Overview:
- Added private Sovereign Worlds allowing players to own a world in the Known Worlds.
Video Overview:
Thanks @Jiivita 
Testing 245:
Private Worlds:
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Player owned private worlds (Sovereign Worlds with in-game terminology) added.
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Ownership:
- Player worlds are owned by a user rather than a specific character, and all characters of that user will be treated as “owners” for permissions. This is to protect worlds from character deletion.
- Player worlds have no restrictions regarding plotting or guilds interactions like Exoworlds and will regenerate as a normal world would.
- When a new Player-owned world is brought online, only the Owner will be able to warp to it, and they will have very limited interactions.
- They may only place Beacons and World Controls, and there will be no Meteorites or Creatures, and no Block drops will be provided.
- After placing the World Control they will be asked to set up the Worlds block-colours, with changes causing a re-mesh of the world to see the effect. Block colours are restricted to whatever colours are available throughout the public and private universe excluding Exoworlds. Player worlds will be given a default generated palette which may contain new colours not seen in the rest of the universe, and these new colours are also then available for successive player worlds to choose from also preventing excessive monopolisation.
- Private worlds will be shown orbiting the world they are assigned to only similar to Exoworlds, but without crazy motion or particle effects.
- Private worlds are always 1 blinksec from their assigned world in the main Universe. This means 2 private worlds orbiting the same public world will be 2 blinksecs apart.
- Allow admin control over where temporary worlds will be inserted into the universe to override default semi-randomised behaviour. By default, worlds will be attached to a world of the same level in the same geographical region.
- Beacons on a Player world cannot be set as the Home beacon. (This may change in future but has non-trivial side-effects around guaranteeing you can always warp “Home” for free. Remember Alderaan!)
- Beacons on a Player world will display extra notices reminding users that they are on a Player world and their beacons may be reclaimed at any time by the Owner.
- Entering a Player world will show a Tip to explain the dangers of plotting even if you have permissions as the Owner may reclaim your beacons at any point.
- Lifetime of temporary worlds (Exo/private) can be dynamically extended with clients able to get updates about the extension appropriately.
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World Control:
- The World Control overview page will also allow Renaming of the world.
- The World Control overview page will also allow “disabling” of the Beacon Compactness rules. When disabled Beacon Compactness, all plotting rules and side-effects of the compactness system are disabled so plots can be as winding as you like with no associated losses of prestige or plotting ability. If the compactness rule is later re-enabled, notifications will be sent appropriately to all beacons that then fall foul of the rules.
- The World Control Citizens list will show your Friends, and also show all recent visitors to your world within the last 2 days regardless of their current permissions, and will also show all plot owners. The owner’s own characters will never be shown.
- Can PM characters in the Citizens list directly even if they are not your Friends; messages will show with a “World” emoji similar to the letterbox system.
- A filter option in the Citizens list will also allow the display of Blacklisted characters so that they may be removed from the blacklist directly without having to find the player in world first.
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Permissions:
- Permissions are controlled via a new World Control block; split into two types “Can Visit” and “Can Claim” permissions.
- Can Visit permissions allow a user to join the world and do everything other than Claim new plots. Players can gather resources, kill creatures, place blocks and be given permissions on existing beacons.
- Players without permissions to visit a private world will not see the world in the sky, and will not be able to connect to the world via any warp or portal to it with suitable notices. Losing permissions whilst on the private world acts like the world becoming Locked or an Exoworld terminating where you will be kicked to the Sanctum and forced to use the right-hand side warp.
- Can Claim permissions allow the user to also Claim new plots. (The permission can be removed without affecting the users existing plots or beacons which can continue to be refuelled). This allows a player to temporarily be given permission to claim plots, for example, to claim a shop plot, before then having the permission removed.
- Permissions can be granted world-wide to any user as “defaults” effectively making the world Public. This allows you to allow everyone to visit and optionally everyone to plot.
- Permissions respect the Owner’s blacklist so that blacklisted characters will never be able to join or claim plots even with world-wide permissions granted; blacklisting a character will immediately Reclaim all beacons on all private worlds you own.
- Permissions can be granted to Guilds that the Owner is a member of; Can Visit permission will be given to all members, and Can Claim permissions will be given to all Workers.
- Permissions can be granted to individual Citizens.
- Characters may be added to the blacklist from the Citizens list on the World Control.
- Players that already have beacons claimed on a private world will have automatic permissions to Visit even if they would otherwise not have received the permission.
- The Player world owner may force beacons of the worlds’ citizens to be Reclaimed enabling the owner to kick the user from their World.
- If none of the owner’s characters are members of a Guild, permissions for that Guild will be removed from the worlds that user owns.
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Locked Worlds:
- When a player-owned private world runs out of time, the world will not be deleted like an Exoworld, but instead enter a “Locked” state where the world is effectively offline, but all world-state is left in-tact and the times of any beacons on the World, and the times of any Portals fuelled “from” the locked player-world will not advance (no fuel will be lost); beacons on the Locked world will show a time bar that does not decrease and state as being “locked”.
- Locked worlds will show as being Locked in the worlds list, and any Portals to Locked worlds will show the world as being Locked. If you are on a world when it becomes locked you will be kicked to the Sanctum and function much like when an Exoworld is terminated with the option to use the alternative Warp to go somewhere else in the Universe.
- Admins can fully terminate a player-owned world (Exoworlds do this automatically skipping the new Locked stage) wherein all beacons will be Reclaimed automatically.
- When the player-owned world is Locked, Beacons that you have on the locked world may be Reclaimed remotely via the Places > Beacons menu; this is a delayed operation with timings not yet decided, but expect up to 1-day delays. The Beacon will show as “pending reclaim” in the list. Once the operation is completed the list will update to show as fully expired with Reclaim available to claim from another Beacon and to be removed from your Beacon list. This operation cannot be performed from the Sanctum.
- A Locked player world can be extended and brought back online, with Client responding appropriately to the changes in state.
- Beacons on a Locked world that you do not own will show up in the Places > Beacons list and Guild Control > Beacons lists with a Question Mark “?” stating the Beacon is on a locked world so data cannot be loaded.
- Allow a portal to always be closed, even if the world on the other side is currently down, can’t be connected to, or is a Locked player world (Relying on the fix about one-sided closes). Ensure no spurious error logs occurring during the multi-stage negotiation which may require the Client to connect to extra worlds to communicate the consistency check correctly.
- Dormant Portals can now be interacted with so that they can be directly Closed rather than only interacted with to try and open again (So if a Dormant portal is going to a Locked player world, it does not just get stuck Dormant forever).
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Warp Conduits:
- The sanctum will now consider the main world the user is connected to be the “current world” for purposes of the Places menu screens and filtering there-of.
- The Warp Conduit GUI is now consistent with the Places menu in terms of filtering and sorting behaviours.
- The Worlds list is now visible from the Warp Conduit so that even if you have no locations or beacons on a world in your list, you can warp to it taking you to the Capital of the world (or a random position if there is no capital). The option to go to a Capital from the Locations list whilst “on-world” is replaced by this.
- Private worlds that you own will be automatically added to the Worlds list and can not be able to removed, shown in a separate sub-section from the current world and other tracked worlds.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- Added Core Objective “Buff it Up”, asking players to receive a Guild buff. This should also allow the hidden achievement “Getting to the Core” to finally be unlocked by completing all 10 Core Objectives.
- Changed some of the objective completion requirements to better match the number of objectives in the game. First Steps Feat now requires 6 Objectives to be completed, down from 7. Taskmaster Feat now requires 170 Objectives completed down from 190.
- In order to allow the “Journal Addict” Achievement/Trophy to be unlocked, we have added 15 new Objectives into the game.
- Trader Objectives: Lucent Sales
- Miner: Blink and You’ll Miss It, You Catch my Rift?, Dark Side of the Mine
- Explorer: Your Own Shiny Warp, A Conspicuously Caustic Atmosphere, A Particularly Potent Atmosphere, A Voraciously Volatile Atmosphere
- Gatherer: World Gatherer Challenge III
- Crafter: Centraforge Power Coil Power Up, Advanced Centraforge Power Up, Compactor Advanced Power Up, Best of the Best, Decorative Delights
GUI + HUD:
- Added emoji for:
- Creatures:
- Gear:
- Resources:
- Crops:
- Creatures:
Bug fixes:
- Fixed “Advanced Surface Resources” Objective not correctly working when collecting surface resources using the gatherer epic.
- Fix an issue with server-side sun-lighting for crop simulations where sunlight could bleed through a single-thick ceiling right at the top of the world [would appear normal to users, but inorganic crops would actually never grow / organic crops would grow anyways even in visual darkness without gleam and such]
- Partially fix issues where deleted characters or beacons could linger in Guilds data. The actual issue is not fully resolved, but worlds will be able to gradually clean up the data during Guild sync operations.
- Fix backend issues where database-side of Guilds data would become cluttered with empty entries about Exoworlds when guild members visit the worlds.
- Fix issues where if a portal is closed one-sided (normally not possible in the past but with timing issues could occur) the closed side reopening will be able to force a consistency check that allows the portal to open where it would previously only report the destination was already open and require you to manually visit the destination side first.
- Fix not seeing your own Beacons in the Places > Beacons list as the “Current beacon” when stood inside.
- Fix campfires not expiring properly for users with Gleam Club.
- Fix not seeing “Report Beacon” button on the “Current Beacon”.
- Fix GUI getting stuck if opening the Places menu to the Beacons tab if the character has no beacons.
- Fix a collection of minor layout issues.
Testing 245.1:
- Fixed an issue where the World Control could get stuck in the “Loading…”.
- All Private Worlds have been returned to the colour selection state. This will stop all block + creature drops until the colours are finalised again.
- Fixed an issue where in-world Warps would fail to send players to another world and capital.
- Tweak the way worlds remesh after World Colour changes.
- Added World Control Recipe and tinting.
Testing 245.2:
- Fixed an issue where adjusting a private world’s color palette would clear a runtime cache of chunk timestamps used for informing clients the timestamp of chunks they need to request via the CDN. This would cause clients to be able to get out-dated versions of chunks even with client restarts requiring a server restart to reload the correct timestamps from disk so that clients would then be informed to request the up-to-date timestamps again.
- Fix bug where blinksecs were shown on a World’s Resources/Settlement tab view.
- Improve display of timing information for player (and exo) worlds to more closely match Beacons behaviour outside of Warp Conduit (which doesn’t show any extra stylings for beacons and so does not for worlds either to be consistent):
- show a “fuel bar” for worlds alongside their life time with thresholds appropriate for exo and player worlds (exo being shorter with max at 7 days and “low fuel” at 1 day compare to player with “low fuel” at 7 days and max currently set to 180 days).
- show different icon colours in worlds list for player and exo worlds to highlight those that are “low fuel” or that are locked player worlds and for player worlds whether they are owned by you or someone else in addition.
- show a warning symbol in red/black matching beacons when a world is “low fuel” or “locked”.
- show a red warning symbol in the Places screen alongside the “Worlds” tab button matching the Beacons tab whenever there is a world in your list that is “low fuel”.
- don’t show “(locked)” tag on world descriptions in the Places screen where that information is otherwise shown via the glyph color and warning icons (takes up too much space).
- don’t show the “in your list” icon for worlds in the Places screen except for the Current World entry (by definition any other world is in your list… so pointless to show with an icon that it is in your list.)
- Fix issue where when changing world colours at private world start-up, the results of gleam lighting would not always update correctly to represent the changed colour of the gleam blocks.
Testing 245.3:
- Fixed World Control to take the Rock tint.
- Allowing recomputing of gleam server lighting simulation when the world colours have changed.
- Spooky Skull and Spooky Pumpkin smart stacks should now correctly be labelled “Halloween Smart Stack”
- Fix some issues in the debug panel for non-english languages (french in particular), eg the Altitude of player not being visible in french. Was caused by a bad mix of string encodings.
- Prevent new characters being able to start on Sovereign worlds. If you have characters who have done this and are now locked out - giving we are still in Testing - just delete them!
- Note: Given that Sovereign worlds give control over a world that is part of the main MMO they’re not really setup for players who only want to play on their own world. If we wanted to allow players to play it total isolation then more changes would be required, specifically: make sure all resources and creature spawn within the world, and then allow players to start on the world directly. This is currently beyond the scope of the initial release.
- Allow resetting a Sovereign World’s Block Colours once per payment cycle.
- To enable this feature, player-placed blocks will never use the “0” world default colorIndex (as can be seen in the Player Debug window) on a Sovereign World so that when changing Block Colours, user builds will not change colours as well.
- As a result of these changes, Beacon Prestige on a Sovereign World will work slightly differently, no longer being able to take into account whether blocks are “foreign coloured” or not, and so will find prestige to be slightly lower in general. (This does not affect any beacon prestige on normal worlds!!).
- Due to these changes, the way that a Sovereign World behaves when Colours have not been finalised is also changed, with the “only” restriction being that default-coloured non-user-placed blocks will not produce “coloured” drops, which also affects Beacon Reclaims that may sometimes gather up such blocks too when modified by a user (This means there are no longer restrictions on placing blocks either, and creatures and meteorites will fall as normal even when Block Colours are not finalised).
- All tabs in the World Control GUI screen are now always visible, so that permissions can be adjusted even without finalising block colours first. This allows you to invite others onto your world during colour selection.
- You can review your current block colour selection even after finalising; the “Block Colours” tab will show a red exclamation mark next to it if block colours are waiting to be finalised.
- Addressed duplicate colour naming in some translations with more suitable replacements.
- French: Teal - Bleu Clair → Sarcelle
- French: Cold Tan - Brun Clair → Brun clair froid
- French: Bright Turquoise - Turquoise Clair → Turquoise brilliant
- Italian: Vivid Turquoise - Turquoise chiaro → Turchese vivido
- Italian: Cool Tan - Bruno Freddo → Bruno fresco
- Spanish: Vivid Moss - Musgo claro → Musgo vivido
- Spanish: Deep Colbalt - Colbalto intenso → Cobalto profundo
- Spanish: Light yellow - Amarillo luminoso → Amarillo claro
Testing 245.4:
- Fixed a sporadic crash on occasion when reopening the world control screen straight after closing it whilst on the block colours tab.
- Improved the robustness of various interaction screens in the GUI that could lead to some edge case crashes.
Known Issues:
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Some players appear to crash their worlds when entering via an in-world Warp. The worlds then don’t recover. You can warp from the Sanctum using the new Worlds tab.Resolved with Testing 245.1. -
Editing some (or too many) of the world colours locks the World Control. This requires a restart to fix.Resolved with Testing 245.1. -
Sometimes the worlds chunks will appear to return to their original state. The server thinks the chunks have been modified, but the client presents them in their original state.Resolved with Testing 245.2. -
It’s possible to crash the client by rapidly opening + closing the World Control.Resolved with Testing 245.4
