Stormworks: Build and Rescue News

v1.7.6

- Fixed build issue where some natural disaster mission files were not being packaged

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is update week, and we are adding new features to ropes in Stormworks!

Rope inventory equipment now has a new option to set the length of the rope when placing it in first person. This makes it possible to place equal length ropes rather than the ropes always being sized based on the distance of the connector anchors. You can still use the auto-length mode, or cycle through a series of fixed lengths.

Ropes will also be destroyed when their rope anchors take damage! If you are using ropes for structural or tethering purposes, this means that your vehicles will react to damage in a new way, making their response to damage a little richer.

Ropes are also now less elastic or stretchy, particularly with heavier objects. If you are using ropes to attach vehicles together using an intermediate connector or block, we recommend either skipping the intermediate connector block, or adding weight blocks to it. This will improve the rope simulation stability and make the ropes less stretchy.



There are also several bug fixes and improvements which you may find useful! Please see the patch notes below.

Some players have also reported to us that they suspect a small amount of hacking in multiplayer servers. Yes, you heard that right. Hacking in a non-competitive, non-esports, vehicle building game. Why??? We can't understand. Anyway, this is against our terms of use, and the Steam subscriber agreement, so we will be protecting our players from this kind of thing. We can detect this kind of behaviour, and we may issue bans and revoke licenses in the future.



We are continuing work on several new updates, so expect another minor update in 2 weeks, and we should hopefully be announcing more info on merch, the next major update, upcoming DLC, and more over the next few months!

Much love
The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.7.5

Feature - #2429 First Person Rope lengths

This update welcomes a new feature for ropes in Stormworks and also some behind the scenes changes to improve their behaviour.

- First person rope items can now be cycled with the secondary action key to change their length:
Dynamic(40m), 1m, 2m, 4m, 8m, 16m
The Dynamic 40m behaviour represents the old auto-spooling behaviour where the length is set when attached to a second anchor. All other lengths represent new non-elastic lengths.

- Ropes, hoses and cables are now less elastic and behave more consistently with high mass bodies.
- Ropes, hoses and cables will now snap when their anchor is damaged.
- Ropes will return to the default dynamic length when detached and picked up by a player.
- Improved handling of ropes for unloading and loading vehicles.

Fix - #16738 Animal biting characters releasing character physics partially underground
Fix - #16738 Fix creatures being unplaceable in seats, correctly remove creatures from seats on death for clients
Fix - Animals revived with defibrillator killing multiplayer clients with physics collision on bite
Fix - Clients applying forces to carried creatures with kinematic physics
Fix - Characters being incapacitated while already in ragdoll state from creature not syncing to multiplayer clients
Fix - #14119 Rotate buttons not disappearing while in micro-controller menu
Fix - #17932 Render moustaches under new hats
Fix - #17820 Fixed safari male mesh
Fix - Reactors now consider all fluid types when determining fluid volume to heat (prev. just water and seawater, leading to unexpected behaviour)
Fix - C4 on vehicle twilight zone for clients
Fix - Several uncommon physics crashes

Notes for Addon Lua:

Due to the new ropes changes it is no longer possible to create ropes with a length less than the attach distance and this may affect some existing scripts using spawnVehicleRope.
For distances less than 40m you should still be able to pass length 0 to automatically create a rope using the distance between anchors as the length.

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is announcement week, with a new feature planned for release in the minor update next week!

This week we have launched Steam login for our issue tracker. This is something that players have been asking for, ever since we launched our first issue tracker. This is something we continue to work on as we plan to continue and improve our support into the future.

Previously, the issue tracker didn't have a login, and players would just click the "report a bug" or "request a feature" buttons. They would then be asked to approve the creation their support account, where the username and password was just generated. This was super easy for players, but in the situation where you delete your settings file, change Windows user account, or reinstall Windows, your account would be lost.



With Steam sign-in, you don't need a Geometa account, and sign-in is handled by Steam. We don't see your Steam username or password, we only see your Steam account number which is just the number in the address of your public Steam profile webpage. This allows us to hold the least possible info about you, and still provide support.

This means you will be safe from losing access to your issue tracker account in the future. Signing in with Steam will also automatically connect to your existing Geometa issue tracker account so still have your current issues and comments.

This also means you can now login through the website rather than only through the game! We do need PC specs to reliably provide support, so you will need to login through the game for the first time. However, from then on, you can just login through your browser. This is a trial feature as this means that we don't get the info on what version of the game you have. We will see if this works, or if we need that info.



Steam sign-in also has the benefit to us for verifying game ownership! Stormworks piracy remains rare, but there have been occasions where we have spent hours and hours helping players solve their technical issues, only to discover the cause is a dodgy pirate exe file! Yeah, that's pretty frustrating when that happens...

We will continue hard at work on all the upcoming updates, and catch you next week!

Much love
The Stormworks Developers

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is update week, and this is a smaller update that focuses on some bugs and issues. For some players, this isn't that exciting, while for others, some of these issues are critical and will solve some blocking problems.

The next minor update in 2 weeks will have a new feature which we are excited about, and it is something players have been asking for, for a while now.

Please see the patch notes below for the full list of fixes in this weeks update.



More Numbers!

Last week we discussed some stats around Stormworks, and in the comments, many players shared their playtime info! Spending the average 100 hours in game is a lot of hours and an achievement, but there are many players with some very impressive hours! Thank you for all the kind comments too.

On the official Stormworks Discord server, you can apply for the "Stormworker" role once you have 1000 hours. When we first launched this role, we didn't think many would get there, but one or two users would get promoted per week. Now it is several new Stormworkers each day, with a total of almost 1000. The biggest hours count I can remember seeing on someone's profile was around 13,600 hours, and they had a really impressive workshop too.



Talking about Discord, the server now has 10,833,750 messages posted, of which 847,724 include images. The community is very active! While we love checking out the chat on Discord, and browsing the incredible creations in vehicle-showcase channel, it would literally be a full time job to read every message! We do read some, but mostly focus on the issue tracker.

Since launching the new issue tracker around a year and a half ago, 19,503 issues have been posted by players! And on the old tracker, there were many many more. Thank you to all players who have taken the time and effort to post feedback here. This is the fuel that powers our updates. Many of these issues are feature requests, suggestions, and many are duplicates, so don't necessarily reflect unique things to be done. These numbers are mostly Stormworks but around 14% are Carrier Command 2.



This is still a huge amount of feedback to process, and it is really important to us that we consider and react to everything we can. Around 6 months later we launched our internal tools for tracking tasks. So far we have planned 3115 pieces of work (most of which have been implemented and released, but many in progress and testing). These tasks are things we have internally planned to do and are usually a few hours to a few days of work. This gives us a central place to write notes and info about a task, track progress, testing, priority, milestones, and more. It helps our efficiency a lot, and also helps gamify the development in a way :-)

Much love
The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.7.4

Fix - #16528 Diagonal surfaces interfering with surface culling
Fix - #16569 Pistol inventory block weight
Fix - #16755 Allow smoke colour effects when damage/overheating is off
Fix - #16942 Flare gun firing twice
Fix - #9462 Export 3D model crashing due to unsupported character glyphs
Fix - #17455 Mounted welder functionality on servers
Fix - #16146 Persisting issue with spawnVehicleRope not spawning as expected
Rework - #17394 Added Oil trading to arctic refinery and simplified default resource trading script

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is announcement week, with minors last week and next week!

This week we will briefly discuss some numbers around Stormworks!

Something that continues to amaze us is how long players engage with the game. Steam tells us that the average player has spent 100 hours and 32 minutes in game so far. We say 'so far' because this number has been steadily going up over the years and continues to climb as players continue to play. This is an extremely high average play time for a Steam game.



Meanwhile, SteamDB tells us that Stormworks peaks most days at over 3000 players playing at the same time. The "all time" history shows the game has grown in popularity steadily and is probably still growing. This is really unusual, and if you check out graphs for other games, you will mostly see big popularity at launch or big updates, with a steady falloff afterwards.



Having on average 2500 players around the clock means that for every minute that goes by, there is 41.7 hours of total playtime. This is awesome! Game development isn't really a high pressure job, but if you break something, then 41.7 hours of players time is potentially ruined every minute it takes you to come up with a fix. It can be very stressful!

In total, the game has 6500 years of total playtime across all players.



The Stormworks Workshop has now passed 200,000 creations! This in itself is incredible, but when you take the time to look at these creations, it is very striking how much time, skill, effort and patience has gone into each and every one. The Most popular creation has over 90,000 subscribers which means about 1 in 6 players have subscribed!



In terms of development, we are continuing to work on our minor updates, major updates, DLC, new game, and more. We are really excited to share more info soon!

Much love
The Stormworks Developers