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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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. ːsteamthumbsupː

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best wishes to everyone in 2024!

Kyle Postlewait
Big Kitty Games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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