The summer survey results were quite clear, people love to craft! So that's what I've been focusing on and this update has a lot of new content for non-beta players.
There are a total of 34 new weapons and shields to be found on the skills trees and crafting NPCs, as well as 3 new types of jewelry with 5 new jewelry slots to equip them in, each able to be crafted from any of the 5 new precious metals. These first 15 Jewelry recipes do not have stats of their own, but do provide extra slots for enchanting. Slots for crafting and harvesting clothes have also been added, though the recipes for which are still being worked on.
Town NPC had been turned off for some upgrades, and were sorely missed. Now back in-game, there's still a lot more planned for them and their buildings, including a system to allow the building of custom structures to summon villagers into, as well as a way to connect villagers from one town to another.
Enchanted Stones are in with this patch and are the third "Town Encounter" along with Coal Mines and Limestone Quarries. Unfortunately this system is not entirely obvious in-game yet, and we get a lot of questions about it in Discord. I will definitely work to try and make how these things work more apparent in-game, but in short they are called "Town Encounters" because you need to build up a town nearby them to make use of them. A Miner can mine coal from a Coal Mine, and so forth. These then allow you to upgrade your towns and town buildings further with the higher "tech" building resources they are used to make.
The next major update with this patch has to do with biomes. The new swamp biome is in with a new resource (silver), but the entire biome generation system has been upgraded to make way for many more biomes to be added along with future updates. This new system makes it possible to specify the minimum and/or maximum level of certain biomes, or even to specify certain locations with specific biomes. Using this the starting area is now specifically set to the grass biome with the nearest neighbors being set to desert, mountain, and ocean. Meaning you will need to travel at least 8km to reach beyond these four starter biomes before you have a chance to run into any swamp or other biomes added in the future.
Because of these changes old saved games will need to be updated. The upgrade system is an imperfect tool but the alternative is to force everyone to start a new world, which I have tried to avoid from day one. You may end up with some buildings in weird places as they try and adjust their positioning to the new biomes, but it's still better than just wiping everything clean.
Thank you to everyone participating in Early Access, all our active members in Discord, and especially to our supporters on Patreon! I have some ideas for making Patreon more engaging we've been talking about on Discord I hope to reveal very soon.
Lots more in the works with storage and organization, crafting clothes, tools, facilities, solaces, and more!
The condensed patch notes are as follows:
Crafting- Added 34 new weapons/shields learnable via town crafters and crafting skill trees
- Added 12 new crafting skills (stats/icons are a wip)
- Added Copper, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Iridium and their ores (only copper (caves) and silver (swamps) can be found so far)
- Added Earrings, Necklaces, and Rings, for each of the new precious metal types
- Increased minimum armor of non-simple armor to 1
Towns- Town NPCs are spawning again
- Added Enchanter I - IV (WIP)
- Added Enchanted Stone town resource to mountain biome
- Added Magical Siphon and Siphoner town buildings to Magical Essence gathering from enchanted stones
- Changed town building snapping to step 1m at a time instead of 3m
General- Added swamp biome
- Changed desert biome topography, rocks, and added circling vultures (just an effect, don't try to build a giant tower to catch them)
- Changed biomes to generate in 8x8 chunks with 2km blending somewhere within the 6km of the south and eastern edges
- Added defense and offense ratings to adventuring stats
- Changed the player icon on the map to display player direction
- Added the ability to turn with the keyboard (default Q & E) while the map is open
- Added harvesting clothes, crafting clothes, and jewelry equipment slots (WIP)
- Added crafting professions stats window
- Changed two-handed weapons to apply double the speed reduction from any applicable crafting skills
- Changed all terraforming changes to be slightly lower than listed to keep buildings from sometimes spawning a millimeter beneath flat ground
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
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