The Last Plague: Blight News

Playtest was updated a bit ago, posting here for completeness

Did a big rewrite of how all the world chunk data is stored to accomplish two things: further reduce the jitter as the world is explored/loaded, and vastly reduce the amount of disk space the world chunk files take up. All the while keeping things backwards compatible, although the biggest performance and disk space savings will be seen in entirely new worlds. I wanted to tackle these important rewrites now to make sure things are stable and the game is in a good position for release later this year.

Performance:

• Reworked world saving/loading system even more to vastly reduce amount of disk space used in a large world with multiple save slots (every unique save has to duplicate all world chunk data to make sure the state is properly preserved)
  
• Related to the above change, another optimization was added to rework how the chunk data is actually stored and loaded to greatly reduce memory pressure in the game and reduce jitter even more, to almost non-existent amounts depending on your CPU/memory setup
  

Fixes:

• Fixed the labels that show up on top of the character for interactions and things like "LMB - Place down" from jittering a bit while you move
  
• Added more logic around the climbing-over mechanic to make sure the character isn't able phase through things like walls of a cabin (and getting stuck behind a chair on the other side for example)
  
• Fixed issue added in the previous update that would cause stockpiled items to lose their collision information allowing you to walk through them
  

Other changes:

• Added warning to smelting UI when trying to smelt too much bronze to fit into the crucible
  

Playtest was updated a bit ago, posting here for completeness

[h3]The Performance Update[/h3]

Finally spent some time on performance which is something I've wanted to tackle for a while. Completely redid a lot of the internals of the game and really happy with the results, seeing solid framerate improvements (~34% improvement on my RTX 2080), as well as a fairly decent reduction of stuttering as the game loads and unloads chunks while running around the world. There is still some more improvement to be done here, but I'm happy with where it is for now.

A few other fixes and tweaks are included in this update. Please continue to report any issues you see! Thanks

Performance:

• Completely reworked internal saving/loading system for much less memory pressure. This greatly reduces some of the stuttering seen before when running around and loading/unloading the world. New games will see the most benefit vs. loading a pre-v0.5.11 save
  
• Tons of optimizations to rendering, culling, logic, etc. Should increase framerate by 5-30% on almost all configurations
  

Fixes:

• Fixed water reflections quality no longer actually using High when Medium is selected. The difference between Medium and High is whether the reflections will render shadows or not, a fairly significant performance impact
  
• Fixed rabbit snares losing their correct state sometimes when multiple are present in the world - some with and without trapped rabbits - when loading a game
  
• Clamped contamination of harvested creature items to 100%
  
• Fixed main menu background scene showing weird gray highlights if leaving an active game with heavy cloud cover
  
• Fixed rare issue where the construction materials shown in the character's hands during the building process would actually have collision enabled and would end up pushing the player around during the animation
  
• Fixed another cause of "ghost items" where trying to drag something like mud into the construction materials UI slot (instead of mud mortar) would cause a ghost item to get stuck in the slot
  

Other changes:

• Soaking slots will always show on the Soaking Basin UI regardless of how much water is present, and the UI was reworked to be more helpful in figuring out what is needed to properly treat the hides
  
• Times shown on things like remaining time for treating a hide are capped to 100 hours now to prevent overly large values from appearing in very inefficient treating setups
  
• Add stockpile ability for soft clay
  
• Slightly different looking bushes as textures/materials are consolidated as part of the general performance optimization above
  
• More interesting looking player/bush graphical interaction effect while walking through them
  
• Better transition between player character running and walking so it no longer appears instant
  
• Long sticks are packed closer together in stockpiles, allowing for more to be placed per stockpile
  
• Reduced how much impact each step has on changing grass to dirt over time
  

Playtest build updated!

Huge update for May! A lot of fixes, some new QoL additions, new map icons, more stockpiles, slight graphical/lighting changes, all that good stuff. A ton of these items are from the great feedback that's been coming in, so thank you for helping make this game the best it can be!

Features:

• New map icons on less realistic mode. In addition to the fire pits, now you will see any cairns, rabbit snares and hand carts you've created
  
• Added "eat/drink half" option to consumable stacks and containers
  
• Added wind force to all smoke from the fire pit, charcoal pile, limestone burn pile and smelting buildings
  

Balance:

• Considerably reduced rotten blueberry fuel time
  
• Increased amount of dogbane plants generated
  
• Greatly reduced stamina cost of blocking attacks to make the shields more worthwhile
  
• Reduced character knockback force from wolf and bear attacks
  
• Increased tanning time for coyote and wolf hides to differentiate them from rabbit hides
  
• Increased weather state duration (ex. cloud cover, wind, rain), but now rain will be prevented from happening again for quite some time after it finishes raining
  
• Reduced amount of Blight clouded areas in newly generated worlds to allow for a bit easier start and long-term gameplay
  

Fixes:

• Fixed quality-boosting exploit for liquids when mixing a low quality soup/tea with potable water. A proper fix for all quality combinations requires a big change to the internals of the game, this will come later
  
• Fixed another cause of "ghost items" in inventories by forcing item dragging to cancel if the game loses focus in any way (ex. alt-tab). Ghost items is when an inventory slot appears empty but would suddenly show an item when clicking and dragging the item out of the slot. Hopefully there are no more such causes
  
• Fix freeze when placing a building foundation down that attempts to add the above "ghost items" to the building
  
• Fixed very rare issue where Elric's camp doesn't generate fully and you'd only see a fire pit and potentially one or more bedrolls
  
• Fixed issue introduced in the last few updates that prevented the dialog options from being clicked (forcing you to use the 1, 2, 3 keys to select the options)
  
• Fixed blueberry bush sometimes getting into a state where it grows back very quickly after being picked
  
• Added missing localization for "mixture" text for liquids that are a mix of different things
  
• Fixed bug where rain in rain catcher would evaporate away very quickly after rain stops
  
• Fixed missing localization for the "empty X into Y" interaction text (ex. empty jug into soaking basin)
  
• Fixed wrong hint text in cooking UI, where it would show "missing cooking surface" instead of "try emptying cooking surface first" when the recipe is possible with the given ingredients minus whatever liquid is in the cooking surface
  
• Fixed issue where climbing over things would briefly re-show any roofs your character is under, such as the shade canopy
  
• Fixed missing collision checks for rabbit snare and bear traps
  
• Fixed bug where the bear trap can be "triggered" by momentarily moving a red/green highlight of another object you are trying to place over the bear trap
  
• Fixed huge sizes of the black and brown bear furs when dropped in the world
  
• Fixed weapons to properly take condition/quality/rust into consideration for damage inflicted to creatures. Before attacks would always deal the same full damage regardless of item condition
  
• Fixed issue where right-clicked inventory slot would stay open after pressing tab to close the overall inventory window
  
• Add range check to creature harvesting so that it's cancelled if the character drifts down the river during the interaction
  
• Added missing crafting recipes for mild steel bar to mild steel chunks and vise-versa
  
• Fixed issue where CTRL-clicking firewood from a stockpile wouldn't stack them properly into your hands and would drop them instead
  
• Fix missing parenthesis in "autosave" text on load game screen
  

Other changes:

• Removed Windows 7 warning now that it has been confirmed saving/loading works properly (yay)
  
• Reduced distance between X marker and label on the map
  
• Ability to stockpile sticks, long sticks, plant rope, copper/tin/iron ores, and iron blooms
  
• Cancel drinking/eating if you become full in thirst/hunger respectively. This check has been around forever but wasn't working because the math was slightly wrong
  
• Village labels on the map will become transparent when hovered over to allow seeing map features under them
  
• Map max zoom level made a bit larger to better accommodate the new icons
  
• Changed internals of tracking elapsed time for cooking/smelting when entering old areas. This should hopefully have no effect ingame but is a more consistent system internally
  
• Stockpiles now fill in width-wise first rather than length-wise for smaller items
  
• Added text on highlighted stockpile label to show which item it stores
  
• Added checks to make sure climbing over can't happen if the space above won't have enough vertical clearance for your character
  
• Increased amount of global lighting when there is overcast weather to better represent light scattering in the sun-less environment
  
• Larger item rust percentages now tints the item image brown in the inventory UI
  
• Hitting ESC while eating/drinking something will cancel the consumption first instead of closing the UI first and keeping the consumption active
  
• Moved the fastforward UI up a bit to make it appear more prominent when crafting or harvesting, and added small key labels to show the keyboard keys used for each button
  
• Liquids in a clay pot in the fire pit will now evaporate if the fire pit is not ignited
  
• Added crafting recipe to break large sandstone chunk down into small ones
  
• Reworded difficulty options to hopefully make things a tiny bit more clear
  

Playtest build updated!

Big new change: difficulty selection! Some people are still looking for a slightly easier experience and so a difficulty setting has finally been added.



There are now two options when starting a new game, difficulty and play style. The play style setting is the same as it was before, switching between whether the map shows your location or not. The new difficulty setting has "Easier" and "Standard" options. Standard is what the game was before, but the easier mode scales down a few things like hunger/thirst, amount of enemies and how fast the Blight spreads.

Currently the difficulty can only be set at the start of the game. Remains to be seen if this is something that will be able to be changed ingame or not.

Features:

• Difficulty selection at the start of a new game with new "Easier" mode
  

Fixes:

• Fixed missing localization for dead creature UI harvesting options
  
• Fixed hardened mold UI layout issues when title is a lot longer in Russian
  
• Fixed rotten wolf meat burn time to be consistent with other meats
  
• Fixed flickering X button in controls settings when trying to clear out a key bind
  
• Fixed bridge piece placement being off in certain situations
  

Other changes:

• Changed Russian translation of Charcoal Pile to make more sense
  
• Changed "hammer" to "hammer or small stone" in crafting list UI and interaction hints for buildings to make it even more clear that small stones can be hammers
  
• All dropdown lists in the UI look a bit nicer now
  
• The first 10 small stones tutorial task is now skipped if a fire pit is placed before 10 small stones are collected
  
• The "click once" interaction style is now the default for new players
  
• Crafting list is starting to get a bit slow as more and more recipes are added to the game, reworked it so that only one recipe shows up per frame to distribute the processing power and speed up the initial display of the window
  
• Roads crossing rivers now have a chance to become bridges or fords
  
• Bridges no longer alter the terrain to create fords, they simply cross the river as is
  

Playtest build updated!

Did a Unity upgrade to try to fix the Windows 7 save/load issue, but there may be a few unforeseen issues introduced. Please report any weirdness that you may find!

Fixes:

• Fixed (hopefully) saving and loading on Windows 7
  
• Fixed item labels under the mouse cursor sticking around after picking up the item
  
• Fixed missing localization for speedup UI label at the bottom of the screen
  

Other changes:

• Upgrade Unity version from 2021.2.3f1 to 2021.2.18f1