Update 45 for cyubeVR is live! Geckos, Monitor Lizards, new tools, and more!

Hey everyone, Update 45 for cyubeVR is live!

This update adds two amazing new animals to the game, a gecko and a monitor lizard, and also adds two new iron tools, an iron pickaxe and and iron axe! Plus many more smaller additions and improvements.

Let's take a look at the list of changes first, and after that, let's get into more detail for some of the changes, with some more nice screenshots!

• Added a new animal in the desert: Geckos
  
• Added a new animal in the desert: Monitor Lizards
  
• Added a new tool: Iron Pickaxe
  
• Added a new tool: Iron Axe
  
• Added a completely new, better algorithm for the wind animation on trees
  
• Added a new "Bester" quality option for the "Tree Distance Quality"
  
• Increased damage of pickaxes and stick on stone
  
• Added a slider in the settings for adjusting the smooth locomotion speed. Maximum is 50% more than before.
  
• Added ingame setting "Tool Hit Item Smoke"
  
• Reduced chance of rain (it was raining too often)
  
• Added ability for animals to save/load their color variation
  
• Added INI setting HapticFeedback=1, affecting haptic feedback on the controllers
  
• Increased the range before the lowest quality LOD of some trees is visible
  
• Adjusted how the antialiasing treats the flying dandelion particles, and how they're rendered
  
• One significant GPU performance optimization
  
• Improved parameters for the dynamic resolution algorithm
  
• Significantly improved CPU rendering performance in worlds with a lot of active block items and/or open chests
  
• Even more CPU optimizations to the chunk visibility system
  
• Told the game the dates for easter 2021 and 2022
  
• The first screenshot of the 8K screenshot now uses "Best" bloom instead of way stronger bloom
  
• Fixed spawn rotation of animals not being correctly randomized
  
• Fixed animals not walking around any more if you walked around a bit after joining the world
  
• Fixed animals sometimes not saving/loading correctly
  
• Fixed copper axe recipe video looking too bright
  
• Fixed block quickbar fully being filled with torches when starting a new world
  
• Fixed block items potentially being able to start burning when they should not
  
• Fixed performance drop when placing a lot of blocks at once with crystal assisted block placement
  
• Updated engine to latest UE4 version (minor changes)
  
• Updated compiler (MSVC) to latest version
  
• Various other optimizations
  

This update adds two new animals to the game, both roaming around in the desert! Suddenly you're not alone any more in the desert!

Both the Gecko and the Monitor Lizard were made by a community member: Xweert123. Thanks very much to him for that! Both animals were his idea, and he modeled, textured and animated them. Check out his Instagram, Youtube Channel, Sketchfab, Steam and Patreon!

Integrating community-made additions into the game is always possible if they are fitting into the game and are of high enough quality to satisfy the high visual standard of everything in cyubeVR. These two new animals are definitely fitting, and also of very high quality! They look really cool, thanks to both a high detail base mesh, and additional tessellation to make every small detail stand out, like the scales on the lizard and gecko. And, of course, as usual in cyubeVR, very nice high-res 8K textures.

The gecko is a relatively small animal, while the lizard is a relatively large animal. They are both extremely detailed, the gecko is likely the most detailed animal in the game yet.

And did I mention yet that the geckos lick their eyes? If you want to see how they lick their eye, check out this clip from KroyVR on Twitch where he ways playing the beta build of cyubeVR with geckos: https://clips.twitch.tv/ClearAgreeableNarwhalBudBlast-3mo0NNq3OvbJlciC

The monitor lizard also has a nicely animated tongue. If you're close enough that your nose touches it, where you can really admire the 8K textures, maybe the lizard will sniff you back.

One really cool thing about the geckos is that they appear in billions of different color combinations. They all look completely different, even the eye color of every gecko is different! You'll never find two geckos that look the same.

For example, here's a screenshot of different color combinations of geckos @Tino posted in the cyubeVR Discord:



The gecko is small enough that you can carry it around with you in one hand, same like a rabbit. I know you always wanted to have a pet gecko in the game! With the amount of color variations it has, you'll have a lot of fun trying to find the perfect pet gecko to take home with you.

If you have some luck, you actually might even find a gecko that has scales and eyes which glow in the dark!



Previously, only an iron shovel and iron sledgehammer existed. With this update, the whole set of tools is now also available as iron tools.

Same like the iron shovel and sledgehammer, these new iron tools are very, very strong. If you like to build big, you'll love them!

The iron pickaxe is very quick at destroying stone. Quick enough that one hit of it destroys stone. It's still a precision tool though, so it does not make area damage like the sledgehammer does. The iron sledgehammer is the tool to use for quickly clearing big areas, while the iron pickaxe is the tool to use for quickly gathering resources and precision work on builds.

The new iron axe is an axe made out of... wait for it... iron. Now that was a huge surprise, right? Want to hear another surprising thing? The axe is quick at destroying wood! Yes! One hit is enough to destroy a block of wood and convert it to processed wood. And additionally, you even get 5 pieces of processed wood from any wood block when you use the iron axe to process it. So much wood! The iron axe is also still a precision tool, so no area damage.



Trees now use a completely different algorithm for the wind animation on them. This fixes trees doing the visually unpleasing "jumping / flickering" while trees were loading / unloading, and it also slightly improves performance as this new wind algorithm is cheaper to calculate.





A big thanks to everyone supporting the development of cyubeVR on Patreon! I'm working fulltime on cyubeVR, and it's quite hard to make a living purely off of the Steam sales of the game, so any Patreon Supporter is really worth a lot for the continued development of the game. Thanks so much to all the Patreon Supporters (list sorted by total lifetime donation):

Al Raw, Shanya / Sabrina, ChibiArcher, ErrorNull, @B4nH4mm3r on Discord, David O, texhnobees, KroyVR, SkgBlaze, Adrian Sawn, Algiz, Lucas van Leiden, Netshaman, DiamondHunter_, HeyMika, Jackerino, SingingFluffyUK, gunair, WarChi1d

Patreon rewards are being mentioned in the list of patreon supporters in the main menu, getting a special colored name in the official cyubeVR Discord, and physical items like a sticker, mug, or t-shirt with cyubeVR designs.



As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 10 separate beta builds! If you 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 positive 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 1500 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!

You can also follow the Stonebrick Studios account on Twitter.

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

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

Cheers!