Solace Crafting News

Still on beta for a quick safety check, but the "General Store" NPC can now be found randomly in most wild towns. These traders will buy basic resources, and will offer a random assortment of raw resources for sale, including at times uncommon and rare resources. The resources they offer will change and refresh every in-game week.

I also want to add other types of traders that can randomly spawn, including a weaponsmith, an armorsmith, an alchemist, etc. Adding new types and new loot tables is easy enough, once the tech of them and their towns are all working properly.

v 1.0.5.1 2024.03.18
- Added Trader "General Store" to wild towns (random spawn) that will buy and sell basic resource on a weekly (in-game) rotation
- Fixed the ivy shader that seemed to have broken

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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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I've added some life into the non-player characters in the game, as well as added procedural towns to the game world. There's still a lot of work and content I'd like to add on to both towns and NPCs, but this is a nice start.

NPCs will now notice you and others in-game, look at you, and often give a bit of dialogue. I've also added some animation changes to them, so they can randomly play a different animation here and there rather than just standing still all the time, but I do need to add more animations onto their capabilities still.

What I really want is to get them wandering around a bit, but this has its ups, its downs, and its dangers. For example if town NPCs can just wander freely all over the place, you might not know where your fletcher is when you need him/her. We already have it setup that interacting with a town buildings sign-post provides the same services, but there are a number of things like that that I am weighing against one another to figure out the best way to let NPCs move around at least to some degree; especially so for procedural towns.

Procedural towns are a new variable in world generation, so things may shift around a bit, but it would be very unlikely for a town to spawn somewhere you've already been building, for example. For safety still, I will push this to beta first and work some things out before I move it to the live branch.

I've also removed the math that makes enchants decay as players level up. The conversation was basically that a legendary enchant really isn't legendary after you've leveled up a few levels, which isn't a very difficult thing to do when you're actively out searching for resources in the big wild. There's also definitely some drop math regarding some of the components for certain enchants that I am looking into.

So, lots being worked on! Fishing also won the vote for what's next, though I am openly discussing how to best go about that as I'm honestly not much of a fishing fan myself. I have received some great input already though.

v 1.0.5.0 2024.03.11
- Added randomly generated NPC towns
- Added head tracking for friendly NPCs
- Added chat bubbles for friendly NPCs
- Added random animation logic to friendly NPCs
- Removed enchant stats decaying based on player level
- Fixed the near terrain draw distance setting button in the main menu
- Fixed Strong Harvest skills not displaying a hotbar cooldown

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

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

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

I readied this patch yesterday, but wanted to wait until morning to push it as there is one kind of "dangerous" fix within it.

[h3]What happened?[/h3]
Last year I hired a programmer to help improve some of the world generation code that takes up a lot of processing power while players are running around. Unfortunately a bit of timing got messed up where the Noise Manager, which handles biome math, was running its warm-up math before world save data had been properly loaded. This caused all game worlds to be treated as if all of their biome frequency settings were at 1.0 regardless of what players may have changed them to during world creation.

[h3]What's fixed?[/h3]
This patch fixes that, so that the warm-up math is now being executed properly, after the world save data has been loaded. However, if you've been playing with a world save file that had altered biome frequency that were not loading properly, and now they will suddenly start loading properly, there will unfortunately be noticeable differences. If the world you've been playing in did not have altered biome frequencies there should be no change.

[h3]What will change?[/h3]
When biome math changes distant mountains can suddenly turn into swamps, and vice versa. The problem arises when we talk about player placed objects, such as buildings and solaces. They save their position in 3D, which means they know how high or low they are compared to sea level. If suddenly the mountain you had built a base on becomes a swamp, you're going to have those buildings floating high in the sky above the swamp. There is a feature implemented long ago to attempt to repair this kind of behavior by marking all player building for a "height check" making them try to re-attach themselves to the ground when they next spawn, but this can cause problems if they end up on a steep hill for example.

[h3]What can I do?[/h3]
1. If you want to play with a world save file you've been using with altered biome frequencies in spite of the changes but do encounter problems such as floating or sunken buildings, you can load into world, open the console (F1) and use the command /forceworldupdate, and then it will ask for confirmation which you would need to then type /y to.

2. If you want to play with a world save file you've been using with altered biome frequencies, as is, and just reset the biome frequencies to the default settings that the bug was causing them to be treated as, I've added the following console commands to alter biome frequencies within a loaded world save:
/grassbiomefrequency
/swampbiomefrequency
/mountainbiomefrequency
/desertbiomefrequency
/oceanbiomefrequency
These will let you reset your frequencies back to 1.0 if you encounter changes to a world you've been playing on and want to reset the settings to default. If you type any of the commands in once it will show you what the current setting is, and you can alter the current setting with for example:
/grassbiomefrequency 1.0
Please do note that in most cases these commands should never be used =D Once a world is created and the biome math is properly set in motion, as mentioned above, mountains and forests and deserts can all be completely rearranged if the biome math changes. I only added these in to try and help correct any problems that players might run into due to the fixing of the bug.

Again, if you world save file did not have altered biome settings, you should notice no changes to world generation at all.

Having said all that to try and mitigate a headache or two in case anyone runs into this; I'm hoping to get some new stuff up on beta today, so this patch has been hotfixed directly to the default branch.

Thank you for the reports from everyone in Discord and on the bug tracker! Those are the main ways that I figure out when something has gone awry!

Happy Gaming!

v 1.0.4.36 2024.02.26
- Fixed the escape menu blocking input sometimes
- Fixed hold to walk not properly applying to left and right movement
- Fixed journal text growing small instead of large for some non-english languages
- Fixed some enemy debuffs stacking improperly
- Fixed most enemy debuffs actually buffing stats
- Fixed world loading biome math triggering too early, overriding custom settings in many cases

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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

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Had some new bug reports due to the new patch. I had to replace and rewire sooo many components to make things navigable with a controller. This hotfix addresses the more major problems, and I will continue to look into the less serious reports.

Also thought I would mention as this often gets asked when a larger patch goes live, but currently the beta and the default branch are on the same build. Once I'm done hotfixing bugs new content will be added for testing onto the beta branch before moving it to the live build. ːsteamthumbsupː

v 1.0.4.35 2024.02.21
- Fixed server join, host, and server list password input fields not responding to mouse clicks
- Fixed controller support for server join, host, and server list password input fields
- Fixed start menu warnings not self-destructing properly
- Fixed holding RMB no longer letting you move while building

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

In all honesty, I severely underestimated how difficult adding full controller support was going to be. This patch took a long time, and has added much more controller support, including an on-screen-keyboard for character and world name input. There are still a few things missing from being able to really say the game has "full" controller support, meaning for example, it could be played from start to finish on a Steamdeck, but it's much closer to that goal now.

Having said that, I'm going to put down controller support for the next ten days or so to focus on some bug fixing and get some new features in. I started a poll yesterday on Discord asking for input on what players would like to see added in given a few choices. It's pinned in #general so go check that out if you like. The goal here being to add some small but impacting changes in the near future.

There are also a couple of discussion about the current controller support that I have not fully read through and responded to yet, though I hope to make sure I go back and review those before I sit down to finish the last 10%, as I'm really not a controller player myself.

Happy gaming!

The condensed patch notes are as follows:
v 1.0.4.34 2024.02.20
- Added controller support (90% working, some changes pending)
- Added an on-screen keyboard for controller support
- Added enchanting to multi-lingual system
- Changed the start menu version text to explain if an error has occured during startup
- Fixed basic attack and recall not being added to hotbar for new characters
- Fixed first time loading messages and other start menu messages breaking controller navigation
- Fixed single player and creative single player button translations
- Fixed cloth boots translating to cloth helmet
- Fixed inventory hotbar links throwing errors when empty
- Fixed start menu link popups not translating properly
- Fixed start menu current game mode not translating properly
- Fixed the in-game compass 'W' not translating properly
- Fixed the unspent points UI not translating properly
- Fixed the radial menu not translating properly
- Fixed facility names not translating properly when cursor'd over
- Fixed the quit menu not highlighting properly when using a controller
- Fixed Q and E to rotate and R to autorun triggering even when certain windows are open/input fields are focused
- Fixed dragging inventory slots to the hotbar not working
- Fixed certain monster abilities throwing an error
- Fixed recipes unlocked in multiplayer not showing up in the crafting UI immediately
- Fixed the initial loading screen not loading any text where it should say loading in at least English
- Fixed a number of harmless localization errors firing in the recipe details UI
- Fixed starting the game for the first time throwing a harmless localization error
- Fixed a harmless error that could fire from PlayerSkills when starting up
- Fixed an error caused by animal corpses sometimes being improperly added to misc save data

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker