Solace Crafting News

Introducing the first iteration of the Item Template Editor.



The purpose of this tool is to allow players to create and test new items for use in-game. I'm very much interested in adding player made content into the base game, and would very much like to run something like monthly contests in the future when things are more refined. A little bit of community effort from a big number of people, can end up being way more useful than 20-30 hours put in by myself.



Currently the Item Template Editor is only accessible in Creative mode, via tha I key. Icon selection is not yet working, I haven't fully tested the loot settings yet, there is no way yet to rename a new folder created via the interface, and some small things, but I will continue to fix those and other features. The base ItemTemplates folder can be located under Users/you/AppData/LocalLow/Big Kitty Games/Solace Crafting to rename folders in the mean time, and I definitely want to make folders and files more obviously different from one another.

For a bit more explanation about the long term goal here, this system once refined will allow the creation of items both to be used as ingredients and/or as final products. We will also need an Enchanting Recipe Interface, though enchanting has some changes planned, that I will probably wait to finish before implementing an interface for that, and an upgrade to the building import/export interface. And finally to have a Biome Creation Interface complete with heightmap noise tuning and texture importing. The complete rework of biome creation and management that I am working on will support this well, and allow players (and me) to create and fine tune new biomes, what monsters can spawn there, what encounters can spawn, etc.

Once then connected to Steam Workshop, we will have the first wave of tools to really help make a lot of new content possible. Further tools can be made to create and add new encounters, new clothing textures, and new models as well.

v 0.6.3.1 2020.02.06
- Added Item Template Editor interface to creative mode

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.

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

Creative mode is now an option beneath single player, in which building, enchanting, and crafting are all free. You can also take no damage. The primary reason for creative mode being to play around with building tools and item creation, which is in the works, though this is definitely just the first step. There is no "item menu" as is common in some other games. You start out knowing all recipes, and everything ignores the requested ingredients so you can simply craft and build whatever you like. And you can go ahead and level up and adventure as normal like that if you prefer.

I was able to build a new computer last Friday. My old PC had some parts that were ten years old. I didn't get anything fancy, but it's definitely an upgrade and is compiling and exporting patches noticeably faster! That also means reinstalling everything, which can take quite a while, and I took it as an opportunity to upgrade Unity from 2018.4.12 to 2018.4.16.

As is common when upgrading Unity, after preparing this latest patch I immediately ran into a bug that was causing headless servers to not work at all. It took the greater part of a day from me and a fellow developer to narrow it down and submit a reproduction project to Unity for fixing. Luckily it was something that I can bypass, and it should not be affecting headless servers.

What I've been working on yesterday and today, an item template creation interface, needs a few more hours, and should be ready for testing tomorrow.

v 0.6.3.0 2020.02.05
- Upgraded Unity to 2018.4.16 LTS
- Added Creative mode

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.

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

I've been putting some things off waiting around for this and that the past few weeks, and it's just turned into a big time sink. I'm working on one last attempt at some outsourcing, that looks promising, but ultimately the real power that isn't being tapped into right now is our community.

On the roadmap fishing is next in line, and I already started working on it a bit, but ever since the new year started I've been increasingly turning my head down a new direction. I'm looking to start actively working on creative mode, Steam Workshop support, and an interface in creative mode to allow players to create items, recipes, and so forth. The capability to create new items and recipes already exists, though things have changed a bit since I created the system and needs to be upgraded a bit, and there is no interface yet which will make it a lot easier to work with.

Why? I've always imagined Solace Crafting as a procedural engine simply populated by default with the rules and data that I feed into it internally. I do very much look forward to adding my own main quest lines, class unlocks, unique items, and so forth. However, giving the community the tools to participate in such creative processes and facilitating the sharing and growth of those aspects are what really makes a lot of my favorite games shine.

I'm imagining a number of interfaces during world creation with lists of possible encounters, monsters, biomes, loot, and more, for players to import and export freely, and turn on and off as they see fit. I've mentioned this a bit before both here and on Discord, but the time has come to really start working on it.

Having said all that, this patch improves a variety of multiplayer aspects including an upgrade to the Steamworks wrapper written by Gary Newman from Facepunch, well known as the creators of Rust. This removes the need for a dedicated server to log in to Steam in order to post itself to the server lists, and will make working with Workshop easier once I get there.

Resources will now also attempt to respawn every 7 days. This is also now a world setting that can be changed during world creation or from within using the console.

The shaking experienced beyond 10km for multiplayer clients is also fixed.



27 new building pieces have also been added, though there are still unfortunately some problems with them that I am very aware of. A number of them do not line up properly or have gaps in them when placed next to one another. Models that do not have these problems are still in the works, though the shapes will be the same, so if you can look past the cosmetic issue for a little bit, they will automatically update when they are ready.

Most of the major changes since the last live update are as follows:

- Added loading progress percentages to the start screen and main game transitions
- Max "Cave Resource Density" value changed from 0.8 to 0.5
- Updated Steamworks wrapper
- Fruit trees watered up to the "Mature" stage will now regrow their fruit with or without being watered
- Added 27 new wooden building pieces
- Relaxed building obstruction box checks from 2.9m cubed to 2.6m cubed
- Terraforming is no longer blocked by buildings
- Steel tools now do +5 damage
- Resources will now attempt to respawn 7 days after being harvested
- Added "Resource respawn rate" harvesting to world settings (/resourcerespawnrate in the console)
- Reduced the cost of solace power upgrades
- Reduced max near terrain draw distance to 1024 (an alternative is in the works)

The latest beta patch notes are as follows:

v 0.6.2.15 2020.01.30
- Changed default resource respawn timer from 1 day to 7 days
- Fixed a crafting experience bug

v 0.6.2.14 2020.01.30
- Fixed animal attacks hitting the host instead of the client
- Fixed client skills not working properly past 8km
- Fixed client side monsters/animals teleporting around improperly past 8km

v 0.6.2.13 2020.01.30
- Fixed crafting experience not enough to level a profession up not being applied properly

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

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

The floating point precision fix for multiplayer clients caused some problems that ended up being different for mutliplayer clients and single player clients, so I didn't catch them all at first. This should fix the last of them.

If no other major problems are found with this version I'm planning to push it live, with only the new building pieces turned off, as they are still in need of repair, though a fair number of bugs have been fixed since the last live patch.

Then I will get back to implementing the new world generation system.

v 0.6.2.12 2020.01.23
- Crafting exp will now automatically recalculate itself when your profession level changes due to leveling up from batch crafting
- Fixed storehouse storage/deposit slider not working properly
- Fixed lower tier fonts blocking higher tier fuel sources from being used

v 0.6.2.11 2020.01.23
- Fixed placing objects in single player not accounting properly for world shift

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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users.

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

The past few days I've been working on a custom system to replace the current world generation system. The current 3rd party tool that I use was built for a wide-variety of purposes and has a number of flaws that have caused some known problems from day 1. I don't want to go too much into it yet as it's still a work in progress, but wanted to make it clear that that's going on.

I took some time away from that for this patch which has one rather large change, that seems to be working well. Floating point precision, you may have heard me talk about before, is a problem where 32-bit floating point values (decimal numbers) can only be calculated with 7 digits of precision. That means that at 10,000.00 meters, or 10 kilometers, you can only calculate down to centimeters. At 100 kilometers, you can only calculate down to decimeters, and so on. This causes graphics and physics to fluctuate back and forth in-between the centimeters or decimeters.

This patch does not fix this problem on the server side of things, only on the client side. That is to say it fakes the players position so as to sidestep the graphical problems. On a dedicated server you are still technically 10 or 100+ kilometers away from the start, but often the difference of 10cm versus 11cm on the Physics engine is not super important when you're throwing fireballs. A real fix will someday require that individual pockets of space are managed per player, in order to eliminate the problem server side, but it's quite a headache, and not necessary at the time being. This patch should allow multiplayer play up to around 1000km without any real noticeable problems.

I did also find a pretty nasty navigation bug that was causing monsters and animals to lock or, get stuck, or run in odd directions, that is now fixed.

A friendly team of Japanese gamers also helped me to translate the Steam store page into Japanese, and I spent some time adding the help menu strings to https://crowdin.com/project/solace-crafting along with a few others, and hope to add the tutorials and other missing strings very soon. I have updated the language files to the most recent build for this patch.

Because multilingual support and multiplayer are still works in progress, Solace Crafting is still listed as single player only and in English only on the Steam page. Finishing those two systems up, adding a bit of the polish I've been working on, and incorporating Steam Workshops along with a creative mode and we should have a pretty solid base to start expanding content not just from my imagination, but from our community as well.

v 0.6.2.8 2020.01.21
- Added loading progress percentages to the start screen and main game transitions
- Added a number of strings to the language system
- Updated language files
- Temporarily adjusted some of the new building pieces to line up better
- Fixed a navigation error causing mobs to stand still/not respond
- Fixed the possibility of storage chest data exceeding the network limits
- Fixed client side graphical stuttering at long distances on multiplayer

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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users.

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