Hello!

For the past week and a half, a bunch of us have been busy adding many more microdungeons to the game.

These will be small to medium sized areas that you’ll discover while exploring beneath the surface. Right now we have about 100 of these microdungeons prepared for implementation. Here’s a few examples:

Until next time!

As Tiy mentioned in his last post, we’re now back in the office after a refreshing holiday and back to work preparing for a stable update. Hooray!

There are a few things that we need to address before the update will be ready. One is, of course, bug fixes. We’ve been looking at your feedback and bug reports over the break, and this week I’m focusing on working through as many of these miscellaneous issues as possible while we get up to speed. Today I cleaned up a number of annoying things with staves and bows, such as: players being forced to walk/stand when cycling weapons, right click charging but not firing, being able to charge (and being forced to walk) without energy, etc. I’m hoping to get through most of this rapidly shrinking issue list by the end of the week.

After that we’ve got a few large-ish but clear tasks. We need to balance the effectiveness of armor against very high and low rate of fire weapons. Kyren will be doing everything she can to improve performance for both servers and clients. Omni will be fixing the parallax transitions between layers. Artists are adding more micro dungeons and miscellaneous content to improve variety of exploration, particularly underground. If we have time, we’d also like to add a key binding GUI and possibly some form of planet bookmarking or teleportation. Once all that’s done, we can finally update the stable branch, and move on to more new and exciting features!

Hey there!

We’re pushing the changes mentioned in our recent trailer to the unstable branch tonight– rejoice! Anyone who’s been playing the nightly builds won’t see a huge difference, but anyone who makes the switch from stable to unstable will see some pretty massive changes.

So here’s what you need to know about the unstable update, starting with…

How to Switch to the Unstable Branch

There’s a handy tutorial right here about how to switch to the unstable or nightly branch of the beta. Be sure to follow the instructions to switch to unstable. :)

World/Character File Compatibility

If you choose to switch to the unstable branch, please know that your characters and worlds will not yet be compatible with the latest version of the game.  Your old characters and worlds will still be there, but the unstable branch will use a different storage location than the stable branch for the time being, while we work out how to upgrade old characters.

We will try to maintain save file compatibility within unstable as much as possible, but it will depend on what sort of changes we have to make during unstable, so we cant make any promises.

If you are currently running nightly, then you probably already know how everything works already.  FYI The unstable branch will use a ‘storage_unstable’ directory while we work on compatibility with stable.

Known Issues:

• Many progression quests aren’t final, some are placeholders for future missions
• Combat balance is still WIP
• Performance issues, particularly in dense areas like dungeons and the outpost
• Background parallaxes have problematic transitions between world layers, e.g. oceans
• Pixel costs and rewards not yet balanced
• Interface windows (containers, AI, etc) can remain open after switching worlds or moving away from the triggering object
• Cooking recipes for tier 5 and 6 crops need to be implemented
• Crops sometimes get out of sync when grown on ship
• Enemy hit/death sounds sometimes fail to play
• Some errors in enemy movement and pathfinding
• Rare crash when removing items from containers, appears as “(InventoryException) Not allowed to discard stack when locked.”
• The launcher, on some people’s machines, will spew dll errors about missing ordinals.  This is not fatal however, and the launcher will still work after you close them.
• And a whole lot more (probably)

We’ll keep everyone posted as we make more updates and plans evolve, but thank you all for being so patient!  Have fun!