This update is accessible via the “Testing” release of Boundless on Steam.
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.
Please report all issues discovered to new posts in the #support category.
The following release notes are not final and should not be considered complete or exhaustive.
Overview:
- Added 5 decorative Ornamental Crops that look great and boost a beacon’s prestige.
- Beacons with over 10,000 prestige will now be automatically protected by a 2 deep border of reserved plots.
- Added a text filter to the GUI.
Video Overview:
Thanks @Jiivita 
Testing 226:
Art + Animation + Assets:
- Marble is now flatter and less reflective.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Added 5 Ornamental Crops:
- Ornamental Oortweed - A beautifully unusual Crop, grown for decorative use. Adds style and Prestige to any Beacon where it is planted.
- Imperial Harlequin - A Crop with a nice regal feel from seedling stage to fully grown. Purely decorative; adds style and Prestige to Beacons.
- Ancestor’s Blade - A delightfully decorative Crop which is believed to have adorned the most prestigious of Oortian houses.
- Trailing Starblossom - A delicate downwards growing Crop which exudes Prestige.
- Sentinel’s Crest - An unusual inorganic Crop which stands upright and proud. Gives Prestige to any Beacon in which it is grown.
- Ornamental crops are long growing plants that look great and give your beacon a boost of prestige.
- Once the crop wilts they will need to be replaced.
- Fertilising an ornamental crop will accelerate their growth and prolong their lifespan.
- Ornamental crops do not yield any harvest or seeds.
- The organic seeds are refined from excess oats, rice, wheat, starberries and a world’s wild flowers.
- The inorganic Sentinel’s Crest can be found within Meteorites on Elemental worlds.
- Fertiliser behaviour changed for all crops so that the fertiliser simulation is based on units of crop growth, rather than time.
- This means fertiliser can never expire without the crop advancing at least once to the next stage.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Neighbouring plot reservations:
- Beacons with more than 10K prestige will now have plots 2 around their claimed plots reserved for them.
- Reservation is on a first-come-first-served basis so whoever gets to 10K prestige first, or whoever extends their >10K prestige beacon outwards first gets control of the reserved plots, based on the time that the plot was claimed rather than the age of the beacon.
- If a beacon drops below 10K prestige or plots are removed, then reservations will be given to whichever beacon nearby either got to 10K prestige first, or placed their plots first.
- Players can still gather resources and blocks within reserved plots. The only limit is claiming the plots.
- Added a new Surveyor beacon permission:
- Beacons can give the new Surveyor permission to individual users to plot in that beacons reserved plots.
- Guild controlled beacons will automatically allow any guild member to plot in the beacon’s reserved plots.
- Guild aligned beacons are unaffected and the Surveyor permissions will need to be granted manually.
- The Surveyor permission only applies to neighbouring plots, it will continue to not be possible to plot above or below someone else’s claimed plots.
- Protection options:
- There is also a beacon option to disable the reservation so that any user can claim plots regardless. This might be useful when building a settlement’s road system and you want players to have freedom to join.
- For purposes of migrations, the time at which the beacon was first created will be used to grant initial reservations.
- Design details:
- The original proposal and discussion is accessible here, but note that the implementation varies from the original proposal.
- More recent details and background behind the implementation are accessible here.
GUI + HUD:
- All filters have been updated to include a dynamic text filter.
- The predefined filters are now accessible via a drop down menu.
- Resources that are beaconed (but not reserved by a beacon plot below/above) will no longer show up either in the Atlas maps, nor in the World resource details panel.
Engine:
- Reduced chances of z-fighting between water/oil/resin liquid types.
- Greatly improve sampling of ambient luminance used to modulate the skill-based light source from the player (turning it off in bright environments) so that it should never misreport lighting levels leading to the skill light not turning on when it should or turning off when it shouldn’t in various edge-case configurations of complex chiselled blocks and large gradients in lighting levels.
- Adjust ambient luminance sampling used as part of auto exposure balancing to only consider the camera position preventing the player being partially submerged in opaque liquids like oil/resin/lava from causing HDR to go a bit crazy.
- Tweaked lighting intensity of planets in the sky to keep them more balanced against the rest of the sky, preventing them from causing the HDR to adjust so much at night when they are visible.
- Small optimisation to shaders reducing the number of light sources from 7 to 5 now that we don’t rely on a hacky “underlight” during the nighttime.
- Adjusting sanctum lighting to no longer rely on using the hacky “underlight” now removed, and making it a little darker to allow the block lighting in sanctum to be more apparent and closer to old sanctum lighting.
- Emissive rendering updated to act as though the material is partially self-illuminating instead of purely emissive which adds much more detail into the features of emissive materials that aren’t being lit by an outside light source.
Server:
- Improved server performance evaluating which regions around the player should be simulated; as part of this have disabled the smaller radius of simulation around spectator-locations (eg looking through a portal) so that if you log out in your farm, you wont see the farm simulation occur whilst only looking through the portal to the farm but have to actually walk through to be stood in the farm. This does not effect the “catch up” behaviour of crop simulation, there continues to be no need to AFK in a farm for growth to occur.
- Small optimisation to inventory data.
Bug fixes:
- Fix forge misbehaving for drap-drop of ingredients when the number of tools being forged is 7 (bad rounding.)
- Fix (depending on world level) machines and other block entities always showing the health bar even when “full” due to precision issues in the GUI code.
- Fix not showing a flashing wear bar when the wear on a machine has gone beyond 100% (often the case as we allow the machine to go into wear-debt to avoid being able to game the system by doing a very large task when wear is about to run out).
- Fix particle effects popping out visually depending on camera angle/position/time-of-day/various circumstances.
- Fix for forge mispredictions if returning to the forge during a forging sessions after restarting the client or otherwise getting far enough for the forge to be unloaded in the client.
- For consistency with crop interactions, can only place grass seeds via interactions with the top faces of the blocks, rather than the underside/sides.
- Fix a server crash caused by trying to grow grass taller when there is a block that would prevent it being valid.
- Fix a bug that the planet atmospheres weren’t being lit correctly and thus were too dark during the day/too bright at night.
- All parts of the Compactor machine should now be visible again.
- Fix for server crash caused by chiselling a grass block such that the grass would become fully hidden and must be removed.
- Patch for bad portal blocks in “Circarpous I” meteor-meet area due to moderator shenanigans.
- Fix characters that are still in the tutorial but have Level > 5 still getting a forced day-time for the first day-night cycle every time a new connection to a world was made for that newly connected world.
- Fix a bug that rarely allowed resources that are not supposed to be appear on the world (or in the game at all!) to be generated in very small amounts and a migration to strip any that may still be lingering.
- Rotated Kindling Shred to display properly in storage.
- Fixed objectives/feat counters now using delimiters for display larger numbers in all cases.
- Fix for horizontal line width in crops tooltips.
- Fixed Skills tab when interacting with other players sometimes being empty.
- Fix knowledge screen not consistently showing output recipes of natural block types.
- Fix knowledge screen not showing all output recipes if there are filters enabled in the cases of natural block types.
- Fix for meteorite drops always showing as “Very Rare” in the knowledge.
- Report a Player / Beacon text shortened in German to fit button.
- Fixed a rare client crash related to guilds when connecting to a new world.
- Accumulate taken ingredients in machine queues to avoid showing the same item multiple times with different counts on a single entry.
- Fix showing the greater settlement mayor name instead of the guild name on newsflash/right-hand log when entering a guild settlement.
- Gathering Healing Guild buff to give healing for harvesting wild crops, and to “not” give healing for breaking already harvested dug-up surface resources collected via a Shovel + Gathering Epic which are not naturally generated surface resources.
- Fixed Goo Pigment and Colour Spray colour in the Knowledge to take the world’s Gleam colour.
- Fix jumping to a knowledge item whilst the tips tab was last selected in the knowledge screen not swapping to the recipes and resources tab correctly.
- Fix jumping to a knowledge item from an items “used to craft” list not taking you to the recipe that necessarily uses that item as an input. Eg there are 2 recipes for Boost Oil, but only one uses a Kranut. If, from the Kranut resource entry, you click on Boost Oil, it will now take you to the recipe for Boost Oil that uses Kranut, and not that other recipe.
- Fix white lines appearing on slope-chiselled special-material blocks like the Umbris set of block types.
- Fix knowledge screen sometimes having duplicate horizontal dividers.
- Fix knowledge screen not showing that Bark could still be harvested from wood after having added a recipe in the farming update to craft Bark from Kranuts. The single knowledge entry for Bark will now both show that it can drop from wood, and that it can be crafted from Kranuts.
Testing 226.2:
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- The Trailing Starblossom can now be grown on any foliage.
- The Sentinel’s Crest can now be grown on any Rock or Stone.
Engine:
- Modifications to the rendering of emissive materials to better retain their normal maps and surface details.
- Added a range of moderator-only controls for manipulating beacon and plot authority. Moderators can:
- Increase and decrease a beacons authority.
- Increase and decrease an individual plot’s authority.
- These controls can be used to move the reservation ownership between beacons. They’re available for us to make authority changes in response to support requests.
- Given that this system is being added to a universe already filled with beacons then we can make changes to the default history.
- If you have authority issues on Live please PM @james with details including exact locations. Authority will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis and we will take into account what is in the best interest of the community and players.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed gleam signs having visual seams between tiles where the normal mapping wasn’t perfectly flat.
- Fixed positioning of prestige crops and seeds in the Knowledge and GUI.
- Fix items in Knowledge like brews stating they drop from meteorites - which they do, but only during the Oortmass event for snow meteorites. This detail will only be shown when the Oortmass event is active matching behaviour of items like the Spooky Seed which only shows information about where it drops when it actually “can” be dropped. This also applies to seasonal creature drops like candy canes from creatures.
- Adjusted heuristics estimating the drop probabilities from creature drops to be more sensible without being heavily weighted by the seasonal drops too that caused all non-seasonal creature drops to always be listed as “Very Rare” no matter what in the Knowledge screen.
- Fix not seeing hover details on items in a smart stack of the player inventory broken in last Testing update by refactoring for screen filters.
- Allow right click whilst in a text-input to de-focus and perform its normal actions.
- Fix a filtering edge-case that allowed things like the campfire to be shown when filtering for “reb”.
- Fix a case where a singular “modular” sign could choose the wrong mesh piece to use visually in certain specific block arrangements.
I was really surprised and couldn’t believe my eyes…
