Solace Crafting News

Stealth, Familiar, and other new skills now available =D

Sorry I haven't posted patch notes for the past couple of patches, it's been a little hectic. This post is catching up on three beta patches. 99% of the new Job skills are in and working with this patch with the remaining need for new animations, audio, and visual effects remaining.

Biting off a chunk as large as this is rough on the ol' sanity, but trying to temporarily veer away from the main task at hand for the sake of sanity often ends up just making the main task heavier. We're now quite a fair amount of content behind on the live version compared to beta and that makes working on small patches for the live version more and more difficult. I'm trying to focus on this last bit of content that needs work to bring the live branch up to speed, so I can focus on bugs, performance, and recipes for a while after that.

Dual wielding and two-handed melee weapons likewise have just been something I'm trying to not get too distracted by until I can further check off the actual skills that are being implemented, but those are much less difficult things I know some people are eager for and just wanted to point out that they are high on my todo list.

v 0.8.0.19 2022.02.22
- Added several new animations
- Finished/fixed Stealth, Ambush, Familiar, Cure, and other skills logic/icons/descriptions
- Added poison to several animals
- Fixed wall torches not being awarded to players along with cleared procedural towers

v 0.8.0.18 2022.02.08
- Finished programming most Job skills besides Stealth and Familiar (animations/vfx wip)
- Improved running animations so that weapons/tools do not clip through the player
- Disabled equipped weapon/tool models when in first person
- Fixed water and lava cave surroundings not flattening properly
- Fixed vertical dungeons from being able to spawn chests/monsters on top of hatches
- Fixed crosshair opacity settings not reloading properly
- Fixed water cave basic resources not being harvestable
- Fixed Crasc not being properly lootable
- Fixed Deconstruct skill button not properly dragging to the hotbar
- Fixed a bug causing terrains to improperly despawn after teleporting causing players to fall through the world

v 0.8.0.17 2022.01.29
- Reactives like force field can no longer be resisted/dodged/blocked/parried
- Changed enchants to scale statically providing 75% when > 5 levels above, 50% > 10, 25% > 15, and 0% > 20
- Fixed enchants being able to apply negative effects
- Fixed player dodge/parry/block messages printing in the outgoing area (mid) instead of the incoming area (left)
- Fixed the posibility of reactive damages killing an already dead entity

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! Follow development live on Twitch!

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

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

I've started streaming again, for those with an interest in game development. I'll be streaming from Tuesday through Friday, 9AM-12PM Japan time. It's not the most exciting thing in the world, but it's actually pretty helpful for me to feel forced to talk out loud about what I'm doing, and of course provides a space for direct interaction with players.

I was pretty burned out with the Job skill trees, I've stepped away from them for most of this week. Instead I've been working on improving the new combat math, fixing a variety of errors, and have added several new features to monsters as well.



I've got a couple monsters now making use of projectiles, like the imp pictured above. The first step in this update involved upgrading monsters and animals, which I group together as "entities," to make use of the same stats that players use such as Melee Critical Chance, Strength, Stamina, and so forth. Now that entities are using the same attributes and stats we can properly apply debuffs like reducing armor, attack speed, intelligence, and so on.

To then expand on that I built an "archetype" system for entities so that they can now spawn as different archetypes within their own genus (am I using that correctly?). For example Earth Elementals can now spawn as a Generic (balanced melee), Tank, or RandedDPS archetype. The RangedDPS archetype has increased Str, Agi, and Dex, and throws rocks at players it targets, while the Tank archetype has heavy armor and increase Sta, etc. This opens the doors for all entities to make use of abilities and I hope to add lots of them, like roar debuffs for bears, rhino impales, scorpion poison, harpy screeches, and so on.

Further down this road I would like to add random Traits to champion+ entities creating for example things like an Arcane Scorpion, or an Ethereal Mummy, likely with improved stats, and preferably improved experience and loot. But, we do still have a number of the more complicated Job skills to work on, so lets not get ahead of ourselves.

Best wishes!

v 0.8.0.16 2022.01.28
- Added monster/animal "archetypes," ex: Tank/RangedDPS/MeleeDPS
- Added a monster/animal ability system
- Added abilities to rock elementals, wolves, and imps
- Fixed several errors related to run speed

v 0.8.0.15 2022.01.25
- Added skill names to the majority of skill based attacks printed to the combat chat log
- Reduced the scaling of damage and armor math against differing levels
- Improved block and parry logic
- Finished more Guard and Adventurer skills
- Fixed a projectile specific error
- Fixed a number of critical multipliers being calculated way too high

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! Follow development live on Twitch!

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

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

A few patches have been uploaded to beta over the past couple days addressing some issues with the new stats and combat math, as well as some multi-player specific problems and skill tree improvements.

v 0.8.0.13 2022.01.18
- Removed Recall mana usage
- Balanced unlockable weapon recipes to new math system
- Fixed monoliths not being properly interactable in multi-player
- Fixed planting mushrooms in tilled ground throwing errors
- Fixed problems with mana halving/resetting
- Fixed a player projectile bug

v 0.8.0.12 2022.01.17
- Reset adventuring skill points spent
- Fixed new characters starting out wounded
- Fixed the skills spent indicator bar not scaling properly & moved it into the skill tree scroll rect
- Setup manual positioning of the archetype skill buttons
- Removed level caps on skills
- Fixed and improved indication of level 10 requirement to purchase Job skills
- Finished several more Guard skills

v 0.8.0.10 2022.01.15
- Fixed some skills not attaching to hotbars properly
- Fixed being able to receive negative exp for fighting monsters between 10-20 levels lower than yourself
- Fixed Job skill points not becoming "spent" properly
- Fixed some problems with health/energy/mana stats

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 introduces the first wave of the new Job skill trees. A number of the more complicated skills are not yet functioning and most of the new actions do not yet have new graphics and animations for them yet. This first wave is intended primarily to be able to test the various new functionality that has been added to the the skill tree interface, as well as the damage and costs of the skills themselves. Now that the backend looks to be working as intended I can focus on finishing up the programming of the skills themselves.



Here we see the majority of the Fighter skill tree, one of the eight Job trees now available. I've added borders to the adventuring skills to separate the four different types of skills: Actions, Passives, Upgrades, and Unlocks. Unlocks are automatically awarded and points cannot be spent in them. Actions are the main "abilities" that you drag onto your hotbar and use. Upgrades improve other actions. Passives improve the player in general or under certain circumstances such as granting the ability to riposte a parry or gain back a small amount of mana on a critical spell cast.

The Archetype skill trees were also reworked to better fit with the Job trees and to contain a total of 12 skills per tree intended for use between levels 0 to 10, for a total of 60 possible points spent on an Archetype tree. To unlock a Job tree only 40 points must be spent in it's parent Archetype tree. This progress is shown within Job skill trees.

Each Job tree then has 24 skills for a total of 120 possible points spent, intended primarily to be unlocked between levels 10-30. Once completed this will bring the total amount of skills to 240, for a total of 1,200 skill points, which would require you to reach level 200 to unlock them all. As the majority of them are passive, continuing to level up well beyond level 30 now has a lot of different ways for a player to grow. Once Class skill trees are implemented these numbers will be ever larger.

As I've been largely focused on getting the foundation working properly along with the new player stats math I have not yet written up all of the active skills damage into a well organized spreadsheet for balancing, so some of the skills may seem stronger or weaker than others. These are all just numbers within the system that can easily be balanced as we test things over the next couple weeks. I'm excited to get some new sword animations and magic effects in, but plan to focus on a little bit of balance and just getting everything to trigger properly first.

Please note that as there are a number of changes to this "branch" (beta) that interfere with changes that have recently been implemented into the default "live" branch, there are a couple of fixes that were added into live that are not yet implemented into this beta patch. They will promptly be addressed now that I've been able to get this first patch out I've been very eager to get up, along with an experience bug that's going on that I forgot to address with this patch.

v 0.8.0.9 2022.01.14
- Fixed quest helper content alignment problems
- Fixed a number of broken enchants
- Added 192 new Job skills, some of which are still works in progress

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

Was in kind of a post-holiday funk last week, ended up blundering some unintentional changes into live. I've released a few small patches since then while working on skills on beta, with the patch notes listed below.

I've made a lot of progress on the new skill trees, and am close to an initial patch. The first patch will be lacking in audio and visual improvements, more focused on getting all of the skill mechanics and numbers in and working so that we can actually try them out in combat as there will definitely need to be some balancing of energy/mana costs and damage output. Lot's of interesting cross-builds I can think of that make me grin while programming the new mechanics in =D

v 0.7.8.9 2022.01.11
- Fixed world encounters not flattening their surroundings enough
- Fixed Crasc's reporting as "Entity"
- Fixed town NPC unlocks not always showing the proper ingredient requirement on the right-hand details UI
- Fixed the enchanting recipe details stats and ingredients scrollbars not working when needed
- Fixed being able to manually enter unintended numbers into world settings during world creation

v 0.7.8.8 2022.01.10
- Disabled NPC towns, which were unintentionally added to the live build
- Added "ctrl to snap" to the facility placement instructions
- Fixed the "Construct: Space" instructions to change with keybindings
- Fixed terraforming on multiplayer

v 0.7.8.7 2022.01.07
- Fixed mouse sensitivity setting titles being backwards

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