The Last Plague: Blight News

Some small changes/bugfixes from feedback collected from Steam Next Fest!

All Changes:

• Soaking basin UI now shows a bit more about its state and salt content, as well as much more helpful tooltips for the hides, properly showing if there is too much salt in the basin for that hide
  
• Salt can be removed from the soaking basin after all the water evaporates (a new button will appear)
  
• Add camera rotation sensitivity slider in controls settings
  
• Fixed double-click actions not working in inventory when crafting window was open
  
• Right-clicking an item and selecting "Craft with..." will now ensure that specific slot is always used first in the crafting process. Helpful for forging with multiple heated items in your inventory
  
• Forging now properly selects the correct heat level items in inventory, instead of using the first one regardless of how heated it is
  
• Add delay after creatures are killed before the harvesting UI can be triggered, helps in situations where there are a bunch of creatures attacking while you try to click a bunch to fend them off
  
• Fix issue where a decaying item like raw meat or animal fat inside a backpack on the ground would either forever delete the backpack itself, or turn the backpack item into a rotten meat item. Now the decaying item is properly handled inside the backpack
  
• Fix issue where taken apart buildings would spit out their inventory contents (ex. tools in workbench, items in fire pit) without preserving any stats like item condition, so tools would be fully repaired
  
• Fix related issue where taking apart a crucible furnace with hardened bronze would break the process so that the furnace's bricks would spawn but the furnace itself would stick around, causing potentially infinite bricks
  
• Less strict spawn area requirement for Mysterious Stranger
  
• Double click is now triggered even if the mouse was moved a small distance for the second click
  
• When cooking more than one meat item, each subsequent item now has a much smaller increase to total cooking time
  
• Fix state of trapped rabbits when killed so they are no longer considered trapped, allowing their label to appear again and be selectable
  

[h2]New Release Timeline[/h2]

The recent Next Fest has been absolutely wild. Thank you everyone who has tried the game out and given your feedback. A lot of you are excited for what's to come and given some amazing feedback and feature requests, and I realize more and more that I want much more to be in the game before it can be release ready. The bar is incredibly high for an Early Access release of a game like this, and I want to make sure Blight doesn't disappoint.

Getting everything in by the end of this year will be a bit too aggressive of a goal, so I want to push the Early Access release back to the first half of 2022. Thanks for your understanding!

[h2]World Generation Updates[/h2]

Procedural generation is a major aspect of Blight. The goal is to have some of the most realistic and beautiful worlds generated in a game like this ever.

Been working diligently on a bunch of world generation updates and wanted to post some progress shots about what's coming soon in the next big update.

[h3]Region Map[/h3]

The current playable alpha release/demo has a basically infinitely generated world, but the game initially populates a specific large area with procedurally generated special features like lakes, rivers and a sea. A "region map" is then generated for the area that you can access:



[h3]Roads & village locations[/h3]

The world feels a bit empty though, so been working a lot on populating it with realistic village generation and roads connecting all of them:



A very customized A* approach is used for the rivers and roads, to make sure they avoid harsh elevation changes as much as possible, have the roads avoid crossing the rivers too much, and keep river paths randomized enough to look fairly natural.

[h3]How things actually look ingame[/h3]

The region map shows all the pre-generated locations as basically one big tile-map. Each of these tiles corresponds to a chunk ingame, and so when you venture to areas with roads, rivers, and villages, the game uses this tile map as a sort of metadata lookup to figure out how to generate the terrain, which objects to place, etc,





Here you can see a road intersecting with a river and generating a simple ford crossing (with generated bridges to come later)



Here is a village location. There is a central chunk designated as the village root, and a random expansion to chunks in various directions up to a certain limit.

Excited to get a playable version of all these features out soon!

Thanks for reading!

Going to be streaming the game and answering any questions on October 5th!

Small update with a few fixes and quality of life improvements thanks to all your great feedback!

All Changes:

• Empty jug no longer slows you down when carried
  
• Show all anvil-related crafting recipes when anvil is used even if not in inventory
  
• Make item/building rotation fixed to 5 degree increments across all platforms for more control over rotations
  
• Crafting output now heavily prefers to merge with other stacks rather than the slot that was right-clicked to select "Craft with..."
  
• Auto-equip any tools crafted if handheld slot is unoccupied (to ease the experience of broken tools put back together)
  
• Show inventory when crafting menu or building menu are opened, now making so hitting tab (or whichever key is mapped) will now close the crafting/building menu too
  
• Reduce amount of fog a tiny bit
  
• Widen scrollbar handles in various UI windows and remove W and S keys from affecting the scrollbar
  
• Rework hostile creature spawning to avoid player camp much more, introduce respawn cooldown, and avoid clumping together
  
• Stones also dropped when breaking off pieces of iron rich rock
  
• Fix any equipped container items (bowls, jug, etc) set to a default position in the hand as they are getting filled
  
• Remove delete buttons in save/load windows ingame to prevent issue with deleting the active save breaking the entire world completely
  
• Add more helpful text to the various crude handle tooltips to explain better how the chisel fits in
  

New update with a bunch of bug fixes, slightly lower camera angle when zoomed in, and a new way to bypass all tutorial tasks for new games.



All Changes:

• Added checkbox on new game window to allow all tutorial tasks to be skipped. For those that are trying out new worlds as the game evolves and don't want the tasks to constantly bug you. Story based tasks will still appear at the right moment
  
• New slightly lower angle when zoomed in. Given the new perspective, there will be a slightly higher chance of seeing unloaded parts of the world in the distance. The game will continue to be optimized so more of the world can be loaded at the same time to prevent this in the future
  
• Different and slightly larger map player icon
  
• Fix divide-by-zero issue with regards to various objects that collect rain. In certain cases the hunger value of water exposed to the rain would become "NaN" and break your hunger meter when consumed
  
• Fix crucible furnace not forcing crucible to be present before smelting, resulting in lost output
  
• Fix weird issue when clicking "Fill" on a container item from an external inventory suddenly breaking the state of your character's inventory. A side effect would be seeing metal objects suddenly start to heat up in the character's inventory
  
• Fill item action now also works from player inventory to items in an external inventory such as the fire pit
  
• Added "Empty Half" option for items like the bowl
  
• Properly reset game state if player dies during sleep, for example from blight infection. Prevents weird player animation and breaking the UI so that you can't load or quit
  
• Allow lake water and rain water mixture to still be boiled
  
• Fix case where queued up forging would still work when the item cools down too much
  
• Add "Toggle HUD" key to allow for better screenshots
  
• Update some item tooltip text to make things a bit more clear in certain circumstances
  
• More mass for log based items so they aren't kicked around as easily
  
• Linux: updated linux toolchain to potentially fix issues with launching the game in certain environments