Solace Crafting News

Two-handed weapons are now live!



Along with that the achievements list has grown and a lot of the not yet "plugged in" achievements have been finished and should be working as intended.



I've also added 15 new weapons (such as the katana above) and 2 new shields, most of which are purchasable from town crafters. Some of the may still need a little tweaking as to how they're held, and I will continue looking into things like that, and appreciate all feedback reports, not matter how small they may seem.

Condensed live patch notes:
v 0.8.1.16 2022.07.26
- Plugged in most of the remaining achievements
- Added a customizable key binding for opening the player list
- Revamped potion calculations to work better with new stats systems
- Increased most potion durations from 5min to 10min
- Reduced level difference penalties for potions and enchants
- Reduced maximum level difference penalty for potions and enchants from 0% to 20%
- Added 15 weapons and 2 shields
- Added two-handed melee weapons and animations
- Added dual wielding
- Changed starting professions to award you 2 free points rather than pre-spending them

Full beta patch notes:
v 0.8.1.13 2022.07.22
- Added 15 weapons and 2 shields
- Added two-handed melee weapons and animations
v 0.8.1.14 2022.07.25
- Fixed a bug during loading preventing beta gameplay for some players
v 0.8.1.15 2022.07.25
- Added a customizable key binding for opening the player list
- Revamped potion calculations to work better with new stats systems
- Increased most potion durations from 5min to 10min
- Reduced level difference penalties for potions and enchants
- Reduced maximum level difference penalty for potions and enchants from 0% to 20%
v 0.8.1.16 2022.07.26
- Plugged in most of the remaining achievements
- Finished some unfinished functionality of the achievement interface
- Fixed some achievement interface bugs

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

Introducing dual wielding.



Most one-handed weapons are now equipable in the off-hand as well. I'm hoping to patch in two-handed weapons tomorrow, but that will involve adding not only a whole new set of animations, but also new weapons as well, so no guarantee it'll be tomorrow.

I've posted about it on Patreon, YouTube, and Discord, so I'll sneak it in here as well, but I have officially run out money. A few months ago actually =D which has made it more and more difficult to continue working on Solace Crafting. As is, I'm looking to release the game out of early access at the end of the month, and am working hard to get a last few things in.

Depending on how the release goes I may have to look for a side job to keep things going. Unless the release does quite well, it's also likely that I will be redirecting the majority of my weekly work hours towards a new project as 4.5 years into Solace Crafting there is still quite a lot of early sown bad decisions and old code that will still take a long time and a lot of work just to correct let alone improve upon. It's likely that moving onto the next stage is more intelligent for the longevity of my career, as I do hope to be doing this for the rest of my life and not just sacrificing everything on my first ever product.

Having gotten that out in the open here on Steam, I will continue to maintain and develop Solace Crafting to at least some extent for likely a very long time, meaning that releasing out of early access in no way means that I'm leaving the game as is, but the sad reality is simply that it's not making me enough money to survive and I can't just keep trying to make it better until I've nothing left. It wasn't an easy decision to make, and it continues to eat at me, but I'm still in my 30s (barely =) and have learned a LOT over these ~5 years of development and am looking forward to making other great games with everything that I have learned.

You can heard and read more about this subject (for free) on my Patreon if you like:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/development-july-68824093

v 0.8.1.11 2022.07.20
- Added dual wielding
- Changed starting professions to award you 2 free points rather than pre-spending them
- Stats interface now properly adjusts armor penalties based on armored magic and armored healing skills
- Added a tooltip to the light requirement for summoning NPCs via a summoning circle
- Fixed spell block working even without a shield
- Fixed a number of spelling errors
- Fixed a couple of stamina skills using the wrong icon color
- Fixed resist stat not updating properly in the stats interface
- Fixed farming plots no longer taking on water from rain
- Fixed wilted plants reviving after reloading
- Fixed removing planted trees not always removing them
- Fixed planters not snapping properly
- Fixed arctic wolves always dropping T0 reagents

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.

Join us in Discord!

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

Small caveat, not 100% of the achievements are capable of triggering just yet. 443 new achievements has generated somewhere around 4500 new lines of code. The automatic management, display, saving, etc of all of these achievements are in and working, but there are several "hooks" still missing, such as for the building achievements. There is now a set of achievement for building a structure that contains at least 20 building pieces, however it still needs a hook for when you actually place a new building piece to check the structure size against your current unlocks. Not difficult stuff, but I've been basically typing non-stop for two days and it's my bed time on a Friday night, so I'm going to go ahead and get this stuff up first. The rest of the hooks should be in soon no problem.

There's also a variety of combat achievements and some other things I still want to plug-in as well. I'm always open to suggestions as well.

I've also fixed a couple of annoying things that cropped up recently with flat angles of the terrain, from the perspective of the player camera, erring switching to a flat white color, as well as player resource pools, health, energy, and mana, reloading too quick causing them to drop to 10 at the start of every session.

More to come!
It's been over 38c (100f) here every day of the week so far. Hopefully tomorrows much needed yard-work (real life terraforming + harvesting) goes kind on me.

v 0.8.1.8 2022.07.01
- Added 443 new achievements!
- Fixed a terrain shader error causing near flat normals to draw as white
- Fixed stats recalculating too fast on load causing resource pools to reset to minimum

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

I've built and coded an interface for the new achievements systems.



This will let me add a bunch more achievements for building, combat, crafting, towns, etc.. I'm hoping this gives players some more ideas of the things they can do and conquer in-game that they may not even be aware of!

For safety I will push this to beta first, though expect to be able to push it to live tomorrow without difficulty and am looking into a few other small problems with the recent changes.

v 0.8.1.7 2022.06.27
- Added an achievements interface
- Changed combat math scaling for monster above your damage level from scaling to 0 at +50 to scaling infinitely towards 0
- Fixed some spelling errors
- Fixed an animation error with ranged weapon run left

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.

Join us in Discord!

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

This patch brings the new character models and character creator to the default live branch along with a variety of bug fixes, some performance enhancements, as well as video quality presets in the in-game settings to help players easily adjust performance on their system.

This patch also brings in 82 new in-game achievements. These are an entirely separate system from the Steam Achievements and are intended to help guide new players down the different directions open to players. This is just the first wave of a small variety of things. For example, two of the new achievements are simply "Travel 250 meters" and "Harvest 10 ore". Each of these new achievements awards the player with a small but permanent stat boost. Once there are more achievements in I would like to add an achievements tab to the main interface to let players see what they've unlocked, and other areas of the game the have maybe not yet progressed down.

Up until now Solace Crafting has included very little "hand holding," or player guidance, other than the starting tutorials and the help menu, both of which I do intend to improve, but more than relying on dry tutorial text dumps I would like to shift content towards more organic methods of progression and story.

As always I'm open to ideas and suggestions, so please join us in Discord and get yourself heard!

Happy Steam Summer Sale!

Condensed patch notes v 0.8.0.33 -> 0.8.1.4:
- Added 82 new in-game achievements with small permanent stat rewards
- Added the option to choose a starting archetype, pre-spending your initial skill points and attribute points
- Added starting harvesting and crafting profession choices awarding 2 free starting levels in a players choice
- Changed start screen
- Character names can now include numbers and multiple capital letters
- Started adding some initial story/introduction to the game world
- Reduced the minimum camera height from 180cm to 120cm
- Increased health cap from 5000 to 9990
- Added beard options and beard coloring to male characters
- Character appearances can now be edited post-creation
- Added new models for both male and female characters
- Added face options to the character creator
- Added Low, Medium, and High video quality presets to the in-game video settings

Latest beta patch notes:
v 0.8.1.4 2022.06.25
- Added 82 new in-game achievements with small permanent stat rewards
- Further restricted the "randomize" buttons for more "normal" characters
- Added the option to choose a starting archetype, pre-spending your initial skill points and attribute points
- Added starting harvesting and crafting profession choices awarding 2 free starting levels in a players choice
- Removed "scenes" from character creation
- Changed start screen
- Character names can now include numbers and multiple capital letters
- Started adding some initial story/introduction to the game world
- Reduced the minimum camera height from 180cm to 120cm
- Disabled outdated in-game automatic player mandible morph adjusting
- Increased health cap from 5000 to 9990
- Fixed the stats window still showing HP capped at 2500
- Fixed the health bar growing too big in some cases
- Fixed characters being able to get stuck in the swimming ascend/descend animations after exiting water
- Fixed misspelling of "Missile"

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker