Ylands News

Hey there fellow Ylanders!

The Ylands team has been hard at work improving Exploration and we are very proud of our work. All this, however, would not be possible without our community and especially those who helped us way back when Ylands was in Early Access. And with today’s Dev Diary, we wanna address you guys specifically.

First of all, we want to mention that we appreciate your support and the time you invested in giving us feedback and helping us along the way. While going through this feedback, we realized that many of the points that were suggested by our EA players are already implemented in the game or are about to be, mainly as part of our polish and adjustment focused 1.8 update. Which is why we would like to invite you back into the game to see for yourself and tell us what you’d still like to see implemented.

In the near future, we will start reaching out to our EA players with a small surprise and we are planning even more EA related activities. Before that happens, we would love to hear from you, tell us what you like, what you’d like to see changed and improved, or simply come say hi and keep in touch!




That’s it for today and next week we will give you a sneak peek into a super cool feature that is coming out in 1.7!

Stay classy, Ylanders!

Hey there, ylanders!

With 1.7, many big things will be coming to Ylands and we are oh, so excited about them! What’s more, we are even planning some very cool stuff for its release! But more about that another time... Apart from these big changes and improvements, the 1.7 update will also bring something that you may have wondered about and that you have asked about: assets.

In the past, we have released asset packs on a semi-regular basis and we intend to release these in the future as well. But going forward, we want to focus on working on Exploration and that is keeping our artists and designers veeeeery busy (in a good way of course!). Which is why adding new assets will mostly be included in updates rather than separately in the future.

You don’t need to worry that there would be any fewer assets though! We are still going to be bringing new and new things for you to unleash your creativity upon and use them in unexpected ways to come up with incredible creations.




We would also like to see releases of new kinds of assets that would be a part of a holiday event like Halloween or Christmas, or assets connected to a specific time of the year like a summer or a winter pack. We have also been noting down your suggestions and wishes for specific items and we are hoping to grant those wishes as well - so please, keep them coming!

That’s it for this week’s Dev Diary and we’ll be in touch with the next one!

Stay safe, healthy and classy, ylanders!

Hey there, fellow ylanders!


A lot of you have been asking about what will the updates beyond 1.7 bring and so today I would like to give you some information about 1.8, which will be mostly focused on polishing and adjusting.

As you know, we have been working really hard on making Exploration much better and some quite radical changes have been done. So far, you, the players, seem to like where we‘re headed, which is reassuring. However, the game can't be made better just by throwing in massive changes.

So far we have received literally thousands of pieces of feedback. Ideas on how to improve features. What you are missing. What you don‘t like.

You might have noticed (at least we hope you have :) ) that in every update we try to react to such feedback, but it‘s not enough. Because of the major features and big changes, there‘s usually not enough time to fix smaller things. Some may think that these things are not that important, that we would be better off adding feature X or Y. But the truth is that when there are many such things (and there are), the overall experience suffers. This may not be such a problem for a long time Ylands players who are already accustomed to some of our weird quirks, but this is something that needs to be taken care of before we try to attract more players back to our game.



And that‘s why 1.8 will be mainly about polishing. We are going through your feedback and deciding what are the things that you (and the game) need and which we haven‘t managed to fix. It can be a small annoying UI thing or something that a larger game system is missing (how can one have naval battles when ships can‘t be damaged...(sad) ). Just to give you some examples - an easier way to share games with other players, building improvements, being able to carry a torch while holding a weapon and much more.

So what would YOU like us to fix?

With 1.8 released we expect to feel good enough about the game so that we can start actively bringing new players into the game. We consider that a whole new chapter for Exploration.

So, that‘s it for today. I will see you next week and until then... stay healthy and classy, ylanders!

Well hello there, Ylanders!

Whether you are an experienced adventurer or a rookie sailor, there is always more to explore!

And to give you an even more exciting journey of discovery, in the 1.7 update, we would like to implement a system of scenarios, which we hope, would challenge you in completely new ways.

You asked us to give you some sense of progression through the game - and this is it. We are going to introduce a kind of "experience points" that will let you open specific ylands. These ylands could be just about anything, so you would have to be on the lookout for a mind twisting puzzle, a hard-hitting boss fight or maybe even something utterly indescribable! Once you "complete" this yland, you will receive a reward for all of your hard work.

We expect the primary way of increasing the experience level through random encounters, so as you keep exploring the world and bumping into unexpected events, you would level up as an adventurer and would be more ready to tackle more and more challenging scenarios. And to enable you to gather up friends you've made along the journey of exploration, these milestone scenarios would be available in multiplayer as well. These would, however, still require a certain level of experience to access.






We believe that this will add a lot of fun to Exploration and we are looking forward to telling you more details soon :)

That's everything for today's dev diary. We will continue working on the 1.7 update and keep you informed!

In the meantime....

Stay classy, Ylanders!

Hey there, fellow ylanders!


The regular streams we‘re doing with Naru are a lot of fun and we get to answer a lot of questions from you, the players. Unfortunately, sometimes it‘s impossible to provide all the information you seek because it first needs to be consulted with the team. So today I‘ll post answers to such questions here and the next week we‘ll return to talking about the cool Exploration / Editor features, which the 1.7 update is going to bring.

Q: Can the Ylands Team add random encounters without uploading the game client? Or was that just for Custom Scenario islands?

A: At this point, it is possible only for custom scenario ylands.



Q: Will we be able to customize the appearance of the new vendors?

A: Technically it is definitely possible. We‘ve put it in our suggestion list, but it has a low priority.



Q: Can we change the terrain to y=0 in Editor?

A: To put this simply - the visible mesh is calculated from voxel terrain data and there is certain imprecision that is difficult to get rid of. So, unfortunately, there is currently no easy way for us to align the terrain precisely with the plane at zero y coordinate.



Q: When will the players be able to transport tamed animals and vehicles by ship? Is there an estimate for this time? (yes/no is ok)

A: We‘ve already tested various solutions and there are some serious issues with this (not unsolvable but requiring substantial time that would have to be taken away from other features) so in the end, we are leaning towards the idea of allowing (un)summoning those instead of transporting them. We would like to have this feature in the 1.8 update .



Q: Can the players have a branch of the tech tree for refining oil?

A: This is a neat idea and we‘re storing it for later (possibly when we do a major update of energy)


Q: Are we bringing back the repair system?

A: What is a very high priority for us is being able to repair ships so that players can engage in naval battles. We‘ll try to bring this to the game as soon as possible (sometime past 1.7).

The damage/repair system for items is something that we would like to bring back at some point but in a different, more interesting way. However, it‘s not currently slated for either 1.7 or 1.8.


Q: Can we have more slots in the toolbox?

A: That is definitely a problem and we‘ll fix that in the upcoming 1.7 update .



Q: Can creators get the hit position for thrown objects (grenades and arrows)?

A: This is currently not possible (basically right now whenever an object is fired/thrown it becomes a different entity and is stripped of most of its data), but we understand that this can be very handy and so we will look into it some more.





Q: Can creators create groups using scripting?

A: Not really. At this point the groups don‘t exist in the game, they are just a helpful way of putting together objects in the Editor and in the game this information is not present.


Q: Can players add grass terrain (like sand/dirt) in Exploration?

A: This is something we are currently discussing - not only this type of terrain but maybe also being able to „pick“ some water and drop it someplace else. We‘ll keep you posted.


Q: Can creators get a better raycast for where the players are looking

A: TL;DR: Right now it‘s not possible, but it should be in future.
Detailed answer: This is a good question because it touches an „issue“ that affects a lot of scripting done by creators. The way things work in Ylands is, that in the multiplayer, absolute majority of the game is simulated on the server and very few on the client. When you play a single-player local game, this isn‘t an issue. But when it‘s multiplayer, it‘s when things get ugly. For example, all the scripting is performed on the server, while the camera is handled only locally and the server doesn‘t have any information about where each player is looking (because it doesn‘t really care about that and in MP you always want to send as little data between a client and a server as possible). This is also why it‘s not easy for us to add some specific instructions. Imagine you would want us to add a feature where you would (on a mobile device) want to evaluate a pinch gesture to say, zoom your camera. While this would work well in locally run singleplayer, in a MP game we would have to send the current gestures data to the server, it would act based on that and send back the result to the client. If your latency is high, say 150ms, it would take 300 ms for you to see the effect of your action. Be assured that if the game took one third of a second to react to your gestures (or even more) it would be useless.
There are two ways of solving this. Firstly it‘s some sort of prediction (which we already use with some things like player‘s movement) but which needs to be specifically tailored to every feature/use case or by allowing some scripts to run locally and perform some actions without having to communicate with the server.
If you‘re among the creators that keep running into this problem you may be happy to hear that we are already discussing how to implement some sort of "local scripting" and even though I can‘t give you any timeframe at this point, we feel that this is extremely important and want to have it in the game as soon as possible.


Q: Can the players use a compass while riding/flying potion/driving?

A: Sure, we‘ll add that.




So, that‘s it for today. I will see you next week and until then... stay healthy and classy, ylanders!