Release 167: Player Progression and Build Progression!
This update is accessible via the "Live" release.
Testing 161
Art + Animation + Assets:
New tintable ice and glacier textures.
Beacons + Campfires:
Beacons now have a prestige value determined by a combination of factors including the types of blocks used to build a beacon, the variation of blocks within a beacon, the distribution of solid/air within the beacon and the presence of blocks from other worlds.
Beacons now combine together (based on proximity in x/z only ignoring vertical distances) into settlements classified as one of an Outpost, Hamlet, Village, Town, City or Great City based on the total prestige of the settlement calculated by summing the prestiges of its beacons. The character which contributed the most prestige to the settlement will be its mayor, who can rename the settlement via a Beacon Control block within the settlement. Settlements whose prestige is too small will not be classified at all and not be given a name. The beacon control block will also show a ranking of up to the 5 top contributors to the settlement, and settlements will be visible on planets in the sky when holding the Totem. The settlement with the highest prestige will be granted the title of Capital on that world.
Beacons that are part of a named settlement will generate footfall when people other than members of the beacon enter the beacon (beacons owned by the same user within the same settlement won't generate multiple footfall payments) each day, with coin collectable from a beacon control block of that beacon.
When placing a beacon, you'll now get an entry in your 'Beacons' list on the player GUI and the warp conduit GUI which will provide you more information about your beacons and allow you to warp to them directly. You will no longer get an automatically saved 'Location' (that actually has nothing to do with beacons) when placing a beacon console. There is no migration in place to automatically add all beacons you already own, so you will need to interact with a console in your beacons and click 'Add to Beacons' in the Settings tab to add it to the list manually. Note that you can now also interact with a beacon as a villager to add a beacon you have permissions for to your beacons list. These new beacons will show up on the planets too for your own set of beacons.
Beacons can now be given a name by the mayor of the beacon which will show up in the HUD and in the Beacons list.
Beacons no longer require their columns of plots to be contiguous (can have vertical C shapes), fixing bugs in the removal of plots.
Beacon plots can now be removed even if there is a console inside of them, this is a change that also removes the limit on the number of consoles a beacon has and is forward planning for beacon fuelling. Beacon consoles are purely an interface onto 'whatever beacon happens to be that position' and no longer store any state whatsoever. They're just blocks!
Beacons will now expire after a given period of time. Beacons already existing in the world will have approximately 6 months of life on them.
Beacons will no longer automatically reserve a plot when placing a beacon control, you must fuel them to reserve the first plot and create 'the beacon'.
Beacons can be fuelled currently using leaf blocks and tree trunk blocks. Further fuel items will be added later with additional balancing and tiers of fuel. As a flavour of this, the leaf blocks will be able to take a beacon up to 3 months of life, whilst a trunk block will be able to take it up to 6 months of life in total.
Campfires are a new item which acts as a device for temporary reservation of beacon area using up two plots and which has no permissions or fuelling, and takes no part in settlements or footfall. Campfires are automatically fuelled and have a life time of 1 day. Placing a beacon control into an existing campfire will 'upgrade' it to a beacon wherein it can now have plots added and removed, and have additional fuel added to it along with permissions. Campfires will be destroyed when the campfire block is destroyed unlike beacons.
Beacons and campfires will both appear in the 'beacons' list of the new 'universe' screen which now holds the locations GUI also.
The new universe screen also contains a 'settlements' list detailing information about settlements you own a beacon in (villager status is not enough).
The new universe screen contains also a 'worlds' list detailing information about all of the worlds you've visited (there is no migration in place to auto-populate this).
Huge changes to character progression:
Character Experience - XP:
All XP and levels have been reset. Don't worry though, because you'll retain all coins and beacon plots earned so far.
Total experience required to level up for the early levels has been adjusted slightly.
XP is now a single pool, not tracked per profession.
XP is earned by completing objectives rather than awarded for individual actions.
Character Objectives:
The first tier of objectives is available.
Objectives give you XP, allowing you to level up. Each new level gives you coin, beacon plots, and skill points to spend.
All objectives are split by profession.
One time objectives can be used to learn about a profession.
Daily objectives will reset each day, allowing you to earn regular XP.
One time and daily objectives must be activated for progress to be recorded. They are tracked in the top left corner of the screen.
Weekly objectives will reset once a week and are always active. They provide big chunks of XP towards your next level. You'll need to view these in the objective screen to track your progress.
Press J or select Objectives menu in the Options to access the Objectives list. This can only be accessed after you have completed the tutorial.
Character Attributes:
We've fleshed out the attribute system with lots of the underlying game systems now using attributes. You'll probably notice you're moving and hitting slower than you used to. Try increasing your Agility and Dexterity to improve that!
Character Unlockable skills:
There's a whole new skill unlock system in place that lets you improve core attributes, combat competencies, and unlock some specialised skills too. Press K or select Character menu in the Options to access the Skills page.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
New players will start the game with just the items they have collected in the Sanctum. Players no longer receive a free Beacon and are instead encouraged to craft one in the tutorial.
The recipe for crafting a Beacon Control has been updated, it is now made with the Crafting Table.
Warp Location Picker Upgrade has been renamed to Warp Shard.
Creatures + Combat:
All five power tier variants of Spitter models are now in the game. Spitter colours have changed slightly.
Items dropped by creatures now always drop in the direction the player is facing to make them easier to find.
Items dropped by creatures now stay for a second to give players time to see them before they are picked up.
Melee hits are predicted on the client, so effects play when you hit a creature irrespective of latency.
Point projectile damage and break blocks if their power is large enough. However only tools create block drops.
Wildstock have all had their textures tweaked and will be slightly different colours now.
GUI + HUD:
Drop items by picking them up from your back pack and clicking on the left side of the screen (replaces previous GUI button)
Improved HUD for beacons to show the beacon name and it's mayor and improve styling.
Improved HUD for other basic interactable items to improve styling.
Improved HUD for portals/warps to show some extra information like whether they're in a valid state, and improve styling.
New tutorial to introduce players to the game and the progression system.
Updated GUI for grid item tooltip, information popup, Smart Stack and Amount Picker.
Updated GUI for Crafting Table, Machines and Spark Core
Use location tokens by taking them in hand and actioning them (replaces previous GUI button)
SFX + Music:
Added character audio for actions, running, landing and emotes. Yarbo!
Engine:
Increase default chunk cache size to 2GB. Added 4GB and 8GB options.
Server:
Reduced the number of protocol messages being sent between the client and server for better network performance.
Bug fixes:
Fixed an issue where health would briefly change after entering portals and warps.
Fixed an issue where the Spark Core was still being referenced as the Power Core.
Testing 162
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
Slingbow special fire modes are now locked behind Slingbow Mastery skill upgrades.
Rapid fire mode: Hold the fire button to spam shots.
Charge fire mode: Hold the fire button to charge up your shot and increase damage.
Some slingbows can rapid fire, some can charge shot, and some can do neither. You'll have to experiment to discover which.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
The impact effect when the Slingbow hits a target is now predicted and played on the client rather than server.
Improved visibility of cuttletrunks, hoppers and spitters in the dark.
Stamina:
The blue SP bar under your health bar now represents your stamina rather than air.
Air is still functional, and you will drown if you remain under water too long, but for now the UI won't display it so be careful while swimming!
Stamina is spent when moving, jumping, and using items.
Stamina is regenerated over time.
When your stamina runs out your are temporarily "fatigued" which reduces all of your attributes down to basic levels and stops you sprinting. Regain stamina to fix this.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
Experience Points required for each level has been rebalanced.
The default jump height has been lowered but the jump height and double jump upgrades have been increased.
The NPC in the Sanctum will now appear after the intro.
The spawn location in the Sanctum has been changed so both Warps are now visible.
Various changes have been made to the tutorial and its flow:
Some of the text shown in the information box has been updated.
The order of the tutorial has been changed to better introduce new players to Boundless.
Various changes have been made to objectives:
After the Tutorial you now only unlock 1 Miner, 1 Gatherer and 1 Explorer objective instead of 90 objectives for all professions.
You start with two objective slots. Further slots are unlocked as you level.
Tier 1 objectives have been updated.
Tier 2 objectives are now available.
The unlock order for objectives has been updated.
Completing an objective for a profession will unlock new objectives.
You now need to complete Miner, Gatherer and Explorer objectives to unlock objectives for the other professions.
The Mender category has been removed until the profession is playable.
A number of the bug fixes have been made, however there may still be some issues with the objective system.
GUI + HUD:
Update machine recipe lists and queue GUI
Update warp conduit GUI
Update skill tree GUI
Testing 163
Art + Animation + Assets:
The Buying Plinth now has a different appearance to distinguish it better from the Selling Plinth. It's now a Request Basket.
New First Person Animations for held items. Animations are more specialised per item and scale better across game aspect ratios.
New effects for slingbow charge, entity despawn, item break and the warp surround.
Fix effects not playing after spawning when holding a torch in sanctum and after portal/warp transitions.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
Changed the resource distribution on home worlds to increase the probability of Iron and Copper spawning when the world regenerates.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
Introduction of creature and combat Threat:
Creatures now have a 3 stages of threat:
Passive - No interest in any nearby players and is unlikely to attack, even if provoked.
Aggressive - Will turn to a nearby player and start acting aggressive towards them. Move away to avoid combat or it will eventually attack.
Hostile - Creature is now hostile towards the player and will attack the player.
In this update players now generate threat with each attack on an enemy. Creatures will now target nearby players with the highest threat value.
Warning! As your threat increases the range at which a creature will become agitated is increased.
If you wish to lower your threat value stop attacking creatures and let it decreases over time.
There are skills in the skill tree which increases or decreases the amount of threat you generate per action.
Improved combat prediction and feel:
Slingbow projectiles will now feel much better at higher latencies, previously a higher latency player would see his projectiles move more slowly for a period of time until the latency was resolved between client and server, but now their projectiles will fly immediately at full speed.
Interactions with creatures, whether with melee items like the totem, but especially with projectile weapons will be much more accurate for collision detection at larger latencies, including for grappling to a creature, you should see far less mis-predictions now.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
Objective changes:
You now gain x4 XP for all objectives including Daily and Weekly. (This is a temporary change for Early Access as we'll continue to balance this area throughout Early Access.)
Some objectives have been reordered, altered or replaced.
Objectives aim to teach you all elements of the game. However some areas have not been implemented yet, but more will be added throughout Early Access.
Updated Tutorial with the following changes:
Less materials required at the start for gathering leaves and timber.
You are now told how to use the Beacon Plotter in the initial tutorial.
You are no longer required to find a new region until after the tutorial, instead you only need to travel a certain distance.
Warp activation rule changes
Your "Warp Distance" skill now limits maximum warp and portal activation. You can still walk through any portal or warp opened by another player.
"Warp Distance" is ignored for your "Home" location. You can always warp home.
Block count limits still apply to portals, but no longer restrict warp activation.
GUI + HUD:
Added a Profile panel to the Character screen (Press K or Character in the Options menu):
See your current level and progress towards the next level.
Additional information such as your Home, Coin, Plots and Skill Points.
Your character's attributes and defensive stats.
Separated out Game Menu GUI and updated look.
Skills in the skill tree now display an info box giving details of the skill.
Updated Beacon Control GUI
Updated dead GUI.
Updated return to Sanctum GUI.
Updated Settings GUI.
Updating character screen GUI.
SFX + Music:
Additional per tier wildstock audio.
World Builder:
Fixed an issue where image noise nodes were having their frequencies too rigidly fixed. All noise nodes are forced to wrap on the world size, which discretises the frequencies that any given noise node can validly take, but the image noise node was being prevented from having a large range of frequencies (higher frequencies). This may well affect any world builder configurations using image noise nodes, so you may need to check.
Testing 164
Art + Animation + Assets:
Added campfire and beacon control meshes. These show the fuelling state of the beacon (on, low, off) and cast a little light.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
Titanium now needs gold alloy or silver alloy (rather than both).
Totem Ammo now only needs base metals an a standard workbench (rather than gold alloy and a powered workbench).
Totem Ammo renamed to Warp Crystal.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
Player projectile damage to blocks is now predicted client-side.
Player projectiles should feel much more accurate at closer distances now, this was due to the visual offset to make it look like the projectile comes from your hands being applied for far too long.
Projectiles shot by creatures now work in such a way that clients can perfectly predict whether they will get hit or not by the projectile, no more feeling like you missed the projectile but then it hitting you anyways! A downside, is that the creature's projetiles now take longer to fire, which makes it easier for you to trick the creature into firing in the wrong direction, but this is somewhat counteracted by the creature projectiles now being able to curve slightly towards the player too.
Reduce size of player hitbox (Was way too big) and physics, and increase/modify the sizes of creature hitboxes/physics slightly to better match the visual meshes.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
XP Actions
Players now earn XP by completing the following actions: placing blocks, defeating creatures, mining blocks, crafting items, and chiseling blocks.
XP is awarded to the player who is placing, mining or chiseling a block.
XP is awarded to the player when an item has been crafted. For machine crafted items, the
XP is stored until the player enters the Beacon where the item was crafted.
XP is awarded to all players who have participated in defeating a creature (this includes players who have healed a player currently in combat).
The amount of XP awarded per action is based on difficulty.
Experience
Coins have been removed from levelling up, as they are now exclusively earned through completing Objectives or by trading with other players.
Experience required per level has been increased due to the new XP Actions.
Objectives
Fixed an issue where items in a Smart Stack were not being tracked by the objective task
XP rewards have been rebalanced for the Tutorial
Variable sized player backpacks:
New players start with 16 inventory slots.
Slots can be unlocked in groups of 4 by purchasing "Inventory Space" skills in the Exploration skill tree.
Existing players will be gifted all "Inventory Space" skills for free and will see no change to their inventory capacity.
Stamina rebalancing:
Stamina drains at a much slower rate.
Movement costs stamina.
Consumable items restore stamina as well as health.
Stamina regeneration is disabled by default and must be unlocked through the "Stamina Regeneration" Endurance skill.
GUI + HUD:
Open Portals and Warps may now have their directions flipped directly in the GUI instead of requiring complex care when setting up to get things right.
Fix for the damage indicator and damage log appearing before the player was actually damaged.
Fix for the damage log showing twice when healing yourself.
Partial update for plinth and trading GUIs
Updated Furnace GUI
SFX + Music:
Updated Hopper SFX.
Updated slide SFX.
Fix missing Spitter SFX.
Engine:
Add some measures to un-stuck players/creatures automatically if they manage to get stuck in the ground somehow.
Choices of which chunk to mesh next are now also moved onto the meshing threads, and should give faster turnarounds on chunk deltas from breaking/adding blocks to seeing the new meshes.
Chunk meshing is now multithreaded (fixed at 2 threads for now). Assuming you're not network bound on receiving chunks (even max download rate is likely still not enough if your chunk cache isn't full of the chunks you need), you should see the world render in more quickly now, but at the very least re-meshing of a chunk when breaking/placing blocks should now be faster, nearly 2 times as fast in local testing.
Fix an issue with pushing players into 2-high gaps when jumping when moving along the Z-direction! Oops.
Fix horizontal(flat) portal/warp rendering.
Resolve inconsistencies between generated grass, and whether grass can be placed by hand, and when it is removed by world simulation (squashing grass by placing a block ontop), can now place grass by hand at the bottom of corners correctly.
Testing 165
Art + Animation + Assets:
Improved day/night cycle lighting settings and added fog to Therka.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
Campfires and beacons can now be warped into by strangers without permissions by default. Beacons may be configured once created to prevent this action so that only members may warp into the beacon. This allows "public" beacons like market places to allow people to warp into them even if they're not members of the beacons.
Fixed incorrectly showing plots that can be added when you have a plot REMOVER in your hand.
Fixed incorrectly showing plots that can be removed when you have a plot ADDED in your hand.
Fixed not showing plots claimed by campfire in hand if there is something in your right hand.
Fixed not showing plots that can be added/removed when holding a plot adder/remover in your left hand with something else in the right hand.
Resources generated with new redistribution.
Some quality of life changes have been made to the recipe timers.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
Balanced weapon and tool damage and speed, so the beginning of the game feels more fun, and less grindy.
Feats, passive tasks, have been added to the Objectives menu and reward the player with Coin and XP when they are completed.
Fixed objectives data bug where some objectives where not showing the activate button properly.
Multiple tutorial objectives have been grouped into a single objective with multiple tasks.
New descriptions have been added to a number of objectives.
Objectives can be toggled on or off the HUD in the Objectives menu and up to 5 Objectives can be shown at any time.
Objectives can be unlocked by performing certain tasks or by completing certain objectives.
The initial skills order has been modified to match the new tutorial flow.
Tutorial flow updated, you are no longer required to find a region or travel a certain distance from your campfire to place Beacon.
Unlearn (the action to forget a skill) has been renamed to Cleanse.
When you complete the initial tutorial new Objectives will unlock and they will be tracked in the background without the need to activate them.
GUI + HUD:
A hint is shown on the HUD for each objective task, instead of per objective.
Fixing incorrectly showing compass home locations.
UI for the objectives shown in the HUD has been updated.
Updated "Shop Stand" GUI
Engine:
Fixed issues in smoothly interpolating entities like creatures that caused them to appear to shake somewhat whilst walking around.
Fixed items like machine crates not having decals shown when in the hand, inventory or dropped into the world.
Introduced synchronisation of chunk remeshing so that when meshing along chunk borders, the meshed results are applied together synchronously to prevent any "holes" appearing whilst mining around chunk borders. This introduces a slight delay in these cases, but is better than showing through into the underworld!
Reduced memory usage of world chunk data, this should allow less memory usage in the client and server and also allow more chunks to be stored in the client chunk cache.
Players now collide with portals while they wait for the other side to load. This should fix most cases where players get stuck on the wrong side of a portal.
Testing 166
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
Damage changes have been made to the early levels to speed up breaking blocks.
Storage shelves have been made easier to craft.
Wanted Basket has been renamed to Request Basket.
You now get more Timber blocks per Trunk.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
Objectives
"Bookmarking And Sharing Locations" has been fixed.
"Building A Crafting Furnace: Part II" has been fixed.
"Hunting Creatures" is a new objective and informs you about collecting items from creatures.
"Improve Your Beacon Base" prestige rating required has been increased.
"Time To Collect Resources" has been altered. You are now required to gather Starberries and the text has been updated.
New descriptions have been added to some of the objectives.
Quality-of-life improvements have been made to the tutorial to avoid the need to repeat actions you may have already completed.
The experience multiplier for completing objectives has been reduced from x3 to x1.5.
GUI + HUD:
Item Crafting recipes have been swapped with Equipment Crafting recipes in the GUI.
New icons have been added to the skill tree.
UI improvements have been made to how objectives are displayed on the HUD.
Updated Trading GUI
Bug fixes:
Resolved an issue where creatures wouldn't attack you if you hit them.
Resolved an issue where Feats you've completed would be shown repeatedly.
Resolved an issue where the coordinates were being incorrectly calculated in the GUI.
Resolved an issue where the first two slots in the inventory would be locked.
Resolved an issue where the server would crash when crafting under certain conditions.
Resolved an issue where travelling through a Portal would cause a crash.