The Last Plague: Blight News

The release date has been set! The game will finally be released into Early Access on October 3rd, 2024.

There will be a solid amount of content in the game for the Early Access period along with substantial plans for the 1.0 release set of features including NPCs, trading, and village restoration. A more concrete outline will come soon.

Thanks for your patience as the game developed and evolved over the last few years. I hope that it will be worth the wait!

Hey everyone,

It's been a while since the Co-op playtest update back in September last year and some of you have been wondering about the status of the game, so I wanted to provide a little update post to show what's been under development. Rest assured that the game is constantly being worked on and tons of new things are being added as it prepares for Early Access release!

[h2]Caves[/h2]
Caves will be an important piece of the game's story with resources, creatures and other things to find. They are completely randomly generated using a voxel-type system, and so the resulting cave networks can truly be breathtaking. Just make sure you have enough fuel for your torch.








[h2]Swimming[/h2]
With the water in caves and a general need for this feature for a long time, swimming has finally been added, allowing you to access more areas both aboveground and below.




[h2]Grid-based inventory[/h2]
Something that has been on the list for a while, a grid-based inventory allows for more detailed inventory management with a greater ability to carry many small items with less large ones, rather than a one slot per item approach before.




[h2]More varied and interesting terrain features[/h2]
Reworked the terrain generation to fully embrace large elevation changes to add more dramatic and realistic looking terrains.












[h2]Fire starting[/h2]
Finally adding a proper fire starting system that needs the right amount kindling, tinder and fuel to make things more immersive.




[h2]Various animation improvements[/h2]
More immersive item placement animations, small tree chopping animation, etc. make the game feel more alive.







These are just some of the new things added to the game. A lot of cool new features and content are planned for the Early Access release to make sure the game is as solid as can be for launch. Stay tuned for further updates and a final potential playtest round right before release!

Get notified when the playtest is live again, sign up for the email list at the bottom of this page: https://thelastplague.com/

A few more fixes from recent feedback! The game is becoming very solid, really appreciate all the testing and feedback from everyone!

Fixes:

• Fixed race condition that caused a save error when saving as chunks are being loaded and unloaded (due to another player moving around)
  
• Fixed placement of generated environment items like sticks not factoring in the slope of the ground causing them to collide with the ground after placement and jitter about
  
• Fixed slime oil crafting not functioning even though your container has just the exact amount of slime oil for the recipe (due to inconsistent rounding of displayed value vs. internally stored value)
  
• Fixed pressing escape while waiting for other players to sleep not properly ending your character's sleep wait state causing all sorts of UI/interaction issues when the other player does end up falling asleep
  
• Fixed the fog particle effect not appearing in swamps since the v0.7.0 update
  
• Fixed multiple nested inventories not properly updating their contents over time, for example food not decaying in a small leather bag within a backpack placed on the ground
  
• Cooking is prevented if the resulting container can't fit all of the output substance (ex. too much tallow to fit in a bowl)
  

Performance:

• Greatly reduced physics complexity for generated environment items like sticks so that there is less CPU load when newly generated chunks are activated
  

Visuals:

• Updated mud brick kiln look
  

Other changes:

• More prevention of blight clouds initially appearing in rivers when the world is generated
  
• Added a pause to the item/building placement highlight after clicking to provide a better experience for high latency clients
  
• New key request form for players to invite their friends to test with them
  

More fixes, quality of life additions and a new way to revert multiplayer game saves in the UI rather than dealing with it in the save files. Also the join game network messaging setup was reworked to vastly reduce the size of the initial message sent to joining players, hopefully this fixes issues with some players not able to join their friends games. Thanks for all the reports!

Features:

• Revert save functionality for multiplayer games. There is a new tab in the host game UI that allows you to revert the game back to an auto-saved day save, deleting all the newer saves above it. This is for cases where the automated save is broken for whatever reason or things just need to be rolled back
  
• New menu button to save the active mutliplayer game without exiting
  

Balance:

• Blight clouds are no longer generated in the water anymore in new games started after this version
  

Fixes:

• Fixed Blight cloud effects not being removed as they are cleared via the oleander burn
  
• Fixed error when trying to double click to equip filled bowl while holding a two handed object like a log
  
• Made the inventory substance count and crafting input ingredient substance count use the same rounding methods to fix cases where it looks like you could make less that the ingredients you actually have
  
• Fixed rare error case where thrown projectiles cause a HUD UI error while they are in the air and "show nearby items" is toggled on
  
• Wetness values of crafting ingredients are preserved for the output ingredients
  
• Fixed ingame chat messages not being cleaned up properly once there are a lot
  
• Fixed other players sometimes disappearing temporarily on joining players' computers
  
• Fixed cooking/smelting losing some output items if they are normally too big to fit in the one stack output slot
  
• Fixed jugs not evaporating when placed on hand carts
  
• Removed unused output slot for copper alembic to prevent double-click from moving ingredients into the slot and preventing further distilling from happening
  

Visuals:

• Reduced intensity of morning mist fog when cloudy
  

Other changes:

• Reworked the join game message response from host to clients to be a quarter of the size to hopefully fix hosts unable to send all the data in one message through Steam and causing the client player to be unable to connect
  
• Password input is hidden in host game UI (when not typing) and for join game password popup
  
• Removed invite friend button for Mac version as the Steam overlay isn't supported in the game yet
  
• A "New!" label for recently updated news on the right-side news section of the main menu
  

Another batch of fixes and small little quality of life additions!

Additions:

• Other players now show up on the map in less realistic mode
  

Balance:

• Wolves and black bears now afraid of daytime fires
  
• Increased accuracy of thrown weapons
  
• Increased amount of time it takes to fully aim thrown weapons to get max accuracy
  
• Added dogbane generation in forests to make forest starts more fair
  

Fixes:

• Fixed standing torch refuel not working and showing a NaN% message
  
• Fixed tool items stored in workbench not being recognized properly when trying to craft a recipe that requires them
  
• Fixed loose substance (ex. sand) stockpiles not appearing on clients when first placed
  
• Fixed very rare race condition error that caused game world state to break when chunks are loaded
  
• Fixed game state breaking or becoming unstable when entering unloaded chunks
  
• Fixed unlocked blueprints/recipes (ex. relating to oleander leaves) being lost after respawn or for players that were not online at the time the recipes were unlocked - works with existing saves too
  
• Fixed issue where gathering clay would never clear the terrain texture and result in near infinite clay
  
• Fixed being able to gather clay very quickly if clicking again within a certain time frame
  
• Fixed double click item movement not working with placed backpacks
  
• Fixed items disappearing on clients when moved within a placed backpack
  
• Fixed clients never receiving the "enter swamp" task due to invalid network serialization
  
• Fixed phantom items showing up in client inventories when moving and placing backpacks in a specific way
  
• Fixed rare error that prevents sleep window from appearing after waking up
  
• Fixed hand cart wheels and rims missing collision causing them to fall through the ground and pop back up infinitely
  
• Fixed run toggle key not toggling if standing still
  
• Fixed hints persisting when unloading a new game and loading another that should not have any on-screen hints at the moment
  

Other changes:

• More attempts to reduce the chance of chunks not loading on clients or taking way too long to load
  
• Reworded rabbit snare label to make it more clear that it is active and ready to catch rabbits
  
• Updated compass description to make it more clear which needle end is north
  
• Reduced shininess of the compass in the UI to avoid it being hard to read when the sun shines on it