Ylands News

tl;dr
- New Eastern Biome
- Big Foot
- New Recipes
- New Costume - Cyborg
- Improved farming
- Editor Wizard

Major General's Log - Sun Date 30.01.20.

My Dearest Readers,

I am currently landlocked while repairs on my fair vessel - the HMS Patcheth Noteth - are well underway, in the ports of Steamtown. So, I'll take this momentary respite to tell you about the brand-new wonders I have seen, while traveling from yland to yland.

I have seen lands that you would not believe - beautiful oriental flora covering entire ylands from head to toe. It was breathtaking! I managed to harvest some of the indigenous trees and took them home with me, I'm planning on using these beautiful exotic trees to decorate my quarters. My stay in this beautiful new biome was unfortunately cut short by the mysterious appearance of a gigantic creature with humongous feet*! It must have been a Big Foot my Dear Reader...



On a particularly verdant yland, I have met folks who have been engaged in an advanced and improved form of farming - their crops grew in such an orderly fashion, that even Her Majesty's Gardener Primerus would have been amazed! Not a single crop was out of alignment - everything was neat and regular, fields after fields of beautiful farmlands.

Their cooks taught our crew fascinating new recipes - dishes formed of many different ingredients, that when eaten, boost the fighting abilities of our crew**.



On another yland, local kids introduced me to numerous new mini-games. In one, they pretend to be saving sheep from alien abductions - I never seen anything like that. Yet another have them cleaning up their forests - useful AND fun! We are definitely bringing some of these back to Playlands.



On the final yland we have seen - the tribal chieftain was wearing a weird metallic costume I have never seen in my life before - they called it "the mighty robotic copper of the elders". Has to be a pain going to the toilet though...

This tech-savy ingenious tribe also told us secrets about what they are calling The Editor. We didn't fully grasp the meaning of it all, but what we know is that the tribe is constantly working on improvements to this Editor - and recently they made several breakthroughs such as a brand-new scene and template wizard. They are saying, this new wizard will make it significantly easier to get started with the Editor and will "streamline the creation process of games".



As you can tell my Dearest Readers, there is always something new on the horizon - so I invite you to hop aboard your own vessel (Steam, Windows Store, iOS, Android) - free of charge - and discover what these Ylands have in store for you!



So until next time stay classy!



Yours truly,



The Major General




*: And funnily enough this time it wasn't my mother-in-law coming in for her bi-monthly visit...thankfully.



**: They might be even better than a steak and ale pie with mushy peas!

Changelog: https://ylands.com/community/topic/27120-11-eastern-endeavors/

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tl;dr
- New Far East biome
- Big Foot
- New Costume

Hey there Ylanders!

We are nearing our first update after the release of Ylands out of Early Access and while there will be a lot of fixes and polishing, we also have some cool stuff lined up. Today we’ll have a look at a couple.

First up is probably the biggest change to Exploration in 1.1 and that’s the Far East biome. This biome inspired by the far east of Japan and China will be a great addition to the tried and tested biomes. You’ll be able to find the Far East Yland in nearly every Exploration map and you can also play around with it in Editor. We also prepared a score of new encounters that will populate new Exploration games, so I’m looking forward to your exploration pics of these.





Next up is the dreaded Big Foot! This guy is the distant cousin of our beloved Yeti, but Big Foot isn’t an easy-going lad, but rather a ferocious creature ready to pounce on any survivor, so beware when you explore Ylands not to fall prey to this mythical creature. Creators will also be able to use Big Foot in their creations and this could turn into a fun photographing game for instance, trying to snap the ever elusive Big Foot. Our hairy fella also comes in a variety of colours, so there really is a lot to play around with.



And maybe a few of you have noticed an ominous figure in that last screenshot. Let’s just say, that dressing up has just been made a lot more...automated. You’ll also be able to pick up this costume in the next update so really a lot to look forward to.

We’ll talk about 1.1 even more next week Ylanders, but until then,

Stay classy!

tl;dr
- New Editor Wizard to help new Creators
- New templates and showcases

Hey there Ylanders!

And we’re at it again. A new feature is coming and here I am to talk about it. We have a small update coming your way soon. It will mostly be fixes and polishing, but the team managed to sneak in a few cool features too. And today I’d like to show you the upcoming Editor Wizard.



So this guy will pop up after you open any new Editor map. For a lot of people (me included) opening the Editor can be quite daunting and it isn’t immediately obvious, what should one do to get started, but the wizard is there to help out. It will take you through the first few steps of game creation to get everything set up and ready for your creativity. He’ll show you where to set up Universal or PC only options, how to pick a map type and he’ll even offer you a few templates. For the experienced creators, he is just one button away of vanishing into thin air 😁



And you might’ve noticed I mentioned templates. Yep, that’ll also come in this update. We’ll have a few templates ready for you: The City and Oasis. More will be added pretty much with each update and this will give you an easy way to set your game in a certain setting without building everything from scratch. The maps will be optimized and welded, but you can unweld what you want and play around with it 😊 We’ll also be adding a few Editor Showcases, maps you might have seen in the marketplace but ready for you to properly explore in the Editor and see, how everything works and what’s is under the bonnet of these games. This should help some with formulating their own scripting ideas and using techniques, that some of our talented designers came up with.





With these features, we’d like to make the Editor more accessible to more players because while it all seems very complicated, it really isn’t once you get into it. It’s just those first few steps, that are the most difficult.

So, hope you liked the new Wizard and until next time,

stay classy Ylanders!

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tl;dr
-Happy New Year
- Have a lot of plans for 2020
- New Year's Resolution's list
- Prize for those, that finish it - unique pet!

Hey there Ylanders! We’re back!


The festive season is over, but it’s about to get very festive in Ylands. We have a lot of plans and cool new features a-cooking, but we are also doubling down and fixing anything that pops up, so keep those reports coming in, they are helping us a lot.


But to start the year less seriously, we came up with an Ylands resolutions list. The Major General is trying to better himself and drawn this list up to see, if he can manage all these tasks in three months and we extend this challenge to you too. And it is not without a prize!




For those that finish the tasks and provide us with some documentation for it (though of course, it will also depend on everyone’s sense of fair-play, like not submitting stuff from last year) be it screenshots, videos or even better some scenarios and games, we will prepare a unique pet, that we are right now working on, and believe you me, it’s a cool one 😂 No one else will ever be able to get this pet ever again and thus you’ll be the proud owner of the 2020 challenge pet forevermore 😊


The deadline is the 9th of April 2020 and on the 16th we’ll be sending out your special companions 😁


And as for 2020, we will be sharing some exciting news and plans with you soon, so keep tuned here on the forums and on our Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit. We are really excited for 2020 especially because of our great community. So good luck and let 2020 be as good or even better than 2019 and most importantly,


stay classy Ylanders! 😉

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TL;DR
Our Creative Director answers player concerns
- What to do in Ylands?
- Maps are small
- Can't find resources
- Game is crashing
- How can we play with friends?


Hey there, fellow ylanders! It's Aleš here, the Creative Director of Ylands.

Ylands 1.0 is out and even though we're already working on update 1.1 and planning many others that you will see in 2020 this feels like a good moment to slow down and address concerns that you voice the most.


We don't know what to do in Ylands

Right now there are three things you can do in Ylands.

Play Exploration (if you bought the DLC or if you are an Early Accesser), which is a survival game that is still being improved and enhanced.

Play other games - basically embrace Ylands as a platform. While Exploration has been around for some years the platform is fairly new and it will take weeks (and possibly even a few months) before the newly come creators get a full grasp of what it can do and interesting games start to appear in a higher number. The same goes for Playlands. We have bigger plans with it but we'll start by continuously adding more and more games. We are even planning to find a way how you, the creators, could have your minigames become a part of Playlands.

And finally, you can Create in the Editor or Sandbox. The Editor is more aimed at game creation with a huge amount of options, including visual scripting, while Sandbox is pretty much a playground in which you can build, experiment and more. We have already registered quite a few new creators, which makes us very happy and we are looking forward to your creations. If you need help with anything, don't hesitate to ask our new Content Specialist TG.

Exploration maps are small. We want bigger maps with more ylands. We want to be able to explore more.

We understand that this is a crucial issue. After all, it's called "Exploration". The reason why we had to shrink the map is purely technical. It doesn't have anything to do with the mobile platform since it doesn't include Exploration anyway, but we are already working on a way to give you a much bigger world to explore. We will be able to tell you more early next year.

We struggle when finding various resources

We hear you. We have gathered enough feedback and you will see some improvements in the next update 1.1.

The game is crashing, there are some problems with servers.

Unfortunately, the ultimate test for a multiplayer game is its release. A lot of never-before-seen stress-related issues surface and have to be dealt with. And that's exactly what we're doing right now. We've already released the first hotfix and are working on fixes that will appear in 1.1 that will be released in early 2020.

You've taken our private dedicated servers. We can't play anymore with our friends ... or can we?

The removal of private dedicated servers has caused a lot of accusations and wild rumours. Let's go over what it means and what it doesn't 🙂

Players can no longer host Ylands on their own dedicated servers. In other words, you can't have Ylands server running on your own hardware. But there are still many other ways how you can play with your friends and some of those come completely free.

If you don't want to spend any money you can host the game locally. That means that you will run Ylands on your own PC (not as a dedicated server but as a common game) and let other players join you. This obviously has one major disadvantage - other players can join your world only as long as your game is running.

If you want to do this but at the same time let your friends enter your world even when you're offline, you can use a feature we call sharegames. By using sharegames, your world can be dynamically hosted by any of your friends that are currently online. This way you can all play in the same persistent world.

The paid option is to rent a server from us and start your game there.

And in early 2020 we want to give you the option to be able to rent your own server from a certified third party server provider. That way you will be able to have full access to the hardware and decided yourself how and what is run there.


I hope this answers some of your most asked questions. We will be monitoring everything you tell us and do another dev diary just like this one soon.

And also we are entering the Holiday Season and so I'd like to wish you all a peaceful few weeks 🎄 The next Dev Diary will be next year the 9th of January, so see you then.

In the meantime - stay classy, ylanders!