The Last Plague: Blight News

Another batch of bug fixes in this update thanks to all the great feedback!

This will be the last update for the demo, focus will shift now onto the remaining work needed for early access release later this year. The demo on Steam will shut off Monday April 17th. Really appreciate everyone's time trying the game out and providing your feedback!

The playtest/alpha build will stay up but won't be updated until close to release.

Balance:

• Reduced time for distilling slime
  
• Changed cleared blight zone regrowth to be prevented if the area was cleared within the last two ingame days
  

Fixes:

• Fixed cooking/smelting progress being lost when loading a saved game
  
• Fixed clicking on an ingredient in building list not switching to the search tab properly in the crafting recipe list for proper filtering
  
• Fixed "Craft with..." while using a workbench preserving the workbench UI instead of closing it and opening normal crafting UI
  
• Fixed very rare error when taking apart support beams causing the taking apart animation to be stuck on the character
  
• Fixed error that happened in certain digging situations causing no dirt to be collected and the terrain not being modified
  
• Fixed ranged attack aim triggering when attempting to use buildings like a fire pit with a stone or spear held
  
• Fixed loose substance stockpiles like sand visually shrinking when more than 10kg is present
  
• Fixed bellows indicator not appearing when placing hearth furnace
  
• Fixed swamp mist effect showing up wrong in the distance and when behind transparent tree leaves
  
• Fixed terrain digging by hand causing handheld items to take damage
  

Other changes:

• Added speed-up ability to bergamot leaf application and also "Apply half" and "Apply all" context menu options
  
• Changed stockpile placement to move all items of that type in your inventory to the stockpile instead of just the one that was right-clicked
  
• Added grass flattening support to stockpiles
  
• Changed large sandstone chunk and resulting grinding wheel to be only handheld and not placeable in inventory
  
• Changed blighted zones to only show tall/wide cloud effects in village areas as originally intended, allowing more straightforward clearing of blighted zones in the wilderness even if they are very large
  
• Added combustibility to more wooden items like improvised spears and various tool handles
  
• Grass in forests and fields now also turn to dirt when run on over a long period of time
  
• Added "Build with..." context menu action to slime oil oleander leaf
  

Fixing a bunch of big and small issues in this update, some balance changes, and lastly enhancements in various areas to make the gameplay that much better. Thanks for playing and giving feedback! Hope you enjoy.

Balance:

• Greatly increased amount of quicklime produced by limestone burn piles
  
• Increased generation chance of slime
  
• Increased amount of slime oil distilled from slime
  
• Reduced material requirements for leaf roof, stone floor and stone walls
  
• Reduced burn time of oleander burn pile and made its clearing effect faster
  

Fixes:

• Hopefully fixed cause of missing terrain chunks that some have reported. Please let me know if you still see it!
  
• Fixed oleander burn pile not being destroyed after being burned
  
• Fixed UI for oleander burn pile showing an empty "Produces" section
  
• Fixed cleared areas of Blight coming back every day. The center of each Blight area needs to be cleared for it to stop growing
  
• Fixed oleander burn pile clearing not working properly if the area is unloaded for the duration of the burn
  
• Fixed toxic smoke particle effect not factoring in the fog when rendered
  
• Updated water generation in newly generated chunks to reduce jagged shorelines
  
• Fixed cases of the progress bar in the interaction UI (ex. "chopping...") from disappearing randomly
  
• Fixed mid-air projectiles breaking when they are restored after a game load
  
• Fixed lake/river container-filling to preserve initial click location when it starts so that mouse movement doesn't interrupt filling when the target point becomes too far
  
• Fixed water not being tagged correctly internally which would prevent things like projectiles causing a splash when hitting it, code to check building placement in water not working correctly, and click-to-move mode not working correctly on water
  
• Fixed thrown spears flying away too much after hitting the ground
  
• Fixed Bloomery collider being too tall to fit under rafters/roof
  

Performance:

• Disabling various physics-based checks for far away objects to slightly reduce CPU load
  

Visuals:

• Reworked UI for active interactions like "chopping..." to look a bit better
  

Other changes:

• Reworked throw attacks to feel a bit better: projectiles are much faster, the max range is a bit further, projectiles get launched at lower angles, and the spear throw animation orients the spear correctly during the throw
  
• Reworked interactions in click-once interaction mode to greatly reduce the amount of accidental melee attacks happening when trying to interact with things while holding an axe
  
• Allowed posts to be placed in shallow water
  
• Added speed-up possibility to the level ground interaction
  

Quick hotfix for an issue introduced in the update earlier today (V0.6.8)

Fixes:

• Fixed compass not showing up on the HUD beside the belt slot bar when held (only relevant for the more realistic mode)
  

Spent some time working on performance and graphical tweaks to allow for further view distances after the previous camera angle update. Fixed a bunch of inconsistencies with the distance fog, rendering transparent objects and effects.

There is a new view distance slider in the graphics settings, defaulting to 50% which is what the game was previously. Keep in mind that at 75% and above the game will need to load more chunks in the distance to show the objects there, this will cause a much greater load on the CPU while loading/unloading chunks during exploration. Let me know how performance is for you, I'd love to hear how the game performs!

Note: most of the game's shaders were replaced in this update to help accommodate the new fog rendering. There may be a few graphical issues from this migration, please let me know if you spot anything that looks weird.

Features:

• New view distance slider in graphics settings, allowing you to see more in the distance if your hardware can handle it
  
• New "Speed-up camera blur effect" checkbox in gameplay settings to allow disabling of the blur effect when speeding up time
  

Performance:

• Faster water reflection rendering - changed rendering pipeline a bit to avoid doing various setup processes to save a bit of time every frame
  
• Greatly reduced game logic CPU cost every frame - world generated objects like sticks and stones no longer take up processing power to update themselves, wetness from the rain is now handled in a much more optimized way. Also greatly reduced the processing time every frame needed for physics based objects. These optimizations will only be present for items in chunks generated after updating to this version
  
• More upfront memory use to pre-allocate a bunch of items/resources to make their creation during the first bits of gameplay faster
  
• Misc optimizations across the codebase to make things a tiny bit speedier
  

Visuals:

• Reworked distance fog rendering a bunch to fix up how transparent objects and particle effects look in the distance to be fully consistent
  
• Reworked skybox rendering to look better across various cloud density and time of day combinations
  
• Adjusted a few level of detail settings to avoid pop-in of trees and other objects
  

Fixes:

• Fixed missing attack cursor when holding a melee weapon like an axe or knife (issue introduced a few updates ago)
  
• Fixed crafting queue not stopping if forging on an anvil that breaks
  
• Fixed refresh rate not being stored and loaded properly when the game is launched again - note that non-default refresh rates only work on the "Exclusive fullscreen" setting
  

Other changes:

• Reduced generation of bushes that make a sound and slow you down in forests
  

Tons of exciting new features and improvements are part of this large update! Wanted to prioritize a bunch of the bigger community requests over the past few weeks, needed to do a ton of rendering updates and optimizations to get it all in. Excited to get this out and see what everyone thinks!

A few QoL features have been added that are new settings options in the gameplay settings screen. You can now change the camera angle to be lower to see more in the distance (has a small performance hit), you can enable speed-up functionality on almost all interactions like chopping or building, and you can enable "quick pickups" to make the picking up or gathering process instant.



Features:

• New camera angle gameplay setting - a slider that adjusts the camera angles ingame. The "higher" side is the old camera angles from before. Keep in mind, lower angles require more to be rendered in the distance and will result in poorer performance.
  
• Quick pickups - a new checkbox that allows instant pickup and gathering of items
  
• Speed-up all interactions - new dropdown setting with "off", "some" and "all" options. The default and previous level was "some" which includes crafting, harvesting, and repairing. The "all" option allows you to speed up things like chopping, building and taking apart buildings.
  
• Predator culling - killing predators enough will now prevent them from re-spawning in an area for a certain amount of time. This feature still needs a lot of testing and balance, please provide your feedback on how it's working!
  
• Added a "camera cursor movement" gameplay option to control how much the camera moves as you move the mouse. Setting it to 0% will prevent all movement
  
• Added a blood spray effect when attacking creatures
  
• Added a progress bar above the player showing the strength of held-down attacks (since not everyone was aware of this before)
  

Performance:

• Removed useless physics events for items near bushes (ex. in forests) that was eating up CPU for no reason
  
• Reworked cloud rendering to be a bit more performant
  
• Increased performance of rain particle system greatly, but with the loss of rain drop effects on the water - will be added back later
  
• Enabled multi-threaded CPU-time rendering on the Windows build to increase performance when many objects on screen
  
• May be a performance hit from the new SSAO effects and new fog rendering system
  

Visuals:

• Better SSAO effect, but may have more of a performance impact - medium vs. high quality will have more of a difference now
  
• New fog effects written from the ground up to account for lower camera angles - still requires tweaks and updates to look better in the future
  
• Tweaked water rendering to look better at the shore when looking at an angle
  
• Adjusted rain rendering to look more consistent regardless of time of day
  
• Increased ambient light at night
  

Balance:

• Drastically decreased bear health
  
• Increased axe damage
  
• Reduced amount of iron ore drops generated near outcrops
  
• Increased pickaxe effectiveness
  
• Reduced material requirements for stick wattle walls
  
• Increased mud requirements for wattle & daub upgrade
  

Fixes:

• Fixed placing dirt with shovel not showing dirt on the terrain
  
• Fixed more repair menu refreshing inconsistencies
  
• Fixed wattle & daub wall being shorter than the wattle wall it upgrades from
  
• Fixed building process not showing clay bricks when building the clay brick based buildings
  
• Fixed stack overflow crash when moving an item from within a held leather bag into the hand-slot the bag is in
  
• Prevented case of double-click of a two handed container like a crucible or clay pot from mistakenly placing it into the inventory and emptying it
  
• Fixed issue where using a workbench and selecting a tool causing that tool to stay selected when opening the crafting menu elsewhere, making the recipe break in certain cases
  
• Fixed stockpiles from being placeable at far distances from the player
  
• Fixed fence posts from placeable with less than 4 sticks in inventory
  
• Fixed bronze anvil popping out from the clay mold when it's done hardening
  
• Fixed the autosave timer so that it factors in main menu time and paused time properly
  

Other changes:

• The speed-up process now adds a radial blur effect to the screen to better signify when time is sped up
  
• Bronze axe blades, saw blades, and bronze knife now are 50% condition out of the mold, and can now be sharpened up to 70% with a sandstone chunk
  
• Added a ranged attack cursor when holding a thrown item like a stone or spear
  
• Adjusted a few animations and events so that chopping and attacks are triggered at the exact right time
  
• Increased strength of the "smooth ground" option with the shovel
  
• Added "Repair..." context menu option for items that have a repair possible
  
• Reduced the disease exposure screen effect when eating lightly contaminated foods like rabbits. It now scales properly based on the level of infection from the food eaten