Update 33 for cyubeVR is live! Magic vacuum bucket, magic crystals and more!

Hey everyone, Update 33 for cyubeVR is live!

The old bucket has finally been retired and been replaced with an awesome new magic vacuum bucket! Collecting items became way easier. Also, magic crystals have been added which you can find and charge with either sun or moon light, resulting in different crystal colors. You can attach these crystals to the bucket to make it either attract or push away items with multiple meters range. A vacuum bucket!

There's also more great new features and a lot of bugfixes, so let's take a look at the whole list and then get into more detail for the new magic bucket and crystals and all the other great things!

• Added new magic bucket!
  
• Added crystal blocks
  
• Added magic crystals and mechanics for charging crystals
  
• Added support for animated custom mod blocks
  
• Added player coordinates below the settings in the inventory briefcase
  
• Default bloom setting is now "Medium"
  
• Significantly improved world loading speed
  
• Added "starter chest" next to the player when creating a new world with some items inside
  
• When starting a new world, the player now starts with 10 torches in the inventory
  
• Added support for running the game through DirectX 12
  
• Fixed shovel not working correctly on custom mod blocks
  
• Fixed haptic feedback of shovel
  
• Fixed place tool not being updated when no more of item left in inventory
  
• Fixed placing chests/chairs being possible at invalid locations
  
• Fixed tool selection sometimes not working
  
• Fixed spawned items when destroying mesh objects like chests or chairs
  
• Fixed nuggets being too heavy (moving too slowly) with telekinesis
  
• Fixed image of currently crafted item not being visible correctly on side of bucket
  
• Fixed some blocks not having "pop" sound when being destroyed
  
• Fixed "ghost items" from quick bar being visible as real items in "slide UI" on right controller when using Vive controllers
  
• Fixed visual ghosting on hand
  
• Fixed behavior when attempting to add an item with a stack limit of 1 to an existing slot of that item in the chest
  
• Fixed color of numbers on block items in chests incorrectly switching between black/white
  
• Made sure that bow is always deactivated when inventory is opened
  
• Updated compiler from Visual Studio 2017 to Visual Studio 2019
  
• More performance improvements
  
• Fixed multiple crashes
  

The old bucket has finally been retired, and a new bucket has been added to the game. Yay! This new bucket looks way better than the old one, it's extremely detailed and has nice 8K textures on it. It also has a slot for a magic crystal, nicely integrated into one side of the wood.

By default, the bucket always has a low-pwer short range vacuum effect now with a range of a bit less than a meter, or a few feet. This means the bucket will never not have any magic effect. If you attach a charged blue crystal to the bucket, the bucket has a very strong vacuum effect with many meters range that makes it extremely quick to collect items from all around you - you just need to point the bucket at some items and the items will get attracted by the bucket and automatically added to your inventory!

To attach a crystal to the bucket, you just grab a crystal and drop it into the crystal slot on the side of the bucket. If the crystal is charged, the veins of the bucket will start glowing in the crystal color and the bucket will activate the magic effect that corresponds to the crystal color. A blue crystal will make the bucket suck in items, and a red crystal will make the bucket blow instead of suck. So, you have a vacuum bucket and a leafblower now!





You can now find crystal blocks in caves, and when you break those, you get one magic crystal.

You can charge these magic crystals either by exposing them to sun light, or by exposing them to moon light. Sun light will charge the crystals blue, while moon light will charge the crystals red. For charging them, you just place the crystals somewhere outside. During charging, you see a charging effect that shows you the crystal is actively being charged. The more charge a crystal has, the brighter it becomes.

If you have a fully charged blue crystal outside during night, it will slowly discharge until it's at 0% charge and then it will switch it's color to red and start charging again. If you have a red crystal exposed to sunlight, the same will happen. You need to make sure that you collect your fully charged crystals during the correct time of day, otherwise you might not get the full desired crystal charge color.

Crystals can not be stacked in the inventory. Every crystal has a green bar below the icon that corresponds to the amount of charge in the crystal. Additionally, the exact % of charge remaining in the crystal will be shown at the top in the name of the crystal, e.g. "Magic Crystal (80%)".



The last updated added custom mod blocks that anyone can easily create, add to the game and share through Steam Workshop. If you haven't seen that Update, read more about it here:

https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/619500/announcements/detail/1612771606001087117

After that update was released, one request in our great discord server was to make it possible to add animated blocks, for example for animated water. Support for that has been added now!



Creating animated blocks works same like creating regular custom blocks (which you can read more about here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/619500/discussions/3/1640917625019543783/) with only small differences in how you have to create the texture. If you want to create some great animated mod blocks and share them through Steam Workshop, it's best if you come into our great discord server where we will be happy to assist you with any questions you have :)





If you scroll down in the settings, you can now see your X and Y coordinates in the world. The coordinates are in meters. This should allow you to make sure that you never "get lost" in the world, and that you find your way back to your home no matter how lost you get. You only need to be able to remember the coordinates of your home.



When starting a new world, you now start with 10 torches in the inventory, and additionally a chest is spawned next to the player, with 10 dark processed wood and 10 light processed wood being inside of the chest.

Having the initial torches should makes it way more convenient for a new player to find some coal for building more torches. Torches can be re-used infinitely, so 10 torches are for sure enough to make finding the first coal easier. Having the chest with processed wood inside results in multiple nice things:

1. A new player knows there are chests in the game, and sees and can play around with the great VR mechanics of the chest.
2. A new player knows there is processed wood
3. A new player can easily play around with how placing blocks works, without having to collect some first
4. A new player has something to look at / play with at the spawn, even if using a slow CPU that might cause initial world generation to be slow
5. Every time you come back to that location, you see the chest, so you will always know where you initially spawned in the world



The game now supports running through DirectX 12. To do this, you need to manually launch the game with the additional command line argument -dx12. Testing shows that DirectX 12 does result in slightly worse performance when using Nvidia GPUs though. Results might be different on AMD GPUs, so there DirectX 12 might result in improved performance. DirectX 11 will stay the default for now. DirectX 12 will be required for raytracing support in the future!



As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 17 separate beta builds! If you also want to test new features earlier when they come out in the beta branch, make sure to join the discord and take a look at the #beta-build-patch-notes and #beta-build-discussion channel!

That's all for today! If you like the game, don't forget to tell other people about it and write a review on Steam if you haven't done that already, even if its just a few words. Writing a review and spreading the word is the easiest way you can support the game!
Thanks for caring about the game and as usual, make sure to report all issues you see and give me as much feedback as possible in the official forums or the official discord server, join it before its full ;) We're over 500 people there already, come and join us! If you don't like something about the game, tell me there and I'll try to improve it! I'm available to chat with anyone in discord :)

There's also a cyubeVR subreddit available on Reddit, if you're active on Reddit, make sure to subscribe to it and maybe post some great screenshots there!

Also, don't forget there's an official roadmap with voting features.

Looking forward to hearing what you think about the new update :)

Cheers!