Hello Wizards of Ignus!
We've been working away the last few months to bring you all an ENORMOUS patch with a vast quantity of balance and performance improvements.
Among other things, you'll find with this update that we've introduced
mastery levels and items, allowing players to progress far beyond level 60 with new unlocks and increased rewards. These are intended to leave the base of the game (pre-60) relatively unchanged, while reducing aspects of grind for higher-level players.
There is also now a
worldwide randomly-spawned loot drop system which provides various rare resources to those who find it. Some items within the system are guaranteed and always drop, whereas some of the items are picked at random.
Additionally, players may now build owned outposts using the new "outpost throne" and offensive structures have been added. There is currently no limit to number of outposts players may build, but the throne only allows players to build structures within a certain radius of it, and it has a no-build range similar to the regular throne.
Dynamic weather has also been added to Ignus, as well as a snowy tundra.
Check out the notes below to see everything else we've added to this update!
New Content
- Marble transmuter added: automatically generates marble from rune power over time
- New broomstick added: a lower mana decent speed option
- Protein transmuter added: generates meat for cooking and tames from rune power over time
- Essence transmuter added: generates a random essence from rune power over time
- Large mana generator added: provides high mana reserves, and has a larger effective radius
- Vitality pool added: simultaneously replenishes health and mana
- Fertile farm plot added: grows plants at roughly double the rate of the regular plot, plants decay at half the rate of the regular plot, and has double the fertilizer and hydration capacity.
- Mystical conjurer added: generates a random rare item from rune power over time
- Offense structures added: a slow but automated siege system to help raze enemy bases
- Rabbit's foot trinket added: increases player magic find by 80-100
- Nexus stone added: allows players to teleport to their throne instantly
- Raider stone added: takes a long time to activate, but provides a siege buff to friendly players within its radius
Balance and Tweaks
- Doubled the wood reward from picking up sticks
- Removed nature's essence from the loot of all NPCs (except forest guardians and golems)
- Added a chance of obtaining nature's essence from trees
- Added minor biome-specific rewards to trees
- Adjusted the NPC XP curve from levels 60 to 70
- Added XP rewards for level 60 craftable items as well as level 60 quests
- Standardized the names of the skeletons
- Fixed some janky tree LODs
- Cleaned up some poorly-placed foliage in the tundra
- Fixes for some griefable rocks
- Adjustments to griefable structure doors and doorframes
- Increased spell charges by 50% for most spells, reduced siege balance accordingly so it maintains the same ratio
- Reformation stone repair cost increased from 10 mana to 15, now heal structures for 240hp/min/stone
- Adjusted the minimum attack range for some bear attacks
- Adjusted the magic find calculation for some trinkets
- Fixes for some loading screen tooltips
- Adjusted boss loot rewards for consistency: average rare item drop down by 1-2
- Adjusted some NPC sounds to ensure they play in the correct channels
- Cleaned up first-time player spawns
- Lowering level and knowledge requirement for obelisk of protection
- Magic find has been adjusted and crafting involving that stat should feel much more rewarding. It's important to mention that the magic find number on the player stat menu represents the percentage that is multiplied by the background odds of rolling enhanced stats. For example: the player has a base value of 100, so if an item has a background extra mana chance of 10%, the odds of rolling that stat on craft are exactly 10%. Having a magic find stat of 175 would increase those odds to 17.5%.
- Increased demonic eye magic find from 10% to 100
- Increased the magic find values rolled on crafted armor significantly
- Fix for collision on the large split hanging flag
- Fix for bear rug material
- Adding Hobart's Growth Solution to boss loot and as a guaranteed drop to world loot drops
Technical Changes
- All structure rendering is optimized using GPU instancing
- Increased structure render distance, structures fade out at a distance
- Added structure streaming, this prevents huge amounts of memory being used to spawn structures and only loads the ones in the world that the player needs to know about
- Dramatically decreased load times when entering populated servers with many structures
- Optimized structure memory, server memory usage decreased
- Optimized particle systems on magic structures for faster rendering times. Moved certain particle systems to use GPU particles
- Improved performance on many UI interactions
- Fixed the voip slider
- Improved physics performance
- Eliminated camera "whipping" effect when a hitch occurs
- Fixed a number of reported crash cases
- Upgraded the engine to use Unreal 4.21
- World settings are now synced so that when a player customizes their server, joining users get the expected values
- Players now drop consumables when killed
- Fixed issuers where some channeled spells were not replicating properly
- Elixir of amnesia no longer hitches clients
- Modified level streaming to not invoke GC so often, this reduces hitching while travelling around the world
- Landscapes are only partially loaded for memory savings, terrain lods are loaded at a distance
- Player no longer fails to auto-equip starting items in single-player
- Broomstick league ball goal streams farther
- Saving now takes less server performance, backups are not on every save iteration
- AI no longer gets stuck when pushed off a navmesh. AI can act regardless of having a navmesh
- Fixed a bug where the structure would disappear if restyling to a piece not known
- Fixed an issue where the player could be stuck suffocating if dismounting while underwater
- Fixed an issue where the player could not create a house while mounted
- Thrones are vulnerable to being damaged once again
- Increased flag draw distance on castles
- Fixed issue where first-person arms could go invisible
- Warding obelisk can kill tames rather than bringing their health to 0 and leaving them alive
- Fixed an issue where the house owner could still interact with a kicked house member's structures
- Added structure limits: server limit is now 250k structures. Structures are limited to 20k per 10k region.
- Updated localization data
- Storm armor now reflects expected amounts of damage
- Added game credits
- Fixed a bug where the player's tame would be lost if the player is killed while the tame menu is active
- Timesliced replicated actor spawning
- Player can now sprint while swimming
- Fixed a number of spells getting in stuck states if switching weapons quickly after casting
- Fixed NPC XP displaying and calculating improperly
- Fixed structure healing using light beam spell
- Tames provide the player with a notification if killed online or offline
- Tames that are killed provide a map marker that indicates if the tame has loot available
- Network error messages are clearer and do not contain random text
- Fixed issues with crafting where the number of items being crafted would frequently reset
- Fixed issues where the player would be unable to manage a craft (on self) after exiting the crafting menu
- Thrones and respawn stones should no longer be able to be created inside any rocks. We have chosen to veer on the side of allowing false positives, so there may be times where a throne or respawn stone needs to be moved away from the rock before it can be built.
- Dead players do not start with 100% health. This is an added penalty to make PVP more meaningful.
- Many gamepad fixes and improvements
- Lowered the volume of the introduction videos
We hope you enjoy these new changes and take the time to check them out. Game performance should be significantly improved with this update and many, many miscellaneous bugs should be fixed.
Enjoy this new update and see you all in Ignus soon!
