Hey everyone,

We're about to do a live stream from the Worlds Adrift steam page in which Herb, Ric and Oliver will discuss the present and future of the game, also taking your questions!

You can view the stream from the Worlds Adrift Store Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/322780/Worlds_Adrift__Early_Access_MMO/

Or on Twitch:
https://www.twitch.tv/bossastudios

Hope to see you there!
Oliver, Ric and Herb xoxox

Greeting Travellers,

Hope you've all had a good week despite the lag-overcast-weather the servers have been having!

 
PTS: As you may have already read, the PTS has unfortunately been delayed. This due to bugs relating to Alliance chat on the PTS build. Obviously, the devs are doing their best to fix it up as soon as possible, because we really want you to try it all out before it hits live! But we also don't want to delay the actual Alliances any longer!

Lag: We are aware of the severe lag some players experience; some were working on a hotfix last week, it didn't work too well in testing, so we decided to fix things up manually until we figure out something that works! As it currently stands server-side devs are continuing to deep dive investigate what's causing the lag. Technically, we already know that all the entity despawn tools have failed to do their job (Blight/Understorm), so there's deposits lying around that we started to clean out during maintenance until we fix the tools themselves. Plot twist has been that even after an intensive cleanup lag sometimes hits you anyway! So onward with the investigation.

"Julia, where the hell did Tech Tuesday go?" - Well, glad you asked! I wasn't comfortable pulling devs away from fixing more pressing broken things (see above), and will try to give them breathing space for next Tuesday. I promise, however, once this is all done, we will get you a nice, in-depth techy blog post! Got any suggestions about what you'd like to read about? Comment below!

 
We are painfully aware (and have been actively reminded by the CCC and the playtesters) that we haven't released anything juicy in quite some time. is the non-codey folk are beginning to crack on with shiny new... CONTENT! So once all this is sorted we can move onto exciting things! On top of that, there's an announcement incoming next week. *eyebrow wiggle*

Also, the ROADMAP. IT IS UPDATED!

 

• Filling out cooking recipes, drop rates and adding new ingredients to loot tables
• Working on a *new culture* loot table! New lore, recipes, clothing, etc for it.
• Alliance bugs
• Working on Tutorial Zone crashed ship
• Working on Tutorial Zone special revival chamber
• Adding pigment system to the game, schematics for dyed cloth, and creating schematics for clothing crafting. Wrote up some documents for pigment, a player reward system, a vault system, and am today starting on data input for the furniture system
• Fixing anything and everything that’s in the way of releasing Alliances
• Atlas compass model

• VFX for leaving the Tutorial Zone. Still WIP (if the placeholder white column doesn't seem out of place)

As a side note, if you feel like you want to make a contribution in terms of direct feedback? Test some games which may or may not be Worlds Adrift? Answer some vague questions? Vote on what you think the best artwork is?

👉 Bossa Studios Playtest Discord: https://discord.gg/GrgPTSq

Have a wonderful weekend!

See you in the skies,

Julia 🌸❤️

🚨 Attention Travellers 🚨

Unfortunately due to technical issues the PTS (Public Test Server) release is delayed until we get everything fixed up – we want you to try out Alliances, after all!

We are also aware of the lag problems on live, and we are continuing to investigate.

Last week we have announced the coming of the Public Test Server, and now we have Community Cloud Council!

10 awesome community members will be ambassadors to the community, bringing your feedback directly to the game's development! You can read more about the CCC and how to become a member in the future HERE
👇👇👇
https://www.worldsadrift.com/captains-log/captains-log-community-cloud-council/

But what have the devs been up to last week??

-Working on Tier Zero requirements and features
-Steam capsule art revision
-Overhauling food system, over a dozen new recipes and ingredients that add temporary buffs such as impact damage reduction and sprint speed
-New resources such as cloth etc continue, alongside pigments allowing players to customise clothing colours if they can find the schematics
-Working on alliance stability
-Alliances bug fixing
-Fighting visual studio to get integration tests running with the new snapshot tool. Learning to use the new build system to deploy Improbable’s hopeful fix to some of the deadzone issues
-Investigating and fixing massive lag issues on live
-Releasing 0.2.2.5, and preparing hotfix 0.2.2.7
-Working on a new ship part for cooking
-Fixed rope reel-out sfx after max length
-Fixed creature’s harvest sfx
-Fixed glider not functioning after logout and log back in
-Potential fixed the helm throwing player off and not able to gain control bug
-Fixed the looking at ship frame schematics breaking UI bug
-Implemented scanning tooltip’s proc colored icon
-Prevent equipable item from putting into functional hotbar slot
-*BOOM! cah-chunk* (check out the full blog post for sound :D )

Greetings Traveller,

Today is going to be a short but sweet Tech Tuesday.

The Public Test Server (PTS) for Worlds Adrift is jingling on its way! Like Santa Claus, but not at all and in the middle of Summer. Not sure where that analogy came from.

The intention of the PTS environment is to provide an opportunity for players to test and feedback on upcoming changes to the game before they are released into the live servers. Here's how you can make a massive difference:

 
Love breaking the game in new and fascinating ways? Wanna test a new feature and help us tweak it? Or maybe you like finding new bugs?

This is for you! You will be able to test upcoming features, help us find big scary bugs that we haven't encountered, and probably encounter things that are very unstable or simply do not work properly at all: enter the PTS with this in mind!

The feedback and bug reporting on what you find on the PTS is CRUCIAL, and it’s the most direct way you can shape the future of Worlds Adrift.

 
The PTS will be a separate server running an early version of a future Worlds Adrift patch. You’ll see future patches on the PTS as well as more theoretical or radical ideas that our team want to try out with the community before working on them further. You'll be able to log in to a duplicated version of the live world, and mess around to your heart's content. What happens on the PTS stays on the PTS - meaning no progress or changes to the world will ever get copied back to live. In fact, during the duration of a given PTS version, we may wipe or update it frequently. We're planning to release a PTS build about two weeks prior to its release to the live servers.

In addition to getting feedback early, your feedback on the PTS will help us find game-breaking bugs, so we can fix them before releasing to live. But since the turnaround is just these two weeks, we won't realistically be able to fix all bugs that aren't game-breakers. This does mean that these things will already be logged and ready to fix two weeks sooner than normal (yay!). We're letting you into the sausage-making process of game development here - you'll get to see first hand the hard choices between fixing annoying but not game-breaking bugs or shipping a release on time, and unfortunately there's rarely consensus on the final call!

 
Disclaimer: Only the existing players (at the point a given PTS release cycle goes up) will be able to access the magical realm.

In short:

• Ensure you have created an account on the main game prior to a PTS release
• Switch to the PTS Beta branch on Steam
• Log in with your main account (It is copied from the main game prior to every PTS release cycle)

We will post specifics on the day and help you log in correctly.

 
You've probably seen there’s a feedback button in the game! If you're as attentive as I am - it's in the upper right corner, or you can just press F2.

You will get an open window to leave us some feedback. Try to do your best leaving all possible details of what you were doing to cause the issue.

 

The PTS will be landing NEXT WEEK, so jump in then, test things out and tell us over on the official PTS forums what you think does or doesn’t work - we’re excited to hear your thoughts !

See you in the skies!

• Sail booms collide with the rest of the ship now. If the boom is blocked from moving to the optimal angle, the ship will receive less power from the wind.
• Fixed a bug where the second-to-last snapshot was sometimes being loaded after maintenance, rather than the last. Now the world should no longer appear to roll back a few minutes after maintenance. This fixes a duping exploit.
• Respawning should no longer have the slight delay introduced in 0.2.2.1.
• Fixed island chest opening SFX.
• Metal scrap deposits that have already been harvested no longer play their explosion VFX upon loading in.
• Atlas cores no longer play the atlas pulse VFX upon loading in.
• Fixed a bug where players who have locked their own movement (by opening UI windows or the chat box) would be unaffected by the atlas pulse.
• Players can no longer learn a new schematic in the middle of crafting, which fixes some UI bugs.
• Fixed a bug that caused the edit ship frame UI to become stuck permanently.
• Deleting a character from the character selection screen now requires you to type the word ‘DELETE’ to confirm.

• Players can no longer rebind the mouse buttons, which prevents people from being unable to access the Settings menu to fix their keybindings.
• Fixed a temporary buffer file creation, which may mean a return to time-honored, artisanal cartography techniques.
• Restored the Drissian pistol’s missing VFX.
• Texture optimization.
• Adjusted and removed certain VFX. It’s all a work in progress!
• Text fixes.

Hey y’all, it’s ya boi Malford. King of islands and God of Hats (Julia: Malford destroyed the hat economy on our last Hunt a Dev stream Recap: CLICKY).

We originally built the Island Creator as an internal tool so we could build islands for Worlds Adrift, but after Tom made it excellent we decided to release it to the community. The islands you guys have made are one of the most amazing, impressive and beautiful things about our game and we’re forever grateful to our amazing community for that.

 

The Island Creator is a great creative tool, and we love people having fun with it and making cool, creative stuff. As we use the community crafted islands to build our world we’ve been asked plenty of times what our criteria for choosing islands are by people keen to increase their chances of getting an island in-game.
 

The key thing we look for in an island is that it’s believable. This is all a bit vague though, what specifically do you need to do to make a “believable” island?

 
 

• Our main goal is to preserve a sense of immersion for our players in Worlds Adrift so the first thing we look for is consistency with the world that we’re creating together. Some islands might break immersion because the structures seem like something you might see in real life, but wouldn’t see in Foundation.

 

• Keep it natural! We don’t get a lot of simple, natural islands submitted, but they’re a lot easier to get feeling coherent. When I make a Wilderness island I just try to make somewhere that feels like it would be fun to chill out.

 

• Trees are usually a big factor when considering if an island will successfully be chosen to be in the game so you may want to take into account:

 

• • Tree size: those that are more or less 50% size of the normal default tree size work really well when designing your island. If you go bigger or smaller than that, it can create collision issues or be immersion breaking.
  • Keep it real: trees that are kept at a realistic angle help keep the level of immersion high for players. One way to avoid planting trees at crazy angles is not to use the “surface align” function when you place them, that way they’ll all be basically upright. You can add a bit of variation of angle manually later if it looks a bit unnatural, but it’s usually fine.
  • Tree colour: rather than a range of colours, one or two colours on trees looks great and a little more natural.
  • Attached items: remember that if a player cuts down a tree, any items attached would float in the air as a result. Avoiding attaching items to trees helps our selection.

 

• When using the mass placement tool, take time to visually check that objects haven’t merged into each other.

 

• Water effects are currently hard to recreate with the tool. The paint tool will give you a block of blue colour but probably it doesn’t look quite right, and if a player sees what they think is water and it turns out to be blue sand this will break their immersion.

 

• When you prepare a landing area on your island, keep in mind that currently, shipyards can only be placed on normal terrain. You cannot place a shipyard on stones or on buildings. Planning this area in advance means players can visit your work, and we are more likely to select your island.

 

• If your island has an underground structure and tunnels, you may want to consider having something at the end of it such as lore, a reward, or a nice room to avoid explorers being frustrated or disappointed if they only find a dead end.

 

We can’t guarantee that every island submitted will eventually make it into the game, but we hope this gives you an idea of what we look to include. These guidelines will keep evolving over time with each update and addition of extra features of the Island Creator.

 

You can also find more tips and discussion via the Island Creator forum, where some amazing community guides have already sprung up, and where you can share your own guidelines to help others.

 

Stay creative and see you in the skies!

Greetings Travellers,

Hope all is well in your lives and games!

We've had a bit of a hectic week, if you follow the Bossa Studios twitter account, you'd have seen some of us were at Develop, the rest of us were trying to survive the heat of London.

For those of you not living UK - London is a big, busy, beautiful city absolutely not equipped to handle any kind of weather! So in a heatwave we kinda melt, so not much happens around that. No drama or anything.

• Scoping out the new creature refactor! Looking likely that turrets will be the first 'creature' to be implemented, but there's a long way to go yet as we need to refactor the Unity entity lifecycle, transform synchronisation, rigidbody synchronisation, damage and hitscan projectile firing first
• Been helping out to get the alliance and crew chat working on the new server
• Feature complete on loot accumulation over time, additionally all chests and containers will be permanently visible on islands but will be closed if they contain loot. Should be ready for 0.2.4
• Balancing reviver charge ship damage, aiming for 0.2.4
• Creatures now drop more resources such as leather and meat, depending on their biome. Will be used in new schematics as well as adjusting old ones to make use of new resources. Looking at 0.2.5+ for that.
• Balancing new wind system, wind shouldn't just randomly change direction and flow a bit smoother so sailing can be more predictable. 0.2.4
• Working on Tier Zero documentation and starting implementation of related features
• Fixes for build pipeline
• Bugfixing alliances
• Making our UI error handling a bit more verbose
• Working on UI mockups for improved user experience and nicer visuals
• Added different sfx to loot chest, loot contains, ruin piles and death bags
• Made a change to the ship yard ownership, so when an unregistered ship dock to a ship yard, no matter who owns the ship yard, it would clear the ownership of the ship yard. Players can then claim the ship yard to take control of the ship
• Made a potential fix to deathbag not interactable bug
• Fixed the bug where blight doesn't end properly
• Working on login refactor TDD
• I've been working on the last few bits of the t0 overall design, working through some details etc.
• Working through the island curation backlog so our list of usable islands is getting bigger and better
• Investigating dead zone issues with Improbable (believe we are now making some progress towards resolving some of those issues)
• Investigating crew beacon and crew chat issues
• Tackling bugs relates with Delta DNA analytics
• Helping the n00bs git gud! (aka Tier 0, worked with Allan to finish the TDD, deal with feedback, make a task estimate, and started some work on splitting the world in two separate areas)
• Finished the design for Overheat Implementation in both Engines and Cannons! Handing off next week to programmers

 

As always, see you in the skies,

Julia <3

 

Greetings Travellers,

Unfortunately 0.2.2.X is pushed to the 24th, this update will concentrate on bug fixes. The good news is this update is going to pave the way for 0.2.3 which will at long last introduce Alliances, big old bug fixes (the ones you think of as a part of the furniture), and something super special to boot!

There are big BIG changes ahead. Apologies they are taking so long, IT WILL BE WORTH IT! 😀

Greetings beautiful Travellers,

Finally, I am proud to announce the...
Gotta say, these competitions are hella tough to judge and decide who gets first place. Especially when all the submissions are so frickin' awesome! You can check them out HERE.

Winning Place goes to Zatios and this pretty birb:





Well done, dude!! Drop me and email on Community@bossastudios.com with your address so I can send you a goody bag!

 
Divineevil's Bronzebeak.





Gitlitwitit's "Trash birds"



 

• Polishing thuntomite/manta damage art
• Fixing the hole in the top of the Saborian ancient respawners
• Making ambient sand effects look nicer in the Badlands
• Working on a tutorial zone island
• Restored missing muzzle flash on Drissian pistol 0.2.2.x
• Disabled wind VFX for helm and wings as these weren't working as well as we'd hoped, we'll revisit soon 0.2.2.x
• Restored missing 'pipe' texture on wooden helm 0.2.2.x
• Ship yard domes now visually do not expand, but fade it. This is far cheaper for client-side physics due to colliders and triggers scaling on the client, it also looks less conspicuous. 0.2.3.
• Creature's visually showing damage and decaying is now nearly in ready to go 0.2.4
• Tweaks to male character's idle pose so it's not quite as rough and jarring 0.2.4
• Still doing stuff* on the tutorial zone

*stuff = Answering questions, preparing the MVP integration of the tutorial system into the current tutorial system, feedback with Jack's beautiful version of the tutorial zone island

• Studying the login flow in order to blow it up and rebuild it
• Continuing the delicate reconstructive work on the Alliance system's face
• Helping Improbable fix the suspected dead zone issues
• Finishing off Spatial 10.6.0 update
• Performing heroics and fixing the develop branch for the artists
• Wrapped up the legendary Saborian turbines
• Future clothing options! (WIP on the textures)

• Balancing loot accumulation over time
• Design on non-RNG ways of acquiring schematics
• Fixed some crew beacon issues
• Banning people
• Helping people

As always, have lovely weekend, and...

See you in the skies,

Julia