Update 47 for cyubeVR is live! The First Survival Update!

Hey everyone, Update 47 for cyubeVR is live!

This is the first "Survival Update" for cyubeVR, adding the health, death, respawn and fall damage mechanics, plus many more great new things, and of course also additional performance optimizations and bugfixes.

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

• Added Health System, Death, and Respawn System
  
• Added Respawn Torches
  
• Added Fall Damage
  
• Improved how the inventory works with regards to the right hand
  
• Gave the Inventory Briefcase a new design, much better looking than before
  
• Added "Crystal Mining Light" that you can put on your head to give off constant light for 10 minutes
  
• Added new setting: "Invincibility"
  
• Added new setting: "Terrain LOD Quality"
  
• Added new setting: "Save AA Performance"
  
• Added new setting: "Night Darkness"
  
• Added new setting: "Image Brightness"
  
• Added two new settings sliders in the settings (gameplay tab) that allow adjusting the bucket angle
  
• Removed "Small Scale Shadows" setting, because they don't cost any performance
  
• Improved handling of loading settings with regards to newly introduced settings
  
• Adjusted how exactly the hand has to grip the controller for the "natural grip" to be detected with index controllers
  
• Added a "Please kill me half" button in the "Stats" tab of the settings
  
• Added additional screenshot (sky castle by alan61333) to the community screenshot showcase in the main menu
  
• Made grass (foliage) generally a bit darker
  
• Increased the amount of smoothing on the inventory "laser pointer" a bit
  
• When hovering over a crystal icon in the crafting recipes overview, it now says "Magic Crystal (any color)"
  
• Added hint text when holding a valid crafted green glowing item in your hand for more than 10 seconds
  
• Added hint text appearing if you try to add an item to your inventory while it's full
  
• Changed the color of the main menu background
  
• Unified font of the text in the main menu
  
• Made sound of torches in hand a bit quieter
  
• Slightly adjusted visuals of the teleport indicator
  
• Improved wording of some tutorial pages
  
• Significant CPU-side performance optimizations, with the most noticeable improvement when very quickly mining a lot of blocks
  
• Significant GPU performance optimizations
  
• Fixed sides of some blocks sometimes looking fully black for a short while when mining with area damage tools
  
• Fixed using gravity gloves on a block item and then not catching it breaking grabbing the item until you did another successful gravity glove grab
  
• Fixed it being possible to enable tool mode or block place mode on right hand while bow is active
  
• Fixed the long-existing bug that wall-mounted torches would sometimes not want to be wall-mounted any more
  
• Fixed deletion of world in main menu sometimes not working correctly
  
• Fixed "progress bars" sometimes being visible below custom blocks in the inventory
  
• Fixed it being possible to "draw another arrow" and trigger the "Quiver" achievement while not having the bow active
  
• Fixed it not being possible to reset "Locomotion Direction" setting to default
  
• Fixed bug that molten pieces of iron/sand sometimes fell through the upper chamber of the furnace
  
• Fixed inventory not opening on left hand if left index finger was detected as fully straight with index controllers
  
• Fixed deleting tool directly from tool quick bar incorrectly deleting different item from the regular item list
  
• Fixed multiple possible crashes
  

If you've played cyubeVR previously, you know that cyubeVR is a very chill and peaceful game, ideal for everyone who enjoys immersing themselves in a beautiful infinite world in VR and being creative. But one of the biggest feature requests from many players has always been to also add "Survival Gameplay" to cyubeVR, to make it possible to play the game in a less peaceful way. So now, the time has come for survival features!

One important note first: If you prefer to play the game without any fear of death, just enable “Invincibility” in the “Gameplay” tab of the settings. Then cyubeVR is same chill and peaceful as always, and you can keep building without having to pay any attention to your health. But by default, "Invincibility" is disabled, so let's talk about what this now means!

On both of your hands, you now see a green "wristband" that indicates your health. With full health, the wristband is fully visible, with less health, it's a less complete circle. Additionally to the wristband on the hands, if you are low on health, you also see a red effect on the edges of your vision that becomes stronger the lower your health is, and you also see blood on your hands. If you are hurt, automatic health regeneration slowly heals you over time.

An important part of survival gameplay is of course "respawn". Every game with health needs some mechanic for that, and cyubeVR now also has one, making use of "Respawn Torches"!

You now start the game with one respawn torch in your inventory. If you load a world you previously played in, you will also see a respawn torch appear in your inventory the next time you load the game (if you have a full inventory, it will appear once you make some free space for it). Respawn torches look very cool, different than all other torches in the game. They're very "magical", and give off a bit of purple light.

If you place a respawn torch in the world, that position will be where you respawn when you die. Without having a respawn torch placed, you will respawn where you originally started the game, which might be far away from where you currently are - so once you found a place where you want to stay, make sure to place a respawn torch there!

You can also craft and place additional respawn torches, using a new recipe you can find now, but placing additional respawn torches deactivates the respawn torches you previously placed. Only one respawn torch can be active at any time. You can activate inactive respawn torches by putting a crystal into them, but that consumes the crystal, so you don't want to switch your respawn point too often. You can also collect a respawn torch again and place it somewhere else, but only if it's either the only respawn torch in the world, or currently not active. If you have multiple respawn torches in the world, and you want to collect the currently active respawn torch, you need to first activate one of the other inactive respawn torches again.

So, what happens when you die? First, you see a very nice looking death animation. All items from your inventory stay where you died, and a blue floating orb appears where you died, with your inventory "floating above it". A very tall death beacon will be visible at your death position, which you can see from very far away, even far outside of your view distance. This death beacon marks your death position, to allow you to easily find your way back to where you died, because nothing would be more frustrating than dying and not finding your way back to get your inventory back. The death beacon will slowly fade away over time, until it disappears after 60 minutes. So don't wait too long if you want to get your inventory back! If you die multiple times in 60 minutes, then multiple death beacons can be visible, and you can identify the most recent one by which one looks the most "powerful" and least "faded away". The items from your inventory stay forever where you died, only the death beacons have a limited lifetime.

Once you walked back to your death position, you can either collect your full inventory by sucking up the blue orb with your bucket, or selectively collecting individual items from your old inventory by dragging and dropping them into your main inventory. If you collect all the items from your old inventory, the blue orb disappears, and the death beacon also disappears.



There's now fall damage! You can take damage, or die, from fall damage. The damage is linearly proportional to the height.

The exact amount of fall damage you take depends on the type of block you fall on. Falling on hard ground like stone is significantly more damaging than falling on soft ground like grass or dirt. The exact values used are these: Falling on hard ground like stone starts causing damage at 4 blocks height, and max damage (death) is reached at 26 blocks height. Falling on soft ground like grass or dirt or sand starts causing damage at 8 blocks height, and max damage is reached at 60 blocks height. Falling on any other blocks starts causing damage at 6 blocks height, and max damage is reached at 40 blocks height.



Previously, opening the inventory would always move the right hand into "laser pointer" mode. This was sometimes a bit confusing for people to understand at first, especially if someone had the inventory opened, looking at the tutorial explaining how to do something with the right hand, but it wouldn't work while looking at the inventory.

Now, the right hand stays in the mode it was in before, even while the inventory is opened, and it's also possible now to select a different mode on the right hand, like the tool mode or block placement mode, while the inventory is opened. The only thing that remains not possible is placing blocks while the inventory is opened, to not accidentally place blocks when using the trigger in the UI.



There's a lot of useful new settings with this update, to allow everyone to customize the game to their liking as much as possible. Here's a list of the new settings and what they do:

"Terrain LOD Quality": Allowing you to adjust how detailed the terrain is further away from you. To save performance, the detail gets reduces after a certain distance. This setting now allows you to increase the visual fidelity of this, at some extra performance cost. There's three options: "Normal", "Ultra", and "INI". Previously, it was possible to adjust this setting in the INI file, using the "ViewDistanceLOD" settings, and there was no way to dynamically adjust it while the game is running. Now, if you set "Terrain LOD Quality" to "INI", your value from the INI will be used, "Normal" is the same default as always (4, 8, 12), and "Ultra" is a higher quality setting for people with good hardware (8, 12, 16).

"Invincibility": Allowing you to choose if you want to have the whole health/death/respawn system enabled, or just play fully peacefully with infinite health.

"Night Darkness": Allowing you to make night more realistically dark if you want to. By default, night is quite bright in cyubeVR. There are two settings now, "Realistic" and "Brighter". The default is still "Brighter", but if you want to, you can now make it "Realistic", which is more immersive, but also more difficult regarding gameplay, as you see less, so it's a lot easier to e.g. accidentally fall into a cave while walking around.

"Image Brightness": Allowing you to affect the overall brightness of the game. You can choose between "Normal", which is the default, and "Darker". This affects very bright blocks the most (e.g. a white block hit by sun light).

"Save AA Performance": This has three options: "Automatic", "Force On", and "Force Off". What this setting does if its enabled is disabling antialiasing (AA) on the edges of the view, so a bit like fixed foveated rendering. This saves some significant GPU performance, and should be unnoticeable in VR, due to the most outside area of the view being outside of sweet spot anyways. It is slightly noticeable on the edges of the desktop mirror window though, so if you record videos or stream the game, you should disable it. Having it enabled saves around 5% GPU performance. This is still a bit experimental, so for now, if you set it to "Default", it's only enabled on Valve Index, and disabled on all other headsets. "Force On" enables it no matter which headset you use, and "Force Off" is doing the opposite.

"Bucket Angle (Roll)" and "Bucket Angle (Pitch)": Allowing you to freely adjust the rotation of the bucket between -180° and +180° on two axis.



You can now put a "mining light" crystal on your head that gives off constant light! This is meant primarily for making the "Blocks mined in 10 minutes" world record in the game more interesting. Did you know recently a new record for this was set? "KroyVR" managed to mine 40822 blocks in cyubeVR in 10 minutes!

If you put a crystal on your head, it will now give off light (matching the color of the crystal) for 10 minutes and 30 seconds. So, exactly the time it probably takes to grab the tools you need, and then do 10 minutes of mining. And then you can mine without having to be in darkness for 10 minutes! After the time is over, the light stops and the crystal disappears, it's not re-usable in this case. But you'll probably accidentally find at least 50 new crystals if you spend 10 minutes mining with dual wielding iron sledgehammers.



As part of every update, I try to also do something that makes "learning" the game easier - it's easy to just focus on the the requests of the "hardcore" players who play cyubeVR for hundreds of hours and know everything in the game perfectly, but it's also important to make sure that new players have a good time when they play the game for the first time! For that, the game now has some "hint texts" that appear if the game thinks the player might not know something and needs some hint. Currently, just in these 3 places:

- If you try to collect an active respawn torch while having multiple respawn torches placed in the world, a hint text will appear telling you to first re-activate one of the other inactive respawn torches

- If you try to add something to your inventory while your inventory is full, a hint text will appear that tells you that your inventory is full

- If you hold a green glowing crafted structure in your hand, or have it lie on the ground, and wait for over 10 seconds without collecting it, a hint text will appear (once), telling you that to finish crafting it, you need to put it into the bucket or drop it behind your shoulder.

With future updates, more of these hint texts will probably be added - if you know anything that you think wasn't clear when you played the game for the first time where you think the game should show some hint text to help, please let me know!



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, highest first):

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

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.





Recently, more new custom blocks were added to the workshop! Let's mention some of them here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2464370400&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2470094670&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2487189515&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2510627809&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2511870284&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2525527486&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2553763821&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2553763998&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2553764147&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2553764580&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2553764677&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2555961525&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2560806427&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2560806550&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2560893774&searchtext=

You can install every one of them with a single button click, and immediately use them for building in the game. Make sure to regularly browse through the Steam Workshop and subscribe to anything you find useful for building in cyubeVR!

If you're interested now in creating your own custom blocks for cyubeVR, here you can find a tutorial about how to create custom blocks for cyubeVR - as long as you are familiar with using any image editing software, it's a really fun and easy process! https://steamcommunity.com/app/619500/discussions/3/1640917625019543783/



As usual, thanks very much to our great beta testers in the official cyubeVR discord who tested this update as part of 24 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 1600 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!