First off, happy Thanksgiving to all our friends in the US celebrating tomorrow! Weve already started getting ready for our CHKN Team feast...
Step 1: Finding the right turkey or is it TRKY? Before were full of way too much food, weve put out an update to Pre-Release with more improvements as we prepare to push to the Live branch. (Note that your previous Pre-Release saves are invalid and wont load.) Patch notes are below and, as always, bugs are expected in these work-in-progress builds so we really appreciate your help testing and reporting feedback on the Pre-Release forum. * If youre not familiar with Pre-Release, its the unstable developer branch we use for testing new stuff. More info here. If youre not a Pre-Release tester, check out this video for a look at some of the features and updates coming to the Live branch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVDvnlrgxfY Well also be playing the Arena on our developer live stream today, Nov 21st @ 3:30 EST on Twitch and YouTube. Come hang out! Help us build creatures and see who comes out victorious.
And now, patch notes!

Creatures & Abilities

• Multiple body sizes added for the octopus and carnivorous plant blocks
• New feather and fur block accessories added
• New traits (blind, diet types) added to provide feedback when building creatures
• Stuns can no longer be applied in consecutive hits preventing stun locking
• Additional text added to abilities to show how to unlock them
• Ability preview images implemented
• Creature block voxel system re-enabled
• Reviving a creature now automatically spawns it
• Creature AI is now more reactive to incoming threats
• Friendly creatures now attempt to walk around the player
• Implemented a system to detect creature to creature collisions. (Creatures no longer run through each other.)

Crafting & Items

• Chicken Armor added!
• New Items: crab axe, pig slingshot, spider bow
• Logs from felled trees now appear as a single log bundle so theyre easier to see
• Added recipe tracking: pin recipes to add them to the HUD
• Adjusted some crafting recipes for resource and progression balancing
• Item recipes are now granted when first building and placing a crafting structure, or by finding crafting tomes when defeating or breaking a resource in the world
• Trough removed (non-functional temp item was confusing players; may return in the future when properly implemented)
• Creative mode spawn eggs are functional again

Adventure/Survival

• Gameplay
  • Temporary shelter added: use as a temporary respawn point
  • Hunger status added if low on energy
  • Crush damage removed if a creature collides with the player
  • Multiple mushroom types and pumpkins added to the world
  • Death message added for all damage types
  • Lifeshaper upgrading now requires defeating a Guardian before it can be obtained
  • Time based creature spawns and creature respawning implemented
• Balance
  • Loot drops tuned
  • Damage dealt to trees changed
  • Creature block drop rates tuned
  • Creature fall damage tweaked
  • Changed stamina regen to be percentage based and added AI routines for creatures to back off and regain stamina. (Results in fights that have a natural rhythm and more creature builds that are viable!)
  • Poacher toughness buffed
• Journal
  • Descriptions to world entities added
  • Descriptions of items tweaked
  • Badging added to the Journal
  • Data organization improved
• Quests & Onboarding
  • Tutorial quests and onboarding prompts added
  • Quest UI overhauled
• Map
  • Beacon added, use to tag a location on the map
  • Map functional. Location of death tagged and other placed objects automatically are added to the map

Arena

• Tournament mode added to the arena
• Arena camera tracking improvements
• Optional night lighting added to the arena

Art & UI

• Temple art tweaked
• New creature head icons added to the creature builder filter for easier identification
• Many missing icons added
• Spear animations added
• Improved sunset/sunrise lighting
• Holding E while walking over items will now pickup all items
• Ability to place torches removed
• Hitting foliage SFX added
• Effects
  • Life Shaper and ability scroll FXs added
  • Item FX more obvious
  • Particle FX improvements for fire and water hose
  • Implemented temple checkpoint FX and creature revive polish
  • Stun FX improved to read clearer as a stun
  • Party creature death particle tweaked
• UI polish
  • New loading screen implemented
  • New main menu implemented
  • New options screen implemented
  • Moved multiplayer options within tab menu
  • Ability browser UI reimplemented
  • Many other minor changes to create consistent look

Performance & Optimization

• Replaced foliage system with a new performant tech which reduces stutters
• Level of detail levels reimplemented for creature animation system to improve frame rates
• Improved pathfinding navmesh generation performance
• Texture streaming added to the options screen; currently a beta implementation. Disable this if you have a video card with 4gb+ of ram!
• World object colliders optimized
• Fur settings added to the options

Bug Fixes:

• Networking
  • Clients stunned properly
  • Clients flinch when damaged properly
  • Party creature death and revive fixed
  • Client save game fixes
  • Weather set for clients properly
  • Creature names no longer reset for clients
  • Adventure games now always show in join lobby. Error message prevents players from joining if they did not complete start of adventure mode
  • Clients now get proper notifications
  • Guards added to prevent game from glitching if null connections are detected
  • Treadmills now animate properly for clients
  • Treadmills now show attached creatures for clients correctly
  • Clients now properly see health bars
  • Fix to clients items becoming stuck which prevents them from interacting with the world
  • Egg crack and stone breaking sounds can now be heard by clients
  • Fix to clients flashing damage indicator endlessly
  • Fix to doors breaking chunk loading
  • Fix to clients not loading world data correctly
  • Fix to duplicate creature created on revive
  • Projectiles now display properly for clients
  • Quests are now networked
  • Fix to creature tamed status not saving properly when joining or leaving a networked game
  • Clicking store all on chests now works properly for clients
• Fix to bad rotation on crab eyes that did not allow them to see correctly
• Fixed dog tail clipping inside of parent block
• Graphical fix to many materials that did not handle depth correctly
• Fix to obtaining multiple Lifeshapers
• Fix to mechdino neck offset
• Fix to elephant ear offset
• Fix to chicken eye scared blend shape
• Fix to hatchery texture
• Sleeping creatures properly close eyes
• Rain volume hooked into master volume
• Ranged weapon throw height fixed
• Crab claw ability animations fixed
• Fix to using the whistle with the hotbar/offhand
• Fixed hopping creatures becoming stuck in place
• Fixed bug in damage formula that made per frame damage to become highly reduced
• Fixed bugs in animation system that caused an ability to become stuck
• Fix to creature building cursor seemingly randomly disappearing
• Shader fixes for OSX
• Rocks shader replaced (was causing server staggers on some hardware)
• Fix issues where save state was not being cleared when starting a new game after playing a saved game
• Bug fixes to creature revive UI
• Fix to creature stat previewer showing incorrect values
• Structure block removal grace period now works again
• Fix to breakables not respecting what item it was struck with causing damage to be applied when it shouldnt and vice versa
• Creatures will no longer eat lifeblocks
• Sign structure item fixed
• Loot bags can no longer be damaged
• Fix to double headed creatures having bad angles
• Fix to post-processing transitions that caused colors to pop instead of smoothly transitioning
• Fix to temple render settings becoming stuck on infinitely
• Water rendering now properly draws fog over it
• Journal 3d renders for trees, rocks, bushes, and items positioning and rotation improved
• Removed some duplicate/broken creatures from the default creature collection

Known Issues:

• Were aware of decreased performance on computers with integrated graphics cards (which are common on some laptops and lower-end computers) and Macs. Were working on fixes for this now.
• World streaming issues can cause an incremental drop in framerate regardless of your computers specs. We have a fix ready to implement in December.
• The radial UI for Observing is glitchy and doesnt always register what youre pointing at. Fix is in the works.
• If you have a 4GB+ video card, textures may be blurry due to new texture streaming tech implementation in progress. Go to Options -> Performance and turn off Texture Streaming.
• Autodetect will do this automatically on fresh installs of the game but current players will need to do this manually to overwrite the existing setting.
• Weve been unable to replicate a bug where the game gets stuck loading while syncing creatures so we believe its been fixed through other changes. But if youre still experiencing this bug, please let us know!

Quick links for testers:

• If you want to see whats new on Pre-Release, here are the instructions
• Please post your bugs and feedback on our forums
• You can also join us on our CHKN discord to post bugs, feedback, or questions (or just hang out!)
• Check out our Trello board development roadmap to see whats coming