Windward Horizon News

- You can now place basic decorations in your own provinces (various rocks for now). It's a new skill on your bar visible in your own regions. Right-click it/hold (X) on the controller for more options, such as the drop-down list of possible rocks. You can fine-tune your rock placement/options by right-clicking them (or (X) on controller). This is purely cosmetic, so don't be surprised if your town buildings start growing into rocks.
- Main menu now has a button allowing you to easily restore player saves from a backup.
- Firework type effect with lights (like taunt) will now be slightly more performant.
- One shot protection was apparently being used incorrectly for quite a while. It will now correctly stop working as your hull gets low enough.
- The ship's gunner crews should now take advantage of non-standard cannon layouts much better (for example when all cannons are on one side, or when cannons have multiple crews servicing them), resulting in noticeably higher auto-attack DPS, particularly on ships like the SotL.
- Fixed towns not generating enough items even though their inventory size was increased.
- The tentacle sightings have started to attract attention.

- Created an optimized way of the water shader rendering up to 64 lights with one draw call, so explosions will no longer drastically affect performance.
- Day/night transition performance optimizations.
- Lighthouses will now have a slightly lower performance cost during the day.
- Fixed provincial town inventory size not being based on the size of the town.
- Added 12 more sail patterns.
- Various changes related to raid support, such as the ability to set the respawn timer and the new cultist faction.
- Fog now affects sight range by default, matching the night time sight range.
- It's now dangerous to use grog on tentacles.
- If faction rep ranks aren't specified explicitly, they will now have reduced rep requirements for solo challenge campaigns (1000 rep for rank 3 instead of 2500, for example).
- Ship (Ship Names.txt) and town names (Town Names.txt), as well as pirate phrase translator files (Pirate Phrases.txt) can now be included in mods.
- Fixed the missing resolution choices on macbook devices above M1 by adding them manually.
- The resolution size selection will now persist properly on macbooks.

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- Player ship will no longer save until after it successfully spawns. So if some odd issue occurs where player fails to spawn, game will no longer save at all.
- Province names will now generate with 2 syllables first before falling back to 3.
- Made the screen shake much more subtle and less jarring.
- Reverted the change that made explosion sounds too quiet.
- Fixed one dialog branch in the Alvana/Rowdy conversation that was blocking the ability to confront Alvana, thus always leading to a bad outcome.
- Fixed the night sight value not saving properly in world options.
- Fixed the erroneous tower/lighthouse placement bug.

- You can now encounter signs of the upcoming raid boss out in the world. I recommend caution.
- Added an optional camera screen shake effect when firing volleys, mortars, colliding with ships or receiving a lot of damage.
- Night-time performance optimizations.
- You can now edit player pref values directly via /set key = value. For example: /set resolution = "1280x800", or /set screenShakeStrength = 0.25
- Being near a light now shares unit sight with others, so using skills like Taunt counters night time's sight reduction and sight sharing penalty temporarily.
- Night sight range is now configurable in world options.
- Fixed the holding shift while placing towers not working as intended. It will now correctly prevent you from placing a tower if it's not max size for this region.
- If a resolution is requested via -screen-width and -screen-height command-line arguments, it will now always be shown as one of the possible choices on the list of available resolutions in options.
- Fixed the skybox star texture being sampled incorrectly.
- More Steam Deck compliance changes, chasing that elusive Steam Deck Verified mark.
- Some platforms appear to not have a list of possible resolutions when queried by Unity (for example M2 Macbook Airs). As a work-around, I now manually add the native resolution and its half size.