Solace Crafting News

This patch heavily reworks the ways in which caves are generated, positioned, traveled through, and more. The main goal of this is to change the entire "cave" system into a "world encounter" system that floating islands, and other "encounters" in the works can all make of use of instead of trying to setup logic for each new system as they come. This way a procedurally spawned encounter can simply be told to Generate, and it will know what to do with itself rather than all of the manager and resource and travel (etc) systems having to change their logic for different types of encounters.

A second big reason for this upgrade is to improve the way that caves are handled in multiplayer. My first attempts at setting things up was just too complicated as caves were originally built to potentially be very long, and so sectioned into "chunks" that were all handled separately. This made converting the system to work with multiplayer very difficult. Instead, I've ditched the chunk method, widened the caves over all making them much easier to navigate (though gems on the ceiling can still be quite high), and reduced the maximum depth by quite a bit.


(A random cave system)

As there are some pretty serious changes to caves with this patch, there may still be some small bugs with it, especially with planters in multiplayer, as I haven't had a chance to check on those yet. If there are any new problems I'll fix 'em up though! Tomorrow I'll be working to reform floating island management into the new World Encounter system and turn them back on, which will be a lot easier now that the system is built and working with caves. After that I'm very interested in working on a lava "portal" or "pocket dimension" encounter, something I've wanted to do for a long time.

I've found it necessary these past few weeks to spend some time working on some of the more fun things as far as game development goes. For me that's easiest explained as new features. I'm very excited to work on a new lava zone. I've been trying to just force my way through finishing up 0.6.4 and upgrading the last few things that are still not working in multi-player, but if I don't spend some time working on the fun stuff here and there I get really burnt out and my productivity nose dives. I ended up pretty much taking all of last week of to just get my life back in shape as I was kind of in a bad spot, the business part of me wanting to do nothing more than finish 0.6.4 as soon as possible, while the real me wanted to do anything but that. Those two mes fought for weeks and it all kind of blew up right as my fridge stopped working in the middle of summer.

Anyway, sorry for the short absence.
More to come!
Stay safe!

v 0.6.4.26 2020.08.19
- Widened caves and reduce their maximum depth
- Changed the way caves are generated, positioned, entered, left, and saved
- Fixed a problem with cave resources being immediately destroyed
- Fixed a problem with client side cave resources destroying nearby resources on death
- Fixed crystal and obsidian golems throwing an animation warning
- Fixed crystal and obsidian golem ragdolls
- Fixed a number of problems with navmesh data persisting after returning to the main menu

v 0.6.4.25 2020.08.07
- Fixed a bug specific to newly created worlds that could cause facilities on the start platform to disappear

Thanks to player screenshots and sharing their worlds with me I've cracked down on a number of stranger bugs in this patch. One of them unfortunately is a small math problem that was causing biomes to grow much larger than they are supposed to be able to making this patch require another world "update" due to possible height changes.

The biggest problem that was causing 3-4 seemingly different bugs, was facilities using their position to determine which terrains save data required updating, when in fact facilities are children components of player structures, meaning they should always be using the save data related to their parent structure. This was causing some buildings to duplicate and show up floating a kilometer away from their actual position, as well as facilities disappearing or reappearing after being picked back up. This patch should solve these problems and more!

Thank you again for all the detailed bug reports and shared files to help me track things down.

v 0.6.4.24 2020.08.06
- Increased small ore size
- Newly generated world encounters (caves, towers, etc) will be centered in a procedural area for easier object removal
- Returned resource rarity settings to be multipliers, maximum final rarity chance now capped at 20% for all rarities
- Fixed stone and earth elemental torso textures losing their tint after being killed
- Fixed some settings text fields being black instead of the intended white
- Fixed right-clicking to equip a sledgehammer causing a bugged sledgehammer to appear in inventory
- Fixed enchanting tables becoming unusable in some cases
- Fixed certain facilty placement issues not saving properly
- Fixed refining facilities respawning even after being picked up (related to above)
- Fixed biomes from inadventently growing too large causing terrains to not line up in rare cases
- Fixed the /stalkRewardMultiplier console command not being recognized
- Fixed terraforming not working in creative nor host modes
- Fixed an instance where structures could duplicate 1 kilometer out of position causing floating 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.

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

Farming is now updated for the first time to work in multi-player.

I've got a lot of messages on different platforms that have really built up over the past couple weeks. I've been a bit overwhelmed of late, as I was trying to go through them one at a time and not respond until fixing the problem entirely, and moving on to the next one. Instead I'm going to go through and gather all of them into a list I can prioritize as getting 0.6.4 working properly and pushing it live is my top priority right now. I don't really like to just give the "I'll look into it" generic response, but it's turned into more of a necessary course of action.

Be safe out there!

v 0.6.4.23 2020.08.04
- Updated farming to work in multi-player

v 0.6.4.22 2020.07.29
- Fixed a bug that could cause avatars to not load properly
- Fixed a bug that could cause plants to wilt while traveling above or below 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.

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

Took a bit of a "break" from finishing up 0.6.4 today to answer some requests in the Steam forums.

One new setting is "mouse smoothing". This smooths the mouse movement slightly, and appears to be frame dependent with its math. I don't have a high dpi mouse, but several users have reported that entering caves, where the FPS is usually much higher than above ground, causes a high dpi mouse to behave differently than above ground. If anyone that has experienced this can try turning mouse smoothing down to zero and letting me know if that fixes the different behavior I'll check into improving it. And I'll ping some users in Discord I know have experienced it.

v 0.6.4.21 2020.07.19
- Added the ability to bind "modifier" keys: shift/alt/control, to normal controls if held down for 3 seconds
- Added a "mouse smoothing" setting to the in-game control settings
- Added bonus slots to bags, backpacks, and chests for higher rarities
- Increased aggressive animal rarity settings
- Fixed resource rarity settings multiplying values instead of adding to them
- Fixed Dashing Strike and Trap Back not working in multiplayer

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.

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

The last major change to 0.6.4, this patch completes the new biome management system.



As you can see in the picture above which is 4 random seeds as viewed in the world creation preview window, biomes now blend and shift between each other much more naturally. This system was built to allow for an unlimited number of biomes so that I can add more and more over time, and hopefully in the future I will be able to setup a biome design system so that community members can even design their own biomes and upload them to Steam Workshop.

For now we have Grasslands, Mountains (which includes the snow biome), Desert, Swamp, and Ocean. I do hope to get more varied fantasy biomes in, for example volcanoes past 10km, maybe a mushroom forest, crystal peaks, etc. I would also like to add biome specific weather and atmosphere, so that it feels more musky in the swamp, and doesn't rain like it's totally normal in the desert.

Please note that this patch will require a world update because of the major changes to the topography. A world update will mark all buildings and facilities for readjusting their height when the come back on for the first time so they don't end up underground or floating in the air. A new world is certainly the better choice, but the world update option is there to try and minimalize me forcing wipes every time anything biome related changes.

Also please note the the world settings related to biomes are not yet updated in this patch and will not affect the outcome. I will plug those back in so users can lower the influence and/or frequency of biomes as they could before.

Currently I am forcing Ocean, as seen above the starting point (solace/purple pillar) marker in the images above, with Mountain clockwise from there, then Grass, then Desert, so there are always a bit of the four starter biomes near the start. They can however still be largely overpowered by their neighbors so even the starting area can be quite different between two seeds.

Mostly just small bug fixes and improvements left for the 0.6.4 branch, hopefully I will be able to push it live mid next week.

v 0.6.4.20 2020.07.17
- Improved biome blending and generation
- Re-enabled and improved the new world preview system
- Added grass deletion to floors and town building pre-mades
- Fixed the "Levels per kilometer" setting not being used properly in some methods
- Fixed a bug related to saving boats

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.

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