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Now Live - v 0.7.8.0

Now pushing all of the recent changes from beta onto the default live branch!

We've got two new locations, 11 new monsters, 21 new items, and 31 new enchants.



This finishes up the 0.7 branch and I'll be starting tomorrow on 0.8 which is primarily focused on combat, player skills, monster abilities, as well as an in-depth overhaul of combat math. I thought I'd go over the planned changes a bit and offer a chance here for input, though I do encourage you join our Discord server and post in the #ideas-discussion channel.

[h2]Player Skills[/h2]
The current skill trees in-game are the four main Archetypes. Each Archetype is planned to branch off into two different Jobs at a minimum level of 10, with each job then branching into 2 different classes at a minimum level of 30, like so:

Squire
- Guardian
- - Knight
- - Paladin (*Priest)
- Fighter
- - Warrior
- - Duelist (*Adventurer)

Scout
- Adventurer
- - Rogue
- - Bard (*Magician)
- Archer
- - Marksman
- - Ranger (*Spiritualist)

Apprentice
- Magician
- - Summoner
- - Enchanter (*Archer)
- Scholar
- - Wizard
- - Spellsword (*Fighter)

Disciple
- Spritualist
- - Shaman
- - Druid (*Scholar)
- Priest
- - Cleric
- - Monk (*Guard)

The Classes listed with a starred job next to them are hybrid classes that require a certain amount of points to be added into a different skill tree before they can be unlocked. For example Paladin needs:
1. 40 points spent in the Squire tree and player level 10 to unlock Guardian/Fighter
2. 80 points spent in the Guardian tree and player level 30 to unlock Knight/Paladin
3. 40 points spent in the Disciple tree to unlock Spritualist/Priest
4. 20 points spent in the Priest tree
Bear in mind that a player gets 6 skill points per level, so at level 29 (counting level 0), you've earned 180 points, making 40+80+40+20 the exact amount you need to start spending skills in the Paladin tree at level 30, if that's what you're aiming to do. At least that's my plan. And if you were wondering you'd need to reach level 520 to fully unlock all of the skills.

Due to the infinite procedural nature of Solace Crafting the current iteration of skills allows for infinite skill point spending. The problems with this are numerous and I do not intend to uphold this system with the coming changes. I am still considering adding a certain type of passive skill at the end of each Class tree that would allow for the continual improvement of a skill tree. For example if a player wanted to remain a "pure" Wizard, not spending points outside of the Wizard trees, but had already spent every skill point possible in the Apprentice, Scholar, and Wizard skill trees, they would keep earning skill points as they level but not have anywhere to spend them. Having a general "Wizard Power" sort of uncapped general magic damage buff skill at the end of the tree would let a player remain "pure," but there is some math I need to finish up before I can really decide if that's a fair way to approach things. Ultimately the goal is always fun more than it is realistic/fair, so we'll see.

[h2]Combat Math & Attribues[/h2]
Similar to what I was talking about above, the current attribute and combat math systems increasingly scale up to numbers and methods that slowly fall apart.
For example, if a level 1 sword does 4-6 damage, then you craft a way better level 1 sword and you're doing 14-17 damage, the change is drastic and obvious. But at level 50 that looks more like 400-600 upgrading into 410-623, and you hardly notice the difference.
This is true for all statistics, not just damage. The general way around it is to just use bigger and bigger numbers, scaling exponentially rather than linearly so the changes look bigger and bigger, and you quickly get into doing 1,000,000 damage and monsters have a billion hit points, and so on. Add that to the fact the we have had players go above level 1000, and the math actually starts to go beyond what 32-bit numbers are capable of. Switching all of the math to 64-bit would of course "work," but again we're talking about monsters with hundreds of billions of hit points, and I really just think that's silly and much more difficult to understand than what it could be.

I've designed and am propsing a new approach. As it is new it will be different than what people are used to, and I'm sure for a lot of people it will seem a bit confusing at first, but ultimately I think it will actually be easier to understand and make combat math make a lot more sense regardless of what level you are.
Put simply all numbers will carry a "level" with them, instead of an arbitrary hard value. These levels will then be weighed against whatever counterpart they're being used against to determine final results. In short, a one-handed weapon will always deal 100 damage to it's target,

Beta v 0.7.7.8

This patch fixes up some problems with the newer cave systems, the lava caves and the water caves, as well as the way the temperature system works. It used to be a contact based system where getting too close to the lava in lava caves, which were rares caves in normal systems, would trigger "hot 2". Now, lava caves are their own separate system and will no longer spawn in normal cave systems, and all encounters will incur a temperature change as soon as they are entered.

Currently there are two level of temperature, hot/cold 1, and hot/cold 2.
Caves, Goblin Dungeons, and Undead Dungeons are all cold 1. At hot/cold 1, all regeneration pools stop, meaning you will no longer regenerate health, energy, nor mana over time. Temperature effects are mitigated by wearing underwear. Hot/cold 1 require only normal underwear.
Floating Islands, Water Caves, and Lava Caves are hot/cold 2, and require silkenthread underwear to survive in. Hot/cold levels 2 and higher (though 2 is currently the maximum) will not only stop regeneration, but will also incur 3% maximum health damage every 2.5s.
Temperature changes will also now show a "effect" being applied in the upper right, as well as give a warning on the right such as: "You are freezing cold!" when you first enter the zone. I'm going to add an indicator, like a mouseover, when you start walking into the entrance to an encounter to show something like "Warning, temperature level: Hot 2," as well, but wasn't able to get that in today.

As talks of perhaps outside help being brought in move forward, I have developed a couple of test scenes this week. One is for cycling through and checking animal and monster animations and sounds. The other is for spawning encounters in which I can change their seed and spawn another one over and over to make sure that everything is generating properly.

I've also fixed a couple of unintended mistakes that combined to create a weird scenario wherein after harvesting a rare animal, leaving the area, then returning, the animal would appear to have respawned, it's sparklies visible from far away, once you got within 150m of it, triggering it's AI to switch on, it would realize that it should not have yet respawned and would disappear. This was a source of frustration for players chasing sparklies at night, only to watch them poof once they got closer. Hopefully this accounts for 100% of these experiences and we won't be seeing that anymore.

I've also improved the town interface a bit to make the costs of town buildings a bit easier to understand, and to have the interface show how much you have in your inventory and to grey out rows of ingredients that you are not carrying, etc.

PS: If this patch goes well, probably with some small fixes over the weekend, I'd like to push this live at the start of next week.

v 0.7.7.8 2021.10.08
- Changed temperature to change immediately when entering or leaving an encounter
- Changed the way town building required resources are displayed to show amount available
- Storehouse now costs Lumber instead of Timber to make
- Fixed Crasc AI
- Fixed Fire and Water elementals not spawning
- Fixed water cave water positioning problems
- Fixed the map solace toggle not working
- Fixed lava and water caves not toggling with large encounters on the map
- Fixed an animal AI problem that could cause rare animals to respawn too early, then disappear when approached

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.

Join us in Discord!

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

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

Beta v 0.7.7.7

Today's patch cleans up a few loose edges brought about by recent patches include new icons for the new enchants, but more importantly I've added a feature that lets you "use any acceptable" resources when paying for something. Currently this is only implemented with recipe unlocking, but I think it should be available wherever resources are used.



The picture above is showing that the Enchanter wants 1x T0 Common Amethyst and 1x T0 Common Sapphire to teach me the recipe I've selected, but that I have (0) of them. Now, if I opt to "Use any acceptable resources," it will look through my inventory and find the cheapest match(es) it can find. In other words, they must be the same kind of item, and at least or better the same tier and rarity. In this case I have (10) T5 Uncommon Sapphire and Amethyst on me, so it is going to use 1x of each of them if I click learn.

This does not yet search through bags, though I will set it up to also be able to do that as well.

I've also added a couple of new commands, for dedicated servers. If you've ever opened the servercfg.dat file, you may have noticed these lines:

"allowAdmin": false,
"adminPassword": "password",
"allowModerator": false,
"moderatorPassword": "password",

By default, admins and moderator are turned off, but they can now be turned on and a password can be saved in the config file. Currently the moderator role does not have any abilities, but I assume in the future it will be nice to have a less powerful role that can for example maybe only mute, or maybe kick players from a server when necessary, both of which are also currently not available actions, but they will most certainly need to be implemented at some point. The admin role has full access to all console commands and should not be given to anyone you don't trust.

Two common admin commands that I've used are:

/admin mypassword /forcesave
and
/admin mypassword /serverbroadcast some message

These commands are issued in-game from a client connected to the server. There is also a windows-only command prompt script provided publicly by Facepunch, the creators of Rust, though I have been reluctant to implement it as I've always hosted my dedicated servers on Linux. At some point I will very likely implement that as well, which would allow anyone with access to the actual server itself to simply type commands into the console without having to log on as a client.

Another tweak I added to this patch is a slight smoothing to mouse movement. It's practically unnoticeable during normal game play, but when there is a lag spike, such as an auto-save, it now greatly reduces the "spin" that these uncommon but extra long frames can cause. Ultimately improving performance and finishing the multi-threading of the save methods will reduce if not eliminate entirely the majority of such lag spikes.
I was not able to notice the smoothing during normal game play, but I know some people are much more sensitive to those kinds of things than I am. If there is a need to I will make the amount of smoothing available as an in-game setting.

PS: I had a mild fever off and on for the past 4 days, and still have a nasty cough, but am feeling much better today. I was hoping to get this up last week along with a few other things, so I've got some catch up to do this week!


v 0.7.7.7 2021.10.05
- Added /admin password & /moderator password commands
- Added smoothing to camera mouse movement reducing the "spin" from lag spikes
- Added icons for the new enchants
- Added "Use any acceptable" button to recipe unlocks
- Improved the town crafter recipe unlock interface
- Fixed the icons for the updated claw, nail, fang, and horn resources
- Improved the performance of a lot of building pieces

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.

Join us in Discord!

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

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

Beta v 0.7.7.6 - New items & enchants

Yesterday I patched in 21 new items, consolidated a number of overly specific drops into more generic forms, and removed a couple of unused drops that have been lingering around for a while. Most of the new drops come directly from the now six types of world encounters: Caves, Goblin Dungeons, Undead Dungeons, Lava Caves, Water Caves, and Floating Islands. Each encounter has two unique monsters along with a unique "boss" or rare monster.



It also introduced a new material "Mirrenium," which has thread, leather, metal, lumber, and stone versions. The recipes for these are a little special and so a little off right now, I should be able to fix that up tomorrow though.

This patch introduces 31 new enchants, all available for purchase on the Enchanter, one of the highest tier town buildings. I still want to improve the current interface used for unlocking things from townspeople, and the new enchants do not yet today have icons to represent them. It's getting late though and I wanted to get this up as is, and can definitely get in icons for the new enchants tomorrow.

I also want to change the current unlock costs that exist in a number of different spots where they may for example ask for a "T1 diamond," which is frustrating when you've got a bucket full of T5 diamonds, but no T1 diamonds. I think it's fair to just have the costs be something like "T1+" meaning anything at least T1 or better, but I also don't want to have such systems automatically eat up whatever is in your inventory. For example if you only have a T10 Legendary Diamond in a bag in your inventory, it would be a waste to use that to pay for a T1 Uncommon Diamond cost. I want to try some different methods, but might just end up adding a "pay with anything" check box that will try to find the lowest quality yet still acceptable method of payment.

I wanted to also point out that the math for all of the sockets and pretty much everything in game are going to be reworked shortly when we move on to version 0.8. There are currently some stats in these new enchants, such as minion damage, that are not actually beneficial under and currently possible circumstances. There are a number of new stats also not yet added to actual items that I want to add in this week as runes to generate a better use of stone, such as life steal, fire damage, and so forth.

v 0.7.7.6 2021.09.27
- Added 31 enchants to the Enchanter
- Consolidated all types of claws, fangs, and nails into shared generic types
- Increased the number of mobs capable of drops claws, fangs, and other items
- Changed a variety of guaranteed rewards to common rewards for fully harvesting an animal
- Improved town building recipe unlocks to be able to list multiple costs

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.

Join us in Discord!

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

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

Beta v 0.7.7.4- New monsters

This patch adds a bunch of new monsters. These satisfy the minimum amount of monsters in different places that I was aiming for for a 1.0 release. I still need audio for the majority of them, but am first working on different drops for each of them and their areas to adds a wide variety of new recipes into the game in the next couple of patches.

v 0.7.7.4 2021.09.21
- Added 11 new monsters
- Changed earth/stone elemental colliders to capsules
- Changed a number of monster spawning locations/spawn types
- Fixed up a number of small graphical errors with desert shrubbery
- Fixed the biome indicator reading ocean in a lot of places even when above water

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.

Join us in Discord!

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

Check out the bug / suggestion tracker