Solace Crafting News

To go with the new ocean biome we now have a few fishies, sharkies, and octopi...ies. To go with new creatures we've got new items include fish meat, ink from octopi, and scales from fish.

I had to craft a new form of AI for the aquatic creatures, and improve the spawning system to be able to spawn underwater things not just on the ground, but anywhere between the ground and the surface of the water. I've also cleaned up the swimming animation transitions a bit, but the main swim animation is still based at the feet of the player making the positioning awkward. I'm hoping to improving swimming next and segue from there into combat animations next week.
As has become common of late I'll first be looking to go through bug reports and forum posts at the start of the week. It's not very efficient for me to be bouncing between a lot of different tasks and builds every day if they're not so severe that they can wait for a few days.

v 0.7.3.3 2021.03.19
- Added pike, salmon, octopi, sharks
- Added ink, fish scales, raw fish, cooked fish
- Land animals should no longer be able to wander or chase into water
- Recall and exit scrolls now require ink

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.

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

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

New biome colors and flora have made their way onto beta!









The ocean biome now has a variety of coral and rocks in it. I've realized today that I'm going to need a new type of AI for aquatic creatures as they'll need to move in 3D, so that's my main goal for tomorrow.

Pushed a first wave of this last night, but had some problems with the fog math. The weather math is still a bit of a work in progress, but it's nearly finished. And now my wife is telephoning me from the bedroom because it's way past my bedtime!

v 0.7.3.2 2021.03.18
- Updated the core weather system to a completely random yet highly controlled system
- Added fog and sky colors to the biome/weather management system
- Added coral and rocks to the ocean floors (WIP)
- Fixed a couple problems with fog math in yesterdays 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 did end up pushing an initial patch to beta before the weekend started last week and I was looking to push all of the recent bug fixes from the default/live branch into beta and push another patch out for it today, but there's still a good share of new things I haven't really had a solid look at so I'm going to hold that off for another day. Unrelated to this patch, but I do have the various fog and sky colors working with the new biome system and should be able to patch them in tomorrow.

As for this patch, I've added a few new items, bug fixes, and some quality of life features in response to community requests.

On the alchemy skill tree you can now find recall scrolls and exit scrolls. The recipes for these are planned to include some items I'm hoping to add later this week, so they're pretty easy to make right now, but basically one will send you back to your home solace (which you can set to wherever you like) while an exit scroll will take you out of an encounter, such as a cave or a floating island.
Currently exit scrolls are setup to move you directly to the surface of wherever you are. In other words if you travel 500 meters west through a cave system, an exit scroll will move you up to the surface 500 meters west of the cave entrance. I think I'm going to change this to have it return you to the entrance, and will be looking for input on that tomorrow.

As for quality of life improvements, large rocks that can be found in the desert and the grasslands can now be harvested to the point of destruction. They have a base of 450-550 stone and their tier does scale, though they are incapable of spawning as or rewarding rarities. The main reason for this being to provide the option to remove a rock if it's in a spot that's really impeding your building plans, or if a change in the spawning math has caused on to appear on your front door step, as was the case for some players with recent changes to the beta flora.
Crate boxes will now also award greater storehouse storage capacity based on their rarity to the amounts of 100, 150, 300, 500, and 750 for legendary.

Lots more to come!

v 0.7.2.5 2021.03.16
- Added recall scrolls and exit scrolls as alchemy recipes
- Crate boxes will now provide increased storehouse storage based on rarity (replace at least one to recalculate)
- Large rocks in the desert and grasslands are now harvestable
- Fixed town buildings not building for free in creative
- Fixed storehouse torches being marked as owned by Malkere and locked
- Fixed a couple of rare errors in the building UI
- Fixed globes of water not being able to be stored
- Fixed a problem causing shadows to stutter (already implemented on beta)

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

I was looking to put up a patch today, but spotted some small bugs with it I want to fix and re-export tomorrow morning, so I thought I'd at least post a little bit of a progress report, as I don't like leaving the news empty for this long.



There are two main categories that I've been working on this week:

1. Colors

The biggest addition to color overall is the new biome based post-processing system. This slowly shifts color correction math used by the camera such as saturation and post-exposure based on the biome that you are in. Overall the game world is much more vibrant than it was before. I also plugged weather into this system, doing away with the old 6-7 types of weather, for a completely random system that also now takes into consideration what biome you're in.

Fog and sky, two complex and important sets of colors within this new color correction system I expect to further increase the diversity between biomes, though I am still in process of tweaking properly for each biome.

2. Clutter

I've removed most of the "flat" rather performance heavy trees in the grasslands, and replaced them with several types of trees that are also now much more colorful, giving more of a late summer feel with purples and red, rather than just green every where. To go with the new trees I've added a variety of trunks, mossy rocks, and general "clutter". I've also recently acquired a variety of new flora and fauna for the desert, the mountains, and the ocean as well, now that we have breathing potions in and working.

I don't want to spend too much time working on the ocean biome just yet, I'm more just looking to improve the general variety and color of each of the biomes as best as I can without changing the actual heightmap noise. Messing with the heightmap generation noise would require a "world update" in which all player placed objects have to be re-positioned, which isn't a huge problem, but improving heightmap noise isn't something I'm looking to prioritize right now in any case. More importantly I want to get back to working on player animations once this pass at the current biomes is finished.

The pollen count is steadily rising here in Japan, but so is the temperature, and that's a welcome change coming out of winter! Thank you to everyone posting here and in Discord, and my apologies if it takes a little extra to get to bug reports while I'm in the middle of some of these larger changes sometimes.

Best wishes,
Malkere

Some small fixes for things brought up recently.

Normal (non-simple) armors previously had a minimum of 1.0 armor, which leather and metal were above even at level 0, but cloth gloves are actually only 0.38 armor at level 0. This caused cloth gloves level 1-7 to look like they were all the same, as the number would get bumped up to 1.0 until level 8 when plain cloth (T0 common) gloves rise above that number. So, I lowered the minimum and reduced the armor gain from simple clothing to make cloth armor still much better than simple armor even if only level 0.

I've also moved all of the attributes to a single skill tree per request, and temporarily removed the "soul" category as there is nothing on it yet. There were also two odd problems, cave exit's had switched themselves to entrances, causing them to not take you back to the surface, and the world preview camera was hiding under a disabled object making it not work, both of which have been repaired.

This small patch probably best of all fixes a number of small math errors that could ultimately lead to trees and rocks spawning inside of encounters. This unfortunately will not retroactively re-roll all of the places anyone has already visited and consequently it may still be possible to find encounters with things improperly spawned in them if they are only several kilometers away from somewhere you have previously visited. For all newly generated encounter (towers, caves, etc) they should now be positioning themselves better to prevent other spawns from entering into their space.

I was out of town for the weekend visiting family, but am also now back to work on color, post processing, environment, and animations as my work on "presentation" continues.

v 0.7.2.3 2021.03.02
- Reduced simple armor from 0.5 armor to 0.25
- Reduced minimum non-simple armor values from 1.0 to 0.25 (minimum cloth actually adds up to 0.38
- Moved attributes to a single page
- Fixed being able to place facilities onto procedural structures
- Fixed world creation preview camera
- Fixed cave resources not respawning properly
- Fixed resource respawn rate being doubled
- Fixed cave underground exits not exiting properly
- Fixed large objects being able to intersect spawn radii
- Fixed world encounters (cave/tower/etc) being able to spawn in locations that would prevent other objects from spawning within them (previously rolled/visited world encounters will not auto-reposition themselves, only newly found encounters will no longer have things spawning inside of them)

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