Ahoy, fellow Ylanders!

Do you remember how we mentioned that we're experimenting with making sailing more fun and interesting?

You do? Well, today we're not going to talk about that! :) Don't worry though, we will get to that soon enough (as well as to other stuff like improved AI and much more). Today, however, instead of talking about getting somewhere, we'll talk about the place your ships take you. The actual ylands.

Even though we made some improvements to ylands in the past - be it their size or their shapes - there's still too little difference between them. Also, some areas look just way too ... ugly. And unrealistic. We feel that exploring shouldn't be only about finding cool random encounters but also interesting terrain features. Bays, lakes. Shallow water. Jagged rocks begging for a bridge to be built over. And much more...

And so one of the things we're working on for the upcoming update 1.12 is the improved terrain generator. We're pretty sure that this will make the exploration much more fun and we can't wait for you to provide us with pictures from your travels.

Until the next week - stay classy, Ylanders!

Ahoy Ylanders!

Love is all around (not only) this time of the year and that is exactly why we are introducing Pinky the Pig!

Pinky is a fantastic companion for all the adventurers out there, so why not gift her to your Ylands friend and show that you appreciate them.

Pinky the Pig will be hanging out in the shop only until February 17!

Ahoy Ylanders!

We often ask you to look at an image or read some new information, but this week, this week is different. And that's because we want you to listen!

Let's set the scene. Just imagine you're on the beach of a beautiful yland, sun just starting to peek on the horizon, shashlik being roasted on the fire, coconut drink in hand, your ship anchored nearby and Track Number 2: Serene Sunrise starts playing... eh... what's Track Number 2 you ask? The answer is easy! That is the track that comes after Track Number 1: Adventure Awaits on the Ylands Original Game Soundtrack!

The Ylands OST is now available for you to stream on Spotify, Apple Music and other music streaming platforms! We are extremely happy to share this with you and make the wonderful music of Ylands easily available for you to enjoy whenever and wherever.




You may or may not know that the music was composed by a Czech composer Varhan Orchestrovič Bauer who hand picked the individual musicians who performed the tracks.

Because we enjoy making fun of ourselves, we'll share a funny story from the implementation of the soundtrack... At one point, we started receiving feedback from players that they heard someone talking when they were inside caves. We thought to ourselves: "That's impossible! We never recorded any dialogue for the game!" So we really dove deep into getting to the bottom of the mystery. And indeed, there it was. When you walked into a cave, you could hear the word "Super!" at times, which was kinda creepy. So we went to consult our sound department and it turned out that they left in a part of the track, where the conductor complimented the great job of the orchestra with a single word... "Super!"

That's it for today, Ylanders!

Stay Super... and Classy!

❤️ New time-limited pet (available Feb 10 - 17)
⚪ Improved behaviour of inventory and radial menu on-screen buttons
📝 New login/registration screen
📘 Tutorial UI improvements





[YLD-42689] Fixed: Tutorial: Mobile: Health layout overlaps the hint box.
[YLD-42718] Fixed: "Gather Alchemy Ingredients" task name overlaps over its box.
[YLD-42411] Added: Flying Boar for Valentine.
[YLD-42530] Tweaked: Adjust character naming screen.
[YLD-42280] Tweaked: Errors during login/registration are now more specific.
[YLD-42544] Tweaked: Mobile UI: Inventory, Radial Menu, Chat a Pause menu should work on release.
[YLD-42497] Removed: The login screen upon the first start.

Ahoy Ylanders!

As we have moved from the designing phase to fully implementing 1.12 features, we will - as always - start sharing with you information about various new or improved features that you will be able to find in the next update.

Today we would like to mention two specific changes we made based on your feedback. 

The first one we already mentioned in the last Live Stream (which was a lot of fun as usual :) ). We know that sailing can get a bit tedious at times, so for 1.12 we're making some exciting adjustments that should make it more fun. The first one is - fishing on moving boats! Got a few moments to spare before you reach your destination? Take out your fishing rod and spend some quality time getting the pretty fish (and other stuff).

The second thing is more subtle but many will love it. For quite a long time some of you have complained about the camera not moving smoothly - which was especially obvious with higher fps. Well, we made some changes to the camera system and we're pretty sure you will notice the difference.

There's a ton of other cool stuff planned for 1.12 so stay tuned ... and classy!

Blueprint shop rules

• Appropriate name of the Blueprint
  
• clear name that represents what the Blueprint is (numbers can also be a name if the context of the Blueprint allows it)
  
• all the names have to be in English
  
• Purposeful use
  
• Blueprints that are not allowed are those that misuse the lack of knowledge of new players (such as propeller pack blueprint, where you need to insert a built propeller pack to build it.)
  
• No low effort Blueprints
  
• For example two blocks, creator cube, ....

Breaking the rules

• After breaking these rules if you do not continue in such behavior you may stay in the shop
  
• If you continually break the rule you will receive Blueprint shop ban

Ahoy Ylanders,

You have probably noticed that a new exciting section of our in-gam shop has appeared with Update 1.11 - Blueprints! You may remember from this Dev Diary, that the Blueprint shop is a great place to gift, buy and sell your wonderful creations. And since the launch of the feature, we have seen some truly magnificent pieces, which is what today's Dev Diary will be about.

Seeing all those incredible ships, buildings, cars, and many more different kinds of Blueprints, we realized that we wanted to show those to everyone which is why we will start regularly highlighting specific Blueprints. Each week, we will handpick a few of your creations and promote them on our social media along with a few details about the specific Blueprint. For now, we are mainly going to promote the creations of the members of our Creators Club (Not a member? Join here.) so that everyone can see their exceptional talents!




To make sure you get to see what some of these Blueprints look like in the game, we regularly look at some during our stream. We even have a special map to showcase the Creators Club Blueprints during each stream. You can already take a peak at what that looks like! https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1718069609

What are your favorite Blueprints? Have you uploaded and/or downloaded any yet? If so, let us know which ones!

That's it for today and we will talk to you again next week!


Stay Classy!

Highlights

💰Additional Coyns packages.
🐛Tutorial bug fixes.
📘Blueprints shop fixes.

Fixed

[YLD-41901] Fixed: Exploration local save entries are now flagged as 'unsaved' before the first write to disk actually succeeds. If a player attempts to continue an 'unsaved' entry, it transparently redoes the initial starting sequence to avoid corruption of that particular map entry.
[YLD-41902] Fixed: Blueprints: The main carousel does not update the download number until restart.
[YLD-42121] Fixed: Blueprints: Preview does not sometimes show particles when rendering the preview for a second time.
[YLD-41422] Fixed: Blueprints: Sometimes have their generated preview image missing.
[YLD-41844] Fixed: Glowing carpets and sledgehammers are pickable in one of the haunted encounters.
[YLD-41870] Fixed: Arrows and space keys can no longer control UI elements when the tutorial overlay is on.
[YLD-41916] Fixed: Rabbits drop raw rabbit meat again instead of raw meat.
[YLD-37944] Fixed: Tutorial: Mobile flow for equipping an axe did not account for not all inventory slots being visible on mobile at all times and could get the user stuck.
[YLD-41874] Fixed: Tutorial: Flow explaining how crafting works should no longer highlight incorrect entries under very specific conditions.
[YLD-41895] Fixed: Editor: multiselection of objects referencing different objects in the same property can break the Properties window.
[YLD-41885] Fixed: Editor: you can not change the color of the brush entity.
[YLD-42100] Fixed: VS: Show next/previous usage does not work.
[YLD-42017] Fixed: Custom HUD/Window: Undo does not work correctly when deleting tree of widgets with buttons as leaves.
[YLD-42015] Fixed: Custom tools: Undo in tool's script and editing HUD layout may break tool's script.
[YLD-42178] Fixed: Custom Tools: Duplicate Objects tile doesn't work in Tool Mode.
Fixed: DLC gifting was producing "invalid input" errors.

Added / Removed / Tweaked

[YLD-40072] Added: Confirmation popup displayed when unlocking a biome via the Expedition now displays the resources required.
[YLD-29662] Added: Multiplayer games can now also be removed from the games list.
[YLD-40121] Tweaked: When a popup that requires input from the player opens on mobile, it will try to position itself so that it's at least somewhat visible under the software keyboard.
[YLD-42182] Tweaked: Coyn packages in the in-game shop are now sorted by their price and not alphabetically.
[YLD-42280] Tweaked: Errors during login/registration are now more specific. From now on, the generic "check your inputs" message will be shown only in cases, where we get an unspecific response from the backend.

Ahoy Ylanders!

Start gathering those materials and prepare to get your hands dirty as this year’s Steam Base Builder Fest is here!




This means that you should take some time to work on your home base and polish up the things you've been meaning to polish for some time now (you know what we're talking about!) and to help you out with that, during the Base Builder Fest we’re cutting the prices of the Exploration DLC by 50% from 23/01/2022 to 30/01/2023.



Don't forget to let us know which adjustments, additions, renovations, rearrangements, upgrades, restorations and repairs you've done while working on your base!


Be sure to follow Ylands on Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, YouTube, Twitch and right here on Steam!

Ahoy, fellow Ylanders!

As you might have read in the previous Dev Diary, we do read your reviews and feedback. We read both the positive and negative - and even though in the last two years we see the negative ones appear less and less with every new update (hence the rising average recent reviews score), there's surely still a good deal of those thumbs down.

There are reviews like these

"I was expecting this to be a single-player sandbox game, but it's more like an MMO with in-game shops. Not for me. Others may like this but I can't recommend it."

"The game is bad. Every minute is a waste on this piece of garbage."

"This shizznit sucks cannot get past the tutorial cuz the game keeps finding a new glitch to softlock me from continuing"

"boring"

"What exactly did I just download?"

(copied from recent ones, Steam, English)

Some obviously provide a bit more feedback than others (and those we answer), but most negative ones don't really help us make the game better - and that's fine. We don't really expect everyone to spend their time telling us what exactly they don't like about our game.

However, there's one specific type of negative feedback that we consider unfair. From time to time we see people posting about Ylands "still being a Roblox clone", "focusing on the platform and ignoring the exploration" and so on. The interesting thing about this is that we, as the devs, see for each player when was it they last played the game, and most of those who post (or update) such reviews have not played the game in the last two years or more.


And that's the only thing we're asking - if you want to tell others about what the game is like, give it a try.

Two years ago we had to change the course back to where we started because we spent some time going in the wrong direction, but now we're back. In many ways, we are much better than the game you once loved. We have larger maps than we ever had. We have better AI. The game is way more optimized and the multiplayer code is way more stable. Don't just take our word for it, though, this is what other players say:

"Its been a while since I've played this game and at the time I deleted it within 30 min. I decided to try it again and they seemed to pull off No Man's Sky level updates and they're still going strong. Give it a shot If it's been a while or you're thinking about trying this game especially if you like games like Minecraft, Ark, Alas, Sea of Thieves, or Deadpoly."


"open world survival game where your main base is a ship. Has come a long way since launch, and it rocks pretty hard now"


"...So why the positive review? Because as of a year ( or maybe two) ago, Bohemia has come to their senses and decided to focus heavily on exploration. The game is far better now than it was even 6 months ago..."

"In the beginning the game was trash, it performed badly, there was basically no gameplay, no advanced game mechanics, and a very short, very strict tutorial on how to play the game. Now the game performs very well, it is not hard on your GPU usage and they added more features, more animals, and basically more stuff that the player can enjoy. So I voted yes because the DEVs have done an amazing job since the beginning :)"


"I played this game since 2017 and have seen many changes in the game, some good and some not so good. I took a year off of playing and just came back earlier this year and wow the changes and the games sure have changed. I love this game from the early days and fell in love with it all over again. I have met a lot of players over the years and became friends with many of them. I would recommend giving this game a chance and you will be surprised."


"I am very surprised how far this game evolved, and I really appreciate the hard work of the developer team. I enjoyed many hours exploring, crafting, building and everything was pleasable."
(copied from recent ones, Steam, English - and there's plenty more where those come from :) )


This is the result of almost 40 people working tirelessly on the game for the last two years. To provide you with cool updates - the 48th is on the way. Yes, we've already brought you 47 updates and if nothing else, it should be enough for you to give the game yet another try and then tell us what you think. If you still don't like what you see, let us know. We'll fix it and the next update can be much better because of you. (mrknutí)

Stay classy, Ylanders!


PS: Yes, 47. Here they are (the game was available even before it entered Steam EA)


1.11 Crafty Crafts
1.10 Ymproved Ylands
1.9 Ocean Odysseys
1.8 Awesome Achievements
1.7 Marvelous Mysteries
1.6 Trading Territories
1.5 Enhancing Exploration
1.4 Creators Club
1.3 Watery Water
1.2 Astonishing Adventures
1.1 Eastern Endeavors
1.0 Ylands Yncoming
0.14 Playful Platform
0.13 Fine Friendships
0.12 Smooth Sailing
0.11 Peak Performance
0.10 Clever Coding
0.9 Comfortable Cooperation
0.8 Meaningful Music
0.7 Cheerful Characters
0.6 Countless Colors
0.5 Rainy Roads
0.4 Stylish Sharing
0.3 Wonderful Writing
0.22 Fabulous Funfair
0.21 Dangerous Depths
0.20 Playful Presents
0.19 Boats & Buccaneers
0.18 Endless Exploration
0.17 Enjoyable Editor
0.16 Wicked Woodsman
0.15 Enormous Explosions
0.14 Wild West
0.13 Armored Appearance
0.12 Happy Horse
0.11 Fancy Furniture
0.10 Extended Editor
0.9 Classy Container
0.8 Elementary Editor
0.7 Gorgeous Gallery
0.6 Amazing Alchemy
0.5 Happy Holidays
0.4 Energy Exposed
0.3 Egyptian Euphoria
0.2 Release Rampage
0.1 Statue Science (25th October 2015)