Solace Crafting News

Temperature is a bit of a fussy subject in game design. As I see it the ultimate goal of any game design is: fun! Which is a complicated subject, too easy is no fun, hyper-realistic if often no fun at all, and so on. Temperature systems are usually added for a bit realism and a bit of progression, but usually end up doing one or two things that I don't like:
1. Forcing you to wear certain types of armor
2. Making you swap equipment as you walk around in different biomes
Thinking of how to avoid those two main problems, as I see them, I've come up with a simple yet still "progression" based system of magic underwear!

In this patch there are two levels of temperature for both cold and hot:
Cold 1: Snow biome
Cold 2: Floating Islands
Hot 1: Lava Caves (upper half)
Hot 2: Lava Caves (lower half)

In order to mitigate the effects of hot and cold you need to craft and wear underwear, a new type of equipment. A pair of underwear mitigates both hot and cold. Basic underwear is made with thread, where "rank" 2 underwear is made with silken thread.

This way, it's more of a progression step you only need to clear once or twice (for now) rather than something you need to carry around different versions of for different scenarios. Over time I do plan to add Hot 3 and more, with more advanced underwear to go with them.

This patch also enables the harvesting of Aetherstone in the floating islands with a steel pickaxe, as well as Emberstone which can now be found on the lower islands of lava caves.

There are a couple of know "bugs" I'm hoping to tackle tomorrow with some software updates:
1. Clicking "Male" in the character creator causing a long pause
2. The cursor leaving the game window on Linux

v 0.6.0.4 2019.11.07
- Added underwear for temperature mitigation
- Added a UI Scaling option to the in-game video settings
- Added /resetuiscale as a console command
- Added temperature zones: Cold 1 (snow biome), Cold 2(floating island), Hot 1(upper lava caves), and Hot 2(lower lava caves)
- Added Emberstone to lava caves
- Plugged in the latest crowdin translation files
- Changed solace travel menu tier readouts to round down to the nearest integer
- Enlarged the main interface
- Fixed cave solaces sometimes repositioning themselves incorrectly
- Fixed cave town portals sometimes respawning when returning to them forcing an instant recall
- Fixed Earrings default to silver instead of copper
- Fixed Villages printing as "Town" and towns printing as "Village"
- Fixed a number of material related crafting bugs

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!

Coal mines, limestone quarries, and enchanted stones have been in-game for a while offering special resources that can only be acquired through towns. This patch adds 3 more town encounters: spider nest (just in time for Halloween!), hornet nest, and scale bug nest, each with it's own specific resource. Each encounter is set in a different biome except for limestone and scale bug nests which are both found in the desert/badlands. This is partly because I hope to add biome specific recipes to town crafters in future updates, giving reason to have at least an outpost in each biome. There are no giant spiders or bugs guarding the nests yet, but I think that would be a fair addition in the near future.



Each new nest provides a specific resource: spider silk, hornet wax, and scale resin. These new resources can be used to upgrade thread into silken thread, leather into waxed leather, and lumber into hardened lumber. These are "rank 2" materials that are stronger than normal materials, and will be necessary for the next couple patches of content.

I've setup these new town encounters to not require a town building be built specifically for them. Instead, only the proper harvester needs to be in town and they can then be set to harvest the special resource instead of their normal resource. I think this is simple and cleans up the town buildings list a bit and I will probably do away with the buildings currently required for coal mines, limestone quarries, and enchanted stones.

v 0.6.0.3 2019.10.31
- Added 3 town encounters: Spider Nest, Hornet Next, and Scale Bug Nest
- Town Encounter biome checks upgraded, moving enchanted stones to the snow biome
- Decreased minimum small encounter and resources spawn height fixing swamp spawns

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!

I've pushed 0.6.0.2 to the live branch ahead of schedule to clear up some bugs that were found in 0.5.6.15 before proceeding deeper into 0.6.

The consolidated patch notes are as follows:

- Added a movement key debugger with F5
- Solace storage will now automatically sort the deposit and withdraw list by resource and tier
- Increased building max size from 25 from center to 100 in single-player
- Added Spider Silk, Silken Thread, Hornet Wax, Waxed Leather, Steel, Scale Resin, and Hardened Lumber (WIP)
- Added "Material" property to items and material selection during crafting (WIP)
- Added "Resources" crafting category

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!

I've had 2-3 reports over the years of input problems, not being able to jump or mouse sensitivity changing either when inside or when outside of caves. There's nothing particular in the code that should have either of these effects, but these kinds of things happen when you're playing a game on thousands of different computers. I've added a simple input monitor under the F5 key in hopes it can help me track down the cause of the no jump bug a couple have experienced, as even with their saved games I was not able to reproduce the problem on my computer to try and look closer at it.

Besides that there are a few quality of life improvements and storage fixes with this patch. I intend to patch this live tomorrow and will be patching in new content to the beta tomorrow as well.

v 0.6.0.1 2019.10.29
- Added a movement key debugger with F5
- Added a method to consolidate solace storage slots if they are not already
- Solace storage will now automatically sort the deposit and withdraw list by resource and tier
- Removed owner check for solace teleporting in single player
- Increased building max size from 25 from center to 100 in single-player
- Improved UI performance
- Reduced the default target frame rate to 60 and moved it's application to the company logo screen
- Fixed a bug with solace storage slots
- Fixed luck being able to award supposedly non-existant precious metal rarities
- Fixed coal and other resource ingredients asking for tiered resources
- Fixed a problem with jewelry enchanting slots unique to 0.6.0.0
- Fixed animals including spiders not properly going passive

v 0.6.0.2 2019.10.29
- Fixed a crafting "not enough resources" bug specific to 0.6.0.1

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!

This patch brings a new property to items: "material". "Metal Gauntlets" are now just "Gauntlets" and can be made from either Iron or Steel. New resources to back this system up include Silken Thread, Waxed Leather, Steel, and Hardened Lumber, as well as four new resources to craft them with.

Equipment crafted with these resources provide more armor and do more damage, but more importantly they allow for the gathering of higher "tech" or "rank" resources that require Steel tools. Other "tech" upgrades, primarily temperature mitigation, will be added shortly as well using this system.

This required quite a bit of little changes to turn "metal" into "iron" and "Cloth Gloves" into just "Gloves", etc. However, there are a couple of bugs I found on the current live build, so rather than finish adding the new town encounters and everything to tie this system together I'm hoping to push tomorrow's patch (some more small fixes) live before moving further into 0.6.

v 0.6.0.0 2019.10.25
- Added Spider Silk, Silken Thread, Hornet Wax, Waxed Leather, Steel, Scale Resin, and Hardened Lumber (WIP)
- Added "Material" property to items and material selection during crafting (WIP)
- Added default keybinds for the 3 additional hotbars: shift+#, ctrl+#, and shift+ctrl+#
- Enlarged and reorganized crafting interface
- Added "Resources" crafting category
- Fixed town building recipe unlocks still using "ReaperIV", instead of "Reaper rank 4", etc.
- Fixed some weapon recipes from skill trees showing up on town crafters as learnable recipes
- Fixed the solace storage scrollbar not showing up
- Fixed being able to transfer non-fluids back and forth from fluid containers with the transfer buttons

Known bug: Schematics are not showing their details in the crafting interface properly, though can still be crafted. This will be fixed in the next 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users.

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