Solace Crafting News

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!

Grass is back! I'm still fine tuning things a bit, but it's running smooth and beautiful. There are still some improvements to be had to ensure that grass is never a nuisance, for example, leeks are almost impossible to spot in thick grass, so I'm going to make little dirt mounds that poke out with 2-4 leeks per node instead of just one sticking right out of the ground. I've already increased the size of small and medium ore nodes making them much easier to spot, grass or no grass. There is of course a slider to turn grass density and render distance up and down should you need to adjust them.

Terraforming and Farming are also working again, though the grass is not yet immediately updating as intended while terraforming. I should be able to finish fiddling with that tomorrow.

And most importantly, there was a bug with town building spawning that was causing them to mark themselves as belong to areas they don't actually. In turn this caused them to be marked for destruction when said areas would despawn, incorrectly taking the buildings down with them. This patch fixes that as well.

v 0.6.4.18 2020.07.07
- Added grass
- Increased the size of small and medium ores
- Increased breath refill rate
- Fixed terraforming
- Fixed farming
- Fixed a bug causing unrelated areas to destroy town buildings
- Fixed the breath bar colors not showing up properly
- Fixed some instances where right-clicking to move stacks into containers wouldn't be saved properly

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!

This is a "small" patch addressing a few bugs. I've actually been finishing up a replacement for the old Unity grass system still being used on the live branch with a threaded (very performant) and beautiful new one. I'm also half finished with upgrading terraforming, but wanted to get this patch on to beta as soon as possible as the town buildings not loading properly is pretty serious. So Sunday night patch it is!

v 0.6.4.17 2020.07.05
- Changed melee attack angle checks to ignore height
- Fixed wood roof not lining up properly
- Fixed town buildings not reloading in certain cases
- Fixed the jump after placing a town building

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!

I got caught up with the Steam Summer Sale, a replacement for beautiful grass, and trying to get get caves to work over the past week and didn't post patch notes for the past couple of small patches. Caves and towers and terrain smoothing are now back in beta for testing. I do believe I've found a good solution for grass and will be implementing it tomorrow complete with a density slider for lower and higher end computers to fine tune things with.

v 0.6.4.16 2020.06.30
- Turned towers and procedural towers back on
- Added a terrain smoothing method for large encounters
- Fixed a way in that player generated objects could be replicated
- Fixed structure data saving too fast for picked up facilities to be registered properly
- Fixed an instance where resource scanners could not be saved properly after upgrading
- Fixed drag + right-clicking to drop single items into a facility not saving properly in single player

v 0.6.4.15 2020.06.29
- Fixed an area self-destruct error interrupting world generation

v 0.6.4.14 2020.06.26
- Fixed basic resources in caves erroring
- Fixed ceiling resources in caves duplicating
- Fixed servers tracking players underground also as above ground
- Fixed cave heat lingering even after leaving heat zone
- Fixed temperature zones not applying in multiplayer
- Fixed environmental damage not applying 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!