Solace Crafting News

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

I've got a tasty beta patch I've been working on. I was holding off this small fix until I could up that along with it, it's been a few days by now though, and regardless of whether I can get the beta patch up today or not I wanted to get this up first thing today and will post about the changes to beta when they are up.

v 0.7.6.2 2021.07.12
- Fixed an item duplication bug when transferring all to storage chests

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

A couple of bug fixes in this patch. Had a rough week last week, ended up taking a couple days off, so sorry this is coming up a bit slow.

Working on a number of new encounter types to up to beta this week. And as we have a lot of new players, I thought I would go ahead and show my current road map that I'm working on as there are often questions about job and class skill trees, as well as combat in general. Keep in mind these are only the major changes, so things like new recipes, new monsters, building pieces, etc., aren't specifically listed:

Version 0.7 milestones
- Lava Caves
- Undead Dungeons
- Water Caves

Version 0.8 milestones
- Combat (math) rework
- Monster attributes, traits, randomization
- Skill system rework
- Skill tree UI improvements
- Monster Skills
- Jobs and Classes
- Combat animations

Version 0.9 milestones
- Performance optimizations
- Full controller support
- Multi-lingual support finalizations

As you can see I'm hoping to start getting into v 0.8 very soon. There is a long list of secondary and tertiary milestones as well, and certainly a lot of things to do post 1.0, but as I've been mentioning lately, the goal for 2021 is to get out of Early Access with a solid 1.0 release.

Also, please note that these changes have not yet gone live on the public beta branch, as there is a bit more work I want to finish up tomorrow before pushing the latest changes to beta.

v 0.7.6.1 2021.07.05
- Added a loop music setting
- Fixed an error with socketing
- Fixed an error with the "transfer all to container" button
- Fixed an error with rare cacti not spawning as rare
- Fixed an error with non-rare animals becoming rare

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