Luckily, in the last major release, we didn't have many major issues to sort out, allowing us to focus on adding more content and smoothing out some important areas of the game for this release. We focused on performance for sure, but we made sure to improve on plenty of lacking areas as well including fishing, reinforcing, and other UI/UX improvements. I encourage you to check all the new things out! While this is a sizable release, we still have more to work on in the 2.8.x series of patches. There's still a few more things to smooth out. Continue to give us feedback on the game! Make sure to check out our Discord if you haven't yet, or shoot me a friend request on Steam

New

• You can now craft items through the item menu (or assign it as the default action of a quickslot).

• Added chopped fish which can be cooked or used as fishing bait.

• Added a tooltip for your own character with your stats as additional information.

Improvements

• Improved the visibility of selected items versus non-selected items in the inventory and crafting windows on hover states.

• Running the Starter Quest mod will now always spawn the player in the northern part of the map (outside of the desert).
• Using bait now has a higher chance of stirring up creatures when casting into empty water.
• You can now gather badderlocks (among other items) from seawater regardless of skill level (was previously disabled over 100% skill).
• Items can now decay into multiple items (in the case of larger meat, fruits or vegetables).
• Consuming most raw or cooked fish now return bone fragments.
• You can now cancel when attempting to sync/download a multiplayer world.
• Fixed performance issues to do with stats on creatures and player movement.
• Improved performance and reduced latency of game rendering.
• Improved performance of saving games, speeding up the saving process.
• Improved idle CPU usage and general performance of the game.
• Improved relative performance when sleeping/resting mostly by staggering growth cycles (so they don't all happen together, causing slow turns/long sleeps).
• The "Disable UI Animations" option has been renamed to "Disable UI Effects" and will feature even more optimizations for lower-end hardware and devices.
• You can no longer attempt to open disabled dialogs.
• Pressing escape in an input now clears the input to the previous text rather than blurring the input.
• Moving in shallow water and snow will now attempt to soothe burn injuries, but at a reduced chance and will notify the player on attempts.
• New UI static components (stats, messages, the menu bar) can now be hidden individually. Added subtle buttons for putting them back or moving them.
• Fruit containing seeds and fish/meat containing bone fragments will now also decay with its seeds/bones. Some items have had modified weights due to this change.
• Fish can now be dismantled into chopped fish and bone fragments.
• Multiplayer games are now set to "Open to Anyone" by default.
• Added an "x" button to clear filter inputs in the new UI.
• The taming and storage quests within the Starter Quest have been moved to the very end.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed merchants not receiving new stock after reloading a saved game. (Thanks num ca nem vi!)
• Fixed dismantling requirements not being protectable. (Thanks Arnkh!)
• Fixed a bug that did not allow new merchants to spawn if you had killed all of them previously. (Thanks Arnkh!)
• Fixed a bug where bare trees could have unlimited resources (yikes). (Thanks Grub!)
• Fixed multiple multiplayer desyncs relating to merchant NPCs.
• Fixed a memory leak in challenge mode causing extreme lag.
• Fixed the map dialog remaining open even when the tattered map was far away from the player.
• Fixed game failing to launch on Debian due to permission issues.
• Fixed the message log not appearing the same when set to appear on the top of the screen.
• Fixed being able to stir up non-cave creatures within cave water.
• Fixed lava tiles being a suitable spawn point.
• Fixed dedicated servers starting as friends-only even though open to anyone was checked by default.
• Fixed releasing creatures not preserving their happiness so that they could be tamed and released repeatedly.
• Fixed music playlist being incorrect when in-game with the menu open. (Thanks Amax!)
• Fixed custom image paths for mod registrations not working. (Thanks Amax!)
• Fixed the "Abnormalizer" milestone modifier not applying its rules to other milestones that edited creatures in some way. (Thanks lovesthesoundof!)
• Fixed treasure being blocked in cases where it shouldn't be. (Thanks Zillvr!)
• Fixed not being able to clear blood in water. (Thanks Tkenny123!)
• Fixed impassable tiles being able to be covered with ash. (Thanks Stelyar!)

Balance

• Reinforcement limits now take into account weight and quality bonuses (more accurately) and will increase in durability the lower the item's durability is (instead of only 10-20 durability per reinforcement).
• The maximum reinforcement value is now a percentage value based on the item's maximum durability instead of a static value for all items (+125), increasing maximum reinforcement on most items.
• Increased plant growth time across most plants, but more significantly on trees.
• You are no longer able to trade back items to merchants that they traded you.
• Reduced fishing net durability slightly.
• Bait is now destroyed when using it to catch a fish.
• Reeling up fish (and other items) now costs stamina based on the item or fish weight.
• Reduced the amount of stamina needed when rafting while overburdened, making it much more efficient than walking with heavy loads.
• Reduced the amount of stamina needed to jump.
• Reduced difficulty of crafting wooden doors and wooden chests.
• Sundials will now have much more durability for normal use.

Modding

• returnOnUse is now returnOnUseAndDecay which is used for decaying items and can now return exact items used to create the item with the new returnFromDisassembly property.
• decaysInto now accepts multiple items as an array.
• The wayward +mod command now supports initializing the mod with a different Typescript file name using +classFile.

Technical

• Some older GPUs are now forced to DirectX9 rendering by default. This will fix some players issues with not being able to see their character and other rendering bugs due to hardware/driver compatibility and age.
• Wayward has been upgraded to TypeScript 3.7.2.