This post continues the release notes from Testing 249.
Video Overview:
Testing 249.1:
Bug fixes:
- Fix an issue where Gleam Club membership didn’t unlock the perks in a Local Universe.
- Fix an assert putting Goo Kernels into an Atlas.
- Change to user the new input-state management for swapping grapple and text-input GUI contexts. Fixes not winding in grapples, and text-input opening the Knowledge, etc.
- Export the latest progression balance to include increasing Cubit rewards.
Testing 249.2:
- Added Multiverse Worlds and an associated default Local Universe configuration.
- Multiverse Worlds allow the resource profile and level of difficulty to vary per biome within a world. This means that you can travel from a Level 1 Lush biome into a Level 2 Coal biome. All aspects of the biome reflect the features that would originally have been controlled per world in the main MMO.
- The default Local Universe configuration contains 3 worlds that contain the full spectrum of resource profiles, creatures and biome types.
- Please try creating a new Local Universe and select the option to generate the default 3 world universe.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Change the way Dripstone drops are converted into Spray Cans so that the number of spray cans produced can be improved via character skills.
- Added an Epic Skill that allows almost all tintable blocks to be spray tinted other than those that can mutate dripstone crops (avoiding totally breaking the system).
- Melee Weapons and Shields added to the “CAN GIVE” list so players can get access to them via the debug menu in testing.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Add elemental resistances to the appropriate shields matching the behaviour of creature elemental resistances; so a Sapphire shield will give good resistance against attacks from Chill creatures etc.
- Added new Block Protection Quirk to Melee Weapons and Bombs, should stop any unwanted base destruction.
- Critical Effect Boon and Defect forge description updated to better reflect shield gameplay.
- Stone Melee weapon will now take the tint from the Stone part of the crafting recipe instead of the Stick.
- Blink Melee Weapon balance changed to have less Action Speed but deal more damage per hit.
- Added missing Gem Melee Weapons smart stack string.
- Hooked up more shield and melee weapon sound effects! Bosh!
- Add randomised Gleam drops from meteorites on Multiverse worlds to allow many colours of Gleam to be harvested on a small number of worlds in a Local Universe.
- Increase the base range of melee weapons. General increase of Melee Weapon hit distance by 1 to 1.5 meters.
- Creatures spawned in a tier 1 biome of a Multiverse world will be passive; not attacking until attacked.
- Set up creatures to have some variation in spawning based on biome features; for example wildstock and spitters will not spawn in “mountain” biomes, and cuttletrunks will not spawn in “forest” biomes. This does not apply to meteorite creatures. This will both give some variance to the creature spawning behaviour to make worlds more interesting.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- Skill Points can now be used on all skill pages independently, so if you have 60 skill points in total you can use 60 skill points on every page you have instead of having to divide them between.
- Skill Point gains are reduced beyond level 50, and any characters beyond level 50 will see a reduction in their skill points. (We don’t believe this is a nerf since all the extra skill points you had above 100 were only useful for additional skill pages which is no longer a concern).
- Added 2 new skills, Colour Spray Crafting skill and Goo and Tint Epic. The Colour Spray Crafting skill increases the amount of Colour Sprays crafted per Goo. The Epic increases the Colour Sprays crafted per Goo and in addition, allows most tintable blocks to be coloured.
- Max skill points have been increased to 367 to accommodate the new skills.
- Updated the Progression system to scale XP and Cubits linearly with character Level progression.
- The first iteration of this change was focused on just letting the players get a feel for the upcoming Skills Tree and progression changes without focusing on Cubit changes. The new balance sees Cubit rewards continue to grow by 5 each level all the way up to max level, and now grants a linear Cubit per XP earned experience across the game. While the later levels do require more XP than the old system, the increase of character output through being able to unlock all aspects of the game (without the need to spread XP progression across alts) should balance this out. And most importantly we see the upside to these changes granting more freedom for players in how they choose to play.
- In response to feedback, the XP requirements per level progression up to the skill cap has been eased a fair bit. While we believe the game’s various systems are balanced around a level 50 focused on one play style, we do want players to be able to diversify their experience at a good rate.
GUI + HUD:
- Add a stamina bar to the central HUD to the left of the cross-hair whilst a shield is raised to have better visibility on stamina reducing whilst being hit.
- Add a debug-map in the player debug window whilst on a Multiverse world to show the layout of Biome levels (not the biomes themselves.) Note: leaving this open whilst switching worlds will cause a stall when requested from the server. It’s only for debugging.
- Be consistent with how the Local Universe feature is named around the GUI (previously had mixes of Sandbox in the names).
Engine:
- Added support for “Multiverse” worlds to the game for use in the Local Universe.
- A Multiverse (or “mixed”) World has no Tier/Level or Type; instead the Tier/Type is defined by individual biomes allowing multiple gameplay styles on a single World (mixes of Elemental biomes and Lush and Coal Biomes etc.)
- Resources / Lighting / Atmospheres / Block-Health / Weather / Creatures / Meteorites all vary based on the biome you are in smoothly varying as the biomes are mixed.
- 3 configs are included “multiverse_0,1,2” for a “lower”, “middle” and “upper” tier multiverse world as candidates for a default 3-world Local Universe setup.
- The “Local Universe” DUI in the client has a button for a new empty universe to automatically set up such a 3-world Local Universe we would like feedback and testing done with.
- Multiverse biomes have unique resource profiles differing from the MMO and the client Knowledge screen details will show details that are relevant to the “Multiverse” whilst on, or connected to a Multiverse world.
- It is “not” well supported to try and mix Multiverse and non Multiverse worlds in a single universe; nothing is “broken” by doing so, but the Knowledge screen details will be less than helpful and change depending on the world you are on which would also be confusing.
- Note:
- There is likely a much better name for worlds that contain a variety biomes with varying level of difficulty.
- The MMO Universe varies difficulty, theme and resource profile per World.
- The Local Universe varies difficulty, theme and resource profile per Biome.
- Make the eclipse when planets obscure the Sun be much more intense and dark.
Server:
- Change the way debug teleporting between worlds (available with higher user permissions on local universe) works to avoid generating false-positive error logs and screens.
- Force disable godMode on a user if their user permissions are dropped back to normal levels in local universe which caused prediction issues for health/stamina/air.
- Reduce logging about waiting for owned-world updates which spammed whilst logging into the game.
World Builder:
- New Biome nodes added to World Builder:
- “Search Biome” node has the same behaviour as the “Select Biome” node, but instead of manually plugging in biomes that it can select from, it will select from all “Custom Biomes” on disk searchable via the config folder.
- “Biome Solver” node introduces a randomised constraint solver to select Biomes. Similar to the “Search Biome” node this will pull from all “Custom Biomes” found on disk in the config folder.
- You can choose biome labels to be fully excluded and included with optional minimum and maximum counts, as well as Block types to be included with optional minimum and maximum counts.
- The constraint solver is not precise, and is expected to be used with fairly loose constraints that have a large scope for randomisation. The algorithm will do a greedy randomised allocation of Biomes to satisfy the constraints and will keep outputting Biomes until all minimum-constraints are satisfied.
- You can therefore specify constraints like “I want at least 10 tier 2 biomes, and at least 3 of each of Lush, Coal and Metal; and some mountains, but not too many; and some flat plains, and no special exo-world biomes, and I want to ensure that all the Block types I care about for my world appear at least once somewhere”. Note the World Builder still doesn’t actually accept natural language or speech input.
- The Block type analysis is done at parse-time determining the set of Blocks that are expected to “always” appear within a particular biome. This means if you have a randomised selection between say 3 different Strata somewhere in the biome definition, it will take the intersection of the blocks found in each of the 3 strata as the set of blocks that are expected to always be found for that randomised node up recursively for the full Biome definition. Analysis of blocks that “could” show up is not done, and thus there is no “exclude Block Types” option on the node which is not considered useful/desirable.
- Add support for Resin and Oil to be appear as resources like Gems and Metal ores being reinserted during world regeneration; used by Multiverse world biome profiles.
- Prevent loading “superflat” configs in the World Builder editor; these are not valid configs for the editor and must be hand-edited only.
- Adjust default “superflat” (lush_0) config to be at 64m with the standard MMO lush-world colour profile for blocks/creatures.
- World Builder configs included in the installed package will now OVERWRITE the versions held in the user config directory (and be made Read Only), this ensures as we make updates that the configs you have from the official repository are up to date which has caused many issues before. Old configs were causing building to fail.
- World Builder node for constraint-based “Biome Solver” node removed count value and added support for multiple label criteria.
Bug fixes:
- Fix an issue for Windows 7 where the local universe servers and generators would now start up correctly.
- Fix a crash introduced with local universe feature where the discovery server would crash creating a 7th character on the user.
- Fix issues in showing the right-click details of tools and weapons where various parameters would not show how your player Skill was affecting them (for example Critical Chance).
- Fix an issue where the client would not clear old portal spectators which produced log spam on the World Servers in the local universe about failing to find portal spectators
- Fix melee weapons not reducing Stamina on use.
Testing 249.3:
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Added a “second chance” brew that can be crafted with materials including the Meteorite Ichor which allows direct removal of a Death Penalty.
- Added a “cheat plot” pie that grants 100 (pre-multiplier) plots to a character. This allows players in Local Universes to give themselves unlimited plots without cheat levelling their character.
- Allow the spray can to target non-collidable blocks like surface resources and torches.
- Recoloured Cheat Skill Loaf and Cheat Skill Reset Loafs to be a bit more distinctly coloured from other food.
- Reviewed and fixed Shield position.
- Compact Oortstone now provides 100 fuel per unit.
- Oort Amalgam now provides 4 fuel per unit, up for the original 3.
- Updated Critical Effect Boon & Defect forge description to reflect shield gameplay.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Updated Multiverse creature spawning rules:
- Roadrunners will now no longer spawn on “hill” or “sea” biomes.
- Hoppers can now spawn in “island” and “lake” biomes
- Spitters will no longer spawn in “Sea” biomes
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- For multiverse worlds in the local universe, all relevant Feats and Objectives that were dependent on visiting certain kinds and levels of Worlds, are now automatically swapped to be based on visiting certain kinds and levels of individual Biomes within a World instead. For example, if the objective in the normal worlds/MMO requires you to go to a Volatile Elemental World, it will now instead require you to go to a Volatile Elemental Biome; or if a feat requires you to visit 5 unique worlds, it’ll now ask you to visit 5 unique biomes instead. Each multiverse world is composed of ~30 biomes (these are not the same as the Regions on the world which are a small subset of particular biomes). Some objectives are either impossible or just don’t make sense in the local universe and will be hidden from view.
- Normalise and fix behaviour for new characters so that in all relevant cases (Meteorite spawning and participation; tutorial tips appearing; day-night cycle; death penalty), the game moves to normal logic once you have either completed the tutorial, or reached Level 5 on your character. Before this fix there was some confusion with some being based on the tutorial, some based on being level 5, and some based on having collected the level 5 reward in exchange.
- The new character flow on local universe multiverse worlds will now additionally allow Level 3 creatures (the starter multiverse world is composed of level 2 and 3 biomes) to also remain passive until you reach level 5 or complete the tutorial so that the entire starter world in the default configuration can remain passive for the start of a new character.
- Reduced the Foliage, Stick and Timber costs to all Wooden Tools and weapons to 2 Timber, 1 Stick and 1 Foliage. The coin cost has been reduced to compensate. The “Getting Crafty” tutorial has had its resource requirements reduced. We were finding the initial tutorial to be quite a grind and wanted to vastly hurry up the player making their first set of tools (and sword!)
GUI + HUD:
- Hide the “Shop” from the main menu when connected to a Local Universe. Gleam Club must be bought only from the MMO though it will continue to replicate to the local universe users when logging into the local universe servers.
- Hide floating text elements in the HUD whilst an Atlas is held up to view in first person to stop them from occluding the globe as the HUD always renders on top.
- Adjust the multiverse map-view in debug menu to be lower resolution allowing faster generation.
- Update the multiverse map-view in debug menu to show the boundaries of the world biomes (noting the same biome can appear multiple times).
- Removed old “Free Weekend” mention from shop introduction text.
- Updated News flashes for the upcoming update. Still placeholder.
Server:
- Allow any world to be set as a spawn world in the local universe, no restrictions. (It is up to the universe creator to be sensible and not construct a universe with spawn worlds that are unplayable.) This includes the universe having nothing other than a creative world for instance.
- Allow for a degree of “catchup” in world regeneration to occur after a world has been down for a period of time; it is not a precise or direct catchup mechanism, but does allow world regeneration to occur more quickly on non modified/visited chunks for a period of time: this is more important for the local universe where worlds are not expected to be running 24/7.
World Builder:
- Added lava falls to various biomes which will appear as fixed features regenerating on newly generated worlds.
Bug fixes:
- Fix for a crash spraying non-255-tintable blocks like metals when using the “spray everything” epic.
- Fix an issue with new resin/petroleum randomised resource insertions which would leave permanent chiselled scars at their insertion points even after removal of the liquid and regeneration of the blocks.
- Fix combination of skill/epics and the innocuous brews causing wildstock to actually become aggressive instead.
- Crash-fix for connecting a client to the World Builder in recent changes.
- Fix health/stamina not being properly kept at 100% when connected to a World Builder preview.
- Fix a rare server crash when actioning augments to be associated with the weapon in your other hand if the other hand becomes invalidated in between starting the action and the action occurring in-time with the animation.
- Fixed text descriptions for Hard Hitter Boon & Defect.
Testing 249.4:
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Added a Gleambow exo-world profile that we can use to create exo-worlds that have the gleambow event force enabled; to enable play on these worlds, the gleambow totem is no longer restricted to be crafted only during the event. Gleambow related wearables will still be locked to the “real” event.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- Reduced the “Work For Hire V” Feat coin requirement to 27000 Coins.
GUI + HUD:
- Hide elements in the GUI to do with reporting players/beacons/signs in a local-universe as such reports do not even get sent to Wonderstruck and are not in a helpful format for the universe owner to even inspect; submission of crash dumps and game logs continue to come to Wonderstruck and remain available.
- Hide feedback form shown to new’ish players in the local-universe as this too does not get sent to Wonderstruck in this case.
Engine:
- Prevent polling the messaging system whilst in an error screen or otherwise changing universe connection, avoiding spams of JWT token authentication errors if for instance, restarting a local universe whilst the client remains in the error screen from the initial disconnection.
Server:
- Stall certain updates to the discovery server on world-server startup to prevent spurious error logs if a server instantly exits due to failure to open ports.
- Update the version of RocksDB used on Windows for the local-universe storage backend.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed a crash that could occur after connecting to a “multiverse” world between forming the connection and the portal becoming breakable, including from the sanctum.
- Fix the character profile screen having the wrong username shown on a local-universe connection.
- Resolve an issue where updates and server crashes in the MMO would sometimes fail to restart worlds correctly.
- Fix an issue in the local-universe discovery server where the optimiser which removes unnecessary links between worlds in the local universe would be able to get stuck in an infinite loop leading to unresponsiveness on certain endpoints including server shutdown.
- Fix the camera resetting if opening and closing the Chat window whilst already on a GUI screen.
