Solace Crafting News

There was a very nasty bug over the weekend emptying storage chests and facilities on the beta branch. I'm sorry I wasn't able to login Saturday/Sunday and catch the reports. This patch should stop the bug.

Sorry again for any lost items due to this mistake.

v 0.5.6.3 2019.10.07
- Fixed a bug causing storage chests and facilities to reload as empty

I was out of town for a few days recently for a wedding and never really found a good time to make that clear here on Steam. Sorry for the late replies on the forums. There were a lot of small requests, and I have tried to address most of them in this patch.

The main point of this patch was a bit of behind the scenes work changing town buildings like MinerI and MinerII to just Miner, which then has a rank that can be upgraded from 1 to 2 and so on. Internally this system works a lot better for me as the programmer. While upgrading the systems involved I've expanded the town interface and set the possible town buildings to always all be visible along with more informational descriptions.

Town buildings should update automatically, though as always with beta, making a backup of your world before diving in is recommended, just to be safe.

I have also found a 3D artist for our September Patreon funding to work on some new building pieces that should be ready to be added in shortly! I hope to have monthly Patreon contracts finished before the end of the month, but since September was the first month I had to poke around a bit and sniff out some good places to find talent. For October I'm already talking with some artists about getting some original music in-game. Starting in November I will be opening polls on Patreon to let patrons vote on what should be improved with the contract(s).

v 0.5.6.2 2019.10.04
- Updated town building descriptions
- Town building descriptions will now display even for already constructed buildings
- Town buildings now carry a rank instead of separating between MinerI, MinerII, etc.
- Player direction will now save/load between sessions
- Lowered default starting area height slightly so buildings will snap above the surface
- Changed default "weather collision quality" settings
- Building upgrades UI will now auto-select "Deconstruct" initially
- Jump (default spacebar) can now be used to engage the selected building upgrade (default now Deconstruct)
- Disabled "attack" sounds when harvesting
- Reduced the volume of several area of effect sounds (Stomp, Meteor, Comet, etc.)
- Lava will now deal 20% max health as damage per second instead of insta-kill
- Auto-harvest is now a unique keybind, default Control + F
- Radial Menu is now a unique keybind, default Shift + F
- Fixed saved structure placement not snapping as shown when actually built
- Fixed saved structures saving items in facilities
- Fixed building "select" in caves not working
- Fixed "sliding" down even slight slopes after interacting with a ladder
- Fixed a number of errors when saving structures

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!

Custom town buildings, a feature that was temporarily turned off a while for improvement is now back on. This lets you create your own buildings to summon NPCs into rather than relying on the default plots. This feature is not yet available for all building types as the current method consists of summoning an NPC via the proper facility. Toolsmiths can be summoned from Smithing Stations, Fletchers can be summoned from Woodworking Stations, etc.

In the previous iteration of this feature I was asking players to create a closed structure to house the NPC. This is however rather difficult to program, though it was mostly working, and ultimately just felt too strict. Those requirements have been removed and now all that you need to summon an NPC into a custom structure is a minimum structure size of 2x2x3, a bed, and a summoning circle.



A new crafting item, summoning circles are used to specify where the NPC will spawn. They can even be rotated to control which direction the NPC will be facing. Summoning an NPC will consume the circle and turn the structure into a town building. A single structure cannot be more than one town building at a time.

Using this method I decorated a smithy and summoned an Armorsmith with the bed tucked away in a back room.



I've also expanded and centered the town interface in preparation for more detail and explanation in general for the whole town system. For starters all town buildings are now visible in the town interface instead of only the ones that the current town can actually build. I will probably color code these, but more importantly I want to add much more detailed descriptions about what does what.

v 0.5.6.1 2019.09.21
- Added Summoning Circle for positioning where town NPC will be summoned
- Re-enabled summoning NPCs from crafting and harvesting facilities
- Deconstruct with the deconstruction tool will now refund resources the same as the building interface does
- Fixed a rare problem with town biome checks
- Fixed Siphoner not actually requiring a Magical Siphon
- Fixed being able to deconstruct a solace that a town relies on

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!

Introducing building "free" mode! The default building method is now "locked" with a toggle for "free" available in the building menu:



Locked mode has a lot of benefits that anyone who's gotten used to it knows. You can build almost without looking, building tall walls and long halls without even moving. But it's just that "locked" and definitely detracts from the creative side in builders.

Free mode loses some of those benefits, but gains a whole ton of freedom. You can move and rotate freely on all 3 axis to get building pieces precisely where you want them. An easy to understand example lies in a fishing dock a player tried to create recently. The "wooden post" piece is aligned to the center of a "building area" whereas a dock would generally position it's legs extending downward from the corners. In "free" mode it's now possible to do that and much more.



The current snap settings are as seen above, though "Free" for movement and rotation aren't working as I was initially planning, I'm thinking I will change them to 1cm and 1d (degree) for extreme precision.

I've also been hunting for a 3D modeler to make better use of our Patreon funding, and should have new building pieces patched in in the near future. There are new Patreon goals setup, so please go check it out if you are interested in further supporting development. I'm already talking to some artists about adding original music to the game for next months Patreon spending.

This is definitely the first wave of this new tool and there may be some bugs. I've already found that leaving deconstruction mode (available in the general skills tab, the only way to remove freely placed building pieces) the "aimbox" doesn't clear properly, but it's only cosmetic and can be fixed by opening and closing the building interface. Just to be safe though I would recommend first testing the feature on new structures in case of a catastrophic error which could possibly render a structure unable to save. Just in case.

I have removed all forms of obstruction and attachment checks for "free" building pieces, and that might be best to leave things that way forever. We'll see how the system grows and if/how important that may be to building progression as a profession in the future.

v 0.5.6.0 2019.09.19
- Added building "free" mode
- Changed breath to require you to be slightly higher in water than before

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!

Hotfix v 0.5.5.6 has been pushed to the live branch.

I was hoping to get the latest beta patch with the new building "free" placement/rotation mode out today, but it's not quite ready. Should be up tomorrow though.