Greetings and welcome to the third Producer's Letter for Solace Crafting. I'm Fab, and today, we're going to spend a little time talking game design and what we have in mind for the near-future of Solace Crafting in that area. Game design is a vast and rich discipline, in that it pertains to any and all aspects that will determine the kind of experience the player will ultimately have. From the numbers that go into a combat system to the way a specific interaction feels, or even the psychology of certain goals and moments of gameplay, or the way lore informs experience, as game designers we must be on top of all that and more. Solace Crafting is a vast and systems-rich game, with plenty to do. However, if the What can be quite clear most of the time (explore, fight, harvest, build), streamlining the How, the Why and the What For is part of the update strategy we have recently embarked on. As those among you who already play the game know, Solace Crafting is named after Solaces, the crystalline nodes around which you will indeed Craft and Build, from a simple workshop at first to an expanding town later on. Being the central concept of the game, we felt there was much more we could do with them in terms of tying things up together and creating a stronger game. So as we currently update many front end aspects of the experience, such as graphics, controller and enemies, we are preparing to launch a revamp of Solaces themselves. In the multiverse of Khora, that youve been exploring through your worlds creation in Solace Crafting, Solaces act as nodes in a network of energy, enabling forces to circulate. Youve seen this from the way you can use them as spawn points and fast travel points. Another aspect of Solaces we will be expanding as we tie their gameplay tighter together, is their function as a reality stabilizer or maybe even as a reality manipulator, and their relationship with the player character itself. We call player characters (and ultimately you, dear players), Astrals, which is also a sort of short for Astral Prodigies, that is souls that have awakened, consciously or not, to the endless breadth of the multiverse and can exist within its worlds. Astrals are connected to Solaces and can operate them in ways others cannot. First, we plan to make the Solaces upgrade cycle much more central to your experience. As you venture out, not only will you want to come back to the Solace regularly for crafting and maintenance, but also to upgrade and empower the Solace itself, discovering new functions and powers it grants you. Second, the worlds of Khora, which you explore and inhabit, will contain scores of pre-existing Solaces. These we call historic Solaces, for they were here before you and have things to bequeath you, from mere lore to new opportunities to weigh upon your worlds. These Solaces you find, out there in the worlds, could take you to hidden locations, allow you to manipulate time, weather, life cycles within biomes, grant you new powers lasting or temporary, and many more things. All Solaces exist thanks to a mysterious focus of energy, called by some an Astral Egg, which you can harvest. However, doing so will destroy the Solace, but the Astral Egg can be carried to manifest a new Solace elsewhere or empower an existing one. This loop of exploring, finding Solaces, interacting with them and deciding what to do with each and with its Astral Egg will be much more prominent in the updated Solace Crafting we are headed to. The goal of this looming update is to infuse your gameplay with more meaning, with a lot more Why and What For to your actions in the game. So that having a lot that you can possibly do in Solace Crafting also means a lot more reasons to do each thing and to commit to a specific path of play. This series of updates touching on the game fundamentals should begin around late December to January, and follow on through. We are still very much focused at the moment on more technical or artistic aspect to bring Solace Crafting into the current times in terms of looks and feel, but we are already hard at work planning those gameplay/experience steps as well. New, or updated ways to interact with the world, will be a thing as well, as previously hinted at. New locomotion modes, more dynamic harvesting, more exciting obstacle navigation and many more. Its a titanic undertaking. An interesting thing is, the more experience you have working on games, the more even a small update turns out to be imposing in terms of implications and repercussions. I can remember, way back before getting involved in game design and production, thinking Oh, the devs should do this or that to improve the game. Lots of grand ideas which, on paper, would have made the game better. Now, after about a decade and a half hands-on, every new feature I plan, every new change gets me like this is going to be so much to do But we keep pushing, because nothings more beautiful than a vision fulfilled and a playerbase happy. Its a beautiful job, a great opportunity, and as I always say, success and fulfillment follow a lot more easily when you love what you do, love the people youre doing it with and love the people youre doing it for. This was intended as a Producers Letter, not quite a Love Letter, but we all know how for Kyle this has been a labour of love and so how could I join this beautiful undertaking with any less than these same feelings? So here we are. Happy to be here and looking forward to it all! - Fab

[ 2024-12-10 13:40:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

Lots of new things in this patch! Not all immediately obvious. Performance is up quite a bit, lots of new environment effects including weather, fireflies, birds, wind, two-handed weapon animations, large mountain stamps fixes, and so on! More monsters, more weapons, and the first set of new locations set to make their appearance next week!
v 1.1.1.2 2024.12.06 - Added player damage numbers - Sword animation tuning - 2h Sword animations - Fixed some moutain splat import problems - Fixed height blending of stamps with non-zero edges - Recolored cliff texture - Implemented new day/night cycle - Implemented new weather systems - Implemented over a dozen new environment effects like birds, falling leaves, etc - Fixed camera and movement working while in menus - Fixed large stamp spawn performance issues - Improved new AI spawn performance 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!

[ 2024-12-06 14:17:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

Continuing onward with new technology improvements, this patch expands on the new world generation technology to spawn large locations procedurally throughout the world. Currently we've only implemented mountains as they're the most obvious to spot, but we'll now be expanding this to work with other biome based locations. Some of the new mountains are currently blending a bit sharply with their surrounding, I will be fixing that tomorrow. And biomes will need to blend to match these large locations as well. The player controller is also continually undergoing upgrades at the moment. This patch adds swimming, increases the angle at which players begin to slide, adds health bars and damage numbers, and removes the fall damage that was cause players to fall flat and not get back up. We've already got a few more things in the pipe, just not quite ready to upload right this moment. Happy Thanksgiving! My wife and son are also back home now, at last! so we've got a very busy, sometimes very noisy household. It took a couple days to get settled back into a home that had been abandoned for the better part of 3 weeks, v 1.1.1.1 2024.11.28 - Added 5 more mountains - Expanded large stamp system to work anywhere - Temporarily blending the edges of large stamps - Added swimming capabilities - Removed fall damage - Increased the player slide angle - Added health bars and damage numbers 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!

[ 2024-11-28 13:44:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

Greetings Adventurers! I'm sorry that my personal life has repeatedly delayed this momentous patch, which I intend to explain, but we've got a lot done these past few months, and we've got a lot to talk about, so let's get into it! First and foremost, I need to make it very clear that

this patch is not at all intended as a playtest.

This patch is intended as a preview for players to take a look at, to feel the new controls, and to provide early feedback. This patch contains thousands of new lines of code, hundreds of new assets, and focuses primarily on the following:

• Overworld biome graphical assets
• Enhanced player movement
• Action based combat
• Enemy artificial intelligence
• World generation technology improvements

This preview patch is only available via the beta branch and has several features that are temporarily turned off, or simply have no effect, such as:

• Avatar creation: no matter what you create or wear you will be a guy with a cape.
• Weather is completely absent. The day/night cycle and skies are also being reworked.
• Harvesting is largely impossible as again, this is not a playtest patch.
• Combat. In the overworld nothing can hurt you. If you travel elsewhere, you will likely not be able to hurt anything else.

So, what is the purpose of this patch?

The above mentioned new features all reach deep into the core of the many systems that make up Solace Crafting, and are foundational in moving the game from it's old haphazard design into the new well oiled machine we are planning for it to become. That means, defining and upholding an expandable art style, and improving the many different ways that players interact with the world. Movement, combat, harvesting, crafting, leveling, exploring, all of these systems are heavily dependent on how the world is shaped and presented to the player, which is why we have added a number of new technologies to bring hand-crafted points of interest into the game world, from a small copse of trees, to an entire mountain village. These foundational changes set the framework for us to move onto the next step of rebuilding the many different types of content that already exist in Solace Crafting. For example, we have now a wolf and a bandit working with out entirely new AI systems which means we can add any type of humanoid creature using the bandit's AI as a starting template, and though a bit trickier we can use the wolf template for other non-bi-pedal creatures. The large mountain that you should be able to see near the start area is hand-crafted, and hand-painted. It's the only mountain in the game right now, but now that the system works we can use it to bring in dozens of mountains, canyons, oasis, islands, anything we want using the same systems. The player character will now always start with a claymore so that you can try out either weapon combat or the hand to hand combos. Likewise, these are proofs of concept for how weapon animation sets will work. Magic and healing will of course be added in very shortly, now that these foundations have been put in place. Climbing, sliding, mounts, and other features are also being built into and tested with these new systems and will be brought online as we progress.

So what's next?

Now comes the fun part. New monsters, new animals, new skills, new weapons, new resources, new locations... content! Content can't exist without systems, and now that we've got the first major group of systems in and working, it's time to make proper use of them. And that doesn't mean reinstating all of the old content, we will be introducing almost entirely new content that better aligns with our long term goals of a well populated fantasy multiverse filled with things to do and lore to explore, as well as a variety of play-styles to go about experiencing them with. There is a long list of advanced features that we will be talking about and implementing as time moves on, but we are going to take things step by step. Having said that, we are working on a roadmap and would very much like everyone's input on that when we're able to reveal it, as our vision for the future of Solace Crafting is entirely dependent on pleasing our community and attracting new adventurers from all around the globe! The current build is also lacking in performance in some areas yet. There are a lot of tricks and puzzles to making Unity perform better, but now is not yet the time to be spending much time on that area.

What happened?

There's no real point in going too deep down this discussion, but we had a kind of perfect storm of unfortunate events one after the other. Our git account went over the limit imposed by its developers, not by like our account tier or anything like that, and became completely unusable right as all three of us currently working on the game tried to merge all of our work together. While waiting for support to help us out I tried a few things to fix the problem, but actually made things worse. Once support picked up our case I was deep into trying to put things together, when my wife's water broke! Our son is happy and healthy, but my wife met several complications and is unfortunately still in the hospital, though it's looking like she will be released in another few days. I lost nearly a week trying to repair the damage and ultimately having to redo several days of work. Such is game development though, problems come and problems go. I have ample time to get us back onto our original schedule, and we've already made a lot of good progress.

In closing

I really hope everyone enjoys the new art style and can understand why the old style was really just making everything much more expensive and difficult to work with. I'm confident the new combat system will grow into a feature rich, player choice driven class system. And above all I look forward to bringing out new content, quests, stories, and treasure for players to engage with and uncover as we move through the next stages of Solace Crafting development! Best wishes and happy gaming! Kyle This preview patch is only available via Beta branch. 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! (Our Patreon will soon be undergoing a revamp of its own)

[ 2024-11-22 01:11:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

Greetings and welcome to the second Producer's Letter for Solace Crafting. I'm Fab, and today, we're diving deeper into the exciting features coming on this journey toward version 1.5. While we've previously shared our broader vision, today well explore the nitty-gritty of what lies ahead. But first, lets take a moment to celebrate another milestone: Kyle, the brilliant mind behind Solace Crafting, is now a proud father! Insert from Kyle: It's been a crazy week! I've got a healthy new baby boy, who will be home with my wife in another 36 hours from the time of me writing this! We had some problems with our version control that completely stopped development but the support from the service that we use was quick to respond, all thing considered, and I was hard at work getting things sorted out when my wife's water broke and we were off to the hospital on Sunday night! It was a chunk of hours I knew I was going to have to take off at some point, but was hoping to get the first preview patch we've been working on up before then. The past few days I've been commuting home from my in-laws to work during the day and had to redo some things that got lost in the version control problems, but I'm planning to have the patch up tomorrow so I can take another day or two off to try and help my wife get some at home rest and recovery which she's very much in need of.
So, sorry again things got delayed a little, but we're still on track in our overall progress You should hear from me again very soon! - Kyle Congratulations to Kyle and his growing family. It's truly poetic to see both a life project and personal life evolve simultaneously. With this in mind, we officially kick off the next chapter of Solace Crafting, starting with the new beta branch updates, outlined in our Patch Notes. Let's go to the plans and Roadmap!

In the last month

Player Controller

• What we've done: We're starting out with improvements to the controller, to make it more responsive and make the character's handling more pleasant all around. That means smoother locomotion controls, which in turn will become more permissive gameplay-wise. Combat is also receiving a major update, where improved animations and controls will make the experience more dynamic overall.
• What we're planning: Further improvements to the Player Controller involving additional locomotion features to create class abilities like Blink, Slow Fall; advanced features like Sliding, Gravity adjustments and Swimming, as well Mount functions. As the worlds of Khora are receiving massive updates, so should your ability to navigate, explore and enjoy them.

Bot AI

• What we've done: Bot AI also gets its upgrade path. Monsters can now fight. They move around, attack, combo, block, dodge, melee and attack at range dynamically, and fight each other; not just through math and hit/miss notifications.
• What we're planning: This foundational update allows us to open the door to more ambitious features, such as social mobs with interdependent behaviors and strategies, as well as companion NPCs and pets, which can follow you around and obey orders.

Game Art

• What we've done: The first visual updates are locked in, with new assets for several biomes, such as plains, deserts and swamps, and early post-processing effects. We also have updated the player character. For the time being, this also means temporarily deactivating some functions like weather, skyboxes or NPCs in this beta branch, as well as character customization. We have a bit of work to make them all catch up with the update, which in some cases requires dedicated production. As it's nothing deeply technical, it's just a matter of time until everything is back in the game looking and working better than ever before.
• What we're planning: Short term, further updates to game art, especially in the realm of Solace/Building/Settlement textures and objects, allowing you to build better, more beautiful or expressive homes and villages. Improved atmospherics and post-processing are also planned for more atmospherics, more beautiful and more surprising worlds.
• Long term: New, better textures for environment assets and players, as well as texture variants to create a greater range of visuals for the same objects, whether trees, rocks, animals, clothing, etc.

World Generation

• What we've done: Considerable work has been added to updating the biomes, giving them specific flora and placeables, improving placement as well as overall shaping of biomes. Plains, Desert, Swamps, Highlands have received their first update. This too is a work in progress but another foundational update nonetheless. Weve also added a custom landscape feature system that now allows the procedural spawning of hand built features, such as mountains and oasis.
• What we're planning: Updating the Snow biome, finishing up the Ocean biome as well as fine tuning terrain shaping and landscape features spawning parameters to get richer, more immersive worlds overall. Dungeons will also receive the same kind of treatment, as we update their assets and ensure more intriguing and richer dungeon layouts.

November & December

Character Creation

• What were planning: A solid character creation, mixing lore, stats and visuals, is the best entry point into an RPG, so we will be seeking to bring Solace Craftings up to standards. This will be a way for us to begin distilling elements of the updated lore of Khora, which always sat far in the back, and give you a sense of identity and purpose for your character. It will also be a way to introduce Classes and their dynamics in a more seamless way.
• Also, as of the visual revamp were deploying on the beta branch, weve had to suspend the character customization features. Were planning to reintroduce them, enabling you to make good-looking characters that insert themselves seamlessly into the revamped world. This process will be an ongoing one rather than a one-off, as new assets, such as new clothes, textures and styling options gradually make their way into the game.

First Hour & Restructured Game Narrative

• What were planning: weve redesigned the games emergent narrative, that is what you do in the game in terms of its meaning within this particular universe. This will give more direction and motivation to doing things, as they will no longer simply be video game tasks that you perform to entertain yourself, but part of a narrative specific to Solace Crafting: why youre there, what Solaces are, why you use them, why you harvest resources and build things, what are the repercussions, what the progression logic is, etc. This should make entry into the game more meaningful, your actions more purposeful, but also tie up several aspects of the Solace Crafting experience together into something more flowy and immersive. The introduction of the tutorial quests were an important way to structure the first hour but we seek to go beyond that. We aim to give you something more organic, intuitive and evocative where you do things because you feel compelled to and experience tighter gameplay loops.

UI Update

• What were planning: With the visual update weve brought to the world and character graphics, as well as the restructured Game Narrative, we have to ensure the UI is clear enough to navigate and visually relaxing. This might be a longer update process, through which we will work with you to tailor finer improvements. However, unifying textures, fonts and adhering to more established UI standards is likely to be the object of a quicker first update that should in turn contribute to making the game more accessible and fun.

Lore & Story Update

• What were planning: Tied to the previous update items, we will do a lore unification pass to make as much content as possible world-specific, doing away with generic. From item names and descriptions to lore nuggets and quests, as well as narrative context introducing cultures, history and stakes, the goal is to help you feel like youre navigating the multiverse of Khora specifically and not any fantasy video game world. This is an ambitious target but another that we will deal with progressively, in layers.

Art Direction

• What were planning: Finally, it will be really important to us to elaborate on the visual identity of Solace Crafting not simply in terms of game graphics, but also in terms of artworks, themes, atmospheres, etc. Expect to see more on that front, as we work to flesh out this Multiverse a lot more for your immersion and enjoyment, enabling you to absorb or come up with new stories, new ideas, new inspiration!

Beyond

Improved Player Content Tools

• What were planning: Building Improvements, World Modification/Terraforming Improvements, Custom Quests

Items & Crafting Improvements

• What were planning: Resources Tiering & Harvesting Updates, Itemization Revamp

Immersion Improvements

• What were planning: NPC Relations, Companions & Pets, Exploration Updates

Revamped & Advanced Towers & Dungeons Mechanics

• What were planning: Architecture Updates, Gameplay Challenges, Resources & Bosses improvements

AND MORE!

This first series of updates and their follow-ups should take us to the spring of 2025 and profoundly change the face and structure of the game by adding a lot more fun, richness, depth, and accessibility to the Solace Crafting experience. Were essentially revamping everything, ambitiously but carefully. We are committed to taking this game to its next incarnation and doing so as transparently as possible. Through Kyles well-demonstrated work-ethic and dedication and my contribution in structuring and communicating, we want to improve both the game and your lives as its players.. Your support and feedback throughout this process, old players, returning ones and newcomers alike, are the lifeblood of this indie venture. Thank you! Fab

[ 2024-11-10 12:16:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

Producers Letter #1

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first Producers Letter for Solace Crafting. Im Fab, and today Ill guide you through the plan elaborated to take Solace Crafting beyond its current limitations and into a future where its creators original vision for this game is fully realized. Through this, well be creating for you an experience that takes everything youve enjoyed about the game and gradually takes it to the next level.
First off, lets celebrate the longevity of this project and the dedication put into it by its solo creator and developer. Creating a game like Solace Crafting is no small feat, bringing it to the market and ensuring its ongoing support and further development, all by oneself, is definitely a tall order. Many of you have put yourselves behind this game in appreciation of its creators hard work, ceaseless commitment and transparent character. It is the reason why I am here as well today.

Acknowledging the Journey So Far

First, lets recognize the dedication behind Solace Crafting. Created by a solo developer, its no small feat to build a game of this scale and depth. Kyles relentless hard work and transparency have won the loyalty of many, and its also why Im here today. Over the past few years, Ive supported the game in various ways behind the scenes and some might have seen my name mysteriously featured in the no less mysterious Associates section of the Discord. Recently, Ive taken a more active role in structuring the next chapter of Solace Crafting, where Ill be pooling more and more of my resources into helping bring the game into its future.

Whats Next: A Roadmap for the Future

This letter is a glimpse into the key areas well be focusing on as we move forward, with clear goals to enhance your experience.

Gameplay Enhancements

The first order of business is improving the core gameplay. Right now, the game offers a vast world to explore, but some aspects, like character movement, combat, and interaction with the environment, feel limited in various ways and for various reasons. Well be making those experiences more seamless and enjoyable, allowing you to better navigate the vast worlds and interact with everything in them with greater freedom and satisfaction. Creature AI will also be revamped, making encounters more varied and exciting, whether youre engaging in combat or using stealth and, ultimately as well, interacting with and relating to NPCs.

A More Meaningful Procedural World

Procedural generation has always been the absolute core element of Solace Crafting, offering endless exploration. However, procedural worlds can lack a sense of meaning or narrative or finality, by their very nature. To address this, were improving the quality of the content generated, focusing on tighter, more thematically rich environments. Youll discover more engaging landscapes with distinct biomes that make exploration more rewarding. Resources will be found in logical places, encouraging more immersive and purposeful discovery. The soul of Khora, the dimension that Solace Crafting takes place in, its history, and its mysteries will also be woven more deeply into gameplay, ensuring that youre not just collecting resources, but uncovering the narrative layers of the world as you go, and weaving your own story into them.

Visual Uplift

Visuals will be a key area of improvement as we replace, one by one, every asset in the game, as well as the games post-processing and visual flair towards something more cohesive, richer, colorful and atmospheric. We have long been aware of the fact that the games dated look has put a ceiling on its ability to provide the visually immersive experience we want, and in a game like this, immersion is key. Open worlds dont need AAA treatment nor do they need the latest technology to satisfy and some very old games in that genre still deliver very rich experiences. So fear not, we arent going to overload the game with a lot of fancy high end visual features. But from the way the terrain itself is generated and structured, to what 3D models, textures and shaders give it its appearance; what atmospherics play out to express light, shadow and weather, and finally the look of characters, NPCs and enemies, everything will be reviewed and improved. This is going to be a long process but one that is vital for your comfort as well as to keep people wanting to come and experience Khora for all that it has to offer.

Enriching the Lore

We spoke of contents previously. Also among the revamp is the worlds identity, its themes and its overall mood are also going to feature in this uplift: currently, the game does not quite have room to make you feel as though you are in an actual world with a fullness and richness of lore and character. The game plays out within a very potential-rich multiverse concept which has yet to be mined for its wealth. The way we will be approaching lore is not merely by dropping tidbits of information here and there for your consumption but rather by restructuring from the ground up the purpose, meaning, place and history of everything in that world. Your identity as a game character, the reason youre here, the long-term of your goals, the resources that you collect, the creatures that you fight, the structures that you build, the NPCs that you attract and encounter, as well as the very process of creating new worlds: all this will mesh together into a grand narrative that well roll out over time. Again, Solace Crafting will not shift genres or turn into something it never was nor was ever meant to be. Simply, we will make sure to enhance and tighten what is current to the game into a richer and deeper presentation where things no longer exist in isolation or simply for gameplay purposes.

A Vision of the Future

If all of this seems ambitious, well it is. We have spent the past few months planning it all out, writing pages upon pages of planned updates and material. My personal belief is that the work initially done for Solace Crafting is massive and, just as your patience and passion, deserves to be honored with a vision for the future that is sharp and decisive and takes you and the game into new territories. We all play games like this for adventure, escape, achievement, discovery and the satisfaction of some fantasy fulfillment: fighter, explorer, builder, storyteller the list goes on. On the back of Kyles work and the wealth of systems and technology put into Solace Crafting, we will build something that resonates with the best that fantasy and RPGs have to offer, to bring the game to its full potential. Thank you for being part of this journey. Were excited about this reveal, about the coming updates, and to continue building something extraordinary together. Stay tuned as we not only deliver more updates and clarity but also find ways to involve you more in this exciting new phase of the games existence. Fab

[ 2024-10-10 12:35:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

Greetings Adventurers! I'm happy to bring you some exciting, albeit long overdue news! I now have a partner in crime. We're going to call him the Project Director for now, who I have been working together with day in and day out for the past couple of months. We have big plans for Solace Crafting I'd like to go into just a bit for now, but I will leave the majority of it up to him, scheduled for a post in the next week or two. Needless to say we are hard at work on creating a much richer, more engaging experience, in order to bring Solace Crafting to the many many players that have yet to hear its name. Most of you know that I have always worked on this labor of love by myself, and no doubt the majority of you are aware of at least some of the many shortcoming of the game as it is right now. There really is no one to blame for these shortcomings other than myself, and yet that has never really bothered me because I am only one man. The job of "indie game developer" nowadays can mean many different things, from multi-million dollar teams of nearly a dozen people, all the way down to zero funding, solo entrepreneurs like myself. On top of that, there are many different levels of difficulty when it comes to creating a video game, and Solace Crafting has pretty much all of the challenges that a game can. It's 3D, it's physics based, it's multiplayer, it's procedural, it uses a semi-realistic style, etc.. Were this being handled by a triple A company there would be teams of programmers, animation specialists, visual effects artists, character designers, level designers, writers, shader technicians, network developers, audio engineers, 3D artists, UI artists, managers, directors, marketers, you get the point. There are many many different professions that a strong game needs filled in order to thrive. Long story short, the majority of these professions, I'm just straight up not that good at. Our new Project Director is a great counterpart to me in that sense because his talents are very different than my own. I have my talents, but they do not stretch far and deep enough to cover even 25% of what a game like Solace Crafting really needs and deserves. Having said all that, I don't have a million dollars to round up a team and get all of those problems solved. That's why over the past couple of months we've been putting together design documentation to redesign Solace Crafting from the ground up, keeping all of its core strengths, while filling in its many gaps with a much more player friendly, rewarding, and engaging experience. The first wave of major changes are things that we can handle with just the two of us, primarily a complete redesign of the art style, world generation, and player controls. We hope to then leverage this improved experience, along with our extensive design documentation detailing the further stages of improvement, in order to attract funding to help make those later stages possible. We hope to have ready the first look at a re-imagined Solace Crafting around two weeks from now. Some of our plans further down the road very much include our community, some of you in Discord have been around from day 1, as well as some interesting ideas for our Patreon. I'm sorry that during all of this the endless content and feature patches that I've been continuing for years now have pretty much grinded to a halt. So much time and stress had passed as a solo developer that I had really lost my direction, and was just doing what felt necessary to keep me and my wife warm and fed. It's was very hard to take this leap given I have my firstborn due in just two months! But there's so much more to Solace Crafting that I was never able to achieve on my own, and now that we've got a solid plan on how to get there, I'm more excited than ever! I hope you'll all hang in there with us as we work through this transition from solo to staffed, and I wish you all the best! Kyle Postlewait Big Kitty Games

[ 2024-09-15 05:29:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Some weekend fixes for a couple of new things that have cropped up with the recent major patch! Again, there were a LOT of changes that had to be made to switch both major engine versions and the render pipeline. If there is anything that looks like a bug or feels like it isn't working as intended please let me know, preferably in Discord or on the bug tracker, and I will do my best to handle it in a timely manner! Please note that this is a client side only patch and shouldn't prevent connection to v 1.1.0.1 servers. v 1.1.0.2 2024.06.30 - Increased the overall game brightness and ambient lighting a bit - Changed ground torch to be able to be placed on both ground and building floors - Fixed a bad cactus shader - Disabled two desert grass sprites causing purple flares in front of the camera, pending replacement - Fixed binding keys closing the setting window - Fixed the storage chest label text shaders - Fixed rebinding the forward and backwards keys causing movement speed problems 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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2024-06-30 13:08:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

Had some small problems reported on Discord, and a few in the anonymouse exception reporting window that I either tracked down and fixed or added some more details to hopefully better understand them tomorrow. Heading to bed here, but I just went through the bug report forum as well and it sounds like storage chest text is not working. I will get that sorted out tomorrow among anything else I can find steamthumbsup big thanks to anyone that helps report a problem. There does seem to be something funky with the game on Linux right now. Forcing it into vulcan with the launch command -force-vulkan seems to be a temporary fix for now. v 1.1.0.1 2024.06.28 - Fixed the collider on some steps shining when it should be invisible - Fixed the sign post shader - Fixed updated weather modules not being linked to the ambient volumes settings - Fixed a case where AOEs that don't hit any target could throw an error - Interrupted a case where it seems the thunder sounds is not being properly populated throwing an error - Improved logging on ItemDetailsUI.UseItem() that seems to be throwing an error - Improved logging on TownData.CheckConstructionResources() that seems to be throwing an error 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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2024-06-28 14:10:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

At long last! The big performance upgrade is now live! This was a major undertaking, upgrading not only Unity from 2019.4.40 to 2022.3.14, but also switching from the Built-in Render Pipeline to the Universal Render Pipeline. The Unity engine upgrade brought in some mandatory code changes, while the pipeline swap required an upgrade to every single material and shader used in the game. That means every texture on every monster, rock, and tree, fog, sky, water, you name it, everything had to be replaced or reworked. What for? Performance! The game is now running much faster on my computer, over twice as fast in most cases, and I sincerely hope that everyone else is able to notice a similar increase in performance. There are still some minor things I'm looking into, particularly the bug reporting system seems to have gone haywire with the engine upgrade, and there are some trees that seem to not be using the same shader across different parts of them causing a mismatch of colors. The biome colors overall have changed a bit as well as the post-processing systems that were previously being used to not work at all in the Universal Render Pipeline, so it was difficult to try and recreate all the same levels of saturation, brightness, and so forth. Sometimes I would make a change to try and fix a problem with the global fog, or the targeting reticle, which ultimately I had to stop using decals for, and it would require a 3 and a half hour recompile of the entire shader library just to try something out... It was a pretty brutal experience all-in-all, but definitely worth it moving forward. Speaking about moving forward, I'm expecting to get pretty busy in the coming months. A peer and some colleagues are planning to start putting in hours on the game as we move towards a sort of revamp of the graphics, the story, the world building, and the "feel" of the game overall. The goals of these changes are numerous and we'll get into them as they unfold, but ultimately we're hoping to take Solace Crafting out of the "solo indie developer" status to being a much more professional level quality game worthy of a modern audience. It's going to take time and money, and hopefully a fair bit of community involvement, but the game has always deserved more than my ram-shack set of skills, and I'm very excited to take the leap into working with others. We already hit 36C (97F) where I live last week! I'm worried this year is going to be a scorcher! Please stay cool and safe wherever you may be, and I wish you all the best! Happy Gaming! Kyle Postlewait Big Kitty Games Condensed patch notes: v 1.1.0.0 2024.06.27 - Changed the targeting and target decal projectors to a quad - Upgrade Unity to 2022.3.14 - Switched to the Universal Render Pipeline - Replaced shaders for all materials - Fixed enchants using Nail, Horn, and Claw from requiring them to be of an equal tier to the recipe - Fixed some enchanting recipes using the wrong materials Latest beta patch notes: v 1.1.0.0 2024.06.27 - Changed the targeting and target decal projectors to a quad - Fixed hotbars being improperly offset - Fixed several monster AI problems - Fixed some small fog issues - Fixed some small grass issues v 1.0.5.8 2024.06.10 - Fixed single-player mobs standing still/not responding - Fixed linux builds 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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2024-06-28 00:56:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

Just wanted to shout out real quick that I am visiting family with a newborn over the weekend. There is a pretty significant performance patch on the beta branch right now but I have made the mistake in the past of pushing a major patch before going out of town and so am waiting until I get back in a couple days to make sure I am available to handle any problems as they arise. There's an open world survival craft sale going on right now so there's bound to be a wave of first time players and I just wanted to make sure anyone put off by the performance knows they can opt in to the beta via your Steam library if you want to check out the improvements before they go live Be back in a couple days. Happy Gaming, Kyle Postlewait

[ 2024-06-01 02:43:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

I struggled a lot with this patch! Not gonna lie! I was able to fix the few major problems that were really bothering me though, in particular the water shaders (still don't seem to be building 100% as intended), the fog both above and under water and on both cameras, as well as the targeting reticle shaders. I'm kind of running out the door here, but there's still a couple of things I need to double check regarding multiplayer functionality, and it seems Linux builds are not working properly with the major upgrade in Unity versions. As such, this patch is again going to the beta branch, which is free for anyone that owns the game to access, if you want to check out the increased performance + help find any new bugs that might have come with all the changes. Hopefully I will get these last couple things sorted today/tomorrow and can push the change live. Happy gaming! v 1.0.5.7 2024.05.27 - Fixed fog - Fixed weather particles not following the player properly - Fixed a timing bug with animal/monster enabling - Fixed targeting projectors - Fixed auto-target working at unintended angles - Fixed Earth and Stone elementals not dying properly 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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2024-05-28 00:20:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

Beta has been updated. Every shader has been replaced. Post processing has been reconstructed from the ground up. It's still much darker and less vibrant, I hope to remedy that. Most in-game video settings have been rewired. Weather has been reconstructed. Grass in the grasslands has been reconstructed, other biomes still pending. Fog on the foreground camera is not working, both above and below water. steamfacepalm FPS on max settings is up for me about 600-800%. Work to be done, but glad to have a test build up. This update is entirely visual and engine based. As such, it shouldn't affect save files, but better safe then sorry. I do recommend you make a copy of any characters or worlds you wish to try the beta with, especially if you plan on switching back and forth. Having said that though, other than the bloom settings, save files should be mutually compatible with both the current live version and the beta version. I crashed hard after trying to crunch finish all of this before the weeklong sale started. My sister-in-law gave birth to the first grandchild of the siblings last week, and my wife is 13 weeks pregnant. So, got a little stressed out there for a minute, kinda had to shut down and recuperate. Sorry for the delay on this first wave, but the performance is looking a lot better, and I hope to be able to get the lighting and general vibrancy back to where it was previously steamthumbsup v 1.0.5.5 2024.05.03 - Upgraded Unity from 2019.4.4 to 2022.3.14 - Switched from the Built-in Render Pipeline to the Universal Render Pipeline - Replaced shaders for all materials - Fixed enchants using Nail, Horn, and Claw from requiring them to be of an equal tier to the recipe - Fixed some enchanting recipes using the wrong materials 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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2024-05-03 03:41:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

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!

[ 2024-04-16 00:41:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2024-03-26 14:03:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2024-03-18 14:01:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2024-03-11 05:17:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

What happened?

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.

What's fixed?

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.

What will change?

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.

What can I do?

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2024-02-26 23:31:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2024-02-21 01:06:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2024-02-20 12:59:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2024-01-12 12:02:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

[ 2023-12-26 13:36:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-10-11 13:18:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-09-10 03:07:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-09-05 08:21:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-08-30 07:03:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-08-17 11:20:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

[ 2023-08-06 04:28:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-07-27 13:42:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-07-19 14:57:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

[ 2023-07-14 15:55:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

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!

[ 2023-07-12 02:56:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-07-05 14:48:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-07-04 13:39:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-07-02 00:18:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-07-01 15:27:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-06-30 12:19:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-05-10 13:25:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-03-28 03:24:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-03-07 14:35:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-02-15 13:31:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-01-25 12:11:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Regarding recent player controller changes

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.

Looking forward

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!

How to report bugs

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.

Patch notes

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-01-24 13:23:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-01-10 13:55:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-01-07 14:51:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2023-01-06 04:07:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

[ 2023-01-05 13:20:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

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.

What's going on on Beta?

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.

New UI in the works

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!

New building skins under construction

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.

Encounter improvements

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.

Closing

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-12-24 13:44:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-12-21 14:08:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-12-17 14:32:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-12-03 14:24:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-11-27 14:12:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-11-23 03:26:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-10-31 14:37:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-10-17 13:34:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

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!

[ 2022-10-14 15:16:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-10-04 13:55:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-09-21 09:08:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

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!

[ 2022-09-14 03:17:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

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!

[ 2022-09-01 07:58:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-08-16 05:13:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-08-12 02:39:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-08-09 14:11:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-08-08 14:54:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

[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

[ 2022-08-05 11:39:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-08-04 05:28:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-08-03 00:56:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

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.

Lots of stuff to do

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!

I'm a huge fan of procedural content, big mountains, islands, lakes, crafting, and the freedom to go and do what you want to do, and I've tried very purposefully to get all of those things in Solace Crafting. No artificial barriers, no artificial sky box mountains, no off-limits. If you can see it, it might be really really far away, but you can 100% get there.

Looking forward

Creating, managing, and prioritizing the items of a development roadmap is one of many skills that an indie developer has to spend time and effort to improve. There is always more that can be added to a game, but more is not always better. Fun has always been the main goal for features added into Solace Crafting, and I've tried to keep the community well informed and make sure that everyone has a chance to have their voice heard. Following that tradition I've setup a new survey specifically for the release of version 1.0 and how players would like to see the game improve from here on: Click here to take the 2 minute survey at Survey Monkey This survey will remain accessible for 30 days, so if you are new here please feel free to explore the game and respond to the survey once you've been able to experience it first hand. I will post an announcement several days before I close the survey in case anyone has forgotten that they were putting it off for later. Of course I'm always in Discord and less so here on the Steam discussion boards as well, so if anyone needs anything please don't be afraid to get in touch with me, but do please understand that this is a solo operation and things can take time. The following items are a broad overview of the features and improvements I plan to implement from here on. Smaller things like new recipes, bug fixes, and general performance improvements are not listed. Quality of life - Improved multi-lingual support - Full controller support - Map & compass way-point system New features - Fishing - Improved cooking & nutrition system Combat & enemies - Monster attributes - More monster abilities & effects - More combat animations & effects Players - Sub-attributes - Class skill trees (currently we have Archetype and Job skill trees) - Special infinite skills (for players pushing beyond level 100) Towns - Revamped money & trading systems - More town features - Villager equipment - Villager AI - Procedural Villages (WIP) Crafting & harvesting - Crafting equipment & harvesting clothing - Improved compass & tracking skills - Facility equipment - Runes Multiplayer - Shared XP - Healing & buffing others Audio - Monster & world sound effects in general Other - Modding support

A bit of retrospect

In 2012 two different people that I graduated from high school with did two different things that I was very impressed by. One of them became a successful stand-up comedian and went on to play roles in movies and TV. The other released a small indie game on Steam. That was the first time I realized I wasn't doing what I wanted to do, and all that was missing was motivation and effort. I spent almost every night after my day job over the next 5 years playing with Unity. I was totally hooked, but boy there is a lot to learn. I made a lot of Minecraft clones for practice, and enjoyed most of all creating procedural dungeons. In early 2016 I finally started piecing together the different systems that I wanted to all come together into my grand vision of Solace Crafting.
(Terrain generation back in 2016) Once I had a vertical slice to show off some basic gameplay, I ran a Kickstarter campaign with the hopes of securing some savings to help feed myself during development, but it fell short of its goal. I put a few more months work in and decided it was time, and on January 16, 2018 I released into Early Access. At the time I didn't understand just how poor quality of a prototype I had presented to the public. Still, the generosity and support of those early players earned me what I thought was more than enough to quit my day job so that I could focus on developing Solace Crafting full-time, and on the very next day I handed in my request for resignation.
(Farming, first implemented in 2018) Little did I know, the amount of money you might make in month one does not at all relate to how much money you might make in month two, and the next 4 and half years ended up being a constant financial struggle. Working at home certainly has it's benefits, and I live in a relatively inexpensive part of the world, the Japanese countryside, but my annual income throughout this journey has been the lowest it's ever been in my life, though the experience has certainly been invaluable.
(The first procedural towers in 2019) As we all do, I wish I could go back to 2016, hand myself a proper game design document, and say "stick to the plan kid, you'll do fine," but back then I still had so much to learn about programming and Unity, that proper scheduling and project scope were just not yet on my plate. Some things we never needed we added in, some things that were never possible I said I'd think about. But you have to grow somehow, and throwing myself into the fire certainly proved one way to go about it.

Looking forward

There's work to be done, and preferably some of it would be done by contractors, so it's hard to tell how much can get done in what kind of a time frame after release as I honestly have now idea how this is going to go. Best case scenario, we get noticed by a large content creator and the exposure brings in a hoard of new players, awarding me the finances to do just that, hire on some freelancers to improve the parts of the game that need it most. Worst case, things continue on slow and steady as they have in the past, as we work towards and richer and smoother experience with modding capabilities and improved server management tools. In any scenario the journey has certainly been a huge reward in and of itself. Our community has been beyond supportive and I could not have done half as much as I've been able to without the ongoing support of our player base. I can't say thank you enough to everyone that helped me make it through Early Access, but thank you thank you thank you. I am many steps closer to my dream of running a financially secure, modern and moral game studio, and I wouldn't be here without all of you. I hope you and many more may find joy and excitement through my efforts! Kyle Postlewait AKA Malkere Big Kitty Games ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Join us in Discord! Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-08-02 01:19:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

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.

[ 2022-07-31 11:34:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-07-26 13:44:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-07-20 13:35:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-07-01 13:59:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-06-27 13:48:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-06-25 13:56:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-06-17 05:12:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

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!

[ 2022-06-13 14:39:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

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.

Character customization

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.

Character controller

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.

Standing out

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-06-06 13:27:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-05-03 14:32:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-04-26 12:19:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-04-26 00:35:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-04-18 13:57:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-04-05 14:00:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-04-01 14:32:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

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.

- What this patch brings to the live branch

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.

- Why this patch is being pushed live now

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

- Regarding the current state of development

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-03-31 14:43:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-02-22 14:00:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-01-28 15:03:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-01-18 13:45:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-01-14 13:22:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-01-11 13:57:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2022-01-06 14:27:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

[ 2021-12-29 01:13:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-12-22 14:50:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-12-09 14:28:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-12-07 14:49:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-12-06 15:18:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-11-25 14:04:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-11-03 03:29:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-10-29 01:19:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-10-21 14:24:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

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.

Player Skills

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.

Combat Math & Attribues

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 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.

Monster Skills

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. Join us in Discord! Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-10-11 05:16:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-10-08 14:53:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-10-05 13:35:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-09-27 14:31:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-09-22 13:30:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-09-14 15:07:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

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.

[ 2021-09-10 07:56:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

[ 2021-08-04 13:51:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-07-27 15:32:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-07-17 15:09:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-07-12 04:12:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-07-05 14:10:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

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.

[ 2021-06-27 14:42:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-06-24 14:32:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-06-23 14:05:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-06-22 14:56:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-06-04 14:05:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-06-02 15:19:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-05-28 15:26:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-05-26 14:35:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-05-17 14:41:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-05-10 14:34:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-05-07 13:53:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-04-30 13:32:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-04-29 14:17:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-04-28 15:14:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-04-27 14:38:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

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.

[ 2021-04-21 06:31:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-04-14 14:07:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-04-13 15:25:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-04-06 14:02:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-03-23 14:46:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-03-19 08:21:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-03-18 14:36:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-03-16 13:54:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

[ 2021-03-11 14:38:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-03-02 13:54:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-02-24 14:12:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-02-23 14:31:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-02-19 14:58:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

[ 2021-02-16 13:44:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-02-14 14:32:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-02-11 04:42:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-02-10 13:34:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-01-29 13:52:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-01-20 13:58:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-01-19 13:37:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-01-07 13:42:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2021-01-05 12:33:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2020-12-28 00:55:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2020-12-24 14:08:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2020-12-22 12:07:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2020-12-15 13:59:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2020-12-14 13:50:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2020-12-11 07:52:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2020-12-09 13:11:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

Lots of annoyances fixed in the patch, some minor, some major. The new storehouses weren't upgrading from their older versions very nicely, and were in general just not working as intended in multi-player. This should fix them up 95%, along with some town interface timing issues. A number of problems with cave multiplayer resource syncing were also identified and should be a much better experience now. v 0.7.0.13 2020.12.08 - Partially fixed problems with fluid container and fluids both SP and MP - Fixed being able to right-click water into the backpack - Fixed filling fluid containers in MP not updating immediately in MP - Fixed clicking town building reposition not updating immediately in MP - Fixed furniture and facilities not spawning when manually loading/placing saved structures - Fixed a variety of problems with the new storehouses SP and MP (please deposition and reposition if necessary to update) - Fixed basic cave resource scale discrepencies between servers and clients - Fixed basic cave resources not destroying themselves post harvest in MP - Fixed encounters not smoothing the terrain around them on MP clients - Fixed being able to spend more points than allowed in certain skills - Fixed rabbits harvesting into nothing - Fixed protect, mana potions, energy potions, and heals spells not destroying themselves after timing out on MP clients 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! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2020-12-08 10:12:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

Come and watch development live Tuesday - Friday 8AM - 5PM (GMT +9) http://www.twitch.tv.com/malkere if the Steam broadcast isn't working right =o

[ 2020-12-04 04:07:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

I left some mistakes in last nights patch, one of the main reasons I prefer to push to beta in chunks prior to pushing things live. This patch remedies those, and also a number of problems that have been frustrating multiplayer players for a while. For one, a number of situations where server and client data would not sync properly causing either ghost resources to appear or resources to award nothing have been remedied with this patch. Something that maybe not quite as many people have run into, but in a way is ever more frustrating was a bug where a resource on a client would look like a rare resource, only to then reward common materials. This proved to be caused by floating point precision errors that only show up at larger distances from the starting area. In single player and on clients the world is continuously shifted back near the beginning in steps of around 8 kilometers to make sure that the math never has to deal with number bigger than the thousands. On a multiplayer server however, one player might be 20km south of the starting area while another player is 40km north of it. This makes it impossible to shift the world around to try and accommodate for everyone, which eventually means the server is dealing with number where it can no longer determine the difference of a point at the millimeter, centimeter, or even decimeter level. This was causing discrepancies in the math on the client who is able to calculate down to the millimeter. To remedy this I've set things up so that multiplayer clients will no longer generate any rarities on their own. Clients will now rely entirely on a signal from the server to verify that a resource is indeed a rarity higher than common. That and some cave work caused me some serious head scratching, but I did it all live again streaming on twitch and other platforms. Tomorrow I'll be trying to stream to the store page in hopes of gaining some attention as I work on sorting out the current town bugs plaguing MP. Once the bugs start settling down more we'll get back to working on new things in beta. v 0.7.0.12 2020.12.03 - Fixed new town buildings locking player controls upon interaction in MP - Fixed an error with server <-> client dead resource synchronization leading to ghost resources - Fixed a second similar error with cave resources - Fixed a bug causing resource loading problems when logging onto an MP server while inside a cave - Fixed floating point errors causing resources to spawn with incorrect rarities on MP clients (all rarities are now server authority) - Fixed rabbits rewarding null - Fixed spiders chasing a sugar cube 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 me on Twitch! Join us in Discord! Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2020-12-03 12:37:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fixed another bunch of bugs live during a 9 hour stream =O I'm really enjoying streaming while working and would love to see more chat! I'll try and send out a live-development stream notification here via Steam when I startup tomorrow morning. v 0.7.0.11 2020.12.02 - Increased hit box sizes for most monsters and animals - Fixed a MP specific navmesh error causing monsters/animals to stop responding - Fixed respawned resources rewarding 0 resources - Fixed harvesting fruit from trees spamming "no fruit" immediately after the first harvest - Fixed not all server side world setting being transferred to clients upon connection - Fixed crafting experience and levels not updating immediately while crafting in multiplayer You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Follow me on Twitch! Join us in Discord! Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2020-12-02 13:39:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Went through as many bugs as I could today off the new bug/suggestion tracker, all while streaming live on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch. I'm still figuring out how everything works, but it was actually very motivating and fun to talk openly about what I was doing, knowing that people are watching and cheering me on. I've set up a streaming schedule of Tuesday -> Friday, 8AM -> 12PM, 1PM -> 5PM, with ten minute breaks at 10AM and 3PM, and that is Tokyo time (GMT +9). I plan to stick to this schedule for the foreseeable future, so come and say hi! It is unfortunately just me doing my job, not shooting aliens in a fast paced online tournament or anything like that, but I enjoyed it very much today and hope it helps bring our community closer together. v 0.7.0.10 2020.12.01 - Autorun now defaults to run even if always run is disabled - Added icons for poultry, white meat, snake scales, feathers, fur, and chitin - Campfires can now cook white meat and poultry - Fixed newly harvested vegetables not being edible - Fixed basic resources not rewarding resources upon harvesting - Fixed towers not repopulating properly when leaving the immediate area and coming back - Fixed several navmesh/AI problems - Fixed building pieces at or above structure level y130 throwing errors when deconstructing - Fixed not being able to jump while holding down shift - Fixed monsters getting stuck if still returning to their spawn while leaving the player's sphere of enabling - Fixed other players going invisible in MP when in first person You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Follow me on Twitch! Join us in Discord! Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2020-12-01 12:33:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch brings the current live branch up to pace with beta along with today's most recent changes. There may be some new small bugs I admit, I changed quite a bit of code regarding harvesting, and am heading to bed for 8 hours after I post this. But if there are any new bugs they should be small and I should be able to patch them up first thing in the morning. Long story short, I want to get the live branch caught up with the current changes to beta before the Steam seasonal sales start up as there are some pretty obvious improvements to performance. I also recorded a short video today detailing what I've been up to the past few days and where I'm taking all of this (testing new cam/mic... don't think I'll be using them): [previewyoutube=64EiNeUwukk;leftthumb][/previewyoutube] Basically, there are still some client side optimizations that I'm working on, but there are also a variety of developer side upgrades that I'm working on while I move towards adding new items and recipes in. With this most recent patch I've rewired the HarvestableObject class that used to be spread out to HarvestableTree, HarvestableThis, HarvestableThat, etc., with lots of ifs ands and buts into a single smooth flowing script with exposed variables so I can setup each type of harvestable object as detailed as I like. While doing this I've added a number of new items such as feathers, fur, chitin, and others, which don't actually yet have icons for them so you will get a temporary question mark icon for some of the newer items, but again, I will link those up tomorrow. I'm simultaneously working on some monster AI updates to better control what they're capable of dropping and am looking forward to adding in a few new mobs this week as well. After cleaning up and improving the AI scripts a bit I'm hoping to add some basic skills like a snake bite or a fire ball, with the ultimate goal of adding more flavor to combat before proceeding forward with new types of encounters, locations, and monsters. Also, if there is an influx of new players on the BKG server it might crash as I have an ongoing theory there isn't enough RAM to support more than a couple players. If that proves to be the case, and it crashes this week, I will look into upgrading it. Condensed live patch notes: v 0.7.0.8 2020.11.25 - Upgraded pathfinding navmesh generation system to prevent a variety of pathing problems - Increased resource respawn check to collide with towns and encounter instead of just player buildings - Revamped all harvestable resources to a new system of management - Fixed object spawning giving priority to objects alphabetically (causing wolves to be rare for example) - Upgraded to Unity 2019.4.14 - Enabled incremental garbage collector - Disabled network object proximity checks for clients/single player - Added a random offset to network object proximity checks to keep them from happening all at once - Increased near and far terrain pixel error forgiveness considerably - Spred building loading out across frames - The default storehouse town building now uses an actual structure that can be modified after placing which allows for the placing of crate boxes to increase storage - Town "ranks" are now upgraded by a specific building for each rank - All town buildings can now be built custom and assigned with summoning circles - Facilities are no longer used to assign custom town buildings - Town population limits removed - Several new town buildings are still works in progress with no current functionality - Town buildings are now capable of requiring an amount of inspecific funiture - Town buildings are now capable of requiring specific pieces of furniture - Town buildings are now capable of requiring other town buildings built first - Structures now require a minimum number of building pieces to be assigned as custom town buildings Latest beta patch notes: v 0.7.0.8 2020.11.25 - Upgraded pathfinding navmesh generation system to prevent a variety of pathing problems - Increased resource respawn check to collide with towns and encounter instead of just player buildings - Revamped all harvestable resources to a new system of management - Fixed rain collision - Fixed some instances of building pieces colliding with acceptable pieces preventing building them - Fixed town hall not building - Fixed the anonymous error reporting toggle in the main menu not loading the saved setting (though the setting was saving properly) - Fixed settings scrollbar on main menu settings not working - Fixed the current resolution text not updating after changing resolutions - Fixed a multi-player specific error related to swamp mushrooms 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! Take the Solace Crafting Fall Survey 2020 Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2020-11-25 14:15:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

I'm very to glad to have heard from several players that the game is running much smoother since yesterday's patch. There were some new bugs and still some old that I'm working on, and will continue to do so this week. One problem involved a tweak with the way that objects are spawned as there was a problem involving the alphabetical order of things. This may cause objects to appear where previously there was nothing, and may upset resource scanner data, a system that currently saves relevant information from areas when you visit them. v 0.7.0.7 2020.11.18 - Fixed the area being loaded/teleported into loading twice - Fixed crates being picked up from a once but no longer storehouse throwing an error - Fixed new villager types being labelled as "Null" - Fixed new villager types not showing their stats nor upgrades - Fixed object spawning giving priority to objects alphabetically (causing wolves to be rare for example) - Fixed some fruit trees not being harvestable - Fixed a lot of animals/mobs going invisible in single 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! Take the Solace Crafting Fall Survey 2020 Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2020-11-18 13:33:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch is going out to beta first with quite a few changes aimed largely at optimizing the general frame rate and trying to keep it steadier while loading in new terrains and objects as you move. Optimization is kind of an unending process, there's always more you can do, but I did find and polish quite a few little dents in the machine. There's still a number of different things I've written down that I'd like to improve, but there's a lot more to be done and I think this was a good pass at things. There may also be some new small bugs due to the Unity upgrade. One thing to note about this patch is that screen resolution is now set in-game, but only currently via the main menu settings. I'm going to expand the settings window in-game to include resolution options, as well as other performance affecting settings as the opening splash screen is no longer built-in to Unity 2019. I also made a video last week talking about why I chose to stop and make a pass at performance though posting it now is ending up making it a bit odd timing wise: [previewyoutube=K10bUW0wP8c;leftthumb][/previewyoutube] In any case, there might be some things I need to address with the new patch, but for the most part I'm looking to focus on bug fixes for the rest of the week. Hopefully I can clear out all of the non-cosmetic, at least, bugs before moving forward. I do want to make another video talking about that, and hope to be posting it tomorrow, and maybe even making that a weekly thing for Patreon. v 0.7.0.6 2020.11.17 - Upgraded to Unity 2019.4.14 - Enabled incremental garbage collector - Disabled network object proximity checks for clients/single player - Added a random offset to network object proximity checks to keep them from happening all at once - Increased near and far pixel error forgiveness considerably - Reverted grass to Unity's - Spred building loading out across frames - Fixed planters not going in and out of inventory properly in MP - Fixed neighboring terrains not matching their LODs causing visual holes from a distance - Fixed arctic wolves not spawning 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! Take the Solace Crafting Fall Survey 2020 Check out the bug / suggestion tracker

[ 2020-11-17 13:58:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch is mostly a number of bugs off of the new bug tracker, I'll push most of these to live in a near future update. v 0.7.0.5 2020.11.03 - Fixed storehouses not saving/loading properly - Fixed servers not sending changes to spawn settings causing resource spawn location discrepancies - Fixed multiplayer client cave generation stalling - Fixed some monsters loot hitboxes not enabling for multiplayer clients - Fixed the cursor not coming on after pausing - Fixed certain ambient sounds not responding to the ambient volume controls properly - Fixed facilities not fully locking 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!

[ 2020-11-03 14:17:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's been a weird year, I don't think anyone would argue against that. For me it's also been a weird few months as I fought hard to get the new world generation engine out and working. On top of that it's been a weird couple of weeks here recently. I actually started having trouble swallowing and was unable to eat my dinner without taking a drink with every bite for a couple weeks. After confirming that there's nothing wrong my neck, they told me I'm probably just stressed out of my mind. I've been taking a nerve relaxant for a few days now and dinner has become much less stressful, so I am grateful for that. So what's causing my stress? Is the big question I've had for the past few days, and I think the majority of my "stress" really stems from a lack of organization. I get e-mails, I get Steam notifications, I get private messages, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, every day. Often times these are questions, sometimes they're bug reports, sometimes they're friendly suggestions. Some of the information I receive takes weeks to respond to. I've had some suggestions in the "suggested-features" channel in our Discord server for over a year now. Not to mention 130,000 lines of code that I page through daily trying to make Solace Crafting better and better without breaking something I may have written back in 2017. Indecision is definitely a big part of that as well. Should I go back and fix this old chunk of code? It might take six hours, and it might break something that could take another 3-4 hours to debug. Should I start looking to add a new feature knowing it will take at least a couple weeks to implement? Sometimes the mix of indecision and new information pouring in every day feels a big overwhelming, to the point that it looks like my body wasn't dealing with it as well as my mind/heart are. In lieu of which, I've spent some time reevaluating what's most important to the game in its current state, but always want to bring the community on board in giving me ideas and guidance as to what version 1.0 really needs to be, and what path we should be taking to get there. To do this, I've setup two things: 1. Solace Crafting Fall Survey 2020 Please feel free to write as much as you can in the "anything else you'd like to add" box, I do read all of them, or get a conversation going in Discord. I don't always participate in or respond to every conversation in Discord/Steam, but I do read all of them even if I'm late to the party. 2. Solace Crafting - Bug Tracker I've setup a bug tracker on bitbucket. Up until now I've been manually keeping track of bugs in Discord, and it's gotten a bit out of hand. Bitbucket isn't necessarily my favorite for bug tracking, but it does allow anonymous logins and/or logging in with a Google/Microsoft/Apple account, which I think is important to ensure people willing to post bugs don't turn away the moment they're asked to make a new account. Some of our Discord users have already migrated the majority of the bugs listed in Discord onto the tracker, thank you for that. I'm hoping this will help me keep bugs better organized, and it certainly has shown me that I was indeed starting to lose track of them. The "Bug Tracker" also allows for the posting of, as well as commenting and voting on suggestions. From here on it seems as though there are two general paths to choose from, though both lead to the ultimate goal of version 1.0.

Path A

I continue to add new features following the roadmap. 0.7.1: Expands on town buildings and functionality 0.7.2: Randomly generated towns 0.7.3: Town quests and unlock 0.7.4: Villager equipment, clothing, naming, skills, AI 0.7.5: Town defense 0.8.1: Improve monsters pathfinding. Add procedural monster generation and monster abilities 0.8.2: Improve combat math. Rework adventuring skills 0.8.3: Improve and add new dungeons and encounters 0.9.1: Broad scale optimizations 0.9.2: Improve animations 0.9.3: Finalize language support, add full controller support

Path B

I work to polish and solidify that which is already in-game before moving further down the roadmap. I prioritize content that interacts with and expands on already implemented content. 0.7.1: Broad scale optimizations 0.7.2: Improve animations 0.7.3: Improve monsters pathfinding. Add procedural monster generation and monster abilities 0.7.4: Improve combat math. Rework adventuring skills 0.8.1: Improve and add new dungeons and encounters 0.8.2: More recipes/materials/enchants/drops 0.9.1: Expands on town buildings and functionality 0.9.2: Randomly generated towns 0.9.3: Town quests and unlock 0.9.4: Villager equipment, clothing, naming, skills, AI 0.9.5: Town defense 0.9.9: Finalize language support, add full controller support Through talking with players here on Steam and on Discord I'm leaning towards Path B more than I ever have. There's a "people pleaser" in me that is constantly trying to get something out every week so to keep my customers (that do pay for my dinner and electricity, thank you so much!) from burning me at the stake. Then on the other side of the mirror I'm usually fine with big names delaying their release dates, because I want them to get it right. I'm not sure what it is inside of me that wants to try and please people quick and fast, but it's definitely a good thing that I've recognized it and am now keeping an eye on it. I do believe that in general quality is more important content, but still, with gaming, fun is number one. That was a wall of text. I almost made it into a video, and do plan to do a video just talking about my thoughts of where we are and where we're going. In any case, we've had an open discussion on the direction of development for a few weeks now. I'm hoping to further that conversation with this post, and hope to reach a conclusion I can latch onto and not look backwards with, at least for a few months. Please do share you opinion on the different possible paths, and thank you in advance to everyone that fills out the survey! Kyle Postlewait

[ 2020-11-02 07:18:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

I fixed the map going white bug with this patch, and actually rewrote a good chunk of the map generation removing the need for generating new sprites in runtime. This is a decent boost to map performance, but still only half of the picture. I ran some tests and have a good idea how to implement a further boost that should further remove the need to generate sprites for the icons generated by resource scanners, etc. Not yet implemented in this patch, but I'm hoping it will smooth the map out a lot as some users have reported real problems with opening and closing the map as it currently works, depending on your world settings. We've also setup a bug tracker on bitbucket, mostly because it allows anonymous logins, and/or Google/Microsoft account logins, so it's a lot easier to post to/comment on when compared to having to make a whole new account on another website. Giving it kind of a trial run right now, but I'll post a link and a sticky here if it looks like a good solution. v 0.6.4.45 2020.10.29 - Improved map performance (1/2) - Increased pause between dedicated server memory purges to 5 minutes - Fixed the map not refreshing properly - Fixed an error stopping resources from getting put into the town storehouse properly (Beta) v 0.7.0.4 2020.10.29 - Improved map performance (1/2) - Increased pause between dedicated server memory purges to 5 minutes - Fixed the map not refreshing properly - Fixed an error stopping resources from getting put into the town storehouse 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!

[ 2020-10-29 15:06:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Small patch to address some of the memory leaks issues that weren't properly coded to work as well on dedicated servers. I've got some bug reports that the map is acting up. I actually got really sick yesterday and haven't gotten much done besides this patch yesterday/today after working all weekend to fix the memory leaks. Sorry this is happening on both Live and Beta simultaneously. I try to keep these kinds of quick changes on beta, but these were problems that needed immediate attention and I've have to mess with some things like the map to make sure that everything is being managed properly. It's midnight Wednesday here now, but I'll be back on bug fixes in the morning. This patched is being applied to both the Live and Beta branches simultaneously. v 0.6.4.44 2020.10.28 - Disabled several unnecessary functions when in dedicated server mode - Improved dedicated server memory management v 0.7.0.4 2020.10.28 - Disabled several unnecessary functions when in dedicated server mode - Improved dedicated server memory management 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!

[ 2020-10-28 15:00:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

As I mentioned on Saturday, a series of memory leaks came to my attention last week that ended up being quite elusive. This patch addresses 99% of those leaks and some problems with the game hanging in the event of an attempted multi-player connection timing out. A memory leak is when a section of memory gets allocated for use but then doesn't get properly unallocated, leaving it in limbo and unrecoverable. Unity games are primarily written in C# which is a modern programming language that has a wonderful tool called a garbage collector that watches objects in memory and automatically unallocates them when it can tell that no one is using it anymore. The internal workings of Unity however operate using C++ which is another similar programming language that does not use a garbage collector. This means that certain types of objects being handled internally have to be managed manually. Unfortunately, Unity's tools for monitoring memory usage are convoluted at best. I ended up making my own tools after almost 20 hours of struggle with little progress to show for it all. After finally figuring out what types of objects were lingering around in memory it was only a matter of time before I squashed them, one by one. There are still some tiny leaks, 100kb's when you return to the main menu kind of small things, but nothing compared to the problems that were crashing the BKG California dedicated server almost daily most of last week. What initially got me looking deeper into the problem was actually measuring the performance of a number of different operations to see what the main cause of the lagg spikes that can cause the mouse to spin are. I have some strong leads on 2-3 different systems that I can improve and spread out over time to decrease those spikes that I plan to work on in the near future. With the BKG server crashing due to the memory leaks there were also instances where I would try to connect to it through the game client and the connection would time out, but the "unable to connect" warning wasn't triggering, leaving the client stuck in "connecting". I've improved that code to be more informational about what's going on, and not get stuck any longer. I've applied this patch to both beta and live simultaneously. v 0.6.4.43 2020.10.26 - Fixed several memory leaks causing the game to slow down over time - Fixed multi-player connection issues causing the game to get stuck "loading" (beta) v 0.7.0.3 2020.10.26 - Fixed several memory leaks causing the game to slow down over time - Fixed multi-player connection issues causing the game to get stuck "loading" 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!

[ 2020-10-26 13:20:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Sad but true, I've spent all of yesterday and today tracking down a memory leak that has been crashing dedicated servers and causing the game to slow down over time. Memory can be a tricky subject as there are different scopes, or levels, of memory, not all of which you can see and track as "managed" objects. I've identified the majority of the problems and am working on implementing fixes, but wanted to get the word out there first as I know some people have been having the server go up and down frequently this past week as well as the game slowing down when traveling long distances. Should you be experiencing the game slowing down over time, returning to the main menu is not the way to reset the memory, you need to save and close the game completely. Sorry if this has caused anyone trouble, and hope to have a fix up tomorrow!

[ 2020-10-24 10:08:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

An error in harvesting exp math was brought to my attention that could result in zero exp rewards so I jumped on it as it was something a lot of people would run into very easily. Likewise, boats had a number of problems post 0.6.4 that were never properly addressed. This patch fixes these two problems on both the default live branch and the beta branch simultaneously. v 0.6.4.42 2020.10.22 - Fixed a math error in harvesting exp - Fixed a number of problems with picking up, saving, loading, and covering long distances with boats (Beta) v 0.7.0.2 2020.10.22 - Fixed a math error in harvesting exp - Fixed a number of problems with picking up, saving, loading, and covering long distances with boats You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Join us in Discord! Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-10-22 14:17:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

The default storehouse placement method via the town interface "construct" button, as opposed to using a summoning circle, will now place a "real" structure, that can be altered as normal. This also allows for the placement of crates to manually increase storage as is the new method instead of upgrading the storehouse repeatedly. I ran into a number of problems with structure placement via the "load" option in the building menu while testing the building I made for the storehouse and making sure it placed and saved properly at different rotations, which had not be updated to work with 0.6.4, and was able to fix them. v 0.7.0.1 2020.10.20 - The default storehouse town building now uses an actual structure that can be modified after placing which allows for the placing of crate boxes to increase storage - Fixed custom structures loaded via the "load" building menu not reloading properly - Fixed switching back to snap mode during structure placement not correcting the rotation 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!

[ 2020-10-20 14:45:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch brings in the first steps in a number of different directions, all of which relate to town functionality. One of my main underlying goals for Solace Crafting has always been to add meaning and reward to building. Having said that, building is not something that everyone is interested in. A lot of the systems I'm designing I want to reward players for making the extra effort, but make it optional, not punishing or forcing onto everyone. With this patch all town buildings can now be built from scratch letting players customize their own town buildings and layouts however they like. That doesn't mean yet that there is a built-in reward for doing so, but I definitely have some plans for that in the near future. One of the best parts of this change is that storehouses can now have crates added to them manually to increase their storage capacity, rather than "leveling" them up. An unfortunate side-effect of this patch is that storehouses "plopped" down with the basic "construct" option from the town interface cannot yet accept crates, making them basically useless. I got stuck with some data management bugs getting this patch ready and haven't fixed that yet, but it's top priority for me tomorrow morning. Custom buildings are now no longer started with facilities, and instead assigned using summoning circles. Many town buildings however have facility prerequisites, such as a miner needing a forge. I've also added in two other prerequisite systems, one for unspecified furniture, meaning two chairs, a table, and a carpet would meet the requirement for "4 pieces of furniture" if a town building were to require it, and a system for requiring specific "items" such as a forge or a bed for example.
Here I'm looking into a storehouse I threw together and added 3 crates to, awarding me 300 slots of storage using the same storehouse interface as before rather than interacting with the crates individually. This sort of a centralized storage system in much easier to manage than trying to move between various chests and locations. I think it would make a lot of sense to expand this system to work with all in-game items, perhaps with different tabs for different types of items, for example. Now that storehouses are no longer upgraded, towns no longer rank up based on the level of the storehouse. Instead, there is a special town building required to increase a towns rank, all of which are now clearly marked with an arrow icon in the town interface. These buildings are the Storehouse, the Trader, the Market, the Town Hall, and the Guild Hall. There is also another new building called the Training Hall. All of these new buildings are works in progress and are not yet functional in this patch, though placeholders and/or custom structures can be placed in order to level up towns. The Training Hall is intended to be a requirement to unlock a Job skill tree. The current four adventuring skills trees (which are scheduled for overhauling in version 0.8) are the Archetype skill trees, each of which is planned to branch into 2 different Job trees. The Guild Hall is then planned as a requirement for unlocking Class skill trees, which come after Job trees. These will each likely have a quest that the player will have to undertake in order to unlock them. The Trader is intended to move resources from one town to another. The main idea behind this is for players to have a favorite town, or a main headquarters of sorts, even though that may be located in tier 0 territory, while their character is now adventuring in tier 10 or higher territory. Creating a new town in a higher level area will allow the gathering of higher tier resources, and using the trader will allow for sending those resources back to their main base in cases where that's preferred. I do also plan to increase not only the base yield of resources from town harvesters, but also allow them to be equipped with player crafted equipment to further increase their productivity. The Town Hall is intended to offer town specific upgrades, such as specializing in a specific resource or trade to increase productivity. More to come! 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!

[ 2020-10-18 13:40:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

First of all, my apologies for forgetting to post the patch notes for 0.6.4.40. That is the current version on the live default branch, with the latest patch notes being as follows: v 0.6.4.40 2020.10.07 - Fixed a math error preventing copper and diamonds from spawning in caves - Fixed solace power upgrade displaying the wrong requirements - Fixed the teleport range upgrade description - Fixed tombstones not working properly in caves - Fixed a problem with planters creating fake copies in the inventory Just now I've also patched 0.6.4.41 into beta as there was one bug that could lock the game up that I ran into, and fixed, but honestly haven't had many actual play minutes in the new build. I don't expect anything serious, but just to be safe I'll push it to beta first as the next big beta patch won't be ready until tomorrow, which I'll talk about then. One of the more noticeable changes to this patch is a strange error that caused a big white ball of light to render on the horizon. It turned out to be a biome math error that caused a terrain splatmap error that caused the bloom post processing effect to go nuts. Game dev is weird like that. v 0.6.4.41 2020.10.15 - Improved entity spawning performance a bit - Fixed some pathing problems with monsters and animals - Fixed a post processing effect problem causing a large white spot to show up on the horizon - Fixed a number of problems with "world shifts" (which happen every 8192m) from breaking grass, pathing, and monsters/animals 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!

[ 2020-10-15 14:09:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

There was in fact a small but nasty bug with yesterday's patch, so I'm glad I sent it to beta. The character creator wasn't working properly, so I fixed that along with several other reports, and will once again push this to beta for safety before pushing it to the live branch. In all honestly I accidentally merged some of the beta content that I was working on into this patch, so early surprise kind of thing, though still a bit of a work in progress. Basically, summoning circles, which are used to summon town NPCs into custom built buildings, have been expanded to work for all types of NPCs, rather than only those with facilities. This functionality has been added to the summoning circles themselves, and they will now tell you what you need to summon the NPC you are trying to summon. I've also changed how it used to do a "flood fill" check on the building to see if it was a completely enclosed house, to a much more lenient system where it simply requires that the building be made up of at least 30 building pieces, including walls, floor, ceiling, etc.. This system is still a bit of a work in progress, mainly in that the reposition/position functions will not save the custom building, instead reverting back to the default town building, but not so alarmingly different that I need to keep it off the live branch until further developed. v 0.6.4.39 2020.10.05 - Fixed town NPC resetting - Fixed chests not locking properly in multiplayer - Fixed the structure (not individual building pieces) deconstruction button not working properly - Fixed the new elemental death audio ignoring volume settings - Fixed the character creation screen not working with yesterdays patch - Fixed picking up leyline teleporters not saving 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!

[ 2020-10-05 14:19:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

Primarily due a lighting problem that seemed to be cropping up more frequently I upgraded the cloud and sky shaders which should fix the problem. This means much prettier clouds! There's also an extra couple levels of quality for the clouds now, though on my machine they don't really effect FPS that directly.
There seems to be a hard shift at 5:45 AM in-game when the night cycle switches into the day cycle where it's really dark for like 15 (game) minutes that I still want to improve, along with adding day and night length multiplier settings. I've also greatly increased the size of small and medium ore nodes so they are much easier to spot. As well as added a dirt mound to the base of all herbs and vegetables so they stick out above the grass making them likewise much easier to spot from a distance.
Not what I actually intended to send to the beta branch, I've been working on some town upgrades, but there are somewhat wide reaching changes to this patch, so I'm going to push it to beta first. v 0.6.4.38 2020.10.04 - Upgraded cloud & sky shaders - Added dirt mounds to all herbs and vegetables - Increased ore sizes - Slowed down the rate at which weather blends/changes - Fixed a bug when backing up a world 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!

[ 2020-10-04 12:01:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've added a post on Patreon mostly asking for input on a few things, but you don't have to be a Patreon supporter to read it and post your thoughts here or in discord, so please let me know what you think! https://www.patreon.com/posts/roadmap-survey-42144787

[ 2020-09-29 10:26:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Another round of small bug fixes. Again I will push this to beta for a day to make sure nothing unintended was affected. Meanwhile work on 0.6.5 begins! v 0.6.4.37 2020.09.24 - Replaced the hard capped harvesting exp system to a diminishing returns formula similar to combat exp - Leyline teleporters will now reposition you to ground height after teleporting - Fixed solace map icons not removing themselves immediately upon destruction - Fixed tombstones map icons not being removed from the map after emptying them - Fixed world settings showing grass density where it should show grass biome frequency - Fixed loading always repositioning you back on the ground even if within buildings 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!

[ 2020-09-24 12:57:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

I'm going to send this patch to beta first for a test run as there are a number of somewhat wide-reaching changes. Prior to this patch, due to the possibility of 3 or 4 different biomes to overlap with one another, there was the possibility for no biome to actual become the "main" biome. Previously a biome was required to have a strength of 40% or greater at any given location to be considered for spawning. In this patch I've reworked the math so that the biomes will weigh themselves against one another to first determine the main biome and then allow blending only with other biomes that are within a 5% stength range compared to the main. Without this there ended up being empty parts of the game world where things were not spawning properly. This may cause some slight shifting of resources and map markers on areas where biomes blend together if they have already been visited in a prior saved game. I've also been investigating resource rarity roll discrepancies across multiple play sessions, though have been unable to reproduce the problem after making a number of changes, so am mostly just keeping my eyes open for now. Resource map markers will now refresh whenever an area refreshes. We've got some new sound effects. I fixed a number of farming data management errors, specifically cave planters for one. Fruit trees should be working as intended now, and some other small bug fixes. I've started working a bit on fishing, but I'm kind of not sure it's really what's important to add to the game right now. I'm thinking to focus a bit more on the various profession skill trees, some water mechanics, and a few larger things before I worry about really fleshing out fishing and nutrition. v 0.6.4.36 2020.09.23 - Added new sound effects to stone, earth, and fire elementals, as well as stone golems - Improved biome determination math to ensure there is always a "main" biome at any given location - Map locations now refreshes with each visit - Added a black outline to the player indicator on the map - Fixed the minimum spawn height for large swamp mushrooms - Fixed mob names not updating properly on multiplayer - Fixed right-clicking items into bags not always updating client data in specific multiplayer cases - Fixed right-clicking items into bags throwing a harmless error in some cases - Fixed decayed items respawning improperly - Fixed fruit trees turning into normal trees when harvested 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!

[ 2020-09-23 14:44:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

There seems to be some way in which non-rare resources can register themselves on the map, only to slightly shift position under some condition, resulting in a different rarity roll. I exported this patch earlier this morning as I was pretty sure that I wouldn't be able to find the cause immediately, and sure enough I'm still looking at it under a microscope. In the meantime, this patch fixes up a problem where items coming out of bags could improperly merge with unrelated items, as well as a couple text problems. v 0.6.4.35 2020.09.15 - Fixed moving items from a bag back to the inventory ignoring item type checks causing similar level/tier/rarity items to stack with other types - Fixed certain mobs not generating their names properly ending up as "Entity Normal" - Fixed skill and attribute numbers not always rounding to the second decimal and/or rounding too much 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!

[ 2020-09-15 13:35:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fixed a number of problems today thank to bug reports. I was also able to fix multiplayer bag functionality on Saturday, but was able to find the time to patch until today. Still tracking a couple of bug reports with the latest patch: - Large white halo on the horizon at certain camera angles - Empty towers - Things showing up on the map that aren't there - Problems with buckets v 0.6.4.34 2020.09.14 - Improved location spawn queues to better prioritize positions closer to the player/players - Fixed changing draw distance settings not immediately recalculating spawn queues - Fixed coal mines not spawning properly - Fixed interacting with obelisks in multiplayer - Fixed obelisk upgrades not saving properly - Fixed bags in multiplayer 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!

[ 2020-09-14 13:14:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

I'm still working on finishing bag handling for multiplayer, meaning this patch only partially enables bag usage in multiplayer. Clicking to drag between bags and inventory slots, as well as right-click should be functioning properly now, though the "transfer all" buttons are not yet working. Still, partial improvement is better than nothing, and this patch also brings in some new music so I thought I'd go ahead and push it today. I should be able to patch the finishing touches to multiplayer bag support tomorrow no problem. v 0.6.4.33 2020.09.11 - Replaced the metal intro on the start screen with the "Grasslands 1" track so that all game music is now original work - Added the "Music by: PIXELNoise" bit to the start screen - Added the "Moutain 1" track to the in-game random BGM track list - Flattened the peaks of the cricket chirps in the night ambient audio - Fixed a harmless error when moving items to and from bags in single player - Fixed moving single items to and from bags in multiplayer 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!

[ 2020-09-11 13:29:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fixed a problem where changing the area render distance in game was causing near terrain render distances to also change and to unacceptable values. I've also added a check when the settings are loaded in as the game starts up to make sure that the settings are within normal bounds. v 0.6.4.32 2020.09.10 - Fixed a bug when changing area render distance in game causing near terrain render distance to change 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!

[ 2020-09-10 07:13:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch pushes the 0.6.4 branch that has been on beta for quite some time now to the default live branch. There are tens of thousands of new and rewritten lines of code making it the most difficult thing that I've honestly ever done. Adding systems one by one in the earlier stages was much easier then going back and rewriting thousands of lines to completely remove a third party tool that I had been using from day one, replacing it with my own custom systems built specifically for Solace Crafting. Is this the end of optimization? Absolutely not. Optimization is generally believed best kept towards the end of the development cycle, but the world generation was taking far too long and getting worse as the amount of content in game grew, prompting me to take on one large chunk of optimization earlier than previously intended. Animations, monsters, the skill and attribute systems, and the interface are still schedule for some heavy rework on the development roadmap, but none of them will be as code intesive as this complete rewrite of world generation was.
So what's new? 1. World generation. World generation is now divided into three stages: chunks, sections, and areas. An area is a 128m square piece of land where actual objects, tree, entities, and buildings are spawned. Previously there were only chunks and sections, or "terrains," which meant that the world loaded in 1024m square sections, which is 64 times the land mass of a 128m square area. Not only that, but the tool that I was relying on to handle the actual generation of objects has some cyclic issues where it was running over the same sets of data many times per iteration during its calculations. On my machine, which is not top of the line by any means, I was loading a world pre-0.6.4 in around 45 seconds, where now I can load a world in roughly 3 seconds. There are of course still a number of improvements and features I plan to add into these systems over time. 2. Compression. Prior to this patch I was using a free compression tool that ultimately proved to have some problems. And by problems I mean, sometimes it just didn't work, causing data corruption and lost progress. It didn't happen to everyone, nor all the time, but still, it was inexcusable, and this patch makes use of an actively supported paid compression system to zip and unzip save files on the fly. 3. Cloud saves. Previously I was writing a file per terrain, per chunk, per map tile, and even per cave section. This resulted in hundreds of tiny files, which Windows, Linux, and Unity are absolutely fine with, but it seems that the Steam Cloud really does not like. The bigger the file count got the longer the cloud syncs were taking, and often locking up Steam entirely while it scanned through the files one by one. Instead, files are now much more self-contained within each "chunk" which is roughly 8km square of game world. This drastically reduces the number of files per world, hopefully to the effect of much faster cloud syncs. Old worlds are in no way able to be upgraded to the new save structure. This is something I try hard to avoid, but in this case the file structures are just so completely different that writing an "update" method would have been very difficult. Because of this I highly recommend you delete any old worlds to stop Steam from trying to cloud sync them. Note that player saves CAN be upgraded. This also means that if you really want to you can create a new player in 0.6.3.29, fill their inventory up with things you want to carry into a new world, then upgrade the player save to 0.6.4. I will leave a public "beta" branch open called "0.6.3.29" for this purpose if anyone wants to do that. Tedious, I know, I'm just going to be starting a new world, but the option is there if anyone really wants to.
What's next? The polishing of minor bugs present in the new 0.6.4 systems is an ongoing process and I very much appreciate bug reports both here on the Steam forums, and on our Discord (link at the bottom of this post). The next steps on the rough roadmap are as follows: Version 0.6 - Fishing - Cooking Version 0.7 - Villages - Villagers - Quests - Town Upgrades / Defense Version 0.8 - Monster Skills - Combat rework - Skill system rework - Jobs and Classes Version 0.9 - Optimizations - Multi-lingual system finalization I'm also always working on a number of things that don't really fit into any specific category on the roadmap, such as new encounters, new recipes, new buildings, and new unlocks. I'm also interested in heavily improving player animations and switching to a root movement system prior to 0.9, though don't have a definite spot on the roadmap for when it will be implemented. I feel compelled to apologize for how long it has taken me to get this patch to where it is. The world and just life in general has been pretty strange these past six months! I hope everyone is being safe, staying healthy, and doing what excites them. Your support and participation in the development of Solace Crafting is extremely appreciated! Condensed patch notes from 0.6.3.29 to 0.6.4.31: v 0.6.4.31 2020.09.09 Major changes: - Complete re-write of world generation, save file management, file compression, and object management - Updated Unity to 2018.4.23 Multiplayer: - Enabled leyline teleporters in multiplayer - Updated floating islands to multiplayer - Updated caves to work in multi-player - Updated farming to work in multiplayer Interface: - Added the ability to bind "modifier" keys: shift/alt/control, to normal controls if held down for 3 seconds - Added a "mouse smoothing" setting to the in-game control settings - Disabled map "unlocking" based on player proximity World Generation: - Floating islands are a bit smaller and easier to navigate now - Widened caves and reduce their maximum depth - Increased the size of small and medium ores Crafting: - Added bonus slots to bags, backpacks, and chests for higher rarities - Increased agressive animal rarity settings General: - Increased breath refill rate - Changed melee attack angle checks to ignore height Bug Fixes: - Fixed resource scanners not loading their range properly - Fixed leyline teleporter upgrades - Fixed the crafting window preview adding crafting skills twice resulting in a stronger looking item than would actually be crafted - Fixed crystal and obsidian golems throwing an animation warning - Fixed crystal and obsidian golem ragdolls - Fixed stone and earth elemental torso textures losing their tint after being killed - Fixed right-clicking to equip a sledgehammer causing a bugged sledgehammer to appear in inventory - Fixed the /stalkRewardMultiplier console command not being recognized - Fixed Dashing Strike and Trap Back not working in multiplayer - Fixed the "Levels per kilometer" setting not being used properly in some methods - Fixed wood roof not lining up properly - Fixed the jump after placing a town building - Fixed cave heat lingering even after leaving heat zone - Fixed temperature zones not applying in multiplayer - Fixed environmental damage not applying in multiplayer - Fixed storage chest and sign color and labels not updating immediately in multiplayer Latest changes from the most recent beta patch: v 0.6.4.31 2020.09.09 - Disabled map "unlocking" based on player proximity 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!

[ 2020-09-09 09:29:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

It looks like there are still some bugs to kink out, some of which are fine after pushing things to live, there are definitely a lot of benefits to be had in spite of a few small bugs, but one in particular I would like to look closer at, and am running out the door for the weekend right now. So I will hold off the push until next week, after I can take a better look at some of the new reports. The beta is of course open to everyone. v 0.6.4.30 2020.09.04 - Fixed a problem with missing icons multiplying 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. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-09-05 01:34:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

Announcing a push to live has brought up some last minute bugs =D I've fixed a few things, and am eagerly awaiting some data that should help me pinpoint the map icon bug. I have not been able to reproduce it myself yet, so hopefully a save game already with the broken icons on the map should let me fix whatever the problem is. Also, the last patch had a bit of a blunder with it. I reused some settings variables that were used in pre-0.6.4, though in a different manner than they used to be used. This caused the old saved settings to be re-loaded, inputting numbers that should never be possible which ended up causing problems. The problems were: 1. Render distance could jump up to over 1000km, and cause the game to crash. 2. Biome noises were not yet being used in 0.6.4, but could still be changed in the world creation window. This would cause the numbers to suddenly switch into use, causing already created (0.6.4) worlds with changes to their biome settings to suddenly generate differently. I renamed all of the variables in question, so they will be forced back to default with this patch. The good: Any worlds created before 0.6.4.28 will now run in 0.6.4.29 as normal. The bad: Any worlds created with altered biome settings, specifically with the 0.6.4.28 patch, will be reset all biome settings to 1.0, causing them to be different then they were yesterday. All in all that means only worlds created in the past 36 hours or so will be affected, but my appologies if that causes problems for anyone, and thank you for the prompt reports! I am going to be out of town this weekend, so it might end up being better to wait to push live until the start of next week... But i think even with the possibility of some small problems with a specific user or two, the benefits outweight the risk and I will go ahead and push beta live tomorrow. v 0.6.4.29 2020.09.03 - Renamed to reset biome settings and render distance settings - Fixed resource scanners not loading their range properly - Fixed leyline teleporter upgrades - Fixed placed facility upgrades not saving/loading properly - Fixed a bug that could cause distant structure duplications when upgrading facilities or transmogrifying You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-09-03 15:00:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

I'm hoping to push this patch to the live branch tomorrow! It's been a long time in the works! There's still a number of multi-player fixes to be had, and... as I type this I'm remembering a bug in creative mode that I don't think I've fixed yet, I'll double check that tomorrow. But overall it should be a much faster, much more stable version of the game than the current live branch. This patch updates the world settings that were not yet working with the new world generation system. You can now once again fine tune biome frequency, as well as most things that spawn out in the world. Render distance settings are now working again as well, so players on faster or slower computers can change how far out the different systems will spawn. There were also some bugs with grass not updating properly during terraforming, as well as a crafting window bug that was applying passive crafting skills twice to the preview item, making things look stronger than the actual item that would be crafted. If all goes well, I will push this live tomorrow, and can start diving into some of the next steps while finishing up the last bits of multi-player that need updating (most obvious being bags). v 0.6.4.28 2020.09.01 - Updated world creation biome settings to work with 0.6.4 - Updated world creation spawn frequency settings to work with 0.6.4 - Updated render distance settings to work with 0.6.4 - Fixed the crafting window preview adding crafting skills twice resulting in a stronger looking item than would actually be crafted - Fixed grass not updating properly while terraforming You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-09-01 11:56:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

I got a bit hung up on this patch, which brings floating islands into multiplayer for the first time. There are now 8+ different possible entry and exit methods from world encounters like caves and floating islands (teleporting from one to another, teleporting from the surface to one, re-joining a server where you logged out at one, etc), and getting them all to work properly using generic terminology, as opposed to writing a custom solution for every scenario, took a bit of trial, error, and rewriting. Mostly only a map icon error I'm still trying to track down, and bags/container support for mutliplayer, and then we should be ready to push beta to the live branch. That doesn't mean that the current beta build is flawless and won't need further attention (thank you everyone for the bug posts in Discord and here on the forums) but it is a big step forward. v 0.6.4.26 2020.08.25 - Added floating islands back to SP and MP - Floating islands are a bit smaller and easier to navigate now - Fixed a number of bugs teleporting in and out of world encounters (caves and floating islands), some MP specific - Fixed teleporters - Fixed dropped items in caves throwing errors You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-08-25 12:12:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch heavily reworks the ways in which caves are generated, positioned, traveled through, and more. The main goal of this is to change the entire "cave" system into a "world encounter" system that floating islands, and other "encounters" in the works can all make of use of instead of trying to setup logic for each new system as they come. This way a procedurally spawned encounter can simply be told to Generate, and it will know what to do with itself rather than all of the manager and resource and travel (etc) systems having to change their logic for different types of encounters. A second big reason for this upgrade is to improve the way that caves are handled in multiplayer. My first attempts at setting things up was just too complicated as caves were originally built to potentially be very long, and so sectioned into "chunks" that were all handled separately. This made converting the system to work with multiplayer very difficult. Instead, I've ditched the chunk method, widened the caves over all making them much easier to navigate (though gems on the ceiling can still be quite high), and reduced the maximum depth by quite a bit.
(A random cave system) As there are some pretty serious changes to caves with this patch, there may still be some small bugs with it, especially with planters in multiplayer, as I haven't had a chance to check on those yet. If there are any new problems I'll fix 'em up though! Tomorrow I'll be working to reform floating island management into the new World Encounter system and turn them back on, which will be a lot easier now that the system is built and working with caves. After that I'm very interested in working on a lava "portal" or "pocket dimension" encounter, something I've wanted to do for a long time. I've found it necessary these past few weeks to spend some time working on some of the more fun things as far as game development goes. For me that's easiest explained as new features. I'm very excited to work on a new lava zone. I've been trying to just force my way through finishing up 0.6.4 and upgrading the last few things that are still not working in multi-player, but if I don't spend some time working on the fun stuff here and there I get really burnt out and my productivity nose dives. I ended up pretty much taking all of last week of to just get my life back in shape as I was kind of in a bad spot, the business part of me wanting to do nothing more than finish 0.6.4 as soon as possible, while the real me wanted to do anything but that. Those two mes fought for weeks and it all kind of blew up right as my fridge stopped working in the middle of summer. Anyway, sorry for the short absence. More to come! Stay safe! v 0.6.4.26 2020.08.19 - Widened caves and reduce their maximum depth - Changed the way caves are generated, positioned, entered, left, and saved - Fixed a problem with cave resources being immediately destroyed - Fixed a problem with client side cave resources destroying nearby resources on death - Fixed crystal and obsidian golems throwing an animation warning - Fixed crystal and obsidian golem ragdolls - Fixed a number of problems with navmesh data persisting after returning to the main menu v 0.6.4.25 2020.08.07 - Fixed a bug specific to newly created worlds that could cause facilities on the start platform to disappear

[ 2020-08-19 14:09:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

Thanks to player screenshots and sharing their worlds with me I've cracked down on a number of stranger bugs in this patch. One of them unfortunately is a small math problem that was causing biomes to grow much larger than they are supposed to be able to making this patch require another world "update" due to possible height changes. The biggest problem that was causing 3-4 seemingly different bugs, was facilities using their position to determine which terrains save data required updating, when in fact facilities are children components of player structures, meaning they should always be using the save data related to their parent structure. This was causing some buildings to duplicate and show up floating a kilometer away from their actual position, as well as facilities disappearing or reappearing after being picked back up. This patch should solve these problems and more! Thank you again for all the detailed bug reports and shared files to help me track things down. v 0.6.4.24 2020.08.06 - Increased small ore size - Newly generated world encounters (caves, towers, etc) will be centered in a procedural area for easier object removal - Returned resource rarity settings to be multipliers, maximum final rarity chance now capped at 20% for all rarities - Fixed stone and earth elemental torso textures losing their tint after being killed - Fixed some settings text fields being black instead of the intended white - Fixed right-clicking to equip a sledgehammer causing a bugged sledgehammer to appear in inventory - Fixed enchanting tables becoming unusable in some cases - Fixed certain facilty placement issues not saving properly - Fixed refining facilities respawning even after being picked up (related to above) - Fixed biomes from inadventently growing too large causing terrains to not line up in rare cases - Fixed the /stalkRewardMultiplier console command not being recognized - Fixed terraforming not working in creative nor host modes - Fixed an instance where structures could duplicate 1 kilometer out of position causing floating structures You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-08-06 14:41:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

Farming is now updated for the first time to work in multi-player. I've got a lot of messages on different platforms that have really built up over the past couple weeks. I've been a bit overwhelmed of late, as I was trying to go through them one at a time and not respond until fixing the problem entirely, and moving on to the next one. Instead I'm going to go through and gather all of them into a list I can prioritize as getting 0.6.4 working properly and pushing it live is my top priority right now. I don't really like to just give the "I'll look into it" generic response, but it's turned into more of a necessary course of action. Be safe out there! v 0.6.4.23 2020.08.04 - Updated farming to work in multi-player v 0.6.4.22 2020.07.29 - Fixed a bug that could cause avatars to not load properly - Fixed a bug that could cause plants to wilt while traveling above or below ground You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-08-04 14:44:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

Took a bit of a "break" from finishing up 0.6.4 today to answer some requests in the Steam forums. One new setting is "mouse smoothing". This smooths the mouse movement slightly, and appears to be frame dependent with its math. I don't have a high dpi mouse, but several users have reported that entering caves, where the FPS is usually much higher than above ground, causes a high dpi mouse to behave differently than above ground. If anyone that has experienced this can try turning mouse smoothing down to zero and letting me know if that fixes the different behavior I'll check into improving it. And I'll ping some users in Discord I know have experienced it. v 0.6.4.21 2020.07.19 - Added the ability to bind "modifier" keys: shift/alt/control, to normal controls if held down for 3 seconds - Added a "mouse smoothing" setting to the in-game control settings - Added bonus slots to bags, backpacks, and chests for higher rarities - Increased aggressive animal rarity settings - Fixed resource rarity settings multiplying values instead of adding to them - Fixed Dashing Strike and Trap Back not working in multiplayer You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-07-20 14:37:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

The last major change to 0.6.4, this patch completes the new biome management system.
As you can see in the picture above which is 4 random seeds as viewed in the world creation preview window, biomes now blend and shift between each other much more naturally. This system was built to allow for an unlimited number of biomes so that I can add more and more over time, and hopefully in the future I will be able to setup a biome design system so that community members can even design their own biomes and upload them to Steam Workshop. For now we have Grasslands, Mountains (which includes the snow biome), Desert, Swamp, and Ocean. I do hope to get more varied fantasy biomes in, for example volcanoes past 10km, maybe a mushroom forest, crystal peaks, etc. I would also like to add biome specific weather and atmosphere, so that it feels more musky in the swamp, and doesn't rain like it's totally normal in the desert. Please note that this patch will require a world update because of the major changes to the topography. A world update will mark all buildings and facilities for readjusting their height when the come back on for the first time so they don't end up underground or floating in the air. A new world is certainly the better choice, but the world update option is there to try and minimalize me forcing wipes every time anything biome related changes. Also please note the the world settings related to biomes are not yet updated in this patch and will not affect the outcome. I will plug those back in so users can lower the influence and/or frequency of biomes as they could before. Currently I am forcing Ocean, as seen above the starting point (solace/purple pillar) marker in the images above, with Mountain clockwise from there, then Grass, then Desert, so there are always a bit of the four starter biomes near the start. They can however still be largely overpowered by their neighbors so even the starting area can be quite different between two seeds. Mostly just small bug fixes and improvements left for the 0.6.4 branch, hopefully I will be able to push it live mid next week. v 0.6.4.20 2020.07.17 - Improved biome blending and generation - Re-enabled and improved the new world preview system - Added grass deletion to floors and town building pre-mades - Fixed the "Levels per kilometer" setting not being used properly in some methods - Fixed a bug related to saving boats You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-07-18 15:10:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

Grass is back! I'm still fine tuning things a bit, but it's running smooth and beautiful. There are still some improvements to be had to ensure that grass is never a nuisance, for example, leeks are almost impossible to spot in thick grass, so I'm going to make little dirt mounds that poke out with 2-4 leeks per node instead of just one sticking right out of the ground. I've already increased the size of small and medium ore nodes making them much easier to spot, grass or no grass. There is of course a slider to turn grass density and render distance up and down should you need to adjust them. Terraforming and Farming are also working again, though the grass is not yet immediately updating as intended while terraforming. I should be able to finish fiddling with that tomorrow. And most importantly, there was a bug with town building spawning that was causing them to mark themselves as belong to areas they don't actually. In turn this caused them to be marked for destruction when said areas would despawn, incorrectly taking the buildings down with them. This patch fixes that as well. v 0.6.4.18 2020.07.07 - Added grass - Increased the size of small and medium ores - Increased breath refill rate - Fixed terraforming - Fixed farming - Fixed a bug causing unrelated areas to destroy town buildings - Fixed the breath bar colors not showing up properly - Fixed some instances where right-clicking to move stacks into containers wouldn't be saved properly You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-07-07 14:23:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is a "small" patch addressing a few bugs. I've actually been finishing up a replacement for the old Unity grass system still being used on the live branch with a threaded (very performant) and beautiful new one. I'm also half finished with upgrading terraforming, but wanted to get this patch on to beta as soon as possible as the town buildings not loading properly is pretty serious. So Sunday night patch it is! v 0.6.4.17 2020.07.05 - Changed melee attack angle checks to ignore height - Fixed wood roof not lining up properly - Fixed town buildings not reloading in certain cases - Fixed the jump after placing a town building You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-07-05 14:17:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

I got caught up with the Steam Summer Sale, a replacement for beautiful grass, and trying to get get caves to work over the past week and didn't post patch notes for the past couple of small patches. Caves and towers and terrain smoothing are now back in beta for testing. I do believe I've found a good solution for grass and will be implementing it tomorrow complete with a density slider for lower and higher end computers to fine tune things with. v 0.6.4.16 2020.06.30 - Turned towers and procedural towers back on - Added a terrain smoothing method for large encounters - Fixed a way in that player generated objects could be replicated - Fixed structure data saving too fast for picked up facilities to be registered properly - Fixed an instance where resource scanners could not be saved properly after upgrading - Fixed drag + right-clicking to drop single items into a facility not saving properly in single player v 0.6.4.15 2020.06.29 - Fixed an area self-destruct error interrupting world generation v 0.6.4.14 2020.06.26 - Fixed basic resources in caves erroring - Fixed ceiling resources in caves duplicating - Fixed servers tracking players underground also as above ground - Fixed cave heat lingering even after leaving heat zone - Fixed temperature zones not applying in multiplayer - Fixed environmental damage not applying in multiplayer You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-06-30 14:37:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Steam Summer Sale event is live! Steam does not post "minor updates" to the store page for users that do not own the game, so I wanted to post an update on the progress of the current beta branch 0.6.4. I was hoping to get it stable and ready to push live prior to the Summer Sale, but as it turns out, rewriting tens of thousands of lines of code from scratch is a pretty time consuming endeavour! Though the benefits of the time spent are already there and obvious, I just need a bit more time to polish out the bugs. In short, 0.6.4 is a major overhaul of the world generation code as well as the save file structure. The new world generation code is able to load an area, for example after teleporting 10 kilometers, in just a couple of seconds, whereas the old system (still on the default "live" branch) could take upwards of 45 seconds. Save file count has also been reduced down to under 1%, meaning a fully explored terrain used to generate up to 129 files, but now those are all contained within a single file. Steam cloud saves seem to have a terrible time when there are a lot of smaller files, so I'm hoping this will improve the problems people have been having when using cloud saves prior to 0.6.4. The new system also uses a new algorithm for file compression/decompression that is much more stable than the one I was using. Data loss is completely unacceptable with any software, and unfortunately the software I was using was, albeit very infrequently, caused data corruption at times for seemingly no rhyme or reason. Overall there is a lot more code in 0.6.4 that was hand-written by yours truly meaning there is actually going to be a lot more control over game and world settings. For example how far to render trees, buildings, grass, terrains, and distant terrains will all be able to be managed individually, letting players further tune their graphics depending on their computer specs. Currently I'm fixing bugs related to multiplayer caves which were added into multiplayer for the first time just last week. There are still however a few things left to upgrade before 0.6.4 can be sent to the "live" default branch: - Terraforming - Farming - Procedural Towers - Floating Islands - Non-chunk based biomes Note: I have not marked the game as "multiplayer" nor with "supported languages" on the Steam store page, because they are works in progress, and I don't want to give anyone the wrong impression. Multiplayer is quite functional, and getting better every week, but still needs work. The UI also supports 30 "major" languages, which make the game at least playable if you can't read English, though they are incomplete, and fallback to Google translations unless a community member has been kind enough to correct them via crowdin.com/project/solace-crafting. I know it isn't a lot of "fun" not having new things like fishing, cooking, new recipes, and more town functions not being added while this upgrade is going on, but I hope everyone will agree that it was a smart decision once the patch goes live and everything is running clean and fast. It's actually quite draining for me as a solo developer because I too have a lot more fun adding in new things, but again, I really feel this has increased the base quality of the game flow a lot and am glad that I decided to make the effort to improve the foundations that everything else runs on top of. Meanwhile, Pixel Noise, our audio guys, are starting work on new sound effects for all of the animals and monsters. If the Summer Sale goes well, hopefully I can funnel more funds their way to improve the overall audio experience of the game. At some point a major upgrade to player animations will also be necessary, just to remind everyone that the current animations are not intended as a final solution. All in all, 3D, open world, multiplayer programming is tough business for a solo developer, but progress is steady, and I'm very much looking forward to the various planned feature from here on! Please join us on Discord at: discord.gg/SolaceCrafting for discussions on suggested features, and for posting bug reports. If you'd like to help test 0.6.4 you need only to opt into the beta branch by right-clicking Solace Crafting in your Steam Library and clicking on Properties. Stay safe, and happy gaming!

[ 2020-06-26 02:20:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Caves have been turned off in multi-player since its first inception. There were a number of challenges to making the cave system work in multi-player that this patch addresses. As expected I had to upgrade quite a few things and had some difficulty with managing multiple players potentially above and below ground. I have not yet tested this patch in "host" mode, I've been mainly building it to work with the new systems of 0.6.4 in single player and with multi-player dedicated servers, just to throw that out there in the open until I can look closer at host mode.
There is also a problem where terrain is not yet being "smoothed" or "flattened" prior to object placement as it was prior to 0.6.4. This can cause cave entrances to be difficult, or even impossible to reach, in cases where they are buried under the surface or sticking out the edge of a sharp cliff face. I do plan to address this, but 6/7 or so caves should be accessible even as is. v 0.6.4.13 2020.06.19 - Updated and enabled caves both in single player and 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. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-06-19 15:01:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

I started working on redesigning cave save structures to make them work with the new 0.6.4 structure and with multi-player in mind, but have turned caves as well as towers back off for this patch in order to get the more important fixes patched in. I ended up teleporting back and forth dozens of times in succession hunting down infrequent world generation timing bugs that were causing sections to improperly turn on and off, or spawn twice in some cases. I worked out everything I was able to recreate myself, and will continue to tune and improve any further bug reports with the new system while I work on getting caves and floating islands added into multiplayer. v 0.6.4.10 2020.06.12 - Turned down earth elemental spawn rates a bit - Fixed Midnight's Touch spawning in the grasslands - Fixed tombstones, monoliths, and drops going empty after a single item transfer - Fixed the possibility for wanted areas to remain queued for destruction post-teleport on MP - Fixed a bug during MP teleportation that could cause duplicate areas to spawn - Fixed a number of MP world generation queue management errors caused by client teleporting - Fixed a timing error that could cause network objects to position improperly past when teleporting more than 8km v 0.6.4.9 2020.06.11 - Removed a method built for testing causing errors v 0.6.4.8 2020.06.10 - Fixed town building saving and loading - Fixed a bug causing areas to unnecessarily despawn You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-06-12 14:12:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

There were problems with the new system duplicating things and sometimes erasing things. They turned out to be one and the same problem as structures could duplicate, and then both be trying to update the same save data causing one structure to overwrite it's copy where facilities like storage chests may have been placed. This also explains duplicating building pieces as was being reported. A similar part of the same problematic system was also causing monoliths and animals to duplicate creating sometimes a dozen guards for a single area instead of the usual 2-3, or "ghost" animals that seemed unresponsive. This patch fixes all of that, and should be a much more stable experience. There are still some small problems with fruit trees and towns aren't fully upgraded yet. I'll be working on those today, and hopefully moving on to caves and other "world encounters" tomorrow before upgrading the current biome generation system which is still running in "chunks" for simplicity. There has also been a couple reports of crashes from Radeon card users. I am also a Radeon card user along with many other players, so it's not necessarily all Radeon cards, but there are definitely some crashes going on. It looks to be a Unity engine <-> GPU communication error, so not likely something I can actively "fix". I've reached out to Unity for support, though should anyone run into this I would definitely recommend trying to upgrade your graphics card drivers for starters, and please let me know if it happens. v 0.6.4.7 2020.06.09 - Lowered default start menu target FPS from 90 to 60 - Reinstated "world shift" solution to correct floating point precision errors in single-player and for clients - Improved world generation queue ordering and management - Fixed trees not being removed properly making doubles possible to appear - Fixed structures and certain miscellanous objects not being removed properly making doubles possible to appear v 0.6.4.6 2020.06.06 - Increased the spawn rate of earth elementals - Fixed multiple objects spawning on single locations - Fixed dedicated server spawning unnecessary terrains - Fixed a number of map saving and loading problem - Fixed a maps not drawing properly immediately after teleporting or entering a new game You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-06-10 00:28:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch should bring multiplayer back to near where it was prior to the first 0.6.4 patch. There are still some minor improvements to be coded for saving speed, and server-side world generation queue priority management, but most things are back to working as they were before. Towns still have some problems, and there are some other minor reports, but I should be able to clear those up tomorrow. I'm always inclined to talk up "what's next!" but honestly it works better if I talk about things after I patch them in as the hours and the days don't always end up going in a straight line, if you know what I mean. As always, thank you to everyone participating in early access, and especially to everyone posting bugs and helping me track stuff down in Discord! v 0.6.4.5 2020.06.01 - Fixed Enchanted Stones spawning in swamps, Spider Nests spawning in Mountains, and Coal Mines not spawning - Fixed a type of tree not spawning a collider - Fixed some trees not properly removing from terrains after harvested - Fixed projectile skills not working - Fixed held equipment not showing properly - Fixed furniture reloading after being picked up - Fixed storage chest and sign color and labels not updating immediately in multiplayer - Fixed storage chest and sign color and labels not updating after picking up and repositioning - Fixed facility upgrades not saving properly - Fixed transmogrifiers not saving their contents properly v 0.6.4.4 2020.05.29 - Fixed multiplayer servers not properly resetting the world generation queue when new clients connect v 0.6.4.3 2020.05.29 - Fixed another world generation queuing issue - Fixed placed facilities reloading position rounded to the nearest meter - Fixed facilities not properly saving their contents - Fixed dropped items not saving properly - Fixed an eye type causing character creation to lock up - Fixed free mode placed building reloading even after deconstructing You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-06-01 13:47:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

On Tuesday night I patched in 0.6.4.1 which stabilized the new generation engine, which was having some priority/queuing issues. Finalizing that system brought up a new problem causing certain terrains to not render at all. Unfortunately this took me a long time to figure out, as it's just not something you would run into in almost any other game out there due to the multi-layered terrain system that Solace Crafting uses to "fake" long distance scenery. In short, the distant shader was overriding the near shader causing it to fail and simply not draw the near terrains at all. Two seemingly unrelated systems ended up costing me a lot of effort to fix. That should be the last of the major problems allowing me to now focus on a variety of "smaller" problems that have been reported with the new code. Most notably there seems to be some saving issues causing stored items to go missing. This is no doubt a result of the new save and load code and should be an easy fix for tomorrow. v 0.6.4.2 2020.05.28 - Fixed terrain shader instancing problems v 0.6.4.1 2020.05.26 - Increased Hippopotamus and Crocodile attack range - Changed horseweed, knapweed, cattails and small swamp mushrooms to allow movement through them - Fixed a number of world generation queuing errors causing a variety of problems - Fixed Swamp and Desert biomes You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-05-28 12:53:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Beta v 0.6.4.0 Last night I pushed 0.6.4.0 to beta. In short it's a complete rewrite of the main foundations of the game for a number of reasons. I've posted about the changes a bit in the past, but first and foremost I want to make it clear that there are some pretty serious bugs, and I don't recommend players trying the current beta branch out without the clear intention of "bug testing". Now, the bugs aren't "difficult," it just needs work, and the best way to narrow down what needs to be worked on is to test it. In other words, Solace Crafting is my baby, and it scares me sometimes to let other people play it, but it's coming along. Why the big rewrite? In truth a good portion of what I "rewrote" I actually wrote for the first time because up until now I was using third party software. This has the benefit of letting you focus on other things, but over time it can turn out to be a wrench in the gears where you find yourself repeatedly trying to force code into places it was never meant to be. The new world generation system is entirely custom, and built specifically to be the biome based, runtime, infinite possibility spawning game system that Solace Crafting really needs. So what's wrong with it? There's a lot of math involved, specifically in understanding where players are in the world, and what needs to be prioritized for spawning and despawning things around them. Currently the system is a little out of control, spawning more than it really needs to, and not in the most logical of order. The base functionality is all there and running much faster, teleporting 1000km can take less than 2 seconds, but it needs tweaking. There's over 10,000 replaced or rewritten lines of code and I spent almost every waking hour working on it on Friday, so despite it being a bit of a mess, I'm going to wait until Monday to jump back into polishing it up, but wanted to at least make it clear what's going on for anyone that is used to trying out the beta builds. The past 10 days or so have also been a constant stream of "just five more minutes" and I have neglected the Steam forums during the bulk of that. My apologies to the questions and suggestions waiting for me on there still. Wishing you and yours the best! v 0.6.4.0 2020.05.22 - Complete re-write of world generation, save file management, file compression, and object management - Grass, caves, towers, and floating islands disabled temporarily

[ 2020-05-23 14:34:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch is an accumulation of fixes that have been implemented on the beta branch over the past couple weeks. There are a few concerns I have related to problems Unity has been patching into their engine lately, but hopefully they won't affect many, and nobody very seriously. The problems in question have a patch from Unity scheduled for later in May, but I want to explain them clearly here should anyone run into them, and if they look to be causing more trouble than expected I will put forth the effort to roll Unity backwards to before the problems were occurring. I should also make it clear that I do not develop using "beta" releases of Unity, I only use the LTS (long-term service) releases that are supposed to be stable.. The biggest problem has been with caves locking certain computers up. I was able to narrow down the problem to an engine-side method related to shadows, and have subsequently added the option to disable shadows completely. If you run into caves locking up on you, please try turning shadows off before you enter, and I will update the engine as soon as the patch is released. The second problem seems only related to certain Radeon graphics cards and has cause a big stir among the Unity community the past couple weeks. This can cause a "d3d11" and/or "vertexBuffer == NULL" error, the former of which can cause a crash. This too is said to be fixed in the patch due for a May 20th release, but again if it's causing frequent crashes for anyone I'll roll the engine back until I can confirm it's fixed. Besides all that, a lot of the fixes in this patch are related to Multi-player, which I was hoping to let sit for a bit longer while I focused on getting 0.6.4 ready for beta, but there were some debilitating bugs making the game unplayable in certain situation. There's still a lot of small upgrades I now know will become important in time for multi-player performance, but 0.6.4 for improved world generation is also very important not just for single player but for multi-player as well.
This patch also includes the reskinned interface, and adds some small "feedback" sounds to a lot of the interface buttons. Fishing, a new music track, and sound effects for monsters and animals are also underway, some of which will be included in the first 0.6.4 patches. Big thanks to everyone supporting development via Patreon! Once again, please be safe, wash your hands, and stay positive! v 0.6.3.23 2020.05.09 - Updated Unity to 2018.4.22 - Reskinned UI - Added video setting options for anisotropic filtering and shadows - Updated inventory, equipment, and wardrobe network synchronization methods - Non-dedicated multiplayer hosts will now also output server logs - Fixed large player buildings over 15kb in data not transferring properly across the network - Fixed torches always turning off when clients connect to multi-player - Fixed town buildings not placing properly past 8km for clients in multi-player - Fixed shadow settings not saving between sessions - Fixed returning to the main menu from in-game causing UI buttons to not respond - Fixed the crafting interface not including crafting skills into equipment stat previews - Fixed resource scanners not saving range properly - Fixed ice spikes spell not working in caves - Fixed some spells playing audio twice immediately - Fixed town citizens sometimes not loading properly when loading into a cave beneath them - Fixed summoning circles causing "unable to spawn" errors on multi-player clients - Fixed a common server side RightClick on inventory slots bug - Fixed a multi-player client split bug - Fixed a multi-player client right-click into facility bug - Fixed interacting with furniture in multi-player - Fixed swamp animals spawning in the snow (and not in the swamp) - Fixed multiplayer town data not compartmentalizing itself across networks - Fixed the chat window minimize button going too far down - Fixed ladder popup text and interaction - Fixed containers dropped into tombstones upon death becoming unusable You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-05-09 14:11:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

There have been a few players having trouble with multi-player. This is causing the client to server connection to hang while the server to client connection remains active, resulting in the client not being able to do anything. I do not yet have a definite solution as to the cause, though there are a couple of different courses of action I've planned out not only in order to fix the problem, but to improve connection performance and stability in general. There are a number of differences with 0.6.4, which I've been working on, that will also improve multi-player performance. I may look into fixing farming and containers on multi-player, but want to try and finish up 0.6.4 as soon as possible as it heavily improves the single player experience as well. I've not yet returned to full-time develop after injuring my left arm, though it's nearly fully healed now. No serious problems reported with the new UI. I will most likely push this patch live. v 0.6.3.19 2020.04.30 - Updated Unity to 2018.4.22 - Non-dedicated multiplayer hosts will now also output server logs - Fixed summoning circles causing "unable to spawn" errors on multi-player clients - Fixed a common server side RightClick on inventory slots bug - Fixed a multi-player client split bug - Fixed a multi-player client right-click into facility bug - Fixed interacting with furniture in multi-player v 0.6.3.18 2020.04.22 - Fixed swamp animals spawning in the snow (and not in the swamp) - Fixed a server <-> client sync bug affecting some players in 0.6.3.17 You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-04-30 13:27:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch brings in the new user interface skin. It's still a work in progress and I'm very much open to feedback and suggestions. There are parts of it I like, parts of it I've already changed, and parts of it I'm planning on changing yet. Some of the buttons feel a bit overactive in my opinion, and some of the backgrounds a little too "cartoonish". All in all a lot better than the default grey we were rolling with I think. Please let me know what you think. v 0.6.3.17 2020.04.21 - Reskinned UI You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-04-21 13:46:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

I'm back in the driver's seat! My left index finger is still half numb on one side, but my back and shoulder are much better. I'm still going in for therapy every day, but it's only 30 minutes or so. My apologies again for the lost time in development. There has been an increasingly common problem with some people crashing while trying to enter caves, that I've added some things to try and better track down in this patch. I've got a helpful player in Discord right now trying some things out for me, as unfortunately most people do not encounter the problem, myself included. If I can reproduce a problem I can go straight to the cause and fix it, but some things aren't quite that easy. (Update: It seems to be shadows causing the crashes. I will continue to dive further into fixing that. It might be only certain graphics cards or drivers) There is also an upgrade to the multiplayer method that sends town data from the server to clients, which was previously going over the single packet limit for fully populated towns. This patch fixes that so they will now compartmentalize the data when necessary. I've also updated Unity from 2018.4.16 to 2018.4.21 though it has a known bug that spams the player log with an unnecessary warning... I've blocked it from printing "an error has occurred" in-game, but until they patch it, logs might be a little messy. I didn't notice any actual performance or visual changes caused by the bug thankfully. The UI reskin has also been largely completed and I hope to push it to beta tomorrow to get some input before moving on to finishing up 0.6.4. I'm also behind on the Steam forum posts and plan to set aside time tomorrow to go through them all. Thank you everyone for your understanding with my injury and need to take a few weeks off to heal up. Stay safe, and wash your hands! v 0.6.3.16 2020.04.20 - Updated Unity to 2018.4.21 - Fixed multiplayer town data not compartmentalizing itself across networks - Fixed the chat window minimize button going too far down - Added video setting options for anisotropic filtering and shadows You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-04-20 15:06:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

First off, my apologies 0.6.4 has been delayed and there are a couple of problems with the current patch that I have been unable to promptly address. The reason for that being that I had a bit of an injury, which I mentioned in the most recent post. Unfortunately, the morning after I mentioned it, I woke up to a numb left hand and a lot of pain in my left arm and back. I went in to a clinic and got some x-rays and shots, and while it was determined as nothing serious it looks like I suffered some nerve damage which unfortunately takes a long time to heal. Meaning, I would have liked to take some medicine and get back to work, but I was unable to type with my left hand at all for about 12 days after that. I've recovered a lot since then. Yesterday I was finally able to start typing again, and I've been working for a few hours here now though my arm is starting to feel tired. My left index finger is still partially numb, though I don't really have any pain that is constant any more, just a lingering sort of sore feeling. So I still need to take it easy for a few more days at least, but at least I'm able to put in a few hours here and there as I'm very eager to get 0.6.4 out as soon as possible. The compression script being used in the current patch has been really problematic for some people all of the sudden and has even started acting weird for me. I've all but completely removed it from 0.6.4, and it only remains to upgrade outdated player files which are currently being compressed during saving using its algorithm. There are still a few things left to do to get the first beta patch out for 0.6.4, but I really don't like leaving anyone in the dark and wanted to at least post an update on the situation. My apologies again for the unintentional silence, and the delay in progress. You guys are the reason I have a salary and I'm very grateful to be able to continue working on Solace Crafting! Stay safe, wash your hands, and happy gaming!

[ 2020-04-14 06:06:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

As posted on Patreon It's been a crazy start to the year! We've got an outsourcing agency working on reskinning the UI, adding UI sounds, and programming the fishing system per my directions. I've also been hard at work on a number of big changes to different systems that the game uses both for performance reasons, bug fixes, and looking forward towards the future of Solace Crafting. I want to go over some of the more major improvements quickly, and hope to have to patch out in within the next couple of days. 1. World Generation I've been using a 3rd party tool to help generate the game world since day one. In short, it's a tool that lets you organize a variety of objects onto a node based graph, and then outputs the actual game world data for Unity to generate in runtime. It was helpful to get going, and it is definitely a powerful tool. The more objects and biomes I add to it though, the slower and slower it has started to run. In lieu of this and the need for a number of improvements, I've been working on replacing that tool with my own custom system built specifically to cater to our needs. I made a short clip (see below) to show how it's working thus far and you can see an improvement on my 6 core CPU from about 34 seconds down to around 6.5 seconds. The older version running at 34s is however using 5 of my 6 cores to generate the data. If you were running on a 4 core CPU of equal GHz that time would be roughly doubled. If you were running on a 2 core CPU of equal GHz that time would be roughly quadrupled. So you can see why I decided it was time for an upgrade. The newer version is actually currently only generating on a single core, so that 6.5s, will be 6.5s, regardless of how many cores someone with equal GHz has. I should mention also those were both recorded in the Unity editor, which makes things a bit slower as it's recording and logging a variety of data for real time development. [previewyoutube=fZVm61Di36g;full][/previewyoutube] Though I don't quite have buttons and knobs for everything yet, this system will also allow for much more fine tuning of render settings, letting players with stronger or weaker machines specify rendering distances for grass, trees, resources, monsters, terrains, buildings, and so forth each individually. What about the "need for a number of improvements"? I started writing the core code of Solace Crafting back in 2016, after years of refining ideas and honing my amateur skills as a programmer. Some of that code was just frankly wrong, and a lot more of it was not smart. I've replaced a variety of poorly written sections with improved code in the upcoming 0.6.4 patch, and will continue to upgrade a number of internal systems as we move forward with the 0.6.4 branch. 2. Compression Since the beginning I have also used a compression tool that is free for anyone to use and so hey, sounds great right. It does the job, often turning 150kb data files down into 10kb files helping out with disk usage a lot, and personally I've run into very few, though not zero problems using it. Unfortunately this tool does not seem to work on all machines as intended, creating problems for a very small number of players, as well as rare but very real input/output problems for a small, but still noticeable number of players. I've thus replace all usage of this tool with a paid and actively supported compression tool with a much more intelligent workflow. Hopefully this will see the end of all compression based errors for all players. 3. Save Files Recently we turned on Steam cloud save files, but it's been a bitter sweet outcome. The main problem stemming from the sheer amount of files that I've been using to store data, not necessarily their size. To remedy this, I'm consolidating what was previously up to 129 files into a single file per "chunk". This should speed up cloud sync a lot, and is also in thanks to a pretty heavy restructuring of save data and runtime data management. This is still an ongoing "upgrade" but is already resulting in faster, more intelligent saving and loading. 4. Biomes Biome generation and management is something I'm very serious about and have tried to improve a number of times without ever quite reaching a final solution. Having rewritten the bulk of world generation over the past few weeks I've had time to re-approach the problem of, how to allow for an infinite number of biomes, and have come up with a new approach I'm currently putting the finishing touches to for the big 0.6.4 patch. Previously we went from mishmashing biomes all on top of one another, to each "chunk," an 8km square area, being assigned a specific biome. Chunk based biome generation certainly worked a lot better than mishmash, which can in no way support unlimited biomes nor does the double layers of noise that a lot of games like Minecraft make use of, but was very... chunky, to be honest, creating very sharp edges, and lacking in control. The new system currently being implemented is still chunk based, but it generates patches of biomes at random within each chunk, overriding what is otherwise a default noise pattern of lakes, grasslands, and forested areas. That means it can be circular, square, or even non-uniform, and of varying sizes, so long as it does not breach the outer border of it's 8km square chunk. This way a chunk can actually have multiple non-default biomes within it, depending on how the chunk rolls to generate itself, and also allows for me to specify certain areas to generate as specific areas. Two of the problems with the current 0.6.3 build are how flat the starter area is, a math error from yours truly, and how long it takes to get to any of the other biomes from the starter platform. Now I can specify that there always be a bit of mountains in one of the first terrains, for example, making sure players can experience different settings much quicker, and still leave the rest of the world to randomize itself based on the world seed. This will also allow for a lot more world settings in regards to biome control, letting players create water worlds, mountainous worlds, etc. I've also fixed the extra flat starting area, back to a 100m radius from the start like it used to be. In closing... There's still a bit of biome work to do, and I do expect some new bugs to crop up with so many changes to the way saving and loading data is now managed, but hope to have a patch out in the next day or two. Having said that, I had to go to a chiropractor today for some x-rays and shots as I messed my back up pretty bad somehow last week, and trying to just stomach the pain actually ended up making things worse. Thankfully it doesn't seem to be anything serious, something along the lines of, I probably shouldn't sit in front of my monitor for 100 hour a week or something like that, but you know, priorities =D Please be careful out there! The Corona virus is very real, and we're not yet sure why it hits some people so much worse than others. Wash those hands, and keep on gaming!

[ 2020-03-31 13:06:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

Some more small fixes for a couple reported problems. The big beta patch I'm working on is taking longer than I had hoped! C'est la vie. It's a weird time depending on where you live. Stay safe out there! v 0.6.3.15 2020.03.23 - Fixed ladder popup text and interaction - Fixed containers dropped into tombstones upon death becoming unusable

[ 2020-03-23 14:22:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

Some more small fixes for bugs that were brought to my attention. Thank you again for the bug reports! v 0.6.3.14 2020.03.19 - Fixed dropped item bags throwing errors when still be looked at but empty - Fixed dropped items being able to merge into facilities other than dropped item bags You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-03-19 13:56:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

Here are some quick fixes for recently reported problems with the latest build. I'm hard at work on the replacement world generation system, which I hope to have out at the end of the week. As well as catching the agency I've hired part-time help from up to speed as to where the game is right now, and what it most needs work on. Thank you to everyone posting about any problems they encounter, that very sincerely helps me out a lot. There have been a couple posts about entering caves causing crashes. I have yet to reproduce this or find a plausible cause other than (just maybe) outdated graphics drivers. If anyone is encountering this, any further details you can provide are much appreciated. Be sure to wash your hands after going out! v 0.6.3.13 2020.03.17 - Fixed boar death animation looping v 0.6.3.12 2020.03.17 - Fixed tombstones not saving and loading properly - Fixed Spider's Nest not rendering properly - Fixed townspeople and town building signs not displaying their text properly You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-03-17 13:18:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

Now live! This patch brings in the first phase of Workshop integration. Structures can now be uploaded to Steam Workshop, and other players structures can be subscribed to, making them available under the new "Workshop" tab in the structure load menu. Workshop support is intended for nearly all systems within Solace Crafting including items, enchants, recipes, monsters, skills, quests, encounters, and so forth.
Currently the item template creation/editing interface is also accessible. Though still undergoing some improvements, you can access the interface with the "i" key while in creative mode. Already the interface allows you to create new items, equipment, recipes, and so on, but is lacking in some information that should be made clear, cannot yet import sprites(icons), and is not yet connected to Steam Workshop. There are two major changes going on right now that are going to heavily affect further Steam Workshop integration. For one, I have been re-writing the world generation system from scratch to replace the 3rd party tool that we have been using from day one. It's a handy and well written tool, but doesn't work well in the way Solace Crafting needs to use it, and is the main reason why currently loading takes so long. The current system takes around 37 seconds to load on my computer. The new system, though not yet finished, loads in less than a couple seconds. It's also designed specifically to allow for new biomes, monsters, encounters, and everything to be easily added into new and existing worlds to really work in unison with Steam Workshop and community content. A wide variety of encounters, procedural quests, and just things to do in general has always been the number one long term goal for a long-lasting mod-driven community. I'm also building it so that several different categories of render distance settings will be available to players. This way stronger computers can turn up the terrain, tree, building, or resource draw distances for example, while older computers can fine tune them to what works best for them. There are some more advanced changes in the works with distance rendering as well, but I don't want to get ahead of myself... The other major news being, I have hired the part-time services of an outsourcing company. It's no doubt going to take them some time to dive into my 100,000+ lines of code, but I'm very excited to have some help in general with some of the things that I'm just not very good at. Namely animation and GUI design/graphics. I'm also looking to set our partners in audio to work in more sound effects in general as there are now quite a few monsters and animals with no audibles.
Also included in this patch are updates to the "new" building pieces that were added in last month, which had a number of problems, as well as 12 new animals. The animals are kind of all over the place right now, and the starting grass area is extremely flat and uninteresting due to some math errors with the current world generation system. These and a number of other problems that have been around for some time will be addressed with the replacement system which should be ready for beta before much longer. The condensed patch notes are as follows - Added Creative mode - Added Item Template Editor interface to creative mode - Added "Workshop" tab to structure loading interface - Added "Upload to workshop" button to structure save interface - Added thumbnail selection to the structure upload interface - Added boars, chickens, cows, crocodiles, does, foxes, goat, hippopotami, rabbits, scorpions, snails, and stags (unique drops pending) - Updated the majority of the new building models from 0.6.2.5 with tighter more performant models - Facilities are now upgradeable in Multiplayer - Items dropped within one meter of other dropped items will now combine into one bag - Items on the ground will now decay after 24 hours - Added /itemDecayTime and /tombstoneDecayTime to world settings and console - Added tombstones that spawn and store the items dropped by player death - Tombstones will decay after 7 days - Changed the fps counter (F3) position and color and updated it to a proper UI element - Added a new BGM track - Upgraded Unity to 2018.4.16 LTS - Turned on cloud saving The latest beta patch notes are as follows: v 0.6.3.10 2020.03.08 - Fixed navmesh data being unnecessarily recycled in some situations - Fixed entity AI engaging navigation prior to being enable in some situations You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-03-10 14:04:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch is intended to go live pending a short testing period on the beta branch. I have initiated a small contract for the services of an outsourcing agency to help with some of the boat load of manual "labor" that is game development. It's no doubt going to take them a bit to wade into the massive solution of code that makes up Solace Crafting, but I'm very excited to see what they can do! In the meantime, there were problems with the last batch of building models that I outsourced and ended up finding someone else to do them. Most of them have been updated with the new models in this patch so they should all line up and are much more performant. There are still 1-2 pieces missing which you can tell by their slightly different color. As the new pieces are more more "generic" than the unnecessarily "boarded" look the other pieces had they will be very easy to apply a variety of different skins to. Currently we only have "wood" and "stone" but I would like to add more varieties including stucco, brick, and others. I've also started interacting a bit directly with the developers of the networking software that I use. There is one major problem that has cropped up twice so far, each time on a different server, which I am still trying to track down. The cause is not making itself at all clear, but, from the developers, I've got some good ideas on things to try and have learned there are a number of different upgrades and tools that I haven't yet made use of yet as the software continues to improve. All in all there's been a lot of work outside of "adding content" to the game these past couple weeks in preparation for this and that, but rest assured work continues and hopefully the ball will be rolling faster than ever here before too long! v 0.6.3.10 2020.03.06 - Updated the majority of the new building models from 0.6.2.5 with tighter more performant models - Fixed harvestable animal toughness and rarity not displaying properly on mouse over for multi-player clients You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-03-06 15:28:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch adds in 12 new animals, some passive, some aggrresive. They don't have unique drops yet, though that is certainly the plan, alongside future plans for farming and cooking. I ended up spending a lot of the later half of last week shopping for a relief programmer, but ultimately decided on an outsourcing company that looks to have quite well-rounded experience. For starters I'm going to have them take over some of the programming and see how well we fit. I will still be very specifically directing everything, keeping a close watch on and making a final pass over all new features, but I've been doing nothing but code for the majority of the past 6 months and it's really worn me out. I program out of necessity, and have become pretty proficient at it, but it's really not where my passion lies. So I'm very excited to be able to start focusing more on content, story, and progression. Hopefully this is the start of a long and fruitful relationship! v 0.6.3.9 2020.03.03 - Added boars, chickens, cows, crocodiles, does, foxes, goat, hippopotami, rabbits, scorpions, snails, and stags (unique drops pending) - Facilities are now upgradeable in Multiplayer - Stopped distant special effects from spawning in multiplayer - Multiplayer clients will now wait for their host to finish loading a terrain before enabling it - Network objects will now immediately rebuilding their observer list when entering within range of a client - Fixed special effects from other players not spawning properly past 8km - Fixed lightning shot throwing errors in multiplayer You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-03-03 13:52:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

I'm back to working on some multiplayer fixes and improvements this week. This patch addresses a rare problem that seems to have been stemming from too many dropped items on the ground, and has in general been a requested feature for some time. Items dropped on the ground will now decay after 24 (game time) hours. This check takes place when the drops are loaded in, so staring at a dropped bag for 24 hours will not cause it to disappear. Also dropped items will now consolidate with other nearby dropped items to create a single bag with multiple items, which works better for multiplayer. Tombstones will now appear when a players dies and will contain all of their inventory, and only be accessible by them (or server admins) in multiplayer. Tombstones will decay after 7 days (game time) have passed. Both tombstones and dropped items will disappear immediately if their contents are cleared out. The mouse over display text for dropped items and tombstones is not quite yet working as intended in multiplayer in this patch. I also fixed some problems with animals and monsters getting stuck in certain situations. v 0.6.3.8 2020.02.25 - Doubled dropped item bag size - Items dropped within one meter of other dropped items will now combine into one bag - Added tombstones that spawn and store the items dropped by player death - Tombstones can only be accessed by the owner and/or the host if in multiplayer - Tombstones will decay after 7 days - Items on the ground will now decay after 24 hours - Added /itemDecayTime and /tombstoneDecayTime to world settings and console - Improved misc (items not placed on buildings) save data disk usage and functionality - Fixed an instance where animals would ignore being attacked by a player - Fixed an instance where animals could spawn a second incorrect rarity particle system - Fixed mobs and animals getting stuck walking in place You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-02-25 14:51:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've taken a successful break from coding multiplayer for a bit, it's an oddly draining endeavor. I gathered a list of the reported problems currently with multiplayer and will be trying to go through the majority of them tomorrow. Today I fixed a major one brought in with the client side only floating point precision fix that was causing resources past 8km to not disappear once harvested. Besides that there are a few small single player fixes. v 0.6.3.6 2020.02.20 - Changed the fps counter (F3) position and color and updated it to a proper UI element - Fixed withdrawing and depositing negative numbers causing problems with storehouses - Fixed solace and encounter map toggles being ignored when moving the map around - Fixed being able to destroy towers with the deconstruct tool - Fixed basic attacks going off while in deconstruct mode - Fixed resource graphics remaining after being harvested past 8km for multiplayer clients You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-02-20 14:29:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch adds a "workshop" tab to the structure load interface, where you should find any structures you have subscribed to via Steam Workshop. I've also added a thumbnail selection tool for specifying a thumbnail for structures you upload, as Steam only allows specifying this at the time of upload, not after. So no more adding a jpg of the same name to a folder or any of that. I built a small hard disk navigator so you can go find custom jpg or png files of less than 1Mb size (Steam limits) to upload as a preview/thumbnail image. There is one small caveat to the "workshop" tab and downloaded Workshop content in general. The game cannot inherently know where Steam has downloaded the workshop files without talking to Steam at least once. That means that if you download the game, subscribe to some Workshop content, then log out of Steam and start the game up "offline" it won't know where to look for your Workshop files. I set it up to check for this directory, if you've downloaded any files, when the game starts, and save the folder that Steam informs it of, but wanted to make it clear that both Solace Crafting and Steam have to be turned on at the same time at least once for Workshop content to work. And of course you need to be connected to Steam to upload files to Workshop as well. There was also a not easily reproduced bug reported that turned out to be caused by dying with bags while on a floating island. That and some general upgrades to the code involved are also in this patch. v 0.6.3.5 2020.02.17 - Added "Workshop" tab to structure loading interface - Added thumbnail selection to the structure upload interface - Fixed older "My Structures" structures not displaying in the structure loading interface - Fixed a bug caused by dropping bags on floating islands - Fixed the likliness of any bugs causing the game to stall while loading floating islands You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-02-17 14:34:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

Happy Saturday! Being the weekend I didn't get a ton of hours in today, but I did learn about all I need to in order to finish programming Workshop interaction. I got stuck on properly setting up the thumbnail for uploaded items, as it's something you can't do from within Steam, it has to happen from within Solace Crafting, for whatever reason. So I'm definitely going to have to make some changes to the way that files are loaded and handled as well as the current interfaces. For now, there is an "upload to workshop" button when you click "save" after selecting a structure in the building interface. This lets you assign a title, a description, and set the item to either public or private. If you try and upload a structure with the same title as a structure you have already uploaded, it will update the item to the structure you are uploading. If you updated a structure by mistake, you can reset it to an older version from within Steam. In order to upload a thumbnail you need to locate your Saved Structures folder which is located at: C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\LocalLow\Big Kitty Games\Solace Crafting\Saved Structures Inside this folder if you add a jpg or a png of the same title as the structure you are uploading to the workshop it will upload the image with it as the default preview image. To test it I uploaded "Staircase" with "staircase.jpg" in my Saved Structure folder. I believe the proper aspect ratio for this image is 800x450. Unfortunately the game is not yet automatically loading in subscribed structures, though Steam will download them to your computer. If you've subscribed to a structure Steam should download it to your Steam folder: steamapps\workshop\content\670260. The number 670260 is the appID for Solace Crafting. Underneath that folder if you have anything you've subscribed to it will be in a folder named after the fileID of the item you subscribed to. If you copy the file inside that folder to your Saved Structures folder, you should be able to use it as normal. I will of course be updating this workflow to not require the manual copying of files. So still just a start, but I wanted to patch it in along with some small fixes to creative to make sure everything up to this point is working as intended for not just me. I want to add "monster spawn point," "loot spawn point," and traps into creative mode to let players create custom "dungeons" or encounters to be plugged directly into the random world generation. Currently there are procedural towers and the static towers that I made, but there could easily be 1000+ different types of buildings of various difficulty to run into and it would require very little disk space. Mines as well are currently procedural and random, and I do plan to add procedural dungeons, but user made dungeons I am also very interested in making possible. And lots more stuff I shouldn't really talk about until I can get closer to it! v 0.6.3.4 2020.02.16 - Turned on cloud saving - Added "Upload to workshop" button to structure save interface - Updated structure save files to a non-binary format. Old files will automatically update when interacted with. - Fixed new structures requiring materials in creative mode - Fixed loading saved structures requiring materials in creative mode You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-02-15 15:45:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

Just wanted to chime in. I've got Steam Workshop support enabled and uploading properly for structures and item templates, though I still need to get subscribing and downloading working, so I'm not quite ready to patch it in. I've got a lot planned for community content implementation over the next couple weeks! I've also enabled Steam Cloud saves for people that use it. The Solace Crafting save data file structure uses a lot of small files, so my personal save data which has a lot of worlds I've received from players over the years for debugging and multiplayer this and that, actually goes over the file limit which is 10,000. This of course shouldn't be a problem for most people, but I wanted to point it out openly. I will definitely be reconsidering how files are handled and separated with some of the bigger changes I'm working on.

[ 2020-02-14 15:00:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

This fixes up some major problems with the item template editor. You can now select icons for custom item templates, though the available selections are limited to the icons I'm currently using for other in-game items. I plan to add an external sprite importer, though I could also add in a variety of icons that I own though am not yet using if our community is interested in creating new items for adding to town buildings for unlocking, etc. This patch also adds a second background track with a third track now in the works! v 0.6.3.3 2020.02.12 - Added a new BGM track - Folders in the item template editor can now be slow-clicked to be renamed - Fixed item template icon selection - Fixed item template numeric values not saving properly You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-02-12 12:45:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

Introducing the first iteration of the Item Template Editor.
The purpose of this tool is to allow players to create and test new items for use in-game. I'm very much interested in adding player made content into the base game, and would very much like to run something like monthly contests in the future when things are more refined. A little bit of community effort from a big number of people, can end up being way more useful than 20-30 hours put in by myself.
Currently the Item Template Editor is only accessible in Creative mode, via tha I key. Icon selection is not yet working, I haven't fully tested the loot settings yet, there is no way yet to rename a new folder created via the interface, and some small things, but I will continue to fix those and other features. The base ItemTemplates folder can be located under Users/you/AppData/LocalLow/Big Kitty Games/Solace Crafting to rename folders in the mean time, and I definitely want to make folders and files more obviously different from one another. For a bit more explanation about the long term goal here, this system once refined will allow the creation of items both to be used as ingredients and/or as final products. We will also need an Enchanting Recipe Interface, though enchanting has some changes planned, that I will probably wait to finish before implementing an interface for that, and an upgrade to the building import/export interface. And finally to have a Biome Creation Interface complete with heightmap noise tuning and texture importing. The complete rework of biome creation and management that I am working on will support this well, and allow players (and me) to create and fine tune new biomes, what monsters can spawn there, what encounters can spawn, etc. Once then connected to Steam Workshop, we will have the first wave of tools to really help make a lot of new content possible. Further tools can be made to create and add new encounters, new clothing textures, and new models as well. v 0.6.3.1 2020.02.06 - Added Item Template Editor interface to creative mode You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-02-06 15:06:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

Creative mode is now an option beneath single player, in which building, enchanting, and crafting are all free. You can also take no damage. The primary reason for creative mode being to play around with building tools and item creation, which is in the works, though this is definitely just the first step. There is no "item menu" as is common in some other games. You start out knowing all recipes, and everything ignores the requested ingredients so you can simply craft and build whatever you like. And you can go ahead and level up and adventure as normal like that if you prefer. I was able to build a new computer last Friday. My old PC had some parts that were ten years old. I didn't get anything fancy, but it's definitely an upgrade and is compiling and exporting patches noticeably faster! That also means reinstalling everything, which can take quite a while, and I took it as an opportunity to upgrade Unity from 2018.4.12 to 2018.4.16. As is common when upgrading Unity, after preparing this latest patch I immediately ran into a bug that was causing headless servers to not work at all. It took the greater part of a day from me and a fellow developer to narrow it down and submit a reproduction project to Unity for fixing. Luckily it was something that I can bypass, and it should not be affecting headless servers. What I've been working on yesterday and today, an item template creation interface, needs a few more hours, and should be ready for testing tomorrow. v 0.6.3.0 2020.02.05 - Upgraded Unity to 2018.4.16 LTS - Added Creative mode You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-02-05 14:55:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've been putting some things off waiting around for this and that the past few weeks, and it's just turned into a big time sink. I'm working on one last attempt at some outsourcing, that looks promising, but ultimately the real power that isn't being tapped into right now is our community. On the roadmap fishing is next in line, and I already started working on it a bit, but ever since the new year started I've been increasingly turning my head down a new direction. I'm looking to start actively working on creative mode, Steam Workshop support, and an interface in creative mode to allow players to create items, recipes, and so forth. The capability to create new items and recipes already exists, though things have changed a bit since I created the system and needs to be upgraded a bit, and there is no interface yet which will make it a lot easier to work with. Why? I've always imagined Solace Crafting as a procedural engine simply populated by default with the rules and data that I feed into it internally. I do very much look forward to adding my own main quest lines, class unlocks, unique items, and so forth. However, giving the community the tools to participate in such creative processes and facilitating the sharing and growth of those aspects are what really makes a lot of my favorite games shine. I'm imagining a number of interfaces during world creation with lists of possible encounters, monsters, biomes, loot, and more, for players to import and export freely, and turn on and off as they see fit. I've mentioned this a bit before both here and on Discord, but the time has come to really start working on it. Having said all that, this patch improves a variety of multiplayer aspects including an upgrade to the Steamworks wrapper written by Gary Newman from Facepunch, well known as the creators of Rust. This removes the need for a dedicated server to log in to Steam in order to post itself to the server lists, and will make working with Workshop easier once I get there. Resources will now also attempt to respawn every 7 days. This is also now a world setting that can be changed during world creation or from within using the console. The shaking experienced beyond 10km for multiplayer clients is also fixed.
27 new building pieces have also been added, though there are still unfortunately some problems with them that I am very aware of. A number of them do not line up properly or have gaps in them when placed next to one another. Models that do not have these problems are still in the works, though the shapes will be the same, so if you can look past the cosmetic issue for a little bit, they will automatically update when they are ready. Most of the major changes since the last live update are as follows: - Added loading progress percentages to the start screen and main game transitions - Max "Cave Resource Density" value changed from 0.8 to 0.5 - Updated Steamworks wrapper - Fruit trees watered up to the "Mature" stage will now regrow their fruit with or without being watered - Added 27 new wooden building pieces - Relaxed building obstruction box checks from 2.9m cubed to 2.6m cubed - Terraforming is no longer blocked by buildings - Steel tools now do +5 damage - Resources will now attempt to respawn 7 days after being harvested - Added "Resource respawn rate" harvesting to world settings (/resourcerespawnrate in the console) - Reduced the cost of solace power upgrades - Reduced max near terrain draw distance to 1024 (an alternative is in the works) The latest beta patch notes are as follows: v 0.6.2.15 2020.01.30 - Changed default resource respawn timer from 1 day to 7 days - Fixed a crafting experience bug v 0.6.2.14 2020.01.30 - Fixed animal attacks hitting the host instead of the client - Fixed client skills not working properly past 8km - Fixed client side monsters/animals teleporting around improperly past 8km v 0.6.2.13 2020.01.30 - Fixed crafting experience not enough to level a profession up not being applied properly You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-01-30 06:24:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

The floating point precision fix for multiplayer clients caused some problems that ended up being different for mutliplayer clients and single player clients, so I didn't catch them all at first. This should fix the last of them. If no other major problems are found with this version I'm planning to push it live, with only the new building pieces turned off, as they are still in need of repair, though a fair number of bugs have been fixed since the last live patch. Then I will get back to implementing the new world generation system. v 0.6.2.12 2020.01.23 - Crafting exp will now automatically recalculate itself when your profession level changes due to leveling up from batch crafting - Fixed storehouse storage/deposit slider not working properly - Fixed lower tier fonts blocking higher tier fuel sources from being used v 0.6.2.11 2020.01.23 - Fixed placing objects in single player not accounting properly for world shift 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-01-23 14:08:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

The past few days I've been working on a custom system to replace the current world generation system. The current 3rd party tool that I use was built for a wide-variety of purposes and has a number of flaws that have caused some known problems from day 1. I don't want to go too much into it yet as it's still a work in progress, but wanted to make it clear that that's going on. I took some time away from that for this patch which has one rather large change, that seems to be working well. Floating point precision, you may have heard me talk about before, is a problem where 32-bit floating point values (decimal numbers) can only be calculated with 7 digits of precision. That means that at 10,000.00 meters, or 10 kilometers, you can only calculate down to centimeters. At 100 kilometers, you can only calculate down to decimeters, and so on. This causes graphics and physics to fluctuate back and forth in-between the centimeters or decimeters. This patch does not fix this problem on the server side of things, only on the client side. That is to say it fakes the players position so as to sidestep the graphical problems. On a dedicated server you are still technically 10 or 100+ kilometers away from the start, but often the difference of 10cm versus 11cm on the Physics engine is not super important when you're throwing fireballs. A real fix will someday require that individual pockets of space are managed per player, in order to eliminate the problem server side, but it's quite a headache, and not necessary at the time being. This patch should allow multiplayer play up to around 1000km without any real noticeable problems. I did also find a pretty nasty navigation bug that was causing monsters and animals to lock or, get stuck, or run in odd directions, that is now fixed. A friendly team of Japanese gamers also helped me to translate the Steam store page into Japanese, and I spent some time adding the help menu strings to https://crowdin.com/project/solace-crafting along with a few others, and hope to add the tutorials and other missing strings very soon. I have updated the language files to the most recent build for this patch. Because multilingual support and multiplayer are still works in progress, Solace Crafting is still listed as single player only and in English only on the Steam page. Finishing those two systems up, adding a bit of the polish I've been working on, and incorporating Steam Workshops along with a creative mode and we should have a pretty solid base to start expanding content not just from my imagination, but from our community as well. v 0.6.2.8 2020.01.21 - Added loading progress percentages to the start screen and main game transitions - Added a number of strings to the language system - Updated language files - Temporarily adjusted some of the new building pieces to line up better - Fixed a navigation error causing mobs to stand still/not respond - Fixed the possibility of storage chest data exceeding the network limits - Fixed client side graphical stuttering at long distances on 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-01-21 15:36:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch updates the Steamworks wrapper which is what the game uses to communicate with Steam. The previous version I was using seemed to have a problem where it required dedicated servers to be connected to Steam when they're supposed to be able to logon anonymously to add themselves to the global server list. This coupled with the fact that Steam randomly closes on both of my Linux headless servers every 1-2 days made the servers often disappear from the server list even though they were still running. The California #2 Beta server is now up and running this patch without being connected to Steam, so mission successful. I've also fixed a number of small reported bugs, and am continuing to look into a number of other recently reported bugs.

Dropping 32-bit support

The updated Steamworks wrapped does not support 32-bit operating systems. According to Steam 0.6% of Steam users are still on Windows 7 32-bit, though that number is rapidly declining with Microsoft now having dropped support for Windows 7, and only 0.18% of Steam users are running Windows 10 32-bit. It's not a "nice" thing to do if it does end up affecting anyone, and I sincerely hope it doesn't, but I need to drop support for 32-bit Windows. This will also speed up patching and some things for me, but ultimately it's something that everyone should have upgraded to by now, and if you haven't, according to Microsoft, upgrading to 64-bit does not require purchasing a new license. v 0.6.2.6 2020.01.15 - Updated Steamworks wrapper - Fruit trees watered up to the "Mature" stage will now regrow their fruit with or without being watered - Fixed a bug causing solace storage to multiply when loading worlds more than once per session - Now automatically reducing solace storage slots to the maximum total allowed if they've gone above it - Fixed a bug preventing deleting worlds and characters on Linux - Fixed monsters less than equal to a players level always giving 1 exp v 0.6.2.7 2020.01.16 - Max "Cave Resource Density" value changed from 0.8 to 0.5 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-01-16 04:26:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

I visited a big outsourcing company in Tokyo last week, looking to get a quote on these buildings pieces. Unfortunately they came back with an entirely ridiculous price for me, but honestly that makes sense. When big companies like Sony and Nintendo want something timely and done right, I could understand that asking for a ridiculous amount of money, even for small tasks, could become a normal thing. Serendipitously, the first of two modelers that I contacted last year messaged me in the middle of last week. We both were poor at communicating with one another last year and ultimately I got frustrated and hadn't replied to his last message at the start of December. So I am partly to blame for our "falling out" and I'd like to openly apologize for saying he flaked out on me.
The 27 new building pieces are the pieces that he did for me last year and they still need a bit of work, but I'm going to go ahead and add them in now to let beta players try them out, and see what other shapes we need most. A lot of the textures don't align properly, and some of the models do not quite line up properly, but for the most part there are only small cosmetic issues that he is working to fix up. Now that I've added them into the game, I can replace/update the models very easily. On a side note, I got pretty burnt out last week as the recent influx of players has created a lot of new discussions, private messages, e-mails, and so on. I've added some more channels to the Solace Crafting Discord to try and help keep better track of bug reports. I have also built a private Trello board to help me organize and prioritize the many and always changing things on my todo list(s), as pen and paper have not been enough lately, much as I enjoy them. I'm still behind on messages, which I used to read pretty much every day, so my apologies if there are unanswered bug reports and the like on the Steam forums. I will do my best to get through them all in the morning. v 0.6.2.5 2020.01.14 - Added 27 new wooden building pieces - Relaxed building obstruction box checks from 2.9m cubed to 2.6m cubed - Fixed Frog's Tongue not spawning - Fixed some building pieces not going translucent when aiming where to build them 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-01-14 14:32:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

I visited a big game content outsourcing company in Tokyo yesterday, and requested a quote for 29 new buildings pieces. Trying to expand outward a bit in these ways has slowed down recent patching a bit, but will pay off in the long run. I'm also looking to spend some time polishing and improving some things that have been kind of rushed in over the past six months as mentioned recently, as opposed to rushing into the next thing. There has been an increasing demand for further the multi-lingual support as the system is currently not plugged into everything, I hope to spend time on that next week. This patch fixes a number of problems that were brought in with resource respawning. I've also setup a second dedicated Linux server specifically for the beta branch. On the beta server resource respawning is currently set to 1 day for testing. v 0.6.2.4 2020.01.08 - Fixed harvested (dead) resources and respawned resource counters not always syncing properly from server to client v 0.6.2.3 2020.01.08 - Fixed a problem brought on by headless server hosts no longer being tracked by world generation managers v 0.6.2.2 2020.01.06 - Terraforming is no longer blocked by buildings - Fruit tree interaction now defaults to harvest fruit instead of chop for wood - Steel tools now do +5 damage - Fixed headless servers starting a new world not finishing loading properly - Fixed a problem with 0.6.2.0 attempting to recycle terrains causing problems 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-01-08 15:32:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

One of the biggest problems with public multiplayer servers prior to this patch was the fact that resources are incapable of respawning. This meant that the starting area was stripped clean pretty fast, and anyone new trying to join had an increasingly difficult time finding resources to start out with. This patch adds a "respawn" feature for all resources, which will now attempt to respawn 7 days after they have been harvested. This is true for herbs, trees, ore, etc. I also implemented a system where they remember how many times they are respawning so each respawn re-rolls the rarity check to determine the rarity of normal resources. Thus a common ore might respawn as a legendary ore, or vice versa. The default is set to 7 days, and is also so in single player, though this can be adjusted via the console or world settings when creating a new world. Note that respawning only happens when a terrain is "regenerated" so it cannot happen if you stand and stare at the same spot for 7 days. If you leave and come back, a check will be made against the current time, and the time the resource was harvested. A resource will fail to respawn if there are any buildings placed within a 10 meter radius. I also fixed a couple of annoying issues, one where certain recipes were not showing up as "known recipes," mostly armor pieces that even new characters should know. This was only happening when returning to the main menu from a game, then re-entering. Resource data in multiplayer was also capable of exceeding the packet limit for a single transfer causing heavily harvested terrains to not update properly. This would cause resources to remain on a client even though they weren't on the server to actually be harvested. Hopefully these two problems are now fixed for good. As setting up resource respawning had some slightly "deeper" changes, I've started back up the Tokyo server for testing. Beta players can log into the Tokyo server, which is somewhat of a weaker system than the California server, while players on the default branch can continue to log in to the California server, until beta patches have been confirmed to not cause any major problems. I tried to copy the California server to another instance and go from there, which would be a stronger, albeit slightly more expensive, Linux instance, but just copying it didn't work out. I'll probably setup a new one from scratch tomorrow in any case if all goes well. FYI, there is a bug that I spotted right away with the new beta patch. If a dedicated server attempts to create a brand new world, by defining a not yet created world in the servercfg.dat file or is simply starting up on a machine for the first time, it will not properly initialize. This is because dedicated servers will no longer force the first 4 terrains to remain active with the presence of an invisible admin "player," as the terrains need to be able to turn off and on with leaving and joining players to make resource respawning possible. I will fix that up tomorrow in any case. v 0.6.2.0 2020.01.03 - Resources will now attempt to respawn 7 days after being harvested - Added "Resource respawn rate" harvesting to world settings (/resourcerespawnrate in the console) - Added reporting of current world settings when typed into the console - Increased death marker timer from 1 hour to 4 hours - Reduced the cost of solace power upgrades - Reduced max near terrain draw distance to 1024 - Fixed void and tabula rasa potions calculating as 1 level lower than actual level - Fixed a number of equipment scaling issues - Fixed ladders throwing a harmless error - Fixed server IP not printing to the in-game console when hosting - Fixed multiplayer client day and time not updating immediately post initial connection - Fixed the possibility of multiplayer terrain harvesting data exceeding the network limits - Fixed the possibility of structure data exceeding the network limits - Fixed cases of "known by default" recipes becoming unknown 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2020-01-03 13:29:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

As the New Year approaches we often take time to reflect on the year that has passed, and set goals for the year to come. Setting and refining goals for Solace Crafting however is something I do every week. Instead I am preparing to enter a new phase of development for 2020. I want to share what I mean by that, and make clear the roadmap I'm following towards version 1.0. Sales Financially I had some pretty hard times this year. In March it was looking like I would have to take on a part time job to help cover bills. In May it was made clear to me, thanks to a fellow developer, that I wasn't using one of the more obscure features of Steam that plays heavily into recommending similar games to subscribers. After improving that, and coupled with a short sale, I was able to get back to making enough per month to stay full-time. November then saw the best sales in a month since the initial release in January 2018, and that record has since been entirely demolished by the ongoing Steam Winter Sale. The influx of sales these past two weeks has seen a large enough number of new players, to the point that I have fallen behind on answering questions directly and I can't stress enough how thankful I am for everyone in our community that takes time to help out beginners with questions and concerns. It's a weird mix of stress, with so many things I want to do and that need my attention, but also joy, that I can not only keep working on my passion full-time, but take development into the long anticipated next phase. Outsourcing In September I made a post on our Patreon about setting up goals to start outsourcing contracts for original content. I contacted a freelance 3D artist for new building pieces, and an audio team that had been following us since early access release. Pixel Noise, the audio team, has been great to work with. They are very active, kind, and understanding. The 3D artist I contacted unfortunately went months over our original contracted timeframe, and once again has not contacted me in over a month. I gave up on him and contacted a second artist, who was likewise very eager to work with me, and now likewise has not contacted me in over a month. I think though, those experiences are to be taken as lessons. I am now in the process of contacting outsourcing companies, not freelancers, whose profession as a corporate entity is to do just that, create original content for paying game developers. Outsourcing is intended to help get the ball rolling even faster, as we are in sore need of more building pieces, better facility models, animations, and code. The next goal beyond outsourcing is of course the acquisition of actual full-time staff, though a term-based paid "partnership" with an experienced studio is not out of the question either. The more common alternative is to seek a publisher, who you then pay a percentage of earnings, and generally have to do as you're told to some degree. I set out to create and operate Big Kitty Games as an independent entity from day one, to ensure that Solace Crafting and any other titles I may be fortunate enough to work on in the future remain 100% under my guidance, and are never pushed into marketing scams, or quite frankly poor design. Optimization Mentioning "poor design" might seem in "poor taste" to some, as Solace Crafting is not a highly optimized AAA game, with a fine-tuned interface and wonderful user experience. When I speak about design, I mean more to mention "game design," as opposed to layout or graphics. Not everyone knows that I started out with no formal training, no funding, no experience. I've always only wanted to make a better model for a crafting RPG, and with the distance based leveling and variable based crafting I believe I have opened up new avenues in our genre that will hopefully flower into even greater things from here on. I have grown tremendously as a programmer over these past two years, but that doesn't mean all of the code that I wrote in 2017 or 2018 has magically leveled up along with me. There is still a lot that can be done both to speed up world generation and frame rate, as well as increase the quality of visuals, animation, audio, and more. This too plays heavily into the subject of outsourcing, as developing a game of this scale is simply not something anyone should be doing on their own. I am looking to set aside a week or two in January or February to work on speeding world generation up, as the current system is getting slower with each new monster, animal, and resource I add. Things not on the roadmap With the recent upgrades to support multiplayer, there have been a number of small, mostly cosmetic bugs that have crept in. I always have a feverish urge to move on to the next step on the roadmap, and have already started working on fishing, but it is important that I polish up what's already in-game, and to some degree I've neglected that truth a bit too much recently. Currently we have buildings that don't actually do anything, menus that don't actually offer anything, and resources that can't yet be used. I'd like to push fishing and cooking back a bit further and ensure I get more crafting recipes, building pieces, enchants, and some other things in first. The roadmap below outlines the greater "features" that things like recipes and quests are built on top of, but without an abundance of items, recipe, and places to find them, the drives to travel and explore are lost. Some more general things that I want to get in: - Many more building pieces - Colorable buildings - Customizable lights (color/distance/brightness) - Steam Workshop support - Mod support (recipes, items, textures, 3D models, pre-made buildings, etc.) - Emotes - Partying - Custom map labels - World map (large scale map) - Resource "sensing" skills - More everything: enchants, resources, biomes, monsters, animals, equipment, potions, etc. - Multi-lingual support (wip) Roadmap This is the current roadmap to version 1.0, but do understand that 1.0 is not "the end". The real goal of releasing a bug-free, polished, and content-rich 1.0 is to hopefully make enough money to have a small team of full-time staff continue to create content, as the procedural nature of the game was designed to support, for years to come. Version 0.6 - Crafting material system (iron -> steel) (90% working) - Temperature zones & underwear (90% working) - Fishing - Cooking & nutrition - Farming improvements & breeding Version 0.7 - NPC villages & trading - Villagers (recruitable NPCs with skills) - Quests - Solace upgrades & research - Solace defense improvements - Obelisks Version 0.8 - Combat rework - Monster skills - Skill system rework - Job and class skill trees Version 0.9 - Optimizations All in all we've got a great start to the "tools" required to let players enjoy an endless and limitless game. I really believe the greatest power in modern gaming is the players. Supporting the creativity of gamers around the world, and giving them the ability to add custom content, whether it's an epic quest chain or an interdimensional dungeon, is what really makes a community grow and last. That's why the biome system, that's why everything procedural, that's why unlimited levels. When all of our systems are in and working, we can work as a community to create quests, rewards, and encounters across countless locations and levels, be they difficult, easy, relaxed, or intense. I hope the New Year finds you and your loved ones in good health and good spirits! I'm very much looking forward to 2020 and can't thank everyone enough for joining me in early access! Kyle Postlewait aka Malkere Big Kitty Games

[ 2019-12-31 02:32:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays! Today we had a new problem crop up on the multiplayer server as the total solace count reached over 130! This was too much data for the server to send all at once to newly connected players and subsequently solace interactions were throwing errors for the past 12 hours or so. I hope that didn't leave a sour first impression for anyone trying multiplayer out for the first time. I have fixed the bug by splitting the package into parts and sending them in a queue. I'm also working on respawning resources right now as the starting area has been picked clean! I hope to have that up in a few hours, but wanted to fix solaces as soon as possible. v 0.6.1.24 2019.12.26 - Fixed the possibility of multiplayer world solace data exceeding the network limits v 0.6.1.23 2019.12.24 - Changed exp rewards to range from a base reward of 0.01 to 3 across -9 to +8 levels when compared to the player - Fixed several exp bugs introduced in 0.6.1.22 - Fixed a number of enchants not showing up on the skill tree properly

[ 2019-12-26 06:56:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

Several fixes for bugs reported over the weekend are addressed in this small Monday patch. Wishing every one happy holidays if that's a thing wherever you may be! v 0.6.1.22 2019.12.23 - Fixed schematics always checking for base materials instead of for example steel - Fixed schematic icons showing the missing ? in the crafting interface - Fixed upgraded materials such as steel not awarding exp - Fixed harvesting silk, wax, and resin not "assigning" properly - Fixed town buildings not snapping properly to the "world grid" after switching snap off then back on - Fixed town building signposts remaining during repositioning - Fixed a town building snapping problem specific to multiplayer v 0.6.1.21 2019.12.21 - Fixed a bug making newly placed doors and shutters uninteractable You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-12-23 14:29:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

The past two weeks have been almost entirely dedicated to upgrading what started out as a single player game to work also as a multiplayer game. There are still a couple of features not yet upgraded, solace storage and caves being the biggest. The process of "upgrading" is pretty draining, so I'm going to get back to other things, and everything added to the game from here on is being built to work with/in multiplayer from the beginning. It's just that originally I was not consciously programming the game to be multiplayer. There is also one multiplayer "defect" that I was unable to remedy with the current software I'm using which is a couple years old, so I will be looking to upgrade it probably first thing after the new year starts. Introducing new or upgrading old software can sometimes lead to serious headaches and I didn't want to risk falling behind schedule right before the Steam Winter Sale. The "defect" is that you can't start a dedicated server without being connected to Steam. If you then have your server set to "require steam authentication" it means that you will need 1 account to host, and 1 account to connect with. For now private servers can disable Steam authentication checks and should be able to run fine. And in the near future I will upgrade the software which will hopefully remedy the problem. As this patch is largely an "upgrade" patch it mostly only fixes things that weren't working in multiplayer. I usually don't post "fixed" type patch notes with live patches, but there were some notable bugs fixed with this patch: - Removed Limestone Quarry, Coal Mine, and Magical Siphon as separate town buildings - Fixed fire fonts making meat become inedible - Fixed resource scanners not accepting the proper resources for range upgrades - Fixed not being able to reselect buildings placed on floating islands - Fixed schematics not letting you adjust their level, tier, rarity, and material - Fixed schematic made items not displaying materials edit: added v 0.6.1.20 The latest patch notes are as follows: v 0.6.1.20 2019.12.20 - Fixed solace upgrades going to the wrong solace v 0.6.1.19 2019.12.20 - Fixed multiplayer clients becoming unable to use skills after certain actions - Fixed the town building interface closing then reopening when interacting while open 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-12-20 08:52:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

The past couple weeks have seen a lot of fixes for multiplayer with a number of small fixes for single player as well. This patch has been prepared for a push to the live branch which I hope to do in a couple hours after some quick testing. I will go deeper into what's up and coming with that post. v 0.6.1.18 2019.12.20 - Removed Limestone Quarry, Coal Mine, and Magical Siphon as separate town buildings - Removed Step 4 (Auras) from the solaces tutorial - Temporarily disabled solace storage in multiplayer - Fixed some instances of client-side NPCs not updating their appearance properly - Fixed fire fonts making meat become inedible - Fixed instances of procedural towers not lining up properly in multiplayer v 0.6.1.17 2019.12.17 - Fixed assigning harvesters to town encounters - Fixed Enchanted Stones not spawning in multiplayer - Fixed servers not kicking clients when connecting with a different version - Fixed clients throwing an error while trying to illegally randomize a town NPC - Fixed obelisk firing for multiplayer - Fixed solace defense on multiplayer - Fixed a variety of network objects spawning universally instead of based on client location v 0.6.1.16 2019.12.14 - Added deconstruction capabilities to town buildings - Fixed newly placed town buildings locking up client input upon interaction on multiplayer - Fixed fully clearing a procedural tower causing problems on multiplayer - Fixed harvesting problems introduced with 0.6.1.15 v 0.6.1.15 2019.12.14 - Fixed a variety of problems with multiplayer towns (still a wip/mostly working) v 0.6.1.14 2019.12.12 - Turned on the first wave of multiplayer town capabilities (still a wip/mostly broken) - Fixed arrow skills throwing errors - Fixed harvesting skill points not updating immediately - Fixed crafting skills not syncing properly You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-12-20 05:54:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

The largest change in this patch is the way that special effects like fireballs and explosion are handled over the network in the case of multiplayer. I still need to make some small adjustments, but it's much more performant than what it was previously. I've also added custom output logging that will start a new log file every 3 hours for dedicated hosts, and turned auto-reboot (6 hours) on for the official BKG beta server. Because of the change to special effects, I'm delaying the live patch for another day to make sure this doesn't impact anything unexpected as it's very late and I couldn't test everything I wanted to today. v 0.6.1.13 2019.12.11 - Updated language files - Added custom log file outputs to dedicated servers - Added the option to specify a query port for Steam to query dedicated servers with - Improved spell effect handling over networks - Fixed the close button on the player list not working - Fixed some sounds playing universally - Fixed a bug with server port settings being ignored - Fixed health pools not updating when leveling up in multiplayer - Fixed skill points spent not updating immediately 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-12-11 15:04:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

A player recently voiced their concern of how I haven't been working on single player recently, I wanted to address that openly a bit. I am planning to continue working on multiplayer for the next two weeks, to try and get it as stable as possible for Christmas. If things go well I will add the multiplayer tags and information to the Steam store page. Single player development, which will from then on include multiplayer development as one, will continue as normal after that. The first pass that I made at multiplayer last year around this time was like learning a new language and caused a lot of head scratching and headaches. It took several months just to get things connecting and then I burnt out. I made a second pass at multiplayer earlier this year and was able to get things "working", but again, I got swamped with upgrading so many different things using skills I was still not very familiar with and burned out pretty hard. This time around I'm finding that things make a lot more sense to me. I've made small improvements to a lot of the basic back and forths between the client and server with this patch, and honestly most of the "manual labor" type of work is out of the way. There is still a fair amount of tiny things like, skills upgrade not showing that they've upgraded immediately, and interface "callbacks" like that that I need to improve/get working this week, but the game is starting to run pretty normal in multiplayer mode. The public server I'm renting has been up for over 24 hours without a hitch, though there are certainly still some known bugs to tackle. Having said that, what I'm doing now with multiplayer is really just catching up to where single player is. Once multiplayer is in a better position I will not necessarily return to single player, but continue developing the game to work in either mode. Single player is really just a "host" that doesn't allow anyone to connect to it anyway. Wrapping your head around the idea of a single object being on 3-12 different computers, each with different levels of authority, and what they should be doing with the data provided to them starts out very daunting and confusing, but I've a much better handle on it now, and can code things from here on to work both in and out of multiplayer, rather than upgrading things from single player in clumps. I wasn't feeling well the later half of last week and didn't post, though I did silent patch beta a few times, whose patch notes are included below. As there are some live bugs fixed with these patches I will be looking to patch live shortly, regardless of multiplayer progress. v 0.6.1.12 2019.12.09 - Added an "autoRestart" field to the server configuration file, defining minutes to auto-restart, the default of 0 meaning disabled - Fixed resource scanners not accepting the proper resources for range upgrades - Fixed right-clicking on items in multiplayer - Fixed splitting stack in multiplayer - Fixed bow/equipment change errors in multiplayer - Fixed non-procedural towers in multiplayer - Fixed hunger in multiplayer v 0.6.1.11 2019.12.07 - Added notifications for players joining and leaving multiplayer server - Disabled Unity Anonymous Error reporting for multiplayer hosts - Improved detection of reboot worthy errors for multiplayer hosts - Fixed not being able to reselect buildings placed on floating islands - Fixed returning to the main menu disconnecting Solace Crafting and Steam v 0.6.1.10 2019.12.03 - Map data for multiplayer clients is now stored locally - Fixed schematics not letting you adjust their level, tier, rarity, and material - Fixed schematic made items not displaying materials - Fixed doors, hatches, and shutters throwing harmless errors on multiplayer - Fixed spider's nests, hornet's nests, and scale bug nests not spawning properly on multiplayer v 0.6.1.9 2019.12.02 - Fixed tear/monoliths not showing up on the map - Fixed multiplayer map data requisiton - Fixed phantom resources on 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-12-09 14:11:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's been less than two weeks since our last live patch, so there's not a ton of new "content" in this patch, but there is a whole ton of fixes, mostly multiplayer, which is still very much a work in progress, and actually afflicted with two pretty serious bugs right now. I will be setting out to fix those right after this! There were a couple minor issues with the prior live patch that warranted pushing this patch live, namely town building repositioning throwing errors and the possibility to pull T-1 resources from a storehouse. This patch addresses those, an inability to make rare upgraded resources (steel, etc), and also moves the language files to a visible folder for quick replacement and testing for community members that are kind enough to help improve the translation files in languages they speak. The multi-lingual system is still a work in progress in that not everything is yet "plugged" into it. Happy crafting! The condensed patch notes are as follows: v 0.6.1.8 2019.12.02 - Added background music that will start playing randomly when above ground during the day - Added cave ambiance - Upgraded resources can now be upgraded using rare base resources - Language files moved to "Solace Crafting_data" in the application folder - Fixed repositioning buildings throwing errors - Fixed a bug with town resources coming out as T-1 The most recent beta patch notes are as follows: v 0.6.1.8 2019.12.02 - Upgraded resources can now be upgraded using rare base resources - Language files moved to "Solace Crafting_data" in the application folder - Fixed "withdraw tier" not updating the first tutorial - FIxed the main menu settings interface not turning off the mode select - Fixed a number of item display problems including not being able to change the rarity of advanced materials 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-12-02 06:08:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch is still largely focused on multiplayer though I didn't quite get to finish two major things that I'm working on, mostly the way that map and resource data are transferred to clients. There are however quite a few bug fixes that have been added into beta since the last live patch. Despite the remaining problems with multi-player, I'm hoping to push this build live pending some more testing to be sure that there's nothing in particularly game breaking, such as the tailor's cap bug that came in with the last beta patch. The repositioning of town buildings was not saving villager data properly, causing errors to be thrown in some cases. This also caused villagers to be re-rolled with each placement. This patch should fix that so the same villager returns in the case of repositioning and without any errors. Farming was doubling vegetables in the case of sleeping in a bed while they grow, and they were returning T0 regardless of where/what was planted. The current system, though we will be going through some changes in the near future with farming as a whole, will reduce a seeds tier to match the tier of where it's being planted if the tier of the soil/planter is lower. v 0.6.1.7 2019.11.30 - Fixed a multiplayer tower bug - Fixed planted vegetables and herbs multiplying while you sleep - Fixed planted vegetable harvests not award the proper tier - Fixed repositioning buildings throwing errors - Fixed players that had learned the "Tailor's cap" recipe being unable to craft since (temporary) removal of the recipe 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-11-30 02:34:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Recently I patched into the beta our first original piece of music, made by the duo known as Pixel Noise. You can take a listen to it and read a bit about what they had to say about the track and their vision for future works in regards to Solace Crafting on our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/posts/31916443 There are also a variety of new buildings pieces in the works and hopefully much more to come!

[ 2019-11-28 12:25:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

There was a problem causing the official dedicated server to not save the world files properly resulting in a world wipe with each restart, though client (player) data was saving properly. I have fixed this so buildings and solaces should save and reload properly, though last night's shenanigans were not saved and have been wiped once more unfortunately. The day is still young, I just wanted to push this up as soon as possible to be sure any further changes will be saved properly. I will add to this post if I am able to put out further patches for today as expected. edit: Added 0.6.1.4 v 0.6.1.4 2019.11.25 - Fixed resource scanner range upgrades asking for rare essences - Fixed facility upgrade rarity borders not showing up properly - Fixed some facility upgrade item names clumping up - Fixed multiplayer animations - Fixed mutliplayer audio - Fixed multiplayer recall - Fixed non-dedicated multiplayer hosts not being able to save nor save & quit v 0.6.1.3 2019.11.25 - Fixed dedicated servers having problems saving non-client (world) data - Fixed a chat bug - Fixed the server object showing it's name near the start 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-11-25 03:24:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

With the recent update of some of the networking tools I use there was a couple of new bugs making multiplayer unplayable. I fixed a number of them and improved a couple other problems with multiplayer and am going to take a look at some more of the reported problems over the next few days to try and get multiplayer to a more stable situation. The official server is currently running beta, and will kick non-beta users. I'm looking to setup a beta specific server branch as well. v 0.6.1.2 2019.11.24 - Fixed multiplayer chat - Fixed multiplayer invisible mobs - Fixed dungeon doors v 0.6.1.1 2019.11.23 - Added the ability to spawn town buildings across the network when hosting a saved game (MP towns are a wip) - Added who gathers what to town encounter mouseover descriptions - Improved multi-player facility/interactable interactions - Fixed client-side network objects not positioning themselves properly - Fixed a few smaller multiplayer bugs/warning - Fixed the stone club tutorial not updating with all possible "withdraw" options You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-11-24 04:40:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch includes our first original background music track thanks to the two very friendly guys known as Pixel Noise, who found me back when I was just getting started. I want to write more about it and them on Patreon tomorrow, but wanted to first get the track in-game so that beta testers can give it a listen in-game before we share it online. I'd like to over time have different music for each biome, but for now we've only go this one track, so it will simply start playing within 4-8 minutes of in-game play, and repeat every 8-16 minutes after that, as long as you're above ground and it's daytime. Those numbers might need some adjusting, but we'll see. I've also added in some background noise for cave spelunking. I think it's a bit too loud, but I exported before turning it down further. I will probably half the volume of it tomorrow, but we'll see what people think. v 0.6.1.0 2019.11.20 - Added background music that will start playing randomly when above ground during the day - Added cave ambiance 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-11-20 14:51:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

A variety of requests from the community, we now have sleeping in beds to "skip" the night, I've increased daylight hours from 6-18(6PM) to 6-20, and we can now farm in planters. Planters not only remove the need to terraform for soil tilling, but allow farming indoors as well as in caves. To go with this you can now gather spores from mushrooms to farm mushrooms for healing potions. I hope to upgrade all farming related systems to make use of tier based soil when we get to cooking which will be adding a variety of new resources.
The real prize that everyone is excited about though is of course magic underwear! This patch brings in the new temperature system along with Thread Underwear and it's upgrade Silkenthread Underwear for temperature mitigation. This system is definitely planned for further expansion via potions and enchants for example.
Silkenthread is a product of one of three new resources that can be gathered from special town encounters Scale Bug Nests, Hornet Nests, and Spider Nests. (No giant spiders guarding them (yet)). UI scaling has also been added to the video settings for those extra giant screens. along with a number of fixes like cities pretending to be villages, and material selections not resetting properly. I'm hoping to add our first original BGM track in today thanks to our October Patreon funding, and should be getting a big batch of new building pieces in soon as well from our September Patreon funding. The condensed patch notes are as follows: v 0.6.0.10 2019.11.20 - Added the ability to sleep in beds until just before sunrise, if night has already begun - Changed daylight hours from 6-18 to 6-20 - Added planters for farming above and below ground - Added the ability to harvest mushroom spores from mushrooms - Facilities can now be rotated in 22.5 degree increments -while- snapping - Added underwear for temperature mitigation - Added temperature zones: Cold 1 (snow biome), Cold 2(floating island), Hot 1(upper lava caves), and Hot 2(lower lava caves) - Added Emberstone to lava caves - Added 3 town encounters: Spider Nest, Hornet Next, and Scale Bug Nest - Enlarged the main interface - Added a UI Scaling option to the in-game video settings - Added /resetuiscale as a console command - Upgraded the game engine to Unity 2018.4.12 The most recent patch notes from beta are as follows: v 0.6.0.10 2019.11.20 - Fixed plants wilting while teleporting from underground to above ground - Fixed a growing miscalculation when loading/revisiting farmables You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-11-20 01:14:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've added a fade out and in effect for sleeping as well as finished upgrading plants and town harvesters so that they will properly calculate for the time that passes, along with a number of bug fixes. I'm hoping to push this patch live as the recent few patches have fixed a number of minor but annoying problems currently on the live branch. As always for safety though as even small changes can end up causing unforeseen big problems, I will push this to beta first to make sure the universe doesn't explode. v 0.6.0.9 2019.11.18 - Added a fade effect to sleeping - Town harvesters will now calculate time skipped during sleeping - Planters and tilled soil will now calculate time skipped during sleeping - Removed the "Update" button from trashbins - Changed plant too hot/too cold altitudes to match cold 1 altitude - Fixed the obelisk upgrade UI listing the current rarity as higher than actual - Fixed arcane spellbook and spellbook rotation and scaling issues - Fixed fire essences dropping as common instead of uncommon - Fixed a bug with plants not maturing in planters 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-11-18 13:49:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Beds now offer the ability to sleep in them at night. Night is considered 20 to 5:30, with the sunrise and sunset now being at 6 and 20 instead of 6 and 18. This is still a work in progress in that it just *blips* to the next morning, when preferrably it would do a minor fade out fade in sequence. It also will skip the time as far as farming and town harvesting is concerned instead of properly calculating how long you slept and figuring out what should have been done during that time, which I will add in the next patch. This patch should also fix the recent problems with equipping watering cans. v 0.6.0.8 2019.11.15 - Added the ability to sleep in beds until just before sunrise, if night has already begun (WIP) - Added the ability to rotate and snap planters - Changed daylight hours from 6-18 to 6-20 - Fixed rotating while snapping moving per frame instead of per button press - Fixed a bug preventing equipping watering cans 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-11-15 13:36:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fixed some small bugs with last nights patch. Some reports of watering can problems. If still present, I will check it out! v 0.6.0.7 2019.11.15 - Fixed ground (terrain) aimed facilities not placing properly - Fixed wall torches not always placing properly in caves - Fixed a bug preventing swapping worlds without restarting - Fixed the Steam manager replicating itself with each return to the start menu (benign) 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-11-15 00:23:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Planters are now available as an alternative to tilling soil for farming with the added benefit that they can be used underground making growing mushrooms and midnight's touch now possible. Planters cannot be used to grow trees, and cannot yet be rotated, but I will add rotation tomorrow. I'd also like that they require soil to make, but I'll be getting more in depth with farming shortly after the upcoming cooking upgrade so will get into that then. I've been having a file compression error with one of the caves I've been testing things in. I am curious to see if anyone else runs into this when saving caves while trying out the new planters. v 0.6.0.6 2019.11.14 - Added planters for farming above and below ground - Added the ability to harvest mushroom spores from mushrooms - Increased the strictness at which town encounter spawns check their biome from 50% to 80% - Facilities can now be rotated in 22.5 degree increments -while- snapping - Fixed spellbook rotation when held 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-11-14 14:36:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch upgrades the game engine to Unity 2018.4.12 which provides some small performance improvements and hopefully fixes the wandering mouse problems on Linux. I've also upgraded a couple of major tools that I use, Mirror for networking, and UMA for avatars. There was a growing problem of the character creator taking a long time to either load or switch avatar sexes. The upgrade did not fix it, but I was able to track down the problem and fix it. Upgrading Unity is always a bit scary, but things seem to have gone smooth. There may be a material missing on something or a small problem or two like that, but none that I've spotted yet. I can now get back to some smaller requests that have been floating around for a while before I move onto the next two planned features. v 0.6.0.5 2019.11.13 - Upgraded Unity to 2018.4.12 - Upgrade Mirror and UMA to their latest versions - Fixed the lagg when starting the character creator and/or swapping to male - Fixed material selection staying on for items that it should not be available 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-11-13 12:47:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

Temperature is a bit of a fussy subject in game design. As I see it the ultimate goal of any game design is: fun! Which is a complicated subject, too easy is no fun, hyper-realistic if often no fun at all, and so on. Temperature systems are usually added for a bit realism and a bit of progression, but usually end up doing one or two things that I don't like: 1. Forcing you to wear certain types of armor 2. Making you swap equipment as you walk around in different biomes Thinking of how to avoid those two main problems, as I see them, I've come up with a simple yet still "progression" based system of magic underwear! In this patch there are two levels of temperature for both cold and hot: Cold 1: Snow biome Cold 2: Floating Islands Hot 1: Lava Caves (upper half) Hot 2: Lava Caves (lower half) In order to mitigate the effects of hot and cold you need to craft and wear underwear, a new type of equipment. A pair of underwear mitigates both hot and cold. Basic underwear is made with thread, where "rank" 2 underwear is made with silken thread. This way, it's more of a progression step you only need to clear once or twice (for now) rather than something you need to carry around different versions of for different scenarios. Over time I do plan to add Hot 3 and more, with more advanced underwear to go with them. This patch also enables the harvesting of Aetherstone in the floating islands with a steel pickaxe, as well as Emberstone which can now be found on the lower islands of lava caves. There are a couple of know "bugs" I'm hoping to tackle tomorrow with some software updates: 1. Clicking "Male" in the character creator causing a long pause 2. The cursor leaving the game window on Linux v 0.6.0.4 2019.11.07 - Added underwear for temperature mitigation - Added a UI Scaling option to the in-game video settings - Added /resetuiscale as a console command - Added temperature zones: Cold 1 (snow biome), Cold 2(floating island), Hot 1(upper lava caves), and Hot 2(lower lava caves) - Added Emberstone to lava caves - Plugged in the latest crowdin translation files - Changed solace travel menu tier readouts to round down to the nearest integer - Enlarged the main interface - Fixed cave solaces sometimes repositioning themselves incorrectly - Fixed cave town portals sometimes respawning when returning to them forcing an instant recall - Fixed Earrings default to silver instead of copper - Fixed Villages printing as "Town" and towns printing as "Village" - Fixed a number of material related crafting bugs 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-11-07 13:39:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Coal mines, limestone quarries, and enchanted stones have been in-game for a while offering special resources that can only be acquired through towns. This patch adds 3 more town encounters: spider nest (just in time for Halloween!), hornet nest, and scale bug nest, each with it's own specific resource. Each encounter is set in a different biome except for limestone and scale bug nests which are both found in the desert/badlands. This is partly because I hope to add biome specific recipes to town crafters in future updates, giving reason to have at least an outpost in each biome. There are no giant spiders or bugs guarding the nests yet, but I think that would be a fair addition in the near future.
Each new nest provides a specific resource: spider silk, hornet wax, and scale resin. These new resources can be used to upgrade thread into silken thread, leather into waxed leather, and lumber into hardened lumber. These are "rank 2" materials that are stronger than normal materials, and will be necessary for the next couple patches of content. I've setup these new town encounters to not require a town building be built specifically for them. Instead, only the proper harvester needs to be in town and they can then be set to harvest the special resource instead of their normal resource. I think this is simple and cleans up the town buildings list a bit and I will probably do away with the buildings currently required for coal mines, limestone quarries, and enchanted stones. v 0.6.0.3 2019.10.31 - Added 3 town encounters: Spider Nest, Hornet Next, and Scale Bug Nest - Town Encounter biome checks upgraded, moving enchanted stones to the snow biome - Decreased minimum small encounter and resources spawn height fixing swamp spawns 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-10-31 12:01:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've pushed 0.6.0.2 to the live branch ahead of schedule to clear up some bugs that were found in 0.5.6.15 before proceeding deeper into 0.6. The consolidated patch notes are as follows: - Added a movement key debugger with F5 - Solace storage will now automatically sort the deposit and withdraw list by resource and tier - Increased building max size from 25 from center to 100 in single-player - Added Spider Silk, Silken Thread, Hornet Wax, Waxed Leather, Steel, Scale Resin, and Hardened Lumber (WIP) - Added "Material" property to items and material selection during crafting (WIP) - Added "Resources" crafting category 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-10-31 04:55:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've had 2-3 reports over the years of input problems, not being able to jump or mouse sensitivity changing either when inside or when outside of caves. There's nothing particular in the code that should have either of these effects, but these kinds of things happen when you're playing a game on thousands of different computers. I've added a simple input monitor under the F5 key in hopes it can help me track down the cause of the no jump bug a couple have experienced, as even with their saved games I was not able to reproduce the problem on my computer to try and look closer at it. Besides that there are a few quality of life improvements and storage fixes with this patch. I intend to patch this live tomorrow and will be patching in new content to the beta tomorrow as well. v 0.6.0.1 2019.10.29 - Added a movement key debugger with F5 - Added a method to consolidate solace storage slots if they are not already - Solace storage will now automatically sort the deposit and withdraw list by resource and tier - Removed owner check for solace teleporting in single player - Increased building max size from 25 from center to 100 in single-player - Improved UI performance - Reduced the default target frame rate to 60 and moved it's application to the company logo screen - Fixed a bug with solace storage slots - Fixed luck being able to award supposedly non-existant precious metal rarities - Fixed coal and other resource ingredients asking for tiered resources - Fixed a problem with jewelry enchanting slots unique to 0.6.0.0 - Fixed animals including spiders not properly going passive v 0.6.0.2 2019.10.29 - Fixed a crafting "not enough resources" bug specific to 0.6.0.1 You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-10-29 06:12:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch brings a new property to items: "material". "Metal Gauntlets" are now just "Gauntlets" and can be made from either Iron or Steel. New resources to back this system up include Silken Thread, Waxed Leather, Steel, and Hardened Lumber, as well as four new resources to craft them with. Equipment crafted with these resources provide more armor and do more damage, but more importantly they allow for the gathering of higher "tech" or "rank" resources that require Steel tools. Other "tech" upgrades, primarily temperature mitigation, will be added shortly as well using this system. This required quite a bit of little changes to turn "metal" into "iron" and "Cloth Gloves" into just "Gloves", etc. However, there are a couple of bugs I found on the current live build, so rather than finish adding the new town encounters and everything to tie this system together I'm hoping to push tomorrow's patch (some more small fixes) live before moving further into 0.6. v 0.6.0.0 2019.10.25 - Added Spider Silk, Silken Thread, Hornet Wax, Waxed Leather, Steel, Scale Resin, and Hardened Lumber (WIP) - Added "Material" property to items and material selection during crafting (WIP) - Added default keybinds for the 3 additional hotbars: shift+#, ctrl+#, and shift+ctrl+# - Enlarged and reorganized crafting interface - Added "Resources" crafting category - Fixed town building recipe unlocks still using "ReaperIV", instead of "Reaper rank 4", etc. - Fixed some weapon recipes from skill trees showing up on town crafters as learnable recipes - Fixed the solace storage scrollbar not showing up - Fixed being able to transfer non-fluids back and forth from fluid containers with the transfer buttons Known bug: Schematics are not showing their details in the crafting interface properly, though can still be crafted. This will be fixed in the next 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-10-25 14:12:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch pushes the most recent changes on the beta branch to the live default branch. Building "free" placement mode is definitely the biggest change, giving players the ability to move building pieces freely in 3 dimensions as well as rotate them freely on all 3 axis. During "free" placement mode buildings will not attempt collision checks so they can be positioned intersecting with one another to create asymmetrical designs.
Besides building "free" mode and a host of small bug fixes and improvements there have been a lot of upgrades to the way town buildings are handled. The town interface will now show all possible buildings even for a town that has just been started so you can read the descriptions and know what's what.
Town buildings can also be repositioned freely if you need to move something around a bit. And of course custom town buildings are back and better than ever.
Not all town NPCs can be summoned in this way yet, only from crafting and harvesting facilities, but with a new placeable item called a "summoning circle" you can position and aim where your NPCs will spawn letting you create your own buildings to fit into whatever kind of a town you're building. Currently non-custom town buildings are not editable, but I have plans to change that so that all town buildings will be customizable after being placed. There are also now 9 color "presets" that can be saved and reused for creating matching armor sets.
All in all there ended up being a fair amount of smaller audio bug fixes, quality of life improvements, interface upgrades, etc.. Today I'm getting back into adding a "material" property to items so that we can have steel tools, embersteel weapons, silk robes, and so on. As always, before you dive into any major patch, backing up your main world can never hurt! If there are any problems I will jump right on them. Thank you to everyone helping out with beta and to everyone joining us during early access! Lots more to come! The condensed patch notes from v 0.5.5.6 until now are as follows: Towns - Added the ability to reposition town buildings - Storehouses now store using a maximum per resource instead of a single total maximum amount - Town building descriptions will now display even for already constructed buildings - Town buildings now carry a rank instead of separating between MinerI, MinerII, etc. - Added Summoning Circle for positioning where town NPC will be summoned - Re-enabled summoning NPCs from crafting and harvesting facilities Solaces - Changed solace storage interface similar to town storage - Solace travel locations now show distance and tier Crafting - Added 9 "preset" color slots to the crafting color picker - Added RGB inputs for crafting color picker - Added color picker to facility color/rename interface Building - Building upgrades UI will now auto-select "Deconstruct" initially - Jump (default spacebar) can now be used to engage the selected building upgrade (default now Deconstruct) - Deconstruct with the deconstruction tool will now refund resources the same as the building interface does - Added building "free" placement mode General - Added "Passive monsters" and "Passive spiders" toggles to world combat settings - Added /lightmultiplier setting to the console and world combat settings - Changed the main UI to scale with the height of the screen using a default of 1200x900 - Lava will now deal 20% max health as damage per second instead of insta-kill The latest patch notes from beta are as follows: v 0.5.6.15 2019.10.21 - Fixed a harmless error originating from the building interface due to the solace storage upgrades - Fixed a harmless error when swapping from free to locked building mode without a structure selected v 0.5.6.14 2019.10.21 - Fixed a bug when upgrading older worlds causing town buildings to not interact until reloaded You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-10-21 00:23:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch adds in 9 'color presets' to the crafting window allowing you to save and reuse colors for crafting armor. It also adds RGB value inputs to the interface similar to the storage chest and sign rename interfaces. I also added a color picker to that facility rename interface.
The presets have a mouse over tooltip that say "Click to use, Shift+click to set". These presets are saved per machine, not per player or world and so are shared across all characters and worlds. I also finished some final touches to the swamp biome that had been pushed back repeatedly, fixed a couple audio problems, and added a new setting /lightmultiplier. The light multiplier will allow you to tweak the amount of light rewarded when defeating monsters and clearing encounters. If all seems well I will push this patch live in the next day or two. v 0.5.6.12 2019.10.18 - Fixed the crafting color interface changing position based on screen width v 0.5.6.11 2019.10.18 - Added 9 "preset" color slots to crafting color picker - Added RGB inputs for crafting color picker - Added color picker to facility color/rename interface - Added earth elementals to swamp biome - Added "Passive monsters" and "Passive spiders" toggles to world combat settings - Adjusted swamp ground texture - Added /lightmultiplier setting to the console and world combat settings - Fixed swamp flora spawning under water (still some mangroves/etc near the shore) - Fixed instances of monster and animal noises not properly routing through the "effects" audio mixer group - Fixed a harmless error when moving open bags - Fixed non-summoning facility upgrades showing building requirements - Fixed fonts (water font, etc) not refining resources lower than their tier - Fixed solace interface location and biome not updating as intended - Fixed "combat settings" not turning on when clicked while looking at basic settings v 0.5.6.10 2019.10.17 - Fixed the solace interface not switching selections 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-10-18 08:45:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

This update primarily enlarges and improves the solace interface, removing some outdated solace upgrades. After getting sick, a three day weekend, and a hurricane, this patch is coming out a bit late. I've got one more list of recommended improvements/bug fixes to burn through tomorrow before getting back to work on more crafting. For a quick update on the Patreon monthly contracts status, both of the artists I am working with for September and October are just finishing moving locations and things have been a bit slow, but we have new building pieces being made, and should have a contract for our first piece of original music signed off shortly! Hopefully contracts from November on we will be able to seal and complete before each month ends. Hope everyone is happy and healthy as we head into Fall! v 0.5.6.9 2019.10.16 - Enlarged the solace interface and added more information, as well as separated it from the inventory interface - Changed solace storage interface similar to town storage - Solace travel locations now show distance and tier - Fixed several "that is not yours" problems in single player - Fixed some instanced of unintended animations 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-10-16 14:19:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

I had to take a sick day today, but there were a couple one-liner bugs causing problems I was able to patch up. For players on the beta there was a few hours yesterday in between patches where town buildings may have gone "invisible" despite being still listed in the town interface. I'd like to try and add in tomorrow a previously requested feature that will also work as a remedy for any buildings that may have gone invisible, which is the ability to reposition town buildings. Sorry for any beta players that have run into these issue the past couple days. v 0.5.6.7 2019.10.09 - Fixed clicking Storehouse in the town interface throwing an error when no town is present - Fixed town ranks unintentionally resetting to Outpost v 0.5.6.6 2019.10.09 - Fixed Hunter, Miner, Logger, Quarrier, and Siphoner not showing up 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-10-09 13:15:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Wrapping up the recent set of town upgrades, I consolidated a lot of data and variables into better packages and added a lot more size/detail to the town and building interfaces. You can now shift-click/ctrl-click/shift-ctrl-click resources slots in the storehouse to quick-move them back and forth between inventory and storage (it gives instructions now) and the maximum storage is now per resource instead of one total sum. I also changed the "scale" of the screen a bit. It now treats a monitor with a minimum of 4:3 in mind using 1200x900 as a base to work off of, scaling the interface against the height. I don't have it in yet, but this will make it easy to add a scale setting to let players zoom in/out the interface to their liking. And it should work better on super wide monitors. v 0.5.6.5 2019.10.08 - Storehouses now store using a max per resource instead of a single total max - Increased the size of the town building interface and added more details - Added more details to the main town interface for built and not-built town buildings - Changed the main UI to scale with the height of the screen using a default of 1200x900 - Fixed storehouse upgrades not properly upgrading town population 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-10-08 13:44:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

There have been a lot of small bug reports the past week that honestly, I love! It's so helpful for me as a solo develeoper to get specific reports of "when I did this, this happened," so I can go straight to the problem and fix it. I believe that bug fixes deserve priority and I really appreciate all the posts over the past few days from everyone. This patch consolidates a number of town building variables that had spread across different locations over time. I'm still working on improving towns and the town interface both behind the scenes and as seen by the player. Tomorrow I hope to start getting into some improvements to storage and the Solace interface among other things. v 0.5.6.4 2019.10.07 - Stockpile is now called Storehouse - Storehouse town building prefabs will now all use the StockpileIV model - Improved town building data storage - Changed "Limestone Quarry" town encounter to "Abandoned Limestone Quarry" - Added "Floating Island Portal" interactable description to floating island portals - Fixed a rare bug causing the crafting recipe list to not load - Fixed unequipping a backpack not properly readjusting the inventory - Fixed a bug during placement of a new town buildings - Fixed an occurrence of town building ranks not saving properly - Fixed max storage, harvest rates, and food produced not properly upgrading with increased rank 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-10-07 10:44:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

There was a very nasty bug over the weekend emptying storage chests and facilities on the beta branch. I'm sorry I wasn't able to login Saturday/Sunday and catch the reports. This patch should stop the bug. Sorry again for any lost items due to this mistake. v 0.5.6.3 2019.10.07 - Fixed a bug causing storage chests and facilities to reload as empty

[ 2019-10-07 00:27:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

I was out of town for a few days recently for a wedding and never really found a good time to make that clear here on Steam. Sorry for the late replies on the forums. There were a lot of small requests, and I have tried to address most of them in this patch. The main point of this patch was a bit of behind the scenes work changing town buildings like MinerI and MinerII to just Miner, which then has a rank that can be upgraded from 1 to 2 and so on. Internally this system works a lot better for me as the programmer. While upgrading the systems involved I've expanded the town interface and set the possible town buildings to always all be visible along with more informational descriptions. Town buildings should update automatically, though as always with beta, making a backup of your world before diving in is recommended, just to be safe. I have also found a 3D artist for our September Patreon funding to work on some new building pieces that should be ready to be added in shortly! I hope to have monthly Patreon contracts finished before the end of the month, but since September was the first month I had to poke around a bit and sniff out some good places to find talent. For October I'm already talking with some artists about getting some original music in-game. Starting in November I will be opening polls on Patreon to let patrons vote on what should be improved with the contract(s). v 0.5.6.2 2019.10.04 - Updated town building descriptions - Town building descriptions will now display even for already constructed buildings - Town buildings now carry a rank instead of separating between MinerI, MinerII, etc. - Player direction will now save/load between sessions - Lowered default starting area height slightly so buildings will snap above the surface - Changed default "weather collision quality" settings - Building upgrades UI will now auto-select "Deconstruct" initially - Jump (default spacebar) can now be used to engage the selected building upgrade (default now Deconstruct) - Disabled "attack" sounds when harvesting - Reduced the volume of several area of effect sounds (Stomp, Meteor, Comet, etc.) - Lava will now deal 20% max health as damage per second instead of insta-kill - Auto-harvest is now a unique keybind, default Control + F - Radial Menu is now a unique keybind, default Shift + F - Fixed saved structure placement not snapping as shown when actually built - Fixed saved structures saving items in facilities - Fixed building "select" in caves not working - Fixed "sliding" down even slight slopes after interacting with a ladder - Fixed a number of errors when saving structures You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-10-04 14:47:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

Custom town buildings, a feature that was temporarily turned off a while for improvement is now back on. This lets you create your own buildings to summon NPCs into rather than relying on the default plots. This feature is not yet available for all building types as the current method consists of summoning an NPC via the proper facility. Toolsmiths can be summoned from Smithing Stations, Fletchers can be summoned from Woodworking Stations, etc. In the previous iteration of this feature I was asking players to create a closed structure to house the NPC. This is however rather difficult to program, though it was mostly working, and ultimately just felt too strict. Those requirements have been removed and now all that you need to summon an NPC into a custom structure is a minimum structure size of 2x2x3, a bed, and a summoning circle.
A new crafting item, summoning circles are used to specify where the NPC will spawn. They can even be rotated to control which direction the NPC will be facing. Summoning an NPC will consume the circle and turn the structure into a town building. A single structure cannot be more than one town building at a time. Using this method I decorated a smithy and summoned an Armorsmith with the bed tucked away in a back room.
I've also expanded and centered the town interface in preparation for more detail and explanation in general for the whole town system. For starters all town buildings are now visible in the town interface instead of only the ones that the current town can actually build. I will probably color code these, but more importantly I want to add much more detailed descriptions about what does what. v 0.5.6.1 2019.09.21 - Added Summoning Circle for positioning where town NPC will be summoned - Re-enabled summoning NPCs from crafting and harvesting facilities - Deconstruct with the deconstruction tool will now refund resources the same as the building interface does - Fixed a rare problem with town biome checks - Fixed Siphoner not actually requiring a Magical Siphon - Fixed being able to deconstruct a solace that a town relies on 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-09-21 14:47:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

Introducing building "free" mode! The default building method is now "locked" with a toggle for "free" available in the building menu:
Locked mode has a lot of benefits that anyone who's gotten used to it knows. You can build almost without looking, building tall walls and long halls without even moving. But it's just that "locked" and definitely detracts from the creative side in builders. Free mode loses some of those benefits, but gains a whole ton of freedom. You can move and rotate freely on all 3 axis to get building pieces precisely where you want them. An easy to understand example lies in a fishing dock a player tried to create recently. The "wooden post" piece is aligned to the center of a "building area" whereas a dock would generally position it's legs extending downward from the corners. In "free" mode it's now possible to do that and much more.
The current snap settings are as seen above, though "Free" for movement and rotation aren't working as I was initially planning, I'm thinking I will change them to 1cm and 1d (degree) for extreme precision. I've also been hunting for a 3D modeler to make better use of our Patreon funding, and should have new building pieces patched in in the near future. There are new Patreon goals setup, so please go check it out if you are interested in further supporting development. I'm already talking to some artists about adding original music to the game for next months Patreon spending. This is definitely the first wave of this new tool and there may be some bugs. I've already found that leaving deconstruction mode (available in the general skills tab, the only way to remove freely placed building pieces) the "aimbox" doesn't clear properly, but it's only cosmetic and can be fixed by opening and closing the building interface. Just to be safe though I would recommend first testing the feature on new structures in case of a catastrophic error which could possibly render a structure unable to save. Just in case. I have removed all forms of obstruction and attachment checks for "free" building pieces, and that might be best to leave things that way forever. We'll see how the system grows and if/how important that may be to building progression as a profession in the future. v 0.5.6.0 2019.09.19 - Added building "free" mode - Changed breath to require you to be slightly higher in water than before 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-09-19 07:25:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hotfix v 0.5.5.6 has been pushed to the live branch. I was hoping to get the latest beta patch with the new building "free" placement/rotation mode out today, but it's not quite ready. Should be up tomorrow though.

[ 2019-09-18 14:51:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

A number of small incomplete problems with the new swamp biome and different things like towns and the map interacting with it were found and fixed in this hotfix. If all goes well I will push this live tomorrow and start on the next chapter of crafting updates. v 0.5.5.6 2019.09.17 - Updated language files to the latest community translations (WIP) - Created a mouseover description (non-interactable) for items such as the coal mine, limestone quarry, etc. - Map sections will now update with each visit instead of only the first - Fixed not being able to build floors above stone window 2 - Fixed crafting experience needed to level in the stats window showing incorrect numbers - Fixed mouse wheel scrolling not catching properly in the crafting stats window - Fixed a problem when deconstructing Enchanter town buildings - Fixed Guardian Jacket displaying its name as Guardian Gauntlets - Fixed several Linux only instances of file deletion attempts being made on folder - Fixed snow drawing black on the map - Fixed a harmless error when saving and quitting single-player - Fixed swamp based town NPCs not harvesting anything - Fixed the in-game language selector overflowing the settings window - Fixed terraforming near water (most of the swamp biome) being "obstructed" - Fixed the "aimbox" not updating properly immediately after placing a new structure You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-09-17 04:49:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

This small patch fixes a couple of bugs that were spotted today. There are still a couple bugs with floating islands it looks like that I was unable to get to today, but should be able to wrap up tomorrow. For the usual safety reasons i will push this once to beta first before sending it to live. v 0.5.5.5 2019.09.11 - Fixed solace positions not updating with moved buildings after updating a world causing towns to not be found - Fixed a number of situations attempting to send files to the Windows recycle bin even on Linux causing the game to hang 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users.

[ 2019-09-11 13:53:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

[ 2019-09-10 14:30:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

A number of small fixes prior to pushing this version to the live branch. Just to be safe I will push it to beta once more. If all goes well this version will go live tomorrow. v 0.5.5.4 2019.09.09 - Increased minor light enchant to a base of 5 with 1 per level and to show that the maximum player light is 100 - Removed world biome settings that no longer apply - Fixed player light (illumination) enchanted items not recalculating player light properly on equip/unequip - Fixed player light (illumination) not updating immediately when changed - Fixed many items display their code instead of name on enchanting tables - Fixed a terraforming problem causing raise to not work and flatten to go too low - Fixed being able to plant trees over trees - Fixed town portals and solaces placed/built on floating islands - Fixed buildings and dropped items on floating islands You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-09-09 13:54:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

15 new pieces of jewelry have been added to go along with the 5 new precious metals: copper, silver, gold, platinum, and iridium.
Jewelry is currently a vessel for enchants. Meaning that they do have inherent stats of their own such as armor or damage. They provide extra enchanting slots to make your character even stronger, and will in the future no doubt have some unique recipes and sets. Precious metal rarity is different than normal metal rarity. Copper can only be found as common rarity, and cannot be upgraded. Each "rank" after that can then only be found at maximum one rarity higher, so silver can be found up to uncommon, gold to rare, platinum to elite, and iridium all the way up to legendary. In this patch only copper and silver can be obtained, copper in caves, and silver in swamps. Gold, platinum, and iridium will be added in to higher level content most likely only found beyond a minimum certain distance from the start. Lot's more to come down this avenue, but I would like to polish up this patch, make sure there are as few bugs as possible with the new biome system, and then push the beta branch to the live branch as NPCs are still turned off on the live branch among other things. v 0.5.5.3 2019.09.06 - Fixed tanning racks producing thread v 0.5.5.2 2019.09.05 - Added Copper, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Iridium and their ores (only copper (caves) and silver (swamps) can be found so far) - Added Earrings, Necklaces, and Rings, for each of the new precious metal types - Reduced size of silver nodes - Fixed a bug causing boats to disappear - Fixed footsteps sounds while driving boats - Fixed a bug with the new biome manager placing distant objects improperly - Fixed tower monsters spawning on 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-09-06 00:09:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Found a rare bug thanks to a report in Discord that I'm not waiting until Monday to fix! v 0.5.5.1 2019.08.31 - Fixed a rare bug causing player loading to hang 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users.

[ 2019-08-31 08:13:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

The new biome generation/management system is in and working at last! It hasn't actually been all that many working days, but anything that takes more than a day or two starts to feel like weeks are flying by. There was some pretty rough math, which I do not have a degree in, required for blending multiple layers of biomes together from different directions with different layers of noise to keep things looking natural and so on. I haven't had any problems updating worlds (other than the unavoidable building repositioning) or starting new games, but this is a big change to the base world generation system, so I would highly recommend starting a new world or backing up any worlds you don't want to risk getting weird if you're playing on the beta, just to be sure. To reiterate from last week, the big upside to this new system is that an unlimited number of biomes can now be added in over time without them getting all mixed up within one another. On that note, introducing the new swamp biome!
There are three new resources in the swamp so far, including silver, though they have been simplified to ore, mushrooms, and stalks for this patch until the recipes that make use of them get turned on. I also have at least two new animals that I'll be adding in to the swamp shortly, which will also provide new resources for crafting. I also upgraded the desert / badlands a bit as it was kind of just a big flat landscape. There are new rocks, water holes (new topography), and circling vultures (though they're just an effect, please don't try to build a giant tower in hopes of shooting them down!).
The new biome system does allow me to specify locations or minimum and/or maximum levels for biomes, so for example the swamp biome could be set to only spawn at levels 10+, but I thought that better reserved for other, later biomes (volcano? enchanted?). The initial four "chunks" that connect to the starting area are being specifically set to grass, ocean, desert, and mountains, to ensure that there is "easy" access to ore and water starting out. Now I can get back to the new crafting and harvesting updates with a better system for adding new materials into the world. v 0.5.5.0 2019.08.29 - Added scrolling to the help windows - Added swamp biome - Updated world "update" to mark town building for repositioning to the surface in case of changed surface height - Changed desert biome topography, rocks, and added circling vultures (just an effect, don't try to build a giant tower to catch them) - Changed biomes to generate in 8x8 chunks with 2km blending somewhere within the 6km of the south and eastern edges - Changed player projectiles (spells/arrows) to spawn in front of the player instead of the camera, using a vector generated by what the cursor is over - Changed Squire's Shortsword recipe from a tier 2 to a tier 1 smithing skill - Fixed text in the crafting stats window interfering with scrolling - Fixed equipped bow positioning and angle - Fixed the recurve bow's rotation and harmless warnings - Fixed enchanted stone showing up just about anywhere 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-08-30 00:32:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

The past few days I've been hard at work on upgrading the way that biomes are generated and handled. Our current biomes are ocean, desert, grass, and mountain. The current system randomizes their placement using several different layers of noise placed on top of one another. This works great for a "natural" look as noise can be very random, much like nature. However, this approach also has a variety of problems with it. 1. Noise generally generates a value between 0 and 1, with 0.5 being far more common than 0 or 1. If you use a single noise function to determine your biomes, for example 0.0 - 0.25 = ocean 0.25 - 0.5 = desert 0.5 - 0.75 = grass 0.75 - 1.0 = mountain This means that ocean will always be proceeded by desert, because you can't jump from 0.5 to 0.25. This creates a rainbow effect that looks unnatural, and you'll also end up with a lot more desert and grass than ocean and desert. 2. The rainbow effect is usually coped with by using two layers of noise, often to create a temperature and humidity map to determine biomes. This still however means that biomes near one another on the temperature/humidity map will always border one another, and you often end up with tiny slivers of biomes in between other biomes due to the random nature of noise. 3. Because of the problems inherent to temperature/humidity maps I've actually been layering completely separate noise functions so that grass is the base, desert overpowers grass, mountains overpower desert, and ocean overpowers mountains. This can however lead to sheer cliffs as mountains try to transition from 3000m high peaks to 800m below sea level, and gets more and more jagged and jumbled as more biomes are added. Due to my desire to add a wide variety of different biomes over time, I've long wanted a better system. What I've come up with is a flexible system designed to be able to grow with any number of biomes. There was some pretty nasty math involved that ended up eating a few days of my time, but it's all coming together nicely now.
Put simply, I'm assigning each "chunk" (8km) a biome using deterministic white noise. White noise is "random", in that it doesn't travel from 0-1 but jumps to any value sporadically, yet is still rule based, so no generated data needs to be saved other than the main world seed. As you can see in the picture above, the chunks are still too obvious, and I'm still working on making them less square, but ultimately the system is working and could handle millions of biomes if we had them. The current biomes were also not designed with this system in mind, and will definitely need to be tweaked to better fit into it.
Of course the "chunkiness" is not as obvious from the ground. Another added benefit to this system is the ability to manually assign biomes should there be a need for it. For starters, I have assigned the nearest four starting "chunks" to 1 each of our current "main" biomes: desert, grass, ocean, and mountain. In the old system it was possible to generate a world without mountains or water for many kilometers. This way we can guarantee certain biomes show up if we want them to, limit them to certain minimum or maximum levels, and so on.
Ultimately the main purpose of this system is to bring more resources into the game. We can now make a volcano biome, an enchanted biome, a haunted biome, a swamp biome, etc. Each with it's own monsters, encounters, and resources. It is my hope that in time this will grow into a robust mod-friendly system. As world generation is intertwined with almost all in-game systems, I'm working to make sure that everything is working well, that the blending between biomes is not too sharp, and taking some time to update the quality of the biomes themselves before I push a patch to beta. As always though I don't like to let too much time pass without reporting what's going on. Best wishes!

[ 2019-08-23 14:29:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

In preparation for more recipes and resources I have added 15 new equipment slots: jewelry (2 earrings, 1 necklace, and 2 rings), crafting clothes, and harvesting clothes. Also a requested feature by several players, the player icon on the map now shows what direction you are facing. To coincide with this I've turned on keyboard turning while the map is open so you can realign yourself while the map is open. I've also added a "defense rating" and "offense rating" to the adventuring stats window. These are rough estimates of what level monster you should be able to handle with your current equipment and stats. This does not take skills into consideration and automatically bases itself off of whatever you primary damage output is (melee/ranged/magic). v 0.5.4.3 2019.08.16 - Added icons for the recently added crafting skills - Added defense and offense ratings to adventuring stats - Added the ability to turn with the keyboard (default Q & E) while the map is open - Added harvesting clothes, crafting clothes, and jewelry equipment slots - Added crafting professions stats window - Changed the player icon on the map to display player direction - Changed two-handed weapons to apply double the speed reduction from any applicable crafting skills - Increased minimum armor of non-simple armor to 1 - Fixed enchanted building supplies not forcing the magical essence ingredient to tier 0 - Fixed a lot of new items printing their number instead of name when dropped/picked up - Fixed the console command /help requiring a space after it - Fixed crafting speed skills adding speed to equipment instead of reducing it - Fixed recipe details showing all tool strength types - Fixed repeatedly clicking on tools increasing their strength and speed 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-08-16 14:56:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

Sorry for the pause in development, but I'm back home after visiting my family overseas, and back on the job! This patch brings in a number of fixes for terraforming, building snapping, and the new crafting skills. v 0.5.4.2 2019.08.13 - Changed town building snapping to step 1m at a time instead of 3m horizontal and 1.5m vertical - Changed all terraforming changes to be slightly lower than listed to keep buildings from sometimes spawning a millimeter beneath flat ground - Fixed grass not updating after terraforming operations - Fixed monsters ignoring terraforming changes when spawning in terraformed areas - Fixed crafting skills not saving/loading properly - Fixed right-clicking an edible item to eat it throwing a harmless error - Fixed a spelling 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-08-13 13:40:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Lots of new weapons and shields in this patch along with some fixes to the recent town additions. I have not had the time the past couple days to create unique icons for each of these new items and the new skills, so this will be added to beta for now, where it will have to sit for a while as I am going to be out of town until the 10th. This finalizes a few system though that now make it quite easy to add new equipment either known, as a drop, or unlockable via towns or skill trees. Both the stats for the new items, and the benefits of the new crafting skills will no doubt need some balancing over time, and definitely more crafting skills are still needed for all professions. v 0.5.4.1 2019.07.29 - Added 34 new weapons/shields learnable via town crafters and crafting skill trees (stats/icons are a wip) - Added 12 new crafting skills (stats/icons are a wip) - Map markers will now clear per terrain prior to it loading forcing all yet present markers to refresh - Fixed magical essence not making it's way into the storehouse - Fixed Magic Siphon town building not automatically positioning itself - Fixed Enchanter NPC displaying as Null - Fixed Town and Terraforming buttons in the inventory working in multi-player (both are currently disabled in multi-player) - Fixed Coal Mines, Limestone Quarries, and Magical Siphons not properly giving the option to deconstruct in the town interface 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-07-29 13:50:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

A new town resource and two new town buildings to handle it are in allowing crafting all the way up to enchanted construction supplies. This patch also fixes a bug that was stopping towns from upgrading past Hamlet status, cause Village, Town, and City buildings to never make it to the buildings list. NPC are back on, and I've also added Enchanter I-IV, though it's just a placeholder building, and they don't teach anything yet. v 0.5.4.0 2019.07.24 - Town NPCs are spawning again - Added Enchanter I - IV (WIP) - Added Enchanted Stone town resource to snow biome - Added Magical Siphon and Siphoner town buildings for gathering Magical Essence from enchanted stones - Halved drop rate of schematics from quality 0 (normal) monsters - Fixed swapping between bow animations and default animations making the player enter a T-pose for one frame - Fixed towns not upgrading beyond village 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-07-24 14:16:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

Mostly small bug fixes and a number of upgrades to multi-player connecting, pushed now live from the beta branch. Beta update soon to follow. The condensed patch notes since the last live patch are as follows: v 0.5.3.7 2019.07.23 - Added /targetframerate to console commands - Turned off demon pathing - Enabled multi-player in non-beta builds - Multi-player saved games are now bound to client's Steam ID (if server requires it, default: yes) - Login attempts using a character name already registered to a different Steam ID will report: "Kicked: Save name + Steam ID mismatch" - Login attempts to servers using a different version than clients will report: "Kicked: Game version mismatch" - Login attempts to a server requiring a Steam ID with a client not connected to Steam will report: " Latest patch notes from beta are as follows: v 0.5.3.7 2019.07.23 - Enabled multi-player in non-beta builds - Fixed headless multi-player servers trying to save the local player - Fixed a bug stopping connecting from the server list You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-07-23 10:31:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

A feature intended to only affect multiplayer clients was messing with single player causing buildings to be displaced. They are not missing, they're just too far away to see or interact with. Implementing an auto-correct feature would be equally dangerous, and hopefully this has yet to affect too many people (beta only, only past 8km+) If this bug has affected any of your buildings I'd be glad to repair them if you send me your saved world via Discord. Sorry for the trouble! That's why we beta is so important. v 0.5.3.6 2019.07.23 - Fixed a bug displacing buildings 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users.

[ 2019-07-23 05:52:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

I started a survey last week that is still and will remain open for a while. If you didn't catch it last week you can fill out here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/8XYVZSD Here are the averaged results thus far:








Imagine that, the community for a game called Solace Crafting would be interested in more crafting! =D It warms my heart. Before getting back to deepening crafting, there are few things that I need to stabilize a bit, primarily with towns. I will also be out of office visiting my family in the States, from the 30th to the 9th. I'm a designer by heart, so I will enjoy the time away from programming to flesh out the upcoming improvements in my array of notebooks. Today I also have a patch, that brings some fixes for both single and multi-player, including the binding of multi-player client accounts to their Steam ID. This is optional, and can be disabled in the servercfg.dat after it has been updated to the latest version by opening the game once. There is also a new console command /targetframerate that will cap the frame rate at the set value, which is now set to 90 by default. There is not a input field in the settings window yet, though I will add one. Note that vsync will override this setting unless turned off. This was added primarily because without any form of capping the CPU or GPU can basically end up running full tilt at 200+ fps on stronger machines, and it's just not necessary/can cause heat problems. This and other commands can be seen by typing /help in the console. This patch will go live on the beta branch first, and assuming nothing is out of order will be pushed live tomorrow. v 0.5.3.5 2019.07.22 - Added /targetframerate to console commands - Turned off demon pathing - Changed initial equipment loading to end with holding main hand weapons instead of sledgehammer - Fixed weapons/tools with missing 3D models (recurve bow) from throwing errors/stalling loading if saved while equipped - Fixed "craft" button unintentionally showing up on schematics in chests and bags - Fixed a number of spelling errors - Fixed recurve bow not displaying a 3D model - Fixed bow idle stance animations not turning off when swapping weapon sets from bow to empty handed Multiplayer: - Saved games are now bound to client's Steam ID (if server requires it, default: yes) - Login attempts using a character name already registered to a different Steam ID will report: "Kicked: Save name + Steam ID mismatch" - Login attempts to servers using a different version than clients will report: "Kicked: Game version mismatch" - Login attempts to a server requiring a Steam ID with a client not connected to Steam will report: " - Reset multiplayer hotbar buttons - Fixed wand and bow basic attacks - Fixed enchanting table and transmogrifier not picking up properly - Fixed enchanting skill purchases not updating immediately - Fixed enchanting skills not saving/loading properly - Fixed distant water not loading on clients 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-07-22 13:50:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

I get the feeling I've been working on too many things at once lately. It's understandable because there is so much I still want to get done from here on, regardless of how far we've come, but it feels like there are too many "unfinished" features in-game right now. I'm actively working on towns, villagers, crafting skills, and multi-player, more or less all at once, with 5-6 other things I'd really like to get started, all while trying to clean up the project to get ready for the possibility of additional staff. In light of which, I'd like to take this opportunity to reassess where priority should be given, both in my opinion as well as the communities. I have prepared a small survey to try and gauge how the community feels about how things are, what's to come, and would very much appreciate everyone's time in answering: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/8XYVZSD As for my own thoughts, here are the things I am working on right now: 1. Multi-player Multi-player has 1-2 major bugs at the moment I'm actively working to fix. I am also working on improving the connection process both to better explain the current state of an attempted connection, and to bind server-side saves to client SteamIDs, and/or offer per-character password protection for servers not interested in requiring an active Steam connection. A number of features are currently turned off in multi-player, most notably caves and towns. Caves and floating islands shouldn't be very difficult to get working and more than anything just have not been tested yet, and should make there way into multi-player soon. Towns will no doubt require a bit more work, and are not currently planned to be added to multi-player until they are further fleshed out in single-player. Multi-player specific features such as partying and being able to tell where your friends are on the map or compass, I do want to get the basics of in and working, but for the most part plan to dedicate most of my attention to single-player most likely until we have additional staff. 2. Town buildings and villagers + Steam Workshop The current town system has a strong base, but is still missing a lot of meat. I want to re-enable the custom building + villager summoning options with less strict building requirements as the primary (cheapest) means of summoning villagers rather than the current pre-made structure plop method. While still of course offering the plop method for people that aren't as interested in building. This also plays into the first phase of Steam Workshop integration which I have been researching lately. In short, an in-game way to upload saved structures to Steam Workshop for sharing with other players around the world. Steam Workshop integration once working, will eventually branch off to items, skins, quests, and more, but with most of those types still further down the road. Villagers, or town NPCs, were temporarily turned off while undergoing some changes, and have remained off for too long. I want to get them at least appearing again as soon as possible, but ultimately am looking to upgrade them into having stats and skills that grow over time. This may be more of a luxury system than something needed right now, and judging by the results of the survey may be pushed to the back burner. 3. Crafting and harvesting skills and facilities One of the biggest "eye-openers" I've come to accept over the past couple months is that Solace Crafting is not a game where player level is the deciding factor as to where a player can travel and survive. It's not difficult for a level 20 player to craft and enchant gear strong enough to let them survive just fine in level 25 or 30 territory, for example. That switch in mentality, that it's more about gear and skills than it is actual player level has done away with my hesitation to add more crafting and harvesting skills. I was worried about making already "overpowered" equipment even stronger, but realize now: that's ok! I want to add an "offensive rating" and "defensive rating" showing roughly what level monster your offensive and defensive capabilities should be on par with. This will be pending some equipment math changes as there is some multiplication currently being used that gets out of hand at higher levels. The current enchanting skill tree gives a decent example of where I want to take crafting and harvesting skill trees. Providing higher level recipe unlocks as well as improved skills to be chosen and unlocked over time. With the recent implementation of schematics we have already started to introduce more powerful equipment, and soon with skills like "smithing melee damage" it will be possible to specialize specifically to your characters play style, slowly making their equipment stronger and stronger. This also plays into the benefits of multi-player play, as one smith can focus on armor, while another can focus on weapons. Note that there will of course never be any skill caps added in single-player limiting anyone from upgrading both armor and weapon skills, for example, it will just take longer to try and "master" both by yourself. 4. Continuing towards version 1.0 There is a lot that I was originally planning to get in prior to 1.0 that I think now will actually be better after 1.0, the biggest of which is the elemental planes. They will add a lot of depth to exploration, new resources, new monsters, and so on, but I think some of the more obvious features that we are still missing and general optimizations should be checked off before we dive too deep into more "advanced" features such as that. Some of the features I consider important for version 1.0 include cooking, fishing, monster skills, and quests, as well as adventuring jobs and classes. I should make it loud and clear, here and now, version 1.0 will be no where near the end of development for Solace Crafting. It's a major step to transition out of "Early Access" into "Released" and is also a prerequisite for many players and organizations that are tired of early access games being abandoned and so just don't cover/play them at all. Releasing version 1.0 is most likely not something I can do on my own, as optimization and polish is a big part of it. But, as sales slowly increase, the prospect of additional staff grows closer and closer to reality.
As always, feel free to comment here, start a discussion on the discussion boards, or join us in Discord at discord.gg/solacecrafting and thank you everyone for your support! Kyle Postlewait Big Kitty Games

[ 2019-07-15 06:13:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

Due to some extra information that was added to the base Item class for schematic support, item comparison checks were failing causing similar items to not stack properly. This patch addresses that. v 0.5.3.4 2019.07.12 - Fixed an item comparison error causing items to not stack properly You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

[ 2019-07-12 05:11:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

A "smaller" live patch since we patched live last week, this patch primarily brings in schematic drops along with a wave of bug fixes. Last weeks last live patch actually "leaked" crafting skills, which are turned off again for this patch, though they will be on and working in the next beta patch. Our Discord server is also now an official discord server and can be searched for via the Discord server discovery button or directly via: discord.gg/solacecrafting Condensed live patch notes: - Added [/help commands] to the console to display a list of console commands - Added "Craft" button to the inventory when a schematic is selected - Added a "Discord" button to the start screen that opens a link to the official Discord server - Added crafting schematics as general drops to all monsters and chests - Reset known enchants - Enchanting point and spent points should now auto-correct themselves if they do no properly reflect how many enchants have been unlocked on the enchanting skill tree Latest patch notes: v 0.5.3.3 2019.07.11 - Added [/help commands] to the console to display a list of console commands - Improved the stone texture on the medium round building parts - Fixed an error where the schematic generator would try to generate tools - Fixed "dead" monoliths adding their icon back to the map - Fixed building structure load windows not resizing to allow for scrolling when more than 14 premades exist - Fixed a bunch of broken console commands - Fixed holding control to snap structure placement mode throwing an error - Fixed larger building pieces not placing properly when manually loading a rotated structure You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-07-11 09:52:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's Saturday! But, no rest for us indie devs! The schematic system was a bit over complicated in the way the code was separating itself from the standard item system. I was able to simplify it quite a bit by rewriting a number of things, though unfortunately at the cost of losing all schematics up until now. My apologies for that. This should fix the storage problems schematics were having. v 0.5.3.2 2019.07.06 - Added "Craft" button to the inventory when a schematic is selected - Fixed deconstruction of buildings that require light return an item called light to the inventory - Fixed a number of storage problems with schematics 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-07-06 15:29:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've added a "Discord" button to the start menu that will open up a link to the official Solace Crafting Discord server. Also fixed a few things and added in a number of new "words" to the schematic prefix/suffix pools. v 0.5.3.1 2019.07.05 - Added a "Discord" button to the start screen that opens a link to the official Discord server - Added attributes as possible schematic words as well as health and energy - Changed "levels" display of schematic bonuses to actual base numbers - Changed schematic tier multiplier to an addition per tier - Fixed changing levels of schematics throwing an error - Fixed some cases where boats could despawn after traveling in them more than 1 kilometer 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-07-05 14:37:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Schematics, now dropping all over, enable the crafting of much stronger than usual equipment. The easiest way to understand them is to see them!
Above is a very basic schematic. It's tier 0 meaning it was found within the first 5km of the starting area, and it's also quality 0 which is equivalent to "common". It has a prefix and a suffix though in actuality common and uncommon schematics will only drop with one or the other, though it makes the explanation easier to follow. The first row of stats for the schematic is the bonus that the schematic itself applies to the equipment when crafted. Meaning this pair of leather gauntlets will have a bonus +2 levels of armor when compared to a normal pair of leather gauntlets. In other words even if you crafted them to be level 0, they would have the same armor as a pair of level 2 gauntlets. The second row is awarded by the prefix "Lesser Sturdy" which doesn't roll of the tongue very well, the words are a work in progress. Lesser means the prefix itself is quality 1. Qualities being: minor, lesser, nothing (ie: just "Sturdy"), improved, and major. You can see the suffix, the third row, is +4 levels, because it is "Improved" or quality 3.
This schematic is the same schematic, but quality 3. Notice though the schematic bonus has improved, the word bonuses remain the same. This is because the schematic quality is independent of the word quality. Schematic quality is however the most important factor, as it is used to determine how many words there are (1-2), and what quality they are.
This schematic is the same schematic but from a T10 area (50-55km). The stats overall have gone up using a multiplier, meaning higher quality schematics and words are more affected by the tier than lower quality.
Notice that even this T10 Q3 schematic can still be crafted at level 0, tier 0, rarity 0. This is only a schematic and can still be customized just as with normal crafting recipes and enchanted as normal. Schematic drop rates are (monsters/chests): Quality 0: 5% common Quality 1: 10% common, 10% uncommon (champions, monoliths, chests) Quality 2: 20% uncommon, 20% rare, 9% elite, 1% legendary (heroes, chests) Quality 3: 40% rare, 50% elite, 10% legendary (rare high tower chests) Schematic word count rates are: Common: 1 Uncommon: 1 Rare: 50% 1, 50% 2 Elite: 25% 1, 75% 2 Legendary: 2 Schematic word quality rates are: Common: 90% minor, 10% lesser Uncommon: 50% minor, 50% lesser Rare: 10% minor, 40% lesser, 50% normal Elite: 30% lesser, 30% normal, 40% improved Legendary: 30% normal, 40% improved, 30% major I don't have a ton of words in yet, but the system is completely modular and can be added to with ease. The data stored on schematics and items is also not hard numbers, but references, meaning any changes to the system will be reflected on anything already owned. This will also allow for players to tweak the settings once I make accessible command to do so with. In time I hope to have set words, "unique" schematics, etc. Lot's of ways to expand on this and other upcoming systems! v 0.5.3.0 2019.07.04 - Added crafting schematics as general drops to all monsters and chests - Reset known enchants - Enchanting point and spent points should now auto-correct themselves if they do no properly reflect how many enchants have been unlocked on the enchanting skill tree - Fixed some resources not properly applying the resource multiplier 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-07-04 12:55:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Some more bug fixes before I push new content to beta! v 0.5.2.7 2019.07.02 - 'S' will now push the "split" button if the inventory is open and an item is selected that can be split - 'D' will now push the "drop" button if the inventory is open and an item is selected that can be dropped - Turned off water barrel recipe (wip) - Fixed town building deconstruction - Fixed enchanting skills not saving properly - Fixed furniture and facility placement rules - Fixed transmogrifiers accidentally placed on the ground from reloading giant and unusable. They must be picked up and moved back to a building or any items placed on them will be lost. - Fixed mountain trees leaving behind colliders - Fixed a number of harmless "missing script" warnings in the console during startup - Fixed a small error with floating islands - Fixed a harmless DNA warning during during loading - Fixed a harmless warning sometimes thrown in the last frame of disconnecting from a server - Fixed a harmless world area encounter removal warning - Fixed a bug sending dedicated server into single player You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-07-02 14:24:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

Another small patch to both live and beta to fix up some of the latest bugs. v 0.5.2.6 2019.06.27 - Fixed a bug when interacting with limestone quarries and coal mines - Fixed upgraded buildings not deconstructing properly - Fixed WarehouseII disappearing upon reload You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

[ 2019-06-27 13:34:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch fixes a bug with loading older saved games that was sometimes causing the town interface to lock up preventing building. v 0.5.2.5 2019.06.27 - Fixed a bug with older saved games that could break the town interface - Changed the town interface to read "None" instead of "Null" when no town is present

[ 2019-06-27 00:55:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

There are still a number of upgrades and improvements being made to the new town building functions, but there were a few bugs on the live branch that make it worth pushing this patch live even if it's imperfect. If there are any problems, please just let me know and I should be able to tidy them up within 24 hours. Note that this will wipe town buildings, wells, and ground torches for players that have not been playing on beta but on the live (default) branch as changes had to be made to the way some things are saved and loaded. I also added in a number of crafting skills for each profession, but have turned them off for this patch and will turn them on tomorrow with the next beta patch. With a number of new town building types in and working, I can now add recipes for "purchase" to all professions. With the crafting skills I'm working on I can also now add them as unlocks for reaching certain levels in crafting professions, for example. I for one am looking forward to lots of new armor, weapon, and enchant sets. I want to spend some time further upgrading multiplayer, and then hope to start working primarily on the new villagers systems next. The condensed live patch notes are as follows: v 0.5.2.4 2019.06.26 - Added bonus armor, speed, and damage as possible variables to item templates - Harvester town buildings now generate per hour instead of per day - Added "Open Journal" to keybindings - Added the Limestone Quarry town encounter to the desert biome - Added Recurve bow to the Fletcher (initial test) - Added Limestone and Coal as items (to be mined via towns, WIP) - Added Mason, Engineer, Arcanist, Arable Farmer, and Pastoral Farmer town buildings - Town building deconstruction now refunds 100% of the costs of the most recent upgrade - Player buildings and building upgrades now refund 100% of their cost - Added crafter buildings: Tailor, Leatherworker, Armorsmith, Weaponsmith, Toolsmith, Woodworker, Fletcher, Artificer, Stoneworker - Added unlockable recipes to tailor, leatherworker, and armorsmith - Added carpenter building that crafts wooden construction supplies needed for Hamlet+ buildings - Resource scanners are now craftable items that can be placed on ground or buildings - Storehouses can no longer be deconstructed while other town buildings are present - Solaces can no longer be deconstructed while town buildings are present - Changed the way that wells and ground torches are saved, forcing a wipe of all wells and ground torches - Changed the way that town buildings are saved, forcing a wipe of all town buildings - Added town building placement obstruction and underground checks - Initiating town building placement will now place the "dummy" 6m in front of players close to the ground - Servers now properly updating their player count - Server list temporarily not showing player count, ? instead, server details will show player count when selected - Facility owners can now lock facilities they own preventing others from interacting with them - Solaces can now be locked making them not show up for other players on the travel list - Added an automatic unstuck attempt post teleportation if the player is found to be underground The latest v0.5.2.4 patch notes are as follows: v 0.5.2.4 2019.06.26 - Fixed limestone quarry and coal mine interfaces not refreshing their details - Changed item template bonus armor and damage from a percentage increase to a flat integer - Fixed storehouses overflowing past their storage limit - Harvester town buildings now generate per hour instead of per day - Fixed the crafter town building "crafting" button not working - Interacting with a non-building material crafter town building will now go straight to upgrades - Fixed construction supplies recipes secondary ingredients not remaining at tier 0 as they are intended to You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-06-26 14:21:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

I'm working to stabilize the current beta build as much as possible while adding a few finishing touches to the new town features so that I can push a stable build live tomorrow. This patch addresses a number of small bugs and semi-rare problems.

Town Signs

This patch also adds signs to most town buildings, though I still want to give each building a more unique look as far as the shape and designs go. This also adds the "harvesting" tab to harvesters which will be used for more in the future, but for now allows quarriers to be assigned to local limestone quarries, and miners to local coal mines. Assigning a harvester to one of these resources is the only way to attain them.

Encounter Spawning

Finishing up a rule-based addition to the terrain generation I started a while ago it's now possible to add encounters with a single line of code, as was the case with the new limestone quarry (once the extremely low quality model was finished, sorry it's not more interesting). Encounters can now be assigned to a specific biome, and as such coal mines are now only found in the mountains, including the snow biome, while limestone quarries can be found in the desert. Note that if playing on a old save, areas that you have previously visited may have saved coal mine or limestone quarry locations on the map that are no longer there (if they were in the wrong biome).

Equipment Upgrades

I've also finished upgrading a step forwards in equipment management that now allows a percentage of bonus armor, speed, and or damage, to different equipment recipes. For starters I have added an extra +10% armor to all of the recipes available for unlocking on the armor crafters, as well as a recurve bow recipe on the fletcher with +10% damage. Mostly for testing purposes at this point. If all goes well I will add a variety of recipes to all of the crafters locked behind increasingly higher levels of resources. Eventually we'll want to have enchanting recipes, armor sets, and much more available for research and unlocking at towns, and other town buildings not yet added. v 0.5.2.3 2019.06.24 - Added "Open Journal" to keybindings - Added the Limestone Quarry town encounter to the desert biome - Added Recurve bow to the Fletcher (initial test) - Quarriers can now be assigned to harvest from local limestone quarries - Miners can now be assigned to harvest from local coal mines - Recipes bought from town crafters now produce 10% extra armor or damage (initial test) - Upgraded town encounters to be biome specific (Coal Mines are mountain/snow) - Removed the leaves from the beach/underwater terrain texture - Fixed procedural towers setting their terrain location to 0,0 causing teleporting to solace place on cleared procedural towers to send the player to terrain 0, 0 - Fixed monster drops attempting to save with claimed procedural towers throwing errors after reloading - Fixed a bug making procedural towers spawn even when premade towers should be - Fixed the chat interface locking controls in certain cases - Fixed not being able to use Strong hit on "basic" cave resources (boulders/stalactites) - Fixed the Steam client attempting to restart when returning to the menu - Fixed UMA throwing an error in multiplayer - Fixed an error when receiving resource data for an already disabled terrain - Fixed town encounters shifting twice as much as they should on the map - Fixed an error that could spam per frame when a targetted solaces data can't be found - Fixed death and revive animations not always working in multiplayer You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-06-24 13:31:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

New buildings, town fixes, and crafter recipe fixes.
Here is a rough list of the current buildings and their purposes, keeping in mind this is not at all a complete list of the planned buildings:

Storage / Town Centers:

Stockpile I-IV (Outpost) Storehouse I-IV (Hamlet) Warehouse I-IV (Village) Depot I-IV (Town) Vault I-IV (City) These allow for storage of raw resources, and are where harvesters will store their harvested resources. They also define the maximum population allowed in a town, and the "rank" of a town.

Producers:

Forager I-III Arable Farmer I-III Pastoral Farmer I-III These generate the towns food. Fishers, Inns, and other buildings are also planned.

Harvesters:

Reaper I-V Hunter I-V Miner I-V Logger I-V Quarrier I-V These are the main resource harvesters. The amount of resources they gather is now dictated by two factors, the level of the building, and the biome of the town. In the near future the villager assigned to work as the harvester as well as their equipment will also affect the amount of resources gathered.

Builders:

Carpenter Mason Engineer Arcanist These specialist crafters can prepare construction supplies that are required to craft most buildings that require the town rank of Hamlet or above. The Carpenter currently only requires lumber and metal to prepare wooden construction supplies, however the Mason requires limestone, the Engineer requires Coal, and the Arcanist requires ??? in order to prepare stone, metal, and enchanted construction supplies. Coal mines were added in the past for this purpose and limestone quarries will also be added, though the process of actually connecting them to gather coal and limestone is not yet working.

Crafters:

Tailor I-IV Leatherworker I-IV Armorsmith I-IV Weaponsmith I-IV Toolsmith I-IV Woodworker I-IV Fletcher I-IV Artificer I-IV (staves and wands) Stoneworker I-IV These are/will be the main source of crafting recipes beyond those that players start with. Other planned buildings include enchanter and alchemist. The basics are in and working. The biggest problem I need to solve next is getting coal mines and limestone quarries working so that the higher ranked buildings can be constructed. Currently a lot of the buildings are also placeholders and look the same, which is no fun. Because I intend to change the look of many of the buildings, and because some of the building upgrades will most likely require making the buildings bigger (farmers for example) I have made both player buildings and town buildings provide 100% refunding for deconstruction. I was thinking of adding a "move" feature for buildings, but deconstruct and reconstruct is nearly as good. Keep in mind this only refunds the most recent upgrade for town buildings. Resource scanning was updated in the last patch, and soon auras will be brought back in via a new craftable/upgradeable shrine system which I will talk about when we get there. v 0.5.2.2 2019.06.18 - Had to reset foragers once more - Fixed armor set recipes only showing up for Tailor - Added Limestone and Coal as items (to be mined via towns, WIP) - Added Mason, Engineer, Arcanist, Arable Farmer, and Pastoral Farmer town buildings - Added higher ranks for most buildings - Relaxed town building obstruction checks a bit - Fixed town building obstruction checks on rotated buildings - Town building deconstruction now refunds 100% of the costs of the most recent upgrade - Player buildings and building upgrades now refund 100% of their cost 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit Windows users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-06-18 14:56:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've added a new section to the item template system now allowing for anything to be "unlockable" via town buildings. In other words, Tailor I now has the Mage and Cleric armor sets available for purchase. I've tentatively set the price for the 8 armor sets at T1 Uncommon resources. These sets were actually already in-game as drops from champions, but there's nothing in-game that actually tells you that, so I wouldn't be surprised if not everyone knew that!
Now, once I finish upgrading the item system to be able to treat one piece of equipment as stronger or weaker than another, we will have all the tools needed to create an endless number of equipment recipes. The displaying, storing, unlocking and everything is all automatic, so long as the item templates are there. I don't yet have an image importer setup for importing item icons from the hard disk, but I did write a JSON importer that can import text files in order to allow players to feed items into the game. If anyone is waiting on that, let me know, and I'll write some instructions on how to use it. None of the building styles are set in stone either, I've actually redesigned them somewhat, and am working on Village+ "rank" buildings being a mix of stone and wood, etc. I'm certainly open to different styles if anyone wants to take a swing at it! A new type of ingredient is also now required in order to construct any of the crafter buildings: Wooden Construction Supplies. This is a special item that only the Carpenter, a new type of building, can create. Currently it's just a mix of lumber and metal, and maybe that's all it should be, but I like the idea of more buildings with different purposes. Once I get the other buildings and "ranks" in and a few recipes for each of them, I will start working on the upgraded villager system. v 0.5.2.1 2019.06.14 - Added crafter buildings: Tailor, Leatherworker, Armorsmith, Weaponsmith, Toolsmith, Woodworker, Fletcher, Artificer, Stoneworker - Added unlockable recipes to tailor, leatherworker, and armorsmith - Added carpenter building that crafts wooden construction supplies needed for Hamlet+ buildings - Deconstructing town buildings will now refund 80% (rounded down) materials used (only most recent upgrade) - Foragers have been reset due to some bugs 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-06-14 14:10:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

WARNING: This patch has two important patch notes: - Changed the way that wells and ground torches are saved, forcing a wipe of all wells and ground torches - Changed the way that town buildings are saved, forcing a wipe of all town buildings I try to avoid wipes, but the changes were to drastic with these two subjects. This patch sets up the foundation for a lot of upgrades to town buildings I have planned and posted a bit about on Tuesday. The new town system is also currently limited to only Outpost rank, though I hope to get the new crafter buildings, and possibly others, in tomorrow. As villagers will be the next big topic for upgrading, villagers are not currently being summoned/used in this build. Instead each building has a sign on it for interacting with, that will be used to assign villagers. One of the biggest "upgrades" to this system is building levels. In this patch the Storehouse now takes on a central roll, being what determines the maximum allowed population. The "Storehouse" actually starts out now as a "Stockpile" and can be upgraded through levels I - IV, which will then allow you to upgrade Stockpile IV to Storehouse I. These upgrades are visual, and also provide increasingly more storage with each upgrade. It is possible to get stuck inside during the Storehouse I upgrade, so try not to stand actually inside the stockpile when you upgrade it! And I will add a collision check to that tomorrow. Harvester and Crafter building upgrades I don't quite have working yet in this patch, as they require new items from other buildings, but soon further upgrades (and in the near future, better/different villagers) will be the primary source of unlocking new recipes. Now that we have a wardrobe system in and working I'm looking forward to adding more weapon and armor recipes, even if at the beginning they don't all have their own unique 3D models and textures.
One piece of new content in is the new resource scanners. Instead of being an "aura" purchasable from town harvesters, they are now craftable, placeable objects, than can be picked up and moved. They can be found under Masonry Facilities for now, though I plan to lock them behind town harvesters as something that can be learned. Note that they can only be placed in an area of equal or lesser tier than themselves, though their range can still reach beyond that, and they can be upgraded indefinitely. This is one of several steps being taken to remove the -need- for more than one to three towns There are a number of small but annoying bugs on the live build right now that I would very much like to patch, so I want to first get the upgraded town system back to a basic working state along with all the new functionality and push it live before continuing on with new recipes and villagers and everything else. v 0.5.2.0 2019.06.13 - Resource scanners are now craftable items that can be placed on ground or buildings - Storehouses can no longer be deconstructed while other town buildings are present - Solaces can no longer be deconstructed while town buildings are present - Player locked chests and facilities are now always openable in single player - Changed the way that wells and ground torches are saved, forcing a wipe of all wells and ground torches - Changed the way that town buildings are saved, forcing a wipe of all town buildings - Added town building placement obstruction and underground checks - Initiating town building placement will now place the "dummy" 6m in front of players close to the ground - Fixed save structure window throwing errors on structures with furniture - Fixed fruit trees interaction - Fixed procedural tower crates interaction - Fixed harvesting essences interaction Multi-player: - Servers now properly updating their player count - Server list temporarily not showing player count, ? instead, server details will show player count when selected - Fixed bows, wands, and staves during "host" mode - Fixed "host" mode not saving the host's data - Fixed a bug stopping multiplayer hunger and thirst - Fixed switching from single player to multiplayer not resetting "world shift" - There is a harmless error that will show up on dedicated servers that try to load a save with old towns 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. The beta is not available to 32-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-06-13 14:14:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've upgraded a lot to do with towns over the past couple day, but still need to correct a few systems, namely resource scanning, before I can up a patch and so wanted to post a bit about it until then.

Building Stages

Buildings now have different stages that they can be upgraded into, for example Stockpile I can upgrade into -> Stockpile II -> Stockpile III -> Stockpile IV -> Storehouse I, and so on. These stages will be functional and visual, at times even increasing the height of the building.

Building Resources

I'm mostly doing away with money in the current way that it is used. I do think there are uses for it, but crafting, harvesting, and building upgrades I think will work better using actual resources instead of money. These will go through stages requiring more difficult components, though for now it's just things that you can make out of the normal resources.

Harvesting Outposts

A new type of hi-tech building, these will allow upgraded harvesters to "connect" to distant outposts to gather higher tier resources rather than having to summon new villagers for every tier. Coal mines, and other yet to be added mines will primarily make use of this, requiring only an outpost setup near the mine instead of a whole village to support it.

Resource Scanners

I want to make scanners a craftable object instead of a villager upgrade due to harvesting outposts rendering the need for villagers unnecessary at outposts.

Food and Population

Population is now tied to the Storehouse which upgrades from a stockpile to a storehouse, a warehouse, a depot, and finally a vault. Food must now also be prepared for most villagers, meaning the first type of building you'll generally build is a Forager. There will also be Arable Farmer, Pastoral Farmer, Fisher, Inn (with a cook), and a number of other food based buildings I plan on adding that generate higher quality foods that higher quality villagers will require. Food will be added without quality and further progression buildings until the more "core" features are in and working with the first patch.

Villagers

This is the biggest change to the system and will not be added until the above are in and working. Villagers can always be summoned for a small amount of Light, though summoning them in this manner will always summon a Common Villager, with no base skills, and only basic attributes. Out in the world however, I want to add villages with randomly generated villagers that can range from Common to Legendary. A villagers rarity will determine the amount of base skills they start with, and their base attributes. Skills will be able to be learned freely over time, but attributes will be locked in, allowing only player crafted equipment to improve upon the base stats. Once the basics of villagers are in and working there are a lot of different ways to go with villager interaction. I think the most important being village quests such as "please build this for us" quests, as well as harvesting, crafting, and combat quests to gain some small amount of "reputation" with a village before any of their villagers will agree to join you. Upgraded buildings and different types of villagers will also then lead to further crafting recipe unlocks and progression. I have buildings upgrades and resources in and working, I mostly just need to upgrade resource scanning, and will hopefully be able to get a beta patch out tomorrow.

[ 2019-06-11 09:17:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

A couple of minor yet very important upgrades to multiplayer adding the ability to lock both facilities and solaces. This means you can lock a chest full of items, a forge full of metal, and the solace leading to your base. A locked solace will not show up on the travel list for anyone but the owner. Note however that the owner of a structure can override locked facilities even if they do not own the facility. So placing and locking a chest in your friends house will still let them (and only them) access the chest. To make something completely private it needs to be on a structure you yourself own. Both incomplete systems by far. A friend/whitelist system will be needed in the future and more specific permission options, as well as structure specific permissions. I've also implemented an auto "unstuck" check post teleporting as there have been a number of people ending up beneath the ground post teleportation for quite some time now. This will check to see if you are beneath the ground, and then attempt to place you above ground if you are, meaning it will place you on the highest piece of building/ground it finds at your current location, so worst case you'll end up on a roof, if there is something built above the solace you're travelling to. Preferably the check won't be needed at all, but I've not had very good luck trying to fix whatever irregularly sends players under the ground, so this will "improve" things until then. v 0.5.1.9 2019.06.07 - Facility owners can now lock facilities they own preventing others from interacting with them - Structure owners can always interact with all facilities placed on structures they own - Solaces can now be locked making them not show up for other players on the travel list - Fixed solace renaming in multiplayer - Implemented an auto-unstuck post teleporting - Fixed facilities not placing on other facilities - Fixed a drop item bug in multiplayer - Fixed dedicated server hosts calculating thirst and hunger for themselves - Fixed the Ice Spikes spell not working in caves 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. This beta version is only available to 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-06-07 04:08:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

Now live, version 0.5.1.7, bringing floating islands, town building snap placement, new resources, building hit points, building eating demons, and more! Multiplayer is still only available on the beta branch. It is still a work in progress, and anyone interested in joining mid-development is welcome to join the beta by right-clicking on Solace Crafting in their Steam library, selecting Properties, going to the Betas tab, and selecting Beta. Normally the beta is only published for 64-bit windows, but for this patch I have included beta patches for 32-bit Windows and 64-bit Linux as well.
(A player base on the BKG California Server) Due to the tools used to communicate between Unity and Steamworks not being available for 32-bit Linux, I am from here on dropping support for 32-bit Linux. I don't believe this will affect anyone, but if it does please let me know.
As for what's new on the live branch, the most obvious change is the floating islands. These are still a work in progress in that the aetherstone that can be found on them can not yet be harvested by any means. Due to the changes this brings to world encounters, saved games will need to be "updated" which will reset encounter data, but will not wipe out player buildings and player characters, so you won't have to start over from scratch. I could easily spend the next 2 months or more focusing entirely on multiplayer and all of the bonus features that it will eventually need, such as grouping, land claims, account verification, and so forth. But there is a lot of fun stuff in the near future that isn't multiplayer specific that I want to continue working on in parallel. There are a few bugs on multiplayer right now, namely with buffs and with enchanting that I want to address right away, but for the most part things that are not yet upgraded to work properly in multiplayer are actually turned off in multiplayer, so they do not cause problems. The main core of harvesting, crafting, and building is in and working, and that is a very good foothold on what is a quite challenging tasks that many people would chastise a solo developer for even attempting. Only when multiplayer is finished enough to come out of it's "beta" phase, will I update the store page to advertise the game as co-op gameplay inclusive. I've got a lot more in store for towns and villagers in the works that we've had some great discussions about on our Discord server. Thank you as always to everyone that takes the time to post problems and suggestions. It's not always easy to get to everyone right away, and I admit sometimes a bug report falls through the cracks, for which I apologize. The condensed live patch notes are as follows: v 0.5.1.7 2019.06.03 - Added a second positioning check after Recall due to a number of reports of falling through the world - Fixed the 268,000km limit bug that reappeared with the Unity upgrade - Added a second positioning check post teleportation - Added (single) structure size limits of +/- 25 horizontally and -10/+60 vertically (153x213x153 meters) - Added /mouseyawmultiplier command to specify a mouse horizontal speed multiplier - Added /mousepitchmultiplier command to specify a mouse vertical speed multiplier - Town building placement now snaps to the world grid by default allowing positioning with the wasd+qe+zx keys similar to building. This can be disabled to return to mouse based placement with the "snap to grid" toggle, or temporarily halted to allow movement with the right-mouse button. - The starter "Core Shard Platform" will now be aligned to the world grid on new worlds - Added building hit points (wip) - Mousing over buildings will now show their hitpoints (wip) - Demons now use an "attacker" specific navmesh attempting to path towards the solace - Demons will now attack buildings in their way when the solace cannot be reached (wip) - Moved the mouse over information display to the bottom middle of the screen - Added basic resources, that remain at T0 regardless of location - Added elemental stones that require special upgraded tools (wip) to harvest - Added floating islands to the world, accessible via portals beneath them - Added a breath meter for when underwater - Shields now provide bonus armor - Dropped support for 32-bit Linux Most recent beta patch notes v 0.5.1.7 2019.06.03 - Fixed the 268,000km limit bug that reappeared with the Unity upgrade - Added a second positioning check post teleportation - Fixed Linux dedicated server - Dropped support for 32-bit Linux You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-06-03 06:48:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's been a rough week between learning how to setup a Linux server from scratch and how Steam's server list registration works, but things are... mostly working now. Currently I've switched the dedicated server I'm hosting from the new California Linux server back to the Tokyo Windows server while I work out some Linux specific bugs, but the Tokyo server is registering fine with the Steam servers, and can now be connected via the in-game server list.
This also means anyone else that starts up a server with thier ports properly opened should now show up on the server list as well! I have changed the default ports used to 27015 and 27016, which are pretty common here on Steam it seems. I will make both of those changeable in the server config file. Once I can clear up the Linux bugs I will move the world that has been up for the past week back onto the California server, and finally get back into fixing bugs. The worst part of it all, the main reason setting up the server list functionality took me so long was due to an error in the documentation I was following. One variable used in the Steamworks SDK has to match another variable in the Steamworks Dashboard, but the documentation I was trusting in said the SDK should be left blank. Luckily I don't think I've lost any hair from the frustration, but I certainly lost a few days of development time. When I consider something important I don't give up on it lightly. Probably the main reason I'm still here, and I'm not going anywhere, as Solace Crafting has a lot left to become. On that note, May sales were the best they've been since Early Access first launched, so I hope that the coming weeks of multiplayer fixes and improvements help to create more momentum as it's really hard to get noticed on this big ball of ours! Thank you again to everyone patiently awaiting multiplayer improvements, and to everyone posting bugs and screenshots in our Discord server, and sorry this feature has taken so long! v 0.5.1.6 2019.05.29 - Steam managed server list functionality added - Server config file added (see stickied post in discussion boards) 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-05-29 14:22:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

The past few days I've successfully setup a much stronger dedicated Linux server, which is about half the cost of a windows server. After taking a poll in Discord, and reading up on the web, I've positioned the server in California, which is a little pricier than some places, but does offer the best "overall" ping. In the future of course I hope to run more servers in different locations. This patch will set the default "Direct connect" ip to the California server. I've also integrated a number of Steamworks functions, such as user authorization, VAC security, dedicated server initialization, and a server list. Unfortunately the server list is only 90% working, and it is not yet properly populating. The past few days I've been working with Steamworks.NET, a user-made C# wrapper for the C++ SDK that Steam provides. I'm going to try Facepunch Steamworks instead and see if I have better luck, a different C# wrapper written by the developers of Rust, as recommended by a number of peers. There's often just one piece to the puzzle that has to slip into place for everything to click. It's just a bummer than can take hours and hours of trial and error when you're doing it for the first time. But it will happen! In the meantime one player has made it to level 58 on the multiplayer server, with only one major glitch (that I've since fixed for next patch). Lot's more to come once I can get the server list working properly! v 0.5.1.5 2019.05.25 - Fixed breath being able to go up/down while loading - Fixed multiplayer breath - Fixed multiplayer auto-harvest - Fixed mutliplayer enchanting and transmogrifying - Fixed multiplayer animal rarity particle problems 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-05-25 13:11:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

The very first problem we had last week was still a possibility if enough people were running around doing their own thing in different places as particularly monoliths and dropped items were still spawning universally, as well as facilities. This patch fixes that, so that everything is proximity based. That also introduces a small problem of buildings tending to "spawn" a second later than players after teleporting, making it possible to fall through a floor or two. I will improve that so that an immediate check it made after teleporting and the loading functions will wait for important objects to finish. More importantly was two unfortunate bugs that showed up with the new method of handling buildings in multiplayer. One was attaching facilities to the ground, where they are not allowed to be, causing them to not be recognized by the loading and saving methods, making them disappear entirely when reloading. My apologies for the lost resources at least a couple of users ran into! Facilities in multiplayer were also trying to find and attach themselves to their parent structures, something they are automatically assigned to in single player. This was incompatible with the new building handling methods and caused them to load improperly (invisibly) if they came on before the building had finished spawning in multiplayer. These problems and more have been fixed, as we push through the bugs towards a stable multiplayer build! Tomorrow I am going to look into exporting a Linux based dedicated server to starting hosting on a much stronger computer as Linux servers are much cheaper than Windows servers. v 0.5.1c2 2019.05.21 - Fixed deconstruction and a number of small building errors - Fixed a number of objects loading universally regardless of distance from client eventually causing connection hangs - Fixed facilities going invisible after teleporting away and back v 0.5.1c 2019.05.21 - Fixed clients getting stuck dead after dying - Fixed facilities being placed on the ground instead of actually on buildings, causing them to not save properly - Fixed health, energy, mana, fullness, and hydration not updating immediately on clients - Fixed a dll file that was causing errors for a small number of players running windows without visual studio c++ runtime 2015 installed - Fixed animal parts dropping in higher rarities than common - Fixed distant other players causing distant terrains to load locally 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-05-21 14:39:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

I can't say thank you enough to everyone that takes the time to point out something that isn't working. It really makes my job so much easier when I can just go straight to a problem and get to fixing it instead of having to try and track them down one by one. The biggest time loss last week was caused by nobody being able to figure out what the problem was! It ended up being primarily just too many network objects being sent to players when they try to "sync" up their local representation of the game-world with the server upon connection. One of the major culprits of this was the way that I had written structures to break down their building pieces into separate objects that would then reassemble themselves on the client side. It worked, but it was a lot of tiny packages of data. With this patch each structure is now a single network object that can send it's entire "recipe" to a client when needed as a single package, and then send individual changes as they happen in real time. Structures will now also only spawn for a client when they are within 200 meters of it. This may need some adjusting though, we'll see how it works for now. I also added building size restrictions to the tune of +/-25 areas from the start horizontally, and -10 to +60 areas from the start vertically. That equates to aroughly 153x213x153 meters as each building area is 3 meters cubed, so still a very big building, that's 175,000 possible building areas. Primarily this is so that I can use bytes (0-255) when sending building data across the network instead of larger data types that take up more bandwidth. It does also solve an old problem that can occur due to the fact that buildings are bound to the terrain they are started on. Once in a while someone decides to build a sky bridge 2km long, and the terrain they started on gets "despawned" unloading the building beneath their feet. This will prevent that from happening, but is in no way intended to prevent players from building skybridges, or any other large scale objects. You can of course start another structure right next to one if the one you're building on gets too big (all the more reason to snap buildings), and I will come up with a better way to handle that than having to start a new structure from a foundation in the ground each time that happens. Besides that a number of both multi-player and single-player bug fixes thanks to reports from players on the forums and in Discord. A few of these are causing problems on the default live branch, so I'd like to work towards getting a patch out to there sometime in the next day or two. The multiplayer work going on right now is 99% multiplayer bug fixes, not new features, so there shouldn't be many new bugs compared to the live branch, but there are a few features that haven't been tested for all that long yet, primarily floating islands. Soon though. Sorry for anyone experience oddities like capsizing boats on the live branch. UPDATE v 0.5.1b 2019.05.20 - Fixed solaces and obelisks throwing errors v 0.5.1 2019.05.20 - Added (single) structure size limits of +/- 25 horizontally and -10/+60 vertically (153x213x153 meters) - Fixed bugs with transferring water to a retting vat from a bucket or watering can - Fixed refining facilities not using lower tiered fuels - Fixed ladder tooltip to include climbing instructions - Fixed solace level upgrade fights getting stuck - Fixed a number of instances with skills and buffs using host stats instead of client stats - Fixed a bug causing teleports to double when more than 8km away - Fixed a debugging method spawning sphere's during NPC summoning - Fixed a bug setting new building health to 0 - Fixed multiplayer buildings breaking the server when too complex - Fixed multiplayer deconstruction - Fixed multiplayer doors and shutters 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-05-20 11:10:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

The dedicated Tokyo server has been running non-stop, besides the last two patches, for two days now without any major problems! Still a lot of small things to repair, and of course a number of multi-player specific features that will need to be added. Here are some of the known bugs, and/or things that are turned off that I'll be working on over the next couple days: Bags Buffs Enchanting Transmogrification Farming Caves Thanks to everyone posting bug reports on the forums and in Discord, it helps me out a lot! v 0.5.0n 2019.05.17 - Added /mouseyawmultiplier command to specify a mouse horizontal speed multiplier - Added /mousepitchmultiplier command to specify a mouse vertical speed multiplier - Added a Player List, default key: O - Added /serverbroadcast command for server host - Fixed animals not always being the exact same level on client/server resulting in tier differences near tier borders - Fixed adventuring experience not updating immediately - Fixed auto-harvest getting stuck on - Fixed bows and wands in multiplayer - Fixed weapon swap 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-05-17 12:50:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

Multiplayer should be pretty solid with this patch. Still a number of things that need work, but nothing game breaking. I'm going to need to redesign the way buildings are handled in multiplayer as well, but I already have a good idea of how to go about it. There are a number of bug reports on the discussion boards I haven't gotten to yet, my apologies for that. I will get to those first thing in the morning, and may need to push a live patch to fix a number of problems on the default live branch. Thank you again for the testing and patience with everyone helping out with multiplayer! v 0.5.0m 2019.05.16 - Temporarily disabled towers in multiplayer - Fixed skill and attribute upgrades not updating immediately in the UI in multiplayer - Fixed monsters not dying properly in multiplayer - Fixed monster health bars not updating immediately in multiplayer - Fixed terrains enabled for the second time in a multiplayer client session causing errors - Fixed storage chests displaying "monster drop" on mouse over 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-05-16 10:00:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

Finally believe I've stomped the problem locking clients up when connecting to the server. Monsters and animals will now only be passed to a client within 150m of them. This will need to be tweaked and expanded to other systems, but is a big enough improvement that it should keep things running no problem. Sorry for the delay, and thank you to everyone on Discord helping me out! v 0.5.0k 2019.05.15 - Fixed multi-player clients get stuck on "Loading" 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2019-05-15 15:31:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've fixed a number of small problems with the dedicated server and client and am currently successfully connected to the Tokyo Server. Again, still a "first step" in that a number of features are still needed to take multiplayer out of beta. I will be working on a more informative "Connecting" screen instead of just getting stuck at "Loading..." when something goes wrong, for example. Client versus server version checking, etc. But first I need to get some food, haven't left my chair since I got up 5 hours ago =D

[ 2019-05-14 03:18:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

Regarding Multiplayer I spent all day trying to tie up the last loose ends for the first public multiplayer patch today, but the dedicated Amazon EC2 server I'm working with is having a problem somewhere. The server <-> client code works fine when run locally, but EC2 servers are generally sort of "bare bones" and extra secure. Tests on the same server have worked fine in the past, so there's just some little problem I'm trying to track down, but have run out of time today. Once the dedicated server is up and running, still, please understand this is just the first patch of several needed. In regards to multiplayer only there are a number of known bugs, a number of missing and/or disabled features, and one yet unsolved problem. Disabled features: - Caves, floating islands, towns, terraforming, and ley line teleports have been temporarily disabled in multiplayer (not in single player). Known bugs: - Towers haven't been thoroughly tested, though monoliths are working well. - Bags, buckets, and watering cans have not been tested. The unsolved problem: Floating point precision errors are cause by players travelling too far from the physics engines point of origin. This happens because computers are highly tuned to work through large quantities of 32-bit numbers. A 32-bit float, or an unwhole number, carries only 7 digits of precision. That means that if you travel over 10,000 meters away from the origin you can now only calculate to the nearest millimeter (10,000.00). Traveling further eventually you will only be able to calculate to the nearest centimeter, meter, and so forth. In single player this is accommodated for by shifting the game world back towards the physics engine's point of origin ever 8192m (a power of 2). In multiplayer however, there are multiple players running around in different directions, possibly thousands of kilometers apart. The normal method of shifting the world does not work. Instead a system of "dimensional pockets" needs to be designed and handled in real time. It's not an easy thing to wrap your head around, but I understand the concept and will be implementing it once everything else is working better. In the meantime, there is now "world shifting" going on in multiplayer. So if you travel too far, things will start to jitter and shake. If you stand still at 20km it is noticeable, and if you make it out to 100km it's quite annoying, but it is ultimately a cosmetic issue up until around 1000km, and again, only in multiplayer until I can fix it. Missing features: Multiplayer means, everyone might be super friendly, or they might not be. Griefing is a very real and unfortunate part of online gaming. In this patch there are not yet permission settings, server passwords, and a number of small features like that which will be necessary to ensure sportsmanship-like play is not only encouraged, but enforceable. That doesn't mean that we will never let anyone make a PvP server, if that's what they'd like to do, but for the most part this is a PvE game, in a VERY big world. Player "claims" and protection will be built-in once things are working more smoothly. Having said all that, it's a solid first step! Please join us in Discord: https://discord.gg/ktAPeCe if you're going to try multiplayer to help me debug and improve things and also because the server will most likely not be up 24/7 as I continue development. Running a dedicated server Not particularly recommended this early, but should anyone be so inclined the dedicated server executable can be downloaded via the beta branch "dedicated server beta". "Solace Crafting.exe" Single player patch notes v 0.5.0c 2019.05.13 - Added multiplayer host and client choices to the start menu - Town building placement now snaps to the world grid by default allowing positioning with the wasd+qe+zx keys similar to building. This can be disabled to return to mouse based placement with the "snap to grid" toggle, or temporarily halted to allow movement with the right-mouse button. - The starter "Core Shard Platform" will now be aligned to the world grid on new worlds - Fixed world creation preview - Fixed boats - Fixed monoliths and champion/hero bound chests throwing errors - Added building hit points (wip) - Demons now use an "attacker" specific navmesh attempting to path towards the solace - Demons will now attack buildings in their way when the solace cannot be reached (wip) - Moved the mouse over information display to the bottom middle of the screen - Mousing over buildings will now show their hitpoints (wip) 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-05-13 14:41:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Just wanted to chime in to say that I've been working on multiplayer again this week and it's going well. I took last week off with family for Spring break, or Golden Week as it's called here in Japan, so a bit of an abnormal gap between the last update has developed. This time around I'm handling things step by step, starting with the basics, so there won't be a fully functional server list with the first iterations of multiplayer open beta, but we'll get to the bells and whistles after the more important base functionalities are working well. Hoping to run a live test in the next day or two. Hope everyone is enjoying the slowly warming weather!

[ 2019-05-09 14:04:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

Floating Islands are here! The second of three encounters designed to facilitate in the next step in progression. These big boys are nearly a kilometer in diameter, and have a number of satellite islands around them. For most of the satellite islands the only way onto them is to build! Luckily there is a fair amount of stone and timber on the main island for just such purpose. The resources on the main island are a new type called basic resources. Basic resources are resources that do not progress with the rest of the game, meaning they are always tier 0, and will only reward a maximum of 10 per node. This system, for example, has now been applied to all of the rocks and stalactites in the caves so you can clear them out of the way if they are in your way, but won't necessarily be something to go hunting for (normal stone nodes in the caves remain as they were). The resources on the floating islands are basic resources because it's a frozen hell up there! Temperature control was added pretty early in the game, but never really turned into an actual system. I will be working on improving that and making it a useful part of progression, or rather a prerequisite to special places like the floating islands. We all know having to change your hat every time you cross into a new biome gets old fast, but I believe I have some good ideas in store for temperature management in the near future. An air meter has also been added for when swimming under water. It will slowly move towards zero, after which you will start taking a percentage of you maximum health as damage. Returning to the surface of course will begin to fill it up again. I was going to wait until breathing potions and enchants are added in, but it's not really a gamebreaker if you can't swim 800m to the ocean floor in one go just yet... soon? I also want to add falling damage, though I do plan to go easy on it. Falling damage however I do want to wait until there are sufficient counter-measures in-game before turning it on, such as feather fall enchants and potions.
Also found on the floating islands is a new resource called aetherstone. These rocks require a hardened pickaxe in order to harvest them which is not yet craftable! So beta players won't be able to start collecting them just yet, but aetherstone and the other two elemental stone types will have their uses made clear shortly.
Please note that world encounter generation prior to this patch was generating placeholders for floating islands a the rate of 1 per 4 terrains, meaning they were everywhere. This could even cause them to overlap and is just way too many of them in general. I've updated the /forceworldupdate command so that you can append 'false' in order to prevent the repositioning of buildings: /forceworldupdate false This will reset a worlds map, encounter, and resource data so that you have a much more "reasonable" amount of floating islands, to the tune of 1 per 8x8km "chunk" (don't worry, they're easy to spot) without having to reset your building, town, and solace data. Next week is Golden Week here in Japan, the longest break of the year. I will be working when I can, but I may be slow to respond for a day or two, here or there. v 0.4.6 - 2019.04.25 - Added basic resources, that remain at T0 regardless of location - Added elemental stones that require special upgraded tools (wip) to harvest - Added floating islands to the world, accessible via portals beneath them - Added a second positioning check after Recall due to a number of reports of falling through the world - Added a breath meter for when underwater 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-04-25 12:36:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch brings in a number of new features including tutorials, coal mines, and the enchanting recipe tree. It also adds a few visual improvements such as GPU instanced grass and anti-tiling shaders for distant terrains. But more importantly than anything, bug fixes! There was a lot of small polish that went into the more recent patches that should clear up a lot of small errors both old and new. One big change was an upgrade to the Unity engine. We went from 2018.2.2 to 2018.3.9. This meant a lot of new systems and changes to code that should produce a slight improvement in performance for everyone. It's always an arduous task to upgrade a project to a new Unity version, but cursor lock was completely broken in the version we were using and it was causing a lot of player headaches. This should fix that once and for all. Note that the mouse is still not confined to the window when the cursor is enabled, for example when looking at the menu or inventory. If an option for enabling cursor confinement is needed I can certainly add one in!
The tutorials that have been added in required a quest system to be built from scratch, and so I created one with, as usual, modding in mind. In the future it will be possible to add quests into the game without too much effort, though a system of quest givers has yet to be added, so we're not quite ready for that.
Building snapping was a favorite addition among many players that allows building and pre-made structures to be placed "snapped" to a world grid, so that other buildings and structure can be placed in perfect alignment.
Coal mines have also been added in, though their true purpose is still just around the corner as I move on to adding more crafting progression content to open up the next phase of adventuring progression! As always a huge thanks to everyone suffering through my mistakes and mishaps on the beta branch, all while diligently reporting bugs. And to everyone in general joining us in open-beta! Note that this patch will require you to "update" older saved games via the update button on them. This will reset map data, encounters, and resources, and will attempt to reposition buildings if the area they are in has changed due to changes in world generation. This may also cause a solace inside of a cave to end up in a void of empty space due to changes in cave generation. It's best to start a new world, but the update option is there so no one is forced to wipe their world and start over from scratch. The condensed patch notes are as follows: v 0.4.5c3 - 2019.04.18 Quests - Added a quest journal via the J key (not built-in to key binding menu yet) - Added a branching series of tutorial quests Building - Control keys can now be used to "snap" buildings and facilities positions to a 1 per meter grid - Control will also "snap" rotation of facilities and town buildings to the nearest multiple of 22.5 degrees Enchanting - Enchants are now unlocked via skill points rewarded for leveling enchanting - Added minor and major versions of attribute enchants Map - Map markers are now stored in a specific compact format, rather than attempting to make use of resource and encounter data - Resource scanning (and all map markers) can now display from all known terrain, not only those loaded during the current session - Added "Town Encounter" and "Small Encounter" toggles to the map - Added coal mines and monoliths to the map Environment - Added GPU instanced grass and settings under the in-game video settings - Grass will now automatically be removed beneath foundations (not around them) - Reduced smoothness of most terrain textures - Trees no long use the "forest" method of simulated placement, now using perlin noise - Improved distant terrain texturing Towns - Harvester NPCs can now be summoned from the facilities if they are in a closed room and certain building and furniture requirements are met (WIP) - Towns now know what biome they are in - Town Crafters now require 50 metal and 50 of the resource they specialize in to construct General - Upgraded Unity to 2018.3.9 (Fixes cursor lock problems) - Added an animation toggle to the character creation screen - Added a music toggle to the character creation screen - Added a tooltip system, currently only used on the facility upgrade screen - Having less than 10 hydration now makes you thirsty, stopping energy and mana regeneration - Having less than 10 fullness now make you hungry, stopping health regeneration - Hunger, Starvation, Thirsty, and Dehydration, will now display effect icons in the upper right - Added Light as a player stat, increased via enchanting, that increases the range and intensity of the player's illumination - Skill tiers not yet unlocked for purchase are now greyed out - Crafting and building can now pull resources from bags in your inventory - Added ragdoll to crystal and obsidian golems after death - Added "final" stats in parenthesis next to the base numbers in skill detail windows that factor in player attributes and equipment (where applicable) You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-04-18 07:13:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

I was hoping to push the 0.4.5b patch live earlier in the week, but it turned out there were still a few unsolved problems. This should patch those up and be ready to go live. Still, it's always dangerous pushing something out onto Steam when I'm the only one that's actually play tested it, so I will push it to beta once more, and push it live after confirming that there are no serious problems. Sorry for the delay! Unfortunately this patch will reset map markers once more. Areas will need to be revisited for their map markers to be refreshed. v 0.4.5c - 2019.04.17 - Moved melee attack distance check origins from feet to waist - Added colliders to crystal and obsidian golems similar to their body parts for looting selection - Added ragdoll to crystal and obsidian golems after death - Fixed obsidian and golem animations - Fixed a number of map marker saving and loading inadequacies - Fixed map icons resetting their scale if a new terrain is enabled while the map is open - Fixed biome calculation of new towns (old towns marked as ocean will attempt to recalculate) 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-04-17 08:25:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

There's one or two more problems I'm still trying to narrow down to surgically remove, but this is looking like a pretty solid build so far. If all goes well I will push it live tomorrow or Monday, as I tend to take Sunday off. Only 1 hour left until Sunday here in Japan! We're in the future! Three major bugs that have been reported (on beta): - Falling through the floor after teleporting - Distant tower objects loading in the wrong place or unloading improperly - 1 case of a disappearing structure, and 1 case of a few pieces of a structure disappearing. If anyone ever falls through the world you can use /stuck in either the console or the chat window to reposition yourself on the surface. If anyone else encounters any disappearing structure pieces, any information you can give me on what they were, what you were doing, what's nearby, and things like that can help me out a lot. Worst case, a file on the disk was corrupted and there's nothing I can do about it, but if it's a problem with the code, I shall not stand idle in the presence of bugs! v 0.4.5b - 2019.04.13 - Improved distant terrain texturing - Turned the default grass distance for new installs down from 150 to 50 - Added "final" stats in parenthesis next to the base numbers in skill detail windows that factor in player attributes and equipment (where applicable) - Fixed lamp post description - Fixed a missing material on woodworking stations - Fixed leather working station and large wardrobe default rotation - Fixed caves not registering map markers - Fixed the sickle using the pickaxe animation - Fixed a bug that could cause NPCs to not load properly - Fixed a bug when placing facilities directly on the ground - Fixed jumping animation playing when on the storehouse's carpet - Fixed buffs and effects lasting through death - Fixed the "GenerateBillboardCell" error - Fixed weather sounds not always turning back on when returning to the surface from underground - Fixed stone gloem health bar placement - Fixed rare animals not adding map markers - Fixed rare resource map markers not removing themselves after being harvested - Fixed solace upgrades not properly checking their requirements - Fixed beacon upgrades turning the beacon off sometimes - Fixed pigs not handling effects such as Ice Missile's slow and Fire Burst's burn - Fixed torches not turning off when unequipped 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-04-13 13:59:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

The new grass is nice, still quite a bit more I can do with it, and plan to, but really it was added primarily to improve the load speed of terrains post-generation. The way that Unity processes grass out of the box when you're generating them at runtime like we do is just horrible and was the main reason for the lag spike that happened with each new terrain. The spike is better, but not gone, though the remaining causes are much more manageable problems I'll be working on over time. Map usage has also been improved in part to make it easier for me moving forward towards cave maps, custom map markers, and more, but also in that the system is now almost entirely self-contained. It used to make use of currently loaded encounter and resource data to try and comb out the data it wants for scanning, which is setup via towns. This meant that it was more or less impossible to see map data from distant locations. I remedied this by creating a very lightweight data storage system that resources and encounters now report to post-generation and again post-death. This also means no more tower icons in the water for example, but more importantly that once a solace aura is fully upgraded you can scan a massive amount of land for resources provided you've unlocked the area. Besides that a number of general improvements have been made, some of which include tree generation and terrain texture (splat) generation methods. Unfortunately this means that some of the save data from saved games is now out of date and needs to be wiped. Rather than forcing a wipe, I long ago implemented an "Update" method that will go through a world, wipe out the outdated data, but then still let you play with the same buildings and everything as before. This may cause a tree to spawn in a previously placed building, or small things like that, but it beats having to start over from scratch. As coal mines (a work in progress) have also changed frequency this may cause a coal miner to be standing next to open ground instead of a coal mine, but that will be addressed when they start doing their jobs. I'm looking to add support for tessellation and a few other small improvements tomorrow before pushing live so that we can get the Unity upgrade and the tutorials onto the live branch. v 0.4.5 - 2019.04.11 Map - Map markers are now stored in a specific compact format, rather than attempting to make use of resource and encounter data - Improved the way that large encounters generate and report themselves to the map - Resource scanning can now display resources from all known terrain, not only those loaded during the current session Environment - Added GPU instanced grass and settings under the in-game video settings - Grass will now automatically be removed beneath foundations (not around them) - Reduced smoothness of most terrain textures - Trees no long use the "forest" method of simulated placement, now using perlin noise - Improved biome noises to more aggressively keep grass and desert out of the water - Improved mountain tree height positioning to keep stumps from sticking out of the ground - Fixed a world generation bug that could cause large patches of empty land - Fixed rarity colliders and colliders sometimes remaining after harvesting trees General - Added a fourth type of large encounter placeholder that won't spawn yet creating some terrains with no large encounter - Added tier indicator to campfire, smithing station, and refining facility interfaces - Added table tier and title to enchanting window - Removed "Upgrades" button from treasure chests - Fixed an error that could prevent world loading on non-english Windows - Fixed player getting stuck in the falling animation when jumping into water or pressing tab while jumping - Fixed storage chest colliders - Fixed a couple english spelling errors - Fixed storage chest text ignoring lighting - Fixed default rotation of leatherworking station 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-04-11 13:38:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

I tend to make a lot of small patches which is great for keeping everyone up to date on what's happening. The past few days I've been working on a bit more heavy changes that still need a little time to hammer out. The good news is I've already boosted performance a fair amount and added in a number of user experience improvements. For one, I've greatly reduced the lag spikes caused when new terrains come on. This was largely caused by Unity's built-in grass system, which most people agree is pretty horrendous. Last Spring we dabbled in a fancier system that was still just getting started and proved to cause more stress on lower end machines than it did improve things over all so it was removed. That system and Unity's abilities have grown quite a bit since then, and it's working much better now. I'm still not using it for trees, rocks, and what not, but for grass it's a big improvement. Of course nothing works out of the box when you're building a world 2 million kilometers squared, but nothing a little duct tape couldn't fix.
New grass on the left, old grass on the right. The major benefit is the reduction in lag when a new terrain turns on, however it is slightly more GPU work for slightly less CPU work. That means that people on graphics cards more than a few years old may see a slight reduction in performance while just running around, but still less lag spikes. The options to turn grass down and/or off will of course remain available. I've also ditched the "forest" method of tree spawning, where a spot is picked then a 100 year forest is simulated outward from that position. It looks nice, but it can also create large areas where nothing at all grows, and has a tendency to bleed over into areas it's not supposed to. I've replaced it with a simpler approach of noise based placement. This and more will be heading to the beta soon after which we'll take a day or two to polish so we can push the new tutorials and everything else since added onto the live branch.

[ 2019-04-08 14:12:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

v 0.4.4k2 - 2019.04.03 - Fixed the crafting tutorial not completing - Fixed some tutorials not rewarding the next tutorial and added an automatic fix to make sure the player has all such continuations - Stopped completed steps in the journal from going green - Fixed some quests being receivable more than once - Fixed tree rarity particles and sometimes colliders not turning off after being harvested - Added an automatic fix for older quests that may have been saved with outdated information - Fixed the journal's quest list scrollbar not showing up automatically 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-04-03 01:20:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've added 36 new tutorial steps across 8 different new tutorials. After completing the first "Getting Started" series, more specific quests are opened for harvesting, crafting, building, and adventuring, some of which then branch further into more tutorials. Each step contains a detailed description that can be read in the journal, and re-read under the "Completed" tab even after being finished. There is then a shorter description that displays on the quest tracker along with the steps. v 0.4.4k - 2019.04.02 - Fixed the journal - Added 8 more tutorial quest lines with 36 new steps 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-04-02 14:58:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

Upgrading Unity, which required me to update the majority of the tools that I use, brought in a lot more bugs than I initially noticed, and ended up having to spend quite a bit more time on get everything back in order. The quest journal that was added during the same patch in which I initially upgraded Unity was thus pushed to side while I was busy getting things working again and is a tad unfinished. Mostly just the "stop tracking" button doesn't work yet, but I should be back to regular development in the morning... assuming nothing is a flaming pile of mess like it was Tuesday morning! Sorry to everyone that loaded into a broken world during that. v 0.4.4j - 2019.03.28 - Fixed a number of bugs introduced after upgrading to Unity 2018.3.9 - Fixed pumpkin seeds throwing price errors - Fixed earth elemental roll animations not looping properly - Fixed monsters not responding to attacks from behind - Fixed pigs having zero health - Added "Town Encounter" and "Small Encounter" toggles to the map (WIP) - Fixed a map bug showing all rare resources 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-03-28 14:55:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

UPDATE: I've temporarily pushed beta back to v 0.4.4h until I can polish the latest version up more. There were more bugs brought in with the Unity upgrade than it seemed at first. --------------------------------- Fixed a nasty bug that didn't show up in the Unity Editor so unfortunately I didn't catch it before exporting a patch. Sorry about that! Still some problems with teleporting I'm working on. Updating Unity is never easy. v 0.4.4i2 - 2019.03.26 - Fixed the bug causing worlds to not generate properly

[ 2019-03-26 03:08:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've added a quest journal this patch and all-round upgraded quest capabilities and management. In order to fix the cursor not locking properly, a known bug with Unity 2018.2, I upgraded to 2018.3.9, the latest and greatest over the weekend. Upgrading a "major" version (.2 -> .3) is always a pretty serious undertaking and there are almost certainly some new bugs in this build that I haven't spotted yet. Nothing difficult, I just need to run into them once, or have someone report them to me and I can patch them up quick and easy. So sorry if you run into something like that. Carpets seem to be acting wonky for one. Then I can get back to expanding the tutorial(s) and town capabilities. v 0.4.4i - 2019.03.25 - Upgraded Unity to 2018.3.9 - Fixes cursor lock problems - Added an animation toggle to the character creation screen - Added a music toggle to the character creation screen - Added tooltip capabilities to the start screen - Added a quest journal via the J key (not built-in to key binding menu yet) 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-03-25 14:24:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

Not finished today, but here are some bug fixes for those playing the beta right now. v 0.4.4h - 2019.03.22 - Added a check to prevent building in an area already occupied by a foundation - Fixed some loot becoming -1 rarity. Saves will auto-correct their loot. - Fixed the crafting category all/none toggle missing some categories - Fixed NPC summoning requirements reporting required furniture as 1 tier higher - Fixed facility upgrades that take multiple resources eating resources when not all are present - Fixed harvesting and enchanting skills not saving 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-03-22 06:49:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

First off.... Quests! Making their debut in the form of a tutorial. This is currently only a chain of 4 quests that walk you through a couple of starting quests. If there's anything wrong with it, I'd like to catch it early, so no point waiting until I finish the whole thing before adding it to beta. Currently it walks you through the basics of solace storage, crafting, harvesting, equipping, and skills. No journal and quest giver types yet, but all in good time. New worlds will now start with 15 stone in their solace storage for the tutorial. Second up we have player built town buildings. Instead of "plopping" down a pre-made building, you can now create and decorate your own houses for harvester townsfolk so long as they meet the minimum requirements now listed in the facility upgrades screen. It is unfortunately possible to summon them in weird positions depending on how you placed the facility, and they are in desperate need of some movement and eye contact, and we'll get to all of that eventually!
On the facility upgrade screen now are ingredient icons complete with tooltips. Rather than text saying "4x Timber" an icon with numbers just as they are in the inventory are much easier to recognize. The tooltips are there in case clarification is needed as to just what they are. I will most likely be changing other parts of the interface that list ingredients with text to use this system instead, and will add tooltips to the inventory and loot and so forth. A lot of this is being added to help me move towards crafting skills and facility upgrades, along with a number of new townspeople and town benefits. To make finding coal mines less difficult and for some general map upgrades that I'm working on in coal mines and monoliths are now visible on the map. I've also temporarily set coal mine generation to 100% per terrain, so they're all over the place. Coal mines in particular will be changing in the very near future, as will monoliths on the map by default, among other things. v 0.4.4g - 2019.03.21 - Added a quest system with the first 4 steps of a soon to be longer tutorial quest - Harvester NPCs can now be summoned from the facilities if they are in a closed room and certain building and furniture requirements are met (WIP) - Added a tooltip system, currently only used on the facility upgrade screen - Monoliths reset to fix a bug that needed fixing to display them on the map properly - Fixed the map not refreshing in several instances that it should - Lowered mountain and snow biome trees - Changed night and day start times a bit - Reset harvesting and crafting skills (free/sorry) - Added coal mines and monoliths to the map (WIP) - Fixed several coal miner problems (WIP) - Fixed items dropped on death becoming temporarily uninteractable when respawning nearby - Fixed monster essence drop rarities scaling with monster rank - Fixed a major night time performance issue - Fixed normal monsters reporting as "Entity Normal" in the combat window - Fixed "Health" enchant altering your current health instead of you max health 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-03-21 14:03:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

A new structure has been added to the open world: Abandoned Mine. These are the first "Town Encounter" object whose specific purpose is to have a town built next to it to be staffed and becomes usable. A staffed abandoned mine becomes a coal mine whose use is currently planned as primarily a requirement for upgrading forges. You don't actually need to mine coal, you just need to own a coal mine somewhere in the world. Either you do or don't. I've also added an algorithm to player built structures called a flood fill, that will test if they are properly "enclosed". The current method does not work with roofing, so until that gets upgraded you will need a layer of ceiling underneath any roofing to "seal" a house. This is intended for one to let players create their own town NPC buildings, so long as they meet certain requirements, such as a min/max size, a bed, a table, and a proper facility. It will most likely also be used in the future for temperature control benefits as well.
There is also now a "snap" option for building and object placement. Currently new structure positioning, town building positioning, and facility/furniture positioning will snap to the nearest 1 meter. Town buildings and facilities/furniture can also be rotated and "snapped" to the nearest 22.5 degree angle. Keep in mind that a town building that is not snapped to a 90 degree angle will not meet up precisely with other "snapped" buildings. There will very likely be more controls added to this system to allow precise tweaking to get different angles and positioning just right. Towns are also now attempting to determine their biome, though there seem to be some problems I am still working out. This may interrupt town gatherers temporarily. v 0.4.4f - 2019.03.12 - Control keys can now be used to "snap" buildings and facilities positions to a 1 per meter grid - Control will also "snap" rotation of facilities and town buildings to the nearest multiple of 22.5 degrees - Having less than 10 hydration now makes you thirsty, stopping energy and mana regeneration - Having less than 10 fullness now make you hungry, stopping health regeneration - Hunger, Starvation, Thirsty, and Dehydration, will now display effect icons in the upper right - Towns now know what biome they are in (WIP) - Town Crafters now require 50 metal and 50 of the resource they specialize in to construct - Reduced the enchanting skill tree icon size and spacing - Moved harvesting enchants back on to the enchanting skill tree - Fixed enchanting categories displaying the total number of enchants in-game instead of just known enchants - Fixed resources defaulting back to T0 on the beta - Fixed wood floor quarters reading as "walls" 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-03-12 13:33:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

Several small bug fixes thanks to reports on our discord server! More in the works. v 0.4.4e3 - 2019.03.09 - Fixed items with the old attribute enchants throwing errors - Fixed lava clipping into the next cave sometimes - Fixed the enchant unlock window resizing too small 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-03-09 12:50:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

There were problems with saved games that had items with "old" enchants on them not loading properly with yesterdays patch, this patch shouldn't have that. I also fixed/improved a number of interface problems like descriptions and warnings that weren't yet working with the new recipes unlocks. I also added to the mod template for enchants the ability to specify a minimum and a maximum level, tier, and/or rarity. Meaning we could make an enchant drop out in the world, that requires at least level 30 in enchanting to use it, for example. This was also important for the new enchant Minor Light, as it only uses light, a currency, it can't use higher tiers and rarities. This also limits leveling up enchanting using the spell because it can only be cast as tier 0, which is what it used to determine experience when crafting and enchanting. I will be adding "Light" and "Major Light" shortly. I also would like to move the the archetype set enchants as automatic and free unlocks on the actual archetype skill trees themselves. So for example once you've spent 20 points in the Squire tree you automatically learn level 1 of the squire set enchant. Discussions on our discord server willing. v 0.4.4e2 - 2019.03.07 - Added back in the archetype set enchants - Added back in the harvesting enchants now unlockable via the harvesting skill trees - Made the skill tree window scrollable - Added enchant unlock descriptions to explain that levels 1-5 unlock rarities common-legendary - Enchants can now have a min/max level, tier, and rarity - Minor light now has a maximum tier and rarity of 0 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-03-07 09:32:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

Enchants are now unlocked as you level up the profession! This is still a bit of a work in progress both in the sense that there are a lot more enchants to be added still, and in that there are still some improvements to be had. After which I will start doing similar work with crafting. v 0.4.4e - 2019.03.06 - Enchants are now unlocked via skill points rewarded for leveling enchanting - Added minor and major versions of attribute enchants - Fixed cave resources tending to be a tier lower than their surface area - Fixed Kilometers per level reading "Levels per kilometer" - Fire elementals now drop essence of fire again - Added Light as a player stat, increased via enchanting, that increases the range and intensity of the player's illumination - Skill tiers not yet unlocked for purchase are now greyed 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-03-06 14:18:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Today I upgraded the map to allow zooming in and out up to 300% and down to 33%. This makes is easier to pin point locations, see the bigger picture, and can also be clicked and dragged for more precise movement now. This required a number of improvements to the way it handles itself, during which I found and repaired a few bugs. To completely repair the resource scanning bugs you may need to revisit an area to allow it to regenerate and repopulate the system with it's data once more.
I've also added two console commands, just because it's late and I haven't made buttons for them yet. /passivespiders will turn on/off spider aggression, meaning the will only fight back when attacked. They won't coming chasing after you on their own (Love you Mom =). The other command /passivemonsters will apply this affect to all monsters, making everything docile unless attacked first. Note that monoloith guards will attempt to help each other. These settings will not yet save with the world, and need to be "reapplied" after loading into a world. Tomorrow they will remember your choices. I've also added toggles to turn on/off encounters and solaces from the map. My original intent was to add a toggle for solace names on the map, but I didn't quite get to it today. On top of all that, the loot system was rolling up to 4 pieces of loot for normal mobs unintentionally. I set it up to specify a minimum and maximum amount of drops for each "rank" Normal, Champion, Hero, and Boss (towers with 45 or more rooms can spawn "boss" chests) I would have preferred to up this to the beta branch first, but it fixes a serious enough problem to warrant an immediate push. Should anything strange crop up I'll patch it up! v 0.4.4d - 2019.03.04 - Added zoom (mouse wheel) and click-drag to the map - Fixed a number of resource scanning bugs - Made loot generation amounts more specific per quality (normal/champion/etc) - Fixed herbs and vegetables respawning with every load - Animals now make the same check as monsters to not spawn too close the player and/or any buildings - Fixed underground solaces showing on the surface map - Added /passivespiders and /passivemonsters console commands You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-03-04 14:25:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

v 0.4.4c2 - 2019.03.02 - Fixed facilities placed on other facilities not saving properly (chests placed on shelves for example) - Fixed 100% drop rate loot being added to the roll tables instead of just dropping - Fixed tower spawning problems - Fixed defeated monsters disappearing immediately after clearing a tower You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-03-02 03:33:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fixed a few minor things, but most of all revamped loot generation as it was very possible to generate treasure chests with nothing in them! Loot will now roll out at least a minimum amount of items for encounters, champions, and heroes. This patch has gone straight to the default live branch. v 0.4.4c - 2019.03.01 - Improved weapon swapping - Added a wardrobe tab to the equipment window that overrides the visuals of equipped armor/weapons - Fixed swimming animations - Improved loot generation so that higher quality rolls will generate at least a minimum amount of rewards - Right-clicking on water in a container will now attempt to drink the water - In the event of an error loading a facility or furniture type the type erring will now print to console You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-03-01 14:30:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch is intended as a hotfix for v 0.4.4a and will be pushed to the live branch shortly. Still, just to be safe I'll push it to beta first to make sure something strange doesn't pop up. v 0.4.4b - 2019.02.28 - Any hero rank monster now has a 1/3 chance to drop an unknown recipe if any unknown recipes remain - Monster and chest loot is now randomized between the minimum and maximum quality it can become per item - Increased fog distance for all weather types - Added the option to disable fog in the settings - Fixed fire elementals poking through floors - Fixed fire elemental death animation - Fixed the GetCamPos error - Separated lower body and upper body animations to prevent "floating" while in a combat stance (WIP) You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-02-28 07:35:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Now on the live branch, v 0.4.4a bringing in a host of fixes, new monsters, town portals, procedural towers, and more! Improvements to caves and resource management have made them much more viable for multiplayer, which is still in closed beta. The beginnings of modding support have been added with the ability to add items and enchants via .ini files. This system is still a work in progress so I haven't gone into detail about it yet, though I certainly will when the time is right. The Steamworks SDK has also been integrated into the game allowing me to now setup achievements, cloud saves, etc., as well as being a necessary step towards Steam Workshop integration. Below is a condensed list of the changes since the last live patch: Encounters - Added seed based procedural towers to the large encounter roll table - Increased encounter light rewards - Increased lava cave spawn chance from 10% to 20% after the 3rd cave in a system - Caves are now seed based - Caves now generate navigation data Monsters - Added Giant Spiders to the grass biome - Added Giant Vipers to the desert biome - Added Ice Golems to snow biome - Added Rock Golems to caves - Added cave heroes to the end of each cave system, either a Crystal Golem, or an Obsidian Golem, each with unique drops - Increased champion/hero/boss monster damage and health - Set all non-passive mobs to drop 1-2 light instead of multiplying by their level up to 10 Items - Added Paper - Added Town Portals - Added several golem specific drops, not yet used in recipes Resources - Replaced the ore model with 3 new versions: small, medium, and large - Ore now spawns different and in different sizes for each biome - Resources and animals are now managed per biome - Resources and animals are now spawned using deterministic noise - Resources and animals now only save changes to non-rare node, reducing save file sizes dramatically General - Added enchant mod file input capabilities - Added the ability to add items and enchants via .ini files - Reduced storm and fog weather chances down from 5% to 2.5% - Monster loot is now handled per biome, per monster types - Improved cursor lock on/off functions - Fixed the help window not centering itself on certain screen resolutions You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-02-27 12:03:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

v 0.4.3h - 2019.02.27 - Set all non-passive mobs to drop 1-2 light instead of multiplying by their level up to 10 - Increased encounter light rewards - Reduced storm and fog weather chances down from 5% to 2.5% - Fixed the help menu not centering itself on some screen resolutions - Fixed cave monster levels doubling past 8km - Fixed obsidian cores using the crystal core icon 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-02-27 03:26:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

There are still two minor cosmetic bugs that I'm aware of (it's very late) but all in all this is looking like a quite stable build. Hopefully I will be able to push this to the live branch tomorrow with only some minor changes. Best of all, I finally fixed fog! It's always been a problem because of the multiple camera setup and advanced sky, but I figured it out. v 0.4.3g2 - 2019.02.26 - Fixed fog - Fixed a monster drop error that could interrupt terrain unloading/saving - Fixed the possibility of a procedural tower chest spawning without a guard - Fixed an error when returning to an underground town portal - Fixed lava caves regenerating when revisited - Increased lava cave spawn chance from 10% to 20% after the 3rd cave in a system - Fixed seeds, pumpkins, and a few other items not staking and not going into containers 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-02-26 14:42:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Posted a few "patch notes" already, but I didn't take the time to post pictures and explain things over the past few days, so here goes! First of all, four new mobs are in since the ice golems and rock golems were added. Giant spiders can now be found in the grass biome, though they could be bigger. And giant vipers can now be found in the desert. No new drops for them quite yet.
Crystal Golems and Obsidian Golems can now also be found at the end of each cave as Hero mobs. Crystal Golems drop Crystal Cores and Obsidian Golems drop Obsidian Cores, though the recipes they are used in have not been added yet. These hero mobs will not respawn once they are defeated.
Also added in are paper and town portals. Paper can be crafted easily from timber and town portals can be crafted with paper and a bit of light. These allow you to place a town portal anywhere in the world that will let you travel back to your home solace and back, round trip, but only once. Upon returning to the town portal it will disappear.
Lot's more in the works, but I want to stabilize the current beta build so I can push it live. There are still a few name usage problems, loot not increasing in rarity for champions and heroes, a rare Unity grass error a couple bug reports have shown up recently, and a lingering navmesh management bug when teleporting from one cave system to another. Once these are all squashed, I'll push 0.4.3 live. Big thanks as always to everyone in Discord posting screenshots and bug reports! v 0.4.3f - 2019.02.23 - Fixed black patches on cave walls due to a shader error - Fixed dragging a hotbar button into the inventory throwing an error - Fixed right-clicking an inventory slot while dragging a hotbar button throwing an error - Fixed a lingering reference to the last skill being dragged after a failed drag - Fixed a navmesh management duplicate key error - Fixed a cave navmesh management duplicate key error v 0.4.3e4 - 2019.02.23 - Fixed an error when swapping weapons with nothing equipped - Fixed mountain trees not spawning properly - Improved cave hero spawn methods - Cave heroes will no longer respawn once defeated - Fixed caves no longer going downward v 0.4.3e3 - 2019.02.22 - Fixed lava caves - Fixed the rare possibility of caves generating too close to their North/South maximums, creating missing walls - Fixed an above ground navmesh error during teleportation - Added Paper - Added Town Portals 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-02-23 10:10:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

Broke some things on beta last night trying to patch quick before bed. Sorry about that! This should fix the major problems with caves, and adds in cave hero mobs to the end of each cave system. v 0.4.3e - 2019.02.22 - Added cave heroes to the end of each cave system, either a Crystal Golem, or an Obsidian Golem, each with unique drops - Widened the spawn area of cave heroes - Fixed a cave data recycling error - Fixed a cave navmesh recycling error - Fixed a problem with resource management in caves - Fixed an animal naming error v 0.4.3e2 - 2019.02.22 - Fixed some animals being unresponsive - Fixed traveling back "up" caves not reloading previous caves - Fixed looting some monsters/animals causing others to disappear 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-02-22 00:59:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

v 0.4.3d - 2019.02.21 - Fixed the scroll sensitivity of the enchant recipe list - Increased champion/hero/boss monster damage and health - Added two safety nets to the UnloadTerrain method due to recent problems - Fixed name specific drops - Fixed enchant mod file requirements (enchantable item types) not working properly - Added giant spiders to the grass biome - Added giant vipers to the desert biome - Improved monster and animal initialization speed - Fixed occurrences where starting too close to monsters and animals could prevent their AI from turning on 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-02-21 14:01:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

I have completed a mod template import system for enchants with this patch and added in several items to test both the enchant importing and item importing. Ice Golems will drop a Frozen Core at a 100% rate, and players now have the knowledge to craft a Frozen Box from 5 Frozen Cores under Alchemy/Consumables. A Frozen Box can then be used with the "Ice Damage" enchant, which is unexpectedly requiring chest armor, and only actually adds physical damage, but they're just for testing today. With these systems and the improved monster and resource spawn management tools I built last week I can now rapidly add in more monsters, resources, ingredient, and enchants! Which I plan to do tomorrow. Thanks as always to everyone playing on the beta branch, pointing out my mistakes for me to fix, and especially to everyone in our Discord server. v 0.4.3c - 2019.02.20 - Rebalanced stone and stalk sizes to pre-0.4.3 and increased all ore sizes several factors - Fixed an error related to navmesh management between teleports - Fixed an out of sync error during procedural tower generation - Fixed an our of range error during procedural tower generation - Updated enchant recipe ingredients to use language files - Added enchant mod file input capabilities 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-02-20 13:52:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

A few fixes for some of the new systems and changes. There seems to be a problem with caves generating black holes in some cases I will be looking into shortly. v 0.4.3b2 - 2019.02.19 - Fixed procedural tower ladders blocking doors in some cases - Fixed cave navmesh recycling problems - Fixed a couple rock/ice golem animation looping problems - Fixed rock/ice golem looting - Fixed rock/ice golem health bars - Fixed cases where an RPC could be called on a self-destructing mob v 0.4.3b - 2019.02.19 - Fixed stalks not spawning - Fixed monsters self-destructing in towers old and new 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-02-19 02:53:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

Several things are still in flux with this patch, namely monster naming and loot allocation, but there are quite a few changes so I wanted to get a patch up for our invaluable beta testers to play with! v 0.4.3a - 2019.02.18 - Added Rock Golem to caves - Added Ice Golem to snow biome - Added the ability to add items in game via .ini files - Replaced the ore model with 3 new versions: small, medium, and large - Ore now spawns different and in different sizes for each biome - Resources and animals are now managed per biome - Resources and animals are now spawned using deterministic noise - Resources and animals now only save changes to non-rare node, reducing save file sizes dramatically - Monster loot is now handled per biome - Caves now generate navigation data - Improved cursor lock on/off functions - Fixed radial menu treating ladders as boats - Fixed a cave bug that cause zero height areas - Fixed a bug during procedural tower generation 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-02-18 13:36:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

While upgrading cave generation to a deterministic system, partially for multiplayer support, I made a few improvements to them including adding a navmesh generation system so that monsters can now be added in. I also limited cave depth to a maximum of 20 caves, still quite large, which means there is now a known end to each cave. Along with this new location ripe for treasure and the new procedural towers screaming for more rewards I started working on more monsters and more loot. New monsters I've got, and quite a few more that I would like to get in, but having grown immensely from who I was as a developer 12 months ago, I'm much more interested in building modular, component based systems that I can "plug" and "unplug" with ease. This opens the doors to user content (modding) but also makes things much much easier for me once the systems are set up nicely. Resources The first system I added was for resource spawning. I can now add resources to any biome with only a few numbers to dictate necessary information like their spawn rate. In order to make sure this works I changed the ore nodes from being the same no matter where you go.
The above is the new large ore node model, different now from the medium and small ore nodes. Ore is now also handled very differently for each biome. In the grass biome there are no large nor medium nodes, and small nodes only spawn at 10% the base rate. However, in the mountains, for example, small medium and large nodes can all spawn, with the large nodes having up to as much as 70 ore per node. This all is handled with only a few lines of code now that the system works the way it does. Monsters Next up came adding new monsters, which now too can be accomplished with only a few lines of code. To make sure things are working I've added in two new monsters: the Ice Golem, and the Rock Golem.
Items The real reason for adding new monsters in though is of course to create new loot. So I finally got my hands dirty and built an external file friendly item creation system. This way I can add new items into the game very easily using a pre-made template to just fill in a few fields such as item name. That also means that anyone else will be able to add new items into the game by simply creating them, and putting them in a folder I've for now set as Solace Crafting/Mod Files/Items. The items that I add into the base game will be built-in and not present in the folder when it goes live, but it will be the first of several doors to be opened soon allowing players to add and share their own content. The item template file is in ini format, and will automatically ignore any data that it doesn't care about. For example there are a few entries for consumables, but if you're adding a sword you can leave them blank, or delete them entirely, the system won't be using that data in runtime. Loot One drawback to this system, as things were, was that I didn't have an easy way to define what drops where. So I built one! Up until now Solace Crafting has used a "loot table" system, where when loot is to be generated it will pick one or two items off the appropriate pre-defined loot table. Now it instead categorizes loot by biomes and monster names assigning a drop rate to each item individually. In short, that means that any given monster could have any number of a dozen possible drops on them, though it's more likely they will only have one or two basic drops. Each item will be calculated for each chance individually. This new loot system of course also only requires a few lines of code, or a new item template, to add it into the game. The final section of each item template offers the ability to define biome specific drop rates, including multiple biomes, or all biomes, as well as the ability to define name specific drops, so that our new Rock Golems can have a chance at dropping their own specific resource. It ended up being a lot of small steps that are all intertwined and I let more than a week pass by without an update! I still need to make a few tweaks to the loot system, then I should be good to add 6-7 new monsters complete with new resources for each of them. We had a good discussion about monsters on our Discord server, and everyone was pretty much in agreement with my stance that we don't want gory and disgusting in our game and so I'm sticking with elemental and golem types for the most part, for now, though I'm pretty sure a giant spider and giant snake will be coming in. There may be a "no giant spiders" button for those that really don't like spiders (I know a guy, it's not me), as again this is all designed to be sort of "plug-and-play" though the question was: how can you disable giant spiders if they're the only thing that drops venom sacs? What we came up with, and is something that has been requested before, was an option to make monsters passive. That combined with the already possible settings of extremely low monster health and damage, and you would effectively be in "safe" mode but still be able to "harvest" monsters for specific ingredients when needed. I hope to get a beta patch up tomorrow with all the new goodies, though I still need to work on building Item Recipe and Enchant Recipe templates so that I can make those new ingredients be worth the adventure!

[ 2019-02-15 13:57:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

I have improved the procedural tower scripts quite a bit and added a variety of extra features. They now will attempt to generate doors to rooftops whenever possible, treasure chests will remain locked until their accompanying hero is defeated, heroes will not respawn after being defeated, and the tower in its entirety will be awarded to the player in the event of all monsters within being cleared.
Note that the basic monsters will respawn between play sessions unless the tower is fully cleared. That however, like all things, is open to discussion and change. I'm going to be updating the cave systems to work more like the new procedural tower system and limit their depth similar to the new towers so that they only go 5-30 "rooms" deep, spawn monsters and heroes, and have more kinds of loot in them. v 0.4.2b - 2019.02.05 General - Changed default hatch open direction to upward - Fixed distant (old) tower models not turning back on when their terrain is disabled - Fixed several errors when attempting to interact with structures that do not belong to you - Light rewards from towers, procedural towers, and monoliths is no longer multiplied by level Procedural Towers - Earth elementals in towers now have a chance to spawn as champions - Fire elementals in towers now spawn as heroes - Fire elemental heroes and their treasure chests in procedural towers will now remain "cleared"/open after being defeated - Clearing all the monsters in a procedural tower now transfers ownership to the player - Added exits to roofs to procedural towers - Increased treasure chest spawn rate in procedural towers - Increased procedural tower monster spawn rate - Improved procedural tower monster and object placement - Fixed procedural tower treasure tier calculations 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-02-05 06:29:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

Now on beta, procedural towers! Currently they can go up to 50 rooms, with the rarity of treasure inside increasing the higher you go, all the way up to legendary if you can find a really big one! These bad boys are a bit empty at the moment, but it's a great start. By empty I mean, I would like to add a lot more "clutter" as well as traps and hidden rooms, things like that.
These are entirely deterministic besides the loot inside, though the rarity of the loot is also deterministic. Meaning, two worlds created using the same seed should spawn the same tower on the same terrain. v 0.4.2a - 2019.02.01 - Added procedural towers to the large encounter roll table 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-02-01 14:44:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

I was going to hold this round of patches off for beta but it ended up fixing enough problems that I turned off the new procedural towers, the main point of sending it to beta first later tonight, and am patching now! One thing that had been requested before, after dying in a cave a death marker will now appear over the entrance of the cave that you died in on the map. Also, a few new building pieces that I added for the procedural towers are in this patch including ladders and floor hatches. The ladder mechnics are always a bit funky in games, let me know what you think and I can tweak them. v 0.4.1i2 - 2019.02.01 - Increased monster corpse decay (when loot is present) from 5 minutes to 15 minutes - Fixed closing news after selecting a character causing the character selection to show up behind world selection - Moved interaction colliders for doors/shutters to the window/door spaces for multi-player purposes v 0.4.1i - 2019.01.31 - Added 5 new stone wall types: StoneWall2, StoneWall2Broken, StoneWall2Broken2, StoneWindow2, StoneDoorway2 - Added WoodHatch floor type - Added 2 new building upgrades, StoneDoor2 and WoodHatchDoor - Added 2 new climbable ladders as building center pieces positioned for walls and hatches - Upgraded cave position data to a per client basis - Dying inside of a cave will now place a death icon on the map at the cave entrance to the cave you died in - Fixed the building UI not immediately switching to upgrade mode when a door or window is built - Fixed very high level prices calculating improperly - Fixed improper solace upgrade resource tiers in worlds with adjusted levels per kilometer - Fixed terraforming stuck as "obstructed" in face mode You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-02-01 06:50:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fixes for a variety of bugs that were found over the weekend. Error Reporting Recently it was suggested that the anonymous error reporting Solace Crafting uses (a built-in service of Unity), was not being made clear enough, so I have made some changes in attempting to improve that. The reports are extremely useful to me and most of the fixes in today's patch were found in thanks to that system. Just to be clear, reports are only sent if something goes wrong, and they do not contain any personal information like IP addresses or Steam account information.The option to turn error reporting off was added to the in-game settings back in the Spring of 2018, shortly after the system was turned on, and now also exists in the start menu settings. A warning that the system exists and is on by default will now appear the first time Solace Crafting is run on any machine/user account. Procedural Dungeons Over the weekend I built a robust "dungeon" generation system that can create deterministic (purely seed based) towers and complexes of any size. This is intended to replace the current towers, a static design, with procedural vertical dungeons full of monsters, traps, and treasure. The current system is only using placeholders, but windows, balconies, special room types, monsters, decorations, and anything else can be brought into the generation.
One of the problems with multi-player than I ran into was how to go about recreating caves on client machines. Currently the cave generation system uses a lot of random numbers to create an organic feel. Unfortunately those random numbers cannot be reproduced and need to be saved, meaning the cave layout would need to be sent to each client in it's entirety after the server generates it. The seed based approach I've built the procedural dungeon generator to use creates absolutely everything, down to monster and torch placement using only a single integer. This way, only the integer and any changes (monsters defeated/etc) will need to be sent to clients for them to be able to reproduce the same dungeon. I will very shortly be "upgrading" the cave generation to use a similar approach, have successfully added monsters to caves, and more! v 0.4.1h - 2019.01.28 - Added a warning to notify that anonymous error reporting is on by default when the application is loaded for the first time on any machine or user account - Added the option to toggle anonymous error reporting from the main menu settings - Improved tree collider and rarity particle field sizing, which includes cacti and fern - Increased ore and stone rarity particle field size - Removed the outdated "Summon Trainer" button from facility upgrades - Lumber can now be used in forges and campfires as fuel - Fixed some furniture throwing an error when "Place" was clicked - Fixed Mud Skin, Clarity, and Flame Glyph using energy instead of mana - Fixed Meteor, Comet, and Lightning Strike throwing errors - Fixed the "Split" button and input not always turning off when no items are selected - Fixed right-clicking with a stack selected attempting to add to it's original location instead of a new location - Fixed right-clicking a stack until empty not resetting the item details interface - Fixed crafting amount buttons throwing an error when no recipe is selected - Fixed a rare error when interacting with objects - Fixed a rare error when dropping items You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-01-28 04:07:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Just a few fixes for bugs reported with the latest update. v 0.4.1g3 - 2019.01.25 - Limited Wooden Obelisk range to a maximum of 100m - Fixed freshly constructed Obelisks not firing - Fixed harvested trees reloading as ghosts - Fixed doors and shutters refusing interaction You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-01-25 07:04:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Now live on Win32, Win64, and Linux, version 0.4.1g. Other than a number of small quality of life benefits like stack splitting, opportunistic saving, and a mouse cursor lock fix, this updates the game client to a server-client framework that I have mentioned in the beta patch notes a number of times. In short, multi-player, which is currently under development, requires distinction between the server and client for almost everything that happens. No longer can I simply code "eat what's in inventory slot 2" everything has to now reference a client, and ask the server to perform the task. Rather than developing two different frameworks, one for single-player and one for multi-player, single-player now acts as if it is a self-hosted server, without actually listening for incoming connections or registering itself to the master server list. This required many thousands of lines of changes to the code and sure enough started out with a lot of bugs. Thanks to our beta testers this build looks quite stable and I'm glad to push it live with all the new bells and whistles. Multi-player development is a chore, and I've put it down for this week as I was really burnt out trying to 'grind' through it. I'm taking a break to work on more fun things like building/structure placement grids and procedural dungeons, but will get back into polishing it up for open beta shortly. Condensed patch notes from v 0.3.3l to v 0.4.1g General - Single player now runs as a self-hosted server with no listening/connection capabilities - Fixed the mouse wandering out of windowed mode after changing applications and coming back - Game world max distance upgraded from 268,000km to 999,999km (will add more when needed) - Auto-save will now wait up to an extra 5 minutes for you to open a window such as the inventory before saving - Added "/autosavetimer [integer]" command to the console. 0 will stop auto-save functions. 60-3600 will set it to 1-60 minute intervals. Crafting - Campfires can now use fire fonts - Updated enchanting material listings to use language specific names - Added the option to craft/practice multiple items at once - Crafting experience can now carry over to the next level - Added crafting experience gained cap at up to 3 tiers higher materials than player profession level Inventory - Added a stack split input/button to the inventory - Right-clicking over a viable slot while dragging a stack drops 1, now combined with shift = 10, control = 100, shift+control = 1000 - Changed +/- buttons universally to match the above method instead of control = 1000, control+shift = 100 - Water and food and other consumables can now be used from within containers, including water in buckets, and watering cans - Consumables can now be right-clicked while in bags to be consumed - Right-clicking on non-consumable items in a container will now attempt to move them to your main inventory - Wells can now be placed on ground with less than 20cm of height variation instead of completely flat ground only - Buckets will now fill with water of a tier proper for the location they are being filled at - Combining water from two containers will reduce the water's tier to the lowest water present - Changed enchanting table "pickup" button to always show like other facilities Skills - Changed Target AOE skills/spells to use a 2m high box check to prevent agroing mobs above and below 'ground' level Harvesting - Ferns can now be harvested for a small amount of stalk and globes of water - Small cacti can now be harvested for a small amount of timber and globes of water - Large cacti can now be harvested for a medium amount of timber and globes of water Building - Added a deconstruct general skill for rapidly deconstructing buildings v 0.4.1g2 - 2019.01.24 - Fixed Store Signs missing material You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-01-24 04:53:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

I spent yesterday and today working on single player as there are a number of new features in the current beta that have not yet made their way to the live build such as stack splitting. When pushed this will upgrade the live version to the server-client framework, where, even in single player the code will be passed around as if the player is "hosting" a single player game. There were a number of changes that needed to happen to make this and multi-player possible, as well as a number of upgrades that made it it along the way. I will post a more complete list of the changes when it's safe to go live, hopefully tomorrow or the next day, and have left out multi-player only patch notes until multi-player goes into open beta. v 0.4.1f - 2019.01.22 - Fixed inventory links on the hotbar not working - Fixed demons throwing errors - Water and food and other consumables can now be used from within containers, including water in buckets, and watering cans - Fixed solace aura upgrades costs calculating tiers incorrectly in some cases Due to a big drop in productivity from me trying to "grind" through the last of debugging multi-player I've put it down for a few days. I worked on performance and deterministic noise (for improvements to caves, and the procedural dungeon system I've started) over the weekend, and am focusing on getting single-player patched up on the live build until that happens. 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-01-22 13:44:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've been working mostly on multi-player, but here are some updates that affect the single player beta as well. v 0.4.1d - 2019.01.15 - Fixed a tilled soil error - Fixed resource rarity particles not rendering properly v 0.4.1c - 2019.01.10 - Fixed farming objects not reloading properly I had to rewrite the master server (server list) a few times last week, but it looks to be working good now. I originally had it checking on servers to make sure they were still active and removing them if it had any trouble connecting, but this made it so that a lagg spike could cause a server to get dropped permanently from the list. Instead, servers now report to the master server their current status, including player count and current day number, every 15 seconds, and the master server only drops a server if it hasn't reported in in over 40 seconds. After a few patches to multi-player we had the Tokyo test server up for 24 hours without any major problems. There was a fair amount of bugs, many of which I was able to fix yesterday and today, but the core systems are working well. Another couple of patches and I will be looking to start up a public beta server or two for further testing. 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-01-15 13:20:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

A variety of fixes for Monday morning before i get back into multi-player specific work. Most notable are the updates to a system known as Network Proximity Checking. This is where an object, say a node of ore, will check to see which connected players are nearby it instead of just telling everyone to keep track of its current status regardless of how far away they might be. For one, this isn't needed on connected clients or in single-player, it's only something a server needs to manage and so has been turned off for single-player/connected clients. Also, because there are so many objects in-game, I rewrote the default system to be managed by terrains themselves instead of all their child objects, so there is only 1 check per terrain every 30 seconds against connected players instead of thousands of smaller objects all making their own checks. While profiling (checking the CPU usage) before and after I found an unnecessary CPU spike that was going off every 5 seconds due to the frequent enabling/disabling of the short range and long range terrain generation systems. Looking into it I was able to fix it, and now am recording a much steadier frame rate. Also, due to the way that trees are being handled across the network, ferns and smaller cacti now are spawning with colliders. In order to implement this properly I had to add a few things so while I was at it I made ferns worth a littl stalk, and cacti worth a little timber. Cacti also are now a steady source of globes of water. This will also let me better control the size of the colliders used on all "trees" to reduce clipping into them. Note that ferns and small cacti still do not collider with players. v 0.4.1b - 2019.01.07 - Ferns can now be harvested for a small amount of stalk and globes of water - Small cacti can now be harvested for a small amount of timber and globes of water - Large cacti can now be harvested for a medium amount of timber and globes of water - Disabled network object observer checks for non-server/single-player clients - Rewrote network object observer checks to be maintained by terrains instead of individual objects - Fixed crafting amount buttons being backwards - Fixed crafting amounts being ignore - Fixed crafting experience to be gained displaying improperly for level 0 professions - Fixed crafting experience not carrying over to next level on all but tailoring and enchanting - Fixed a moderate CPU spike every 5 seconds caused by the terrain generator - Fixed wild fruit trees not bearing fruit - Fixed right-click to equip not updating avatar - Fixed estimated dodge/parry/block/resist tooltips diving by 0 at level 0 producing bad results - Fixed ferns and small cacti colliding with players - Fixed placing objects directly on the ground/caves throwing errors - Fixed flame burst throwing errors 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. This beta version is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2019-01-07 01:42:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch upgrades the single-player game mode to a self-contained server to mimic the server to client relation rather than maintain two completely different frameworks for single-player and multi-player. Single-player is forced in this patch so the "change" button next to single-player will not offer any other options. There are a lot of changes to code here, so there are bound to be some small bugs that need repair. I would highly recommend making a backup of any game worlds/player files that you use with this branch. v 0.4.1 - 2019.01.04 - Single player now runs as a self-hosted server with no listening/connection capabilities - Wells can now be placed on ground with less than 20cm of height variation instead of completely flat ground only - Buckets will now fill with water of a tier proper for the location they are being filled at - Combining water from two containers will reduce the water's tier to the lowest water present - Game world max distance upgraded from 268,000km to 999,999km (will add more when needed) You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2019-01-04 03:23:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

Happy New Year! From the land of the rising sun. I hope everyone had a safe and fun New Years. I want to take a few minutes to talk about how things have progressed up until now, and how I'd like things to progress from here on. 2018 in retrospect In the Fall of 2013 I started teaching myself how to use Unity and C# as a hobby from scratch. By the start of 2017 I had worked out the basics of what it was I was trying to create and started piecing together the first rendition of Solace Crafting. On January 16th 2018 I released Solace Crafting as Early Access on Steam, and on February 21st 2018, I quit my day job and started work as a full-time developer. Initially the game was riddled with small problems I simply hadn't thought about as an inexperienced developer. Problems with different types of machines, keyboards, and graphics cards. Things that were too difficult to understand if you didn't simply "know" everything about the game front to back as a developer does. The player-base then and now have always been the primary source of information as to what needs work, and I can't express my thanks enough to everyone that has posted here on the forums or joined our Discord server to post screenshots, share files with me, and engage in discussions about the design and style of Solace Crafting with other players and myself. Over the first few months I learned more than anything that time management is absolute top priority at all times, both in the sense of what to be working on, but also how to. In programming there are dozens of ways to approach any problem. Creating a flexible framework that you can add a wide variety of different pieces to is extremely important as things are always changing and evolving. I have been silently updating most things to work in a much more modular, settings based, fashion, though some of the earliest systems still need improvement to better handle all the forms of modding planned for the coming months. Graphics were improved and downgraded a number of times, but in the end really are tertiary when compared to fun and performance. My wife painted a picture for me by request that I keep next to my monitor which says "tanoshisa ha ichiban" or "fun is number one". Crafting, building, adventuring, and exploration have all been vastly upgraded since the initial release, but one problem persists: a lack of content. And as they say, content is king. I hope to remedy this problem with the addition of modding support, which will not only allow players to offer optional content for download, but make things much easier for me to create and add in myself. When it rains it pours By the end of 2018 I had finished around 70% of multi-lingual support, something that required me to go through and refurbish thousands of lines of text content. This ended up being an exhausting process and I decided to put it down for a while to try and spread the stress of it out over time. The next step I had planned however was multiplayer, which has by long and far been the most stressful task to date. In order to test any sort of change to multiplayer code it's generally necessary to export a fresh copy of the game, start up a server, and connect to it, which makes testing even small changes very time consuming. With the language system still on hold and multiplayer less than half-way finished, a string of unfortunate events, hardware, software, and personal, threw me into a burnt out funk. You don't often see it talked about here on Steam or gaming web-sites, but we are people, developers and players alike, and sometimes the world is not as kind to us as we might prefer. I ended up taking more days off to be with my family for the holidays than I had originally intended to, but I feel much better now here on the 2nd of January, and have redefined my short terms goals. In my continuing efforts to be an open and honest developer I'd like to make my plans clear and open for discussion. One of the primary goals as a corporate entity remains: to make enough money to hire additional staff. I do not however believe in running ads, subscriptions, or micro-transactions, despite the very real fact that they can be a boon to development finances. It would be nice to have some cosmetic items for sale, but that would take time to setup and populate. I believe that when Solace Crafting is a better game than it is today it will make us more than enough money to hire additional staff so that we can take it to the next level. These are the three broad features currently in development and I'd like to give my reasoning for each: 1. Multi-lingual support Most of the world doesn't actually speak English. The base Google translations that I'm implementing aren't perfect, but it's still 90% better than not being able to read anything at all. Already we've had a number of player help improve machine translations, and several requests for more languages. Once this system is finished and I setup language specific Steam Store pages, I hope we see an increase of players around the world. My apologies that this was left unfinished for almost all of December. 2. Multiplayer This is something a number of players have expressed their concerns with, primarily as something too difficult for a solo developer. Development has definitely stalled since I began working on multiplayer, however that was largely due to hardware and personal problems than actual difficulty. We have successfully tested multiplayer a number of times, and just need a few more solid 8-10 hour days to get things polished up. Many players over the past six months have made it clear they are waiting for multiplayer, and I completely understand that. I too much prefer to play at least in the same world as my friends and other people if not in real-time together. Hopefully this will help us attract some more streamers as well! 3. Modding support There are a number of well-tested reasons why modding support is great for any game. One reason is the simple fact that I can't get nearly as much content in-game as I would like to by myself. Recipes, items, encounters, plants, monsters, buildings, almost everything has been upgraded over the past few months so that it can be turned on and off with ease. Making it so that additional content can be added in is only a few steps away and along with Steam Workshop integration I hope for this to help generate a wide variety of optional content. This will also in general make it much easier for me to plug in new "official" content as well instead of the hard-coded methods that dominated 2018. What I'm treating as most important here for #1 and #2 is accessibility, and for #3 is content. Hopefully these 3 with another wave of marketing will help bring in enough new players and funds to bring in a programmer smarter than yours truly, and let me focus on design, interface, and content. In any case, modding support will most likely be followed by a period of me focusing on content generation, but once these are in and working, there are a few features I've been very excited to get into for a long time: 4. Dungeons The caves system that we currently have is a work in progress, and certainly has more planned for it. However, room based dungeons, both above and below ground can be generated, created, and manipulated much easier. With the addition of monsters, traps, and treasure, procedural dungeons are one thing, but player owned complexes are another feature to this system I've long wanted to setup. In short, to allow players to create and extend upon a complex via the management of rooms instead of individual pieces as we do when creating structure/buildings. This will allow the creation of complexes both above and below ground, allow player pre-built dungeons from the Steam Workshop to spawn into any world, and could also lead to a better system for spawning town NPCs. 5. Quests This is a long requested system that I have continually put off until there is more content in-game. I think that once modding support is working well and I am able to add more "official" content, it will be easier to set up reward based tasks. 6. Elemental Planes Adding other "types" of dimensions such as a fire plane, or an ice plane, isn't much of a technical difficulty as much as it is artistically time consuming. The basics of world generation, monster spawning, flora, encounters, etc., are all in and working in the base world. Extending that in different shapes to create different dimensions is not so difficult. Once we have more monsters and loot in and working, this is something I've wanted to get into from day one. These are just some of the broader categories on my todo list that I'm looking forward to. There are a number of smaller things yet to be addressed such as improved animations, movement of data management to a database structure, freeform building placement, and more. Please let me know what you think should be given priority, or what has you waiting before giving Solace Crafting a try. Thank you! Thank you again to everyone that bought into Early Access in 2018! I'm sorry Early Access didn't sell as well as I had hoped, preventing me from hiring help. I'm more capable than ever, and still confident I can fill Solace Crafting with the features and content it needs to attract the funds necessary for a small team of dedicated staff so we can take it out of Early Access and beyond! Best wishes to you and your loved ones for 2019 Kyle Postlewait Big Kitty Games

[ 2019-01-02 05:13:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

For the duration of the Steam Winter Sale, Solace Crafting is 25% off!
Multiplayer development continues! Skills and monsters are working 90% Buildings, facilities, and furniture are working 90% I still need to work on towers and caves and some small things, but the important part is the overlying system works well. We've successfully tested players simultaneously connecting from different parts of the world. Unfortunately I lost a hard disk last week that I bought brand new specifically to hold the beta 0.3.3 branch. It completely corrupted the entire project after only three weeks of use. I was only planning to have that as a separate project for a month or two and hadn't made a full (45GB) backup in over a week. Long story short it would have been a fair amount of work to try and reinstate all the changes that are currently in the public beta, from the newest complete backup copy I have. Instead I've been pushing through with multiplayer, and have tested the majority of systems in single-player mode to be sure nothing is bugged before I push the next beta patch. Shortly after that my car broke down! So it's been a rough couple of weeks getting ready for Christmas and the New Year (New Years is a much bigger deal over here in Japan). I'll be busy off and on for the next few days with the holidays. After the Christmas glitter passes I'll be looking to start a multiplayer open beta and see if we can handle more than 2-3 players on a single low/mid-level server. I don't doubt a high end machine in headless mode could handle 16-32 players, but, all in good time! Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2018-12-21 14:50:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

Just now I successfully tested connecting to a dedicated cloud server with my home computer as well as a friend's! Can't stop grinning! =D This required me to first move all player specifics like inventory and skills to a per player system which was a big effort on it's own. Previously, anything could just say "add this to the inventory," but now we have multiple inventories connecting and disconnecting freely. Next was to set up a server-client relationship where the server maintains authority over what players can and cannot do. This is necessary so that a client can't just say "I just dropped 500g." Instead they ask to, and the server checks to see if they actually have 500g before allowing it. Then came building a dedicated server. A dedicated server uses no graphics and does not spawn a player of it's own, focusing entirely on supporting a game world for others to connect to. I wrote a small program to act as a master server list, lost some sleep, and threw my back out once in the process, but phase one is cleared!
Phase two will be improving the hosting options, the server list, and getting everything like building and combat synchronized properly. Much easier than phase one. The final phase three will evolve around enabling infinite terrain, so that players can exist across vast distances from one another. Not an easy task, but certainly not impossible! I'm still hoping to get everything working before Christmas, and will continue to post progress as it happens.

[ 2018-12-11 13:10:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

A few new features, and a few fixes while I continue development of multiplayer. One great idea brought up by one of our players: opportunistic saving. Rather than just saving whenever the autosave timer goes off, it will now enter a state of watching for players to open a window, such as the inventory, before saving. A deconstruct mode is now also available via the general skill tree and allows the rapid deconstruction of buildings. Be careful with it though as it does not ask for confirmation! I still want to add a label to make it more obvious when deconstruction mode has been activated. This version will likely go live tomorrow or the next day. v 0.3.3n - 2018.12.06 - Auto-save will now wait up to an extra 5 minutes for you to open a window such as the inventory before saving - Added the option to craft/practice multiple items at once - Crafting experience can now carry over to the next level - Added a deconstruct general skill for rapidly deconstructing buildings - Improved the methods used to add items to the inventory - Fixed obelisks constantly targeting and untargeting any pigs in their range, slowing things down - Fixed the + tier button in building resources window not using shift and control properly - Fixed Stoneworker's not deconstructing 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. This version of the beta is open to all available platforms. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2018-12-06 08:01:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

A few fixes and upgrades to keep everyone from thinking I've forgotten about them! Best of all is the new stack button, a long requested feature.
Multiplayer Update Multiplayer development continues! And quite well. The problem with multiplayer is you have player 1, player 2, and the server, each with their own copy of, for example player 1's current clothing. If he/she want to make a change, they have to ask the server to make sure they aren't cheating, and if the server is cool with it, the server tells everyone to change player 1's clothes. It sounds easy enough, but if you don't have all your dominoes in order it turns in a big pile of spaghetti. I'm making a number of changes to the underlying code structure, as well as a variety of improvements to data management in order to create smaller save files, and overall transfer less data between clients and the server. This is where most of my attention is these days, though I will still do my best to fix anything that crops up on the currently available builds. A small closed beta test should take place in the near future, followed by open beta testing. Stay tuned! v 0.3.3m - 2018.11.28 - Added "/autosavetimer [integer]" command to the console. 0 will stop auto-save functions. 60-3600 will set it to 1-60 minute intervals. - Changed enchanting table "pickup" button to always show like other facilities - Added a stack split input/button to the inventory - Right-clicking over a viable slot while dragging a stack drops 1, now combined with shift = 10, control = 100, shift+control = 1000 - Changed +/- buttons universally to match the above method instead of control = 1000, control+shift = 100 - Fixed the elite button on the map not working - Fixed the console auto-indenting the left - Fixed the camera jerking behind small boat - Fixed woodworker armor bonus aura not working 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. This beta patch is available on both Windows and Linux. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2018-11-28 13:23:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

The beta branch which was on 0.3.3k has been patched up to 0.3.3l, while the live branch which was on 0.3.3j has also been patched up to 0.3.3l. I however forgot to change the in-game version number and date so it will still say v 0.3.3k, but the changes to 0.3.3l are minor and rest assured they are in. Meanwhile, multiplayer development continues! =D v 0.3.3l - 2018.11.24 - Fixed solace auras being upgradable beyond level 5 which then breaks them - Added a temporary console command /checksolaceauras to automatically repair any solaces above level 5 - Fixed Essences of beast, plant, and wood reading as hide, stalk, and timber - Fixed the English version explanation of how to use a campfire v 0.3.3k - 2018.11.22 - Fixed the day display not updating post-load in some cases and reading "DayDay" - Linux builds will no longer attempt to move files to the windows recycle bin, deleting them outright instead - Added "Run in background" to gameplay settings - Trashbin and campfire now display "Destroy" and "Craft" instead of "Refine" - Holding the control key while clicking on a +/- tier button, +/- level button, or an upgrade skill button will perform the operation 1000 times (Shift = 10, Shift+Control = 100) - Fixed Essence of water displaying as "unknown" 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2018-11-24 08:50:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Some bug fixes in-between my continuing work on Multiplayer. Note that this patch is "beta" but is available on all 3 platforms (Win32, Win64, Linux) as it is intended for a live patch. I will let it sit on beta for a day or two to be sure there are no unforeseen problems with it before pushing it live. Multiplayer Update Speaking of which, it's going well! I have successfully connected a client to a host, each with a unique character. I've set it up so that you can bring in a character design from your machine onto the server you connect to. Inventory, levels, and so forth will be unique to the server but the look of your character is better setup prior to connecting rather than trying to set aside a specific "hidden" area in the game world just for character customization. I've got most of the basic concepts down now and just need to implement them into a server authoritative structure. Once that's all working I will run some beta testing. The real challenge will come after that where I have to create fake "pockets" of space for players in distant locations to move around in without getting too far from the world zero to prevent physics math errors. It's only a matter of time though! v 0.3.3k - 2018.11.22 - Fixed the day display not updating post-load in some cases and reading "DayDay" - Linux builds will no longer attempt to move files to the windows recycle bin, deleting them outright instead - Added "Run in background" to gameplay settings - Trashbin and campfire now display "Destroy" and "Craft" instead of "Refine" - Holding the control key while clicking on a +/- tier button, +/- level button, or an upgrade skill button will perform the operation 1000 times (Shift = 10, Shift+Control = 100) - Fixed Essence of water displaying as "unknown" 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. The beta is usually only available to Windows 64-bit users, but this beta patch is available on all 3 platforms. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2018-11-22 14:18:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

Due largely to a nasty bug found in 0.3.3b, 0.3.3j has now been pushed to the live branch. This primarily brings in 2 new features, world creation settings, and multi-lingual support.
Multi-lingual support is still a work in progress as some features are not translated, including item descriptions, enchants, skills, and the help menu. Thank you again to everyone helping correct translations! Work on multiplayer continues! v 0.3.3b -> v 0.3.3j condensed patch notes - Improved terraforming to check "too steep up" and "too steep down" independently, preventing the ability to create irreparable shapes - Added language select system with 30 languages to choose from (WIP) - Town buildings can now be placed on top of buildings (foundations, floors, etc suggested) - Added new world presets for difficulty and resources - Added a world preview button to the World Settings list that will show roughly the first 60 square kilometers - Added world settings setup menu to the create world interface with a wide variety of settings You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2018-11-17 01:15:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

This fixes the bug I posted about earlier today, as well as a couple other player reported problems. If all looks well I will push this version live tomorrow. v 0.3.3j - 2018.11.15 - Improved terraforming to check "too steep up" and "too steep down" independently, preventing the ability to create irreparable shapes - Fixed terraforming letting you go deeper than "too deep" - Fixed placing items (except for ground torch and well) on the ground being possible, causing them to not save properly - Fixed resources above ground not saving partial harvests 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

[ 2018-11-15 13:24:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

Warning! There is a bug going on that will eat anything you feed it! Placing things (storage chests, crafting tables, etc) directly on the ground (grass/dirt/rock) is unintended behaviour and will not save properly. This is a bug in the placement code where it's supposed to say "You can't place that there". Please be sure to place your things on structures/floors/foundations until I can patch the problem. This bug is currently affecting both live and beta branches. Sorry for anyone that has lost things!

[ 2018-11-14 23:17:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

Multi-lingual support has been furthered to include building and crafting. Three cheers and big thanks to those that have chimed in on Crowdin helping out with translations! If you've a moment to help correct any Google misses, please join us at: https://crowdin.com/project/solace-crafting Multiplayer Update: In truth I have been primarily working on multiplayer. I have successfully set up and tested a dedicated server list for hosting and finding games around the world. Once multi-lingual support is finished I will focus on multiplayer. There is however one difficulty known as floating point precision. A server cannot handle one player at 100km and another at 0km at the same time. Players need to be calculated within false "pockets" of math in order to keep their number beneath 10,000m. I only bring it up to point out that it's difficult, and it's going to take a while. I'm hoping to have less advanced versions of multiplayer ready for some closed testing in the near future, but the first live release may well take until around Christmas time. Updates will thus be less frequent for a bit, but I will post progress reports as things happen! v 0.3.3i - 2018.11.13 - Fixed the character list loading twice on the first "refresh" - Fixed the character list turning on behind the world list after leaving settings - Fixed "Desert Biome Strength" slider accidentally setting "Desert Cacti Frequency" - Furthered multi-lingual support to around 80% 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron!

[ 2018-11-13 14:20:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

I spent most of today working on multiplayer! Wee! It's going to be a while until it's full fledged Solace Crafting Multiplayer, but hopefully I will be able to do a limited test server sometime next week or so. I also added 24 more languages. This makes for a total of 30, the "top 30" according to crowdin. I had to change the interface and some things a bit to compensate for the increased number and workflow. Currently the in-game language select window bleeds 10 of the 30 buttons outside of the window, but it's (once again) way past my bed time. I will fix that up tomorrow and continue expanding the language systems reach. There are still a fair number of in-game words and phrases to be plugged into the system but it's a great start to opening to a much wider audience. The complete language list is now: Afrikaans catal etina dansk Deutsch English espaol suomi franais magyar italiano Nederlands norsk polski portugus - Brazil portugus - Portugal limba romn svenska Trke ting vit To participate in translation repairs: https://crowdin.com/project/solace-crafting v 0.3.3h - 2018.11.07 - Fixed towers not spawning their insides - Added 24 more languages 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron!

[ 2018-11-07 14:30:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

Warning to beta players! There was an error several players ran into with the current beta build even since biome frequency and strength sliders were added in that could cause giant walls to appear. This only happened when a world created before the sliders were implemented was loaded. The problem was one of several dozen curve keys that are used to calculate terrain biomes and subsequently height. Fixing this means it won't happen again, won't happen on worlds that it was experienced in, and won't happen to any non-beta player. Fixing it however means that any new worlds that were created after the sliders were implemented will be "corrected" resulting in mountains being slightly raised. This will most likely bury any structures that have been built. To cope with this I have added a /forceworldupdate console command that will reposition structures onto the ground. Now that I think about it I'm afraid it will not update town buildings. I will add to the /forceworldupdate command a fix for townbuildings as I want that in the update function anyway. Sorry for the beta woes! v 0.3.3g - 2018.11.06 - Implemented item language files - Fixed world saves of older versions interrupting loading the world list - Added a check to prevent an error during reloading of terraformed areas, pending complete repair - Fixed a rare chat interface error - Fixed a rare in-game menu error - Fixed a beta only "massive wall" bug - Added /forceworldupdate command 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron!

[ 2018-11-06 14:21:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

Writing a language system capable of controlling any text any where is not an easy task. I don't have decades of experience and a team of programmers at my call, but I was able to come up with a quite flexible system that will scale as the game grows. For support I am making use of a third party service called crowdin https://crwd.in/solace-crafting This allows community players to suggest translation fixes for any of the words and phrases that I have added into the system. For now they are all machine translations via Google, and I can already tell some of them are quite off. But that's entirely expected. In English we call noise seeds "seeds", but that doesn't translate to grain in other languages for example. Games especially tend to have specific terminology within any given language and translation will definitely be a work in progress for some time. Anyone willing to participate in translation feel free to! Suggestions should be open to public users. Or if there are any other languages that you'd like me to add, please let me know! I will add more from the suggested "top 30" eventually either way. Adding a new language is not difficult once the system is fully implemented. Regarding the system, it works, it just isn't plugged into all of the 1000+ places that words appear in-game yet. I was able to get most of the settings and core functions in today, and hope to get the rest of things in by tomorrow. v 0.3.3f - 2018.11.05 - Added a language select system (actual words are 50% implemented) - Added French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Russian - Fixed an obelisk 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users. Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron!

[ 2018-11-05 13:48:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've been working on multi-lingual support for a few days now and it is working well. There's a fair amount of "manual labor" left to do, but once one language works any language will work. First off, any requested languages will be machine translated using Google's Translator API, which is 80% better than no translation if you don't read English. Following that all languages will be open to public translation suggestions via an online cloud translation platform that I will post about when the Solace Crafting project on it is more together than it is now. I am currently testing with German, Russian, and Japanese, though I cannot read German nor Russian, so the machine translations will most likely be a bit rough. If there are any other languages anyone would like to request I add in from the start please let me know!

[ 2018-11-01 08:51:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Cave resources can now be adjusted with two new sliders. The first is total cave resources. This is a chance based check to see if any "face" of a cave (wall, ceiling, or floor) will spawn a resource. If it does spawn a resource it will then check to see what kind. The cave gem density (default 0.1 or 10%) will then determine if a gem shows up. The above picture is an example of both settings turned up to the maximum of 0.8 or 80%. Biomes can also now be directly adjusted prior to world creation, including the starter area size and strength. The strength of each biome determines how sharp it will adjust to and from other biomes. Grasslands is the "default" biome, so lowering the strength of any other biome will tend to move it towards grasslands. I moved the preview button to be more accessible, so try a couple seeds and settings and see what you like. I also added a few presets to game settings for easier or harder combat, as well as richer or scarcer resources. v 0.3.3e - 2018.10.31 - Town buildings can now be placed on top of buildings (foundations, floors, etc suggested) - Added new world presets for difficulty and resources - Added biome frequency and strength controls for ocean, mountain, and desert - Added cave total resource spawn density and cave gem spawn density 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-31 01:59:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

27 more settings have been added along with a graphical interface where all settings can be adjusted prior to world creation.
I also added a world preview feature so you can see what your seed looks like and how adjusting the biome sliders will affect the outcome. Please note that there are only three biome settings available in this patch, ocean noise size, mountain noise size, and desert noise size. This does -not- however change the overall amount of any of the biomes. You'll notice if you turn oceans down to 100, that they don't get less, they just get smaller. Now that this is all in and looks to be working (fire extinguisher on standby) I will add a few more complex settings to adjust the amount of biomes against one another. I will also add some settings for caves, and more descriptions as to the actual end results of most of the "multiplier" settings. One unintended problem arose and I've been forced to change the seed used for grassland forests. This means that grassland trees will be regenerated and may end up inside player placed buildings. v 0.3.3d - 2018.10.26 - Added world settings setup menu to the create world interface - Added a world preview button to the World Settings list that will show roughly the first 60 square kilometers - Added 27 new world settings that cannot be changed post world creation Levels per kilometer Ore spawn frequency Stone spawn frequency Stalk spawn frequency Cabbage spawn frequency Carrot spawn frequency Leek spawn frequency Mushroom spawn frequency Pumpkin spawn frequency Osmolla spawn frequency Frog's Tongue spawn frequency Pixie Leaf spawn frequency Fool's Mint spawn frequency Frozen Demise spawn frequency King's Leaf spawn frequency Spirit Tea spawn frequency Monolith spawn frequency Grasslands animal spawn frequency Mountain animal spawn frequency Snow animal spawn frequency Desert animal spawn frequency Grasslands forest frequency Snow forest frequency Mountain forest frequency Desert cacti frequency Ocean biome size Mountain biome size Desert biome size 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-26 14:28:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've added 37 new commands to the console to tweak game world settings. I am almost done with a visual interface for them as well. Some more severe commands (not included yet) will only be able to be applied via the start menu interface when creating a new world. This is not a complete list of planned settings, though please let me know if there's something you'd be interested in. Most of the harvesting commands will only work on not-yet-generated terrains. Meaning, somewhere you've been before will not have an increased chance at higher rarity resources even if you change the settings. Only terrains that you load for the first time will make use of such changes. commands are currently CASE SENSITIVE v 0.3.3c - 2018.10.25 - Added 37 "server" commands to the console (listed are the default settings): - Combat expToLevelUp 25 encounterExpMultiplier 1 enemyExpMultiplier 1 enemyDamageMultiplier 1 enemyHealthMultiplier 1 playerDamageMultiplier 1 - Crafting baseMaterialsToLevel 50 maxStackSize 100 transmogrify0To1 20 transmogrify1To2 10 transmogrify2To3 10 transmogrify3To4 10 - Harvesting baseResourcesToLevel 100 stalkRewardMultiplier 1 hideRewardMultiplier 1 oreRewardMultiplier 1 timberRewardMultiplier 1 stoneRewardMultiplier 1 gemRewardMultiplier 1 plantRewardMultiplier 1 resourceToughnessMultiplier 1 gemToughnessMultiplier 1 resourceUncommonSpawnRate 1 resourceRareSpawnRate 1 resourceEliteSpawnRate 1 resourceLegendarySpawnRate 1 gemUncommonSpawnRate 1 gemRareSpawnRate 1 gemEliteSpawnRate 1 gemLegendarySpawnRate 1 baseLuck 1 maxLuck 50 - Farming farmingPlantGrowth 90 farmingTreeGrowth 180 farmingPlantRewardAmount 3 farmingTreeRewardAmount 3 fruitRespawnHours 48 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-25 14:08:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

A number a balance changes and a couple of small fixes. v 0.3.3b - 2018.10.22 - Changed rarity tool strength bonuses: Uncommon 5 -> 4 Rare 10 -> 10 Elite 15 -> 18 Legendary 20 -> 30 - Changed weapon damage and armor math resulting in roughly: Uncommon +0% Rare +1% Elite +7% Legendary +31% (Early-game weapons/armor(based on medium) will notice a 0.2 increase, and that rarity now affects even level 0 equipment) - Changed enchant math resulting in roughly: Uncommon -2% Rare +4% Elite +14% Legendary +32% (Rarity will now affect level 0 enchants) - Increased Rhinoceros rarity rolls 8x - Increased Wolf and Bear rarity rolls 10x - Increased Winter Wolf rarity rolls 12x - Raised luck cap from 20 to 50 - Removed the "you're playing on beta" warning (current patch is not beta) - Fixed a bug with the storehouse eating resources when withdrawing I was called out of town on some family business yesterday, and have to leave again now for another couple days. Will be back soon though! You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

[ 2018-10-22 08:38:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Now live on the public branch v 0.3.3! Bringing in a host of upgrades to towns, including crafting and harvesting auras, trading, and new methods of storage. Also a ton of fixes and lot's of new furniture. Monsters and loot in general now are much more tantalizing with loot tables increased to include all types of resources at all possible rarities. v 0.3.3 - 2018.10.20 - Condensed patch notes: Town Buildings - Town Storehouses can be upgraded to store large amounts of resources - Town Gatherers can be upgraded to automatically gather resources - Town Crafters can be upgraded to craft item from a limited set of recipes up to rare rarity - Town Traders can buy most items in exchange for money and sell item randomly generated every day, at midnight, based on their upgrades Solace Auras - An aura can now be bought on any Solace ranging from 2.5km to 20km - Solace aura range will draw on the map as a yellow circle - Crafting auras can be purchased on Town Crafters increasing player crafted item speed, damage, and armor - Gathering auras can be purchased on Town Gatherers increasing harvesting luck, strength, speed, and a chance at increased rewards - Resource scanning is now a purchasable aura Loot - Monsters now have a chance to drop "treasure," high value items - Monsters now have a chance of dropping any of the 5 major resources at any rarity - Stone monoliths and fire elemental chests now have a chance of dropping higher rarity loot Furniture - Added 26 new decorative items under the furniture category across various professions - Added editable text to signs and storage chests - Furniture can now be placed on other furniture - Ley line teleporters can now be upgraded to 500km and 1000km Crafting - Removed restrictions for placing harvesting enchants on non-tools and non-harvesting enchants on tools New to v 0.3.3: - Town crafters can no longer be upgraded to craft elite and legendary items - Resource random higher rarity reward chances reduced - Fixed teleporting out of a cave from using a height check instead of going directly next to the home solace You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

[ 2018-10-20 14:07:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

A plethora of fixes and smaller upgrades in this patch. Hopefully this version will be stable enough to patch to live. As always, for safety I will push it to beta for a day to let everyone on beta play it while I double check things myself before pushing it live. A couple of new things and changes to mention. Solace/town auras will now display their range on the map as a yellow circle. The aura can be upgraded up to 20km so it's very possible that you can't see any of the edges while you're standing right next to it. Effectively that's 4 entire tiers or 20 levels of coverage. It's definitely not intended that anyone should need to start a new town every 5 levels, so hopefully this will be a good distance allowing players to weigh the decision of starting a new town less often. To go with that, resource scanning has been changed to make use of the solace aura instead of creating it's own distance. In exchange, resource scanning now has three levels for rare, elite, and legendary scanning, with uncommon included in the rare upgrade. Enchants have had some changes, mostly to make sure that each enchant requires at least 1 gem. Ley line teleporters have also been upgraded to allow for 500km and 1000km jumps in an attempt to ease the burden of getting back out to higher level areas in the event of starting a new world with a high level character. v 0.3.2m - 2018.10.19 New - Added "Healing Speed" enchant - Solace aura range will now draw on the map as a yellow circle - Added solace aura range to gatherer/crafter NPC interfaces if purchased Changes - "Speed" enchants now affect skills as well as basic attacks - The following enchants recipes have been changed: Melee/Ranged/Healing/Magic Speed no longer require a Frog's Tongue, instead requiring a Citrine. Melee/Ranged/Healing/Magic Damage no longer require a Dewed Demise, instead requiring a archetype specific gem (Ruby, Emerald, Sapphire, Topaz) Melee/Ranged/Healing/Magic Proficiency now all require an Amethyst instead of an archetype specific gem Defense enchants now require either an Amethyst or a Citrine instead of an essence Energy and Mana enchants no longer require a Osmolla, instead requiring a Frog's Tongue for energy, a King's Leaf for mana - Towns will now automatically adopt the same name as their Solace - Resource scanning range is now decided by solace aura range - Solace aura buff no longer display a countdown timer, and will simply run out if you leave aura range for more than 15s - Ley line teleporters can now be upgraded to 500km and 1000km - Improved weather cloud, sky, and fog colors - Improved jump registry Fixes - Fixed vegetables being able to be planted in the same plot as trees - Improved farming error message details - Fixed doors and shutters not being able to be individually deconstructed after reloading - Fixed trying to plant midnight's touch seeds throwing an exception - Fixed town population levels 4 and 5 displaying a maximum population of 0 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-19 14:06:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

Added in three new crafting auras: damage, speed, and armor. They go up to 10% increase at level 5, and will show their benefits as a separate stat row during crafting. I also increased the treasure drop and rarites rates quite a bit. I haven't tried the mouse lock fix on linux yet, hopefully it will fix the problem of alt-tabbing breaking cursor lock on both platforms though. I will try it out before pushing beta to live later this week. v 0.3.2l - 2018.10.16 - Fixed the mouse wandering when it's supposed to be locked after changing windows - Doubled treasure drop rate - Increased treasure rarity increase chances - Added crafting auras, speed, damage, and armor, with display bonuses in the crafting interface 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-16 13:31:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch brings in a couple of new things including town auras and treasure items. The first wave of town auras has been added to gatherers. Before you can purchase any aura upgrades however, you'll need to purchase the aura itself on the town's solace. Then from any of the gatherers you can purchase increased strength, speed, luck, or a new stat that creates a chance for any harvesting reward to become 2 instead of 1. Any number of these auras can be unlocked and will add up to become a "Solace Aura" buff that will stay on you as long as you are within range of the aura. Multiple auras within range of one another will not stack. The strongest buffs from any auras within range of one another will mix into a single buff. Next up will be crafting auras, and eventually combat and others as well.
Now that we have a bustling economy, and because most of these new upgrades cost money, I've added a new type of item to monster drops called Treasure. These are high priced items specifically for selling to vendors. They have a chance to drop in all five rarities with each rarity of course being more expensive. Once the crafting auras are in tomorrow I hope to spend a day or two polishing things up, and responding to any new bugs or feedback before pushing the current beta branch onto the live branch as v 0.3.3. After that I will be primarily working on town guards and improving the solace defense battles. v 0.3.2k - 2018.10.15 - Added aura to solace upgrades - Added gathering auras to town gatherers: strength, speed, luck, and double reward chance - Some town buildings now have prerequisites (gatherers require a storehouse for example) - Monsters now have a chance to drop "treasure," high value items - Raw resource base sale value reduced, rarity multipier increased - Fixed town building stats going invisible - Fixed different town building details layering over each other - Fixed buffs decaying while game paused - Fixed mining speed bonus enchants speeding up skinning - Luck has been capped at 20 per profession 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-15 12:37:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

Storehouses are now constructable from the town interface. With a low upgrade cost they are an easy way to store large amounts of raw resources. I've tried many different ways to create a better interface for storing what can end up being a large variety of resources in as small a space as possible. The current solace storage system is an earlier attempt at that, but is much more a mess of buttons than this is I think. A sort by tier and some options may help out a lot as well. It might also be better to go extremely compact and only use colored text in a single line per resource/tier. Please let me know if you think this is better or worse than any other method or if there's anything you'd like added to it. Unfortunately this will wipe any currently stored resources on gatherers, but this will allow them to gather much more over time. v 0.3.2j - 2018.10.13 - Storehouse can now be constructed and upgraded - Fixed the hidden solace population upgrade button v 0.3.2j2 - 2018.10.14 - Fixed fake storehouses pretending to be constructed on the town interface - Fixed town building resources not matching with the displayed ingredients v 0.3.2j3 - 2018.10.14 - Fixed an error with starting new worlds - Empty storehouse storage rarity will now auto-hide - Added total stored to storehouse withdraw/deposit details - Storehouse depositing enabled v 0.3.2j4 - 2018.10.14 - Fixed town building construction trying to use tier 0 resources beyond tier 0 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-13 12:47:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've redesigned the town interface as well as the solace upgrade interface. This will make it easier for me to add the next set of planned town buildings as well as display prerequisites and costs for buildings. Some buildings have different resource requirements now. I've also changed solace defense numbers a bit in preparation for adding walking attacking monsters instead of just the floaty demons we have now. Upgrading population also no longer triggers an attack. v 0.3.2i - 2018.10.10 - Redesigned town interface - Redesigned solace upgrade interface - The town interface will now display mega meters (1,000 kilometers) for towns at a distance over 1,000 kilometers from the start - Fixed trader throwing error message with vegetables - Fixed "Show power" toggles not working with the starter solace - Fixed custom saved structures not saving furniture properly

[ 2018-10-10 12:48:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

A quick fix for a couple of reported problems. v 0.3.2h2 - 2018.10.09 - Fixed an error with empty/fill functions of containers - Fixed an error with traders 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-09 02:30:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Being able to label chests was a long requested feature. With the recent addition of signs I thought it a good time to tackle it. You can now edit signs, as well as storage chests adding text and choosing the color of the text as well. Storage chests you can actually write different text on the top and on the front each with it's own color. I believe I have squashed all of the bugs with the new furniture with this patch. Money has also been reworked to better scale with how much can be made from selling equipment and how much is needed to purchase upgrades, for whatever tier you may be in. Now raw resources sell for less than crafted gear which now calculate prices based on the amount of materials used to create them. Enchants being the most valueable of all, making enchanted equipment the best way to earn more cash. v 0.3.2h - 2018.10.08 - Fixed an error when clicking "Empty" on containers - Fixed armorsmith's anvil only being placeable on the ground - Fixed shelf rotation and missing collider - Fixed lantern positioning - Fixed weapon rack, grindstone, and weaponsmiths anvil colliders - Added icons for new furniture pieces - Added editable text to signs and storage chests - Rebalanced town building upgrade costs and item prices - Gatherers now charge money for upgrades instead of resources and essences (scanning still requires an essence) 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-08 13:24:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

Due to a number of small problems there have been a number of large problems for a handful of players over the past week or two. I implemented several safeguards against data loss, but had sort of a eureka / duhh moment today and have implemented a better safeguard for most cases. Problems and bugs can still happen, but this should localize them to their own business instead of making a broken bed sending everything into chaos. I've also made a change to loot so that stone elementals now have a chance to drop any kind of resource at any rarity. It's a small chance, the same as each basic reward received when harvesting (only per kill, not per swing). I've also added the same chance to all loot within stone monoliths and fire elemental chests. Stone monoliths with a champion still have a minimum rarity of uncommon while fire elemental chests still have a minimum rarity of rare. Along with a number of fixes for reported problems. Thank you to everyone reporting on the forums and in our Discord server! v 0.3.2g5 - 2018.10.07 - Wrapped most save and load methods into try / catch patterns that will prevent small problems from snowballing into much larger problems - Fixed leatherworking stations not registering as nearby while crafting - Fixed an error when auto-harvest and strong-harvest hit at the same time - Removed restrictions for placing harvesting enchants on non-tools and non-harvesting enchants on tools - Fixed several errors in the interface and in item removal for crafting/enchanting with recipes that have ingredients that do not adhere to recipe rarity (plants / essences) - Stone elementals now have a chance of dropping any of the 5 major resources at any rarity - Increased the amount of non-champion stone elementals with loot from 25% to 75% - Stone monolith and fire elemental chest loot now has a chance of become higher rarity than its minimum 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-07 09:13:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

More bug fixes for the weekend. v 0.3.2g4 - 2018.10.07 - Fixed beds, jar handled, weapon rack, and lantern wall throwing errors - Terrain and chunk data files will now check an increasing integer to prevent overwriting newer data should an error ever occur during loading - Fixed a possible bug with structure loading 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-07 02:26:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

Some more bug fixes. Furniture icons will be added within the next day or two. (Tomorrow is Sunday, no promises!) v 0.3.2g3 - 2018.10.06 - Furniture can now be placed on other furniture - Seed planting mode will no longer automatically end with each plant unless the seeds in use run out - Fixed Health, Energy, and Mana enchants awarding, for example, health instead of increasing maximum health - Fixed a frost nova bug causing enemies to freeze, er.. get stuck 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-06 14:34:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Some quick fixes. I should be able to get more out later today. v 0.3.2g2 - 2018.10.06 - Fixed furniture not saving properly - Fixed missing lights on candle, candlestick, and lantern 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-06 01:51:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

A variety of decorations have been added in this patch including carpets, a chair, tables, and some things. None of them are functional yet, for example you can't sit in the chair, yet. v 0.3.2g - 2018.10.05 - Added 26 new decorative items under the furniture category across various professions - Furniture placement mode will no longer automatically end with each placement if there are more items in the stack being currently used, such as with torches - Player data files will now check an increasing integer to prevent overwriting newer data should an error ever occur during loading - Set the 5 minute auto-save to only begin counting after (if) the game has successfully loaded - Upon loading, the system will no longer assume you are starting a new game. This stops an automatic first save that engages with new games. This is intended to stop writing any data if the game did not load 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-05 14:22:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

Crafters are another pretty significant change to gameplay. We now have the option to forgo crafting things for ourselves and instead have a crafter make it for us. However, that comes at a price and has several limitations. In this patch the crafters aren't charging you, but I think that's a smart move. They are however already limited by level and rarity, both of which you can pay to upgrade. If for example you summon a tailor into T2 space, his/her maximum crafting level and rarity will start out at 10 and common. If you want them to craft you something higher level or higher rarity you will need to upgrade them, and upgrading them to elite and legendary won't be easy early on.
The money and prices system however is still incomplete and largely unbalanced. I will be working on better math for prices tomorrow as well as unique buildings for each of the crafters. I just stuck them and the trader all with generic copies for now. The way the new system works though we can swap in new models at anytime. Along with that I hope to make more of those decorations craftable by players, such as crates, lamp posts, and much more. Ultimately I hope to make crafters work also as trainers to help you learn new recipes based on biome and level. As well as offer town-wide benefits when we get there. I think we're also in need of a grid system, something that existed in pre-Steam versions of Solace Crafting. Currently it's nearly impossible to align a structure and a town building. With the use of a world and/or custom grids we can force building placement and new structure selections to snap to universal grids, ensuring different buildings and pieces fit together even across long distances. v 0.3.2f - 2018.10.03 - Added 6 town crafters: Tailor, Leatherworker, Armorsmith, Weaponsmith, Toolsmith, Woodworker, Stoneworker - Moved the console to its own independent system now accessible immediately after the initial startup hang - Added console notes for each step of loading to help debugging of any startup problems from here on - World data files will now check an increasing integer to prevent overwriting newer data should an error ever occur during loading 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-03 13:00:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

Patching in a couple small fixes early in the day before moving on to bigger things. Town buildings were not destroying themselves properly when told to, and even reloading. This may cause problems if you try to rebuild in the same town as any ghost buildings, though I don't think so. If it's a problem just let me know, I'll add a way to get rid of them. v 0.3.2e - 2018.10.02 - Fixed town building destruction - Fixed super long range obelisks causing errors - Water from buckets and watering cans can now be added to retting vats for retting v 0.3.2e2 - 2018.10.02 - Fixed a bug that could crop up in worlds with ghost buildings trying to reference a deconstructed solace 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-10-02 02:44:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

Traders are now an option in the town constrution menu. They will both buy and sell goods of almost any kind. Still a young system there definitely needs some upgrades, for example an enchanted sword won't sell for anymore than an unenchanted sword, and prices in general are more or less than same all across the board. Also the trader's current stall is quite boring... At midnight of each day each trader will roll a new inventory of 2 weapons, 2 pieces of armor, and 2 tools or facilities. These are an optional way to attain gear outside of crafting should you be a leatherworker in need of a new sword for example. This also introduces money into Solace Crafting for the first time, which eventually will be the main source of currency for town buildings upgrades, and so forth, things which are currently requiring essences. Some of the recent changes to the Town interface haven't been polished up and there are some unnecessary statistics being displayed in odd places and this and that, but we'll get to polishing things up next patch now that things are in and working. v 0.3.2d - 2018.09.29 - Added Trader to the town construction list - Added money to the game in the forms of copper, silver, gold, and platinum - 1000 copper is worth 1 silver, and similar for silver to gold, and gold to platinum - Each trader's items for sale will refresh (random) at the start of each day - Items sold are gone forever (temporarily) be careful! - Fixed a number of problems with obelisks getting stuck - Fixed solaces not being properly removed if their structure is destroyed 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-09-29 13:46:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Trying to "reuse" a variety of unrelated systems with the new town system, partly for time concerns, though mostly to try and make the older town buildings somehow still compatible, was not working well. In lieu of which I have completely separated the town system from the building system. Town buildings will now place using their own checks (currently requiring ground, though we do plan to allow them to be placed on foundations), and are a self-contained system. This change will unfortunately render all past town buildings useless. To cope with this I have "unlocked" them, so they won't say "this is off limits" anymore, and I have added a destroy button next to the structure name in the building interface. If you select a structure an "X" will show up and allow you to completely remove the structure if you want to. Be warned that it WILL destroy everything to do with the structure including all factilities, chests, and what not and all of their contents, so be careful with it. This has allowed me to create new town buildings without needing to stick to the restrictions and building recipes of the player building system so I have created a new building for each of the five gatherers. These are much more open and are easier to tell what is what from the outside. They can also now be rotated in 360 degrees, instead of only 4 directions. There are still a lot of building pieces and furniture I have not been able to get in game yet, many of which I hope to get in sometime in the next week or two. Some of those items I am teasingly using with the new town buildings. There had also been a couple mentions of pigs not dropping meat, and lately a legendary wolf not dropping his rewards. This turned out to be caused by the fact that they "rot" and are destroyed after a time. I have removed this timer so that now animals once killed will remain until you leave the area far enough for it to unload, or if you leave the game world. v 0.3.2c - 2018.09.28 - Animal corpses will no longer decay after 5 minutes. They will be removed automatically only when their area is unloaded. - Obelisks can now target all animal types without throwing an error - Fixed solace defense demons health bars growing way too large - Fixed town buildings asking for Null ingredients - Fixed town buildings not always saving upgrades properly - Town buildings can now only be built using the appropriate tiered resources for their town 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-09-28 13:43:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is the first step in a number of upgrades planned to take place to Towns and Town Buildings. In other words this is not the final form of resource gatherers, nor resource storage. Some other features will need to be added prior to further upgrades to gatherers. Having said that, the way that Towns are initiated, stored, and handled has improved quite a bit with this patch. I have tried to make it as compatible with any present town buildings as possible, though you may need to for instance get close enough to an old town for its buildings to load into the new system before the map will recognize their scanning capabilities. Best scenario of course is always to start a new world. Note that gatherers as they are now aren't necessarily a "super easy" means of getting uncommon and rare resources. Anyone used to setting up scanners knows that getting uncommon and rare materials aren't all that difficult, especially at higher tiers. Still, this is an automatic process, and will remain in town until gathered. In the long run this is intended to feed other autonomous and non-autonomous tasks within towns. Also, interacting with a gatherer now goes to the new Town Building Interface instead of the Dialogue Interface, though the Dialogue Interface has not been destroyed and will reappear with conversation options in time. v 0.3.2b - 2018.09.26 - Town gatherers can now be upgraded to automatically gather resources 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-09-26 13:48:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Towns are intended to provide many benefits during our adventures such as: unlocking new recipes, providing stat boosting hot stew, remedying powerful ailments, and awarding us important quests. It is from here our story and class quests will begin eventually leading us even to other dimensions, where setting up a safe haven will be even more important compared to the quite placid world we start out in. Villages and towns (and eventually higher) are not meant to be something we need to set up everywhere we go. Setting up an outpost to help find rare resources in whatever tier we are currently adventuring can be very useful, though it is intended that we only need one "main" town to upgrade and unlock to its full potential. These are most of the town buildings I am working on, about in the order they are listed. This list does not list the actual upgrades and unlocks per building, and is subject to major change. Some things that are not mentioned here are for example resource storage and transfer capabilities, etc. Still I would love to hear what you think about the concept in general and if there's anything specific you think should be added to the plan in these early stages. Another topic up for discussion is the placement and construction of the buildings themselves. Currently we are just using a 3x2 house for each of the gatherers which makes it impossible to distinguish them from one another on the outside. I definitely want to give each building it's own look. But for example should we require flattened ground? Should buildings that require a carpenter or stone mason simply have their location assigned by the player and then we have to wait while the carpenter actually builds it using town resources? Outpost (Base population: 5) Reaper - Gathers stalks Hunter - Gathers hide Miner - Gathers ore Forester - Gathers wood Quarrier - Gathers stone Guardhouse - Houses guards Guard Station - Positions a guard Hamlet (Base population: 10) Tailor - Crafts cloth (Requires Reaper) Leatherworker - Crafts leather (Requires Hunter) Blacksmith - Crafts metal (Requires Miner) Woodworker - Crafts wood (Requires Logger) Stoneworker - Crafts stone (Requires Quarrier) Trader - Buys and sells items Carpenter - House/building upgrades/repairs (Requires Woodworker) From here on requires Carpenter: Arable Farmer - Farms fruits/vegetables Crop - Designated farming space Pastoral Farmer - Farms animal Coop - Raises fowl Small pasture - Raises small animals Chef - Crafts meals, town benefits House - Increases max population Village (Base pop: 15) Weaponsmith - Melee guard upgrades Fletcher - Ranged guard upgrades Priest - Healer guard upgrades Arcanist - Magic guard upgrades Large pasture - Raises large animal Stone Mason - House/building upgrades/repairs (Requires Stoneworker) From here on requires Stone Mason: Shrine - Town benefits (Requires Priest) Town (Base pop: 20) Enchanter - Crafts enchants Alchemist - Crafts potions Adventurers Guild - Provides quests Farmers Guild - Provides quests Crafter Guild - Provides quests Builders Guild - Provides quests Harvesters Guild - Provides quests

[ 2018-09-25 14:05:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

Quick fix for a possible game breaker and a small bug. v 0.3.2a2 - 2018.09.25 - Fixed an error with proficiency enchants - Fixed an uncommon error in the Town interface You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

[ 2018-09-25 06:22:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Just a few bug fixes today for the latest version. v 0.3.2a - 2018.09.22 - Fixed dropped bags holding Null items after reloading - Fixed saved structures not placing properly above ground - Fixed a bug caused by killing monsters with frost nova You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

[ 2018-09-22 14:12:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

With v 0.3.2 several new features have been introduced each of which I will go over briefly. For a more complete explanation please read the condensed patch notes.

Farming

Farming brings in several new items: Hoe, Watering Can, Well, and seeds for most harvestable plant types. The process involves, flattening land using terraforming, tilling soil using a hoe, getting seeds from a wild plant, planting seeds in tilled soil, and watering them until they grow. One seed will yield 3 produce, while trees once grown can continue to produce fruit no matter how many times they are picked. Seeds will reduce their tier to match the soil they are planted in if planted in lower tier soil.

Containers

Two forms of containers are now available for crafting: Bag, and Bucket. Buckets, like watering cans can be used to hold and transport water. Currently buckets are bit useless but will be placeable in future updates. Bags can only store stackable items meaning no armor or weapons, facilities, things like that.

Practice

Enchanting and crafting interface now have "practice" buttons on them that allow increased experience gain for crafting without the production of an actual item or enchant. This allows you to level up for example tailoring without having to repeatedly create and destroy clothing just to level up.

Transmogrification

Using a transmogrifier it is now possible to increase and decrease the rarity of resources. For example 1 elite resource can be reduced into 10 rare resources, or 10 rare resources can be increased into 1 elite resource. Next stop, Town improvements! I've already started working on gatherer NPCs actually gathering resources. After which will be crafting NPCs, guards, merchants, and a long list of Town and Solace improvements. Thank you again to everyone participating in Early Access, and I'm sorry I haven't done a better job of advertising Solace Crafting. Nevertheless my dedication has not faltered and I'm very excited to be moving forward with Town and Solace improvements, after which it's on to multiplayer!

Condensed Patch Notes v 0.3.1a - 0.3.2

Farming - Hoe added to Smithing -> Tools. Cannot be "equipped" but "used" from inventory (for now) - Use a hoe to till a flat section of land into farmable land - "Use" seeds to engage planting mode and plant them in tilled soil - Water soil to make plants grow, or wait for rain (water is free for now) - Vegetables will grow through germination -> vegetation -> maturity -> old, 900 seconds per stage - No penalty for "old" plants yet. - Water will dry up at 1 per 10 seconds - Plants will mature even when you are no where near them, though they can't yet understand if it's raining if you aren't near them enough for them to be loaded. - Added "Watering Can" under smithing -> tools - Added equipment slots for the hoe and watering can on the harvesting equipment tab - Added a "Till Soil" general skill for initiating tilling mode (recommend putting it on a hotbar somewhere) - Added all herbs and vegetables to farming except mushrooms - Midnight's Touch cannot be grown in any environment (yet) - Frozen Demise can only be grown above 1,475m - All other plants can only be grown between 800m and 1,475m (800m is sea level) - Pumpkins now spawn in the grass biome - Added "Well" under Masonry -> Facilities - Wells and ground torches can now only be placed on ground - You can now "Fill" fluid containers with water when standing near a well - Added lemon and orange seeds - Lemon and orange seeds can now be planted to grow lemon and orange trees - Trees take up one full plot per tree - Trees take longer to mature, but will regrow their fruit after it is picked Containers - Added a container: bag - Containers cannot be put inside other containers or storage devices - Added a fluid container: buckets - Watering Can is now also a fluid container - Watering soil will now require water in the watering can - You can transfer water between fluid containers by clicking to drag one and right-clicking it on another - Buckets and bags can now be placed in trashbins (even if they have things in them!) Crafting - Added "Practice" buttons to crafting and enchanting - Practice crafting will award 150% experience but no item - Practice enchanting will award 200% experience but will not enchant the item - Added tooltips to practice, craft, and enchant buttons that show how much exp will be awarded - The enchanting and building interfaces will now increase level/tier at +/- 100 when holding control+shift - Added "Transmogrifier" under Masonry -> Facilities - Crafting and enchanting ingredients can now be set to match recipe rarity or not. For example the rare version of the Melee Speed enchant now requires a rare Bear Fang, but only a common Frog's Tongue (which is an herb), because there are no rare Frog's Tongues. - Added a toggle next to "Practice" in the enchanting and crafting interfaces that automatically turns off every time you close the interface - Enchanting can now be practiced without adding an item to the table - Removed the category display on enchanting and crafting detail interfaces, widening the profession, level, and exp displays - Fixed a bug causing crafting and enchanting exp to level being higher than intended (This may cause one or more professions to level up) Harvesting - Added the ability to "auto-harvest" with control+interact. Looking away from the resource or pushing control+interact again will stop it. - Strong skills can be used without breaking auto-harvest - Turned off "huaa!" during vegetable and herb gathering - Animal specific drops (claws, etc) are now the same rarity as the animal - Added the ability to bind a key to Auto-Harvest (none by default) Building - Fixed structures not placing properly underground - The structure (start a new structure) interface now allows ctrl+shift for raising/lowering tier by the 100s - Stone and wood foundations (newly placed) will now clear grass (note that one grass patch is 8m^2) General - Fixed the radial menu not working in some instances (boats for one) - Added weather intensity controls in settings - Added weather collision quality controls in settings - Moved the console to be the first thing that loads when a game is started to better capture errors - Added an item selector (yellow border) to show which item's details are currently being displayed - Added an open container (orange border) to show which containers contents are currently being displayed - Fixed secondary weapon set adding stats when equipped You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

[ 2018-09-21 01:32:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

This one is a bit of a game changer. The transmogrifier allows you to change resource rarities both up and down. I wouldn't recommend grinding common ore if you're shooting for legendary, but it is possible as an alternative method now. I think it's a bit too easy of a facility personally. Once crafted it works for everything forever. I think in the future it will be locked behind maybe enchanting advancement for example, and maybe require upgrading to handle increasingly higher tiers of resource. For now, it's pretty straightforward. I've also fixed recipes and enchants to not require all ingredients to be of the same rarity. The practice buttons also now have toggles that will automatically turn off every time their interfaces are closed requiring you to click the toggle on before practicing to prevent quick click mistakes. v 0.3.1g - 2018.09.19 - Added "Transmogrifier" under Masonry -> Facilities - Crafting and enchanting ingredients can now be set to match recipe rarity or not. For example the rare version of the Melee Speed enchant now requires a rare Bear Fang, but only a common Frog's Tongue (which is an herb), because there are no rare Frog's Tongues. - Wells and ground torches can now only be placed on ground - Added a toggle next to "Practice" in the enchanting and crafting interfaces that automatically turns off every time you close the interface - Enchanting can now be practiced without adding an item to the table - Added further checks to prevent a rare error involving weather - Buckets and bags can now be placed in trashbins (even if they have things in them!) - Added the ability to bind a key to Auto-Harvest (none by default) - Fixed tilling soil reporting "You need to equip a hoe to do that" unless you have a torch equipped - Removed the category display on enchanting and crafting detail interfaces, widening the profession, level, and exp displays 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-09-19 09:37:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch mainly brings in two new things to the beta branch: fruit tree farming, and wells. Fruit trees, orange and lemon, will take an entire plot, need to be watered, and take quite a bit longer to beat fruit, but will regrow their fruit no matter how many times they are picked. Wells provide an endless source of water once placed. I'm am already working on two other things I was not able to include in today's patch. One is an improvement to the ingredients system that will allow me to control for example herbs not needing to be rare for a rare enchant, because there are no rare herbs. The other is a transmogrifier that will allow a batch of common resources to be upgraded into an uncommon resource, and higher, and vice versa. Also other smaller button additions and some things. Once those are in that will be the end of 0.3.1 which will then be pushed to the live branch. 0.3.2 will be focusing heavily on town buildings and town NPCs. I have way too many plans to plop them down in this post, though I want to share where I am with my plans in a post tomorrow or Thursday. Towns are intended to provide many important functions in Solace Crafting (hence the name), including quests, unlocks, automation, and alternative means of obtaining equipment. Anything you'd like to see included in all that I'd love to hear it! v 0.3.1f - 2018.09.18 - Animal specific drops (claws, etc) are now the same rarity as the animal - Fixed the "Place" button spawning at 125% size - Added "Well" under Masonry -> Facilities - You can now "Fill" fluid containers with water when standing near a well - Engaging "Till Soil" while it's already engaged will now disengage it - Added lemon and orange seeds - Lemon and orange seeds can now be planted to grow lemon and orange trees - Trees take up one full plot per tree - Trees take longer to mature, but will regrow their fruit after it is picked 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-09-18 14:10:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

There are a number of minor bugs on the beta, but this one was major so I'm patching it right away. I will add the rest of the fixes to this announcement as I implement them throughout the day. v 0.3.1e1 - 2018.09.16 - Fixed planted vegetables throwing errors when attempting to reload - Added a catch for a possible error in the console during startup v 0.3.1e2 - 2018.09.16 - Added a double check to prevent distant terrains not loading water/encounters properly - Fixed equipped watering cans not saving their contents - Fixed dropping items from containers - Fixed container empty slots going "Null" when saved in runtime 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-09-16 01:46:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch brings in fluids and fluid containers, specifically water and buckets. There is no well yet, so you have to actually go to water to get water, for now only used for farming. It's much more of a nuisance that just unlimited water from your watering can, but this is just a step. Once wells are in you won't have to teleport around with buckets in your inventory to keep up a large sized farm. This also adds bags, which are in inventory containers. The code was a little slippery because you can have an item inside an item in it looks like a potential loop if not setup properly and compilers do not like loops. For now they are... big! Up to 40 slots at higher levels! To make it easier to see what is open and what is clicked on with all that inventory I've added a "currently open" orange highlight, and a "currently selected" yellow highlight. I also move the way the game starts up around a bit, at least one player is having some infreqent problems when loading. For one, now the console always tries to load immediately after the main interface, allowing it to catch and report any errors after that. v 0.3.1d - 2018.09.14 - Moved the console to be the first thing that loads when a game is started to better capture errors - Fixed King's Leaf Seeds throwing an error when planting - Pigs now really don't drop pumpkin seeds - Added a container: bag - Containers cannot be put inside other containers or storage devices - Added a fluid container: bucket - Watering Can is now also a fluid container - Watering soil will now require water in the watering can - You can transfer water between fluid containers by clicking to drag one and right-clicking it on another - Added an item selector (yellow border) to show which item's details are currently being displayed - Added an open container (orange border) to show which containers contents are currently being displayed 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-09-14 14:36:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch mainly upgrades farming with a "get seeds" button for all vegetables. One vegetable gives one set of seeds, which grows into three vegetables. Still a number of upgrades intended for farming, but I'll put them down for now to upgrades some other systems that work in tandem. I still want to get water containers and water gathering in tomorrow for one, and hopefully get started on fishing! v 0.3.1c - 2018.09.12 - Fixed structures not placing properly underground - Fixed several weather errors including tilled soil wetness not increasing with rain - Added all herbs and vegetables to farming except mushrooms - Midnight's Touch cannot be grown in any environment (yet) - Frozen Demise can only be grown above 1,475m - All other plants can only be grown between 800m and 1,475m (800m is sea level) - Pumpkins now spawn in the grass biome - Pigs no longer drop pumpkin seeds - Turned off "huaa!" during vegetable and herb gathering 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-09-12 14:04:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

Two "major" things added with this patch. 1. Auto-harvesting. Control+interact will now engage auto-harvest and keep harvesting a resource until it runs out. It will automatically stop if you try to swing at thin air, or if you trigger is a second time. 2. Crafting practice. There is now a practice button on the crafting interface and enchanting interface. Using practice will award 150% crafting exp or 200% enchanting exp at the cost of no item output or enchant. This is intended to remove the hassle of having lots of left over items after working to level up a profession. Tooltips on both of the buttons will now show how much exp can be expected as well. Besides that and a number of things, I have added in weather controls for lower end users to turn down rain/snow collision detection which can be rather performance intensive, and/or to turn down the global amount of rain and snowfall, all the way to off if desired. The full patch notes are as follows: v 0.3.1b - 2018.09.10 Farming - Added "Watering Can" under smithing -> tools - Added equipment slots for the hoe and watering can on the harvesting equipment tab - Added a "Till Soil" general skill for initiating tilling mode (recommend putting it on a hotbar somewhere) - Tilled soil wetness will no longer go above 100 in rain Harvesting - Added the ability to "auto-harvest" with control+interact. Looking away from the resource or pushing control+interact again will stop it. - Strong skills can be used without breaking auto-harvest Crafting - Added "Practice" buttons to crafting and enchanting - Practice crafting will award 150% experience but no item - Practice enchanting will award 200% experience but will not enchant the item - Added tooltips to practice, craft, and enchant buttons that show how much exp will be awarded General - The structure (start a new structure) interface now allows ctrl+shift for raising/lowering tier by the 100s - Added weather intensity controls in settings - Added weather collision quality controls in settings - Stone and wood foundations (newly placed) will now clear grass (note that one grass patch is 8m^2) 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-09-10 13:35:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

I made a mistake in last night's patch that I need to explain a bit so players on the beta branch can understand what kinds of problems it might bring up even after fixing it. The problem was an unordered enum called ItemType. When an enum is unordered it takes on the value of whatever order it's written in. Because I stuck Hoe and Seeds, two new ItemTypes into the middle of the enum it offset everything behind them. To fix this I have moved Hoe and Seeds to the back of the list, and specifically assigned a number to each entry in the ItemType enum (as it is with all other enum's used in game) so this can't happen again. However, when an item is saved, it is converted to an integer value, not the text in the code that says "Hoe" or "Consumable". This means that some of the items that were picked up or crafted using last nights patch may continue to think they are something that they are not. I don't expect everyone to remember everything they picked up and crafted in the past 12 hours (on the beta branch only), but if you have food that won't let you eat it, or a hoe or seeds that don't work that's probably why. Best to trash them and find anew. My apologies for the trouble! v 0.3.1a2 - 2018.09.07 - Fixed out of order ItemType enum

[ 2018-09-07 02:12:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Farming phase one

This patch brings in the first round of farming. There are pumpkin seeds on pigs, and hoes to be crafted at smiting tables now with which it's possible to start a pumpkin patch! Mostly at this point just for testing to make sure that everything is working as intended before we add more vegetables and tools. Plants must be watered to grow and will continue to grow even when you are not around. Pumpkins take roughly 45 minutes and a watering at 15 minutes and 30 minutes to grow to full maturity. The rain will also water them, though it's not smart enough (yet) to know it's raining when you're not there. I still want to add a watering can, and buckets for gathering water from water sources, as well as a.. well.. ːsteamhappyː Eventually we also want to add gardening NPCs that will take care of things for you, and of course a way to get seeds from wild pumpkins rather than picking them from the hair of pigs! Behind the scenes I've also upgraded the item database to accept scriptable objects which makes creating new items much easier, and will allow modders to add new items in the future. The pumpkin, pumpkin seeds, and hoe are already making use of this system. Eventually I will convert all items and recipes to this system, but that will take time so I'm doing it a little at a time. v 0.3.1a - 2018.09.06 Farming - Hoe added to Smithing -> Tools. Cannot be "equipped" but "used" from inventory (for now) - Use a how to till a flat section of land into farmable land - Pumpkin seeds will now drop off of pigs (for now) - "Use" seeds to engage planting mode and plant them in tilled soil - Water soil to make plants grow, or wait for rain (water is free for now) - Pumpkins will grow through germination -> vegetation -> maturity -> old, 900 seconds per stage - No penalty for "old" plants yet. - water will dry up at 1 per 10 seconds - Plants will mature even when you are no where near them, though they can't yet understand if it's raining if you aren't near them enough for them to be loaded. General - The enchanting and building interfaces will now increase level/tier at +/- 100 when holding control+shift - Fixed the radial menu not working in some instances (boats for one) 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-09-06 13:32:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

New enchants, new plants, and a big upgrade to terraforming in this patch. Development of the new farming system is already underway and requires flat land for tilling, making terraforming improvements a prerequisite. With the new luck enchants, it's now much easier to get rare resources the higher level you and your enchants are. And run speed was something long requested. As always, thank you to everyone participating in Early Access! Lots more to come! Here are the condensed patch notes: v 0.3.0b - 2018.08.22 - Added 24 new enchants: Melee Speed Melee Damage Melee Proficiency Ranged Speed Ranged Damage Ranged Proficiency Magic Speed Magic Damage Magic Proficiency Healing Healing Proficiency Run Speed Armor Dodge Parry Block Health Energy Mana Reaping Luck Skinning Luck Mining Luck Logging Luck Quarrying Luck - Added 8 new "herbs" Fools Mint (mountain biome) Pixie Leaf (mountain biome) Frogs Tongue (mountain biome) Osmolla (mountain biome) Spirit Tea (grass biome) Kings Leaf (grass biome) Midnights Touch (caves) Frozen Demise (snow biome) v 0.3.0c - 2018.08.24 - Added icons for the new enchants and plants - Added run speed indicator to adventuring stats - Added file recovery capabilities for terrain/chunk save data in case of improper handling v 0.3.0e - 2018.09.02 Terraforming - Fixed and re-enabled terraforming (default key: y) - Split terraforming into two modes: point and face - Face mode can flatten an area - While in face mode you can lock the current height to flatten neighboring areas to the same height - Max steepness increased to 10m General - Terrains will now save their border heights the first time they are generated to prevent the rare occurrence of heights shifting between plays which previously could cause player buildings to end up above or below ground when built directly on terrain borders. - Interactable interfaces (trashbins, forges, etc) will now allow you to switch between crafting and inventory without breaking the connection to the actual facility. Closing the main interface is now what breaks the connection. - Fixed mobs disappearing after a world shift v 0.3.0f - 2018.09.03 Terraforming - Terraforming will now rescan and refresh the interface prior to flatten/raise/lower in case the player has moved onto the area since the last scan General - Run speed enchant details now display actual percentage gain of enchant, and notify that 200% is the max run speed - Fixed an error that could happen when returning to the menu then back into a world cascading into other problems v 0.3.0f3 - 2018.09.03 - Updated the structure placement interface with raise/lower instructions - Added a keybindings helper display to the terraforming interface v 0.3.1 - 2018.09.04 - Terraforming obstructions will now print to the main chat window - Added a controls display window during new structure creation You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

[ 2018-09-04 00:27:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

I ended up turning off most of the recently added multi-threaded/coroutine functions intended to improve terrain generation speed. They were causing more problems than good. After several testers had a chance to try out the new terraforming I received a number of suggestions/bug reports of people burying themselves and pigs. This updates terraforming with more realtime/thoroughobstacles checking and will update pathfinding in realtime as well. v 0.3.0f - 2018.09.03 Terraforming - Players will now count as obstructions to terraforming - Non-colliding objects such as stalks and vegetables will now count as obstructions to terraforming - Fixed obstruction scan size (was too small) - Terraforming will now rescan and refresh the interface prior to flatten/raise/lower in case the player has moved onto the area since the last scan - Terraforming will now update entity pathfinding in realtime General - Fixed "Run Speed" on the adventuring tab reading as a second "Resist" - Run speed enchant details now display actual percentage gain of enchant, and notify that 200% is the max run speed - Fixed an error that could happen when returning to the menu then back into a world cascading into other problems - Fixed winter wolves thinking they are normal wolves - Fixed pathfinding not updating in realtime (during building) after a world shift v 0.3.0f2 - 2018.09.03 - Fixed resources not spawning rarities v 0.3.0f3 - 2018.09.03 - Fixed several terraforming errors brought up with reverting functions in 0.3.0f - Fixed an error with demons - Fixed melee/ranged/magic speed enchant errors (currently only affects basic attacks) - Fixed stat interface not properly reflecting speed enchants - Fixed town buildings not always placing properly - Updated the structure placement interface with raise/lower instructions - Added a keybindings helper display to the terraforming interface 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-09-03 03:28:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Terraforming is back with new features, minus the bugs! It's now very easy to make flat spaces using the flatten tool while in "face" mode as opposed to "point" mode for terraforming. This turned out to require a rediculous amount of logic checks to be sure that each point is pulling from the correct terrain within an infinite landscape. Now that we have an easy system for flattening areas, I'll be looking to get back on track with farming and fishing. v 0.3.0e - 2018.09.02 Terraforming - Fixed and re-enabled terraforming (default key: y) - Split terraforming into two modes: point and face - Face mode can flatten an area - While in face mode you can lock the current height to flatten neighboring areas to the same height - Max steepness increased to 10m General - Terrains will now save their border heights the first time they are generated to prevent the rare occurrence of heights shifting between plays which previously could cause player buildings to end up above or below ground when built directly on terrain borders. - Interactable interfaces (trashbins, forges, etc) will now allow you to switch between crafting and inventory without breaking the connection to the actual facility. Closing the main interface is now what breaks the connection. - Fixed mobs getting stuck due to an implementation mistakingly left out of the last patches patch notes. The game world shifts back to zero every 8192 meters traveled to prevent floating point precision errors. This used to cause mobs to sometimes get confused as their spawn points are saved for them to run home to. Post world shift, their spawn point would be 8 kilometers away all the sudden and caused mobs to disappear sometimes. The fix that I implemented in 0.3.0d was causing them to constantly update their spawn point in some cases. Both problems are now fixed. - Fixed a bug that would caused dropped items to reappear after reloading even if picked up - Fixed using "interact" to close windows causing them to pop open immediately again 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-09-02 07:20:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

Though sometimes it would be nice to start things over from scratch if we had all the time, patience, and stamina in the world, that's rarely possible! One of the lingering internal problems, or rather shortcomings, of Solace Crafting has been upgraded with this patch. Multi-threading is still turned off as it needs it own array of tests, but all runtime save data is now completely controlled in memory, making it entirely safe for multi-threading. I ran into quite a number of problems along the way, and doors are still not saving their swing direction properly, but everything else is looking good. There may be a few bugs left as is expected on the beta branch. v 0.3.0d - 2018.08.30 - All save and load functions are now capable of multi-threading - Terrains generated while moving (not teleporting/loading) while spread their actions out across multiple frames 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-08-30 10:15:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

I started upgrading several areas of performance with beta v 0.3.0c though was honestly trying to do the bare minimum amount of changes mostly for time constraint reasons. All in all that caused more harm than good and the current beta build is quite unstable. Since then I have gone forward with more wide-reaching changes changing some of the fundamentals of how game data is managed in runtime. This will lead to increased performance and do away with a number of recurring problems. I have more or less completed the work, but it needs further testing and a few more tweaks and then it should be ready for tomorrow. Still, this patch will not reduce terrain size, which would force a wipe of all world saves. Currently each terrain is 1 kilometer squared and it's pretty taxing to turn them on and off causing the lagg spikes that occur when running around. The new system will alleviate a lot of that lagg, but not all of it. It would require another one or two arrays of data to be written to disk, but reducing the terrain size to something more like 256 meters squared could end up providing a much smoother gameplay experience. It might be possible to upgrade the world "upgrade" feature to handle that shift and not require a complete wipe as well. I just don't like leaving the news empty for more than a couple of days at worst and wanted to provide an update on what's going on behind the scenes! Thank you to everyone that has joined us for Early Access, and I hope I haven't caused to many beta tester headaches with the current beta build!

[ 2018-08-28 14:19:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've reduced the spikes that occur during terrain generation a bit with this patch. To get more in depth I would need to enfore a world wipe and nobody likes that =] It'll have to happen someday. We'll get some more things in before then though. v 0.3.0c - 2018.08.24 - Added icons for the new enchants and plants - Fixed harvesting luck enchants - Fixed run speed enchant - Added run speed indicator to adventuring stats - Improved terrain loading / saving performance - Added file recovery capabilities for terrain/chunk save data in case of improper handling 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-08-24 14:20:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

I added in a number of new enchants and herbs for their recipes today. There are a few problems that I will be fixing up tomorrow, like, they don't have icons for the inventory, they're using a silly shader that isn't accepting shadows, and midnights touch doesn't seem to be rotating properly to fit cave walls. The run speed enchant as well as the luck enchants will not yet work either, though you can go ahead and enchant them getting ready for tomorrow if you like. v 0.3.0b - 2018.08.22 - Added 24 new enchants: Melee Speed Melee Damage Melee Proficiency Ranged Speed Ranged Damage Ranged Proficiency Magic Speed Magic Damage Magic Proficiency Healing Healing Proficiency Run Speed (WIP) Armor Dodge Parry Block Health Energy Mana Reaping Luck (WIP) Skinning Luck (WIP) Mining Luck (WIP) Logging Luck (WIP) Quarrying Luck (WIP) - Added 8 new "herbs" Fools Mint (mountain biome) Pixie Leaf (mountain biome) Frogs Tongue (mountain biome) Osmolla (mountain biome) Spirit Tea (grass biome) Kings Leaf (grass biome) Midnights Touch (caves) Frozen Demise (snow biome) 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-08-22 13:14:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

Now pushing 0.3.0a to the live and beta branches, along with another small fix. I also updated the store page to be more about the current state of the game rather than things to come. v 0.3.0a2 - 2018.08.21 - Corrected the "show hidden" solaces button showing hidden when unchecked v 0.3.0a - 2018.08.21 Harvesting - Increased harvesting exp for rare nodes to uncommon +2 (was +0.5) rare +4 (was +1) elite +6 (was +2) legendary +10 (was +3) Pause - Added a pause button with keybinding options - Pausing the game will turn volume off, and disable all functionality except for the escape menu Building - Fixed parts of freshly placed structures not interacting properly since Unity upgrade General - Added the option to hide the UI for screenshots via F9. Escape will toggle out of it as well as F9 - Fixed ambient volume controls not working properly since Unity upgrade - Changing to a different window (alt-tab, etc) will now automatically pause the game, but leave it running in the background - Cursor lock should now properly re-enable fixing placement aim errors and wandering cursor in windowed mode brought up with Unity upgrade

[ 2018-08-21 12:55:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

Upgrading Unity is always a risky operation and there were some left over bugs brought up by players in yesterdays patch. This should fix those I'm aware of, specifically the cursor not locking properly which is a really big problem in windowed mode. It was necessary to work around the cursor bug, but a requested feature nonetheless, so two birds with one stone, we now have a pause button. Something requested by content creators was an option to turn the UI off. This has now been implemented via F9. I will post this to beta for a bit of testing, though all should be well. If nothing is exploding I will push this live later tonight. Thank you everyone for the bug reports! v 0.3.0a - 2018.08.21 Harvesting - Increased harvesting exp for rare nodes to uncommon +2 (was +0.5) rare +4 (was +1) elite +6 (was +2) legendary +10 (was +3) Pause - Added a pause button with keybinding options - Pausing the game will turn volume off, and disable all functionality except for the escape menu Building - Fixed parts of freshly placed structures not interacting properly since Unity upgrade General - Added the option to hide the UI for screenshots via F9. Escape will toggle out of it as well as F9 - Fixed ambient volume controls not working properly since Unity upgrade - Changing to a different window (alt-tab, etc) will now automatically pause the game, but leave it running in the background - Cursor lock should now properly re-enable fixing placement aim errors and wandering cursor in windowed mode brought up with Unity upgrade 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.

[ 2018-08-21 06:56:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

Now with boats, crossing that water between you and glory has never been easier! Boats are persistant and can be picked up for ease of use, and are currently the fastest and safest way to travel. We certainly plan to add storage and upgrades and much more to boats over time, and with the new small boat in and working all of that will be much easier when the time comes. Caves, both cold and hot are also new and very useful. Within caves is the only place to find gem veins making gem hunting now possible in place of gem grinding. Lava caves are the first of several "rare" caves planned, showing up roughly once every ten caves. In almost all cases you will need to build a bridge to make it to the other side of a lava cave should you wish to continue diving deeper.
Caves actually make use of a new system that completely side-steps the above ground terrain generation. Now that this alternative system is in and working, it will be much easier to create side "dimensions" or "pockets" for increasingly varied content beyond just more and more biomes. Harvesting tools and resource nodes have also had their math reworked into a linear system that is now much more balanced across all levels. For high level players still powering through resources with low level tools, this may come as a surprise. With the new harvesting tool enchants however, it's still very easy to get your harvesting strength well above the toughness rating of equal level resources. Next up on the todo list: Farming, fishing, and a number of other water related things. Thank you again to everyone participating in Early Access, and to everyone making suggestions and reporting bugs both here on the Steam forums and in our Discord server! For anyone interested in supporting Solace Crafting beyond the purchase of a Steam key, please check us out on Patreon Lot's more to come! Note: The windows executable is now "Solace Crafting.exe" instead of SolaceCrafting.exe, a change implement by Unity between 2017 and 2018. Steam has been updated to execute "Solace Crafting.exe." If you receive an executable error Steam may have updated the settings but not the game itself. Restarting Steam should force the update to begin as normal. Note 2: A known bug in the latest Unity, alt-tabbing destroys cursor lock functionality. This can cause the aim "dummy" to wander with the invisible cursor as opposed to the crosshair (center of the screen) after alt-tabbing from and back to the game and trying to place a facility such as a torch. Unity claims to have fixed the bug in their next release. A restart is required to return functionaly fully in the meantime. Opening the esc menu, or the tab menu will display the mouse letting you reposition it manually as well, though it will still wander while invisible. The cleaned up list of updates since version 0.2.2 are as follows: Boats - Added small boat as a known woodworking facility recipe - Boats can be picked up using the shift+interact radial menu Caves - Added cave entrances in place of half of the towers - Increased cave resources node rarity chances: Uncommon + 5% (base 5% at T1+) Rare + 4% (base 1% at T3+) Elite + 1% (base 0.25% at T4+) Legendary + 0.4% (base 0.1% at T6+) - Added ruby, amethyst, emerald, citrine, sapphire, topaz, and diamond gem veins to caves with 5-10 gems each - Gem veins have a natural toughness of +2 with an increased +2 per rarity - Gem veins are twice as likely to be a higher rarity - Added uncommon (1 in 10) lava caves that need to be built across to continue diving deeper - Lava IS lethal. Inventory items will be dropped on top of lava to make sure they are recoverable. Harvesting - Adjusted tool rarity damage bonus from 2.5 to 5 per rarity - Adjusted harvesting passive strength skills from 1 strength per level to 0.2 per level - Adjusted harvesting strong skills from 4 + 1.5 strength per level to 4 + 0.5 per level - Adjusted resource toughness from 15 per tier to 11 - Reworked tool damage and harvestable resources toughness - Resource toughness now displayed on mouse over - Damage done to resources now shown using a yellow damage display - Added 5 harvesting strength enchants - Harvesting enchants can only be placed on harvesting tools - Non-harvesting enchants can no longer be placed on harvesting tools - Harvesting experience is now 1 per harvest (at teir) not 1/10th - Harvested resources required to level reduced from 250 to 100 - First five harvesting level requirements reduced to 10, 20, 40, 60, and 80 - Harvesting tools now use harvesting levels to check if you can equip them instead of adventuring level Solaces - Solaces on the solace travel list can now be assign a color for sorting purposes: blackGeneral - Upgraded engine to Unity 2018.2.2 - The map will now automatically unlock all 8 sections adjacent and diagonal from the currently occupied section. Note that this requires the section be generated at least once meaning near terrain drawing distance will become a limiting factor in map section unlock distance. - Wall torches and ground torches are now stackable - Facilities (which includes wall and ground torches) can now be placed from the hotbars - Wall torch and ground torch light range upped from 6m to 15m, intensity reduced from 1.5 to 1.2 - Player torch (if equipped) light range upped from 10m to 25m, intensity reduce from 1 to 0.8 - Fixed hot bar keybindings for 11-40 not working - Improved player collision detection to help prevent falling through cave corners - Reduced the number of wandering Earth Elementals by roughly half - Control-shift now increases/decreases crafting level and tier selection by 100 - Turned off the lasting visual effect of the Protect spells - Hold shift to rotate facilities 3 times faster during placement - Improved tool descriptions to point out where they go - Added a helper to point out rotation capabilities during boat/facility/structure placement - Added a helper to point out keybindings during building construction - Added warnings to point out when a slot type or a recipe needs to be selected during construction Fixes - Fixed solace storage not accepting resources of tiers above 999 - Fixed not being able to construct resource scanners past tier 999 - Fixed tool strength and speed not showing up in item and recipe descriptions - Fixed uncommon set enchant icons - Fixed some skills not checking for enough energy/mana - Fixed Opportune Strike not dealing double damage on backstabs - Fixed energy and mana bars not updating immediately after skill use - Destroying an item in a trashbin while selected will now reset the item details to prevent dropping null items - Disabled draw/sheath weapon and weapon swap during boat/facility/structure/building placement v 0.3 specific patch notes from the latest beta build: - Disabled underground towns until properly implemented - Disabled terraforming until improved - Fixed abnormal health bar size bugs on enemies - Fixed shift-interact not working on doors - Improved corruption detection and handling of map files

[ 2018-08-20 10:18:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

Some minor improvements and bug fixes before pushing 0.2.2 to the live branch. Thank you everyone for the bug reports and feedback! v 0.2.2k - 2018.08.17 - Fixed saved structure placement in caves - Improved tool descriptions to point out where they go - Fixed back stab actually being front stab - Disabled draw/sheath weapon and weapon swap during boat/facility/structure/building placement - Added a helper to point out rotation capabilities during boat/facility/structure placement - Added a helper to point out keybindings during building construction - Added warnings to point out when a slot type or a recipe needs to be selected during construction - Moved damage messages pop-up range off of hunger/distance indicators - Reduced the range around players that items can drop from 25cm to 10cm - Fixed the "Chunk not stored" error - Fixed camera going through cave walls and cave decorations - Ley Line Teleporters cannot be used underground - Fixed setting an underground solace as home and recalling to it bugs Additional: v 0.2.2k2 - 2018.08.17 - Fixed loading getting stuck at 88% - Fixed targeted AOE spells (meteor, etc) hitting monsters more than once 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-08-17 03:02:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

The first of a series of uncommon procedural caves is in and will show up roughly 1 in every 10 caves. Lava! Which is deadly if you didn't know, please don't touch the lava. I also hope to get a water cave and a mini-boss cave in though maybe not immediately as there are quite a few things to do. I also was able to find one more small fix in regards to terrain generation/handling. That is top priority and I hope to fix completely before pushing this branch live. If anyone runs into any floating objects it would help me out a lot to know what you were doing (teleporting? recalling? running around?). If all is well, this or tomorrow's patch will most likely go live! v 0.2.2j - 2018.08.16 - Added uncommon (1 in 10) lava caves that need to be built across to continue diving deeper - Lava IS lethal. Inventory items will be dropped on top of lava to make sure they are recoverable. - Fixed buildings being obstructed by cave decorations - Fixed items dropped in caves disappearing - Fixed doors and windows obstructing construction near them - Hold shift to rotate facilities 3 times faster during placement - Fixed another small bug related to terrain recycling - Fixed a memory leak related to weapon switching Additional: v 0.2.2j2 - 2018.08.16 - Fixed a bug that would lock the building interface after closing it with the escape key 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-08-16 09:53:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Gem veins are in! Along with your daily array of fixes and improvements. The solace travel list is now highly maintainable for those with way too many solaces, including the option to hide solaces and show hidden when needed. Harvesting is easier to level up, and wandering monsters are less abundant (wandering animals are no less abundant). v 0.2.2i - 2018.08.15 Caves - Added ruby, amethyst, emerald, citrine, saphire, topaz, and diamond gem veins to caves with 5-10 gems each - Gem veins have a natural toughness of +2 with an increased +2 per rarity - Gem veins are twice as likely to be a higher rarity - Fixed rocks spawning in the way of cave entrance/exits - Caves now are a dry 10 degrees Celsius. Too cold for no clothes! Solaces - Solaces on the solace travel list can now be assign a color for sorting purposes: blackBoats - In the event of a disappearing boat, you will now be automatically disembarked - Fixed a bug caused by boats loading before terrains enable - Fixed another cause of disappearing boats Harvesting - Harvesting experience is now 1 per harvest (at teir) not 1/10th - Harvested resources required to level reduced from 250 to 100 - First five harvesting level requirements reduced to 10, 20, 40, 60, and 80 - Harvesting tools now use harvesting levels to check if you can equip them instead of adventuring level - Fixed strong harvesting skills not spending energy General - Reduced the number wandering Earth Elementals by roughly half - Fixed Ley Line Teleporters not teleporting until reloaded - Destroying an item in a trashbin while selected will now reset the item details to prevent dropping null items - Fixed the tiling on the loading screen water - Fixed snow starting outside of the snow biome Additional: v 0.2.2i2 - 2018.08.15 - Fixed strong harvest not engaging - Control-shift now increases/decreases crafting level and tier by 100 - Turned off the lasting visual effect of the Protect spell - Fixed loaded structures not being able to be placed in caves 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-08-15 09:22:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

Glowing mushrooms are in, adding a much better feel to the caves, the first of many light sources planned. I hoped to be getting crystals and gem veins in today, but there were some bugs that needed attention. I have reworked the saving and loading pipe a bit to ensure that things execute their timing properly. This should fix a number of small bugs and the not so small bug of sometimes things being overwritten that has unfortunately affected some players over the past few days. Beta branch or not, my sincerest apologies for that. Yesterdays patch brought in some new tool and resource math as well, though it needed some work and todays patch should help it out quite a bit. Basically a common tool of, for example, tier 20 should provide equal strength for a tier 20 resource assuming your harvesting profession is also up to a level equivalent to tier 20 (100 in this case). That assumes you have bought 20 points speed, and put 20 points into the "strong" harvesting skill for that profession, meaning 60 points in strength. Each higher tier or higher rarity past the minimum will provide an extra +5 per swing. Harvesting enchants will also provide more per swing. This way, a higher level tool with enchants can be used for many levels, while starting out you can still get going with just a tier 0 common tool. Starting out it makes more sense to put points in harvesting strength, then when you have a better tool, buying the strong skill and speed makes more sense. v 0.2.2h - 2018.08.14 Skills - Fixed skills not checking for enough energy/mana - Fixed Opportune Strike not dealing double damage on backstabs - Fixed energy and mana bars not updating immediately after skill use Harvesting Tools - Adjusted tool rarity damage bonus from 2.5 to 5 per rarity - Adjusted harvesting passive strength skills from 1 strength per level to 0.2 per level - Adjusted harvesting strong skills from 4 + 1.5 strength per level to 4 + 0.5 per level - Adjusted resource toughness from 15 per tier to 11 Caves - Added glowing mushrooms - Reduced global illumination from 50% to 30% - Fixed decorations not always saving and loading properly System - Repositioned runtime data save / load calls inline with the actual terrain generation enable / disable / destroy calls - Added further checks to ensure runtime data is saving itself properly - Fixed a bug that could cause floating distant encounters (leftovers from recycled chunks) Additional: v 0.2.2h2 - 2018.08.14 - Stone and ore nodes can now spawn underwater - Increased underground resources node rarity chances: Uncommon + 5% (base 5% at T1+) Rare + 4% (base 1% at T3+) Elite + 1% (base 0.25% at T4+) Legendary + 0.4% (base 0.1% at T6+) 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-08-14 10:53:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

This patch most notably changes tool and resource toughness math. The Strong harvest skills now do more damage per level, but they take up 1 point that would otherwise be spent on basic harvesting strength. This is however now easily counteracted with harvesting enchants. There will probably need to be some tweaking over time, but with the new harvesting enchants I don't think we'll be seeing any problems at higher levels. There are some good discussions happening on the Steam forums. Most interesting to me is the concept that regular monsters at higher levels don't drop useful loot, and are rarely needed for their experience and light. In other words, they are more a pain in the neck than anything after a certain point. We'd love to hear more opinions on the matter of wandering mobs in the wilds. v 0.2.2g - 2018.08.13 - Fixed freshly placed facilities not interacting properly - Fixed dropped items not interacting properly - Fixed disappearing boats - Boats can now be picked up using the shift+interact radial menu - Added a 0.5 second cooldown to boat interaction to prevent simultaneous enter/exit - Fixed tool strength and speed not showing up in item and recipe descriptions - Increased strong harvest skill strength per level from 1 to 1.5 - Reworked tool damage and harvestable resources toughness - Cave resources now properly generate their teir based on the cave entrance location as well as the number of caves decended - Resource toughness now displayed on mouse over - Damage done to resources now shown using a yellow damage display - Added 5 harvesting strength enchants - Harvesting enchants can only be placed on harvesting tools - Non-harvesting enchants can no longer be placed on harvesting tools - Fixed uncommon set enchant icons 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-08-13 13:06:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

v 0.2.2f3 - 2018.08.12 - Fixed a bug that could cause towers and caves to not show up where they're supposed to - Fixed a bug that could improperly overwrite terrain and chunk data files 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-08-12 09:31:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Apparently Unity 2018 does not automatically remove spaces from the executable file name making the new executable "Solace Crafting.exe" while Steam has been told it is "SolaceCrafting.exe" as Unity 2017 would remove the space. This caused Steam to return a "missing executable" error. I have renamed the file and data folder to fix this and will fix the Steam command with the next live branch update.

[ 2018-08-11 01:39:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

Please backup any worlds you are planning to play, if there's anything in them you can't afford to lose. There may be a rare bug causing terrain files to be overwritten improperly I will be looking into tomorrow.
This patch upgrades the engine to Unity 2018.2.2 from 2017.1.0. That's a big step and it might have some side-effects for some players. All seems to be working well on my side, but please let me know if an armor set is not rendering, or the sun explodes, something silly like that. This patch has a number of small fixes and quality improvements, notebly stacking ground and wall torches with the ability to place them from the hotbar now. I also fixed hotkeys not working on the optional 3 hotbars. Most of all though I've got a "decoration" and resource spawning system for caves working. This is a work in progress in that resources will not yet properly manage their teir as caves aren't fully aware of their difficulty and location in the world yet. This can also cause the temperature to go crazy high if you travel too deep. I will be working on fixing those kinds of numbers and the systems that use them in the next patch. I have also temporarily doubled the ambient light in caves, and will turn it back down once I get some procedural lights spawning on the walls. I also turned up the collision detection for players universally. This costs some extra compute power and I haven't finished testing it yet. If you notice a big difference in FPS while moving around compared to before please let me know. v 0.2.2f - 2018.08.10 - Upgraded engine to Unity 2018.2.2 - Wall torches and ground torches are now stackable - Facilities (which includes torches) can now be placed from the hotbars - Wall torch and ground torch light range upped from 6m to 15m, intensity reduced from 1.5 to 1.2 - Player torch (if equipped) light range upped from 10m to 25m, intensity reduce from 1 to 0.8 - Fixed hot bar keybindings for 11-40 not working - Improved player collision detection to help prevent falling through cave corners - Retextured caves - Added persistent procedural decoration system to caves - Added stone and ore spawns to caves (wip) 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-08-10 14:25:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Back from my short overseas excursion with some fixes. Before I update to a newer version of Unity, always a dangerous operation, I'm going to push what I've got in so far today. This will correct a number of bugs with the cave generation/management system currently on the beta build. Why upgrade? Increased performance and engine bug fixes aside, there are some tools that I want to make use of that don't work with the older version I'm still working with. Moving onto adding items into and prettying up cave interiors if all goes well. v 0.2.2e - 2018.08.09 - The map will now automatically unlock all 8 sections adjacent and diagonal from the currently occupied section. Note that this requires the section be generated at least once meaning near terrain drawing distance will become a limiting factor in map section unlock distance. - Active terrains will now be forcibly saved when entering caves to prevent possible loss of unsaved changes - Increased the flattening and resource no-spawn zone around cave entrances - Fixed grassland trees being able to spawn inside cave entrances - Fixed cave entrances not being destroyed properly causing them to reappear floating on other terrains - Fixed terrain objects not destroying themselves properly when teleporting from underground to a distant location above ground causing them to float on other terrains - Fixed lingering references to certain runtime data when returning to the main menu and loading a different game - Fixed spawning beneath the surface of "above ground" after reloading an auto-save that was teleporting from underground to above ground - Fixed the building selection aimbox going invisible in all cases but starting a new structure and remaining invisible until a new selection was made 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-08-09 08:06:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

Seems to be some infrequent bugs with caves in Steam that aren't in Unity, more so with some than others. I've added some simple console outputs that should say "Going underground" "Generating cave #4 for terrain 25, 12" etc. Unfotunately I'm heading out now and can't test this further on my own. Best wishes to everyone while I'm away! v 0.2.2d - 2018.08.02 - Fixed a bug that could lock the mouse and keyboard when clicking recall with the mouse from underground - Added basic cave notifications to console output for moving above/below ground and cave generation 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. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.

[ 2018-08-02 00:18:02 CET ] [ Original post ]