Dear Stormworkers,

This week we release minor update 1.4.17, including new outfit items, as well as many bug fixes and improvements.

This update is dedicated as a tribute to all of the Youtube content creators who are part of the Stormworks community. These content creators have a genuine passion, they are highly skilled communicators, editors, story makers, and are just lovely people with a positive energy that we admire. Building a Youtube channel is very difficult. It takes huge commitment, energy and skill. Building a brand and a business up from nothing is a great achievement that few have achieved.

I am not sure if we have spoken about Youtubers before, but Stormworks owes a great amount of it's success to the many content creators who have covered, supported, and promoted the game over the years. Almost all games that release on Steam don't reach enough players and fail. A lot of people would say that Stormworks has been lucky, but it wasn't luck. It was Youtubers, and players who gave their time up to help others, the incredible player created workshop items, and all the players who share our love of design and engineering.



In appreciation, we have added new branded shirts and hoodies to the Stormworks wardrobe in honour of Camodo, Spycakes, Beautiful OB, MrNJersey, Raptor, Frantic, ND, GQ, LynxHighland and RubberDuck. This isn't every great Youtuber, but we have added outfits for the top 10 youtubers by most viewed videos from the last year or so. Please consider checking out their channels.

And there is more in this update! Check out the extra wardrobe items and huge list of bug fixes and improvements in the patch notes below.

The new crash reporter that we added last week is working well and this update also includes some crash fixes so crashes should be dramatically reduced. We continue to monitor quality and will continue to add more fixes.

We have also added a new "auto" physics setting for the physics quality. The game will automatically step the setting up and down based on the physics simulation speed. If you do experience physics issues, you can always set this setting back to "high".



We hear the players who may be pointing out what their ideal next minor update is, and perhaps not all players watch as much Youtube as we do! But please do take a moment to consider how all players benefit from the content creators, vehicle builders, teaching players, and the community that has supported the constant free updates for the last 4 years.

We hope you found this weeks update interesting, and enjoy the new content and fixes! We look forward to your feedback :-)

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.4.17

Feature - New casual outfits and youtuber outfits
Feature - Auto physics quality (Steps up and down based on fps)

Fix - Frequent crash caused by destroying physics objects
Fix - #2196 Characters do not clear ragdoll on revive
Fix - #2190 Characters get of beds on death for clients
Fix - #1860 Player can return mission objects set as 'show on map' to workbench, but get sent to 0,0
Fix - #1427 Coal duplication glitch
Fix - #567 #6913 Monitor block rendering flickers when it moves
Fix - #4924 Whale animation issue
Fix - Static vehicle behavior inconsistencies with electric
Fix - #5113 Door tooltip at hospital island
Fix - #5330 Wave patch issue for sealed volumes in whirlpools
Fix - Light and billboard light distance rendering re-balance
Fix - #6455 Ocean draws over elements like HUD or light halo
Fix - #5611 Vehicles Fall Through the Ground in Low Physics
Fix - #6305 Crankshaft Converters do not output RPS value
Fix - #6367 Fish spawning upright at save load
Fix - #6377 Radio RX composite descriptions are switched
Fix - Ladder climbing now respects the inverted movement setting
Fix - Fixed fog/water attenuation for light sources
Fix - Fixed volume lights using atmospheric fog values when underwater
Fix - #6712 Swimming direction inverted on controllers
Fix - #6718 Increased catalytic converter conversion speed
Fix - #6701 Updated property slider description in micro-controllers
Fix - #7185 #6761 All controllers are now activated on any controller button press
Fix - #6802 Added several missing localizations
Fix - #4968 Removed dynamic icebergs
Fix - #6808 Missing face on battle-cannon
Fix - #7165 Vehicle spawned by script does not have a peer_id of -1
Fix - #7415 being unable to heal survivors while in seats and stuff
Fix - #7469 Guns don't deal damage to other players
Fix - Main menu settings not saving correctly

Dear Stormworkers,

This week development has pressed forward, with big progress being made on the 2 next minor updates, the next major update, and the new crash reporting system.

The next 2 minor updates have long lists of bug fixes and we are making good progress on fixes and improvements. We use the issue tracker to get info from players on where the quality issues are, and this gives us clear metrics on how many identified issues there are. This data shows we are steadily reducing the total number of bugs, and our new quality control processes are introducing relatively few new issues.

Next weeks minor update will also include a new cosmetic feature, and we will announce more next week as we release it!

Recently we have seen a surge in reports of crash to desktop, which is of major concern to us, particularly with our recent push to resolve issues and implement bug fixes. We have been unable to reproduce this new crash, with the game playing very stable in the office. Steam crash reporting only works with 32bit software, and most players play the 64bit version of Stormworks. We had tried using Bugsplat (a 3rd party crash reporter) but that also didn't work well for us. So, we have implemented our own and put it live yesterday. The new crash reporter is very similar to the built in Steam one, except it also capture data when 64bit applications crash.



Immediately we can see that the crashes are probably just a single issue related to physics objects being despawned, and we are already investigating how to fix. Moving forward, the new crash reporting system will help us monitor the stability of Stormworks, and quickly recognise any quality issues, as well as clearly see exactly which update introduced new crash issues.

We will return next week with the next minor update!

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers



v1.4.16

Feature - implemented new crash reporting system

Dear Stormworkers,

Today we release the multiplayer bandwidth and vehicle desync update!

Bandwith and Sync Improvements

Players have told us the multiplayer experience needs to be improved, and we have been hard at work for a long time. We have made 3 major changes - we have reduced the overhead of our network protocol, vehicles now use a new technique to replicate, and we have created a proprietary compression algorithm that works specifically for Stormworks vehicle data.

This means that bandwidth usage has reduced by 60% to 80%, and the issue where vehicles would sometimes appear delayed is resolved.



This isn't the first multiplayer update we have released, and multiplayer has been a long-standing challenge for us. In Stormworks, vehicles can often have hundreds of individually moving physics bodies, as well as hundreds of complex logical components, all of which have lots of data that needs to be replicated between server and client. Stormworks is probably the most complex vehicle builder game, with the smallest block size, and the most data to sync up. This is simply a problem that other games have not had to solve and so requires a lot of engineering.

This new update solves a lot of these issues, and the new bandwidth reduction and netcode dramatically improves the multiplayer experience for a lot of players.



What About Slow Down / Slow Motion?

Some players experience slow-motion. This is caused by playing on a server with too much stuff spawned in, or the computer being below min-spec. When too many physics objects are spawned in and interacting with each other, the game will slow down. This is true for all physics sandbox games.

If you check the comments, I am sure you will find a few multi-threading and optimization arm chair experts who think the game just needs to run faster. However, the reality is that the physics calculations are complex, we have already optimized a lot, and there are no shortcuts if you want the detailed physics, robotics, ocean physics, and other mechanic that Stormworks has. It is the nature and the core of Stormworks to be a detailed physics sim.



So, if we can't magically make the same game run faster, what are the solutions? We are putting a lot of thought into this and welcome players to let us know your thoughts and ideas!

This isn't the only change and we have been also working hard clearing out the bug backlog. Please see below for the full list of fixes and improvements.

We hope this new update improves your multiplayer experience and we look forward to seeing you in-game!

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.4.15

Feature - Improved crash dump reporting system
Feature - #5247 #6364 #6221 Multiplayer time dilation algorithm overhaul
Feature - Multiplayer bandwidth optimization

Fix - #6770 #6862 Two sided buttons now use the correct color zones and are paintable on both sides
Fix - #6765 Door color changes after saving and reloading vehicle
Fix - #6777 Window inverse pyramid 2x2x2 mesh offset
Fix - #6764 Instrument panel bar and radial indicators are now unpaintable
Fix - #6757 Door frame edge and corner component coloring not working

Fix - #6465 #7029 Gamepad sensitivity issues on varied framerates
Fix - Controller Axis settings getting reset
Fix - Small inputs on controllers when leaving the dead-zone not registering correctly

Fix - #369 Menu Audio Glitching
Fix - #106 Clients moving while in workbench
Fix - #1365 Rotor blades don't snap off
Fix - #3920 Small Engine sound inaudibly quiet
Fix - #2797 Mirrored barrel extensions for rotary canon rotate incorrectly
Fix - #2762 Editor tooltip sometimes get stuck
Fix - #4885 Wind sounds when submerged
Fix - #5140 #6673 #7044 Environment sounds no longer play in editor
Fix - #5098 Laser beacon not rendering glass/additive mesh
Fix - #5527 Character deforming when emoting in photo mode
Fix - Tornado wind affecting enclosed compartments
Fix - #5235 Meteors show in editor
Fix - #5699 Autocannon belt naming inconsistencies
Fix - #5862 Visual glitches on HUDs
Fix - #6082 Fuel stations pumping slowly (Updated default gantry plumbing)
Fix - #6100 Very tall tornadoes
Fix - #6199 Engine temperatures below absolute 0
Fix - #6210 3x3 and 5x5 Fluid Heat Radiator (electric) missing faces
Fix - #6211 Cost calculation is not reduced when in mirror mode and parts are deleted
Fix - Kraken sometimes refusing to let a ship go
Fix - Host not waiting for tiles to simulate correctly (falling through map on teleport)
Fix - #6354 Tank wheel mesh issue
Fix - #6571 Weather and Time of day overriding when a player joins a server

Rework - Updated default path nodes to match the new iceberg tiles

Addon Lua:
Fix - setGameSetting can now correctly set weather_override
Fix - #6150 onVehicleDespawn happens twice

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is announcement week, as we alternate between game updates and announcements every Friday!

This week, we will discuss the upcoming updates and general plans we are making at the moment.

We already have the next 2 minor updates underway, with many improvements already complete and being reviewed. At the moment, we are regularly testing multiplayer as we want to make improvements to this area of the game. We are making progress, but this is still being worked on. Players can expect some improvement although we are not sure how much will be in the next minor update. Players can know this is being worked on and some progress is being made.



Otherwise, we have a long list of bug fixes and minor improvements that have been requested on the issue tracker. We are working our way through these, and we are making good progress. The new quality processes we now use have dramatically improved the quality of releases, with much fewer new issues, and we are fixing things at a good rate. Our goal is to reduce the total issues and get through the back-log of issues that has built up as a priority.

That said, we are still dedicating some resource to feature updates and major updates! We have loads of minor updates planned for the rest of the year and we are working on the next major update which should release at some point this summer. Our support plan for Stormworks continues to run indefinitely, and we are already discussing update ideas for the rest of this year and into 2023.



While we are committed to supporting Stormworks into the future, we are also thinking about other projects. The engine powering Stormworks is our own in-house engine and is now 6 years old, so we are discussing how we want to do things differently in the future and looking at creating a new engine that could power our next generation of game. This is still in the game-engine design stage and a new game is still a long way off.

Be sure to come back next Friday or a new minor update release!

And do let us know if this style of announcement is useful! We want to keep players in touch with the studio's plans, but with our personal style, we prefer to "do" rather than "talk", and we prefer not to give too much detail on anything until it is complete and working, so that we don't disappoint.

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers

Dear Stormworkers,

This week we add support for painting components on multiple sides! This has been a consistent problem for creators, particularly for things like 2 sided buttons and some windows, where you may want to set the paint color to be different on the inside compared to the outside.

Many components now have different paintable zones where needed, so you can change the color of different parts of the component as you wish.



We have also been hard at work fixing issues and making various improvements. The full list of patch notes is below. The issue numbers are included so those who want to cross-reference with the issue tracker may do so if they wish.

We are continuing work on the next minor update (due in 2 weeks), as well as the next major update. We will announce more on this when we have more info to share!



Thanks for all the players who have been asking for multi-sided painting, it has been a very long requested feature and we are pleased to have brought it to the game.

We look forward to your feedback!

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.4.13

Fix - #6405 #6369 Seats displaying wrong tooltips

v1.4.14

Feature - #2885 Multiple component paint colours
Feature - #5693 Re-painted and optimized ai/mission vehicles

Rework - #2878 Ammo drums now lose their ammo when exploding
Rework - #502 The chat window no longer shows up over other UI
Rework - #5514 Fish no longer spawn under island meshes
Rework - #5257 The tutorial will now end when moving away from the starter island
Rework - Disabling vehicle damage now also disables engine overheat effects
Rework - Passworded servers have been pushed to the bottom of the server list
Rework - Servers now sort by network quality
Fix - #3472 Clients not taking damage from explosions
Fix - Fixed some code causing weather desync (#4881 #5245 #6138 #6204 #6251)
Fix - #4880 Wind override slider inverting its value
Fix - #4795 Gap in rail-line near O'neill base
Fix - #5480 Disaster Sirens now take into account tsunami travel distance
Fix - #3087 Lowered some dock mission zones for boats with origins below the waterline
Fix - #5818 Players lose their hair when in the seat
Fix - Buoyancy surfaces added to the air and liquid exchanger components
Fix - UI focus not clearing in certain situations
Fix - #6495 #6471 Fix Kraken data for saving/multiplayer
Fix - Ping always displaying as 0ms in multiplayer

New packet loss network graph has been added to the F1 menu

Addon Lua:
Feature - #5307 Added setWeather lua function
Rework - #715 onButtonPress() now returns the type of interaction (press/release)
Fix - #4588 parented server.spawnFire only spawning at vehicle center

Dear Stormworkers,

About 4 weeks ago and shortly after the natural disasters update, a small number of players started to report encounters with a kraken-like creature. Sometimes the claims lacked any evidence, other times there were dark screenshots in foggy storms suggesting something that could be huge tentacles.

Some stormworkers chose to believe the beast could be out there somewhere, but most dismissed the creature as a hoax, vehicle creation, modded xml or modded mesh.



And, for the next 4 weeks, the legend of the kraken lived on as only a myth. This was except for a small number of players, who remembered the megladon was released in secret, and were determined to search the oceans and prove that the kraken was real and was out there somewhere.

And finally, they have succeeded, while creating vehicles, and info to help others also search for the kraken. Several youtubers have released videos over the last few days with this new info, proving the kraken is real.



The kraken is a physics based squid-like sea creature which uses its tentacles to swim around the ocean, attack and wrap around player vehicles. It is a very unique approach to creating a kraken, and we are not aware of any other game where the creature is a complete physics based animal rather than more of an event or tenticles and mouth anchored to the sea floor.

What Are The Spawning Conditions For The Kraken?

The kraken only spawns in strong weather, at night, in deep water. The ocean must be atleast 150m deep, the sun must have set, the fog must be atleast 25%, and rain atleast 50%. The "Enable Megladon" setting must also be ticked in the creative menu.

These conditions may change in the future, and we may add a "spawn kraken" button to the creative menu in the future too.



The kraken has been huge fun to develop and test in Stormworks. We have had a lot of fun so far playing with, trying to survive, and battling it. Releasing as an easter egg and watching players react has also been awesome fun!

Development continues as normal, with a feature based minor update coming next week, and several more minor and major updates continuing development.

We look forward to your thoughts and feedback on this new creature of the sea!

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers

Dear Stormworkers,

We are back with more updates and improvements to controller support!

You can now control the player character, as well as rebind all your controller settings, with a joypad or controller. We have also fixed some issues for players with complex controller setups. This means that most of the game now works with a joypad, as well as multiple controller support. The exceptions are the vehicle editor and add-on editor, which still require keyboard / mouse / touch screen.

As well as improving the game for any players using a joypad, this update dramatically improves the player experience when playing on the new Steam Deck.



We have also fixed lots of bugs and issues that players were experiencing. Please see below for the full details. The full set of controller changes can also be seen below in the patch notes.

We will return next week with an announcement, and again the week after with a frequently requested feature that has long been asked for by vehicle builders!



We look forward to your thoughts and feedback on these new changes!

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.4.11

Controller support updates:
- Character controller support
- #466 Vehicle controller support
- Characters/Vehicles no longer move while in map/photo/creative menu
- B button now acts as a generic back button for all UI screens
- Creative menu day/night slider support
- Research screen controller support
- Photo-mode controller support
- Sunrise-Sunset slider support
- Back button keeps getting selected when scrolling a list
- Pad input key-binds now work for UI navigation (#6070 #6081 #6206 #6264 #6001)
- #6000 Rebinding menu can no longer be backed out of except with 'Esc'
- Photo-mode hotkey tips now display their bound keys
- Reset button now works correctly for bindings

Rework - Iceberg tiles now have more room between bergs for ships
Rework - #1553 Force non-combat AI vehicles to despawn if they sink
Rework - #5262 Catalytic converter now converts exhaust to air rather than destroying exhaust

Fix - #5871 Edge-case logic thread lockup caused by setVehiclePosSafe

Fix - #5441 Crash on vehicle despawn while interacting
Fix - #5122 Prevent vehicle fires when damage is toggled off, vehicle invulnerable flag is now checked for all damage systems
Fix - #4926 Objects removed via lua now force an update to despawn them
Fix - #3615 Make radar ignore trees
Fix - #2792 Fix setVehiclePosSafe getting stuck when targeting an area between two vehicles (occasionally caused game lockup)
Fix - #793 #728 Language workshop uploading disabled
Fix - #3924 Added buoyancy surfaces to heat exchangers

Fix - #5254 Missing collision mesh for filing cabinet
Fix - #5891 Missing Face on Fluid Hose Anchor
Fix - #4981 Floating tree cluster
Fix - #4940 Foghorn model issues
Fix - #4930 Mute sirens when damaged
Fix - Short Tornadoes

Dear Stormworkers,

Last week, we released new controller support for some of the UI screens in Stormworks. Next week, we will further extend this support to include character control and further joypad improvements.

This extended support is important for players who want to play with controllers, and also for supporting the new Steam Deck hardware which has just launched. Its a great excuse for us to improve controller support which is something we have long wanted to do.

The new character support will enable you to move around, use first person items, interact, and use seats, from your joypad.



We are also improving controller settings so that you can program your UI bindings for multiple controllers, and set your controller up to work as you want. This will also resolve some issues that players with multiple controllers / hotas / steering wheels are having.

This upcoming update will also include several important fixes and improvements, and as usual, the full list of these changes will be released in the change notes.



Next weeks update has already entered testing in our new and improved quality process, and we are already working on the subsequent minor update, which is a feature update, and a very popular player request!

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers

Dear Stormworkers,

This week would normally be an announcement week rather than update - but instead, we are adding improved controller support for players with controllers and Steamdeck!

In this minor update, we have introduced new controller support for many of the UI menus in Stormworks, to allow players to play more of the game with a controller. We plan a further update next week to introduce character movement controller support which will make most of the game playable with controller.



However, we are not "badge hunting" and simply want to improve support for players where it makes sense. For example, the vehicle editor is most comfortable with keyboard and mouse, and we don't plan to try to introduce controller support to the vehicle editor where it would not feel comfortable.

As well as new controller support, we have also been listening to the many players asking us about multiplayer support - this week we introduce new ping displays, and sort multiplayer servers by ping. Servers also display their ticks per second value. Once in game, we then display improved player list information, with current ping, frames behind server data, and bandwidth quality indicator. Players with insufficient internet connection to the server will also be automatically dropped to avoid degraded performance for other players.



We look forward to players feedback on these new features and will continue to read and take on board player feedback as we build these fixes and improvements in the future.

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes


v1.4.9

Feature - Improved Controller support for UI and menus
Feature - Internet servers now display and sort by their ping (and show current tps)
Feature - Improved player list network information (current ping, frames behind server and bandwidth quality)
Rework - Removed old network frame numbers from the scoreboard as players often confused this with ping.

Fix - Friend servers now show their DLC status
Fix - Fish sync rate being very high and causing large bandwidth usage

Fix - MacOS Audio crackling

Dear Stormworkers,

This week we release a minor update entirely focused on bug fixes and quality improvements!

This update is the latest in a campaign of quality focused minor updates, and we have more planned for the future.

The main quality improvement is a change to how we save vehicle files - this change is backwards compatible so your existing vehicle files still work the same - but vehicles will now saved with a better compressed format, meaning their size on disk is now smaller. This has several benefits to players - some players with lower spec PCs are less likely to run out of memory if they don't have much RAM, saves are generally smaller, and vehicles should spawn faster in multiplayer.



In the patch notes below, you will see a lengthy list of all the changes we have made for this update. Some of the patch notes include an #issue number which relates to the issue id from the issue tracker. We are trying to provide this extra info so players can better see what has prompted the change, as well as look at the official issue tracker to better understand the discussion around the change.

This also clearly shows what is driving bug fixes and improvements to the game - the clear and concise issue reports that players submit - so thank you to every player who submitted an issue relating to the below. We are really pleased to have made these improvements to the game, and so thank you for your help.



This week we have been made aware of some networking issues caused by the new physics based fish system. While we were unable to patch this issue for today's update we are working on a fix that we hope to deliver by next week. In the meantime we recommend that server hosts disable wildlife in general settings to prevent network slowdown. Thank you for your patience and helping us out by reporting bugs to the issue-tracker site.

While our schedule can still be subject to change, we hope to release improved controller support next week in time for the launch of Steam Deck, and a week or two after that, return with another bug focused minor update. We also have several minor update features in the works, as well as an exciting new major update.

We hope these new fixes make a positive difference to your experience playing Stormworks, and we look forward to your thoughts and feedback!

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.4.7

Feature - Parsing Optimization

With an update to our parsing system, you can expect save and vehicle files to be significantly smaller in size; we managed to reduce the default mission vehicles by ~50%. We are not only hoping this will save users storage space but also reduce load times when sending vehicle data in multiplayer. You may need to re-save your vehicles.

Fix - #5064 Fix health sync requests causing ragdoll on respawn
Rework - #5381 Added addon option to disable natural disasters in default missions
Fix - #5158 Adjusted default natural disaster period from 5min to 15min
Fix - Volcanic ash now affects jet engine intakes
Fix - #2943 Increased relevance threshold for radar hits by 10x
Fix - #4395 increase detection range for cargo deliveries / cargo not delivering to large zones
Fix - #2973 Added buoyancy surfaces to motors and generators / modular engines sometimes not linking correctly
Fix - #4862 Unable to un-crouch when carrying a survivor
Fix - Initialize AI Aircraft state on vehicle load (Aircraft dropping out of the sky on load)
Rework - #1986 Solid rockets lose fuel on damage and take damage anywhere along the body of the rocket

Fix - #3763 Emp warhead now uses built-in impact threshold
Fix - #3781 Rename detonate warhead nodes to Arm
Fix - #2792 SetVehiclePosSafe not accounting for target vehicle bounds size
Fix - #4061 Muzzle break -> muzzle brake spelling error
Fix - #2165 Keypads not de-focusing when leaving their range
Fix - #4727 Arctic volcano mesh fixes
Fix - #4686 Train-line mesh issue for Donkk arctic exit and track diagonal variant
Fix - #4996 All electric parts should now be disabled by EMP blasts
Fix - #4941 Fluid cannon mass increased from 1 to 11
Fix - Impeller pump preventing flow when torque slot not connected
Fix - Ocean surface render issues
Fix - Reduce particle spawn rate for lava physics contacts
Fix - Lava emissive texture ignoring fog
Fix - #3472 Projectile splash damage not affecting MP clients (Fixed for non-dedicated servers)
Fix - #4507 Emotes broken when crouched
Fix - Minor tornado position desync for mp clients
Fix - #5091 Tornados bypass damage prevention

Fix - #4930 Siren component placement surfaces removed, added to research group
Fix - #5173 Add success returns for disaster lua functions and rework volcano spawning checks
Fix - #5172 Remove success return from guaranteed functions getWeather, getTime and cancelGerstner
Fix - #5048 Add tsunami callback for meteors and add lua param to allow meteor tsunamis
Fix - #4435 remove duplicate onVehicleDespawn() lua callback call
Fix - #4510 getAiTarget returning vehicle/char ids as numbers not integers
Fix - Creative menu button not calling onVolcano
Fix - #4580 Return params for getAiTarget
Fix - #5396 Megalodons spawned with volcanic eruption button

Balance - #4925 set fish flee speed higher than player swim speed
Balance - Increased fish scare distance
Balance - Increased fish max spawn depth