We will then review the metrics again, and increase the limit accordingly.
- Opening the Exchange or Shop GUIs will both redeem any items purchased outside of the game via the PlayStation Store.
- Fixed a crash which could occur when network connections open and close, this was the main crash most players experienced since the update.
- Fixed an issue where Stamina would not recharge if a player continued their action.
- Fixed an issue where players were unable to chisel placed blocks.
- Fixed an issue with Coin trading where players would sometimes get incorrect values. No coins were generated, but the incorrect values could have been transferred.
- Fixed a precision and rounding issue which showed incorrect values for Attributes in the GUI. The attributes have not changed, but some values were rounded down leading to some values looking like they had been altered.
NOTE: There is a known issue on the Testing universe where the planet map you see might be from the Live universe. This happens because the worlds have the same identifier and the cache doesn’t differentiate between the 2 universes for planet maps. It will correct itself when the map is next updated. But once you’ve played on Testing, the Live map could be incorrect for a few hours.
NOTE: The macOS version has not been deployed to Testing. It will be deployed next week.