These release notes are a continuation from Testing 224:
Overview Video:
Testing 224.1:
This update includes changes to the balance that are not final and should not be considered complete or exhaustive. Feedback about the balance is welcomed and helpful.
The update doesn’t include any changes to the wild crop spawning and distributions as these require the resources to be regenerated on the worlds. This will be iterated in a future testing update.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
Earthyam and Starberry foods will no longer drop from Blocks and wild Surface Resource Plants.- Added Earthyam and Starberry (including their variants) back into block drops. Starberrys (including Glossy and Juicy) and Earthyams (including Waxy and Exotic) will once again spawn as bonus drops from Foliage and Mud respectively.
- Rebalanced the drop ratios of Earthyams and Starberries to be in line with other alt drops such as Flint or Opals. The original values were boosted to make it easier for new players to collect foods on the spawn worlds. However, as new players can now collect the foods directly from wild crops the alt-drop boost is no longer required.
- All wild crops now have a chance of dropping multiple seeds.
- All wild crops now have a chance to drop one or more crops.
- Full-voxel sized signs will now all block liquid flow.
- Set doors and trap-doors (that don’t have visual holes in the meshes) to block fluid flow once more.
- Added Pigment Processors, Pigment Processor Power Coils and Spray Tinters to the testing “Can Give” menu.
- Changed some of the growing conditions for Inorganic crops:
- Combustion Particle and Kindling Shred no longer have a massive negative of time to grow when planted on stone. The presentation has also changed to show a massive benefit growing the crops on Gravel, instead of a massive negative to yield when sown on Rock (this is now part of the base yield).
- Growing Goo on rock now greatly increases seed yield but with minimum crop yield.
- Growing Goo on sponge will greatly increase crop yield with minimum seed yield.
- This should help farmers tint Goo over more generations before taking the crop yield.
- Removed the Sackcloth ingredient in the crafting recipe for Bag of Wheat, Bag of Oats and Bag of Rice. This is to reduce the crafting cost now that the wheat, oats and rice are gatherd or farmed from crops.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- Added tips for Farming.
- Added a Builder objective for using the Spray Can.
- XP is now awarded when harvesting crops.
- Added Core Objectives for farming to help players better get to grips with the basics of farming.
- Removed Earth Yam collection requirement from Soil Examiner objective due to farming changes to Earth Yam gathering.
- Added unlocked crops to the crops epic/skill tooltip.
GUI + HUD:
- Added Spray Can to the decorative filter on the knowledge.
- Split Crop drop information in the Knowledge into Wild and Farmed versions.
- Added held items and block colour info to the HUD.
- Added equipped atlases world name to the HUD.
Engine:
- Let water have much higher transparency when butted up against glass blocks.
- Improvements to crop fast-forwarding to allow all crops to fast-forward within roughly 12 seconds instead of 24 minutes when revisiting crops that have been left un-simulated.
Bug fixes:
- Fix a black edge being visible at times around opaque liquids (resin/oil/lava) when the Smooth Normals effect is turned on in graphics options.
- Fixed the “A spot of gardening” objective.
- Fixed visual artefacts in normal-mapping of resin/oil liquids.
- Improved tiling of liquid textures.
- Fixed the Hand Tiller from incorrectly being placed in the Forge machine.
- Fixed LED/Lantern/Gleam Lantern inventory visual offset.
- Fix for cancelling forged smart stacks of items returning the items with the forged effects applied.
- Fix for forged items not showing the new forged effects in the queue tooltip.
- Fix for change appearance button being clickable in the sanctum even though you cannot change appearance in the sanctum.
- Fix crop-condition “sown in block-type” not being evaluated correctly.
- Fix a client crash when the mesh-based fuel crop changes visual state.
- Fix crop seed placement to be aligned with normal block placement.
- Fixed some holes in new liquid meshing around tight u-turns in geometry such as around doors/signs or more complex chiselled configurations.
- Fix for forge crashing when players accidentally click cancel forging just after clicking start round 1.
Testing 224.2:
Art + Animation + Assets:
- Reworked the crop colours to make them a little more natural on the Earth-like spawn worlds.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Wild Rice and Wheat have a small chance of appearing on starter worlds.
- Increased the max seed yield for all crops (apart from Goo, which can be targeted higher) up to 75% chance of a seed. Effectively a single seed can lead to 4 planted crops (up from 3).
- Kindling Mass Kernel now prefers to be near Bitumen instead of Ancient Corruption to differentiate it a bit more from Combustion Fraction.
- Experimental change to rice growing behaviour:
- Rice will now grow really slowly out of water, however harvesting it out of water will increase the crop and seed yield.
- We think this encourages a bit more fun when growing rice fields, having Citizens flood their rice fields to grow the rice, then draining the water when it is ready to harvest. Let us know your thought about this gameplay mechanic!
- Can you find some interesting fluid patterns maybe controlled by door switches that make this interesting. Have an experiment and see what you can find.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- Added XP awards for placing liquids within your beacon and breaking liquids (via a tool forged with Liquid Breaker) in wild areas.
GUI + HUD:
- Added colour coding to the “Requires crop sowing:” field in crop information, showing if you have the necessary skills to plant the crop.
Testing 224.3:
Art + Animation + Assets:
- Pigment Processor crate shows the appropriate glyph now.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Added a bit more variation between Crops for favourable conditions for nearby Blocks:
- Kranut now likes to be grown near Amber, was Mud.
- Glossy Starberries now likes to be grown near Tangle, was Mould.
- Juicy Starberries now likes to be grown near Thorns, was Mould.
- Waxy Earthyams, now likes to be grown near Ash, was Sand.
- Exotic Earthyams now likes to be grown near Dark Glass, was Sand, how exotic indeed!
GUI + HUD:
- Added HUD information showing growth and efficiency summaries for crops.
- Bitumen and Amber added to the debug give menu for players on Testing.
- All crops should display in the correct places in the Knowledge screen.
- Guild related devices are now displayed in the “Guild Devices” section of the Knowledge.
- Slightly increased detail regarding crop placement preferences in Knowledge.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed an issue with immature crops being counted towards harvested objective targets.
Testing 224.4:
Art + Animation + Assets:
- Spray Tinter now animates with a spray effect and the current item shows as it changes colour.
- Dripstone now glows faintly to make it easier to find in caves.
- Allow Workbenches to be Sprayed.
- Adjusted the orientation of seed bags in storage and on plinths.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- Farming based objectives now live in a new Farming category.
- Added a new Fuel Farming Objective “Bio Fuels”.
- Added a new Fuel Farming Objective “Bigger Booms”.
- Added a new Kranut Farming Objective “Go Nuts for Kranuts”.
- Added a new Goo Farming Objective “From Me to Goo”.
GUI + HUD:
- Crop information growth bar and yield percentages show amber for positive growth/improvement and green when maxed.
Bug fixes:
- Fix server crash when black goo matures.
Testing 224.5:
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Power Coils can now only be placed in Beacons. This is to stop players accidentally losing misplaced Power Coils to world regeneration.
- As part of the big farming world migration, all lava within beacons will be removed. Liquid flow mechanics have changed, as has the behaviour of lava destroying blocks (it destroys many more than it used to), and to be “safe” for players’s builds, the lava will just be removed from within beacons ensuring that no-one will suffer from their base suddenly being destroyed by all the lava that didn’t used to interact with their build but may now destroy it. Players will need to manually re-add lava to their beacons.
- Foliage/Crop drops to behave like other block drops in the sense of the dropped entity’s initial velocity distribution.
- Swap goo colour-morph targets of metal/blast worlds so that Metal now tends to cyan, and Blast tends to white.
- Changed crop tint colours to make the fertilised state clearer.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- All characters will be awarded 5 free Skill Cleanse points to allow them to re-spec as Farmers if they wish.
GUI + HUD:
- The Sanctum-edit panel now contains options to manipulate selected crops in the sanctum; you will still have to plant a crop in the sanctum first, but this will allow controlling the growth stage & fertilised state. The Crop HUD details have been disabled in the sanctum to keep it purely visual.
- WIP News Flashes for the Farming Update added.
- Improve positioning of berry crops in knowledge screen.
- Added Goo tint mutation information to the Worlds tab of the Places menu for worlds which will mutate Goo grown on them.
- Added a colour picker and random colour generator to the cheat give menu.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed an issue where an unused item would show in the Request basket price list for Creature Trophies.
- Fix client crash when crafting with the pigment processor.
- Fixed cheat give menu colour picker using the wrong colour space.
- The 3 new compacted combustion particle blocks were previously texture-rotatable, but with changes to assets was decided to not make rotatable anymore. This then caused crashes in the client/server where the rotated versions had already been placed. This has been patched to allow their existence to remain valid without them actually showing a visual difference.
Testing 224.6:
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Reworked crop growth likes and dislikes presented in the Knowledge and right-click details to improve clarity.
- Removed Cultivated Drops World Level and Drop Chance data from farmed crops in the Knowledge because crop drop rates are not an absolute value but are driven by their surroundings.
- Changed some of the Farming Tips and Objectives text to better explain farming to Citizens.
- Crop HUD info now displays an “Expected time to maturity” value, which is a rough estimate of the real world time until a crop is ready to harvest.
- Lowered knowledge unlock level for various Farming items.
- Some farming objectives will now unlock if a Citizen picks up a relevant item related to the objective. This is to help Citizens get to grips with the more advanced parts of the Farming system quicker.
- Changed the starting seed yield for most crops to greatly increase the chances of getting a seed when harvested. Improving growing conditions now has a lower improvement to seed yields, meaning the max seed return chance stays the same.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed some older news items linking to the Testing rather than Release announcements.
- Fixed a bug due to flowing liquids in the server-sunlighting algorithm that could cause sunlight to bleed into areas that should be dark preventing growth of inorganic crops.
- Fixed Crafting Tables and Campfires not being tintable with Colour Spray.
Testing 224.7:
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Changed the starting seed yield for Earthyam, Starberry and Oat plants to give maximum chance of seeds regardless of conditions. Waxy Earthyams and Glossy Starberrys now have a higher starting seed yield. This is to help new players farm without the need to fully optimise their conditions without higher end tools or blocks available.
- Changed some of the balance around Starberry (including Glossy and Juicy) to allow them to be grown in closer proximity and still offer maximum yields.
- Added Infused Fuels and Goo Pigment Colouration tips.
- Added a “Farmer” filter to Objectives in the Journal.
- Knowledge drop information can show Exoworld only drops.
- Updated the Hand Tiller description to offer more information on the tool.
Bug fixes:
- Fix for Spray Tinter item not showing on top of the machine while it is spraying.
- Fixed some older News Flashes to use the correct web links.
- Fixed missing Special Effect text on Fists with the Power Grabber Boon.
Testing 224.8:
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Hand Tiller will now harvest crops and remove grass before tilling.
- Withered prestige crops drop seeds.
- Experimental balance pass to yam and starberry crops so that:
- they can be conditioned to increase seed or crop yield, and
- the seed yield can be increase to = 1, and even > 1 with the right configuration.
GUI + HUD:
- Goo and Decorative Prestige crops (not available in the update) show their tint in the HUD.
- Goo shows its atmosphere driven target tint in the HUD on worlds which can modify it.
- Item links in the Knowledge now work regardless of filtering settings. Filtering will be automatically disabled if you click on an item link that is not visible under the current filtered view.
- Mesh count warning messages will appear in the action log (on the right hand side of the HUD) more regularly as you approach the build limit.
- Update to the seed knowledge entry so that seed and crop yield conditions can be presented independently.
Engine:
- Reworking of client voxel block lights:
- Block lighting will flood taking the maximum value of r,g,b seperately instaad of attempting to add lights together, and falloff is driven entirely by the component light intensities. This allows block lighting to be done all at once instead of having to evaluate each light one at a time making it a huge performance win on block-lighting, and allows us to lift the effective radius of block lights greatly in cases like lava that had previously been forced to have really small radius for performance. Block lights will also adjust their intensity with the colour of the light source in cases of gleam lighting that are not a single fixed colour meaning that white gleam will literally be brighter than black gleam, though we set the intensity range so that black gleam is not just entirely black for lighting still.
- This change also allows the new server-side lighting for farming to be exactly in-sync with the client, with the client also performing the additional calculations as part of block-lighting for “gleamlight” allowing the hud information on crops to now take into account the lighting conditions that the crop is in and report its ability to grow accurately; matching the server exactly. This means that for gleam light sources, the “gleamlight” for crops will roughly match the visual light provided by the block, so even without hud information on the crops should be easier to work with.
- This change also introduces some smaller optimisations for the sunlight flooding in the client and hopefully even though all block lights now have larger radiuses (sometimes much larger), the performance of meshing has actually gotten better.
- Gleam poles/beams/door will now be able to provide “gleamlight” for crops too.
- NOTE: Lighting intensities are still under review. They have been roughly set, but are subject to change still. Feedback is always helpful.
- The Forge Glow boon, as well as the Luminous brews, and the skill-based permanent light are also now, in consistency with block lighting, not radius based, but purely intensity based, and as such will not display information about radius in the GUI, but about increased light intensity. The intensities here are also subject to more change, but are roughly set to get a progression of “effective” radius again.
- Known Issue: block-lights will not flood “above” the top of the world any more, so if you build a wall right up to the top of the chunk, and put a block light at the top of the wall on one side, the light will not flood around the top of the wall (above the world) to reach the other side any more.
- Gleam doors/trap-doors will now emit light equal to that of gleam poles/beams.
- Doors (that don’t have holes in them) will now block lighting propagation. Note the door mesh itself is lit via the entity-lighting system which is not incredibly precise, and so the door itself may be influenced still by lighting on the other side, but the voxel world will fully respect the blocking of light by the door, as will the lighting conditions of crops so that doors can be used to block sunlight from reaching inorganic crops more easily.
- World lighting will update automatically when doors are opened and closed.
Testing 224.9:
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- 1-wide portals and warps will now show a “rotate” button instead of a “flip” button in the GUI allowing them to be rotated 90-degrees at a time.
GUI + HUD:
- Modified Crop/Seed Efficiency display. Now shows Crop/Seed Yield % (e.g. Crop Yield: 125% guarantees 1 crop drop with a 25% chance of a second)
SFX + Music:
- Sounds for special material slingbows and bombs for blink, rift and umbris
- Updated the audio and visual effects on Colour Sprays.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed rendering of grow-down crops like goo on corner-slope faces.
- Fixed foliage (long-grass and most crops as well as the extra foliage on leaf blocks) popping out if the block the foliage is attached to is off-screen.
- Fix breaking decals on blocks like thorns and particularly glass blocks rendering badly.
- Fix for terrain distortion allowing seeing through to the underside of the world in rare cases.
Testing 224.10:
GUI + HUD:
- 1-wide portals and warps will now show a “rotate” button instead of a “flip” button in the GUI allowing them to be rotated 90-degrees at a time.
- 1-wide portals and warps will now also show two “rotate” buttons side-by-side, one for the interacting warp/portal, and one for the exit of the interacting warp/portal.
- Decorative prestige crops now show a progress bar once mature as they become withered.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed audio on the Spray Tinter to sound the same as the Spray.
- Fixed server issue where the local world database could become extremely fragmented making the background process of tidying it take vast amounts of RAM. Which isn’t great of machines with virtual memory disabled.
Testing 224.11:
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Added a Wood Till to enable more efficient farming for new players.
- The tool is introduced alongside the other wood tools during the tutorial.
- Whilst the Till isn’t required to start farming it is required to get a seed yield of x1.0 for the level 0 crops.
- It will also act as a catalyst to point new players toward farming.
- Additional pass on the crop and seed yields. (Still a work in progress.)
- Updated Goo to allow it to grow on Gleam.
- Goo colour will mutate towards the gleam colour with a chance of mutation.
- Removed the colour mutation based on atmospheres. After testing we concluded that the atmosphere approach whilst it encouraged players to have farms across multiple worlds it was unnecessarily complicated and having multiple farms could be seen as a chore. Farming directly on gleam allows you to farm at home.
- Removed all the references to the atmosphere colour and system.
- Updated the Goo HUD details to tend towards the Gleam colour and not the atmosphere.
GUI + HUD:
- Clamped crop and seed yield values in the HUD to >0.
- Extended the crop progress bar to include withering duration. This is only used by the decorative prestige crops.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed crop harvesting failing for adjacent blocks when using a tool forged with the “Affect Adjacent” boon.
Testing 224.12:
Art + Animation + Assets:
- Tweaks to the Oil, Lava and Water rendering to use the latest fluid renderer features.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Release candidate pass on the crop balance:
- Yams:
- Tubers - should be easy to grow and only require tilling to reach a seed yield of 1.
- Waxy Tubers - then require water irrigation to reach a yield of 1.
- Exotic Tubers - then require neighbour tilling to reach a yield of 1.
- Introducing Sand, Mould, Ash, Tangle, Thorns and Dark Glass allows targeting additional crop or seed yield at the expense of the other.
- Berries:
- Starberries - should be easy to grow and only require the correct foliage block for a seed yield of 1.
- Glossy Starberries - then require sufficient space (ie. Air) for a yield of 1.
- Juicy Starberries - then require the conditioning blocks.
- Introducing Timber, Mould, Tangle and Thorns allows crop/seed yield trade offs.
- Grains:
- Oats - require tilled soil to reach a seed yield of 1.
- Rice - then require water irrigation. Requires flooding to boost growth time, and draining for harvesting yield.
- Wheat - then require condition blocks.
- Planting between Tilled and Compacted soils allows crop/seed yield trade offs.
- Nuts - required water and amber, with a crop/seed yield trade off with compacted Copper and Iron.
- Fuels:
- Combustion Fraction - requires lava irrigation, and Ancient Corruption / Compact Combustion Particle yield trade offs.
- Kindling Mass - requires lava irrigation, and a Bitumen / Enriched Combustion Particle yield trade offs.
- This means that you need to invest the crop produce back into the farm to optimise the yields.
- Goo:
- Farming for crop yield with Sponge and lava irrigation.
- Farming for seed yield (and hence colour mutation) with Gleam and Growth.
- Yams:
- The 6 different families of crops each have a slightly different strategy for growth and balance.
- The crop expected duration presented in the HUD, will now represent the time based on the crop’s current lighting, fertilised state and skills.
Engine:
- Updating representation of lighting values to improve accuracy at the darker end improving consistency of fall-off curves across ranges of intensities, and improving quality of coloured lighting fall-off, helping to avoid ugly attenuations changing the colour of the light as it falls-off too much.
- Fuel and Goo Crops will now emit a small amount of light when Mature or found Wild in the world. The colours will match the Fuel Crop mature colours, and match the colour of Goo. This will make them easier to find underground and be an additional indicator that they’re ready to harvest.
Testing 224.13:
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Add a “small” light source to obviously emissive surface-resource meshes (travellers perch, trumpet root, rosetta nox, branch funnel fungus, glow cap fungus) making them easier to find at night.
- When breaking crops planted in tilled soil, there will be a small chance of the tilled soil reverting to its non-tilled form.
GUI + HUD:
- Shortened “Reel In Speed” and “Reel Out Speed” to “Reel In” and “Reel Out” to allow space for associated speed attributes in Details view.
- Simplified Goo Kernel Gleam preference display. Note that the actual planting preferences regarding Gleam remain unchanged.
Bug fixes:
- Fix goo light source not scaling with colour intensity.
- Shop Stand and Request Basket notifications about stock and coin levels now display item names correctly.
- Corrected grammatical error in Diamond Heavy Axe description - An durable to A durable.
- Fixed Lucent Slingbow placements in the inventory, Shop Stands, and Request Baskets
- Fixed Craftable items in the Used To Craft section of Knowledge item data being incorrectly hidden by the currently applied filter.
- Fixed a bug that could cause tips around advanced planting and harvesting to not unlock for some players.
- Fixing a light sampling artefact introduced in last update that would manifest in fog popping out at times due to the game misclassifying the player as in a cave.
Testing 224.14:
- Fixed the placement of crops of Compacted Soils.
- Fixed missing Goo crop “Towards” display for Goo growing on Refined Gleam and Gleam Lanterns.
- Liquids now have a link to their solidified version in the Knowledge, and vice-versa.
- Made objective and feat task completion colouration consistent.
- Added a developer-only admin command to transfer ownership of a beacon to another character. Required for players who have lost access to the PSN accounts.
- Regeneration bombs effect will be disabled nearby meteorites or creature portals of a meteorite. The radius is fairly large (encompassing the entire “active area” of the meteorite). If used in the area, an error log will be shown in the user log. Once the meteorite is lost, completed, or becomes dormant, the disabled radius around the meteorite will shrink over time (but never allowing the meteorite itself to be regenerated) until the meteorite core entity is completely removed (at which point any disabling effects are removed and the meteorite would then be regeneration bomb-able).
