19th February – Experimental Changes

Hi guys,

We recently posted on the forums and on reddit asking for feedback on tweaks (not including new features) you’d like to see for the ever closer 1.0 release.

We’ve completed a bunch of experimental changes in response to those threads that we’d love those of you on the nightly to test out. These are only the first set of changes, and there’s a lot more we’re going to address before 1.0.

Planet Variety

We’ve made a major change to the way planets are generated. Planets now contain multiple biomes, each of which might contain a sub biome. Currently some biomes look great together and others less so, the current distribution is a little on the wacky side. We’ll be tweaking this as we go. Multiple biomes alongside the massive amount of new content we’ve recently added to each biome individually should make every planet feel far more unique. We’d love you to test this out and provide feedback. It’s still being heavily tweaked.

biome

Inventory Management

We’ve added another tab to the inventory screen, this one contains all your crafting ingredients. We’ve also made sure that items automatically open the correct tab when picked up, and added a ‘Take All’ button to the chest interface.

inventory

Dungeon/Village content

We’re adding a huge amount of new dungeon content, including all of the missing hylotl dungeons and villages, brand new content for the other races including new towns, rebel camps, a much larger number of random encounters. We’ll also be adding quests to a lot of these before 1.0.

apex_rebels

Performance

We’re putting out the first part of a *major* performance change in tonight’s nightly. Some of you may see dramatic improvements to framerate, and those of you already able to play the game well should now be able to run the game at a much smaller zoom level without sacrificing framerate.

outpost

There will be more changes to come in response to the feedback threads, but please try some of these out in the nightly and let us know what you think.

Warning: The nightly is only for people willing to lose their character/universe. You will need to wipe your universe/character folders to ensure the current version of the nightly works corrected. Nightly is also full of bugs as it’s uploaded automatically every night and reflects our latest in progress builds.

Leave feedback in this thread: Experimental Changes