Solace Crafting News

I spent the majority of the past two weeks studying up and testing a variety of performance tricks, especially targeting rendering and lighting. I'm still just toying with the different possible improvements, but lighting is by far the biggest destroyer of performance in Solace Crafting right now.

Putting that stuff to the side for a bit, I've added a new type of procedural tower to the world spawns. These new tower ruins have pedestals with glowing light on them that can be looted for a small boost of light, the main currency used for building and upgrading solaces, among other things.

After a discussion on Discord I've also added 3 new world settings along with console commands for them. The true or false commands are:
/showBiomes
/showEncounters
/showResources
These all relate to the way that the map will handle itself. If showbiomes is off biomes (map colors) will only be drawn for areas that you have been to. Likewise, showencounters will only show large and town encounters for areas that you have been to. Showresources will then only show resources within scanner range of areas that you have been to.

Implementing this into multiplayer I decided to make the list of "visited areas" a global list, so any player that visits an area will unlock that map section for everyone else on the server. We'll try it out on beta first and see how things feel before pushing this lot live.

v 0.7.5.8 2021.06.22
- Toned down swamp flora a bit
- Added procedural tower ruins with lootable light sources
- Added three new world settings and console commands: /showBiomes /showEncounters /showResources

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

Some more little fixes for recent changes and multi-player.

I've also added 18 more achievements, Achievements take a fair amount of time to plug-in and make the graphics for them, but I hope to add more and more over time.

This patch also increases the text resolution for the Tier and Amount texts over inventory icons and adds a small outline around them to make them easier to read. Unfortunately it looks like some of them are positioning themselves a little too far to the point that they're bleeding over the top right a little. I'll tweak that in next patch though.

If all seems well, this patch might be good for pushing live. I want to give another look at stalk scaling, and still have some storehouse things I'm looking at.

v 0.7.5.7 2021.06.04
- Added 18 new achievements for upgrading towns, solaces, and ley line teleporters
- Increased inventory item tier and amount text resolution and added a shadow
- Fixed rare trees above water spawning as fruit trees
- Fixed some click to transfer inventory problems with storehouses
- Fixed limestone quarries and enchanted stone not spawning
- Fixed equipping and removing sockets in multi-player

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

Mostly was just bug hunting today, and found some of the problems I was looking for. Along the way I started playing with some things to speed up testing and thankfully came up with some useful new options.

Most of all, the player camera can now be adjusted in two different new ways. The "targeting mode," which is enabled via the tilde key (usually above tab) by default, will now follow the same zoom as the normal chase camera, so you can move it forward and backward to your preference. You can now also adjust the cameras height by holding the left shift key while scrolling the mouse-wheel. I actually find it quite a bit easier to look at in targeting mode with the camera moved up a little bit. These settings will also be saved between sessions so if you were last playing in first person for example, the game will reload in first person.

I also added shift+interact as a sort of quick-loot for monster drops. It will also print out what, if anything, you looted on the right of the screen color coded for rarity.

There were also a number of weird duplication and/or item amounts going negative reports over the past little while here. I believe I've found what was causing them and fixed it. There were also some "out of bounds" errors I've fixed, and a lack of limestone and magical essence that I'm still looking into.

v 0.7.5.6 2021.06.02
- Added the ability to zoom the camera in and out when in targeting mode
- Added the ability to raise and lower the came with shift+mouse wheel
- Added shift+interact to auto-loot monsters
- Camera state and position in regards to player are now saved
- Changed 3 large cacti to trees for rare spawns
- Removal of items changed from displaying on the right as red to using the color rarity of the item
- Fixed a problem with the possible animal lists generated per biome used to spawn rare animal
- Fixed saturation and post-exposure in-game settings not working properly
- Fixed an inventory error causing items to become stacks or negative numbers in some instances
- Fixed a "pickup" option showing for monoliths on the radial menu

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 am happy to participate in Steam's first open-world sale! It's a bit of a loose term for some, and an incomplete story yet when it comes to Solace Crafting, but often new players will ask the question: "What's the furthest someone has gotten?"

Because of Solace Crafting's infinite procedural generation, the game world actually goes out beyond 1,000,000,000 meters. That's one billion meters, or one million kilometers! The Earth for comparison is roughly 40,000km around the equator. So they're definitely not planets we're playing on. In fact that adds up to be over one trillion square kilometers! So don't worry about running out of space to build on the public server I host.

The world actually goes even beyond that, there's no ice shelf at the million kilometer mark, the math just starts to get a little fuzzy, and well, we can tackle that beast some day if we really need to.

With the new map upgrades all of that entirety is previewable and with today's patch to beta, even faster than ever before.



Here we see a section of the map fully zoomed out, so an area of 20x20km. I've got a fully upgraded metal resource scanner placed here at my level 70 base in one of my single player worlds to show the new rare resource generation at work. It ramps up from levels 0 through 30, after which is uses the same math for the rest of the game. You can see there is an uncommon resource per terrain, a rare for roughly every 2x2, and elite for roughly ever 4x4, and a legendary node for every 8x8. Those numbers are generated using noise of course, so it's possible to find them quite near each other, or have a run of a bad luck.



I've also added a new stalk and timber node for underwater resource hunting as well as fixed a couple of bugs that cropped up with the last patch.

Happy gaming!

v 0.7.5.5 2021.05.28
- Rare resources are now spawned 1 per terrain on default settings, resulting in less uncommon resources
- Increased the default spawn rate of rare, elite, and legendary resources
- Added rare stalk and timber nodes to underwater areas
- Fixed resource scanner upgrades in multi-player
- Fixed a ProceduralArea spawning error from last patch

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 made a number of bug fixes, mostly multi-player last week that I never quite got up and ended up holding onto them for the several days that it took me to finalize these bigger changes which revolve around updates to the map.

The short version is that the map can now generate any of the data that it wants to, besides monoliths, without actually generating that entire area to determine what's there.



Previously everything was reliant on the area generation methods firing and determining what all needs to spawn there based on the biome, the height, the level, etc. This meant that resource scanners would only be able to produce map data for areas that you have "loaded" into the game at least once, as the important data would then be written out to disk.

Instead, a standalone system now generates large encounters, town resources, and rare resources, in that order, using a very lightweight series of methods that doesn't require the whole terrains biome data be generated for example. This keeps the map fast, while at the same time awarding other systems access to that data in runtime. The maximum range of a scanner is 20 kilometers (roughly 12.4 miles), which amounts to around 314 square kilometers (121 square miles). Attempting to cover that distance is no longer necessary. Unless of course the scanner picks up what you're looking for, in which case you can now head straight for it.

This meant rewiring a lot of different systems, the map, trees, animals, spawning methods, saving methods, network methods, and so on. I've tested things out a bit myself, but it's always difficult to try and really exhaust all possibles by myself for every change that I make. Hopefully I haven't overlooked anything though.

There is still one problem with multi-player in where the destruction of a rare resources is not yet being reported to client maps, so even though a scanner may pick up a rare resource, if another player beats you to it and it has yet to respawn, it may not actually be there, but will still show up on the map. I will fix that tomorrow, but wanted to get this up for testing first.

v 0.7.5.3 2021.05.26
- Large encounters and town resources can now be seen anywhere on the map (previously was only visited areas)
- Rare resources can now be scanned anywhere on the map (previously was only visited areas)
- Resource scanners now work in MP
- Rare resources and town resources are now generated on a per terrain, deterministic system
- Added tooltips to the encounter and town resource map icons
- Home solaces can now be set in multi-player on a per player basis
- Added a number of safety checks in case someone tries to recall in a world where their home solace has been destroyed or all solaces are locked, etc.
- Fixed spending crafting skill points in MP causing points available to be reduced by twice the amount
- Fixed raw fish not going into campfires
- Fixed the unspent points available ! not managing itself properly in some instances
- Fixed not being able to select a structure via a solace in MP
- Fixed "show hidden" on the solace travel list showing locked and unowned solaces
- Fixed locked and unowned solace showing up on the map

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