Solace Crafting News

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.

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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

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!