Solace Crafting is on sale with a weeklong deal!

Unfortunately I was not able to get the big update I've been working on up in time, but here's hoping today goes well!

I've been working a variety of pretty serious engine upgrades including upgrading from Unity 2019.4 to Unity 2022.3, switching from the Built-in Render Pipeline to the Universal Render Pipeline, and a handful of FPS improvements. Last time I checked FPS was up around +75%, but in order to do that I've had to update over 3500 materials, and rewire basically all of the video settings, weather components, all fluids such as waterfalls and lava, and quite a bit more. Sadly the new water shaders in particular are still giving me problems to the point that I was up till 1AM last night trying to get everything sorted out.

So things are not quite ready yet, but should be ready to go here very soon. I just wanted to break the silence and let everyone know what's going on.

Happy gaming!

Traders and NPC villages now live!

Coming off the beta branch now, a variety of traders offering to buy and sell different types of goods on an in-game weekly loot schedule can now be found scattered throughout the world. The "world" is actually an infinite plane by the way, if you were wondering... Complete with head tracking and dialogue bubbles.



I want to create custom buildings for each of the different types of traders, but I'd like to do so with building textures that are more fitting to their biomes. So, as an in-between step I'm going to start working on new building textures on the beta branch tomorrow.

As always, there are a number of bug fixes and small improvements to go with the new content as well.

v 1.0.5.4 2024.03.26
- Added Trader "General Store" to wild towns (random spawn) that will buy and sell basic resource on a weekly (in-game) rotation
- Added Trader variations: Weaponsmith, Alchemist, Herbalist, Fletcher, Arcanist, Armorsmith, Leatherworker, Tailor
- Fixed the ivy shader that seemed to have broken
- Added randomly generated NPC towns
- Added head tracking for friendly NPCs
- Added chat bubbles for friendly NPCs
- Added random animation logic to friendly NPCs
- Removed enchant stats decaying based on player level
- Resources attempting to respawn near player built objects will now check a 10m radius sphere instead of only a vertical line directly through their position, not respawning if anything player built is touched
- Fixed the proper harvesting tool not always showing when harvesting
- Fixed standard Cloth Armor English translations
- Fixed a typo for Smithing Melee Speed
- Fixed harvesting profession level up achievements decreasing swing speed instead of increasing it
- Harvesting profession level up achievements now reward 2% speed increase per achievement
- Fixed some facility interfaces overlapping when a new one is interacted with while one is already open
- Fixed the near terrain draw distance setting button in the main menu
- Fixed Strong Harvest skills not displaying a hotbar cooldown

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

Still on beta for a quick safety check, but the "General Store" NPC can now be found randomly in most wild towns. These traders will buy basic resources, and will offer a random assortment of raw resources for sale, including at times uncommon and rare resources. The resources they offer will change and refresh every in-game week.

I also want to add other types of traders that can randomly spawn, including a weaponsmith, an armorsmith, an alchemist, etc. Adding new types and new loot tables is easy enough, once the tech of them and their towns are all working properly.

v 1.0.5.1 2024.03.18
- Added Trader "General Store" to wild towns (random spawn) that will buy and sell basic resource on a weekly (in-game) rotation
- Fixed the ivy shader that seemed to have broken

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

I've added some life into the non-player characters in the game, as well as added procedural towns to the game world. There's still a lot of work and content I'd like to add on to both towns and NPCs, but this is a nice start.

NPCs will now notice you and others in-game, look at you, and often give a bit of dialogue. I've also added some animation changes to them, so they can randomly play a different animation here and there rather than just standing still all the time, but I do need to add more animations onto their capabilities still.

What I really want is to get them wandering around a bit, but this has its ups, its downs, and its dangers. For example if town NPCs can just wander freely all over the place, you might not know where your fletcher is when you need him/her. We already have it setup that interacting with a town buildings sign-post provides the same services, but there are a number of things like that that I am weighing against one another to figure out the best way to let NPCs move around at least to some degree; especially so for procedural towns.

Procedural towns are a new variable in world generation, so things may shift around a bit, but it would be very unlikely for a town to spawn somewhere you've already been building, for example. For safety still, I will push this to beta first and work some things out before I move it to the live branch.

I've also removed the math that makes enchants decay as players level up. The conversation was basically that a legendary enchant really isn't legendary after you've leveled up a few levels, which isn't a very difficult thing to do when you're actively out searching for resources in the big wild. There's also definitely some drop math regarding some of the components for certain enchants that I am looking into.

So, lots being worked on! Fishing also won the vote for what's next, though I am openly discussing how to best go about that as I'm honestly not much of a fishing fan myself. I have received some great input already though.

v 1.0.5.0 2024.03.11
- Added randomly generated NPC towns
- Added head tracking for friendly NPCs
- Added chat bubbles for friendly NPCs
- Added random animation logic to friendly NPCs
- Removed enchant stats decaying based on player level
- Fixed the near terrain draw distance setting button in the main menu
- Fixed Strong Harvest skills not displaying a hotbar cooldown

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

I readied this patch yesterday, but wanted to wait until morning to push it as there is one kind of "dangerous" fix within it.

[h3]What happened?[/h3]
Last year I hired a programmer to help improve some of the world generation code that takes up a lot of processing power while players are running around. Unfortunately a bit of timing got messed up where the Noise Manager, which handles biome math, was running its warm-up math before world save data had been properly loaded. This caused all game worlds to be treated as if all of their biome frequency settings were at 1.0 regardless of what players may have changed them to during world creation.

[h3]What's fixed?[/h3]
This patch fixes that, so that the warm-up math is now being executed properly, after the world save data has been loaded. However, if you've been playing with a world save file that had altered biome frequency that were not loading properly, and now they will suddenly start loading properly, there will unfortunately be noticeable differences. If the world you've been playing in did not have altered biome frequencies there should be no change.

[h3]What will change?[/h3]
When biome math changes distant mountains can suddenly turn into swamps, and vice versa. The problem arises when we talk about player placed objects, such as buildings and solaces. They save their position in 3D, which means they know how high or low they are compared to sea level. If suddenly the mountain you had built a base on becomes a swamp, you're going to have those buildings floating high in the sky above the swamp. There is a feature implemented long ago to attempt to repair this kind of behavior by marking all player building for a "height check" making them try to re-attach themselves to the ground when they next spawn, but this can cause problems if they end up on a steep hill for example.

[h3]What can I do?[/h3]
1. If you want to play with a world save file you've been using with altered biome frequencies in spite of the changes but do encounter problems such as floating or sunken buildings, you can load into world, open the console (F1) and use the command /forceworldupdate, and then it will ask for confirmation which you would need to then type /y to.

2. If you want to play with a world save file you've been using with altered biome frequencies, as is, and just reset the biome frequencies to the default settings that the bug was causing them to be treated as, I've added the following console commands to alter biome frequencies within a loaded world save:
/grassbiomefrequency
/swampbiomefrequency
/mountainbiomefrequency
/desertbiomefrequency
/oceanbiomefrequency
These will let you reset your frequencies back to 1.0 if you encounter changes to a world you've been playing on and want to reset the settings to default. If you type any of the commands in once it will show you what the current setting is, and you can alter the current setting with for example:
/grassbiomefrequency 1.0
Please do note that in most cases these commands should never be used =D Once a world is created and the biome math is properly set in motion, as mentioned above, mountains and forests and deserts can all be completely rearranged if the biome math changes. I only added these in to try and help correct any problems that players might run into due to the fixing of the bug.

Again, if you world save file did not have altered biome settings, you should notice no changes to world generation at all.

Having said all that to try and mitigate a headache or two in case anyone runs into this; I'm hoping to get some new stuff up on beta today, so this patch has been hotfixed directly to the default branch.

Thank you for the reports from everyone in Discord and on the bug tracker! Those are the main ways that I figure out when something has gone awry!

Happy Gaming!

v 1.0.4.36 2024.02.26
- Fixed the escape menu blocking input sometimes
- Fixed hold to walk not properly applying to left and right movement
- Fixed journal text growing small instead of large for some non-english languages
- Fixed some enemy debuffs stacking improperly
- Fixed most enemy debuffs actually buffing stats
- Fixed world loading biome math triggering too early, overriding custom settings in many cases

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

Had some new bug reports due to the new patch. I had to replace and rewire sooo many components to make things navigable with a controller. This hotfix addresses the more major problems, and I will continue to look into the less serious reports.

Also thought I would mention as this often gets asked when a larger patch goes live, but currently the beta and the default branch are on the same build. Once I'm done hotfixing bugs new content will be added for testing onto the beta branch before moving it to the live build. steamthumbsup

v 1.0.4.35 2024.02.21
- Fixed server join, host, and server list password input fields not responding to mouse clicks
- Fixed controller support for server join, host, and server list password input fields
- Fixed start menu warnings not self-destructing properly
- Fixed holding RMB no longer letting you move while building

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

In all honesty, I severely underestimated how difficult adding full controller support was going to be. This patch took a long time, and has added much more controller support, including an on-screen-keyboard for character and world name input. There are still a few things missing from being able to really say the game has "full" controller support, meaning for example, it could be played from start to finish on a Steamdeck, but it's much closer to that goal now.

Having said that, I'm going to put down controller support for the next ten days or so to focus on some bug fixing and get some new features in. I started a poll yesterday on Discord asking for input on what players would like to see added in given a few choices. It's pinned in #general so go check that out if you like. The goal here being to add some small but impacting changes in the near future.

There are also a couple of discussion about the current controller support that I have not fully read through and responded to yet, though I hope to make sure I go back and review those before I sit down to finish the last 10%, as I'm really not a controller player myself.

Happy gaming!

The condensed patch notes are as follows:
v 1.0.4.34 2024.02.20
- Added controller support (90% working, some changes pending)
- Added an on-screen keyboard for controller support
- Added enchanting to multi-lingual system
- Changed the start menu version text to explain if an error has occured during startup
- Fixed basic attack and recall not being added to hotbar for new characters
- Fixed first time loading messages and other start menu messages breaking controller navigation
- Fixed single player and creative single player button translations
- Fixed cloth boots translating to cloth helmet
- Fixed inventory hotbar links throwing errors when empty
- Fixed start menu link popups not translating properly
- Fixed start menu current game mode not translating properly
- Fixed the in-game compass 'W' not translating properly
- Fixed the unspent points UI not translating properly
- Fixed the radial menu not translating properly
- Fixed facility names not translating properly when cursor'd over
- Fixed the quit menu not highlighting properly when using a controller
- Fixed Q and E to rotate and R to autorun triggering even when certain windows are open/input fields are focused
- Fixed dragging inventory slots to the hotbar not working
- Fixed certain monster abilities throwing an error
- Fixed recipes unlocked in multiplayer not showing up in the crafting UI immediately
- Fixed the initial loading screen not loading any text where it should say loading in at least English
- Fixed a number of harmless localization errors firing in the recipe details UI
- Fixed starting the game for the first time throwing a harmless localization error
- Fixed a harmless error that could fire from PlayerSkills when starting up
- Fixed an error caused by animal corpses sometimes being improperly added to misc save data

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

Happy New Year everyone o/
It's been oddly warm over here every day, I'm a bit concerned how this years summer is going to end up, but a warm winter in and of itself is hard to complain about.

As previously mentioned, the multi-lingual system and full controller support got left in a sort of 95% finished state last year, so I'm going to wrap those up to more of a 99-100% state so I can push them live, and start getting into a few different things I've got lined up for early 2024.

This patch adds multi-lingual support for enchanting which was overlooked, as well as a few smaller areas that were missed. There's still a couple left, and I can certainly fix more if they show up as adding new words to the system is the hard part, not necessarily plugging things into the system.

v 1.0.4.30 2024.01.12
- Added enchanting to multi-lingual system
- Fixed inventory hotbar links throwing errors when empty
- Fixed start menu link popups not translating properly
- Fixed start menu current game mode not translating properly
- Fixed the in-game compass 'W' not translating properly
- Fixed the unspent points UI not translating properly
- Fixed the radial menu not translating properly
- Fixed facility names not translating properly when cursor'd over

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

Happy holidays everyone! I hope you had a nice Christmas or whatever may be going on wherever you are. For me, living in Japan, New Years is a much larger holiday than Christmas, and is just around the corner.

I know it's been a long time since the last update, and I apologize for that. I went back to working on Solace Crafting full time in October, but ended up running into some health problems and decided to take more time off. In case anyone reading this doesn't know, I had some semi-serious health problems in July that forced me to take 3 months off of development. I was taking 3 pills a day during that time and am down to 1 pill every other day, so I'm doing a lot better, but am still not 100%.

During my time off I have spent a fair chunk of my time studying not only Unity and game design, but game production. The unfortunate truth as an indie developer is that there are 10+ professions you have to learn. Production manager is an important but not often talked about profession when it comes to indie games. The quite extensive paid course on design and production that I went through was well worth the money, and has me looking at things in a quite different light.

Solace Crafting was originally built within Unity 2018 and eventually upgraded into Unity 2019. Recently I've been playing with Unity 2021 and there are definitely some significant performance improvements to be had, though the conversion process to a scriptable render pipeline is likely a lot of work, but something I do want to attempt.

Prior to upgrading engines, or anything that serious, I need to finish the improved multi-lingual support and full controller support that were both left mostly finished in October. I've also got some things lining up for January that will hopefully turn into a great way to start a fresh year!

There are a lot of less than amazing decisions I made in regards to design and production in the early years of Solace Crafting, but the game has come a long way overall and I'm going to give it a few more pushes to see if we can't get it into a better composition all around.

Best wishes to everyone in 2024!

Kyle Postlewait
Big Kitty Games

This has been in the works for a long time, and is still not quite a complete solution as I finish plugging in some UI elements (there are a lot of them) into the full controller support system, but I wanted to get it up onto beta to get some feedback as I'm not actually a controller player myself.

Currently the biggest problem as I see it for full controller support is choosing which is more important:
1. Being able to cycle between next and last targets with R2 and L2
or
2. Being able to cycle between next and last hotbars with R2 and L2

As I've been torn between this, there's currently not a pre-bound key for targeting, though using any offensive skill will generally try to target whatever is in front of you. Currently I am leaning towards putting next target on the far right button (B for me), and maybe putting last target on the select key, as something not generally used, but there if you need it.

One of the biggest challenges of this patch was actually merging the 3+ months of on/off work that were spent on the controller support branch and the 3+ months of bug fixes that were being done on a separate branch. I spent pretty much the entirety of the past three days just getting everything to come together properly, and still have some weird unanswered questions why git (version control) was behaving the way it was with certain files, but all's well that ends well.

There are still some oddities I'm ironing out though, the save and quit menu is not highlighting properly, even though it is technically being selected properly from top to bottom, as well as the solace interface, and some things here and there. But for the most past the game is fully playable with a controller, so again I wanted to get it onto beta in it's current state in hopes of some feedback or suggestions from more experienced controller users steamthumbsup

And of course there's a round of random bug fixes to go with everything.
More to come over the next few days.

v 1.0.4.28 2023.10.11
- Added controller support (90% working, some changes pending)
- Fixed Q and E to rotate and R to autorun triggering even when certain windows are open/input fields are focused
- Fixed dragging inventory slots to the hotbar not working
- Fixed certain monster abilities throwing an error
- Fixed recipes unlocked in multiplayer not showing up in the crafting UI immediately
- Fixed the initial loading screen not loading any text where it should say loading in at least English
- Fixed a number of harmless localization errors firing in the recipe details UI
- Fixed starting the game for the first time throwing a harmless localization error
- Fixed a harmless error that could fire from PlayerSkills when starting up
- Fixed an error caused by animal corpses sometimes being improperly added to misc save data

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

This weeks fixes from the beta branch are now live on the default branch.

I'm still mostly going through the bug tracker reports that have built up over the past couple months during my absence, in order of severity. The game's definitely running quite a bit smoother with this patch though than it has been for a bit, my apologies for that. A mix of rushed changes and outsourced mistakes had a number of systems causing inter-related problems here and there.

Lots to do though, hoping to get town building features fleshed out a bit more, and more building textures in asap.

v 1.0.4.27 2023.09.09
- Added a check to reassign Basic Attack and Recall to the hotbar in the event of skills being reset
- Added mouse over text on map icons for Shrines, Monoliths, Rifts, and Totems (English only for now)
- Added solace names to solace map icons
- Reduced the spawn rate of Rifts outside of badlands
- Reduced the spawn rate of Goblin Totems outside of swamps
- Reduced the spawn rate of Monoliths outside of Grasslands and Mountains
- Fixed remaining adventuring skill points printing incorrectly for Jobs
- Fixed a storehouse duplication bug
- Fixed hold to walk and always run not working
- Fixed Spiritualist passive skill for Magic Damage awarding Magic Crit Chance (this will reset your skills if you had it)
- Fixed player skills in MP not downloading spent totals properly
- Fixed changing gatherer assignment not updating changes immediately in MP
- Fixed harvested Hornet Wax not showing properly for client in MP
- Fixed some Squire, Scout, and Apprentice skills that got messed up in version control
- Fixed storehouses changing resources to T0
- Fixed Masonry spent points showing Woodworking spent points
- Fixed shrines not properly awarding buffs
- Fixed Imps disappearing as soon as their rift is closed
- Fixed Rift Spawn Rate setting
- Fixed Monoliths and some other objects spawning at improperly low rates
- Fixed finishing drinking a stack of water in a container throwing an error
- Fixed several non animal specific items printing out animal specific names

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

I finally got in a full work day today! I hope that doesn't sound condescending, but I've had a really hard time looking at a screen for very long without getting dizzy and, frankly, sick. I'm doing a lot better this week, though still only 60-70%. I made it back to the gym yesterday for the first time in over two months, and was only able to walk on the treadmill for 15 minutes after some light weight lifting, where I used to run for 30 minutes 2-3 times a week. I am definitely getting better though steamhappy

I've spent most of today going through problems mentioned recently in Discord and on the Bug Tracker. As always, bugs really have to take priority, but I am excited to get into adding some of the suggested features we've got posted and voted on in Discord. Assuming nothing strange arises, these changes will be pushed to the live version in the near future.

Happy gaming!

v 1.0.4.24 2023.09.04
- Added a check to reassign Basic Attack and Recall to the hotbar in the event of skills being reset
- Added mouse over text on map icons for Shrines, Monoliths, Rifts, and Totems (English only for now)
- Added solace names to solace map icons
- Reduced the spawn rate of Rifts outside of badlands
- Reduced the spawn rate of Goblin Totems outside of swamps
- Reduced the spawn rate of Monoliths outside of Grasslands and Mountains
- Fixed Masonry spent points showing Woodworking spent points
- Fixed shrines not properly awarding buffs
- Fixed Imps disappearing as soon as their rift is closed
- Fixed Rift Spawn Rate setting
- Fixed Monoliths and some other objects spawning at improperly low rates
- Fixed finishing drinking a stack of water in a container throwing an error
- Fixed several non animal specific items printing out animal specific names

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

This patch merges all of the current changes on the beta branch onto the default live branch. I was hoping to finish a bit of upgrading I'm working on on the skills and skill points systems as there are still some small bugs floating around with those, but time has been steadily moving forward, and the longer beta and live fall apart the harder it is to track which bugs have or have not actually been fixed yet.

My health has been a lot better this past week and a half. My family convinced me to take Monday and Tuesday off to spend some time together and focus on getting better. I'm just past 3 weeks now on the medication that has been helping me out of lot. Hopefully next week I can start reducing the frequency or dosage and keep moving towards a full recovery.

I am hoping to get back to a mostly full-time schedule for the rest of the week, and appreciate very much everyone's patience and understanding with the unforeseen unfortuitously combining with the untimely.

v 1.0.4.23 2023.08.19
- Refactored localization system to fix the root of a variety of recent bugs related to stats, skills, recipes, and monster abilities
- Improved breath and temperature logic
- Improved effect and buff logic
- Raised minimum healing percentage from 0 to 10
- Added a catch for attributes going null, causing players to not load
- Added a debug to print the current language in use to logs to help track future problems
- Fixed effects reapplying repeatedly
- Fixed a skill upgrading issue
- Fixed players saving in caves reloading their position improperly in MP
- Fixed an instance where client data could be not saved properly in multi-player
- Fixed a harmless error related to monster sounds
- Fixed cave changes not being saved properly in some cases in multi-player
- Fixed a problem with learned/unlocked recipes blocking the recipe list from refreshing
- Fixed a bug preventing new character creation
- Fixed a variety of equipment names and icons not displaying properly
- Fixed Market town building displaying as Stoneworker
- Fixed a bug preventing new character creation
- Fixed a number of attribute, adventuring, crafting, and harvesting skill tree problems
- Fixed entity abilities being able to stack
- Fixed an error with multiplayer audio calls
- Fixed harvesting throwing errors
- Fixed some skills not properly applying to new characters that chose starting classes
- Fixed strong harvest cooldowns not working
- Fixed Rhinos named improperly
- Fixed Lamp Posts not being able to spawn in multiplayer
- Fixed debuffs spamming errors
- Fixed a Buff UI refresh problem
- Fixed a console error
- Fixed damage over time spells applied to monsters applying all ticks immediately
- Fixed some models rendering in front of water
- Fixed crocodiles and hipos getting stuck walking in place

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

After two weeks completely offline and one week on a medication that is supposed to take a couple of weeks to really set it, I'm doing better, but not great. Thus, I'm imposing very limited screen time on myself, but was able to put in 3 hours of work today, and hope to do so for the next few days before trying more. It's been a very weird and unfun experience, but thankfully it's nothing life threatening and likely impermanent.

The bug tracker I use, a part of Atlassian software, is for some reason requiring my to approve all bug reports before they become visible to other users, despite not having required that for the past several years that I've been using it. I can't find any setting to make it stop doing that, and have asked for help in the Atlassian community, but rest assured submitted bug reports are going through and will be seen by me. I have approved for visibility all those that were pending.

v 1.0.4.22 2023.08.17
- Fixed strong harvest cooldowns not working
- Fixed Rhinos named improperly
- Fixed Lamp Posts not being able to spawn in multiplayer
- Fixed debuffs spamming errors
- Fixed a Buff UI refresh problem
- Fixed a console error

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

After an episode of heat exhaustion, my sympathetic nervous system broke down, and has yet to recover. It's been a very weird experience. Sometimes I fell fine and the next morning I'm a mess. It's apparently normal to take up to or even over a month to repair, and I'm coming up soon on one month. It is however likely I will not be online for another few days as I am trying to make sure that this goes away for good.

I know there are a number of small but debilitating bugs floating around, but I have to take care of this before anything else.

This was in part caused by my long running addiction to a certain very stress enducing video game and I'd like to take this moment to remind everyone how important your health, hydration, and sleep really are. Even more so after 40!

Stay safe, and happy gaming!

Kyle Postlewait
AKA Malkere

Due to a technical decision that was made early in the development of the recent localization revamp there ended up being quite a few unforeseen bugs brought into the game. Several patches were made slowly remedying the problems, but the underlying cause wasn't being addressed and more and more little problems kept cropping up. This patch instead, though it took longer, refactors the main problem from its origin and has fixed most of the problems based on initial tests.

As I should have done with the first wave of localization patches, this patch will first be placed on beta to be sure that it doesn't have anything catastrophically wrong with it. However, given the state of the current live branch, it's likely that this will be pushed live by tomorrow.

Once these more major problems are out of the way I am planning to shift my attention to focus purely on bug fixing and a variety of quality of life improvement requests that have been floating around for a while.

v 1.0.4.17 2023.07.27
- Refactored localization system to fix the root of a variety of recent bugs related to stats, skills, recipes, and monster abilities
- Improved breath and temperature logic
- Improved effect and buff logic
- Fixed effects reapplying repeatedly
- Fixed a skill upgrading issue
- Fixed players saving in caves reloading their position improperly in MP
- Fixed an instance where client data could be not saved properly in multi-player
- Fixed a harmless error related to monster sounds
- Fixed cave changes not being saved properly in some cases in multi-player

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

Not gonna lie, it's been a rough few weeks. Made some bad calls, rushed out some patches, and have been scrambling to get things sorted out. Unfortunately, I got so sick last week that I couldn't even watch TV for more than 15 minutes without getting dizzy. Heat exhaustion is weird, and I still haven't recovered 100% 10 days later.

This recent series of patches has sorted the majority of the problems out but there are still some smaller problems I am working on. In particular, a lot of people's skill points got messed up with a localization error several patches ago. This most recent patch should sort the majority of these out, though they may still reset if you load a character in a different language than they were last saved in. I will continue to improve those and other systems so these side-effects don't linger.

v 1.0.4.12 2023.07.19
- Fixed terraforming data not being properly factured when being sent to clients causing general loss of control of characters
- Fixed an issue with skills getting overriden, this may cause an initial reset of bought skills in some skill trees

v 1.0.4.11 2023.07.18
- Fixed a subsequent timing error causing the first 4 terrains to load using an incorrect world seed

v 1.0.4.10 2023.07.18
- Fixed several intialization timing issues causing a number of multi-player problems

v 1.0.4.9 2023.07.17
- Fixed a performance issue with AOE attacks
- Fixed an incorrect map marker
- Fixed an issue with disappearing towers
- Fixed a bug causing some skill descriptions to not show up

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

I have received a number of reports that the F key for interacting with objects is not working for some first time players but have not been able to reproduce the problem, nor is it something most players are encountering. In order to help track down the cause, if anyone experiencing this problem could tell me their OS, OS language, whether they have any controllers or joysticks plugged in, and if possible send me their cfg.dat and player.log files found under:
C:\Users\\AppData\LocalLow\Big Kitty Games\Solace Crafting\
That would be most appreciated

v 1.0.4.8 2023.07.14
- Added tooltips to hotbar buttons
- Added a tips to the initial loading screen
- Fixed a prominent teleport bug and added several checks to help debug any further errors
- Fixed a prominent shader error
- Fixed a collision problem with some town buildings
- Fixed several localization errors
- Fixed a goblin archer sound
- Fixed the quarrying animation not playing
- Fixed an AOE skill error

The recent review summary has become "mostly negative," something I've never had before, and it's my full-time job to try and make sure that doesn't happen. So I'm trying to better understand the main reasoning behind that to make sure I spend my time wisely over the next few weeks trying to correct the problems causing this.

A couple of important mentions first:
1. It's impossible to please everyone, especially with a (currently ~) $11.50 indie game made by one guy. There will always be negative reviews that I can do nothing about
2. There seems to be two annoying bugs going on right now, one with ranged bow attacks, and one that seems to only affect first time players causing the default interact keybind of F to not work. If you run into the interact key problem please try clearing the keybind and then setting it again.
3. I was briefly hospitalized on Sunday and have not been able to work since and may be unable to for another day or two, otherwise I would have fixed those bugs by now.

Having said that, I think one of the main things first time players are complaining about is the control scheme. We spent a lot of time and effort adding the RMB to move camera and click to target WoW style controls thinking that would make casting, ranged attacks, and UI interaction easier overall. For players that prefer a locked camera there is a toggle (default is V), but it seems a lot of people don't know there is a toggle and do not like the RMB controls.

Now of course there are a lot of little QoL things that can be improved and that will be my focus after we clean up the current issues, make sure the new multilingual system is working properly and get full controller support onto the beta branch. But this post is not about those.

I'm asking the people that left a negative review, or would consider leaving one still for responses along the lines of:
"I couldn't get the controls to work,"
"RMB to move the camera was terrible,"
"I didn't know I had to target mobs to attack them,"
"I didn't know there was a help window,"
"I couldn't figure out xxxx and gave up."

Things that caused you to go beyond "well that's kind of annoying," into "I don't like this game and what the developer is doing with it."

Some things I am considering to try and improve the new players experience:
- Adding tips to the loading screens
- Adding more buttons linking to the help window
- Adding pictures to and improving the help window
- Offering a return to the aim to shoot (no targets) locked camera controls

We talk about a lot of these things in the SC Discord server, but I know there are plenty of people, especially those willing to write a negative review, that aren't interested in joining Discord. I'm hoping this will reach some of those people so I can get a better grasp on how to best use my time improving things from here on.

Thank you and happy gaming!

More little fixes patching up the recent new bugs.

v 1.0.4.6 2023.07.05
- Now automatically recalculating skill points on load
- Fixed language resetting to OS on startup
- Fixed one of two spent skill point displays not working properly
- Fixed an item description issue due to recent changes
- Fixed a bug causing targeted creatures to rendered through walls
- Fixed snake scale missing translations
- Fixed a General achievements & Town achievements menu bug

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

The allure of the Steam Summer Sale got the best of me, and the big patch last week ended up bringing in a number of debilitating bugs unfortunately. First and foremost, my apologies for that. We've remedied the majority of them with this 5th hotfix, but there are still some after effects affecting some players, in particular messed up skill points. I've received some bugged player character saves from affected players and am looking into a way to retroactively remedy the problem. Worst case scenario I will a full skill reset with a small patch tomorrow so that we can get everyone back to where they should be.

v 1.0.4.5 2023.07.04
- Refactored a portion of the localization code to prevent future errors
- Fixed the hotbar resetting sometimes after changing language

v 1.0.4.4 2023.07.03
- Fixed a missing German translation
- Fixed translation problems preventing the game from loading

v 1.0.4.3 2023.07.02
- Fixed obsidian golem & glowing mushroom name errors
- Fixed broken item requirement text in crafting menu
- Fixed weapon recipe description text

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

Had a small bug with a big impact last night. Unfortunately it was not a problem in the Unity editor, only after exporting the executable, so I completely missed it trying to get yesterdays announcement out in like 20 different languages! It was a quick fix though as soon as I woke up and saw people yelling at me =D Which is always much appreciated, no joke. Player reported bugs are my most precious commodity.

v 1.0.4.2 2023.07.02
- Fixed a post-export only bug causing skills to not load

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

Now supporting 30(31) languages!

(Please note that for non-English news posts, this has been translated with Google Translate and may contain grammatical errors)

Steam itself does not actually support 31 languages, so I cannot mark the game as available for all of the languages that have been added, but the complete list of supported languages is as follows:

Afrikaans
Arabic
Bulgarian (under repair)
Catalan
Czech
Danish
German
Greek
English
Spanish
Finnish
French
Hebrew
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Dutch
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese (Brazil)
Portuguese (Portugal)
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Swedish
Turkish
Ukrainian
Traditional Chinese
Simplified Chinese

As the initial translations are made using machine translation there may be some words or phrases that can be improved in any particular language. Because of this, the language files are stored separately from the base game files in a folder called LanguageFiles, and can be editted directly. Soon I will setup a public git repository, allowing players to submit corrections to help improve the localizations for others. We also ran into a problem with the Bulgarian files, but will have them up shortly. We've also added a new function that will automatically switch to the language that a new players OS is using when they are opening the game for the first time, but that didn't quite make it into this patch and likewise will be added in soon.

If there is anything missing from the translations please let me know and I will make sure they get added into the system.

Happy Gaming!

Condensed patch notes:

v 1.0.3.1 -> 1.0.4.1 2023.07.01
- Vastly improved and expanded multi-lingual support
- Made player fired arrow graphical components a bit slower and a bit larger
- Improved the targeting reticle shader
- Added over 30 new monster abilities including visual and audio effects
- Upgraded target projector
- Monster abilities can now show an indicating projector
- Added or improved the audio and graphical effects of around 60 spells and abilities
- Fixed a multi-player storehouse bug where special resources wouldn't show up
- Fixed camera collision on cave entrances
- Fixed an issue with buildings and facilities in dungeons
- Fixed a problem where tombstones and buildings might not save properly in dungeons upon death or leaving
- Fixed lighting not updating correctly when entering a world encounter as an mp host
- Fixed lighting and sky breaking when leaving world encounter as an mp host
- Fixed an item dupe glitch
- Fixed a projector layering issue
- Fixed a couple multi-player invisible equipment bugs
- Fixed an issue with armor sometimes being invisible to others in mp
- Fixed the harvesting tools of others being invisible in mp
- Fixed resources not despawning after being harvested
- Fixed a new resource respawn check method happening too often causing performance problems and crashes
- Fixed scroll bars and text input problem in the start menus, character, and world creation
- Fixed monster tier trying to calculate itself prior to level causing loot to drop as tier 0
- Fixed a bug with monster damage over time abilities
- Fixed a bug that could lock player movement
- Fixed a bug for persisting effects
- Fixed a harmless multiplayer specific error
- Fixed resources respawning inside of buildings
- Fixed an error with shrines
- Fixed an error with ward skills
- Fixed loot disappearing with the clearing and removal of small encounters

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

There are just a few last minute things we're still tweaking with this build but the sale is upon us! So I'm going to push things as they are to beta, probably for less than 24 hours, and will push this branch to the live default build tomorrow to make room on beta for the full controller support branch that is also nearing completion.

I've never added the languages supported by Solace Crafting to the Steam page, because they only really supported each language 50-60%. We're now more like 95% and finishing up the last little bits, so tomorrow I will make a post in each language and turn on the tags in Steam. Not overly exciting if you're primarily an English speaker, but there are a LOT of gamers around the world that don't speak English. Once everything is in and working well, I will setup a public git repository specifically for the purpose of allowing community members the ability to improve translations in languages they are familiar with.

Real quick regarding myself and the lack of updates recently, I've had a lot of issues in and around my family that more or less prompted me to take some time off, and I made my annual visit to see my friends and family in the USA earlier than usual this year. Now, families members are all on the mend, the scary stuff is behind us, and I am back in the driver seat trying to properly piece together the work that Caj and Newbery have continued working on throughout my absence.

More soon!

v 1.0.4.0 2023.06.30
- Vastly improved and expanded multi-lingual support
- Fixed a multi-player storehouse bug where special resources wouldn't show up
- Fixed camera collision on cave entrances
- Fixed an issue with buldings and facilities in dungeons.
- Fixed a problem where tombstones and buildings might not save properly in dungeons upon death or leaving
- Fixed lighting not updating correctly when entering a world encounter as an mp host
- Fixed lighting and sky breaking when leaving world encounter as an mp host
- Fixed an item dupe glitch
- Fixed a projector layering issue
- Fixed a couple multi-player invisible equipment bugs
- Fixed an issue with armor sometimes being invisible to others in mp
- Fixed the harvesting tools of others being invisible in mp

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

My apologies for the gap in Steam news posts!
April was a mad house for me including hospital visits, house problems, pet problems, and my family visiting from the US for the first time in 8 years! But my personal life aside, work carries on, and we've got quite a few things not only on the current beta branch, but more behind the scenes eager to move onto the beta branch once we can push these changes live.

The main feature of the recent several patches is the introduction of 30 new monster abilities, most including new audio and visual effects to go with them. This and the recent reworking of the majority of player abilities as well has introduced a few combat bugs that I am still trying to ensure get squashed before all of these changes are pushed live.

Once we are done with this branch, I will be introduce the first wave of full controller support, and we are also working on improved multi-lingual support as well.

v 1.0.3.7 2023.05.10
- Fixed resources not despawning after being harvested

v 1.0.3.6 2023.05.02
- Improved the targeting reticle shader
- Fixed a new resource respawn check method happening too often causing performance problems and crashes
- Fixed scroll bars and text input problem in the start menus, character, and world creation
- Fixed monster tier trying to calculate itself prior to level causing loot to drop as tier 0

v 1.0.3.5 2023.04.28
- Added over 30 new monster abilities including visual and audio effects
- Upgraded target projector
- Monster abilities can now show an indicating projector
- Fixed a bug with monster damage over time abilities
- Fixed a bug that could lock player movement
- Fixed a bug for persisting effects
- Fixed a harmless multiplayer specific error
- Fixed resources respawning inside of buildings

v 1.0.3.3 2023.03.28
- Fixed the UMA database having been inexplicably wiped
- Fixed an NRE related to new controller support assets in the start menus

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

Lot's of new spell and ability animations and sounds have been the main focus of this patch. I have had a crazy week, and apologize for not posting a bunch of fun pictures to go with this. Had some hospital visits and emergency house reform and all kinds of stuff, kind of back to normal on a sunny Tuesday now though.

Once these changes have been tested out more thoroughly I will push the changes live with some screenshots and more information.

For the record, full controller support is coming along nicely.

Happy Spring, and happy gaming!

v 1.0.3.2 2023.03.26
- Added or improved the audio and graphical effects of around 60 spells and abilities
- Fixed an error with shrines
- Fixed an error with ward skills
- Fixed loot disappearing with the clearing and removal of small encounters

v 1.0.3.1 2023.03.08
- Fixed stuttery movement for ranged monsters / improved it for melee
- Refactoring Monster AI
- Fix for ability hotkeys not working

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

New encounters and lots of bug fixes in this patch!

Most importantly, in my opinion, I'm glad to finally fix the in-game menu blocking hotbar keys fixed on the live branch. This has been causing frustration for people, when the escape menu, but not an actual window comes open and blocks the use of hotbar keys. This patch for one no longer opens the menu when you escape out of a window, but it will also automatically close if you press a hotkey while there isn't an actual window open.

Some new encounters can also be found throughout the world:



Over time the game has developed a lot of different systems, we're now trying to improve the quality of those systems and add more content to them. These new encounters are considered "small encounters" and can be found scattered throughout the over-world, including two treasure cache types that do not show up on the map.

Besides that and a variety of bug fixes and performance improvements we are well underway with full controller support. We used the start screen and all of the game settings and character and world creation as a good testing point for the coding. Everything is working well there on our end, though not implemented for end users, so work is now underway on the in-game content.

More to come!

Condensed live patch notes:
v 1.0.2.14 - > v 1.0.3.0, 2023.03.07
- Added 4 new small encounters. Goblin totems, Buried Treasure (several varieties), Abandoned Goods, and Imp Rifts.
- Added shrines that can grant temporary buffs
- Upgraded dungeon generation to a wave function collapse method
- Added common room to dungeons with food spawning tables
- Now automatically combining meshes in dungeons to improve performance
- Disabled the menu opening when hitting escape while another window is open
- Now allowing player input to no longed be blocked by the MenuUI unless a window is actually open
- Fixed storehouse not gathering town resources properly
- Fixed several world encounter teleport, entrance/exit bugs
- Fixed town storehouse errors with special resources
- Fixed heals throwing an error when monsters are selected
- Fixed melee skills locking up player movement in some instance
- Fixed basic melee attacks unintentionally using an outdated range check causing blank swings
- Fixed bug causing markers to not disappear after clearing an encounter
- Fixed a null ref error in TargetUI
- Fixed an error when casting buffs on enemies
- Fixed a variety of potion effects and skill/spell effects cast by others not showing up in multiplayer

Latest changes to beta:
v 1.0.3.0 2023.03.07
- Added common Room with food spawning tables
- Refactored, sped up, and added multi-threading to dungeon wave function collapse decorator
- Now allowing player input to no longed be blocked by the MenuUI unless a window is actually open
- Fixed a null ref error in TargetUI
- Fixed an error when casting buffs on enemies
- Fixed shrines serialization and behavior in sp and mp
- Fixed bug causing markers to not disappear after clearing an encounter
- Fixed a variety of potion effects and skill/spell effects cast by others not showing up in multiplayer

v 1.0.2.19 2023.02.18
- Fixed several serialization and data management issues for the new small encounters
- Fixed input being blocked in some cases for MP clients

v 1.0.2.18 2023.02.17
- Fixed storehouse not gathering town resources properly
- Fixed several world encounter teleport, entrance/exit bugs

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

We've been having some hardware difficulties over the past couple weeks slowing things down, my apologies for that. There are still some small bugs to work out in the new dungeon generation methods introduced in this patch, but there is also a number of fixes and upgrades so I wanted to go ahead and push things out as they come.

Most notably the escape button when used to close the main in-game interface was also opening the escape menu in the upper right which blocks movement and action input. This was causing a number of people to think their controls had stopped working, not noticing the menu was open. This has been fixed so that escape will only open the menu when there are no other windows open.

We've also added a number of new small encounters throughout the world. Previously there were only the monoliths with stone elemental guards. Now there are imp rifts, goblin totems, treasure caches, abandoned goods, and shrines, as well as the monoliths. Still some tweaking going on with the spawn rates and overall multiplayer performance of these.

I also wanted to mention that work on full controller support was started a little while ago. I know there were quite a few people that had confused my talking about the "player controller" with controller support. It's been on the todo list forever, and though I'm not a controller player myself, I'm excited to see not only how it is received, but also what kind of new opportunities that may open for us down the road.

v 1.0.2.16 2023.02.15
- Added 4 new small encounters. Goblin totems, Buried Treasure (several varieties), Abandoned Goods, and Imp Rifts.
- Added shrines that can grant temporary buffs
- Fixed new storehouses data not properly transferring to clients in MP
- Fixed a number of MP specific problems with beta 1.0.2.15

v 1.0.2.15 2023.02.08
- Upgraded dungeon generation to a wave function collapse method
- Now automatically combining meshes in dungeons to improve performance
- Disabled the menu opening when hitting escape while another window is open
- Fixed a dungeon trap visual bug
- Fixed town storehouse errors with special resources
- Fixed an error in target acquisition method

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

Had a couple big problems reported I was able to smash. Throwing up a quick hotfix to squash them.

v 1.0.2.14 2023.01.25
- Fixed heals throwing an error when monsters are selected
- Fixed melee skills locking up player movement in some instance
- Fixed basic melee attacks unintentionally using an outdated range check causing blank swings

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

[h2]Regarding recent player controller changes[/h2]
Had some problems with new characters not properly assigning the basic attack to skill slot 1 upon creation, along with no sort of click to engage auto-attack, causing fully understandable frustration for some players. This patch, among other things, fixes the "Basic Attack" skill (found under the general skills tab) not being assigned for new characters, but also adds the ability to simply right-click on targets within range to engage auto-attack. I've also fixed auto-run as well as Q and E for keyboard turning.

The player controller overhaul was a huge undertaking, and I ended up releasing it a bit early causing us to take on some pretty nasty reviews due to the bugs. Hopefully this patch cleans up the majority if not all of the player controller related bugs, but I also take solace in the knowledge that we shouldn't have any hurdles from here on as far reaching as a player controller update is.

[h2]Looking forward[/h2]
I also wanted to share a bit about what we've lined up for the near future:
- A new procedural dungeon generator to improve the current undead and goblin dungeons and make adding new dungeons quick and easy.
- New and revamped small encounters, adding variety to what are currently only the stone elemental guarded monoliths.
- Improved enemy combat AI.
- Monster classes & abilities. This system is already implemented on a few mobs, for example some rock elementals spawn as a ranged class and throw rocks. I have laid out a plan for around 36 new monster abilities, including hero specific area attacks to be implemented to animals and monsters.
- Monster equipment randomization. Some monsters will randomize their equipment when spawned based on their class to increase variety.
- Monster champion & hero damage and health rework.
- Improved loot tables, including adding sockets to global loot.
- Runes. Several new types of sockets attainable as loot. These may also be dropped as recipes using the Masonry profession instead of Enchanting to add more use for stone and Masonry in general.
- Full controller support. Work on this started today and aims to make menus, crafting, hotkeys and all functions within the game possible with a controller.
- Further town capabilities, including resource transferring, trading with currency, and food production.
- Nutrition system & improved cooking. I have planned out a simple yet pretty deep set of systems designed to compliment one another for nutrition and cooking, and have only to implement them into the game. Note that these will only be beneficial, offering a way to further increase a characters performance through their food and drink.
- Fishing.
- NPC towns. The spawning and randomization of these is already mostly implemented, but I want to add more functionality to these NPC towns before we switch them on, such as trading and possibly questing.
- Revising the multi-lingual support. There are a lot of holes in the current multi-lingual system that for the most part simply need to be added into the current, working system, along with some organization to make the game fully multi-lingual.

I also paid for some work on building piece revisions and prepared 9 new textures to expand upon the current wood and stone, but unfortunately the work was very low quality and pretty much unusable. I was hoping to get some of that up for the Base Builder Fest, so ongoing, but they really need to be redone properly. So I've pushed work on that area to the side for the moment, but I will definitely be adding more building textures, and likely the ability to color buildings freely, along with some other building and town building specific upgrades in mind.

There are a number of other things on the back burners, but I don't really want to blab about things that may or may not be scrapped. For the most part, all of the functions mentioned above are things we're actually working on and hope to have ready for testing in the near future!

[h2]How to report bugs[/h2]
I also wanted to real quick mention fast that this is still primarily a solo developer project, massive though it is. I have some paid freelancers working on the things I tell them to, but it is not part of their responsibilities to monitor customer support, and I cannot yet afford hiring someone to manage things like that and social media and marketing and 7-8 other things. It's up to me to find, verify, and organize bug reports, and that can be very time consuming sometimes.

If you do run into something that needs my/our attention, the best way is to either add it to the bug-tracker, linked at the bottom of this and every news post, or to post in the #bug-discussions channel in our Discord server, also linked at the bottom of every post I make.

More important than where though is how. If you run into an error, opening up the console with F1 will show a print out of what caused the error. Often a screenshot of this is enough for me to go straight to the problem and fix it. If you can further provide the following details it often makes fixing the problem much much easier for me:
- What version were you playing
- Did it happen in single-player, or as a multiplayer client, or as a multiplayer host.
- What were you doing and what did you expect to happen
- What happened instead of what you were expecting
And honestly any other details can sometimes provide a massive clue into what happened. It is and always will be in my highest interest to find and repair any and all bugs as soon as I can, but sometimes it takes hours just to figure out what really went wrong. That's the price of such a big project being developed and run by so few people (mostly just me! XD ), but solid bug reports are a serious godsend, and are always very much appreciated.

[h2]Patch notes[/h2]
v 1.0.2.13 2023.01.24
- Enabled right-click to target enemies + engage auto-attack
- Updated a number of tutorial steps
- Improved Blink skill
- Disabled small encounters, monsters, and hostile animals from spawning in the starter area (250m radius by default)
- Fixed autorun immediately cancelling itself
- Fixed Q and E (default keys) not turning the player properly
- Fixed the quest helper not engaging automatically when tracking a quest or starting a new character
- Fixed weather particle generators not initializing collision quality properly
- Fixed several harmless startup errors client side when connecting to a server
- Fixed a multiplayer client specific undead & goblin dungeon bug
- Fixed Charge and Jump Back skills not working with new controller
- Fixed new characters not properly starting with basic attack in skill slot 1

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

Still some bugs I'm hacking away at. My apologies again that these made it through to the live build, there was so much we changed over the last three months, it was really hard to try and catch everything.

One sort of bold change with this patch is that the cursor is now confined to the game window for both windowed clients and for those using multiple monitors. This was a requested feature and should be no different for full screen players/single-monitor players, but if we need it to be an option which method we use I can certainly add that.

There are still some problems with riding in boats, climbing ladders, and getting stuck on joined 45 degree angle slopes, like multiple stairs pieces joined together, and pausing the game sometimes causing the player to get stuck in a dance. Newbery our controller guy is looking into those for me.

I am looking into obelisk damage, ranged attack direction and line of sight, dungeon enter and exit problems, as well as some problems with potions.

v 1.0.2.11 2023.01.10
- Fixed a storehouse bug deleting leftover resources when withdrawing
- Stopped a different harmless storehouse warning from throwing an error
- Improved mouse lock/unlock logic
- Now confining the mouse cursor to the game window for multi-monitor users
- Fixed auto-harvest in multiplayer
- Fixed town resources not harvesting properly
- Added tab target cycling to the key bindings settings

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

It's Saturday here, but there were a couple things that ended up being pretty debilitating for some people I wanted to take a look at. I have disabled the movement locking during combat and harvesting, that seemed to be seizing up for some players, so hopefully that will fix that until/if we decide to improve and reimplement it. I've also fixed freelook cam and cursor lock turning on or off improperly in certain situations, as well as a problem with the basic melee attack.

v 1.0.2.10 2023.01.07
- Removed movement lock during actions
- Increased melee range
- Fixed auto-attack animation and cooldown being able to fire at a longer range than the actual attack
- Fixed cusor lock and freelook falling out of unison in some cases

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

Definitely some problems with the latest patch, it was a big one!

I have repaired most of the biggest problems brought up so far. It's noon here, so I exported and uploaded a patch while I made some lunch. I will now get to work on some other things that have been brought up. Sorry this stuff made it all the way to live, should be largely sorted out today and tomorrow.

v 1.0.2.8 2023.01.06
- Fixed mouse sensitivity setting not working
- Fixed invert mouse Y setting not working
- Fixed player collider being too tall
- Fixed jump gravity being too low
- Fixed the refining UI (forges, etc) staying open even after cases of closing the connection with it
- Fixed settings still being able to revert to temporal AA causing targeting reticles to flicker
- Fixed a bug causing object spawn placement to randomize, especially obvious between client and server
- Fixed MP mobs going invisible while moving

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

Now bringing a host of changes from the beta branch onto the live build!
The main categories of change can be summarize as follows:

- Improved world generation performance
- New player controller and animations (Use the V key to switch between locked and MMO cam)
- Tab targeting
- Dungeon improvements

The player controller and animations have long been a deal breaker for a lot of players as the previous setup was just not quality enough for people whose minds work that way. We all have different wants and needs when it comes to gaming, and you certainly can't please everyone, but the new controller does feel a lot better, even though we are still hammering out some kinks.

We still have a number of upgrades in store for the targeting system and dungeon / encounter enhancements, though I have spent most of today plotting our next moves on a much broader scale. There are long term goals in regards to combat that the tab targeting moves us closer to, but is by no means the total package. I hope to be uploading a video to talk more on our plans for the next few months soon.

There does still seem to be a problem with boat riding related to the new controller that I was not able to get today, but I will jump on it first thing tomorrow, and I noticed, after the hour long export, that I forgot to update the year to 2023! I'm sure no one has ever done anything so careless, I do apologize, and have taken care of that typo already for the next patch.

Happy New Years to you all!
I am looking forward to Solace Crafting's best year yet!

v 1.0.1.1 - > v 1.0.2.7 2023.01.05
- Added a direction indicator pointing towards your current target
- Added character, inventory, craft, skills, and journal buttons to the overlay
- Implemented new player controller
- Implemented tab targeting / click to target
- Improved monster health bars
- Improved terrain texture quality filtering
- Added Gold Mine rooms to Dungeons, gold can now be mined from exposed gold veins in these rooms
- Barrels containing resources can now be found scattered around dungeons.
- Storage rooms now occasionally spawn in dungeons, where players may find useful items and uncommon goods.
- Secret treasure rooms now spawn in dungeons, if players spot and reveal their location, they are rewarded with treasure.
- Spike traps now spawn in some corridors, making dungeons more dangerous
- Reduced the size of goblin dungeons
- Switched to Fast Approximate Anti-aliasing (shader compatability issues, may be temporary)
- Improved world generation queue logic
- Improved object spawning logic
- Improved biome noise math
- Implemented multi-threading to save functions
- Redesigned player teleportation handling in and out of caves/dungeons/floating islands
- Added noise to tree spawning
- Increased most tree resource maximum rewards
- Fixed bugs causing void areas where no walls or floor would exist
- Fixed stun skills not working properly
- Fixed damage over time abilities not properly adjust damage for level differences
- Fixed debuffs/effects overriding one another

The most recent changes in regards to beta are as follows:

v 1.0.2.7 2023.01.05
- Added a direction indicator pointing towards your current target
- Fixed a dedicated server specific problem causing a lot of harmless error spam
- Fixed the possibility to get stuck between harvesting animations making you unable to move
- Fixed a bug with entering dungeons

Happy Holidays everyone!
I was hoping to make this post at the same as pushing the changes currently on beta to the live build, but there's still some small bugs that we're ironing out, so I'll be covering a mix of what's currently on beta and some of what's just around the corner.

[h2]What's going on on Beta?[/h2]
Currently on beta we have a LOT of changes being tested. The biggest of which are:
- New player controller. The player controller is what blends the huge amount of different animations the player uses as it runs around, swings swords, and throws fireballs. This has been re-written from the ground up for a much smoother, modern controller.

- New world generation algorithms. World generation is something that has to run in real time as the player moves around, up to and beyond 1 million kilometers in any direction. It's one of the most important aspects of the Solace Crafting engine, and has been upgraded in a wide variety of ways with better code, making better use of multi-core processors, and spreading the hard work out across multiple frames. This is an ongoing process with the goal always being as smooth and high of a frame rate as possible. Unfortunately one of the developers I hired specifically to work on improving our draw calls, a major drain on frame rate, disappeared without word. I hope he's alive and well, but was forced to freeze the contract.

- Mob targeting. Combat has always been a bitter sweet part of Solace Crafting. "Kinda janky" would be a fair explanation of the previous state of combat. In truth, combat was never intended to be the main aspect of Solace Crafting, but it is still a very integral part of it as crafted equipment needs a good reason to use it. Switching to a targeting system is the first step in an extended plan to improve the combat experience, with a lot of upgrades to monster AI, combat mechanics, and a few surprises planned out for the next few months.
This change has primarily switched from the camera previously being locked to the mouse, to a more MMORPG style of controls where the right mouse button is held down to move the camera. A locked camera mode for those that prefer it has also been implemented, but by default this unlocks the cursor for use to be able to click on monsters, NPCs, and UI buttons, all of which play into more upcoming improvements we have planned for 2023.

The bulk of these features are in and working, we're just smoothing out some of the rough edges before we push things to the live build.

[h2]New UI in the works[/h2]
A user interface revamp is in the works, and I wanted to take this opportunity to bring it up a little bit to get the discussion going. We're still in the planning and design phase, so these images do not reflect the final look of what we're aiming for, just the layout and flow improvements. One of the main improvements that I personally want to add is the ability to click and drag windows so players can position and dock things as they see fit.



Here the proposed layout for the main inventory screen collapses the stats window by default for a much slimmer design, and reorganizes the equipment slots to a more body relevant layout.



The crafting window is planned to do away with the profession buttons, instead listing the profession that a craftable item is related to along with the players current level in that profession. The stats and ingredients lists will automatically scale to fit however many lines are needed making the UI viable for more complex items.



In today's patch I've introduced some simple buttons on the overlay linking to inventory, crafting, etc., and these may remain in some form or another, but I also like the proposed idea of holding down CTRL to bring up a window selection wheel something like the above image, for quick access to the most common windows.

Again, these aren't the actual colors or design of the windows that we are going for, just proposed changes to their layout and functionality. Please let us know what you think!

[h2]New building skins under construction[/h2]
Currently we have a mix of wood and stone structures, but we will be upgrading from two materials to nine materials early next year. This will also open opportunities to get new town and player harvesting resources in. I was hoping to get some pictures up for this section, but it's Christmas Eve =D We'll show them off when they're done.

[h2]Encounter improvements[/h2]
In order to get some basic improvements up in time for the winter sale, we have not begun work on the more serious plans we have for revamping encounters such as caves and dungeons, but we do plan to be spending a fair amount of time in January working on combat improvements, mob variation, and most fun of all, encounter generation methods. For starters we've added a few new things to goblin dungeons including a storage room, a secret room, traps, and gold veins. We would like to next month really step up the room and layout generation of all encounter types, above and below ground, to not include just rooms, door, and hallways, but platforms, pits, stairs, balconies, and lots of inter-connectivity to better work with the variety of mob abilities and modifiers we have planned.

[h2]Closing[/h2]
All-in-all there is a lot we're excited to start working on including new recipes, recipe types, weapons, skills, dimensions, quests, town functions, modding support, full controller support, and improved multi-lingual support. We've gone from just me to around 2.5 people over the past few months, and it's really exciting to see the hastened progress. Hopefully our baby keeps gaining traction and we can continue to expand our capabilities to bring better and more engaging content as time goes on!

Thank you so much to everyone that supported me through Early Access, and to everyone that has stuck around despite a less than perfect launch. Merry Christmas!

Kyle Postlewait


The latest changes to beta are as follows:

v 1.0.2.6 2022.12.24
- Added character, inventory, craft, skills, and journal buttons to the overlay
- Improved tab target algorithm
- Fixed the building and terraforming interfaces reading WASD movement even when not holding down RMB
- Fixed character size being able to affect foot position on ground
- Fixed running down slopes resulting in a hopping animation
- Fixed death and revive animations
- Fixed an issue with entering encounters
- Fixed underwater animations
- Fixed demons not spawning properly with solace defense waves
- Fixed animations getting stuck when performed in quick succession sometimes

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

Had a beta patch on Monday, and just finished pushing up a second. Between the two of them, should have the major bugs cleared up. There are still some things that are fixed, but not in my lap yet, in particular different height characters models feet not meeting up with the ground properly, and hopping down slopes rather than running. And the first person camera logic is a little wonky, turning the character model off too early and some things. These and others should be sorted out tomorrow, and hopefully we'll have a few days left to add some new fun stuff in =D

v 1.0.2.5 2022.12.21
- Camera wheel will no longer zoom the camera while interacting with UI elements
- Reduced maximum camera zoom out distance
- Free look (V key by default) will now switch in and out of locking the camera to the cursor
- Fixed autorun not working with the new controller
- Fixed a bug where loading a game saved in an encounter would result in loading into a void
- Fixed a bug improperly despawning objects client-side in multi-player, also negatively affecting performance
- Fixed the possibility for a spawn logic discrepancy between server and client making some objects appear unharvestable

v 1.0.2.4 2022.12.19
- Fixed movement input persisting while dead
- Fixed LMB RMB camera controls going through UI
- Fixed mobs positioning improperly bug that came back in MP
- Fixed breakable barrels and secret rooms to work in MP

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

Wave two of lots of new things in-game in preparation for the Steam Winter Sale! Please note that these changes are being added to the public beta, and we are aware of a number of quality of life problems and some bugs that we are still working on polishing up before we push the changes to the live default build.

The new player controller makes its first appearance. Reworked animations, blending, and controls, all from the ground up (not a pun). Still hopping down sheer slopes a little awkwardly, and depending on your characters size, I think particularly shorter characters are not properly positioning themselves on the ground, but again we will get this all sorted out in the next few days.

Tab to open the main inventory screen is no more, replaced with tab to cycle nearby targets. You can also click to select enemy targets. This system does away with the physics based projectiles, both "ranged" and magic based. Projectiles will now automatically seek their target, assuming the player has line of sight, as Solace Crafting is much more about rolling stats against one another. Whether you hit or miss or critical or the monster dodges or resists is based on your and your enemies stats. Some next steps for these systems includes using the cursor to aim target AOE abilities such as Flame Glyph which still currently rely on the crosshair or reticle, and adding the ability to "charge" or cast spells over a period of time while remaining still.

The click to target system is not however replacing everything else in the game. Harvesting, facility interaction, doors, etc., can all still be interacted with using the F key (by default) as usual. Holding the right mouse button down will rotate your character as well as move the camera, while holding the left mouse button down will rotate only the camera. This is a very standard method of camera control that players of any sort of 3rd person RPG or MMO should be very used to.

I is the default key for opening up the main inventory, and can be reassigned via the in-game menu / settings / controls, if you have changed that or had it turned off. We are however working on a lot of new UI pieces I'm planning to bring up in the big push next week, some of which should make accessing the inventory and other interfaces much easier and much more user friendly. Those will not be ready to be implemented by next week, but they are coming along and I want to bring up the proposed changes with everyone to gather input.

Gold makes it's way into the game for the first time. We've only had copper and silver nodes up until now, but gold can now be found in goblin dungeons if you've the gear and the guts to brave them. Dungeon layouts have also been reworked a bit to include secret rooms, breakable barrels, "storage rooms" with special loot, as well as deadly traps. We still want to make more extensive changes and upgrades to dungeons and caves in general, but knew that we would not have enough time to do everything before the holidays start, so this is kind of a first pass on dungeons in general.

I've also made some changes to monster health bars. Champions and Heroes now have different colored and shaped health bars both above them and when targeted. I've long planned to add named mobs, mob and dungeon modifiers, and have already implemented a monster class (tank/rogue/etc) system I hope to make more understandable with these changes. The champion and hero nameplates don't quite stand out enough yet, but these too shall be improved now that they are all in and working.

It's super late, Saturday night here, I just patched and logged into the BKG beta server, and it seems that mobs are going invisible in multiplayer past 8km again, I may have inadvertently reintroduced that bug through my poor version control management skills (one of the 27 professions expected of a indie developer), but should be able to fix it in the morning.

Still a couple of small things I want to get in before the end of next week, but again we plan to focus on bug fixes and polishing up all of this that we've been putting together over the past couple months, and have a lot more planned for 2023!

v 1.0.2.3 2022.12.17
- Implemented new player controller
- Implemented tab targeting / click to target
- Improved monster health bars
- Improved terrain texture quality filtering
- Added Gold Mine rooms to Dungeons, gold can now be mined from exposed gold veins in these rooms
- Barrels containing resources can now be found scattered around dungeons.
- Storage rooms now occasionally spawn in dungeons, where players may find useful items and uncommon goods.
- Secret treasure rooms now spawn in dungeons, if players spot and reveal their location, they are rewarded with treasure.
- Spike traps now spawn in some corridors, making dungeons more dangerous
- Reduced the size of goblin dungeons
- Fixed bugs causing void areas where no walls or floor would exist
- Switched to Fast Approximate Anti-aliasing (shader compatability issues, may be temporary)
- Fixed stun skills not working properly
- Fixed damage over time abilities not properly adjust damage for level differences
- Fixed debuffs/effects overriding one another

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

At long last, we have our first patch of upgraded logic and math on a variety of our core systems including world generation queues, biome noise math, and object spawning. These three are the major systems running the background at pretty much all times while players are moving around in the game trying to determine what needs to be spawned, where, who needs to be spawned first, and so forth.

You all as gamers are probably aware of these concepts, but Solace Crafting operates on a near 100% runtime spawning system, meaning that there are no "levels" or predetermined areas already designed that are getting copied and pasted into your game world. Yet at the same time, each world is not at all "random" but actually completely math based, derived entirely from the seed generated whenever you create a new world. Right down to the placement of a flower, everything can be derived from the world seed and so nothing actually gets saved to disk either, until you make a change.

I personally very much enjoy the replayability and randomness this brings to game, but it does also come with a variety of challenges as all of this has be handled in runtime, whether the player is looking at a menu or in the middle of a decisive fight for their life. This patch makes some pretty deep changes to these core systems for an overall faster and smoother game engine.

As these changes are in some place quite "foundational", it's not unlikely that there will be some new bugs we'll have to look into, but our new programmer has been doing a stellar job, and let me be the first to say I'm super thankful to finally have someone that knows what they are doing! haha... >_>

The new player controller is very close as well, 95%, didn't quite make it into this patch, but it is indeed, so much better than the current controller, it's hard for me to switch back to the current. I have also opened a contract with a new 3D artist for some new buildings pieces and skins, as my old contact has proven inapplicable for our current needs. We've also seemingly lost one of our initial hires for some reason, he never logged any hours, but I have not heard from him in over three weeks now, so I've unfortunately frozen the contract, but things are moving steadily forward. I've also gotten a first glimpse of some of the UI changes we've got in the pipe, and they too are much more intelligently planned out, and I hope we can get some early iterations of them in as soon as possible! I'm also working on some new items, but nobody wants to hear about that!

Best wishes and holidays to everyone in the merry month of December!
We should have some more updates very soon.

v 1.0.2.0 2022.12.03
- Improved world generation queue logic
- Improved object spawning logic
- Improved biome noise math
- Implemented multi-threading to save functions
- Redesigned player teleportation handling in and out of caves/dungeons/floating islands
- Added noise to tree spawning
- Increased most tree resource maximum rewards

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

Now pushing v 1.0.1.1 to the live default branch. I have been really hesitant to push this patch as there is a lot of changes to the core networking code that could have had generated some yet unforseen problems, and I knew I had a small trip coming up before Thanksgiving, and then well it was Thanksgiving. I'm headed to bed now though and tomorrow is Monday morning for me here, so if there is anything problematic that crops up I'll be on top of it!

As I've mentioned before once this patch is moved off of the beta branch I will start pushing the procedural generation and engine optimization changes that we have been working on to beta. This patch will primarily only affect multi-player, outside of the various bug fixes, but this next wave of patches will be more foundational improvements affecting all play modes. Hopefully we will be able to get targeting and the new player controller up for testing and input in the next week or two as well.

I usually summarize patch notes moving from beta to live by removing smaller fix notations, but that was the majority of what was being worked on outside of the networking upgrade, so I went ahead and left all of the changes below.

v 1.0.0.6 -> 1.0.1.1 2022.11.27
- Upgraded Mirror (network codebase)
- Added guardian gauntlets recipe
- Improved crafting and item details for weapons
- Added checks to update really old, unedible food to be edible
- Fixed facility/other windows staying open/connected when swapping between crafting & inventory causing problems.
- Fixed an issue with the multiplayer town building spawning
- Fixed some tilled soil math issues
- Fixed a new issue causing network object to go invisible while standing still
- Fixed a bug with cooked food despawning from backpacks and storage chests
- Fixed player models not loading avatar changes properly in multiplayer in some occasions
- Fixed a bug improperly kicking player for SteamID mismatches
- Fixed a bug causing basic melee attacks to miss on multiplayer clients
- Fixed a bug with weather not syncing properly in MP
- Fixed a bug with resource respawning
- Fixed a bug causing skill cooldowns to reduce slightly with each level
- Fixed /stuck not working in caves
- Fixed blink cooldown
- Fixed hotkeys retaining unwanted data after using a tabula rasa potion
- Fixed Stoneworkers requiring stone to summon
- Fixed several skill description errors
- Fixed charge attacking with or without Dashing Strike
- Fixed charge going wild sometimes
- Fixed the weapon set swap icon being scaled improperly
- Fixed wardrobe weapons being overriden with swapping, sheathing, and some skills
- Fixed save and exit briefly throwing harmless errors sometimes on multiplayer client
- Fixed a bug with equipping shields in multiplayer
- Fixed a bug with harvested resources in multiplayer still showing up
- Fixed weapon targeting not working at times
- Fixed an issue with terraforming collision detection
- Fixed a problem with tombstones duplicating
- Fixed a bug with Charge and Jump Back
- Fixed an animation error with passive animals
- Fixed a bug with the new Mirror stopping resources from syncing properly after harvest
- Fixed auto-harvest not working with the new Mirror
- Fixed being able to loot while dead
- Fixed static network objects not always positioning properly on clients past 8192m
- Fixed guardian leggings not rendering properly
- Fixed being able to save a solace placed using free placement mode into a structure save
- Fixed weather turning on in caves sometimes
- Fixed character creation assigned skill points not properly increasing skill tree spent point count
- Fixed character creation assigned attributes not properly assigning
- Fixed harmless render texture error spam on dedicated servers and a couple other harmless start up errors
- Fixed bought attributes not always applying properly until reconnecting
- Fixed some types of weapon speed improvements reducing their "base speed," upsetting damage math

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

We were hoping to get the latest changes currently on beta pushed to the live branch last week but there have been a number of small network bugs that cropped up holding things back. That and I am currently on a train in Southwest Japan. I went AFK on Monday and will be back tomorrow, so I didn't want to push a major patch, knowing that I would be gone for a few days. Once we free up beta there's a whole new wave of performance upgrades we've been working on that will be moved to beta.

Beyond the performance upgrades we have some new UI upgrades under construction, a new player controller, and I am in talks with a modeller for new building textures.

I also wanted to bring up that I've been researching using the Steam Datagram Relay transport as an alternative to the current TCP based transport. This is not a sector of software development that I am skilled in, but Steam offers backend support for P2P gameplay that bypasses the need for router port forwarding that some people have a hard time setting up, and/or are unable to work with. It's not something I'm sure yet that we can work with, but it could be a useful alternative to the current TCP transport.

Again, I will be back tomorrow and looking to push the recent changes as soon as possible.

The latest beta patch notes are as follows:

v 1.0.1.1 2022.11.21
- Fixed facility/other windows staying open/connected when swapping between crafting & inventory causing problems.

v 1.0.1.0 2022.11.15
- Improved crafting and item details for weapons
- Fixed an issue with the multiplayer town building spawning
- Fixed some tilled soil math issues
- Fixed a new issue causing network object to go invisible while standing still

v 1.0.0.18 2022.11.08
- Fixed a bug with cooked food despawning from backpacks and storage chests
- Fixed player models not loading avatar changes properly in multiplayer in some occasions
- Fixed a bug improperly kicking player for SteamID mismatches
- Fixed a bug causing basic melee attacks to miss on multiplayer clients

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

I've rented a new Los Angeles server from PingPerfect.com for the beta branch. I am currently aware of two hosting services that have recently started offering hosting for Solace Crafting:
PingPerfect
Nexus Hosting Networks
Setting up port forwarding on whatever random router you might have isn't always the easiest thing in the world. And then there's firewalls and security and Windows getting in the way. I hope we'll be able to make the experience smoother someday, but I know that as is, some people have a tough time getting dedicated servers up and running on their home computers, so it's cool that there are some cheap, quick, and easy alternatives available now.
As far as I know, both sites are offering shared server usage, so it's not necessarily "dedicated" but should run fine, especially for groups of 2-4, and we are actively working on improving runtime world generation to speed up servers.

The new beta server is running the latest patch, 1.0.0.13. Primarily bug fixes, as we are still hammering out a few different things on a separate beta branch.

In other news, we now have a total of 5 people working on the game in some capacity \o/ Only two of us are working full-time, but we have a third developer looking into texture optimization and general rendering performance, a fourth developer working on reworking the character controller and locomotion, and a fifth individual I will be working one on one with tomorrow morning lined up to spend time working on the UI/UX side of things.
Things are slowly gaining speed, and again, I'm hoping to have some wider reaching changes up before the Steam Winter Sale gets started.

This patch is a good candidate to push to the live branch, pending some testing, and maybe a hotfix or two, I hope to push the update live within a day or two.

v 1.0.0.13 2022.10.31
- Added checks to update really old, unedible food to be edible
- Fixed a bug with weather not syncing properly in MP
- Fixed a bug with resource respawning

v 1.0.0.12 2022.10.25
- Fixed a bug causing skill cooldowns to reduce slightly with each level
- Fixed /stuck not working in caves
- Fixed blink cooldown
- Fixed hotkeys retaining unwanted data after using a tabula rasa potion
- Fixed Stoneworkers requiring stone to summon
- Fixed several skill description errors
- Fixed charge attacking with or without Dashing Strike
- Fixed charge going wild sometimes
- Fixed the weapon set swap icon being scaled improperly
- Fixed wardrobe weapons being overriden with swapping, sheathing, and some skills
- Fixed save and exit briefly throwing harmless errors sometimes on multiplayer client
- Fixed a bug with equipping shields in multiplayer
- Fixed a bug with harvested resources in multiplayer still showing up

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

As previously mentioned, there are some biome changes underway that we want to keep out of beta until we can compile together a couple of other changes that will render currently saved worlds in need of updating. Here is a build from a separate branch we are working on with some bug fixes.

Recently I updated the networking solution that I use, Mirror, to its latest version and there were some slight changes to the architecture that has required a few components be updated. Several of these issues are related to that, and there are a couple more multiplayer specific issues that I am still looking into, outside of the general bug reports on the bug tracker which we are trying to whittle away at.

v 1.0.0.11 2022.10.17
- Fixed weapon targeting not working at times
- Fixed an issue with terraforming collision detection
- Fixed a problem with tombstones duplicating
- Fixed a bug with Charge and Jump Back
- Fixed an animation error with passive animals
- Fixed a bug with the new Mirror stopping resources from syncing properly after harvest
- Fixed auto-harvest not working with the new Mirror
- Fixed being able to loot while dead

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

Hey everybody, hope all is well!
I just wanted to give a quick update as it's been a bit since the last update / patch.

As previously stated we're trying to focus on bug fixes and overall game engine improvements at the moment, but, for a fair amount of things, simply patching up whatever the problem isn't always the best approach. Sometimes the reason there are bugs with a system is because the foundations of the system itself were not written very intelligently in the first place.
These kinds of things are 100% my fault, as I've made clear, I never really wanted to be a programmer, but that was 90% of what the game needed to get everything working, so there is some undesirable code and some less than perfectly designed systems in-game. Since we now have a more experienced programmer helping out, he is reworking some of these systems at a more "root" level rather than just putting duct tape over the holes.
The first thing that I actually had him look at had to do with "area" generation, which is what spawns resources, monsters, and so forth. Any changes to these kinds of systems affects saved games to the point that they need to be restarted or "updated" which repositions player built objects. There are some other changes to spawning underway, so rather than having beta players need to wipe or update repeatedly in a short period of time, I'm looking to group a couple of things together into one larger patch.

Beyond that, I've hired on a second developer part-time, primarily to look into performance optimizations for the time being. A third developer is due to join us shortly for reworking the character controller. And a friend of a friend is exploring some ideas for redesigning and redrawing the user interface.

So, nothing has necessarily happened overnight, but there is a lot going on! Hopefully before the Winter sale starts up we can get a few larger waves of patches up. To be honest, personally I've spent quite a bit of time this week getting my life back in order. I got my car fixed, paid off a bunch of lingering bills I had, etc.

More to come soon!

After a diligent search for cost efficient talent, I've hired on a programmer who's now diving into the code headfirst! It will definitely take some time for him to get situated within the over 120,000 lines of code, but having some help is going to make a big difference!

I am still negotiating with a few other developers for other tasks, likely more short term, but this has brought up a lot of important new things for me to work on to make sure that our team can work together efficiently, how every many are working on the game at any given point, now that it's no longer a solo endeavor.

I am very much having us focus on bug fixes and performance for the foreseeable future. We want to make sure this ship is running as smooth as possible before we get back into expanding on both current systems and new.

I've also finished upgrading Mirror, the network solution that Solace Crafting uses, to the latest and greatest version. There were some bumps in a couple of beta patches over the past few days, but I think I've got everything sorted out.

More news to come shortly!

The latest beta patch notes are as follows:

v 1.0.0.9 2022.10.04
- Fixed static network objects not always positioning properly on clients past 8192m

v 1.0.0.8 2022.10.03
- Upgraded Mirror (network solution)

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

I've been working on a big upgrade to the network code for the past 3-4 days, but it's dragging on so I'm going to push a number of bug fixes for now until the network upgrade is finished. I use a network software package called Mirror that is very actively developed, but upgrades can mean changes in terminology and architecture. As there is some rigging of the internal code to make it work for Solace Crafting's specific needs, major upgrades can take a while to reapply, and this is several major upgrades at once.

Until then. the following fixes will be upped to beta first for safe testing before being pushed to the live build depots:

v 1.0.0.7 2022.09.21
- Added guardian gauntlets recipe
- Fixed guardian leggings not rendering properly
- Fixed being able to save a solace placed using free placement mode into a structure save
- Fixed weather turning on in caves sometimes
- Fixed character creation assigned skill points not properly increasing skill tree spent point count
- Fixed character creation assigned attributes not properly assigning
- Fixed harmless render texture error spam on dedicated servers and a couple other harmless start up errors
- Fixed bought attributes not always applying properly until reconnecting
- Fixed some types of weapon speed improvements reducing their "base speed," upsetting damage math

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!

This video covers a lot of what I want to get across in this post, but it ended up turning into an hour so I will try and summarize a bit via text. If you'd like to watch the video though, it covers 5 topics:
1. What's been going on
2. The money situation
3. Talking about hiring on freelancers
4. The survey results
5. My long term vision of Solace Crafting
[previewyoutube=hkpISiHkCzc;full][/previewyoutube]

1.
To summarize, I've been swamped with all of the contacts coming in, alongside working on getting the project more ready to welcome onboard other developers. It's a 50+GB project folder full of thousands of assets that I know how to navigate because I've been working with them every day for the past 5 years, but I want to get things better organized to ease the onboarding process I'm planning to get into at the start of next month.

2.
As previously talked about the initial sales boost is in large generated by a "visibility round" wherein Steam boosts the games exposure so that a lot more people than would normally are recommended to look at the game. That ended on something like Sept 1st, so there was the possibility that sales would go back to pre-1.0, which case I would need to be more careful in my spending. Thankfully these past two weeks of post-1.0 sales have not reverted to pre-1.0 numbers, so I'm more confident in planning how to spend my earnings to improve the game.

3.
There are four different developers I am looking to pay in some capacity once the August sales make it to me at the end of the month. One is a girl I've paid in the past to do building pieces for me, and another is our audio team. These both are not necessarily hourly or "part-time" positions, but more milestone payments where I ask for a package of things like a package of desert theme building skins, or harpy combat sounds, for example. The other two are more part-time positions focused on revamping the in-game user interface, and converting the current targeting/combat system to a click to target system similar to games like Everquest or World of Warcraft. This will both better allow for grouping and being able to click on other players to heal, buff, or interact with them, as well as remove the need to aim fireballs and arrows, while adding in things like channeling abilities and spell cast times.

4.
There were somewhere around 350 response to public survey, with a fair amount of text based comments and remarks, but here are the number based responses:




This graph shows that for the most part everyone voted towards "this does not bother me". The higher the number the more "bothered" people were, with combat AI, animations, and the UI being the least liked.





I was a little surprised that audio was voted as not bothering people, and that achievements weren't better received. There are some bugs with the current achievements systems, one big one showing a ton of achievements as just all giving "wisdom 0.2" when they actually give a wide variety of stat bonuses, that I have fixed, though not patched in yet. But all in all I personally agree with the bulk of the answers.

5.
In the video I go into some depth as to how I want the game to evolve to better support some of the survey results, and how some of the systems already in-game have been designed from day one specifically to support exploration, area based quests, NPC villages, and to add more practical uses to the long range viewing distance we have rather than just looking neat. Tough to summarize twenty minutes of me talking into a few paragraphs, but I'll try.

Currently the world of Solace Crafting generates in 8km squared "chunks," which are divided into 64 "sections" or terrains, each 1km squared themselves. Each chunk, for example, can contain only 1 floating island, then each remaining 63 sections that do not have a floating island then roll to determine what type of a "large encounter" they have. So there is only ever one cave or dungeons per square kilometer. This is a flow of logic that the generation engine goes through to make sure that encounters are properly placed throughout the world.

In the future I would like to further expand on those systems to generate an NPC town per chunk, and to have that town aware of the other encounters within the same chunk, and build stories and offer quests and rewards for engaging in those encounters.

One of The main thing I am interested in exploring further is a quest system that in large does away with the:
- get a quest from a quest hub (city)
- walk to some distant location to kill 8 monsters
- walk back to the quest hub
- rinse repeat
This is still a widely used system, especially in RPGs and MMORPGs, and is in my opinion just terrible, and really ends up making otherwise great games a chore to play. I think for example, NPC villages that offer quests should have a public solace within them that players can teleport back to, maybe even with a spell specifically for NPC villages only.

The quest hub, story building system has a lot of good that can come out of it as long as it doesn't turn into a walkathon, but a superior and generally more fun system of questing that I want to implement is an area based quest generation system. In the video I use the example of walking into a swamp and having a quest notification popup that "you hear a scream to the northwest." You don't need to "pickup" the quest, and you don't need to engage in it if you don't want to, it just exists in that area, and can be engaged with if you choose to. Maybe killing a skeleton in a graveyard drops a ring that starts a quest, or you come across a broken shrine that starts a quest, etc. Things that don't ask you to walk somewhere else to engage with them, but start and finish relatively where you are.

I think it will be entirely possible to support these types of area based quests with an area specific section of the journal, and by allowing players to interact with map "sections" by clicking on them to show if there are quests that they encountered and either finished or are maybe still available to them.

I think there are a lot of unexplored possibilities for making "questing" more fluid and exploration based than the plain old "go get this for me" stuff, and I think can open up a lot of opportunities for modders to get involved in designing more fun content in the future.

I also think having crafting and harvesting quests, class specific quests, and a lot of other "unlock" content can really add to giving players more options of what to do with some minimum level of guidance, without railroading players down a main story quest or predetermined path.

Anyway, check out the video if you'd like to hear more about me rambling about that kind of stuff. I'm sorry I haven't actually been engaging a ton in "game development" these past two weeks. I'm trying to dedicate the majority of this week to bug fixes, and probably half and half next week between bug fixes and again getting ready for onboarding more help.

It still feels like mid-summer over here, but the nights are starting to cool down, hopefully I can get out and repair my once accessible yard from it's current jungle status.

Happy gaming!

I made it back home from my annual visit to the US after another 23 hours of transit just in time for bed! This morning I had 1018 new e-mails, that I took care of, and I still have a lot of private messages and things to go through. All-in-all I probably won't be able to get anything serious done for a day or two, but wanted to at least get out a message that I'm back and I didn't disappear as people slowly start to assume the longer you are gone =]

I also wanted to remind everyone that I will be closing the short survey that has been live throughout August via this link:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HVRZBLP

I will leave it up for another 24 hours then take it down and gather the data into a spreadsheet to share with everyone.

Thank you again to everyone that has joined us this past month, and I will have more to report again soon!

Hello fellow gamers!
I'm so appreciative for all the friendly messages people are sending me in Discord and on YouTube, etc. It seems that the majority of gamers are well aware of the fact that games don't get made overnight, and really we all just want to play fun games. I've been very anxious about bringing my game out into the open from day one, so it's very invigorating to see all of the positive reactions.

As I stated recently, I don't actually get to see any of the revenue that is coming in right now until the end of September, and from there it will take a bit to onboard some assistance, but it's looking very probable that I will be able to safely go down that route! Next month will be interesting as the current visibility boost going on on Steam will wear off and sales will revert back to normal organic visibility. If September sales are enough to cover my basic needs I can likely consider the bulk of earnings from August as fuel to improve the game to the next stage.

In other news, I am leaving in 30 minutes to get on a train towards Narita Airport to visit my family in Seattle. I do this every August, and was lucky enough to get support from my family to help pay for tickets this year, because I was broke! Because of this I have held off from patching anything in this past weekend, as change is always dangerous and I am not going to be able to make any corrections while I'm not at home. I hope the recent multiplayer improvements have smoothed some of the larger problems out, but am aware there is still a lot to be done.

I've got about 25 hours of travel ahead of me, and notebooks to plan out the next few months with. I will likely not be able to keep up with all the e-mails, messages, and chat that is going on right now while I am gone, but will be back shortly and ready to program!

Best wishes to everyone in the ongoing heat!

The most recent patch also went down silently through discord discussions and brought in the following changes:
v 1.0.0.6 2022.08.12
- Added [/help admin] to the console for listing admin commands
- Added /kick, /kickall, and /reloadworld admin commands
- Added console command report backs to admins issuing commands to the server
- Added the command line argument: -uselocalfolder to change all file and folder access to the application folder
- Defeating monsters, monoliths, and animals will now give light and experience to all players within 50m
- Further improved world generation speeds on dedicated servers
- Added a method to check the current status of world generation on a dedicated server

Join us in Discord!

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

Small patch here with some little things that are ready to patch in. Primarily I wanted to fix a problem with the Linux dedicated server files, which isn't going to affect most people, so sorry for the small patch here.

I do plan to have another patch later today (later today for me is the middle of the night for most people, still mid-morning atm) with more multiplayer server speed upgrades as that seems to still be a problem for people playing on servers with more than 4-5 people. Was trying to focus on multi-lingual stuff, but I'm sure this is annoying for people that are running into it.

I'm also going to be adding in some "devops" to try and gather better data on if the official server (7 people on it right now) is indeed getting it's terrain generation queue backed up.

v 1.0.0.5 2022.08.11
- Fixed some spelling errors
- Fixed the two newest shields facing backwards
- Fixed the offhand weapon positioning being rotated improperly
- Fixed the brutal sword being rotated improperly
- Fixed a number of hair types not responding to color changes
- Fixed the world terrain preview being too dark
- Fixed stuns slowing down damage over time spells

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

Join us in Discord!

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

This patch pushes 1.0.0.3 and 1.0.0.4 to the default "live" branch, as well as 0.4 to the beta branch.

1.0.0.3 brings in improvements to server world generation speeds, so hopefully we will see a drop in what people are labeling as "desync" where again when you run around on a multiplayer server with several other people and monsters seems to not spawn or resources don't seem to interact properly.

I've also fixed a number of more annoying multiplayer bugs that people were running into. More to come tomorrow o/

v 1.0.0.4 2022.08.09
- Fixed skill points spent not always updating properly in multiplayer
- Fixed some multiplayer achievement errors
- Fixed familiar not spawning nor firing in multiplayer
- Fixed chain lightning lingering for multiplayer clients
- Fixed backstab criticals multiplying way too much

v 1.0.0.3 2022.08.08
- Improved multi-player dedicated server world generation speeds
- Enabled password protection for servers
- Upgraded quest system to work in multiplayer

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

I'm totally swamped trying to keep up with e-mails, discord chat, and Steam posts. Sorry again for anyone that hasn't yet gotten an answer to anything. I'm trying to prioritize some of the bigger problems that are going on before I tackle the small stuff.

One major problem I've seen a few people run into so far is a lack of enemies in multiplayer. This is caused by the server not keeping up with the connected players. If, for example, there are 6 players all running in different areas of the world, the server has to be constantly generating all of those areas in order for the player to be able to engage with anything as everything is server authorative. There is still a lot of room for improvement on this front, but I've tweaked a few server specific methods that should speed things up.

The starter quests/tutorials not working in multiplayer has also been a problem for families and friends that start their very first character in multiplayer. This patch upgrades the system to work properly in multiplayer.

As there are some bigger than small changes in this patch I will push it to beta for a bit of testing before I push it to the default live branch, but expect to push it over tomorrow assuming there aren't any serious problems.

v 1.0.0.3 2022.08.08
- Improved multi-player dedicated server world generation speeds
- Enabled password protection for servers
- Upgraded quest system to work 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.

Join us in Discord!

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

[previewyoutube=v-00dv79BOc;full][/previewyoutube]

Not everyone is happy about Solace Crafting coming out of early access in a less than could be state. In this video I talk a bit about how the other options open to me were much more dangerous for the game, how sales have been doing well these first 3 days of launch, and what I hope to do be able to do with those sales in the coming months.

To recap a bit using text, I had completely run out of money, and the slow draining of my bank account down to literally zero was a psychologically and emotionally demoralizing experience. The options before me were either to get a full-time job and likely end up abandoning Solace Crafting some years down the road due to a of lack of time to develop it and through that an inability to keep people interested in it, or try to make the best of what I have. It was a bit of a gamble, and some people are upset with me, but the majority is enjoying what I've accomplished thus far, and looking forward to improvements.

As sales are doing quite decent, I have completely regained my morale, and more importantly once the sales actually make it to my business account, I should have enough to hire on freelancers to help improve the game where it needs it most, and in ways that I would never have been able to do properly on my own.

To me it feels like the first big step on the larger journey towards what Solace Crafting can really become. There is so much that I've had to put down and cross off my lists, simply because there's only so much one person without any funding can do. With this initial burst of funds I hope to take Solace Crafting to the next stage to attract even more players with an ever better product, and then to the next stage, and so on, just as so many of my favorite games have done over the years.

From what it seems like to me, most of the negative reviews I'm receiving come from 1 of 3 things:
1. The graphics aren't good enough.
To me, graphics are, and always will be, less important than gameplay and content. That doesn't mean that, of course, Solace Crafting has a lot of room for improvement in the graphics department, but I don't think this is the proper stage to be worrying too much about improving the graphics. It's certainly not something I could do on my own, with any sort of efficiency at least. I do certainly understand that at some point along the way, the graphics will need to be improved, but I don't think that is top priority.

2. The controls are too clunky.
This I very much understand. The controls honestly bother me very little, it's just not the way my brain works, but I do very much understand what people are talking about when they bring this up. Animation blending, combat distancing and movement, jumping and swimming transitions, etc. This is one of the first things I hope to put funding towards as soon as I am able to. Again, it's not something that I can bring to a high quality level by myself, and would be better left to someone that has a lot of experience working specifically on this subject.

3. The user interface is bad.
This, I also very much understand. The current UI is largely grey and sometimes you need to click 4-5 buttons to get to a specific window. There is a lot of room for improvement here, and like with the controls, if sales keep up at all in the volume that they are currently going I will be very interested in hiring on someone specifically to redesign the in-game UI completely. I will make a list of all the needs and end-goals of the UI for now and the near future, and work with a specialist to improve it.

The plain truth is though that I never would have been able to address these problems properly on my own. I know some people are worried that I've made a bad move, but I think this is just the beginning, and I am ready to get the ball rolling faster and faster as we improve, expand, and realize Solace Crafting to its full potential.

So thank you to everyone that has stuck with me through Early Access, to everyone that has joined us these past few days, and especially to all the positive reviewers that recognize that this is not the end of the road!

Best wishes and happy gaming!

Kyle Postlewait
Big Kitty Games

Another small patch that fixes what for some has been a couple of big problems.

One is the frost nova spell. Part of it seems to be crashing certain graphics devices. This patch should stop that.

Another is resource desyncing between server and clients. This has been an elusive problem only affecting some people for several weeks. I was able to track it down together with some friendly new players that ran in to it today and fix it.

Bug fixing will always take priority, so I've got a number of new reports and things that I'm looking into. Again though, please do let me know, preferably in Discord if you run into anything specific.

Happy Gaming!

v 1.0.0.2 2022.08.04
- Fixed some spots that still said "early access"
- Fixed the Frost Nova spell causing crashes on certain video cards
- Fixed encounter resource clearing throwing errors for clients not in the encounter
- Fixed the multiplayer server list not masking and scrolling properly
- Fixed multiplayer server versions not printing properly
- Fixed instances of multiplayer resources falling out of sync between server and client

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

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

Thank you to everyone that has joined us over the past 24 hours!

I'm a little swamped with e-mails, some obvious scams, friend requests, etc. I'm hoping to focus on improving multi-lingual support to open up access to the non-English world, as well as get a threaded save test up to beta later today.

This small patch is actually what I did with some free time yesterday. Up until now I've often patched in a days work and then gone to bed, but once in a while I'll mess something up and then be asleep for 8 hours and not notice people telling me I messed up! So I'm going to start patching in the morning instead. I also usually will post the majority of changes to the beta branch first to be safe, but these are small enough changes that they shouldn't affect anything serious.

Almost all changes/fixes are brought on by player feedback. If something is not working as intended please let me know and I will fix it!

v 1.0.0.1 2022.08.02
- Added keybinding settings for the WIP item creation UI in creative mode
- Tweaked cloud coloring/coverage
- Fixed an incorrect instance of the I key being bound to open inventory
- Fixed the "loading" screen not being open in the first frame, showing a white/empty world
- Fixed clouds often rendering a charcoal sketch effect over white parts
- Fixed the quest helper starting up every session even if you turned it off last session
- Fixed the default crating materials to level saying 50 instead of 25 in the world settings UI

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

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

After some bumps in the system, Solace Crafting version 1.0 is now Live!



Come and see the many experiences within an infinite procedural fantasy world!

It's been six years since I first started programming the core of Solace Crafting, yet here we are! There's always more to add, but full of things to do as we are, I can safely say that Solace Crafting is now well worth the $15 price tag and I am happy to take it out of Early Access.

I have to make most clear of all, version 1.0 is not the end of development. I'm not quitting my full-time job as a developer and moving to the Bahamas. This is my full-time job, and development of Solace Crafting continues today and tomorrow and beyond. I've updated the roadmap, the bug tracker is live, and thanks to players in Discord and here on Steam I've already got a list of new things to look into.

[h2]Lots of stuff to do[/h2]
Solace Crafting doesn't often hold your hand and tell you what you should be doing. For some that's awesome, but for some players it leaves them feeling like there's nothing to do. Well, here are some in-game stats to alleviate those with such concerns:

• Adventuring skill points to spend: 1200
  
• Crafting skill points to spend: 1479
  
• Harvesting skill points to spend: 320
  
• In-game achievements: 514
  
• Steam achievements: 62
  
• Craftable armor pieces: 63
  
• Craftable weapons: 64
  
• Building pieces: 108
  
• Furniture pieces: 29
  
• Possible schematic recipes: 18,684
  
• Furthest (known) distance traveled: 1,000,000+ kilometers
  
• Highest (known) player level reached: 22,617
  
• Most (known) hours played: 5,000+
  
• People enjoying the game you made: priceless!

Well... I spent weeks (and six years) preparing to release. I have a long post full of graphics all ready to go. There's a big green "release" button for developers on the app dashboard. I clicked it, and it error'd, and it reverted the game back to pre-early access status, so now it's currently not available for purchase until a two-week grace period required of all new games passes, even though it's not a new game...

Unfortunately there are no more buttons for me to push. I worked all day to get ready for this and 11 hours in this is what it's amounted to, me waiting for a Steam representative to fix it. I will post an update when I know what's going on.

Two-handed weapons are now live!



Along with that the achievements list has grown and a lot of the not yet "plugged in" achievements have been finished and should be working as intended.



I've also added 15 new weapons (such as the katana above) and 2 new shields, most of which are purchasable from town crafters. Some of the may still need a little tweaking as to how they're held, and I will continue looking into things like that, and appreciate all feedback reports, not matter how small they may seem.

Condensed live patch notes:
v 0.8.1.16 2022.07.26
- Plugged in most of the remaining achievements
- Added a customizable key binding for opening the player list
- Revamped potion calculations to work better with new stats systems
- Increased most potion durations from 5min to 10min
- Reduced level difference penalties for potions and enchants
- Reduced maximum level difference penalty for potions and enchants from 0% to 20%
- Added 15 weapons and 2 shields
- Added two-handed melee weapons and animations
- Added dual wielding
- Changed starting professions to award you 2 free points rather than pre-spending them

Full beta patch notes:
v 0.8.1.13 2022.07.22
- Added 15 weapons and 2 shields
- Added two-handed melee weapons and animations
v 0.8.1.14 2022.07.25
- Fixed a bug during loading preventing beta gameplay for some players
v 0.8.1.15 2022.07.25
- Added a customizable key binding for opening the player list
- Revamped potion calculations to work better with new stats systems
- Increased most potion durations from 5min to 10min
- Reduced level difference penalties for potions and enchants
- Reduced maximum level difference penalty for potions and enchants from 0% to 20%
v 0.8.1.16 2022.07.26
- Plugged in most of the remaining achievements
- Finished some unfinished functionality of the achievement interface
- Fixed some achievement interface bugs

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

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

Introducing dual wielding.



Most one-handed weapons are now equipable in the off-hand as well. I'm hoping to patch in two-handed weapons tomorrow, but that will involve adding not only a whole new set of animations, but also new weapons as well, so no guarantee it'll be tomorrow.

I've posted about it on Patreon, YouTube, and Discord, so I'll sneak it in here as well, but I have officially run out money. A few months ago actually =D which has made it more and more difficult to continue working on Solace Crafting. As is, I'm looking to release the game out of early access at the end of the month, and am working hard to get a last few things in.

Depending on how the release goes I may have to look for a side job to keep things going. Unless the release does quite well, it's also likely that I will be redirecting the majority of my weekly work hours towards a new project as 4.5 years into Solace Crafting there is still quite a lot of early sown bad decisions and old code that will still take a long time and a lot of work just to correct let alone improve upon. It's likely that moving onto the next stage is more intelligent for the longevity of my career, as I do hope to be doing this for the rest of my life and not just sacrificing everything on my first ever product.

Having gotten that out in the open here on Steam, I will continue to maintain and develop Solace Crafting to at least some extent for likely a very long time, meaning that releasing out of early access in no way means that I'm leaving the game as is, but the sad reality is simply that it's not making me enough money to survive and I can't just keep trying to make it better until I've nothing left. It wasn't an easy decision to make, and it continues to eat at me, but I'm still in my 30s (barely =) and have learned a LOT over these ~5 years of development and am looking forward to making other great games with everything that I have learned.

You can heard and read more about this subject (for free) on my Patreon if you like:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/development-july-68824093

v 0.8.1.11 2022.07.20
- Added dual wielding
- Changed starting professions to award you 2 free points rather than pre-spending them
- Stats interface now properly adjusts armor penalties based on armored magic and armored healing skills
- Added a tooltip to the light requirement for summoning NPCs via a summoning circle
- Fixed spell block working even without a shield
- Fixed a number of spelling errors
- Fixed a couple of stamina skills using the wrong icon color
- Fixed resist stat not updating properly in the stats interface
- Fixed farming plots no longer taking on water from rain
- Fixed wilted plants reviving after reloading
- Fixed removing planted trees not always removing them
- Fixed planters not snapping properly
- Fixed arctic wolves always dropping T0 reagents

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!

Small caveat, not 100% of the achievements are capable of triggering just yet. 443 new achievements has generated somewhere around 4500 new lines of code. The automatic management, display, saving, etc of all of these achievements are in and working, but there are several "hooks" still missing, such as for the building achievements. There is now a set of achievement for building a structure that contains at least 20 building pieces, however it still needs a hook for when you actually place a new building piece to check the structure size against your current unlocks. Not difficult stuff, but I've been basically typing non-stop for two days and it's my bed time on a Friday night, so I'm going to go ahead and get this stuff up first. The rest of the hooks should be in soon no problem.

There's also a variety of combat achievements and some other things I still want to plug-in as well. I'm always open to suggestions as well.

I've also fixed a couple of annoying things that cropped up recently with flat angles of the terrain, from the perspective of the player camera, erring switching to a flat white color, as well as player resource pools, health, energy, and mana, reloading too quick causing them to drop to 10 at the start of every session.

More to come!
It's been over 38c (100f) here every day of the week so far. Hopefully tomorrows much needed yard-work (real life terraforming + harvesting) goes kind on me.

v 0.8.1.8 2022.07.01
- Added 443 new achievements!
- Fixed a terrain shader error causing near flat normals to draw as white
- Fixed stats recalculating too fast on load causing resource pools to reset to minimum

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

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

I've built and coded an interface for the new achievements systems.



This will let me add a bunch more achievements for building, combat, crafting, towns, etc.. I'm hoping this gives players some more ideas of the things they can do and conquer in-game that they may not even be aware of!

For safety I will push this to beta first, though expect to be able to push it to live tomorrow without difficulty and am looking into a few other small problems with the recent changes.

v 0.8.1.7 2022.06.27
- Added an achievements interface
- Changed combat math scaling for monster above your damage level from scaling to 0 at +50 to scaling infinitely towards 0
- Fixed some spelling errors
- Fixed an animation error with ranged weapon run left

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!

This patch brings the new character models and character creator to the default live branch along with a variety of bug fixes, some performance enhancements, as well as video quality presets in the in-game settings to help players easily adjust performance on their system.

This patch also brings in 82 new in-game achievements. These are an entirely separate system from the Steam Achievements and are intended to help guide new players down the different directions open to players. This is just the first wave of a small variety of things. For example, two of the new achievements are simply "Travel 250 meters" and "Harvest 10 ore". Each of these new achievements awards the player with a small but permanent stat boost. Once there are more achievements in I would like to add an achievements tab to the main interface to let players see what they've unlocked, and other areas of the game the have maybe not yet progressed down.

Up until now Solace Crafting has included very little "hand holding," or player guidance, other than the starting tutorials and the help menu, both of which I do intend to improve, but more than relying on dry tutorial text dumps I would like to shift content towards more organic methods of progression and story.

As always I'm open to ideas and suggestions, so please join us in Discord and get yourself heard!

Happy Steam Summer Sale!

Condensed patch notes v 0.8.0.33 -> 0.8.1.4:
- Added 82 new in-game achievements with small permanent stat rewards
- Added the option to choose a starting archetype, pre-spending your initial skill points and attribute points
- Added starting harvesting and crafting profession choices awarding 2 free starting levels in a players choice
- Changed start screen
- Character names can now include numbers and multiple capital letters
- Started adding some initial story/introduction to the game world
- Reduced the minimum camera height from 180cm to 120cm
- Increased health cap from 5000 to 9990
- Added beard options and beard coloring to male characters
- Character appearances can now be edited post-creation
- Added new models for both male and female characters
- Added face options to the character creator
- Added Low, Medium, and High video quality presets to the in-game video settings

Latest beta patch notes:
v 0.8.1.4 2022.06.25
- Added 82 new in-game achievements with small permanent stat rewards
- Further restricted the "randomize" buttons for more "normal" characters
- Added the option to choose a starting archetype, pre-spending your initial skill points and attribute points
- Added starting harvesting and crafting profession choices awarding 2 free starting levels in a players choice
- Removed "scenes" from character creation
- Changed start screen
- Character names can now include numbers and multiple capital letters
- Started adding some initial story/introduction to the game world
- Reduced the minimum camera height from 180cm to 120cm
- Disabled outdated in-game automatic player mandible morph adjusting
- Increased health cap from 5000 to 9990
- Fixed the stats window still showing HP capped at 2500
- Fixed the health bar growing too big in some cases
- Fixed characters being able to get stuck in the swimming ascend/descend animations after exiting water
- Fixed misspelling of "Missile"

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

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

Introducing beards. Not a huge selection yet, but a few is better than none. There are also new hair styles for both sexes.



I pushed the majority of the new character models to beta a couple night ago, but wanted to clean up some remaining bugs before posting about it. These patches now also allow for character appearances to be edited even after creation from the character select screen. Each character selection slot now has an edit button "looks like a pencil" that will open the character inside of the character creator for editing.

Note: Old characters cannot transfer their "look" to new character. When opening up an old character for editing, they will be converted to the new base model. You can still cancel out of that, or just keep your old look if you prefer. I haven't been able to test every piece of clothing individually, but they should work with either base model.

I've also transferred town NPCs to this model, so you may find that your townfolk have been "rerolled" and now have different appearances.

I've also updated Unity, the terrain shaders, and a few things under the hood, some of which I'm still tweaking a bit.

v 0.8.1.2 2022.06.16
- Added beard options and beard coloring to male characters
- Fixed the Head section in the character creator not sizing properly
- Fixed female bra and/or panties sticking through armor
- Fixed a red subsurface scattering artifact/fog over some of the characters faces
- Fixed backing out of editting a character without saving potentially returning to that character if creating anew afterwards
- Fixed boats not moving after mounting

v 0.8.1.3 2022.06.17
- Fixed male characters going naked

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!

I've been hard at work updating the old player models to a better looking base, as well as adjusting the minimum and maximum values of the body morph sliders to make the end results quite a bit less silly.

Here you can see the old faces versus the new faces:



While in these systems I've cleaned up some of the code and also been able to add in different base face selections that aren't actually morph presets, but different base meshes for the face and head, including an Orc and an Elf face:



I have some new hairs in as well, and should be able to get some facial hairs in as well, though I wasn't able to get to that today.

I ran into some Unity related problems last week that really set me back a couple days. At one point I had to wait six minutes every time I changed anything before Unity would become responsive again! It was very frustrating, but I was able to track down and get rid of the problem eventually, with minimal loss.

I hope to finish testing a few of these new options tomorrow not just in the character creator but in-game before pushing the changes to beta. I think it will also be a very good thing if I can add the option to edit a characters appearance even after the initial creation process.

I've also finished some work on weather and things like fog color and cloud types that had been left kind of hanging.

Not all quite ready yet, but I wanted to check in and give a bit of an update.

Join us in Discord!

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

Hey all, hope everyone is well.
It's been a rough few months, I'm barely making enough money to get by, and well, that's pretty demoralizing. I started playing with other projects and thinking I needed to try and get something new and decent out, and quick, with all the skills I've gained over the past 4-5 years. That's of course kind of silly, and after spending some time working on some different projects I realized more clearly that that's just not who I am nor what I want to do. I may have to take up some supplementary work to keep all of this going, but the third option of just releasing as 1.0 early and seeing how it does would honestly be a disservice to the game and everything I've worked on these past years.

So I'm back, working to polish up and integrate on the road to 1.0. For starters this patch introduces a few small performance improvements, as well as one pretty large one that was running very redundant checks, especially when hungry or thirsty. There's still room for improvement, but this patch is already much better with handling passive stats and quickly repeating buffs.

I've also done a fair amount of what is called profiling, where you put an application under the microscope and really watch each piece to see who's slowing things down. While doing this I have identified shadows, grass, and sky rendering to be the three main culprits damaging performance. With this knowledge via actual hard numbers I've implemented Low, Medium, and High video quality preset buttons to the in-game video settings. Each button has a tooltip as well, but will in short primarily tone down grass, shadows, and cloud rendering in those orders. I don't have a super fast machine (hence the poor frame rate of the trailer =o=) but can range from 45-130 fps depending on the settings. There's still very much a number of things to be done for improving performance, and I consider that entire profession a constant work in progress.

I would like to focus on a few different things these next couple weeks, one of which I brought up in Discord and would appreciate more input on.

[h2]Character customization[/h2]
The current system is "neat" in that it allows you to stretch your arms and tummy and things like that, but mostly just ends up with silly characters rather than being some sort of high level customization engine. In short it's really kind of a gimmick, though I've been proud of it's presence as it is something that's not all that easy to do.
My main question being, how would you feel about a less robust, but more performant, likely prettier, character customization system?
This would likely be reduced to things like height, skin color, hair, hair color, some different faces and easily enough things like fangs, horns, etc., though probably nothing fine tune-able like arm size, foot size, etc. Facial features could be a thing without interfering with what would likely be entirely new weapons and armor, but probably not something included in the initial system. I would also likely be able to add a much greater variety of weapons and armor as the current system requires things rigged specifically for it.

[h2]Character controller[/h2]
The current character controller uses a mix on non-root based animations and physics, to the effect of very smooth movement that doesn't necessarily reflect what is actually going on in the animations. I get a lot of reviews that people feel it's "clanky" for example. Personally it's not something that bothers me, but it's clearly something quite a few people notice much more than I do. I am looking into replacing the current controller with a root-based system which means that the animations would actually be driving the movement of the character.

[h2]Standing out[/h2]
A lot of Unity games have kind of a Unity look to them. I've, partially subconsciously, tried to make the game look a bit like reality, likely because that's what I'm used to looking at. I'd like to play around with altering the colors more extremely to create a stronger fantasy feel and to help screenshots stand out further from other games.

So, there's a bit of uncertainty in the near future, with a number of possibilities still up in the air. It's a big project and there's still some things left to do to tie it all together. Hopefully a 1.0 release is received well enough to merit continued work on the game post-1.0. Thank you as always to everyone that has supported the game thus far, and my apologies development has been slowing down as the months add up.

v 0.8.1.0 2022.06.06
- Fixed some performance issues, several primarily related hunger and thirst
- Added Low, Medium, and High video quality presets to the in-game video settings

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!

The last few patches have gone onto beta for testing, so I've kept their posts to Discord. Discord has been very busy of late with lots of extremely helpful bug reports and QoL suggestions. With my hands full I have not gone through the Steam discussion boards for a few days, sorry if I've left anyone hanging on there. I will try and go through those tomorrow.

One of the biggest changes is the complete restriction of anything hostile spawning within the first 250m, generally the grassy circle on the map that players start out in. The aim being to give players enough room to find the basic resources (passive animals are still available for skinning for example) they need to gear up and get ready to move out.

I'm well aware that I can just outrun anything that attacks me at the start, and I know what everything looks like, and exactly what I need to get a new character on their feet, so it's often difficult for me to know how to properly give enough information to new players without pulling their hand too hard. I've also changed the wording on a few of the tutorials as some players have expressed difficulty in understanding some of the initial steps.

It still looks like there will be another beta patch or two before I move onto looking into some performance improvements, but this patch should be a good candidate for pushing to the live branch.

The current changes on beta are:

v 0.8.0.32 2022.05.03
- Added Main hand melee speed reduction, Off hand melee speed reduction, ranged speed reduction, and magic speed reduction stats. Each point provides a 1% speed reduction to appropriate weapons, up to a maximum of 50%
- Updated weapon speed upgrading passive skills to use the new stats
- Added skill tree specific cooldown reduction stats, currently only used by the archetype specific enchants
- Increased jewelry recipe ingot use by 1
- Fixed Obsidian Golems not showing up properly in multi-player
- Fixed Siphoners gathering regardless of Enchanted Stone presence
- Fixed containers (bags and watering cans) not properly storing their material
- Fixed Tabula Rasa potion not resetting job skill points
- Fixed empty hand damage scaling upward with level

v 0.8.0.31 2022.05.02
- Reverted to the previous stalk model
- Added resources and facilities to navmesh generation calculations
- Restricted monster and aggressive animals from spawning within the "starter area" 250m radius
- Stopped the "Strong Hit" skills from triggering on vegetables and herbs
- Enabled the game instance to be visible in the background if you alt-tab away from windowed or windowed full-screen mode
- Tweaked the storage chest size to not slightly overlap when placed next to each other using snap
- Fixed the Hallowed Ground skill
- Fixed a rare multi-player structure update bug
- Fixed a number of skill spelling and description errors
- Temporarily fixed ranged speed skill, pending a better solution

v 0.8.0.30 2022.04.29
- Increased the collider size on most herbs and vegetables
- Increased stalk size
- Moved stalk closer to ground to prevent the appearance of floating
- Increased stalk spawn rate in grasslands
- Added material names to bag, backpack, and storage chest titles
- Added slot count to bag descriptions
- Fixed familiars throwing an error if their target dies while casting
- Fixed a number of skills not properly using damage levels

v 0.8.0.29 2022.04.28
- Enabled keyboard turning while in aim view
- Enabled view cam (unlocked) while in aim view
- Disabled towns that were spawning unintentionally
- Fixed a harmless archer run animation event error
- Fixed a burn/targeted aoe error
- Fixed players appearing naked in multi-player sometimes
- Fixed an error when remove death markers from the map
- Fixed a chain lightning MP error
- Fixed a rare AqauticAI error
- Fixed a rare MonsterAI error
- Fixed a rare projectile error

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!

Had a couple of really annoying bugs patched in last night that this patch fixes with some other quality of life things. Due to the start of the Steam sale, it's very likely that some first-time players immediately ran into this bug. Normally changes are pushed to the beta branch prior to being pushed straight onto what I call the live branch, but being in the middle of some changes, and hoping to get stuff out in time for the sale, I rushed last nights patch a bit and apologize for the problems that caused people.

Earlier today I found a new "let's play" sort of YouTube two-part series of a player playing Solace Crafting for the first time, which is always super informative watching someone play without knowing where everything is and what everything does. I took some notes and have tweaked a few descriptions and tutorial steps to try and improve the user experience with some of the things he got caught up on.

v 0.8.0.28 2022.04.26
- Improved several tutorial descriptions
- Fixed a couple spelling and grammar errors
- Removed the majority of the taller plant like grasses to alleviate confusion for new players looking for stalks
- Replaced stalk with a non-SpeedTree model
- Increased stalk size
- Fixed another bug brought on by the recipe bonuses

v 0.8.0.27 2022.04.26
- Fixed a bug brought on by the recipe bonuses

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

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

Over the past few days I've been working on a new trailer, that is up now on Steam and YouTube! Sadly I don't have a very good graphics card, so I can't record full HD at 60 FPS, but it's still a lot better than the old trailer. I'll have to make a new "let's play" sort of intro video for the store as well I think at some point as I deleted the old one from version 0.2.

To celebrate, I'm running a weeklong sale. Sales always bring in a lot of new players, as over 99% of Steam users still have never even heard of Solace Crafting. So I'll probably be on overtime responding to new questions and concerns =]

I've also upped a new patch that fixes, one pretty major bug in particular that was improperly scaling damage based on level difference between players and mobs. I've also reinstated weapon and armor bonuses from learned recipes, so some equipment recipes now have innate attribute bonuses, etc., prior to any enchanting. There are also still some shortcoming with some of the new magician spells it seems and I'll be looking into those today. I've also had 1-2 players say their skills keep resetting. I've been unable to reproduce this though, and if anyone is encountering this and can give me more details or send me a save file to look at that would be much appreciated.

Happy gaming!

v 0.8.0.26 2022.04.25
- Added/reenabled learned recipes bonus stats
- Added instructions in key bindings that you can hold to set modifier keys
- Fixed Fire Pillar spell
- Fixed some spelling errors
- Fixed a problem with the level difference damage scaling math

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

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

I pushed a silent patch at the end of last week and just now pushed another. Last weeks patch introduced a variety of new special effects and animations for skills and spells.



Beyond that both patches bring a number of smaller quality of life improvements and bug fixes as I'm primarily trying to focus on polishing what we've already got in the game rather than adding new features from here on towards 1.0. Please read the patch notes below for more information.

Last week I also updated the Steam store page with new graphics, text, and tags. I hate to say it, because I'm terrible at video editing, but more than anything the store page needs a new trailer. So, I thought I'd try and say that out loud and see if maybe anyone is interested in helping out with that. I'll be trying to gather pertinent video clips while working over the next few days, working on a script for overlay text, etc. If anyone's passionate about putting video together for fun, I'd very much appreciate the help!

v 0.8.0.25 2022.04.18
- Added the player level weighed enchant amounts to the enchanting UI
- Added a larger collider for swamp trees
- Put a cap on enchants higher level than the player so they retain their normal value
- Tweaked the scale of wood roof pieces to fit better
- Tweaked the colors of a lot of wood pieces to fit better
- Fixed the Lightning Wave skill
- Fixed X to rotate while snapping facility placement not working
- Fixed ocean rocks not registering as ground / harvestable
- Fixed familiars firing at dead things
- Fixed a math error scaling damage and enchants upward when out leveled

v 0.8.0.24 2022.04.15
- Added new animations for Strike, Thrust, Stomp, Zealous Strike, Sweeping Strike, Flurry, Sunder, and Calculated Strike
- Added new effects for Heal, Expulse, Cure, Chromatic Blast, Fire Pillar, Lightning Wave, Flame Shield, Inferno, Blizzard, Storm, Arcane Explosion, Bind, Swarm, Rejuvenate, and Seance
- Adjusted Damage Levels to use percentages instead of a solid number when adjusting damage against target level
- Increased maximum hit points from 2500 to 5000
- Fixed a bug with Quick Shot triggering Rapid Fire repeatedly
- Fixed a walking while equipped animation event error

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

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

Fixed another wave of bugs thanks to reports from Discord, console bug reports, and anonymous reporting. I added 6-7 new animations for skills too, but they're acting funny so I've turned them off for this patch to work on them more tomorrow.

v 0.8.0.23 2022.04.05
- Added a new Flame Pillar particle effect
- Fixed a line of stats when crafting metal armor not getting updated properly, instead reading "16 wood"
- Fixed the teleport distance description showing up in a bunch of unrelated skill descriptions
- Fixed the bow shot animation playing with staves and wands
- Fixed a bug with obelisks attacking
- Fixed a variety of incorrect attribute descriptions in the Skills -> Attributes descriptions
- Fixed an error with Wood Triangle 3
- Fixed imp firebolts not showing up in multiplayer
- Fixed two rare projectile bugs

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

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

I've got a number of bug reports to look into, mostly regarding the new skills, but here is a first wave of bugs fixes to get started.

v 0.8.0.22 2022.04.01
- Upgraded the vegetation engine
- Changed facility placement to ignore the player layer
- Tweaked the large spiral staircase collider to improve movement between other building pieces
- Fixed Ice Spikes attempting to align to the ground from too far up, causing them to place on the roof of goblin dungeons
- Fixed teleporting to a solace positioning further away than when recalling
- Fixed a number of new animation not producing foot step audio
- Fixed a bug letting storehouses fill up with NPC gathered resources beyond their capacity

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

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

This patch has been a long time in the works, and in truth is not yet 100% complete. In this post I'll go into What's new, why this patch is being pushed live incomplete, and what's been going on here at Big Kitty Games.

[h2] - What this patch brings to the live branch[/h2]

At the bottom of this post there is a condensed list of patch notes that lists the changes between the current live version and the new live version, and I've covered these topics in greater detail in previous posts, but there are a couple of big changes that I'll go over.

The math behind all systems in-game has been updated to a shifting scale of values that adjusts itself based on the level of the player. This means that at level 0 having 1 strength grants you no bonus and no penalty, and likewise at level 50 having 51 strength grants you no bonus and no penalty. If however you have 75 strength at level 50, you will be receiving a variety of bonuses including increased health, increased melee and ranged damage, etc. The reason for this is two fold. For one, the old system was a form of linear progression where an attribute bonus difference between levels 0 and 1 would be something like 100%, but over time, the difference between two levels would drop down to numbers like 0.1%. Secondly, because levels are infinite, health and damage numbers were capable of going beyond the capabilities of 32-bit numbers. This new system solves these and other problems by having a base set of values that any "balanced" character will have, and a scale of possible bonuses and penalties that keep the math under the hood at manageable and balanced numbers regardless of your level. It is however fun to see your damage and health numbers go up, so these numbers are scaled, though only visually, when presented to the player.



The 4 Archetype skill trees have been redesigned and 8 Job skill trees have been added now as well. This amounts to around 240 skill nodes now available, and all characters upgrading from the live version will have their adventuring skills reset so they can reassign their points as desired.

Monster classes and abilities have also been added to the game, though there are still only a handful of monsters that have been equipped with varying classes and abilities.

Almost all of the old animations have been entirely replaced with new animations. Animation has always been a weak point of mine, and in studying up a bit I came to understand that a lot of the animation I was using were built for more "toon" shaped characters and so don't properly translate when fit onto standard human shaped models. The new animations that have now replaced most of those old animations are built specifically for human models. I also completely did away with the old animator, which is a compilation of state machines that blend what animations should be playing on the player at any given moment, for a fully scripted animator. Manually creating an animator can involve hundreds if not 1,000+ mouse clicks, and locating a problem can be just as difficult. To avoid that, as I do want to add more animations and more "categories" like 1-handed melee, 2-handed melee, etc., I wrote a machine that can construct an animator purely from code. As such there may be an animation state or two that I have overlooked, but can address easily if enough once brought to my attention.

[h2] - Why this patch is being pushed live now[/h2]

Being honest here, this is not everything I wanted to get into 0.8.0 before pushing it to the live branch. There is a lot still under construction, including unfinished skills, a lack of skill animations, audio, and visual effects, as well as some lesser features that have been temporarily disabled. This patch has been in the works for months and with every week that passes the differences between the live branch and the beta branch grow farther apart. This has led to an increased difficulty in managing bug reports among other things, and I really need to push these changes live to get a better grip on the current state of the game before moving forward.

Because of this there may some small problems that were fixed on the live branch that get reintroduced with the

[h2] - Regarding the current state of development[/h2]

I've also spoken a few times over the past 12 months about a growing heaviness in regards to development of Solace Crafting. The project has over 180,000 lines of code, and I've spent something like 10,000 hours on it, in this chair, at home, alone. It's been a very difficult journey thus far, and I have no intention of ending it. Having said that, over the past couple months I've had to come to terms with the fact that I am extremely burnt out on working on a single solo title for a straight four and a half years now. When I put together the game's core design back in 2017 it was full of a lot of great ideas that I was never able to realize on my own and over time had to repeatedly shorten the roadmap. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a learning process that I had to go through. Despite repeatedly redesigning the roadmap, my optimism of being able to put together all things that I wanted to in maybe a couple years max, we're still here and SC still needs quite a few more hours even after 50 months of dedicated development.

In truth, the first month of early access back in January of 2018, was one of the best selling months I've ever had, and it fueled my optimism that I would very much be able to afford more paid freelance work than I ever actually was able to. In reality, one month not long after that I made less than 500$, and overall it's been an ongoing struggle, not necessarily to pay my bills, but to refrain from doing more of the things that we all want to do. This over time is a weird form stress that I never really had experienced prior to starting my own business.

I have been aware of these different angles of stress slowly building up on me and pledged at the start of 2021, that 2021 would be the year that we would leave early access, for better or for worse. Then later in the year, after wrestling with whether to go through with it or not for several months, I decided to start the 0.8 branch by revamping the game math and adding more skills to the game. This was a massive undertaking, and I should have been more aware of that truth by then. The skill trees are something I designed back in 2017, and have always been something I've really wanted to implement, but in hindsight, they may have been better left for a post-1.0 release patch.

Sure enough, after several months working on 0.8, I was completely exhausted. I tried for months to take breaks during the week, but no one is more aware of the bugs and shortcomings of the game than I am, and the desire to create better is a constant thorn in my head when I'm only "stepping away" for a bit. A few weeks ago I was generously gifted a VR kit and finally decided to put Solace Crafting down for real, albeit of course temporarily. I "officially" have started working on a new title and did nothing but that for two weeks straight, and have already made a lot of progress in the game itself. That four and a half years of experience has made a very big difference, not only with the speed at which I can develop things, but my ability to judge what's important, what's not, how long something is going to take, and so on. I'm still only a little over two weeks into development of the game, and not ready to start blabbering about it, but I need, not want, need to be open my actively working on something else, as that has become a necessity for my own well-being.

Having taken a few solid weeks to do something else, my burnt motivation for SC has had some time to heal and I've been gathering bug reports and reassessing the current situation and how to best approaching going forward from here. I do believe that just slapping the "good enough" sticker on it and seeing what happens if I release out of early access is not something I can morally get behind, but I do also think that for my own well-being, both mentally and hopefully financially, that focusing intently on adding nothing else to game, but rather polishing and improving what is so that I can release a version 1.0 and temporarily switch into "maintenance mode" where I only address problems and bugs, while I work on something else for a while. If the game generates enough interest (sales), then I can continue to put my resources (money & time) back into the game in the hopes of turning it into all of the things I want it to be.

What I've come to realize recently though is that Big Kitty Games is more important than Solace Crafting. If Big Kitty Games can thrive, then I can always come back to Solace Crafting regardless of what happens over these next few months. But there seems to be a very real chance that I will dry up and run out of money if I stubbornly keep trying to "muscle" my way through development of my first love.

I've spent the past couple days working again on SC, and am planning to work on SC for the next few days, but it's likely I'll be working on my second title on and off from now on. I hope I'm able to get SC to a solid 1.0 release in working condition over the next few months, and hope it is able to make enough money for me to keep working on it well beyond 1.0!

Best wishes as always,
Kyle Postlewait
AKA Malkere

v 0.7.8.10 -> v 0.8.0.21 condensed patch notes
- Upgraded animator to a fully scripted construct
- Replaced all players animations not specifically built for a semi-realistic humanoid avatar
- Added poison to several animals
- Disabled equipped weapon/tool models when in first person
- Reactives like force field can no longer be resisted/dodged/blocked/parried
- Changed enchants to scale statically providing 75% when > 5 levels above, 50% > 10, 25% > 15, and 0% > 20
- Added monster/animal "archetypes," ex: Tank/RangedDPS/MeleeDPS
- Added a monster/animal ability system
- Added abilities to rock elementals, wolves, and imps
- Added skill names to the majority of skill based attacks printed to the combat chat log
- Improved block and parry logic
- Changed fonts to the alchemy profession
- Removed Recall mana usage
- Added 192 new Job skills, some of which are still works in progress
- Improved the font clarity in a lot of UI
- Improved enchant details explanation on enchants/sockets
- Added some basic instructions to the solace storage UI
- Added ascend and descend specific key bindings
- Changed attribute and statistic math to new system
- Increased flattening around procedural towers
- Monsters more than 15 levels under you will no longer agro
- Added a /checkheightmaps console command
- Fixed paper being unstackable
- Improved the strong harvesting skills descrpitions to explain that they share a single hotkey
- Improved terraforming performance
- Enabled terraforming in multi-player
- Added /dayspeed and /nightspeed multiplier commands as well as world creation settings
- Altered the ghost death animation so they don't "fall" through the floor

Latest changes to beta:
v 0.8.0.21 2022.03.31
- Upgraded animator to a fully scripted construct
- Replaced all players animations not specifically built for a semi-realistic humanoid avatar
- Repositioned tool/weapon holding position/rotation

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

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

Stealth, Familiar, and other new skills now available =D

Sorry I haven't posted patch notes for the past couple of patches, it's been a little hectic. This post is catching up on three beta patches. 99% of the new Job skills are in and working with this patch with the remaining need for new animations, audio, and visual effects remaining.

Biting off a chunk as large as this is rough on the ol' sanity, but trying to temporarily veer away from the main task at hand for the sake of sanity often ends up just making the main task heavier. We're now quite a fair amount of content behind on the live version compared to beta and that makes working on small patches for the live version more and more difficult. I'm trying to focus on this last bit of content that needs work to bring the live branch up to speed, so I can focus on bugs, performance, and recipes for a while after that.

Dual wielding and two-handed melee weapons likewise have just been something I'm trying to not get too distracted by until I can further check off the actual skills that are being implemented, but those are much less difficult things I know some people are eager for and just wanted to point out that they are high on my todo list.

v 0.8.0.19 2022.02.22
- Added several new animations
- Finished/fixed Stealth, Ambush, Familiar, Cure, and other skills logic/icons/descriptions
- Added poison to several animals
- Fixed wall torches not being awarded to players along with cleared procedural towers

v 0.8.0.18 2022.02.08
- Finished programming most Job skills besides Stealth and Familiar (animations/vfx wip)
- Improved running animations so that weapons/tools do not clip through the player
- Disabled equipped weapon/tool models when in first person
- Fixed water and lava cave surroundings not flattening properly
- Fixed vertical dungeons from being able to spawn chests/monsters on top of hatches
- Fixed crosshair opacity settings not reloading properly
- Fixed water cave basic resources not being harvestable
- Fixed Crasc not being properly lootable
- Fixed Deconstruct skill button not properly dragging to the hotbar
- Fixed a bug causing terrains to improperly despawn after teleporting causing players to fall through the world

v 0.8.0.17 2022.01.29
- Reactives like force field can no longer be resisted/dodged/blocked/parried
- Changed enchants to scale statically providing 75% when > 5 levels above, 50% > 10, 25% > 15, and 0% > 20
- Fixed enchants being able to apply negative effects
- Fixed player dodge/parry/block messages printing in the outgoing area (mid) instead of the incoming area (left)
- Fixed the posibility of reactive damages killing an already dead entity

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

I've started streaming again, for those with an interest in game development. I'll be streaming from Tuesday through Friday, 9AM-12PM Japan time. It's not the most exciting thing in the world, but it's actually pretty helpful for me to feel forced to talk out loud about what I'm doing, and of course provides a space for direct interaction with players.

I was pretty burned out with the Job skill trees, I've stepped away from them for most of this week. Instead I've been working on improving the new combat math, fixing a variety of errors, and have added several new features to monsters as well.



I've got a couple monsters now making use of projectiles, like the imp pictured above. The first step in this update involved upgrading monsters and animals, which I group together as "entities," to make use of the same stats that players use such as Melee Critical Chance, Strength, Stamina, and so forth. Now that entities are using the same attributes and stats we can properly apply debuffs like reducing armor, attack speed, intelligence, and so on.

To then expand on that I built an "archetype" system for entities so that they can now spawn as different archetypes within their own genus (am I using that correctly?). For example Earth Elementals can now spawn as a Generic (balanced melee), Tank, or RandedDPS archetype. The RangedDPS archetype has increased Str, Agi, and Dex, and throws rocks at players it targets, while the Tank archetype has heavy armor and increase Sta, etc. This opens the doors for all entities to make use of abilities and I hope to add lots of them, like roar debuffs for bears, rhino impales, scorpion poison, harpy screeches, and so on.

Further down this road I would like to add random Traits to champion+ entities creating for example things like an Arcane Scorpion, or an Ethereal Mummy, likely with improved stats, and preferably improved experience and loot. But, we do still have a number of the more complicated Job skills to work on, so lets not get ahead of ourselves.

Best wishes!

v 0.8.0.16 2022.01.28
- Added monster/animal "archetypes," ex: Tank/RangedDPS/MeleeDPS
- Added a monster/animal ability system
- Added abilities to rock elementals, wolves, and imps
- Fixed several errors related to run speed

v 0.8.0.15 2022.01.25
- Added skill names to the majority of skill based attacks printed to the combat chat log
- Reduced the scaling of damage and armor math against differing levels
- Improved block and parry logic
- Finished more Guard and Adventurer skills
- Fixed a projectile specific error
- Fixed a number of critical multipliers being calculated way too high

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

A few patches have been uploaded to beta over the past couple days addressing some issues with the new stats and combat math, as well as some multi-player specific problems and skill tree improvements.

v 0.8.0.13 2022.01.18
- Removed Recall mana usage
- Balanced unlockable weapon recipes to new math system
- Fixed monoliths not being properly interactable in multi-player
- Fixed planting mushrooms in tilled ground throwing errors
- Fixed problems with mana halving/resetting
- Fixed a player projectile bug

v 0.8.0.12 2022.01.17
- Reset adventuring skill points spent
- Fixed new characters starting out wounded
- Fixed the skills spent indicator bar not scaling properly & moved it into the skill tree scroll rect
- Setup manual positioning of the archetype skill buttons
- Removed level caps on skills
- Fixed and improved indication of level 10 requirement to purchase Job skills
- Finished several more Guard skills

v 0.8.0.10 2022.01.15
- Fixed some skills not attaching to hotbars properly
- Fixed being able to receive negative exp for fighting monsters between 10-20 levels lower than yourself
- Fixed Job skill points not becoming "spent" properly
- Fixed some problems with health/energy/mana stats

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!

This patch introduces the first wave of the new Job skill trees. A number of the more complicated skills are not yet functioning and most of the new actions do not yet have new graphics and animations for them yet. This first wave is intended primarily to be able to test the various new functionality that has been added to the the skill tree interface, as well as the damage and costs of the skills themselves. Now that the backend looks to be working as intended I can focus on finishing up the programming of the skills themselves.



Here we see the majority of the Fighter skill tree, one of the eight Job trees now available. I've added borders to the adventuring skills to separate the four different types of skills: Actions, Passives, Upgrades, and Unlocks. Unlocks are automatically awarded and points cannot be spent in them. Actions are the main "abilities" that you drag onto your hotbar and use. Upgrades improve other actions. Passives improve the player in general or under certain circumstances such as granting the ability to riposte a parry or gain back a small amount of mana on a critical spell cast.

The Archetype skill trees were also reworked to better fit with the Job trees and to contain a total of 12 skills per tree intended for use between levels 0 to 10, for a total of 60 possible points spent on an Archetype tree. To unlock a Job tree only 40 points must be spent in it's parent Archetype tree. This progress is shown within Job skill trees.

Each Job tree then has 24 skills for a total of 120 possible points spent, intended primarily to be unlocked between levels 10-30. Once completed this will bring the total amount of skills to 240, for a total of 1,200 skill points, which would require you to reach level 200 to unlock them all. As the majority of them are passive, continuing to level up well beyond level 30 now has a lot of different ways for a player to grow. Once Class skill trees are implemented these numbers will be ever larger.

As I've been largely focused on getting the foundation working properly along with the new player stats math I have not yet written up all of the active skills damage into a well organized spreadsheet for balancing, so some of the skills may seem stronger or weaker than others. These are all just numbers within the system that can easily be balanced as we test things over the next couple weeks. I'm excited to get some new sword animations and magic effects in, but plan to focus on a little bit of balance and just getting everything to trigger properly first.

Please note that as there are a number of changes to this "branch" (beta) that interfere with changes that have recently been implemented into the default "live" branch, there are a couple of fixes that were added into live that are not yet implemented into this beta patch. They will promptly be addressed now that I've been able to get this first patch out I've been very eager to get up, along with an experience bug that's going on that I forgot to address with this patch.

v 0.8.0.9 2022.01.14
- Fixed quest helper content alignment problems
- Fixed a number of broken enchants
- Added 192 new Job skills, some of which are still works in progress

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!

Was in kind of a post-holiday funk last week, ended up blundering some unintentional changes into live. I've released a few small patches since then while working on skills on beta, with the patch notes listed below.

I've made a lot of progress on the new skill trees, and am close to an initial patch. The first patch will be lacking in audio and visual improvements, more focused on getting all of the skill mechanics and numbers in and working so that we can actually try them out in combat as there will definitely need to be some balancing of energy/mana costs and damage output. Lot's of interesting cross-builds I can think of that make me grin while programming the new mechanics in =D

v 0.7.8.9 2022.01.11
- Fixed world encounters not flattening their surroundings enough
- Fixed Crasc's reporting as "Entity"
- Fixed town NPC unlocks not always showing the proper ingredient requirement on the right-hand details UI
- Fixed the enchanting recipe details stats and ingredients scrollbars not working when needed
- Fixed being able to manually enter unintended numbers into world settings during world creation

v 0.7.8.8 2022.01.10
- Disabled NPC towns, which were unintentionally added to the live build
- Added "ctrl to snap" to the facility placement instructions
- Fixed the "Construct: Space" instructions to change with keybindings
- Fixed terraforming on multiplayer

v 0.7.8.7 2022.01.07
- Fixed mouse sensitivity setting titles being backwards

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

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

Happy New Year!
I hope everyone is doing well.

With the Steam Winter Sale there is always a batch of new players, some of whom brought to my attention bugs and places that could use with a little quick improvement. Keeping in mind that I have to judge all requests on how long they would likely take to implement, I was able to answer a number of them, and have now patched them in directly onto the default live branch.

I'll be back to working on finishing up the new Job trees in the morning and will merge these changes into the beta branch while doing so.

v 0.7.8.6 2022.01.06
- Non-hide skinning (ex: chitin) and non-iron mining (ex: copper) resources will now provide harvesting experience
- Increased the range of possible mouse/turn sensitivity from 0.01-3.0 to 0.001-10.0
(Known bug: "Vertical" and "Horizontal" mouse speed setting labels are backwards)
- Improved the colliders on several types of steps
- Paper can now be stacked as intended
- Added a Wood Triangle 3 to fit with Wood Gables
- Added a transparency setting under Setting -> Gameplay for the quest tracker background
- Removed an outdated system attempting to block building areas when constructing with large building pieces

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

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

Happy Holidays everyone o/
I hope you're all enjoying an adult beverage with your loves ones, or whatever may be your leisure of choice. I have a tradition with my family over here in Japan where we visit a hot spring before the new year. We're just about to head out the door.

I wanted to in part apologize that the new skill trees are not up yet and explain myself a bit. I did have some family bad news crop up last week, but also had some family good news this week, so it's been a bit of this and that. But most of all it's just my bad habit of thinking I'll somehow pull 4-5 20 hour work days back to back to get things out "on schedule," let alone amidst the holidays. End result I don't yet have the remaining 10+ hours or so of work that the skill trees need done yet, and am going to be away for the next few days. I was hoping to get everything up and ready at least for testing before the Winter Sale started, but wasn't able to quite get things together in time. I'll be back shortly and in quick order get things sorted out!

Until then, happy gaming, and thank you everyone for your support through early access.

- Kyle Postlewait

I've been hard at work on designing and plugging in the new Job skill trees, as well as reworking the Archetype skill trees to better fit with the bigger picture. As there are a planned 660+ skill nodes planned, only counting adventuring (combat) skills, I'm making the majority of them passive skills as well as upgrades. The point being to keep you from needing 50 buttons to play your class.


(The Fighter Job tree)

Using Fighter as an example which evolves from Squire, there are a total of 12 non-passive skills to be unlocked across the two trees, with the majority of them being on the Squire tree. The other 25 skills are passive skills, skill upgrades (ie: Strike becomes Powerful Strike), and one equipment unlock.

Passive skills however doesn't mean just +5 strength, I've added a wide variety of skills like riposte, double attack, lot's of different procs like applying a bleed, mana refund on a critical spell, and so on. So, there's quite a bit of coding going on behind the scenes. I was hoping to get them up today, but it's taking a bit longer than I planned. I was initially going tree by tree and did the Fighter tree first, so it is largely finished, though I'm now going level by level and plan to patch in as far as I get tomorrow even if I only get to maybe 25 out of 30 levels. I should be able to finish the rest up on Christmas Eve, which is not as big of a holiday over here, I think I'm free until night time =]

Looking at the above screenshot now, I'll try to add some different stylized borders to differentiate between passive, active, unlock, and upgrade skills to make them a bit easier to understand just by looking.

There have also been two small patches over the past week on beta whose patch notes I will post below.

Stay warm and Happy Holidays!

v 0.8.0.8 2021.12.21
- Fixed text being oversized in a number of areas
- Fixed rarity borders not displaying properly in the inventory

v 0.8.0.7 2021.12.17
- Improved the font clarity in a lot of UI
- Fixed experience gain being calculated improperly

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!

I've updated the skill trees a bit to show their maximum level, how many levels you've purchased, which skills are purchasable, etc.



There's still some more color, graphics, and things I want to add here and there... I increased the sharpness of the text being used, but I really don't like it for some reason, it doesn't look good. I've got a few different thing I want to play with to try and make the numbers easier on the eyes.

I've also added more detail to the weapon damage mouseovers in the player stats window. There's definitely still some balancing needed, especially for two handed weapons, but the handling and display of the math all seems to be working well.

Soon now I start the journey to flesh out the skill system with more than 400 skills. *cracks knuckles* Excel and I are going to be good friends this winter. Be sure to check out the link in Discord to the public Google sheet if you'd like to add a skill suggestion!

v 0.8.0.6 2021.12.09
- Improved the skill trees interface
- Added more detail to weapon damage mouseovers
- Fixed strong harvests not triggering 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.

Join us in Discord!

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

Some small fixes & improvements mostly related to recent changes. Enchants in this patch now also have more information, displaying their enchant level both while crafting and once crafted. Previous to this patch enchant recipe level was not properly being taken into account, but now they are 50% level (0.5 per), 50% tier (2.5 per), with rarity providing a flat bonus, as it is with most everything else in the new system.

There is still some data that I want to add to weapon damage mouseovers in the player stats window just to make it totally clear how the final numbers are being reached. Attributes provide 50% of the values used to calculate weapon damage and then the weapon provides the other 50%. There are also then buffs, effects, enchants, and passive skills that might be affecting the final number so I'm writing it all out plain and simple in the mouseover, but it didn't quite make it into this hotfix.

v 0.8.0.5 2021.12.07
- Improved enchant details explanation on enchants/sockets
- Added some missing data to player statistic mouseovers (wip)
- Fixed a bad LOD mesh in one of the procedural tower walls
- Fixed NPC Town NPCs not spawning properly in multiplayer
- Fixed the Light Ward skill
- Fixed harvesting speed and strength skills

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!

Last weeks patch upgraded the combat and player attribute math to a new system, but the current Archetype skills were not fully upgraded to work with the new math. This patch updates the system that player skills operate on to a much more robust and capable system as I look forward to adding Job and Class skills in the next few patches. I also want to improve the skill interface to show the requirements necessary to unlock each tier of skills and some other quality of life improvements.

The previous skill system was one of the earlier systems that I wrote and it was lacking in a number of different capabilities. I've now added support for dual wielding, critical hits, two-handed weapons, and a lot of general upgrades on how skills are defined and organized to help with planning and plugging in new skills. As the new system uses a number of new approaches to storing and organizing skill data, and also does away with the infinite scaling approach, opting for a 5 levels for per skill system (though some may deviate from that), I had to re-input the current skills with new numbers so there may be some balance necessary, especially in regards to health, energy, and mana regeneration.

There were also a number of small problems in regards to exp scaling, damage scaling, and how armor mitigation was being display in the stats UI. Most of these should be working better now.

v 0.8.0.4 2021.12.06
- Upgraded the skill system in preparation for new skills
- Rewired all Archetype skills to work with the new system (may need some balance)
- Changed the armor mitigation display to easier to understand numbers and explainations
- Added some basic instructions to the solace storage UI
- Added ascend and descend specific key bindings
- Fixed monsters going passive due to being below player level too soon
- Fixed the pause keybinding not working
- Fixed exp scaling way beyond the intended cap of monsters 20 levels lower than a player

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!

Post contents:
I. Attributes & combat math rework
II. NPC Towns
III. Community assist sheets

[h1=one]I. Attribute & combat math rework

When starting out with big ambition for an open-world RPG in late 2017, writing a system of stats and attributes for our characters was one of the earliest things I worked on. Put nicely, I wasn't as experienced of a programmer nor as a designer, then, as I am now. As such there were not only a number of things missing completely from the system, but there were some underlying problems that did not mix well with the game overall.

I've talked about some of these problems at different times recently, primarily the fact that most games will either be using a linear growth system or an exponential growth system. The main problem with a linear growth system is that the difference between 2 damage and 4 damage is 100%, while the difference between 100 damage and 102 damage is only 2%. The amount increasing is equal, but the difference gets less and less noticeable. With Solace Crafting that was causing players that get up to levels 200-300+ to craft a new weapon dozens of levels higher than their previous, with little noticeable benefit to combat.
An exponential system on the other hand aims to keep the difference always the same so that if 2 becomes 4, then 100 should become 200. This usually works well for games that only go up to level 50 for example, but again, with some players reaching even up to level 1000 or higher, monster health quickly becomes hundreds of billions and all of the combat math starts to exceed the capabilities of 32 bit numbers. Working with 64 bit numbers is certainly possible, and is actually what Solace Crafting did previously in regards to monster health, because this was an actual problem some players ran into, but it was only a cover-up for a deeper problem.

To solve these problems, I have implemented a new a somewhat unorthodox system. I'm sure it will be a bit strange for newcomers, but it's not difficult to understand, especially at low levels, yet it solves all of the problems of both linear and exponential growth patterns, and makes programming skills and equipment much easier for yours truly.

Put simply, all combat math is now calculated on a scale of -100 to +150. This scale being the difference from your level. If for example you are level 20, your expected skill at anything is 20, whether that's armor, dodge, healing, or whatever.

Let's look at healing for an example.
Different skills then operate on a second min/max scale. Healing goes from 0%-250%, with 100% as its baseline. So with our primary scale being -100 to 150 that means that at 0 difference (20 at level 20) you'll be healing for 100%. Say you're level 20, but you only have 15 healing skill, that means you've got -5 on the primary scale and will only be healing for 95%.

Let's look at dodge for another example.
Dodge uses a secondary scale of 0%-40% with 5% being the baseline. So if you're level 100 with 100 dodge skill, you will have a 5% chance to dodge. If you had 0 you would be at 0%, if you had 250 you would be at 40%.

Keep in mind that the primary scale bring used to display your stats grows with each level you gain. However, in combat, it's actually being weighed against the level of your enemy. So when your stat window says you have a 5% chance to dodge level 20, you'll actually have a higher chance to dodge against a level 18 enemy, and a lower chance to dodge against a level 22 enemy. So this primary scale of -100 to +150 moves with you as you level, and is weighed against your target.

This brings in 3 major benefits.
As the underlying math is based on this shifting scale of differences, not endlessly growing numbers, the math under the hood is actually always very similar. Even at level 1000, it's only checking to see where you are on the scale of -100 to +150. So the results are very predictable and work at all levels.
This also means that skill damage, equipment damage, enchantment bonuses and so on are much easier to control as it's now their level that is most important, again instead of endlessly increasing numbers.
And lastly of course, because the numbers being used in the math are only increasing by 1 per level, there is practically no chance that they will grow to levels anywhere near the boundaries of 32 bit accuracy.

To explain things a little further, most stats are primarily based on your attributes. At level zero you have 0 in all your attributes, but the math wants to assume you have 1 in each as you start out with 6 attribute points to spend as you wish. If you spend them equally across your attributes, you will find that all of your stats increasing exactly 1 point, resulting in something like this:



This is due to the way I've spread out stats to be affected by different attributes. Stamina for example increases: Max Health by 0.4, Max Energy by 0.3, and so on. If you however spend 2 points on Strength, Stamina, and Agility, with zero points in Dexterity, Intelligence, and Wisdom, you'll find that some stats turn green, indicating that they are above their "assumed" value, while others will turn red, indicating that they are below their assumed value:



Mousing over any of the stats will now also give a detailed explanation of how that number has been reached, showing you the actual skill value. I think it's easier to just show 5% dodge chance than to show 20 dodge skill and make you mouse over it to see what that translates too, though it might be kinder to be showing both, though I think the color coding system will help alleviate the need for showing the actual skill numbers as well. We'll see how players feel about it though. On a side note I do plan to change the "mitigation" section to better explain damage reduction and how it works.



This is a step that I wanted to be sure and get right before moving onto improving combat, monster AI, and player skills, as attributes and combat stats play heavily into each of those systems. There will very likely need to be tweaking and balancing of two-handed weapon damage, enchants, and some things that will be affected by these changes, but those are all based off of very centralized math that can be easily changed to alter the entire system.

[h1=two]II. NPC Towns

NPC Towns were actually added into the beta last week without patch notes. I wanted to make this the first patch note for 0.8, and it ended up taking longer than I expected. Having said that, NPC towns are now spawning in-game, though are largely just cosmetic at this point, and still need a new map icon.



[h1=three]III. Community assist sheets

After Pixelnoise made the suggestion to me that perhaps the community could assist in documenting when and where audio seems lacking in the game, which I think is a great idea, I thought I would go ahead and make several different public sheets along those lines. These will be Google Sheets accessible to anyone that clicks the links posted in Discord, and offer a way for people to append their own suggestions.
I've currently added a sheet for audio suggestions and a sheet for player skills suggestions, and have some plans for others as well. Suggesting topics for suggestions also welcome as well! =D



All in all I had to rework the combat math a few times to get it to where it is now, but it was an important step towards improving combat and skills.

Thank you to everyone participating in early access and especially to everyone that posts here on Steam, in Discord, and of course to my patrons on Patreon that help make all of this possible! And if it's a thing where you live, I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving!

v 0.8.0.1 2021.11.25
- Changed attribute and statistic math to new system
- Increased flattening around procedural towers
- Monsters more than 15 levels under you will no longer agro
- Added a /checkheightmaps console command
- Fixed paper being unstackable
- Improved the strong harvesting skills descriptions to explain that they share a single hotkey

v 0.8.0.0 2021.11.15
- Improved terraforming performance
- Enabled terraforming in multi-player
- Added /dayspeed and /nightspeed multiplier commands as well as world creation settings
- Altered the ghost death animation so they don't "fall" through the floor
- Fixed an error that could cause terrains to despawn immediately after player spawn
- Added procedural NPC towns (wip)
- Fixed a problem that could cause players to go invisible in multi-player

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!

I've been tidying up some things on beta for a couple of patches, and am now pushing those to the live builds. This should clear up beta for the first wave of 0.8 patches.

The condensed patch notes for the default live build are:

v 0.7.8.1 - 0.7.8.5 2021.11.03
- Added a 1s delay to input (movement/animation) while harvesting
- Added a harvesting "stance" animation to better blend with the various harvesting animations (wip)
- Added a set of optional secondary key bindings
- Added shift-click to remove a key binding
- Added Controller Axis settings to the in-game controls settings
- Added Mouse Pitch and Mouse Yaw settings to the in-game controls settings
- Floating island portals can now spawn underwater
- Animals rewarding chitin, feathers, or scales as their main resource will now reward skinning experience
- The procedural engine will now despawn 1 object per iteration rather than always prioritizing spawning
- Fire Golem, Fire Hound, and Imp can now drop Essence of Fire
- Water Elemental and Crasc can now drop Essence of Water

The most recent changes to beta, which are included in this patch, that I have not yet posted patch notes for are as follows:

v 0.7.8.5 2021.11.02
- Improved the to/from/during swimming animation blends
- Fixed an error interrupting the recall ability in MP

v 0.7.8.4 2021.11.01
- Reduced the frequency of flora in the desert biome and darkened the large stones to better match the ground color
- Added a 1s delay to input (movement/animation) while harvesting
- Added a harvesting "stance" animation to better blend with the various harvesting animations (wip)
- Added LOD group to light pedastals
- Stomp graphic will now align with ground normals
- Floating island portals can now spawn underwater
- Fixed some MP problems with temperature
- Fixed some MP problems with new caves trying to run server commands on clients

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

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

I've implemented a few more much needed features for partial controller support. You can now set a secondary key or button for every key binding in the in-game settings, which allows you to have a controller bind without having to overwrite a keyboard bind. I still want to add an auto-loot options, but I've been really busy this past week working out some potential business matters, and reorganizing my/our plan/priorities.

v 0.7.8.3 2021.10.28
- Animals rewarding chitin, feathers, or scales as their main resource will now reward skinning experience
- Fixed grass density and distance not properly being reapplied from saved settings after restarting
- Added a set of optional secondary key bindings
- Added shift-click to remove a key binding

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!

Two larger changes in this patch, so I'm going to push it to beta first to be safe.

For one, I've added the first of three steps of better controller support. The first step being manual selection of controller axis for look and move controls. I'm still using the legacy input manager, which accounts for up to 28 possible axis, but I don't actually think there are controllers with that many axis? So I've set up a system where in the in-game settings you can now cycle between axis 1-11. My XBox-like generic controller I'm testing with has axis 1 and 2 for the movement X and Y, as well as axis 4 and 5 for the look X and Y. I also added sensitivity settings, Y inversion, and a "current input" display so you can hold down a joypad while cycling through the choices without having to exit out of the settings window to test it, in the event that your controller may not use the same axis as mine.



The second step I want to add in tomorrow, being a secondary key binding option for all keys. Without this, you can only either have a controller key bound, or a keyboard key bound, and that's not nice. Even with this added step there is still going to be a variety of actions like UI navigation, building, and crafting, that won't be possible with a controller. But you will be able to setup hotbar buttons, camera, and movement on a controller for general running around, fighting, and harvesting. I will also make sure to add an "always auto-loot" option or something of that nature as looting individual items from monsters won't yet be possible.

The third step will then be full UI navigation, but there are some things on the development table right now that make waiting on implementing full controller support the correct choice for right now.

Besides that I have made some changes to the procedural generation engine. Previously it would always prefer to spawn things before opting to despawn things. This became problematic for some people when quickly teleporting to different locations, or moving around a lot to cause the "loaded" game area to grow and grow before any of it be prioritized to despawn. Instead, this patch now opts to despawn one thing, if anything exists in the "to despawn" queues, per iteration of the procedural engine. Despawning, like spawning, can be a hefty operation in some cases and is the main cause of "lagg" or hiccups in the engine at the moment, so I want to send this to beta first and give it some more testing myself before we go ahead with it as is.

Also there are a number of threads here on Steam I have not gone through yet. My apologies if I am slow to respond to any problems anyone may be experiencing!

v 0.7.8.2 2021.10.21
- Added Controller Axis settings to the in-game controls settings
- Added Mouse Pitch and Mouse Yaw settings to the in-game controls settings
- Fixed the /mousepitchmultiplier console command
- Fixed crafting multiple items of non-stackable items in one go causing them to stack
- The procedural engine will now despawn 1 object per iteration rather than always prioritizing spawning
- Improved boat performance
- Fire Golem, Fire Hound, and Imp can now drop Essence of Fire
- Water Elemental and Crasc can now drop Essence of Water
- Going under water in water caves will now properly cause your breath to wear out

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!

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, IF[b] the level of the damage and the level of the target are the same (prior to armor mitigation). To better understand the differences, let me compare the "normal" way of doing things, to the way I'm looking to change it (made up numbers just for example):
Normal
Level 50 Sword vs anything, deals a base 500 damage

Updated
Level 50 Sword
Versus level 45 monster: 170 damage
Versus level 50 monster: 100 damage
Versus level 55 monster: 45 damage

The concept of reducing or increasing damage due to level difference between a player and a monster is not new, but this is basically taking that to the extreme, making level be the only factor.

One of the benefits of this is that all monsters can now have 1000 hit points, regardless of level. A champion can easily stand out from normal monsters by having a full 2000 hit points and slightly better stats, etc. This also means that players can also always have a base hit point count of 1000. That's assuming though that you've spent your six attribute points per level evenly every level, and you're not gaining any stats from skills or equipment. If at level 50 you socket a level 50 stamina gem, your stamina goes up, and your hit points go up with it. Likewise of course with damage and every other stat, so that level 50 sword could actually be a fully socketed tier 11 legendary sword dealing 250 (level 50) damage.

You're still trying to make all of your numbers go up, but every level that you gain your numbers will now be weighed against a likewise increasingly difficult set of monster stats. Another way to look at this would be to imagine the current system as always measuring numbers against a level 0 foe. That's why the numbers just get bigger and bigger and bigger. Instead we'll be weighing numbers against our own level (assuming we're fighting equal level enemies) so the numbers will always be using a similar scale, regardless of whether we are level 5 or 5000.

[h2]Monster Skills[/h2]
Up until now monsters have only been able to run at you and punch. It's time we up not only their AI, but their arsenal of weapons as well. Bear roar debuffs, poisonous spider bites, fire elemental fire balls, earth elemental stuns. There are a lot of ways to add a little flare to monster attacks, but ranged attacks and spell effects are what I'm most looking forward to.

This also opens the door for damage types to be brought into the game which makes for more interesting random champion/hero mobs, enchants, and much more.




All in all, it's definitely a lot of work to do, but a lot of 0.8 is actually more about content than it is about new code and features. Meanwhile, bug fixes and new recipes/weapons are always on my plate as work continues towards version 1.0.

Condensed patch notes 0.7.6.5 -> 0.7.8.0 2021.10.10:
- Added /admin password & /moderator password commands
- Added smoothing to camera mouse movement reducing the "spin" from lagg spikes
- Added "Use any acceptable" button to recipe unlocks
- Improved the town crafter recipe unlock interface
- Added 31 enchants to the Enchanter
- Added 21 new items, including a new material
- Added 11 new monsters
- Added constructing your first solace manually as the unlock for achievement solace level 1

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

[b]Join us in Discord!

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

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!

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!

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!

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!

Some bug fixes for the current live version. As there are some changes still in production on the beta branch, these fixes are not quite ready for publishing on beta.

v 0.7.6.5 2021.09.14
- Improved Goblin Dungeon performance
- Fixed harvesting experience not scaling properly across levels
- Fixed tier 0 resources not providing any experience after reaching harvesting level 5
- Fixed seaweed not rewarding stalks
- Fixed rare animal icons remaining on the map after being harvesting
- Fixed "Get seeds" not working properly on plants in chests
- Fixed some non-hide creatures still going rare
- Fixed ice spikes not aligning to the ground on steep hills
- Fixed the meteor explosion not aligning to ground properly
- Fixed area target skills not working in world encounters
- Fixed goblin boss chest loot/interaction
- Fixed goblin boss health bars
- Fixed some goblin specific drops not displaying their names properly on the right-hand floaty indicators

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

First and foremost, I really appreciate the support I received from everyone after posting my last video in early August talking about needing to take a break from Solace Crafting. I'm still only four years into running my own personal game studio, and being open and honest about things like that is scary given that I don't yet have a fair sized chunk of profit in my business account, which makes the potential backlash of my actions feel much more potentially dangerous regardless of how necessary they may sometimes be.

This post is again me being honest and open about my current situation, as I don't like to leave our community in the dark as to where am I and what's going on. Having said that, August was hands down the weirdest month I have every lived.

The first week of August I spent working on my second title, Solace Kingdoms. The first several weeks of any project of any notable size are very much focused on just getting the code base set up, initial user interface creation, basic game-play mechanics like camera controls, data structures, and so on. On the weekend after that first week, unfortunately, my wife's mother was diagnosed with late stage cancer. We ended up spending the entirety of the second week at their house, helping them clean, organize, and in general get ready for chemotherapy. My wife and her siblings are very close, and we had a lot of teary discussions late into the evenings. I personally am a very positive minded person, and am looking forward to a full recovery for her mother, but there is nothing scary than the unknown and the feeling of helplessness that often comes with illness.

Every year in mid to late August my high school buddies and I always get together for a guys weekend up in the mountains of western Washington. I already had bought my tickets, and it was agreed that I should continue on with my trip. I wasn't able to attend last year due to the pandemic, but having received both of my vaccinations recently I was ready to see my friends and family for the first time in two years. This is where things got even weirder.

Getting into the US was no problem. I had to pay a hefty fee to get a PCR test confirming that I was not infected before being allowed into the airport, and ticket prices were almost double what they used to be, so I was unable to take a direct flight, instead flying backwards to South Korea before then flying to Seattle. In what universe that translates to a cheaper ticket cost still baffles me, but no big deal. The trip was great. I purposefully did not bring a laptop, though I did borrow one for a day when there was nothing going on, and generally just tried to unwind and spend a lot of time catching up with everyone.

The return flight worked out that I would have a one night layover in South Korea, so I had booked a 1 star hotel just to have somewhere to sleep for the night. Upon landing in South Korea however I was told that if I left the airport I would be required to quarantine for 14 days. I actually had a business meeting setup with a potential investor who was waiting for me outside the airport, but they wouldn't let me out, and they wouldn't let him in. I ended up having to cancel my hotel reservation and stay in a ridiculously overpriced airport hotel, which was located in terminal 2, while my gate was located in terminal 1. For some reason passengers are not allowed to travel between terminals 1 and 2 and I had to have a security guard escort me between the two terminals both to get to my hotel room, and to get back to my gate the next morning.

Landing in Japan the next day, the entire flight was escorted to a long series of folding chairs setup in the corridors of Narita airport. We underwent two hours of questioning, saliva testing, mandatory cell phone quarantine app installation and setup, and a handful of us were separated from the rest of the group. Apparently Washington State was on the "high risk" list, and I ended up waiting several hours along with a variety of other passengers until hotel reservations and a bus could be secured for us. We were being quarantined into hotel rooms for 3 days after which a second saliva test would be conducted to confirm we had not been exposed to Covid-19. One girl that I spoke to was a university student who was now going to be missing her first day of classes, but it seemed that everyone, like me, was taken by surprise.

I'm still banned from public transportation and am now self-quarantining in my house, but in total it was 20 days before I made it back to my own bed. I still receive frequent requests from the apps that were installed on my phone to report my location and sometimes even to respond to an AI operated video call to confirm that I am indeed at my location and not just making someone push a button on my phone.

So, it's been a very relaxing, and a very stressful August full of surprises. I took a couple days to unwind and get back into my normal rhythm, and here I am now updating everyone on the strangeness of it all! I don't not understand why the precautions were taken, but I sure wish it had been made clear to everyone at some point that we would have to go through all of this. On the other hand, everyone that didn't visit a "high risk" area walked straight out of the airport and got on their trains and buses towards their final destinations, so I do question the effectiveness of the whole ordeal, but we're all just trying to do what we think is best. I'm not begrudged or disgruntled, but it was not fun being stuck in a tiny hotel room for 72 hours after nearly 48 hours of transit.

I hope that doesn't leave a sour taste in anyone's head, it is what it is, I just wanted to update everyone on what's going on, and why I don't yet have more development progress ready to show off and talk about.

I wish you all the best, stay safe, and happy gaming.

Hey everyone, sorry it's been a bit quiet on here. Though it frightens me, I want to post this here as well, as I don't want to leave the Steam community in the dark on what I'm doing, what's going on, and so forth. I put together a video to explain what's going on, but it's a bit lengthy:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/54465402

In summary, I'm taking a short break from Solace Crafting development, just to recuperate my ambition and drive that I've been really working into the ground this year to try and finish the last several remaining months I need to complete 1.0. I'm still 100% on board with Solace Crafting, I'm just going to work on a second title that I've wanted to get started for a long time, again, mainly just to step away from SC for a little bit, as four years, every day, behind one screen, in one chair, has really taken it's toll on me these past few months. I just need to recharge my batteries a bit and am looking forward to coming back with renewed vigor. Taking breaks where I'm constantly beating myself up for not working day and night on SC hasn't worked at all! So I'm starting on a second, much "simpler" to developer title I hope to have up here on Steam some day as well!

Frightening because I'm Human, and the internet can be a scary place! But you've all (almost all) always been very supportive of my health and mental health, and again, I don't want to leave anyone worrying about why there hasn't been any patches or updates for a couple weeks.

If you want the full story, please check out the video, and I'd love to hear your input on the subjects it covers.

Best wishes,
Kyle Postlewait
Big Kitty Games

I'm gonna have to keep this short, it's past midnight. I've struggled with this patch a little bit, but it fixes some important bugs with multi-player. Hopefully starting new monster skills tomorrow, I need to check up on the bug tracker and look around a bit first though. We had a four day weekend over here, and now I feel like I'm behind schedule!

This patch is being applied to both live and beta simultaneously.

v 0.7.6.4 2021.07.27
- Fixed several instances of MP data being able to exceed the maximum per packet size

v 0.7.6.3 2021.07.26
- Fixed a flora spawn desync problem in multiplayer when returning to an already visited area
- Fixed not being able to select a structure via an obelisk in MP

Beta:

v 0.7.7.2 2021.07.27
- Fixed several instances of MP data being able to exceed the maximum per packet size

v 0.7.7.1 2021.07.26
- Fixed a flora spawn desync problem in multiplayer when returning to an already visited area
- Fixed not being able to select a structure via an obelisk in MP

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

This patch adds in the last major changes to 0.7, getting in all of the encounters for what I consider to be the minimum necessity for a 1.0 release. They aren't necessarily all finished and polished, but they are in and accessible, some with new monsters.


(The new lava caves)

Currently I'm working on revising loot tables and working out new enchants and other socketables in a more organized system where I'm localizing drops based on the area of difficulty for different locations. To summarize I'm planning progression as:
1 . Open world, above ground encounters, town resources.
2. Caves, goblin dungeons, undead dungeons.
3. Floating islands, lava caves, water caves
4+ TBA

Each level of progression is currently "locked" behind underwear progression, as that is what increases your temperature resistance. Clearing each layer of temperate locked content should reward you access to the resources required to make the next grade of materials required to upgrade your underwear, as well as your equipment and things as well.


(The new vampire lord in, boss of the undead dungeon)

I haven't quite gotten into it yet, but I also want to change the current schematics system, which can pile up quite quickly, to a system of learnable sockets, not unlike the current schematics "word" system. This will allow for higher rarity socket recipes and socket set recipes to drop in more difficult areas.

The focus of 0.8 which I hope to start soon will be focusing almost entirely on combat, skills and attributes (both players and monsters), loot, and difficulty. So getting these new encounters and new monsters in is a nice first step in that direction. For now most of these new monsters don't have abilities, or even sounds for that matter, but hopefully in the coming month or so that will all start to change, and combat will not only be more interesting, but more rewarding as well.

I do still want to uphold my belief that full pieces of equipment dropping from monsters is weird, but I think random sockets dropping once in a while would be a lot of fun, letting you stick them right into your equipment now that they are items instead of equipment bound "enchants".


(the new water caves)

Anyways a lot of work going on. I'm also working on some complicated math for the combat changes ahead of us that ultimately make things in a way much simpler, but are not your standard linear scaling up to 1,000,000+ damage at level 80, or whatever tends to happen with MMORPG expansions. The system I'm working on is really designed to allow play to continue up to level 1000 and beyond, as we've had players reach those levels with the current math and it really just starts to get ridiculous, and does bring in some serious shortcomings... I'll be explaining more about that in depth when we get there.

v 0.7.7.0 2021.07.17
- Added lava caves (lava cave sections will no longer spawn in normal caves)
- Added water caves
- Added undead dungeon
- Added navmesh carving to dungeons props
- Added mummies, skeletons, harpies (to floating islands), and vampire lords
- Added aquastone resource

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

I've got a tasty beta patch I've been working on. I was holding off this small fix until I could up that along with it, it's been a few days by now though, and regardless of whether I can get the beta patch up today or not I wanted to get this up first thing today and will post about the changes to beta when they are up.

v 0.7.6.2 2021.07.12
- Fixed an item duplication bug when transferring all to storage chests

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

A couple of bug fixes in this patch. Had a rough week last week, ended up taking a couple days off, so sorry this is coming up a bit slow.

Working on a number of new encounter types to up to beta this week. And as we have a lot of new players, I thought I would go ahead and show my current road map that I'm working on as there are often questions about job and class skill trees, as well as combat in general. Keep in mind these are only the major changes, so things like new recipes, new monsters, building pieces, etc., aren't specifically listed:

Version 0.7 milestones
- Lava Caves
- Undead Dungeons
- Water Caves

Version 0.8 milestones
- Combat (math) rework
- Monster attributes, traits, randomization
- Skill system rework
- Skill tree UI improvements
- Monster Skills
- Jobs and Classes
- Combat animations

Version 0.9 milestones
- Performance optimizations
- Full controller support
- Multi-lingual support finalizations

As you can see I'm hoping to start getting into v 0.8 very soon. There is a long list of secondary and tertiary milestones as well, and certainly a lot of things to do post 1.0, but as I've been mentioning lately, the goal for 2021 is to get out of Early Access with a solid 1.0 release.

Also, please note that these changes have not yet gone live on the public beta branch, as there is a bit more work I want to finish up tomorrow before pushing the latest changes to beta.

v 0.7.6.1 2021.07.05
- Added a loop music setting
- Fixed an error with socketing
- Fixed an error with the "transfer all to container" button
- Fixed an error with rare cacti not spawning as rare
- Fixed an error with non-rare animals becoming rare

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

Earlier today the BKG California server crashed. It's an Amazon EC2 Linux instance that I've paid for for a couple years now, but for whatever reason after rebooting it I was no longer able to connect with it remotely. I fussed with it for a good five hours, but Amazon's 1700 different features can be pretty unfriendly and ultimately was not able to get it back in working condition for some reason.

To replace it I've purchased a Digital Ocean server that is faster, has way more disk space, and is half the price. It takes a little work to get a fresh Linux server setup, but it's up and running a new world now, and I was able to connect to it just fine. It is set to reboot the server thread every 12 hours, and I'm going to try and setup some monitoring so that it can reboot the whole OS if it somehow gets stuck in a loop as it seemed to earlier today on the Amazon server. If that happens again tracking down the cause of the loop will be my top priority, but as I can't even access the Amazon server anymore I can't look at any of the log files to try and debug what went wrong steamfacepalm

Sorry for the loss of data for everyone that was playing on the BKG server. Hopefully the new server will be easier to manage!

I've got a few bug reports involving multiplayer resources incorrectly respawning on clients, rare cacti not loading properly, and some trouble with transferring items in and out of bags via the transfer buttons I will be looking into Monday (tomorrow for me) morning.

Now live! Patch 0.7.6 adds our first set of Steam achievements, auto-looting, new camera controls, lots of new map features, and of course lots of bug fixes.

Please note that due to changes in how things are spawned, resources and encounters may shift around if playing on a save game from a previous version. The new updated methods used to determine town resource locations, for example, will no long be shifted around due to changes in decorations. Predetermined now are, in order: Large encounters, town resources, rare resources, tower ruins. Everything else is still generated on a per-area basis and subject to change if/when changes are made.



Tower ruins are a new addition just this week that have the first interactable source of the "light" currency. These are very common encounters and as such monolith spawns have been turned down a bit. I think it's important to point out that I do hope to use different assets for these rather than the standard building player pieces they're using right now, but I'm trying really hard to stick to my schedule of moving things forward towards 1.0. There is always more to do, and I don't want to get hung up on every little detail.



Speaking of which, I'd like to open up about my plans moving forward a bit. Tomorrow I want to start the process of finishing up the six encounter types that I have planned for progression. Currently you need silkenthread underwear to survive the temperature in certain areas and I want to expand this system with further "ranks" of materials.
Caves, Goblin Dungeons, and the soon to be Undead Dungeons will all be Cold 1, meaning that normal health/energy/mana regeneration will stop unless you have silkenthread underwear on. At the end of each of these 3 encounters will be special resources used for crafting the third rank of materials.
With rank 3 underwear you can proceed to temperature 2 zones: floating islands, lava caves, and water caves. Each of which will in turn have another set of special resources that will allow access to temperature 3 zones, though I don't plan to work on temerature 3 zones just yet.

Once these encounters are in and working I want to move into 0.8 where I plan to revamp the combat math, attributes, and skill trees, as well as finish the job and class trees. During this phase I'll also be working on combat animations and controls, as well as monster skills and abilities.

Moving then into 0.9 I largely plan to focus on improving performance, the user interface, color schemes, better controller support, as well as finishing up multi-lingual support. During 0.9 it's most likely that I'll be adding a main story quest line, though not set in stone.

The real goal is to get a version 1.0 game out that is bug-free, stable, and worth 15-20$, keeping in mind that nothing is capable of pleasing everyone. It's a really hard subject for me to talk about openly, but I haven't really made much profit from early access these past years, and have really just been funding myself with the money I make. Which is pretty cool, don't get me wrong, but Solace Crafting could be so much more if I had enough money to pay for an artist and an animator, for example. That's the real goal for a 1.0 release Q4 2021, because there's still a LOT of stuff we CAN add to make the game everything that it can be. Luckily 99% of the Steam user base has still never heard of Solace Crafting, so there's still a lot of potential to make that dream come true, and is why I think sticking to the core plan towards 1.0 is important.

All in all, progress continues, and there's a lot to look forward! As always I welcome everyone's comments on direction and features. We get into some great discussions in Discord. And a huge thanks to my Patreon supporters that very seriously make all the difference in allowing this project to continue!

Happy gaming!

Condensed patch note v 0.7.5.0 -> 0.7.6.0

- Added 62 Steam Achievements
- Added procedural tower ruins with lootable light sources
- Added rare stalk and timber nodes to underwater areas
- Rare resources and town resources are now generated on a per terrain, deterministic system
- Increased the default spawn rate of rare, elite, and legendary resources
- Changed 3 large cacti to trees for rare spawns
- Removal of items changed from displaying on the right as red to using the color rarity of the item
- Rare resources are now spawned 1 per terrain on default settings, resulting in less uncommon resources
- Toned down swamp flora a bit

Multiplayer
- Home solaces can now be set in multi-player on a per player basis
- Resource scanners now work in MP

System
- Upgraded terrain flattening to allow multiple inputs during generation
- Improved several AI scripts performance
- Added three new world settings and console commands: /showBiomes /showEncounters /showResources
- The will no longer be entirely visible if /showBiomes is disabled in world settings
- Large encounters and town resources can now be seen anywhere on the map if /showEncounters is enabled in world settings
- Rare resources can be scanned anywhere on the map if /showResources is enabled in world settings
- Increased inventory item tier and amount text resolution and added a shadow
- Added the ability to zoom the camera in and out when in targetting mode
- Added the ability to raise and lower the came with shift+mouse wheel
- Added shift+interact to auto-loot monsters
- Camera state and position in regards to player are now saved

Latest patch notes to live/beta:
- Fixed the possibility of tower ruins spawning too close to terrain borders causing errors

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!

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

Small patch to improve the new towers and map features a bit, as well as some single-player/client performance improvements.

v 0.7.5.9 2021.06.23
- Upgraded terrain flattening to allow multiple inputs during generation
- Now flattening area around
- Improved several AI scripts performance
- Fixed the /showEncounters command not working properly
- Fixed an outdated method causing some town resources to disappear
- Fixed the description for the enchanting table unlock

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!

I spent the majority of the past two weeks studying up and testing a variety of performance tricks, especially targeting rendering and lighting. I'm still just toying with the different possible improvements, but lighting is by far the biggest destroyer of performance in Solace Crafting right now.

Putting that stuff to the side for a bit, I've added a new type of procedural tower to the world spawns. These new tower ruins have pedestals with glowing light on them that can be looted for a small boost of light, the main currency used for building and upgrading solaces, among other things.

After a discussion on Discord I've also added 3 new world settings along with console commands for them. The true or false commands are:
/showBiomes
/showEncounters
/showResources
These all relate to the way that the map will handle itself. If showbiomes is off biomes (map colors) will only be drawn for areas that you have been to. Likewise, showencounters will only show large and town encounters for areas that you have been to. Showresources will then only show resources within scanner range of areas that you have been to.

Implementing this into multiplayer I decided to make the list of "visited areas" a global list, so any player that visits an area will unlock that map section for everyone else on the server. We'll try it out on beta first and see how things feel before pushing this lot live.

v 0.7.5.8 2021.06.22
- Toned down swamp flora a bit
- Added procedural tower ruins with lootable light sources
- Added three new world settings and console commands: /showBiomes /showEncounters /showResources

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!

Some more little fixes for recent changes and multi-player.

I've also added 18 more achievements, Achievements take a fair amount of time to plug-in and make the graphics for them, but I hope to add more and more over time.

This patch also increases the text resolution for the Tier and Amount texts over inventory icons and adds a small outline around them to make them easier to read. Unfortunately it looks like some of them are positioning themselves a little too far to the point that they're bleeding over the top right a little. I'll tweak that in next patch though.

If all seems well, this patch might be good for pushing live. I want to give another look at stalk scaling, and still have some storehouse things I'm looking at.

v 0.7.5.7 2021.06.04
- Added 18 new achievements for upgrading towns, solaces, and ley line teleporters
- Increased inventory item tier and amount text resolution and added a shadow
- Fixed rare trees above water spawning as fruit trees
- Fixed some click to transfer inventory problems with storehouses
- Fixed limestone quarries and enchanted stone not spawning
- Fixed equipping and removing sockets in multi-player

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!

Mostly was just bug hunting today, and found some of the problems I was looking for. Along the way I started playing with some things to speed up testing and thankfully came up with some useful new options.

Most of all, the player camera can now be adjusted in two different new ways. The "targeting mode," which is enabled via the tilde key (usually above tab) by default, will now follow the same zoom as the normal chase camera, so you can move it forward and backward to your preference. You can now also adjust the cameras height by holding the left shift key while scrolling the mouse-wheel. I actually find it quite a bit easier to look at in targeting mode with the camera moved up a little bit. These settings will also be saved between sessions so if you were last playing in first person for example, the game will reload in first person.

I also added shift+interact as a sort of quick-loot for monster drops. It will also print out what, if anything, you looted on the right of the screen color coded for rarity.

There were also a number of weird duplication and/or item amounts going negative reports over the past little while here. I believe I've found what was causing them and fixed it. There were also some "out of bounds" errors I've fixed, and a lack of limestone and magical essence that I'm still looking into.

v 0.7.5.6 2021.06.02
- Added the ability to zoom the camera in and out when in targeting mode
- Added the ability to raise and lower the came with shift+mouse wheel
- Added shift+interact to auto-loot monsters
- Camera state and position in regards to player are now saved
- Changed 3 large cacti to trees for rare spawns
- Removal of items changed from displaying on the right as red to using the color rarity of the item
- Fixed a problem with the possible animal lists generated per biome used to spawn rare animal
- Fixed saturation and post-exposure in-game settings not working properly
- Fixed an inventory error causing items to become stacks or negative numbers in some instances
- Fixed a "pickup" option showing for monoliths on the radial menu

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!

I am happy to participate in Steam's first open-world sale! It's a bit of a loose term for some, and an incomplete story yet when it comes to Solace Crafting, but often new players will ask the question: "What's the furthest someone has gotten?"

Because of Solace Crafting's infinite procedural generation, the game world actually goes out beyond 1,000,000,000 meters. That's one billion meters, or one million kilometers! The Earth for comparison is roughly 40,000km around the equator. So they're definitely not planets we're playing on. In fact that adds up to be over one trillion square kilometers! So don't worry about running out of space to build on the public server I host.

The world actually goes even beyond that, there's no ice shelf at the million kilometer mark, the math just starts to get a little fuzzy, and well, we can tackle that beast some day if we really need to.

With the new map upgrades all of that entirety is previewable and with today's patch to beta, even faster than ever before.



Here we see a section of the map fully zoomed out, so an area of 20x20km. I've got a fully upgraded metal resource scanner placed here at my level 70 base in one of my single player worlds to show the new rare resource generation at work. It ramps up from levels 0 through 30, after which is uses the same math for the rest of the game. You can see there is an uncommon resource per terrain, a rare for roughly every 2x2, and elite for roughly ever 4x4, and a legendary node for every 8x8. Those numbers are generated using noise of course, so it's possible to find them quite near each other, or have a run of a bad luck.



I've also added a new stalk and timber node for underwater resource hunting as well as fixed a couple of bugs that cropped up with the last patch.

Happy gaming!

v 0.7.5.5 2021.05.28
- Rare resources are now spawned 1 per terrain on default settings, resulting in less uncommon resources
- Increased the default spawn rate of rare, elite, and legendary resources
- Added rare stalk and timber nodes to underwater areas
- Fixed resource scanner upgrades in multi-player
- Fixed a ProceduralArea spawning error from last patch

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

I made a number of bug fixes, mostly multi-player last week that I never quite got up and ended up holding onto them for the several days that it took me to finalize these bigger changes which revolve around updates to the map.

The short version is that the map can now generate any of the data that it wants to, besides monoliths, without actually generating that entire area to determine what's there.



Previously everything was reliant on the area generation methods firing and determining what all needs to spawn there based on the biome, the height, the level, etc. This meant that resource scanners would only be able to produce map data for areas that you have "loaded" into the game at least once, as the important data would then be written out to disk.

Instead, a standalone system now generates large encounters, town resources, and rare resources, in that order, using a very lightweight series of methods that doesn't require the whole terrains biome data be generated for example. This keeps the map fast, while at the same time awarding other systems access to that data in runtime. The maximum range of a scanner is 20 kilometers (roughly 12.4 miles), which amounts to around 314 square kilometers (121 square miles). Attempting to cover that distance is no longer necessary. Unless of course the scanner picks up what you're looking for, in which case you can now head straight for it.

This meant rewiring a lot of different systems, the map, trees, animals, spawning methods, saving methods, network methods, and so on. I've tested things out a bit myself, but it's always difficult to try and really exhaust all possibles by myself for every change that I make. Hopefully I haven't overlooked anything though.

There is still one problem with multi-player in where the destruction of a rare resources is not yet being reported to client maps, so even though a scanner may pick up a rare resource, if another player beats you to it and it has yet to respawn, it may not actually be there, but will still show up on the map. I will fix that tomorrow, but wanted to get this up for testing first.

v 0.7.5.3 2021.05.26
- Large encounters and town resources can now be seen anywhere on the map (previously was only visited areas)
- Rare resources can now be scanned anywhere on the map (previously was only visited areas)
- Resource scanners now work in MP
- Rare resources and town resources are now generated on a per terrain, deterministic system
- Added tooltips to the encounter and town resource map icons
- Home solaces can now be set in multi-player on a per player basis
- Added a number of safety checks in case someone tries to recall in a world where their home solace has been destroyed or all solaces are locked, etc.
- Fixed spending crafting skill points in MP causing points available to be reduced by twice the amount
- Fixed raw fish not going into campfires
- Fixed the unspent points available ! not managing itself properly in some instances
- Fixed not being able to select a structure via a solace in MP
- Fixed "show hidden" on the solace travel list showing locked and unowned solaces
- Fixed locked and unowned solace showing up on the map

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

I put out a small ninja patch to beta last week, but was mostly focused on the sale, planning, and a number of important non-software related tasks important to keeping Soalce Crafting and Big Kitty Games alive.

With this patch, I've added an initial wave of 44 Steam Achievements to the beta branch. We're already talking about more in Discord, some just for fun, and are of course always open to suggestions.

I'm planning to return to normal operations in the morning, spending the AM working on a list of bugs I've built up from reports and posts here on the forums, thanks to all of our new players that noticed us during the sale!

v 0.7.5.2 2021.05.17
- Added 44 Steam Achievements

v 0.7.5.1 2021.05.13
- Towns at a point where the land is above sea level will now choose the second strongest biome if ocean is first
- Fixed changing sign and storage chest colors and labels in multiplayer
- Fixed some projectile/targeting skills getting interefered with by certain types of triggers (colliders)

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

Though this patch does add a number of new animals and items, I'm moving away from adding "more" to improving what is. The biggest changes in this patch reflect that with improved performance, user experience, visuals, and more.

Please note that this patch updates biome math and will require a world update. A world update will attempt to reposition all player placed objects back onto ground level. This is an imperfect system, but the alternative is starting a new world. You can of course always bring characters from other worlds into any new worlds.



I have been working hard on Solace Crafting for over 3 years now, and I've learned a great deal in that time. One of the biggest lessons continues to be the fact that I chose almost all of the most difficult "genres" of a game that a developer can aim for. 3D, procedural, infinite, multi-player, RPG. I chose all of these because that's what makes games fun for me, and because I wanted to make something better. It's been a difficult journey, but Solace Crafting has a solid core, and now that core needs to be polished.

As a first time solo developer, there are a lot of things that crop up requiring your attention that you don't initially plan for. Managerial skills seem unnecessary, I mean, it's just me, right? But actually time management and project management have proven to be two of the most critical skills towards sustained and meaningful productivity. If I get sick, everything stops. If a task I spend a week on turns out to be a waste of time, it's my fault. The stress of full responsibility can be very real, but I'm still here and Solace Crafting is looking better than ever.

I'm in the process of writing up a list of what I think needs to be polished and finalized for a version 1.0 release, taking us out of early access, but I want to give everyone a chance to voice their opinion as to not necessarily what "more" the game needs, but again, what needs to be better. The animations and the interface are definitely in need of work, but there are a lot of little things that can end up having a big impact. The addition of solace names to the map for example, wasn't difficult, it just had to brought up and prioritized.

I don't have a survey or form setup yet to let everyone provide both structured and open feedback, but I do want to setup something similar to the surveys I've run in the past with more of a focus on a "what bothers you the most" kind of a questionnaire.

All-in-all, the community has been invaluable throughout development thus far, and remains my one true boss. Without my supporters on Patreon, and new players buying copies, I would quickly be out of work. I was never good at asking for support, but it does makes a huge difference. If you're doing well and can pitch in to the Patreon fund I would very much appreciate it.

So thank you to everyone that has ever taken the time read one of my posts, and thank you to everyone that has participated in early access! The goal for 2021 is to leave early access, but that is by no means the end of the road.



The weather has warmed up here in Japan. I, as of today, no longer have any bandages (I had a small surgery for those that didn't know). And I hope to get back into streaming development in the morning, after I get a new video up on Patreon.

As this patch is going straight to live, there may be a new bug or two, on top of a couple of small things I am aware of and working on. Just let me know, and I will fix them up!

The condensed patch notes are as follows:
v 0.7.2.5 -> 0.7.5.0
- Updated map tile and icon drawing and management methods
- Added other players to the map when in multi-player
- Added player and solace names to the map on mouseover
- Replaced circular "forced" biome system with a noise based system
- Added an "archipelago" setting to world creation
- Updated world setting restrictions and added more descriptions
- Updated MP nametags to reposition themselves based on the height of the player
- Improved multi-threading of distant terrain generation
- Improved a variety of shaders used by different objects
- Improved batching of building pieces
- Improved monster turning, stopping, tracking, and acceleration
- Darkened lighting in goblin dungeons
- Randomized color of torches in goblin dungeons
- Monsters killed will no longer block movement/skill target checks
- Improved character creation camera positioning/movement
- Improved biome spawn calculation checks
- Improved player and NPC model generation speed
- Ocean objects can now spawn anywhere underwater regardless of biome
- Added pike, salmon, octopi, sharks
- Added ink, fish scales, raw fish, cooked fish
- Updated the core weather system to a completely random yet highly controlled system
- Added fog and sky colors to the biome/weather management system
- Added coral and rocks to the ocean floors
- Added a per biome lighting and weather management system
- Added anti-aliasing, motion blur, post-exposure, saturation, and bloom settings
- Enlarged and upgraded the in-game settings interface
- Updated the grass biome with more clutter and replaced the speed trees

The latest patch notes from beta are as follows:
v 0.7.5.0 2021.05.10
- Reduced cave environment brightness
- Increased goblin dungeon environment brightness
- Removed respawn capabilities from basic resources in swamp/cave/floating islands
- Fixed monster/animal animations breaking due to limiting network specific proximity checks in single player
- Fixed town buildings and planters not properly saving their updated position after a world update
- Fixed a bug where custom recipes with no ingredients could cause the crafting UI to break
- Fixed the chat UI not scrolling down all the way with a new message
- Fixed chat messages going off too far to the right
- Fixed vertical dungeons throwing an error in MP
- Fixed monsters not spawning in caves in MP
- Fixed small encounters not showing on the map in MP
- Fixed saving after traveling to far in a larger dungeon being able to cause you to reload in empty space
- Fixed a couple of "failed to spawn" errors in MP goblin dungeons

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

This build is looking pretty solid. I've got a couple of bugs I'm still looking into, but I'm looking to push this live sometime in the next few days before moving on to globally calculable map markers.

I pushed a small patch earlier in the week without a post, so am including those notes here as well.

Last weekend was "Golden Week" here in Japan, a 5-day weekend. I hope everyone is getting some sunshine and fresh air! Happy gaming!

v 0.7.4.7 2021.05.05
- Fixed an important new variable not being sent from servers to clients
- Fixed lowering ocean frequency too far causing biome math problems

v 0.7.4.8 2021.05.07
- Changed the larger cacti to no longer remain as T0 across all areas
- Added resources to the list of obstructions for terraforming
- Fixed goblin dungeons spawning monsters on the client while in multi-player

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

Note: It is highly recommended that you use the /forceworldupdate console command if you're playing a save that has been updated in one of the recent patches prior to this.

Had one last problem with the noise math unfortunately, blending the grass biome into ocean improperly. That is fixed with this patch, along with the possibility for areas with too much ocean influence to end up going barren.

I've also improved the world update function to better position town buildings, farming plots, and miscellaneous things not attached to structures. There was a couple reports of items going missing from chests I was looking into at the same time and it turned out these were also caused by the world update. As a storage chests runtime data changes it has to report its contents to the save files for updating. That data is stored within the structure that the chest is attached to, so first it attempts to locate the structures save data based on its location in the world. After a world update buildings reposition their height so they're back on the ground, which caused that step in the lookup process to fail. Although the runtime data looked like it was behaving, the save data not actually getting updated properly. This patch will address that, if you invoke the /forceworldupdate console command, but cannot automatically restore already lost items.

It's been a rough couple weeks on beta. I know that's frustrating for players helping me out with spotting these bugs so that I can track them down and squash them. That's exactly why the beta branch is so very important though. I don't have any outstanding new reports of problems at the moment, and hope to be going through the bug tracker and the forums over the next couple days, but if something shows up, I'll snap to it!

In other words, thank you so much to everyone helping out in beta! Sorry it get frustrating like this sometimes. I assure you it's just as frustrating for me!

v 0.7.4.6 2021.04.30
- Fixed a problem with certain areas going barren
- Fixed a problem with grasslands blending into ocean improperly
- Fixed misc objects not attached to a building not repositioning themselves properly after a world update
- Fixed town buildings that end up in water after a world update repositioning themselves under water
- Fixed storage chests attached to repositioned buildings breaking

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

I updated yesterdays patch notes pretty quick explaining I'd found a bug and had to roll back a part of the code. Turned out the save that I was working with, which I had received from a player, had all of the biome frequency settings turned up to 200%. This was causing the math to get out of control, but is definitely something it should be able to handle. So I've upgraded the noise math to be able to cope with any combination of settings, and this has also allowed me to fix the last of the blending issues we were having in some parts.

Hopefully this is the last time I will need to mess with the noise for a good while as that's really the only reason that buildings ever need to be repositioned.

As posted yesterday, I'm not going to force a "world update" with this patch, but there may be changes to ground height at areas near the water, or in saves that had their biome frequencies not set to default. If you want to mark a world save for update, which will mark all of the buildings for repositioning onto ground level, please use the console command:
/forceworldupdate

v 0.7.4.5 2021.04.29
- Fixed ocean noise unnecessarily lowering other biomes height math which could also cause sharp edges near the start
- Fixed resource scanner range circles not drawing on the map
- Fixed a problem with calculating biomes when biome frequency settings don't total 100% (ex: all at 200%)

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

Update:
Had to roll back the ocean noise change temporarily, and was only able to do so for Windows. Will up a similar change for Linux in the morning, and fix whatever's wrong with it with some good new data I've received.

v 0.7.4.4 2021.04.28
- Rolled back ocean noise changes temporarily

Original Post:
This patch fixes a number of small but impactful bugs with yesterdays patch. The largest of which is something that has been hiding since the biome update, and unfortunately may cause the ground to shift a bit at places where a biome is blending with the ocean biome. This should smooth the biome shifting overall, and create more natural looking features. The map certainly shows the more interesting formations, and there were still some sharp artifacts showing up near the starting area that this change also fixes.

In the event that a shift in height noise has put a building in a funky spot, I've updated the console command:
/forceworldupdate
This will turn the loaded worlds version number backwards, so that when you return to the main menu it will require an "update" which will mark buildings for repositioning. I do not forsee any more changes to noise math in the near future, but this one was important to get in before pushing these changes from beta to live.

v 0.7.4.3 2021.04.28
- Map now updates tiles near the player first
- Updated /forceworldupdate console command
- Fixed the noise offset also offsetting the starter area
- Fixed ocean noise unnecessarily lowering other biomes height math which could also cause sharp edges near the start
- Fixed map tiles going underneath other map tiles sometimes while the map redraws
- Fixed a rotation error positioning icons on the map improperly
- Fixed colors on the map going darker than intended in some cases

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

Regardless of my surgery, which is still very sore, the world map interface is definitely one of the most difficult things I've created. The old map, still on the main branch, had a number of things slowing it down, a big one of which is the runtime creation of textures and sprites. I knew for sure that I needed a way to recycle the textures and to set up a multi-threaded solution for altering them in runtime, but that doesn't mean there's a book I can refer to that says: "Ah yes, in that case, write it like this."

I tried several different ways to get what's called torodial updating to work, wherein you move tiles from the left edge to the right edge or top to bottom and vice versa. It doesn't sound very difficult, but when you're doing it on an undetermined scale, in two dimensions, in varying step sizes, and you're bad at math like me, it ends up being a serious puzzle.

In the end it feels like it was an exercise in simplification. I'm now using a method that tracks positions, checks them against the current desired tiles, and sends those that have fallen out of range to an "unused" bin for recycling, similar to a common system used in game development called pooling.

This system is now generating the map data based on the noise math in runtime, rather than waiting for a terrain to generate it's splatmap when it turns on for the first time and write that out to disk. That means that you can now drag the map around to anywhere and it will load it in, whether you've been there or not. The final step in this series of updates will be to predetermine the locations for encounters, town resources, and rare resources separate from the spawning rules for everything else, so that the map and resources scanners will also be able to show all of those things, whether you've visited them or not.

There are however still some minor problems with the map interface I want to address tomorrow, such as the rulers on the side of the map are not giving correct values (more math), and the map is loading from the bottom to top, as opposed to starting from the middle and building outwards. I wanted to first get the changes as are, up so that our beta testers could give them a whirl and hopefully give me some input or spot any problems I haven't yet uncovered.

There is also still a variety of ways I could make the map load much faster. For example right now, each map tile is 100x100 pixels, and there are 20x20 tiles on the map. Changing each tile to 50x50 pixels would make drawing the map 4 times faster. And that could be a user setting for people to set themselves if they're running on a lower end machine. I'll see how it feels to other players first though.

Additional changes to this patch include player icons with names on mouse over for when connected to multiplayer, as well as the ability to now mouse over solaces to see their names. This too could be a toggle, to be displayed always, without mousing over... I've yet to actually try that, but it wouldn't be hard, and may be better. Please let me know what you think.

I'm supposed to get my stitches removed tomorrow, but it's far from back to normal. Sorry for the sudden delay in everything.

v 0.7.4.2 2021.04.27
- Updated map tile and icon drawing and management methods
- Added other players to the map when in multi-player
- Fixed a math error causing sharp edges around the biome starting area
- Offset the initial noise to reduce the chance of the starting area being surrounded by ocean for new worlds (will not affect already created worlds)
- Added player and solace names to the map on mouseover

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

Just wanted to chime in due to the latest patch not being out yet. I ended up undergoing a small surgery this morning, and had to go back later and some details I will spare everyone. I'm fine, just exhausted and need to lay here and be still for a bit. Be back shortly.

The need arose to develop a new system capable of determining rare resource positions without rolling for all of the spawns in that area. The main user of this system would be the map, as it would gain the ability to scan for rare resources anywhere in the world. It's a complicated task though that touches on a variety of different systems, and at the root of most of those system was the biome generation math.

When I stopped using a third party tool for world generation last year due to its increasingly slowing performance, it was up to me to develop my own system for biome creation. I always had it in my mind that there would be some day in the future when there would be either procedural biomes, or dozens of hand-crafted biomes. I developed two very different systems to "force" biomes into certain locations after rolling a random number on a table that could do just that, generate any number of biomes. Unfortunately both systems were chunky, very unnatural, and not very perfomant.

Instead, I've for the first time (personally) written a much more normal noise based system that produces very random biomes:



This also brings back the ability to customize the frequency of each biome during world creation, as well as the size of the starting area, the blend distance to be used between biomes, the general scale, or frequency, of the noise used to determine biomes, as well as a new optional archipelago setting:



The archipelago setting will separate mountains and swamps from grasslands and desert with channels of water (whose width you can customize) make travelling around with boats a very viable system, and honestly just makes a lot of cool land formations. I love building on islands and sheer cliffs for some reason. Because of the extreme difference in height between the mountain biome and the ocean biome it is now possible to have quite steep cliff-sides, so I've upgraded the object spawning systems to be able to understand terrain steepness, and can now assign a maximum or minimum slope to any object:



All-in-all I hope it makes for a much more interesting landscape, but the improved performance and capabilities that it offers me under the hood are very real. I have fixed the funky lines that show up on the map in this patch, but for the most part have yet to switch on the new features that I'm working on with the map.

This patch will require a world "update" which will attempt to reposition buildings to the now changed surface height of the new biomes wherever they may end up. Or of course this would be a great time to start a new world, into which you can bring any already made characters. The map update will reset some of the spawned objects and rare object positions, but it won't mess with the biome noise, which is really the only reason I ever need to force a world update.

Outside of all that, I've fixed a few problems with multi-player, and animations in general. One bug that looks like it has been around for a long time was only affecting clients connecting to servers or hosts that turned up their stone spawn frequency, causing server and client resource positions to not match up. Found today and fixed, thanks to a player report!

Thank you so much to everyone that has put up with my mistakes and adventures in coding as I try to bring Solace Crafting to a solid 1.0 release. I know we were in the middle of working on animations, but there was an increasing number of problems and performance issues cropping up due to the old biome system, and wounded ego aside, I'm quite happy to be rid of it.

Work on map improvements continues!

v 0.7.4.0 2021.04.14
- Replaced circular "forced" biome system with a noise based system
- Reduced maximum ocean depth (meaning less deep)
- Added an "archipelago" setting to world creation
- Updated world setting restrictions and added more descriptions
- Added the ability to check the slope of an area for object spawn rules
- Updated MP nametags to reposition themselves based on the height of the player
- Fixed a number of animal animation running twice
- Fixed a number of animals not playing their attack animations
- Fixed MP animations jerking funkily
- Fixed a bug causing clients to load resoures different in MP worlds than the server if the stone spawn frequency was altered

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

Big patch setup for tomorrow, a couple things need a closer look before I give it the go though, so here is a smaller patch addressing some recent performance problems, as well as some multi-player specific bugs that crept in over the past few patches.

v 0.7.3.6 2021.04.13
- Improved multi-threading of distant terrain generation
- Disabled an unneccesary physics check eating performance in single player
- Disabled player bound render probe causing performance drops for some players
- Fixed fish throwing errors in multiplayer
- Fixed player animation in multiplayer reverting to a constantly falling animation
- Fixed monoliths not unlocking properly 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.

Join us in Discord!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

I've been working on an upgrade to resource scanners that ties into a lot of different systems including the map and resource node spawning. All in all it's been a difficult endeavor, but should generate a lot of benefit and I'm looking to improve the map quite a bit, performance wise, while I am it.

Taking a break from that today I answered a few bug reports and made some improvements to general monster AI as well as goblin dungeons. I ended up making the goblin dungeons pretty dark, darker than I had shown while streaming, but added much more prominent light sources with randomized color, so they should still be largely well-lit, with patches of darkness.



I've also gone through all of the building pieces and a lot of in-game decorations making sure that shaders and batching settings are set as they need to be to squeeze out better performance.

There was also a problem where running around the world zero, or any point where four terrain corners meet, would cause terrains to spawn and despawn due to the terrain occupied by the player changing in rapid succession. I fixed this problem a couple weeks ago, but the grass was actually still behaving this way causing lagg spikes. That should now be fixed in this patch as well reducing lagg spikes while running around in a set area such as the starting platform.

v 0.7.3.5 2021.04.06
- Improved a variety of shaders used by different objects
- Improved batching of building pieces
- Improved monster turning, stopping, tracking, and acceleration
- Darkened lighting in goblin dungeons
- Randomized color of torches in goblin dungeons
- Monsters killed will no longer block movement/skill target checks
- Fixed some pathing issues in goblin dungeons
- Fixed grass turning on and off around the starting area causing lag
- Fixed a missing material on standing torches
- Fixed scanners not being placeable in creative mode
- Fixed a bug that could reset game settings when creating a new world
- Fixed goblin dungeons being able to spawn staircases directly underneath staircases creating inaccessible routes

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

So... Somehow there's some kind of a mesh deformity on the female models breasts that produce oversized nipples on certain graphics cards... Unfortunately my graphics card is not affected for whatever reason so I was not aware of the problem, though it sounds like it's been around for months. In bringing it up in Discord recently a number of players sent me screenshots showing the problem so I've put forth some effort to try and remedy the problem with this patch. Unfortunately I can't tell if I've fixed it because it doesn't happen on my computer, so I'm patching this in despite a few more things I was hoping to get done with this patch.

Since I was working on the character creation interface I cleaned up the code a bit and better situated the camera and zoom functionality so that you can get right up on a characters face, etc. I do also hope to add an edit option to already existing players to let you go back in and change them should you see fit to do so.

I've also improved a couple of small but important methods used during object spawning that will cause spawning order to jumble up a bit and could cause rocks and things to spawn on or around player buildings and town once more. I've also improved the colliders, LOD groups (draw distance managers), and shaders used on a variety of new objects that should increase performance and stop things from spawning insides of some of the new rocks that weren't setup as properly as they should have been.

v 0.7.3.4 2021.03.23
- Improved character creation camera positioning/movement
- Improved biome spawn calculation checks
- Improved player and NPC model generation speed
- Ocean objects can now spawn anywhere underwater regardless of biome
- Fixed sleeping and pausing not working in creative mode
- Fixed cave monsters not working properly due to recent changes
- Fixed fallen logs/stumps not harvesting properly
- Fixed eye coloring
- Fixed some outdated methods interfering with weather patterns
- Fixed cloud coverage average being too high
- Fixed world preview camera

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

To go with the new ocean biome we now have a few fishies, sharkies, and octopi...ies. To go with new creatures we've got new items include fish meat, ink from octopi, and scales from fish.

I had to craft a new form of AI for the aquatic creatures, and improve the spawning system to be able to spawn underwater things not just on the ground, but anywhere between the ground and the surface of the water. I've also cleaned up the swimming animation transitions a bit, but the main swim animation is still based at the feet of the player making the positioning awkward. I'm hoping to improving swimming next and segue from there into combat animations next week.
As has become common of late I'll first be looking to go through bug reports and forum posts at the start of the week. It's not very efficient for me to be bouncing between a lot of different tasks and builds every day if they're not so severe that they can wait for a few days.

v 0.7.3.3 2021.03.19
- Added pike, salmon, octopi, sharks
- Added ink, fish scales, raw fish, cooked fish
- Land animals should no longer be able to wander or chase into water
- Recall and exit scrolls now require ink

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

New biome colors and flora have made their way onto beta!









The ocean biome now has a variety of coral and rocks in it. I've realized today that I'm going to need a new type of AI for aquatic creatures as they'll need to move in 3D, so that's my main goal for tomorrow.

Pushed a first wave of this last night, but had some problems with the fog math. The weather math is still a bit of a work in progress, but it's nearly finished. And now my wife is telephoning me from the bedroom because it's way past my bedtime!

v 0.7.3.2 2021.03.18
- Updated the core weather system to a completely random yet highly controlled system
- Added fog and sky colors to the biome/weather management system
- Added coral and rocks to the ocean floors (WIP)
- Fixed a couple problems with fog math in yesterdays patch

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

I did end up pushing an initial patch to beta before the weekend started last week and I was looking to push all of the recent bug fixes from the default/live branch into beta and push another patch out for it today, but there's still a good share of new things I haven't really had a solid look at so I'm going to hold that off for another day. Unrelated to this patch, but I do have the various fog and sky colors working with the new biome system and should be able to patch them in tomorrow.

As for this patch, I've added a few new items, bug fixes, and some quality of life features in response to community requests.

On the alchemy skill tree you can now find recall scrolls and exit scrolls. The recipes for these are planned to include some items I'm hoping to add later this week, so they're pretty easy to make right now, but basically one will send you back to your home solace (which you can set to wherever you like) while an exit scroll will take you out of an encounter, such as a cave or a floating island.
Currently exit scrolls are setup to move you directly to the surface of wherever you are. In other words if you travel 500 meters west through a cave system, an exit scroll will move you up to the surface 500 meters west of the cave entrance. I think I'm going to change this to have it return you to the entrance, and will be looking for input on that tomorrow.

As for quality of life improvements, large rocks that can be found in the desert and the grasslands can now be harvested to the point of destruction. They have a base of 450-550 stone and their tier does scale, though they are incapable of spawning as or rewarding rarities. The main reason for this being to provide the option to remove a rock if it's in a spot that's really impeding your building plans, or if a change in the spawning math has caused on to appear on your front door step, as was the case for some players with recent changes to the beta flora.
Crate boxes will now also award greater storehouse storage capacity based on their rarity to the amounts of 100, 150, 300, 500, and 750 for legendary.

Lots more to come!

v 0.7.2.5 2021.03.16
- Added recall scrolls and exit scrolls as alchemy recipes
- Crate boxes will now provide increased storehouse storage based on rarity (replace at least one to recalculate)
- Large rocks in the desert and grasslands are now harvestable
- Fixed town buildings not building for free in creative
- Fixed storehouse torches being marked as owned by Malkere and locked
- Fixed a couple of rare errors in the building UI
- Fixed globes of water not being able to be stored
- Fixed a problem causing shadows to stutter (already implemented on beta)

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

I was looking to put up a patch today, but spotted some small bugs with it I want to fix and re-export tomorrow morning, so I thought I'd at least post a little bit of a progress report, as I don't like leaving the news empty for this long.



There are two main categories that I've been working on this week:

1. Colors

The biggest addition to color overall is the new biome based post-processing system. This slowly shifts color correction math used by the camera such as saturation and post-exposure based on the biome that you are in. Overall the game world is much more vibrant than it was before. I also plugged weather into this system, doing away with the old 6-7 types of weather, for a completely random system that also now takes into consideration what biome you're in.

Fog and sky, two complex and important sets of colors within this new color correction system I expect to further increase the diversity between biomes, though I am still in process of tweaking properly for each biome.

2. Clutter

I've removed most of the "flat" rather performance heavy trees in the grasslands, and replaced them with several types of trees that are also now much more colorful, giving more of a late summer feel with purples and red, rather than just green every where. To go with the new trees I've added a variety of trunks, mossy rocks, and general "clutter". I've also recently acquired a variety of new flora and fauna for the desert, the mountains, and the ocean as well, now that we have breathing potions in and working.

I don't want to spend too much time working on the ocean biome just yet, I'm more just looking to improve the general variety and color of each of the biomes as best as I can without changing the actual heightmap noise. Messing with the heightmap generation noise would require a "world update" in which all player placed objects have to be re-positioned, which isn't a huge problem, but improving heightmap noise isn't something I'm looking to prioritize right now in any case. More importantly I want to get back to working on player animations once this pass at the current biomes is finished.

The pollen count is steadily rising here in Japan, but so is the temperature, and that's a welcome change coming out of winter! Thank you to everyone posting here and in Discord, and my apologies if it takes a little extra to get to bug reports while I'm in the middle of some of these larger changes sometimes.

Best wishes,
Malkere

Some small fixes for things brought up recently.

Normal (non-simple) armors previously had a minimum of 1.0 armor, which leather and metal were above even at level 0, but cloth gloves are actually only 0.38 armor at level 0. This caused cloth gloves level 1-7 to look like they were all the same, as the number would get bumped up to 1.0 until level 8 when plain cloth (T0 common) gloves rise above that number. So, I lowered the minimum and reduced the armor gain from simple clothing to make cloth armor still much better than simple armor even if only level 0.

I've also moved all of the attributes to a single skill tree per request, and temporarily removed the "soul" category as there is nothing on it yet. There were also two odd problems, cave exit's had switched themselves to entrances, causing them to not take you back to the surface, and the world preview camera was hiding under a disabled object making it not work, both of which have been repaired.

This small patch probably best of all fixes a number of small math errors that could ultimately lead to trees and rocks spawning inside of encounters. This unfortunately will not retroactively re-roll all of the places anyone has already visited and consequently it may still be possible to find encounters with things improperly spawned in them if they are only several kilometers away from somewhere you have previously visited. For all newly generated encounter (towers, caves, etc) they should now be positioning themselves better to prevent other spawns from entering into their space.

I was out of town for the weekend visiting family, but am also now back to work on color, post processing, environment, and animations as my work on "presentation" continues.

v 0.7.2.3 2021.03.02
- Reduced simple armor from 0.5 armor to 0.25
- Reduced minimum non-simple armor values from 1.0 to 0.25 (minimum cloth actually adds up to 0.38
- Moved attributes to a single page
- Fixed being able to place facilities onto procedural structures
- Fixed world creation preview camera
- Fixed cave resources not respawning properly
- Fixed resource respawn rate being doubled
- Fixed cave underground exits not exiting properly
- Fixed large objects being able to intersect spawn radii
- Fixed world encounters (cave/tower/etc) being able to spawn in locations that would prevent other objects from spawning within them (previously rolled/visited world encounters will not auto-reposition themselves, only newly found encounters will no longer have things spawning inside of them)

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

Now pushing all of the changes on the beta branch to the live default branch! The Goblin Dungeons still have some changes planned, but all in all there is a lot of new content as well as some new features and a fair share of bug fixes as well as some UX in the works. Check out the condensed patch notes for all of the new changes!



As previously mentioned I'm looking to spend some time for the next while here improving the "presentation" of the game, meaning primarily to improve the animations, audio, and the interface. We've got a lot of features in, with a lot of content planned to be added on top of those now in and working features, but the presentation of them all has been lacking, and it's time I showed them some love.

Thank you to everyone participating in Early Access.
A big extra super thank you to everyone helping support development via Patreon.
And thanks to everyone in Discord and those that have taken the time to post on the bug tracker!

v 0.7.2.2 2021.02.24
Condensed live patch notes:
- Added deconstruction bench
- Enchants are now sockets, insertable and removeable from equipment
- Added procedural "Goblin Dungeons"

- Added new potions
- Potions can now give buffs
- Potions are now unlocked via alchemy
- Potions can now be crafted at different rarities
- Added enchanted torches with color, intensity, and range controls
- Glowing mushrooms in caves are now harvestable

- Updated and blended a number of player animations (WIP)
- Added links to twitch, merchandise, and tipping to the start screen
- Added an "Item Editor" button to the main UI in Creative mode
- Added "Empty" and "Fill" buttons to chests / tombstones / loot
- Moved armor sets to skill trees
- Cleared caves will no longer spawn monsters in single-player
- Brightened underwater fog (WIP)
- Increased the "area" despawn distance by 1 to prevent repeated spawn/despawn when walking back and forth over threshholds

Most recent changes (not yet pushed to beta):
v 0.7.2.2 2021.02.24
- Fixed Item Template Editor in creative mode not properly clearing certain selection windows post selection
- Fixed creative worlds not backing up/updating/deleting properly
- Fixed player mouths hanging open
- Fixed a bug that could cause grass to stop updating

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

Had some small fixes that I wanted to get patched in before pushing live, but ended up with a busy weekend and a gale that kept my up all night last night! Assuming there's nothing that needs immediate attention, I'm again looking to push this patch live tomorrow. It mostly addresses some small bug fixes, but also includes a number of updates to the player animations.

Character controllers are a tricky business, and I have neglected ours for a long time. Still very much a work in progress, I've updated most of the armed and unarmed animation as well as blended them all together rather than the twitchy immediate changes we've had up until now. I've also updated some of the bow animations, but some of the backwards and strafing movements are still pretty bad. I also need to work on swimming as well as combat animation in general.

v 0.7.2.0 2021.02.23
- Updated and blended a number of player animations (WIP)
- Removed combat stance timing out to idle. Instead equipped weapon and whether it's sheathed or not is used to determine animations.
- Added a Goblin Dungeon map icon
- Fixed water, fire, and tannin font recipes not showing up

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

I'm looking to push this patch and all the recent changes to the live public build tomorrow if all seems well after simmering on beta for a day.

First off in today's patch are enchanted torches:



These special, currently wall only, torches have a settings interface that will let you specify their color, range, and intensity. I wanted some of these components for use in procedural content like the goblin dungeons, and so just extended things a bit and built an interface with some customizable "preset" color slots, and so forth.

I've also added breathing potions and "light range" potions to the alchemy tree. Breathing potions are pretty self-explanatory, and the light range potion applies a buff with a new stat called "light range". This increases the range of the player's light aura, brightening up a larger area either at night, underwater, or in caves, for example.

I've also fixed a few small problems that had been bothering me like procedural areas turning on and off repeatedly when you cross back and forth over a distance threshold. This happens very often at the starting platform because it is spawned right in the corner of 4 areas. Areas to be marked for despawn will now have 1 extra unit of allowed distance (128m) than areas being marked to spawn to prevent that. Grass not joining together properly at the seams causing long straight bald lines to appear every 128m has also been repaired.

I've already started working on the character controller and animations, something I've been putting off for a long time that is very a common issue with players that leave a negative review here on Steam. It's almost midnight here, but even after just a couple hours of working on it it's already looking a lot better. I've only updated the out-of-combat movement animations though and it was too late to export the changes into this patch. All-in-all I think I've no other choice but to buy some better animations for the combat stance as the running caveman animations I'm using right now just don't do anyone any good.

Updating the controller and animations is the first of several "presentation" upgrades I want to make over the next few patches, as I've really only focused on "features" for a long time, and the poor presentation of them is turning away players and press that otherwise might find a quite enjoyable game. I'll be looking to finally implement some lore and am in the processes of consulting with some peers on UI improvements for which I've already garnered some great advice.

Thanks as always to everyone joining in for early access, and a special thanks to all of my Patreon supporters!

v 0.7.1.9 2021.02.19
- Added a "Light Range" potion that increases the range of the players light aura
- Added a breathing potion that allows breathing under water
- Added console commands for resource spawn rates, though they should not be used unless necessary
- Added enchanted torches with color, intensity, and range controls
- Glowing mushrooms in caves are now harvestable
- Increased the "area" despawn distance by 1 to prevent repeated spawn/despawn when walking back and forth over threshholds
- Brightened underwater fog (WIP)
- Fixed turning all the cave resource spawn settings to max causing iron and copper to become unable to spawn
- Fixed grass "areas" not overlapping properly, leaving obvious gaps

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

One lesser know aspect of creative mode finally gets a button in this patch. The item editor allows you to create most types of items, except for potions and sockets, and then even upload them to the Steam Workshop for Solace Crafting. I've also fixed a couple of small problems that were preventing structures subscribed to via the Steam Workshop from showing up in game via the building / load / workshop tab. I'm hoping to add a preview screenshot capability for uploading to the Steam Workshop as well.

Tomorrow I'm looking to add a couple of new building customization tools that will hopefully make for even more interesting uploads.

This patch also adds an empty button to monster drops, tombstones, and monoliths, as well as a fill button to chests.

v 0.7.1.7 2021.02.16
- Added an "Item Editor" button to the main UI in Creative mode
- Added "Empty" and "Fill" buttons to chests / tombstones / loot
- Added new icons for not yet updated enchant sockets
- Fixed workshop subscribed buildings not listing / loading properly
- Fixed saved structure load placement doubling the placement height modifier (Q/E)
- Fixed strong harvesting skills not working on elemental stones
- Fixed the new Armor and Alchemy recipes on the skill trees from leveling up beyond level 5
- Fixed socket icons not loading properly in storage chests and bags

I've been working on cleaning out old files and improving some of the data structures that manage enchants and skills in particular. This patch rearranges some of the skill trees and moves the 3 starting armor types, cloth, leather, and metal, to the skill trees, using the updated item template system instead of hard coded recipes. I'm still a bit on the fence whether these work better entirely on the skill trees, or if maybe the first level of them each should be awarded to new characters for free. We'll try it out though and see how things feel.

Also, due to popular demand, I've added a deconstruction bench, that allows old gear to be broken down into some of its original components. Only resources such a lumber and metal can be recovered in this way, and only half of them rounded down will be rewarded. Items that do produce returns due to the previous two rules will be ignored by the bench.

v 0.7.1.6 2021.02.14
- Added deconstruction bench
- Moved armor sets to skill trees
- Removed up a variety of scripts, textures, and models no longer in use
- Fixed a number of harmless errors printing to console/log during startup

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

I had to put out a small hotfix for some long standing fog/cloud/weather timing and color issues that were amplified by last nights patch causing flickering at certain times of the day. All in all this smooths out a few different problems that were present with the light/color timings, and instant weather changes and some things.

I generally stick to 1-2 topics to work on, making "passes" at different systems that need improvement or work. I hadn't touched weather lightning/clouds/fog in a long time, and it is looking a lot better now with just a bit of work. Still not the desired end result where I want to program an entirely dynamic weather system, which won't be difficult, it's just hard to justify prioritizing something like that when there's so much to do. Glad with the outcome of these unanticipated repairs though.

v 0.7.0.26 2021.02.11
- Improved weather/fog/cloud coloring
- Fixed weather flickering

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

A small patch for some of the most recent fixes.

I've been working on beta and the default branch simultaneously, but wanted to get these latest fixes up first. The biggest noticeable difference is with the fog. Apparently the main fog shader was being stripped from the build entirely, even though it was working properly on my end. This also adds a semi-bright fog to caves which makes them quite a bit easier to look at. I also fixed the math causing a variety of a cave resources to rotate improperly into their walls.

More to follow shortly!

v 0.7.0.25 2021.02.10
- Updated fullness/hydration for most items
- Fixed signs not working in multiplayer
- Fixed town recipes not properly checking against building rank
- Fixed non-sky fog not working
- Fixed not being able to drink from equipped watering cans
- Fixed crafting experience not being rewarded in creative mode
- Fixed a variety of cave items/resources rotating improperly into the walls

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Join us in Discord!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

This (beta) patch brings in a lot of new potions, potions with lasting buffs, and sockets.



Sockets replace the current system of enchants which used to be "magic" cast onto an item, with new socketable/removeable objects. One of the main goals for this is the add sockets that are not necessarily magical enchantments, for example weapon attachments, armor upgrades, etc. I don't yet have new icons setup for all of the new sockets, so some of them are temporarily using their enchant icons, but I will add unique icons for each of them.

This is all part of a movement to add a variety of new recipes into the game as well as to the skill trees and town buildings, a variety of which still have no or very little unlocks on them. This patch also moves a number of "known by default" recipes to now require unlocking via the alchemy and masonry trees, along with upgrades to the related systems to support such functionality. As a result of this profession unlocks have been forcibly reset and points should be automatically refunded requiring only that you respend them in whatever way you see fit.

I am continuing work on adding more recipes and can now begin to add more socketable recipes in particular to the Tailoring, Leatherworking, and Masonry skill trees.

Have a good idea for a drop, ingredient, potion, set enchant, or socket? By all means, please join in the discussion on Discord. The game already has a built-in and largely automatic import system for inputting custom enchants as well as items (along with the item creation interface accessible via the "i" key in creative mode (my apologies some of these things aren't better presented in a clearer manner)) that I plan to make easier to access and understand in hopes that the community can help out in designing actually in-game content.

v 0.7.1.5 2021.01.29
- Added new potions
- Potions can now give buffs
- Updated fullness/hydration for most items
- Enchants are now sockets, insertable and removeable from equipment
- Cleared caves will no longer spawn monsters in single-player
- Fixed a bug not properly displaying the bonuses of set enchants
- Fixed the sort buttons in the solace travel UI not greying on/off properly
- Fixed the possibility of respawning cave resources adding rarity icons to the overworld map

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!
Follow development live on Twitch!

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

I had to upgrade the way potions are handled quite a bit, but now the system is mostly ready to take on any and all new types of potions. For starters I've expanded the old health, energy, and mana potions to now have minor, normal, and major forms, all of which are unlocked via the alchemy skill tree. They also now also require a single stalk, which is used to determine their rarity, meaning they can now also be crafted at rarities higher than common. In order to gain alchemy skill points starting out, tannin has also been removed as a drop from trees, and is now instead an alchemy recipe that is known by default.

I've also added attack, damage, and death sounds to the 3 new types of goblins in the goblin dungeons, as well as given each of them a special type of loot... Now that I think about it, some of the loot is not set up as intended, I left it in a bit in "test mode," but these drops will open up opportunities for more enchants and potions to be added in.

I've also added 4 new buttons to the start screen: Twitch, Patreon merchandise, and tipping. Twitch is just a link to my Twitch channel, where I stream development live Tuesday-Friday. Patreon is a subscription based site designed to allow people to support content creators. The merchandise page is a work in progress, but has some hooded t-shirts, t-shirts, a mug, and a mousepad for now, all of which I get a cut for each sale. The tipping page is simply that, a way for people to offer one-time monetary support via credit card or PayPal, of which 100% goes to Big Kitty Games, none being gobbled up by the host site Streamlabs, which is the software that I use to stream. Of course none of these things are mandatory, and provide no benefit in-game, they're just good to have as options, as some people are better off financially than others, and are capable of supporting development they agree with directly, if a simple way to do so exists. In short, please don't hate me, I need money to survive too, and some people really are very generous such as our lovely Patreon supporters! Which really does help out very much.

It's a bit tough to come up with new loot and new potions to be honest, all ideas are welcome! I've got a lot of general "Strength Potion" and "Breathing Potion" and things like that lined up for tomorrow.

v 0.7.1.4 2021.01.20
- Added links to Twitch, Patreon, merchandise, and tipping to the start screen
- Added sounds to goblins, hobgoblins, and the goblin warlords.
- Added new drops: Orcish Charm, Goblin Penny, Hobgoblin Iron
- Added new potions: Minor/Major Healing/Energy/Mana potions
- Changed the recipes for potions a bit
- Potions are now unlocked via alchemy
- Potions can now be crafted at different rarities
- Fixed some animation problems with the goblin warlord

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.

Follow development live on Twitch!
Join us in Discord!

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

This patch adds the ability to increase and decrease global tree render distance for those that want to tweak the system in either direction, along with a variety of fixes for both single-player, multi-player, and some balancing.

v 0.7.0.23 2021.01.19 (beta v 0.7.1.3)
- Added tree render distance slider to video options
- Added more descriptions for how to transfer water between container
- Added Essence of Beast as uncommon drops to all animals
- Disabled the transfer buttons from improperly turning on with fluid containers
- World encounter resources are now checking for saved stats within an error margin of 1m instead of 0cm
- Changed some town building loading code, hopefully fixing disappearing buildings
- Fixed several errors caused by meeting another player within a world encounter
- Fixed a harmless error on dedicated servers
- Fixed a harmless error in the start menu when starting with a non-english language
- Fixed an error being thrown when loading tilled ground in some cases
- Fixed an unexpected error being thrown during facility interaction
- Fixed a harmless dedicated server specific Steam error during startup
- Fixed a harmless error when getting disconnected due to a server restart or kick
- Fixed "ResetPath" errors on monsters/animals when using charge and/or on death
- Fixed floating island temperature not working in single player
- Fixed farming planters not saving/loading properly on floating islands
- Fixed "harvest essence" via the radial menu not working in single player

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Follow development live on Twitch!
Join us in Discord!

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

I added some quality of life tools as well as a number of fixes for problems that were reported.

I've also found a way to allow more control over tree quality that will allow users to turn up or down the level of detail distances that should offer some pretty serious performance improvement for those lower end systems that need every little bit. I wasn't able to patch it in today as there are some safety hooks I need to setup as it involves altering the original tree prefabs in runtime, changes that will persist even in the Unity editor while I'm testing them. I'm also looking into most likely doing away completely with a type of tree called SpeedTrees that I use quite a lot of, which, out of the box, are really just not cutting it.

v 0.7.0.22 2021.01.06 (beta v 0.7.1.1)
- Crosshair given an outline and a transparency setting under video settings
- Improved rain and snow collision
- Added a number of shadow quality control settings to the in-game video settings
- Fixed snow not colliding with anything
- Fixed world preview not showing up
- Fixed loading premade structures in caves not working
- Fixed Charge not stunning mobs
- Fixed watering cans throwing errors when filling or emptying them without opening them first
- Fixed equipped watering cans duplicating into the inventory when emptied or filled

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Follow development live on Twitch!
Join us in Discord!

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

Happy New Years!

I recorded a video reflecting on 2020 and looking forward to 2021. It's a bit long, so for those more interested in the cliff notes I will summarize below.

[previewyoutube=Vp9bPB1V3gA;full][/previewyoutube]

In short, 2020 was a rough year for me. In Q2 I tried to hire on some part-time help but ended up just wasting a lot of time and money that really put me a negative spot. In Q3 I decided to take on re-writing a major chunk of the main engine and got really burned out just coding day after day for months. Putting those two together had me really demotivated in Q4, and I was finding myself really lonely and having a hard time focusing.

As is most often the case, when you love something and you don't give up on it, the hard times are surmountable, and on December 1st I tried streaming development live and found it extremely motivating for me. I took a break for the end of the year, which is a big holiday here in Japan, but have started streaming again today, and have really enjoyed it even if at times no one is watching =] It's been very uplifting and my productivity has greatly increased since it's long, slow decline during 2020.

The video though is above all else heavily focused on my determination to get Solace Crafting out of early access in 2021. That doesn't mean that I will publish it, and never work on it again, there are a lot of features that I want to add post version 1.0 after leaving early access. But the core aspects of the game are largely in place, and I plan to focus, improve, and polish the game as is, with minimal new "features," meaning instead to focus on content, community tools, and overall engine polish. For example, mounts could be a great addition to the game, but they're not a necessity. There's no reason that can't be the focus of version 1.1, but getting a solid and robust version 1.0 to take us out of early access and reach a wider audience is much more important.

2021 starts my fourth year of full-time solo development of Solace Crafting. I am no less interested in taking Solace Crafting as far as it can go, but I can't stay in solo early access forever. Releasing an unfinished buggy product is in no way an acceptable move, but spending another 4 years slowly adding more and more features by myself is not a smart move either. A best case scenario would be releasing a polished game full of content and community tools that will generate enough money for me to expand the small bits of outsourcing I currently am able to afford into a couple of full-time staff to help speed up development of new features.

Until then, I'm back to work at full throttle, and was able to answer the majority of the new bug reports added to the bug tracker over the past week. I have some 80+ messages here on Steam that I will be going through tomorrow, and will continue to prioritize bugs over furthering development, but wanted to reiterate a bit of my current thought process:

1. Add a number of new areas to add a variety of new enemies with new drops.
2. Use those new drops to create a lot of new recipes to add to the respective skill trees and town buildings for unlocking and improving, including potions, masonry, and enchants.

As always, input is greatly appreciated!
A huge thanks to everyone that continues to post bug fixes along with screenshots and videos.

One note, I've had a player report a problem with building it sounds like specific to Linux. I have yet to look into this myself on Linux, which has many versions, but will do so and would appreciate any reports from any other Linux players that can either confirm a similar or dissimilar experience.

v 0.7.0.21 2021.01.05 (beta v 0.7.1.1)
- Mushrooms can now be grown above ground as well as underground
- Crate boxes in vertical dungeons can no only be picked up after clearing the dungeon
- Fixed journal descriptions being dark grey
- Fixed "Cleric Robe" to read "Cleric Jacket"
- Fixed all boats reverting to common T0 whenever they are picked up
- Fixed herbs looting as T0 regardless of location
- Fixed leyline teleport range upgrade confirmation box displaying incorrect material requirements
- Fixed planters not placing properly in single player at distances beyond 8km
- Fixed picking up crate boxes in vertical dungeons throwing errors
- Fixed pressing "Interact" (default: F) while renaming, closing the solace rename interface
- Fixed a number of problems with tombstones, bags, and trashbins
- Fixed getting seeds from a vegetable in a bag not updating immediately in single player, or at all on multiplayer
- Fixed swamp map drawing as full ocean in places
- Fixed animals/etc duplicating in semi-rare circumstances

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Follow development live on Twitch!
Join us in Discord!

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

I've been busy with the holidays and fixing up a health problem I ran into lately. My apologies this fix didn't get out faster.

This patch fixes a problem where walking far enough away from an area for it to despawn, but not so far enough away to have the entire terrain despawn, and then coming back would cause town buildings to revert to their mid-"reposition" state, wanting them to be placed again from the town menu.

v 0.7.0.20 2020.12.28
- Fixed a spawn management problem causing town buildings to revert into "reposition" mode

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Follow development live on Twitch!
Join us in Discord!

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

Goblin dungeons are now capable of spawning complete with lots of nasty critters inside as well as a boss and treasure chest at the end. There are still a variety of plans for these dungeons including traps, secrets, more decorations including particle effects, unique drops, and an undead version.



Along with these "dungeons" a series of "planes" such as the fire plane are also in the works along with a new types of water cave, during which I'll be revisiting the current caves a bit more.

All in all these new locations are intended to provide a lot of new drops from a lot of new monsters, with which we'll then be working on lots of new recipes for armor, weapons, potions, and enchants!

v 0.7.1.0 2020.12.24
- Added first phase of procedural "Goblin Dungeons" for beta testing

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.

Follow development live on Twitch!
Join us in Discord!

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

One nasty bug fixed in this patch was caused by clicking "apply" to the video resolutions settings without first selecting a resolution, causing the window to turn into a 1x1 window. I setup a catch to automatically resize any players that got stuck in this condition to 640x480, fixed the bug causing it, and added an option for borderless fullscreen. Along with a number of other fixes and repairs.

I'm hoping to plug in the new dungeon generator into beta tomorrow!

v 0.7.0.19 2020.12.22
- Stalks and large cacti now drop have a chance to drop essence of water
- Added a blue fog to brighten up caves
- Added a fix to automatically catch and repair broken video resolutions
- Fixed a bug crashing the game when clicking "apply" to a video resolution prior to selecting a resolution
- Fixed some weather audio not obeying the ambient volume sliders
- Fixed some problems with the displaying and purchasing of long range leyline teleport upgrades
- Fixed essence harvesting in MP
- Fixed grass not updating immediately while terraforming
- Fixed a harmless error when entering caves
- Fixed bags not dropping properly into tombstones while in caves
- Fixed towns deciding on a different biome than the overlay biome indicator
- Fixed certain resources respawning with every reload and ignoring building collision checks

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Follow development live on Twitch!
Join us in Discord!

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

Another round of bug fixes before hopefully starting out onto some new stuff tomorrow!

v 0.7.0.18 2020.12.15
- Updated language files from crowdin
- Fixed a lot of animations going dead in SP
- Fixed grass patches going bald
- Fixed the math for multiple crafts that involve leveling up into new tiers
- Fixed animals that should not go rare, going rare
- Fixed crafting exp not scaling across levels as intended, but hard capping

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Follow development live on Twitch!
Join us in Discord!

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

I've gathered the measurable results from the Fall survey into a series of graphs and welcome open discussion as to what we are to take from them, and how that should affect development. I've give my own take and explain what I think is the best course of action for the immediate future in the following video:

[previewyoutube=GVDUmxsB6j8;full][/previewyoutube]

I've tried several times to summarize the contents, but it's a long video for a reason, and am having difficulty giving a short explanation... I think the roadmap (below) speaks for itself quite well, and hope that people looking for a deeper explanation of why I think those are the best steps to be taking towards version 1.0 will be able to check out the video.

Some questions definitely remain, such as how to continue offering improvements to crafting, ie: new recipes for say a sword, without simply adding a different sword recipe every tier and just making it better just because.

The image themselves are as follows:













And my proposed revision to the roadmap is as follows:

0.7.1: Procedural dungeons/planes, more monsters (more drops).
0.7.2: Enchants -> sockets. Lots more recipes.
0.7.3: Deconstruction bench. Crafting and harvesting equipment.
0.7.4: Improve Monster AI. Add monster abilities. Upgrade combat math.

0.8.0: Rework adventuring skills. Add Job & Class skill trees.
0.8.1: Expand on town buildings and functionality.
0.8.2: Randomly generated towns.
0.8.3: Town quests and unlocks.
0.8.4: Nutrition, cooking, and fishing.

0.9.0: More dungeons/planes, more monsters, more recipes, more quests.

0.9.4: Villager equipment, clothing, naming, skills, AI.
0.9.5: Town attacks/defense.

0.9.8: Finalize language support, add full controller support.
0.9.9: Optimization.

1.0.0 Leave Early Access.

These are of course only the larger milestones. There is a lot of small improvements to be made to various aspects of the different inventory systems, the interface, audio and animation in general, etc.

I've also pushed the 0.7.0.17 patch to the live branch, which other than a long list of fixes adds:
- Added a biome indicator to the main overlay (lower left)

Follow development live on Twitch!
Join us in Discord!

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

Lots of small annoyances fixed in this patch along with a remedy for the broken facility inventories that was brought in with .15 and .16 trying to get bags within tombstones to work.

The problem with bags in tombstones is that a bag is an item, and the items inside of a bag are items, but you can't allow items to be within items or you create a possibly endless loop that won't compile. Instead bags are actually "containers" which inherit from their parent "item" class, but are in fact not "exactly" "items" preventing this loop as containers can only contain items, not other containers. Unfortunately serialization, which is used to save data and to transfer it between computers in multi-player cannot tell the difference between a child and a parent class. This requires some special handling to get containers to exist within other list and arrays such as a tombstone's list of contents.

In upgrading that system I miscalculated some steps and ended up causing non-tombstone "facility" inventories to forget what type of contents they are and aren't allowed to deal with. This patch fixes up both problems to that tombstones and facilities should be working as intended in both single player and multi-player.

v 0.7.0.17 2020.12.11
- Fixed learned recipes being craftable at any rarity regardless of rarities learned
- Fixed sheathing/unsheathing in MP
- Fixed weapons and tools not automatically being brought out with use in MP
- Fixed armor colors and stats not sync'ing immediately after joining a MP server
- Fixed dropping multiple items duplicating them after returning
- Fixed "large towers" aka "vertical dungeons" not spawning in MP
- Fixed resources spawning too close to vertical dungeons
- Fixed animal rarity particles not spawning properly on MP clients
- Fixed the fullscreen toggle not loading it's initial state properly
- Fixed random snow beneath high elevations
- Fixed "Get seeds" not properly updating inventory in MP
- Fixed facility slots being improperly labelled in SP causing them to not accept items as expected

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.

Follow development live on Twitch!
Join us in Discord!

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

One of the fixes this patch addresses is bags being dropped inside of tombstones on death. In other words that's containers within containers. This has always been a bit of a challenge, and to make sure that I didn't inadvertently mess anything up I'm going to push today's patch to beta first for a day or two.

v 0.7.0.15 2020.12.09
- Added a biome indicator to the main overlay (lower left)
- Fixed boat interaction in MP
- Fixed veggies not generating as anything but T0
- Fixed a rare case where town biomes could go null causing gatherers to stop gathering
- Fixed a possible loading error with empty planters
- Fixed swimming animations getting stuck on land, until you jump
- Fixed a number of problems with bags dropped into tombstones/onto the 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.

Follow development live on Twitch!
Join us in Discord!

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