Solace Crafting News

New encounters and lots of bug fixes in this patch!

Most importantly, in my opinion, I'm glad to finally fix the in-game menu blocking hotbar keys fixed on the live branch. This has been causing frustration for people, when the escape menu, but not an actual window comes open and blocks the use of hotbar keys. This patch for one no longer opens the menu when you escape out of a window, but it will also automatically close if you press a hotkey while there isn't an actual window open.

Some new encounters can also be found throughout the world:



Over time the game has developed a lot of different systems, we're now trying to improve the quality of those systems and add more content to them. These new encounters are considered "small encounters" and can be found scattered throughout the over-world, including two treasure cache types that do not show up on the map.

Besides that and a variety of bug fixes and performance improvements we are well underway with full controller support. We used the start screen and all of the game settings and character and world creation as a good testing point for the coding. Everything is working well there on our end, though not implemented for end users, so work is now underway on the in-game content.

More to come!

Condensed live patch notes:
v 1.0.2.14 - > v 1.0.3.0, 2023.03.07
- Added 4 new small encounters. Goblin totems, Buried Treasure (several varieties), Abandoned Goods, and Imp Rifts.
- Added shrines that can grant temporary buffs
- Upgraded dungeon generation to a wave function collapse method
- Added common room to dungeons with food spawning tables
- Now automatically combining meshes in dungeons to improve performance
- Disabled the menu opening when hitting escape while another window is open
- Now allowing player input to no longed be blocked by the MenuUI unless a window is actually open
- Fixed storehouse not gathering town resources properly
- Fixed several world encounter teleport, entrance/exit bugs
- Fixed town storehouse errors with special resources
- Fixed heals throwing an error when monsters are selected
- Fixed melee skills locking up player movement in some instance
- Fixed basic melee attacks unintentionally using an outdated range check causing blank swings
- Fixed bug causing markers to not disappear after clearing an encounter
- Fixed a null ref error in TargetUI
- Fixed an error when casting buffs on enemies
- Fixed a variety of potion effects and skill/spell effects cast by others not showing up in multiplayer

Latest changes to beta:
v 1.0.3.0 2023.03.07
- Added common Room with food spawning tables
- Refactored, sped up, and added multi-threading to dungeon wave function collapse decorator
- Now allowing player input to no longed be blocked by the MenuUI unless a window is actually open
- Fixed a null ref error in TargetUI
- Fixed an error when casting buffs on enemies
- Fixed shrines serialization and behavior in sp and mp
- Fixed bug causing markers to not disappear after clearing an encounter
- Fixed a variety of potion effects and skill/spell effects cast by others not showing up in multiplayer

v 1.0.2.19 2023.02.18
- Fixed several serialization and data management issues for the new small encounters
- Fixed input being blocked in some cases for MP clients

v 1.0.2.18 2023.02.17
- Fixed storehouse not gathering town resources properly
- Fixed several world encounter teleport, entrance/exit bugs

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

We've been having some hardware difficulties over the past couple weeks slowing things down, my apologies for that. There are still some small bugs to work out in the new dungeon generation methods introduced in this patch, but there is also a number of fixes and upgrades so I wanted to go ahead and push things out as they come.

Most notably the escape button when used to close the main in-game interface was also opening the escape menu in the upper right which blocks movement and action input. This was causing a number of people to think their controls had stopped working, not noticing the menu was open. This has been fixed so that escape will only open the menu when there are no other windows open.

We've also added a number of new small encounters throughout the world. Previously there were only the monoliths with stone elemental guards. Now there are imp rifts, goblin totems, treasure caches, abandoned goods, and shrines, as well as the monoliths. Still some tweaking going on with the spawn rates and overall multiplayer performance of these.

I also wanted to mention that work on full controller support was started a little while ago. I know there were quite a few people that had confused my talking about the "player controller" with controller support. It's been on the todo list forever, and though I'm not a controller player myself, I'm excited to see not only how it is received, but also what kind of new opportunities that may open for us down the road.

v 1.0.2.16 2023.02.15
- Added 4 new small encounters. Goblin totems, Buried Treasure (several varieties), Abandoned Goods, and Imp Rifts.
- Added shrines that can grant temporary buffs
- Fixed new storehouses data not properly transferring to clients in MP
- Fixed a number of MP specific problems with beta 1.0.2.15

v 1.0.2.15 2023.02.08
- Upgraded dungeon generation to a wave function collapse method
- Now automatically combining meshes in dungeons to improve performance
- Disabled the menu opening when hitting escape while another window is open
- Fixed a dungeon trap visual bug
- Fixed town storehouse errors with special resources
- Fixed an error in target acquisition method

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

Had a couple big problems reported I was able to smash. Throwing up a quick hotfix to squash them.

v 1.0.2.14 2023.01.25
- Fixed heals throwing an error when monsters are selected
- Fixed melee skills locking up player movement in some instance
- Fixed basic melee attacks unintentionally using an outdated range check causing blank swings

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

[h2]Regarding recent player controller changes[/h2]
Had some problems with new characters not properly assigning the basic attack to skill slot 1 upon creation, along with no sort of click to engage auto-attack, causing fully understandable frustration for some players. This patch, among other things, fixes the "Basic Attack" skill (found under the general skills tab) not being assigned for new characters, but also adds the ability to simply right-click on targets within range to engage auto-attack. I've also fixed auto-run as well as Q and E for keyboard turning.

The player controller overhaul was a huge undertaking, and I ended up releasing it a bit early causing us to take on some pretty nasty reviews due to the bugs. Hopefully this patch cleans up the majority if not all of the player controller related bugs, but I also take solace in the knowledge that we shouldn't have any hurdles from here on as far reaching as a player controller update is.

[h2]Looking forward[/h2]
I also wanted to share a bit about what we've lined up for the near future:
- A new procedural dungeon generator to improve the current undead and goblin dungeons and make adding new dungeons quick and easy.
- New and revamped small encounters, adding variety to what are currently only the stone elemental guarded monoliths.
- Improved enemy combat AI.
- Monster classes & abilities. This system is already implemented on a few mobs, for example some rock elementals spawn as a ranged class and throw rocks. I have laid out a plan for around 36 new monster abilities, including hero specific area attacks to be implemented to animals and monsters.
- Monster equipment randomization. Some monsters will randomize their equipment when spawned based on their class to increase variety.
- Monster champion & hero damage and health rework.
- Improved loot tables, including adding sockets to global loot.
- Runes. Several new types of sockets attainable as loot. These may also be dropped as recipes using the Masonry profession instead of Enchanting to add more use for stone and Masonry in general.
- Full controller support. Work on this started today and aims to make menus, crafting, hotkeys and all functions within the game possible with a controller.
- Further town capabilities, including resource transferring, trading with currency, and food production.
- Nutrition system & improved cooking. I have planned out a simple yet pretty deep set of systems designed to compliment one another for nutrition and cooking, and have only to implement them into the game. Note that these will only be beneficial, offering a way to further increase a characters performance through their food and drink.
- Fishing.
- NPC towns. The spawning and randomization of these is already mostly implemented, but I want to add more functionality to these NPC towns before we switch them on, such as trading and possibly questing.
- Revising the multi-lingual support. There are a lot of holes in the current multi-lingual system that for the most part simply need to be added into the current, working system, along with some organization to make the game fully multi-lingual.

I also paid for some work on building piece revisions and prepared 9 new textures to expand upon the current wood and stone, but unfortunately the work was very low quality and pretty much unusable. I was hoping to get some of that up for the Base Builder Fest, so ongoing, but they really need to be redone properly. So I've pushed work on that area to the side for the moment, but I will definitely be adding more building textures, and likely the ability to color buildings freely, along with some other building and town building specific upgrades in mind.

There are a number of other things on the back burners, but I don't really want to blab about things that may or may not be scrapped. For the most part, all of the functions mentioned above are things we're actually working on and hope to have ready for testing in the near future!

[h2]How to report bugs[/h2]
I also wanted to real quick mention fast that this is still primarily a solo developer project, massive though it is. I have some paid freelancers working on the things I tell them to, but it is not part of their responsibilities to monitor customer support, and I cannot yet afford hiring someone to manage things like that and social media and marketing and 7-8 other things. It's up to me to find, verify, and organize bug reports, and that can be very time consuming sometimes.

If you do run into something that needs my/our attention, the best way is to either add it to the bug-tracker, linked at the bottom of this and every news post, or to post in the #bug-discussions channel in our Discord server, also linked at the bottom of every post I make.

More important than where though is how. If you run into an error, opening up the console with F1 will show a print out of what caused the error. Often a screenshot of this is enough for me to go straight to the problem and fix it. If you can further provide the following details it often makes fixing the problem much much easier for me:
- What version were you playing
- Did it happen in single-player, or as a multiplayer client, or as a multiplayer host.
- What were you doing and what did you expect to happen
- What happened instead of what you were expecting
And honestly any other details can sometimes provide a massive clue into what happened. It is and always will be in my highest interest to find and repair any and all bugs as soon as I can, but sometimes it takes hours just to figure out what really went wrong. That's the price of such a big project being developed and run by so few people (mostly just me! XD ), but solid bug reports are a serious godsend, and are always very much appreciated.

[h2]Patch notes[/h2]
v 1.0.2.13 2023.01.24
- Enabled right-click to target enemies + engage auto-attack
- Updated a number of tutorial steps
- Improved Blink skill
- Disabled small encounters, monsters, and hostile animals from spawning in the starter area (250m radius by default)
- Fixed autorun immediately cancelling itself
- Fixed Q and E (default keys) not turning the player properly
- Fixed the quest helper not engaging automatically when tracking a quest or starting a new character
- Fixed weather particle generators not initializing collision quality properly
- Fixed several harmless startup errors client side when connecting to a server
- Fixed a multiplayer client specific undead & goblin dungeon bug
- Fixed Charge and Jump Back skills not working with new controller
- Fixed new characters not properly starting with basic attack in skill slot 1

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

Still some bugs I'm hacking away at. My apologies again that these made it through to the live build, there was so much we changed over the last three months, it was really hard to try and catch everything.

One sort of bold change with this patch is that the cursor is now confined to the game window for both windowed clients and for those using multiple monitors. This was a requested feature and should be no different for full screen players/single-monitor players, but if we need it to be an option which method we use I can certainly add that.

There are still some problems with riding in boats, climbing ladders, and getting stuck on joined 45 degree angle slopes, like multiple stairs pieces joined together, and pausing the game sometimes causing the player to get stuck in a dance. Newbery our controller guy is looking into those for me.

I am looking into obelisk damage, ranged attack direction and line of sight, dungeon enter and exit problems, as well as some problems with potions.

v 1.0.2.11 2023.01.10
- Fixed a storehouse bug deleting leftover resources when withdrawing
- Stopped a different harmless storehouse warning from throwing an error
- Improved mouse lock/unlock logic
- Now confining the mouse cursor to the game window for multi-monitor users
- Fixed auto-harvest in multiplayer
- Fixed town resources not harvesting properly
- Added tab target cycling to the key bindings settings

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