Solace Crafting News

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

Introducing beards. Not a huge selection yet, but a few is better than none. There are also new hair styles for both sexes.



I pushed the majority of the new character models to beta a couple night ago, but wanted to clean up some remaining bugs before posting about it. These patches now also allow for character appearances to be edited even after creation from the character select screen. Each character selection slot now has an edit button "looks like a pencil" that will open the character inside of the character creator for editing.

Note: Old characters cannot transfer their "look" to new character. When opening up an old character for editing, they will be converted to the new base model. You can still cancel out of that, or just keep your old look if you prefer. I haven't been able to test every piece of clothing individually, but they should work with either base model.

I've also transferred town NPCs to this model, so you may find that your townfolk have been "rerolled" and now have different appearances.

I've also updated Unity, the terrain shaders, and a few things under the hood, some of which I'm still tweaking a bit.

v 0.8.1.2 2022.06.16
- Added beard options and beard coloring to male characters
- Fixed the Head section in the character creator not sizing properly
- Fixed female bra and/or panties sticking through armor
- Fixed a red subsurface scattering artifact/fog over some of the characters faces
- Fixed backing out of editting a character without saving potentially returning to that character if creating anew afterwards
- Fixed boats not moving after mounting

v 0.8.1.3 2022.06.17
- Fixed male characters going naked

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

I've been hard at work updating the old player models to a better looking base, as well as adjusting the minimum and maximum values of the body morph sliders to make the end results quite a bit less silly.

Here you can see the old faces versus the new faces:



While in these systems I've cleaned up some of the code and also been able to add in different base face selections that aren't actually morph presets, but different base meshes for the face and head, including an Orc and an Elf face:



I have some new hairs in as well, and should be able to get some facial hairs in as well, though I wasn't able to get to that today.

I ran into some Unity related problems last week that really set me back a couple days. At one point I had to wait six minutes every time I changed anything before Unity would become responsive again! It was very frustrating, but I was able to track down and get rid of the problem eventually, with minimal loss.

I hope to finish testing a few of these new options tomorrow not just in the character creator but in-game before pushing the changes to beta. I think it will also be a very good thing if I can add the option to edit a characters appearance even after the initial creation process.

I've also finished some work on weather and things like fog color and cloud types that had been left kind of hanging.

Not all quite ready yet, but I wanted to check in and give a bit of an update.

Join us in Discord!

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

Hey all, hope everyone is well.
It's been a rough few months, I'm barely making enough money to get by, and well, that's pretty demoralizing. I started playing with other projects and thinking I needed to try and get something new and decent out, and quick, with all the skills I've gained over the past 4-5 years. That's of course kind of silly, and after spending some time working on some different projects I realized more clearly that that's just not who I am nor what I want to do. I may have to take up some supplementary work to keep all of this going, but the third option of just releasing as 1.0 early and seeing how it does would honestly be a disservice to the game and everything I've worked on these past years.

So I'm back, working to polish up and integrate on the road to 1.0. For starters this patch introduces a few small performance improvements, as well as one pretty large one that was running very redundant checks, especially when hungry or thirsty. There's still room for improvement, but this patch is already much better with handling passive stats and quickly repeating buffs.

I've also done a fair amount of what is called profiling, where you put an application under the microscope and really watch each piece to see who's slowing things down. While doing this I have identified shadows, grass, and sky rendering to be the three main culprits damaging performance. With this knowledge via actual hard numbers I've implemented Low, Medium, and High video quality preset buttons to the in-game video settings. Each button has a tooltip as well, but will in short primarily tone down grass, shadows, and cloud rendering in those orders. I don't have a super fast machine (hence the poor frame rate of the trailer =o=) but can range from 45-130 fps depending on the settings. There's still very much a number of things to be done for improving performance, and I consider that entire profession a constant work in progress.

I would like to focus on a few different things these next couple weeks, one of which I brought up in Discord and would appreciate more input on.

[h2]Character customization[/h2]
The current system is "neat" in that it allows you to stretch your arms and tummy and things like that, but mostly just ends up with silly characters rather than being some sort of high level customization engine. In short it's really kind of a gimmick, though I've been proud of it's presence as it is something that's not all that easy to do.
My main question being, how would you feel about a less robust, but more performant, likely prettier, character customization system?
This would likely be reduced to things like height, skin color, hair, hair color, some different faces and easily enough things like fangs, horns, etc., though probably nothing fine tune-able like arm size, foot size, etc. Facial features could be a thing without interfering with what would likely be entirely new weapons and armor, but probably not something included in the initial system. I would also likely be able to add a much greater variety of weapons and armor as the current system requires things rigged specifically for it.

[h2]Character controller[/h2]
The current character controller uses a mix on non-root based animations and physics, to the effect of very smooth movement that doesn't necessarily reflect what is actually going on in the animations. I get a lot of reviews that people feel it's "clanky" for example. Personally it's not something that bothers me, but it's clearly something quite a few people notice much more than I do. I am looking into replacing the current controller with a root-based system which means that the animations would actually be driving the movement of the character.

[h2]Standing out[/h2]
A lot of Unity games have kind of a Unity look to them. I've, partially subconsciously, tried to make the game look a bit like reality, likely because that's what I'm used to looking at. I'd like to play around with altering the colors more extremely to create a stronger fantasy feel and to help screenshots stand out further from other games.

So, there's a bit of uncertainty in the near future, with a number of possibilities still up in the air. It's a big project and there's still some things left to do to tie it all together. Hopefully a 1.0 release is received well enough to merit continued work on the game post-1.0. Thank you as always to everyone that has supported the game thus far, and my apologies development has been slowing down as the months add up.

v 0.8.1.0 2022.06.06
- Fixed some performance issues, several primarily related hunger and thirst
- Added Low, Medium, and High video quality presets to the in-game video settings

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

The last few patches have gone onto beta for testing, so I've kept their posts to Discord. Discord has been very busy of late with lots of extremely helpful bug reports and QoL suggestions. With my hands full I have not gone through the Steam discussion boards for a few days, sorry if I've left anyone hanging on there. I will try and go through those tomorrow.

One of the biggest changes is the complete restriction of anything hostile spawning within the first 250m, generally the grassy circle on the map that players start out in. The aim being to give players enough room to find the basic resources (passive animals are still available for skinning for example) they need to gear up and get ready to move out.

I'm well aware that I can just outrun anything that attacks me at the start, and I know what everything looks like, and exactly what I need to get a new character on their feet, so it's often difficult for me to know how to properly give enough information to new players without pulling their hand too hard. I've also changed the wording on a few of the tutorials as some players have expressed difficulty in understanding some of the initial steps.

It still looks like there will be another beta patch or two before I move onto looking into some performance improvements, but this patch should be a good candidate for pushing to the live branch.

The current changes on beta are:

v 0.8.0.32 2022.05.03
- Added Main hand melee speed reduction, Off hand melee speed reduction, ranged speed reduction, and magic speed reduction stats. Each point provides a 1% speed reduction to appropriate weapons, up to a maximum of 50%
- Updated weapon speed upgrading passive skills to use the new stats
- Added skill tree specific cooldown reduction stats, currently only used by the archetype specific enchants
- Increased jewelry recipe ingot use by 1
- Fixed Obsidian Golems not showing up properly in multi-player
- Fixed Siphoners gathering regardless of Enchanted Stone presence
- Fixed containers (bags and watering cans) not properly storing their material
- Fixed Tabula Rasa potion not resetting job skill points
- Fixed empty hand damage scaling upward with level

v 0.8.0.31 2022.05.02
- Reverted to the previous stalk model
- Added resources and facilities to navmesh generation calculations
- Restricted monster and aggressive animals from spawning within the "starter area" 250m radius
- Stopped the "Strong Hit" skills from triggering on vegetables and herbs
- Enabled the game instance to be visible in the background if you alt-tab away from windowed or windowed full-screen mode
- Tweaked the storage chest size to not slightly overlap when placed next to each other using snap
- Fixed the Hallowed Ground skill
- Fixed a rare multi-player structure update bug
- Fixed a number of skill spelling and description errors
- Temporarily fixed ranged speed skill, pending a better solution

v 0.8.0.30 2022.04.29
- Increased the collider size on most herbs and vegetables
- Increased stalk size
- Moved stalk closer to ground to prevent the appearance of floating
- Increased stalk spawn rate in grasslands
- Added material names to bag, backpack, and storage chest titles
- Added slot count to bag descriptions
- Fixed familiars throwing an error if their target dies while casting
- Fixed a number of skills not properly using damage levels

v 0.8.0.29 2022.04.28
- Enabled keyboard turning while in aim view
- Enabled view cam (unlocked) while in aim view
- Disabled towns that were spawning unintentionally
- Fixed a harmless archer run animation event error
- Fixed a burn/targeted aoe error
- Fixed players appearing naked in multi-player sometimes
- Fixed an error when remove death markers from the map
- Fixed a chain lightning MP error
- Fixed a rare AqauticAI error
- Fixed a rare MonsterAI error
- Fixed a rare projectile error

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