We hope you enjoy this new patch! You'll have to read the full patch notes below as we're only highlighting a few of our favorite things here.
Player Shop Spotlights
First, we wanted to show off some of the shops made by the
Saleblazers community sent in to our
Saleblazers Discord!
Here are some shots of some awesome player-built shops that are now featured on our
Saleblazers Steam store page:
[h3]uRBAN_Spaceman[/h3]
[h3]Cyraine[/h3]
[h3]Jenpai[/h3]
[h3]doghman[/h3]
And that's it for now! Thanks for checking out these shops with us.
New Employee UI
In response to many feedback threads about the employee UI being a bit too unwieldy, we've performed an entire rework to the Employee UI!
Our goal for this rework was to offer at-a-glance insights into how your employees are performing in your shop with as few clicks as possible.
Credits to Steam user "Power" for jumpstarting this rework with some great ideas: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1419850/discussions/2/4293690852340209785/
Applicants will now all appear on-screen together in a more visually intuitive way. Chairs represent the maximum number of applicants.
An overview of their basic information is visible all at once in rows, allowing for easier comparisons. Hovering over an applicant's row will also physically highlight the applicant in the 3D view.
Clicking on an applicant row will bring the camera in for a closer look. We've taken the time to introduce more applicant clothing variety for increased immersion. Gone are the constant clown hats!
The Manage tab now allows you to view all your employees at once, where you can monitor morale levels, current status, schedule availability, wage, and task priority.
A more detailed view now even shows their needs levels.
The Training page has also received the same treatment!
There's a handful of more changes, but we'll let you check it out for yourself. We hope this will greatly improve the shopkeeping experience and plan to continue improving the employee system throughout Early Access!
New Edit Appearance Feature
The Snowville Barber Shop is now open! Here, you'll be able to edit your character's appearance without having to make another character.
Optimized Shop Loading System
We've dedicated a lot of time to overhauling the save system to asynchronously load save data and stagger out load times for a much smoother experience.
Here's a comparison of loading times when running to your shop before and after this optimization:
[h2]Before (Single Frame Load)[/h2]
[h2]After (Async Load)[/h2]
We'll be looking into polishing this more with a cool effect later down the road. We just wanted to make this change live as soon as possible since a lot of players have been asking for this.
Thank you to all the players on the Steam forums and https://discord.gg/Saleblazers for sending in reports and save files!
In-game Bug Reporting
We really appreciate all the effort you have put into reporting issues and sending us to save files, and we understand that it is a hassle to do so.
We've added a new in-game bug reporting button under the ESC -> Help menu to make this a little easier!
We use Google Drive to store the save files, so keep in mind that it might not work if your country doesn't allow Google services.
General Polish
This patch introduces a lot of polish, balance changes, and stability fixes from player feedback. We'll continue to keep a close eye on Steam and Discord. Read more in the patch notes below!
What's Next?
For the next few patches, we plan to keep
polishing and optimizing what we currently have. We're already planning a followup build to resolve some minor issues.
Once we feel good about the state of the game, we'll be moving on to more features towards 1.0.
Earlier in the year, we talked about updating the art for mountain ranges which should provide visual and performance benefits. To give you an update, we're still working on this. You can take a look at the splash screen in this latest patch to see what it'll look like in-game!
Have fun shopkeepers!
v0.14.6 Patch Notes
[h3]➡️ Changes[/h3]
- Added Barber Shop functionality to Snowville which will let you edit your character's appearance
- Reworked employee UI with better support for more resolutions
- Employees have more random outfits
- Added reversed triangle building pieces for all building sets
- Added Glass roof building pieces to the research tree
- Added VFX to connecting/disconnecting electric nodes
- Updated splash screen mountains and fog (a sneak peek of the mountains we're working on!)
- Added better support for various edge cases when saving/loading quest tracking if you join a server as a client
- Added bug report button to ESC -> Help menu
- Reduced chance that other encounters will spawn if you are currently being attacked by night enemies
- Customers who step on defensive spikes will no longer call the police
- Rebalanced some lock levels throughout the world
- Ramen is now a consumable instead of a weapon
- Increased value of Apex Gems
- Added more dialogue to some customers
- Smoke Grenade and Mortar now count as Ranged weapons
- Added more Runes to Aiden's House and increased texture quality of Runes
- Added more Runes beneath the Lighthouse
- Connected a road to the ruins near the Dojo Shop Plot
- Crafting button will now only show "queue" if employees are using it
- Removed revenge and night attack encounters from Barry's Bazaar
- Increased drop chance of glowing mushrooms
- Slightly reduced range of Sprinkler
- Improved Electric Longsword visuals
- Added delay and FX to dialogue responses to give a better visual indicator of what was voted for
- Updated several research tree descriptions
- Melee hitstun increased towards NPCs on normal and easy difficulty modes by 2.25x and 3x
- Parry hitstun decreased towards players by 0.3x
- NPCs have more inertia in their movement so that they don't appear as jittery
- Removed auto-continue from dialogue system
- Some weaker Cage Ghouls can now be staggered with melee attacks
- Changed default FOV from 80 -> 65 for better immersion
- Added Level of Detail dithering crossfade effect for items, trees, rocks, and buildings
- Adjusted LOD ranges across the board and added LODs to character models
- Reduced emissive on Rune race checkpoint VFX so that it doesn't trigger auto exposure fade
- Updated lock levels in Prologue shop area
- The Glider can no longer be deployed briefly at 0 stamina
- The Great Banana Thief quest now gives a better reward
- Slightly improved rewards for common treasure chests in the Bamboo Forest
- Slightly reduced the visual size of the medium wooden display tray to better differentiate it from the large wooden display tray
- Updated the amount of ammo required to craft ammo crates to 99 for pistol, rifle, and shotgun ammo
- Adjusted spawn zone for mineable rocks near the Island Shop Plot
- Added attributes to the Ferret accessory
- Added new dialogue variations for request customers
- Bright night fog starts earlier now
- Filled out a road towards the ruins near the Quarry and Ronin Skull Camp
- Customers who open doors will let in nearby enemies less often
- Added fallback for customer AI to be able to interact with queues from farther away if they can't initially reach their destination (for example, when you put a Cash Register on the far edge of a table)
- Added a cool border to the prologue training video
- Moved lobby camera farther back
[h3]⚙️ Optimizations[/h3]
- Heavily reworked save system so that loading is more asynchronous, runs faster, and optimizes away loading unnecessary data
- Optimized shop loading
- Added new dummy object system to save and load system for faster loading
- Optimized crafting UI so that it has fewer hitches when there are a large amount of recipes unlocked
- Removed tail physics animator on Bellstalker since it didn't look good anyway
- Reduced frequency of water computations by performing a height check
- Converted much of the western ocean into a static visual mesh to reduce calculations on inaccessible areas
- Added Bloom as a separate graphics setting from Post Processing, which should help lower-end devices with higher performance without sacrificing color correction
- Removed screen space reflections since they didn't really do much visually but took a huge performance hit, so you should see higher FPS at High and Ultra graphics levels
- Clothing items have smaller LOD ranges, which is made possible with the new LOD crossfade effect
[h3]🛠️ General Fixes[/h3]
- Construction UI should no longer appear in dialogues and various menus
- Fixed various issues with employees and employee UI
- Fixed various edge case issues with crafting
- Improved spawning zones in several areas to not spawn night enemies inside obstacles
- Fixed wrong encounter sometimes showing up in snowy areas
- Fixed various collision and culling issues with Leyasoon's arena
- Fixed AI being able to phase through certain doors in prologue
- Fixed some NPCs spawning in with no shoes
- Fixed some Elderly customer request dialogue hooked up to the wrong conversations
- Fixed turrets being able to fall through the floor sometimes on save and load
- Fixed some random encounters spawning more frequently than expected
- Fixed some missing colorways and icons in character customization
- Improved load order of shop data
- Fixed combat music persisting after all enemies are dead
- Fixed weapon hold points being offset for larger enemies
- Fixed placing items in display containers not working properly if clicking on a taken slot
- Fixed more droppables spawning than expected due to droppable rework
- Fixed various missing LODs
- Prevented packets that are too large from being sent
- Fixed some crafting achievements not working as client
- Fixed Health/Stamina/Damage upgrades showing as incorrect name due to localization updates
- Amount of bullets in player built turrets is now saved
- Fixed more cases of enemies spawning inside terrain
- Fixed some floors z fighting with walls when used as second floor
- Fixed various item hold sockets and item collisions
- Fixed Shepherd laser, mortar, and homing drone attacks not working as expected
- Fixed Shepherd laser not rendering properly on top of fog
- Add laser indicator to Shepherd homing drone
- Fixed various edge case issues that occur when trying to pick up items at full inventory, such as beauty increasing with trash pick up attempts
- Fixed level up text displaying 1 behind the actual player level
- Fixed a case where NPCs could fly up when parried
- Fixed world streaming logic not loading enough zones when teleporting
- Fixed a case where request customers would sometimes fail to find their dialogue
- Fixed Western Swinging Doors sometimes only rendering half the door
- Moved an encounter spawner away from the Smithrock Shop Plot
- Fixed a load zone in the ocean with a bad network identity
- Fixed Sun Hat not loading the model properly
- Corrected journal text for the Glider quest
- Corrected journal text for the Mystery of Research quest
- Fixed dialogue issues with the Great Banana Thief quest
- Fixed some missing collision in the railings at the entrance to Kazai Village
- Fixed the construction pants and shoes culling too early
- Fixed cases where non-stackable items were stacked in treasure chests in the Bamboo Forest
- Fixed plate of candles item rendering below the floor at some distances
- Fixed the collider on the wooden shield
- Fixed held positions for wooden display trays
- Fixed a wall in the bunker in the trenches sometimes not loading properly
- Adjusted the name and description for the Rocket Booster
- Castle Foundation icons are no longer offset from the item frame
- Triangle building pieces now have triangular colliders instead of square colliders
- Fixed LOD issues on Desktop Computer
- Fixed LOD issues with the Cute Chair
- Fixed some beard facial hair not properly supporting the color wheel
- Fixed a bug causing crafted ammo crates to drop more ammo than intended
- Fixed collision issues around the top of the Northern Snow Shop Plot
- Fortune clothing set now correctly applies the increased stamina regeneration attribute instead of double applying the increased max stamina attribute
- Fixed offset doors in the golf course pro shop
- Fixed the wallet amount sometimes showing 0 in the ESC menu
- Fixed recipes sometimes not showing up in the Bamboo Construction Hammer right away after researching them
- Fixed vault doors not showing their LOD meshes
- Removed errant beep sound from Ronin Skull Camp area
- Fixed case where illegal items could have their illegal values saved when they shouldn't
- Added fallback for customer AI to be able to interact with queues from farther away if they can't initially reach their destination (for example, when you put a Cash Register on the far edge of a table)
- Fixed some floating outpost meshes in the Wetlands
- Fixed a rare case where a customer would not be counted as in the store when leaving and returning to a shop chunk
- Fixed a few code exceptions
- Fixed a few edge cases of infinite loops and 100% loading when moving around to chunks in a certain way
- Timber achievement is more consistent for connected clients and will count even if one person on the server achieves this
[h3]🧠Known Issues[/h3]
- Armor stands and mannequins may not display their contents on save and load until you press E on them
- Wooden storage crates may show a checkerboard artifact on them
- Clients only see neutral yellow bullet points in the shop review UI
- Plants inside of crop plots cannot be watered or harvested. Plants growing on the ground are unaffected
A hotfix is on the way for these issues!
