Solace Crafting News

15 new pieces of jewelry have been added to go along with the 5 new precious metals: copper, silver, gold, platinum, and iridium.



Jewelry is currently a vessel for enchants. Meaning that they do have inherent stats of their own such as armor or damage. They provide extra enchanting slots to make your character even stronger, and will in the future no doubt have some unique recipes and sets.

Precious metal rarity is different than normal metal rarity. Copper can only be found as common rarity, and cannot be upgraded. Each "rank" after that can then only be found at maximum one rarity higher, so silver can be found up to uncommon, gold to rare, platinum to elite, and iridium all the way up to legendary.

In this patch only copper and silver can be obtained, copper in caves, and silver in swamps. Gold, platinum, and iridium will be added in to higher level content most likely only found beyond a minimum certain distance from the start.

Lot's more to come down this avenue, but I would like to polish up this patch, make sure there are as few bugs as possible with the new biome system, and then push the beta branch to the live branch as NPCs are still turned off on the live branch among other things.

v 0.5.5.3 2019.09.06
- Fixed tanning racks producing thread

v 0.5.5.2 2019.09.05
- Added Copper, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Iridium and their ores (only copper (caves) and silver (swamps) can be found so far)
- Added Earrings, Necklaces, and Rings, for each of the new precious metal types
- Reduced size of silver nodes
- Fixed a bug causing boats to disappear
- Fixed footsteps sounds while driving boats
- Fixed a bug with the new biome manager placing distant objects improperly
- Fixed tower monsters spawning on the ground

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!

Found a rare bug thanks to a report in Discord that I'm not waiting until Monday to fix!

v 0.5.5.1 2019.08.31
- Fixed a rare bug causing player loading to hang

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.

The new biome generation/management system is in and working at last! It hasn't actually been all that many working days, but anything that takes more than a day or two starts to feel like weeks are flying by. There was some pretty rough math, which I do not have a degree in, required for blending multiple layers of biomes together from different directions with different layers of noise to keep things looking natural and so on.

I haven't had any problems updating worlds (other than the unavoidable building repositioning) or starting new games, but this is a big change to the base world generation system, so I would highly recommend starting a new world or backing up any worlds you don't want to risk getting weird if you're playing on the beta, just to be sure.

To reiterate from last week, the big upside to this new system is that an unlimited number of biomes can now be added in over time without them getting all mixed up within one another.

On that note, introducing the new swamp biome!



There are three new resources in the swamp so far, including silver, though they have been simplified to ore, mushrooms, and stalks for this patch until the recipes that make use of them get turned on. I also have at least two new animals that I'll be adding in to the swamp shortly, which will also provide new resources for crafting.

I also upgraded the desert / badlands a bit as it was kind of just a big flat landscape. There are new rocks, water holes (new topography), and circling vultures (though they're just an effect, please don't try to build a giant tower in hopes of shooting them down!).



The new biome system does allow me to specify locations or minimum and/or maximum levels for biomes, so for example the swamp biome could be set to only spawn at levels 10+, but I thought that better reserved for other, later biomes (volcano? enchanted?). The initial four "chunks" that connect to the starting area are being specifically set to grass, ocean, desert, and mountains, to ensure that there is "easy" access to ore and water starting out.

Now I can get back to the new crafting and harvesting updates with a better system for adding new materials into the world.

v 0.5.5.0 2019.08.29
- Added scrolling to the help windows
- Added swamp biome
- Updated world "update" to mark town building for repositioning to the surface in case of changed surface height
- Changed desert biome topography, rocks, and added circling vultures (just an effect, don't try to build a giant tower to catch them)
- Changed biomes to generate in 8x8 chunks with 2km blending somewhere within the 6km of the south and eastern edges
- Changed player projectiles (spells/arrows) to spawn in front of the player instead of the camera, using a vector generated by what the cursor is over
- Changed Squire's Shortsword recipe from a tier 2 to a tier 1 smithing skill
- Fixed text in the crafting stats window interfering with scrolling
- Fixed equipped bow positioning and angle
- Fixed the recurve bow's rotation and harmless warnings
- Fixed enchanted stone showing up just about anywhere

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 hard at work on upgrading the way that biomes are generated and handled.

Our current biomes are ocean, desert, grass, and mountain. The current system randomizes their placement using several different layers of noise placed on top of one another. This works great for a "natural" look as noise can be very random, much like nature. However, this approach also has a variety of problems with it.

1. Noise generally generates a value between 0 and 1, with 0.5 being far more common than 0 or 1. If you use a single noise function to determine your biomes, for example
0.0 - 0.25 = ocean
0.25 - 0.5 = desert
0.5 - 0.75 = grass
0.75 - 1.0 = mountain
This means that ocean will always be proceeded by desert, because you can't jump from 0.5 to 0.25. This creates a rainbow effect that looks unnatural, and you'll also end up with a lot more desert and grass than ocean and desert.

2. The rainbow effect is usually coped with by using two layers of noise, often to create a temperature and humidity map to determine biomes. This still however means that biomes near one another on the temperature/humidity map will always border one another, and you often end up with tiny slivers of biomes in between other biomes due to the random nature of noise.

3. Because of the problems inherent to temperature/humidity maps I've actually been layering completely separate noise functions so that grass is the base, desert overpowers grass, mountains overpower desert, and ocean overpowers mountains. This can however lead to sheer cliffs as mountains try to transition from 3000m high peaks to 800m below sea level, and gets more and more jagged and jumbled as more biomes are added.

Due to my desire to add a wide variety of different biomes over time, I've long wanted a better system. What I've come up with is a flexible system designed to be able to grow with any number of biomes. There was some pretty nasty math involved that ended up eating a few days of my time, but it's all coming together nicely now.



Put simply, I'm assigning each "chunk" (8km) a biome using deterministic white noise. White noise is "random", in that it doesn't travel from 0-1 but jumps to any value sporadically, yet is still rule based, so no generated data needs to be saved other than the main world seed.
As you can see in the picture above, the chunks are still too obvious, and I'm still working on making them less square, but ultimately the system is working and could handle millions of biomes if we had them. The current biomes were also not designed with this system in mind, and will definitely need to be tweaked to better fit into it.



Of course the "chunkiness" is not as obvious from the ground.

Another added benefit to this system is the ability to manually assign biomes should there be a need for it. For starters, I have assigned the nearest four starting "chunks" to 1 each of our current "main" biomes: desert, grass, ocean, and mountain. In the old system it was possible to generate a world without mountains or water for many kilometers. This way we can guarantee certain biomes show up if we want them to, limit them to certain minimum or maximum levels, and so on.



Ultimately the main purpose of this system is to bring more resources into the game. We can now make a volcano biome, an enchanted biome, a haunted biome, a swamp biome, etc. Each with it's own monsters, encounters, and resources. It is my hope that in time this will grow into a robust mod-friendly system.

As world generation is intertwined with almost all in-game systems, I'm working to make sure that everything is working well, that the blending between biomes is not too sharp, and taking some time to update the quality of the biomes themselves before I push a patch to beta. As always though I don't like to let too much time pass without reporting what's going on.

Best wishes!

In preparation for more recipes and resources I have added 15 new equipment slots: jewelry (2 earrings, 1 necklace, and 2 rings), crafting clothes, and harvesting clothes.

Also a requested feature by several players, the player icon on the map now shows what direction you are facing. To coincide with this I've turned on keyboard turning while the map is open so you can realign yourself while the map is open.

I've also added a "defense rating" and "offense rating" to the adventuring stats window. These are rough estimates of what level monster you should be able to handle with your current equipment and stats. This does not take skills into consideration and automatically bases itself off of whatever you primary damage output is (melee/ranged/magic).

v 0.5.4.3 2019.08.16
- Added icons for the recently added crafting skills
- Added defense and offense ratings to adventuring stats
- Added the ability to turn with the keyboard (default Q & E) while the map is open
- Added harvesting clothes, crafting clothes, and jewelry equipment slots
- Added crafting professions stats window
- Changed the player icon on the map to display player direction
- Changed two-handed weapons to apply double the speed reduction from any applicable crafting skills
- Increased minimum armor of non-simple armor to 1
- Fixed enchanted building supplies not forcing the magical essence ingredient to tier 0
- Fixed a lot of new items printing their number instead of name when dropped/picked up
- Fixed the console command /help requiring a space after it
- Fixed crafting speed skills adding speed to equipment instead of reducing it
- Fixed recipe details showing all tool strength types
- Fixed repeatedly clicking on tools increasing their strength and speed

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!