Solace Crafting News

Some bug fixes for the current live version. As there are some changes still in production on the beta branch, these fixes are not quite ready for publishing on beta.

v 0.7.6.5 2021.09.14
- Improved Goblin Dungeon performance
- Fixed harvesting experience not scaling properly across levels
- Fixed tier 0 resources not providing any experience after reaching harvesting level 5
- Fixed seaweed not rewarding stalks
- Fixed rare animal icons remaining on the map after being harvesting
- Fixed "Get seeds" not working properly on plants in chests
- Fixed some non-hide creatures still going rare
- Fixed ice spikes not aligning to the ground on steep hills
- Fixed the meteor explosion not aligning to ground properly
- Fixed area target skills not working in world encounters
- Fixed goblin boss chest loot/interaction
- Fixed goblin boss health bars
- Fixed some goblin specific drops not displaying their names properly on the right-hand floaty indicators

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

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

First and foremost, I really appreciate the support I received from everyone after posting my last video in early August talking about needing to take a break from Solace Crafting. I'm still only four years into running my own personal game studio, and being open and honest about things like that is scary given that I don't yet have a fair sized chunk of profit in my business account, which makes the potential backlash of my actions feel much more potentially dangerous regardless of how necessary they may sometimes be.

This post is again me being honest and open about my current situation, as I don't like to leave our community in the dark as to where am I and what's going on. Having said that, August was hands down the weirdest month I have every lived.

The first week of August I spent working on my second title, Solace Kingdoms. The first several weeks of any project of any notable size are very much focused on just getting the code base set up, initial user interface creation, basic game-play mechanics like camera controls, data structures, and so on. On the weekend after that first week, unfortunately, my wife's mother was diagnosed with late stage cancer. We ended up spending the entirety of the second week at their house, helping them clean, organize, and in general get ready for chemotherapy. My wife and her siblings are very close, and we had a lot of teary discussions late into the evenings. I personally am a very positive minded person, and am looking forward to a full recovery for her mother, but there is nothing scary than the unknown and the feeling of helplessness that often comes with illness.

Every year in mid to late August my high school buddies and I always get together for a guys weekend up in the mountains of western Washington. I already had bought my tickets, and it was agreed that I should continue on with my trip. I wasn't able to attend last year due to the pandemic, but having received both of my vaccinations recently I was ready to see my friends and family for the first time in two years. This is where things got even weirder.

Getting into the US was no problem. I had to pay a hefty fee to get a PCR test confirming that I was not infected before being allowed into the airport, and ticket prices were almost double what they used to be, so I was unable to take a direct flight, instead flying backwards to South Korea before then flying to Seattle. In what universe that translates to a cheaper ticket cost still baffles me, but no big deal. The trip was great. I purposefully did not bring a laptop, though I did borrow one for a day when there was nothing going on, and generally just tried to unwind and spend a lot of time catching up with everyone.

The return flight worked out that I would have a one night layover in South Korea, so I had booked a 1 star hotel just to have somewhere to sleep for the night. Upon landing in South Korea however I was told that if I left the airport I would be required to quarantine for 14 days. I actually had a business meeting setup with a potential investor who was waiting for me outside the airport, but they wouldn't let me out, and they wouldn't let him in. I ended up having to cancel my hotel reservation and stay in a ridiculously overpriced airport hotel, which was located in terminal 2, while my gate was located in terminal 1. For some reason passengers are not allowed to travel between terminals 1 and 2 and I had to have a security guard escort me between the two terminals both to get to my hotel room, and to get back to my gate the next morning.

Landing in Japan the next day, the entire flight was escorted to a long series of folding chairs setup in the corridors of Narita airport. We underwent two hours of questioning, saliva testing, mandatory cell phone quarantine app installation and setup, and a handful of us were separated from the rest of the group. Apparently Washington State was on the "high risk" list, and I ended up waiting several hours along with a variety of other passengers until hotel reservations and a bus could be secured for us. We were being quarantined into hotel rooms for 3 days after which a second saliva test would be conducted to confirm we had not been exposed to Covid-19. One girl that I spoke to was a university student who was now going to be missing her first day of classes, but it seemed that everyone, like me, was taken by surprise.

I'm still banned from public transportation and am now self-quarantining in my house, but in total it was 20 days before I made it back to my own bed. I still receive frequent requests from the apps that were installed on my phone to report my location and sometimes even to respond to an AI operated video call to confirm that I am indeed at my location and not just making someone push a button on my phone.

So, it's been a very relaxing, and a very stressful August full of surprises. I took a couple days to unwind and get back into my normal rhythm, and here I am now updating everyone on the strangeness of it all! I don't not understand why the precautions were taken, but I sure wish it had been made clear to everyone at some point that we would have to go through all of this. On the other hand, everyone that didn't visit a "high risk" area walked straight out of the airport and got on their trains and buses towards their final destinations, so I do question the effectiveness of the whole ordeal, but we're all just trying to do what we think is best. I'm not begrudged or disgruntled, but it was not fun being stuck in a tiny hotel room for 72 hours after nearly 48 hours of transit.

I hope that doesn't leave a sour taste in anyone's head, it is what it is, I just wanted to update everyone on what's going on, and why I don't yet have more development progress ready to show off and talk about.

I wish you all the best, stay safe, and happy gaming.

Hey everyone, sorry it's been a bit quiet on here. Though it frightens me, I want to post this here as well, as I don't want to leave the Steam community in the dark on what I'm doing, what's going on, and so forth. I put together a video to explain what's going on, but it's a bit lengthy:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/54465402

In summary, I'm taking a short break from Solace Crafting development, just to recuperate my ambition and drive that I've been really working into the ground this year to try and finish the last several remaining months I need to complete 1.0. I'm still 100% on board with Solace Crafting, I'm just going to work on a second title that I've wanted to get started for a long time, again, mainly just to step away from SC for a little bit, as four years, every day, behind one screen, in one chair, has really taken it's toll on me these past few months. I just need to recharge my batteries a bit and am looking forward to coming back with renewed vigor. Taking breaks where I'm constantly beating myself up for not working day and night on SC hasn't worked at all! So I'm starting on a second, much "simpler" to developer title I hope to have up here on Steam some day as well!

Frightening because I'm Human, and the internet can be a scary place! But you've all (almost all) always been very supportive of my health and mental health, and again, I don't want to leave anyone worrying about why there hasn't been any patches or updates for a couple weeks.

If you want the full story, please check out the video, and I'd love to hear your input on the subjects it covers.

Best wishes,
Kyle Postlewait
Big Kitty Games

I'm gonna have to keep this short, it's past midnight. I've struggled with this patch a little bit, but it fixes some important bugs with multi-player. Hopefully starting new monster skills tomorrow, I need to check up on the bug tracker and look around a bit first though. We had a four day weekend over here, and now I feel like I'm behind schedule!

This patch is being applied to both live and beta simultaneously.

v 0.7.6.4 2021.07.27
- Fixed several instances of MP data being able to exceed the maximum per packet size

v 0.7.6.3 2021.07.26
- Fixed a flora spawn desync problem in multiplayer when returning to an already visited area
- Fixed not being able to select a structure via an obelisk in MP

Beta:

v 0.7.7.2 2021.07.27
- Fixed several instances of MP data being able to exceed the maximum per packet size

v 0.7.7.1 2021.07.26
- Fixed a flora spawn desync problem in multiplayer when returning to an already visited area
- Fixed not being able to select a structure via an obelisk in MP

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

This patch adds in the last major changes to 0.7, getting in all of the encounters for what I consider to be the minimum necessity for a 1.0 release. They aren't necessarily all finished and polished, but they are in and accessible, some with new monsters.


(The new lava caves)

Currently I'm working on revising loot tables and working out new enchants and other socketables in a more organized system where I'm localizing drops based on the area of difficulty for different locations. To summarize I'm planning progression as:
1 . Open world, above ground encounters, town resources.
2. Caves, goblin dungeons, undead dungeons.
3. Floating islands, lava caves, water caves
4+ TBA

Each level of progression is currently "locked" behind underwear progression, as that is what increases your temperature resistance. Clearing each layer of temperate locked content should reward you access to the resources required to make the next grade of materials required to upgrade your underwear, as well as your equipment and things as well.


(The new vampire lord in, boss of the undead dungeon)

I haven't quite gotten into it yet, but I also want to change the current schematics system, which can pile up quite quickly, to a system of learnable sockets, not unlike the current schematics "word" system. This will allow for higher rarity socket recipes and socket set recipes to drop in more difficult areas.

The focus of 0.8 which I hope to start soon will be focusing almost entirely on combat, skills and attributes (both players and monsters), loot, and difficulty. So getting these new encounters and new monsters in is a nice first step in that direction. For now most of these new monsters don't have abilities, or even sounds for that matter, but hopefully in the coming month or so that will all start to change, and combat will not only be more interesting, but more rewarding as well.

I do still want to uphold my belief that full pieces of equipment dropping from monsters is weird, but I think random sockets dropping once in a while would be a lot of fun, letting you stick them right into your equipment now that they are items instead of equipment bound "enchants".


(the new water caves)

Anyways a lot of work going on. I'm also working on some complicated math for the combat changes ahead of us that ultimately make things in a way much simpler, but are not your standard linear scaling up to 1,000,000+ damage at level 80, or whatever tends to happen with MMORPG expansions. The system I'm working on is really designed to allow play to continue up to level 1000 and beyond, as we've had players reach those levels with the current math and it really just starts to get ridiculous, and does bring in some serious shortcomings... I'll be explaining more about that in depth when we get there.

v 0.7.7.0 2021.07.17
- Added lava caves (lava cave sections will no longer spawn in normal caves)
- Added water caves
- Added undead dungeon
- Added navmesh carving to dungeons props
- Added mummies, skeletons, harpies (to floating islands), and vampire lords
- Added aquastone resource

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