Dear Stormworkers,

This week is update week, and we are adding new features to ropes in Stormworks!

Rope inventory equipment now has a new option to set the length of the rope when placing it in first person. This makes it possible to place equal length ropes rather than the ropes always being sized based on the distance of the connector anchors. You can still use the auto-length mode, or cycle through a series of fixed lengths.

Ropes will also be destroyed when their rope anchors take damage! If you are using ropes for structural or tethering purposes, this means that your vehicles will react to damage in a new way, making their response to damage a little richer.

Ropes are also now less elastic or stretchy, particularly with heavier objects. If you are using ropes to attach vehicles together using an intermediate connector or block, we recommend either skipping the intermediate connector block, or adding weight blocks to it. This will improve the rope simulation stability and make the ropes less stretchy.



There are also several bug fixes and improvements which you may find useful! Please see the patch notes below.

Some players have also reported to us that they suspect a small amount of hacking in multiplayer servers. Yes, you heard that right. Hacking in a non-competitive, non-esports, vehicle building game. Why??? We can't understand. Anyway, this is against our terms of use, and the Steam subscriber agreement, so we will be protecting our players from this kind of thing. We can detect this kind of behaviour, and we may issue bans and revoke licenses in the future.



We are continuing work on several new updates, so expect another minor update in 2 weeks, and we should hopefully be announcing more info on merch, the next major update, upcoming DLC, and more over the next few months!

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.7.5

Feature - #2429 First Person Rope lengths

This update welcomes a new feature for ropes in Stormworks and also some behind the scenes changes to improve their behaviour.

- First person rope items can now be cycled with the secondary action key to change their length:
Dynamic(40m), 1m, 2m, 4m, 8m, 16m
The Dynamic 40m behaviour represents the old auto-spooling behaviour where the length is set when attached to a second anchor. All other lengths represent new non-elastic lengths.

- Ropes, hoses and cables are now less elastic and behave more consistently with high mass bodies.
- Ropes, hoses and cables will now snap when their anchor is damaged.
- Ropes will return to the default dynamic length when detached and picked up by a player.
- Improved handling of ropes for unloading and loading vehicles.

Fix - #16738 Animal biting characters releasing character physics partially underground
Fix - #16738 Fix creatures being unplaceable in seats, correctly remove creatures from seats on death for clients
Fix - Animals revived with defibrillator killing multiplayer clients with physics collision on bite
Fix - Clients applying forces to carried creatures with kinematic physics
Fix - Characters being incapacitated while already in ragdoll state from creature not syncing to multiplayer clients
Fix - #14119 Rotate buttons not disappearing while in micro-controller menu
Fix - #17932 Render moustaches under new hats
Fix - #17820 Fixed safari male mesh
Fix - Reactors now consider all fluid types when determining fluid volume to heat (prev. just water and seawater, leading to unexpected behaviour)
Fix - C4 on vehicle twilight zone for clients
Fix - Several uncommon physics crashes

Notes for Addon Lua:

Due to the new ropes changes it is no longer possible to create ropes with a length less than the attach distance and this may affect some existing scripts using spawnVehicleRope.
For distances less than 40m you should still be able to pass length 0 to automatically create a rope using the distance between anchors as the length.

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is announcement week, with a new feature planned for release in the minor update next week!

This week we have launched Steam login for our issue tracker. This is something that players have been asking for, ever since we launched our first issue tracker. This is something we continue to work on as we plan to continue and improve our support into the future.

Previously, the issue tracker didn't have a login, and players would just click the "report a bug" or "request a feature" buttons. They would then be asked to approve the creation their support account, where the username and password was just generated. This was super easy for players, but in the situation where you delete your settings file, change Windows user account, or reinstall Windows, your account would be lost.



With Steam sign-in, you don't need a Geometa account, and sign-in is handled by Steam. We don't see your Steam username or password, we only see your Steam account number which is just the number in the address of your public Steam profile webpage. This allows us to hold the least possible info about you, and still provide support.

This means you will be safe from losing access to your issue tracker account in the future. Signing in with Steam will also automatically connect to your existing Geometa issue tracker account so still have your current issues and comments.

This also means you can now login through the website rather than only through the game! We do need PC specs to reliably provide support, so you will need to login through the game for the first time. However, from then on, you can just login through your browser. This is a trial feature as this means that we don't get the info on what version of the game you have. We will see if this works, or if we need that info.



Steam sign-in also has the benefit to us for verifying game ownership! Stormworks piracy remains rare, but there have been occasions where we have spent hours and hours helping players solve their technical issues, only to discover the cause is a dodgy pirate exe file! Yeah, that's pretty frustrating when that happens...

We will continue hard at work on all the upcoming updates, and catch you next week!

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is update week, and this is a smaller update that focuses on some bugs and issues. For some players, this isn't that exciting, while for others, some of these issues are critical and will solve some blocking problems.

The next minor update in 2 weeks will have a new feature which we are excited about, and it is something players have been asking for, for a while now.

Please see the patch notes below for the full list of fixes in this weeks update.



More Numbers!

Last week we discussed some stats around Stormworks, and in the comments, many players shared their playtime info! Spending the average 100 hours in game is a lot of hours and an achievement, but there are many players with some very impressive hours! Thank you for all the kind comments too.

On the official Stormworks Discord server, you can apply for the "Stormworker" role once you have 1000 hours. When we first launched this role, we didn't think many would get there, but one or two users would get promoted per week. Now it is several new Stormworkers each day, with a total of almost 1000. The biggest hours count I can remember seeing on someone's profile was around 13,600 hours, and they had a really impressive workshop too.



Talking about Discord, the server now has 10,833,750 messages posted, of which 847,724 include images. The community is very active! While we love checking out the chat on Discord, and browsing the incredible creations in vehicle-showcase channel, it would literally be a full time job to read every message! We do read some, but mostly focus on the issue tracker.

Since launching the new issue tracker around a year and a half ago, 19,503 issues have been posted by players! And on the old tracker, there were many many more. Thank you to all players who have taken the time and effort to post feedback here. This is the fuel that powers our updates. Many of these issues are feature requests, suggestions, and many are duplicates, so don't necessarily reflect unique things to be done. These numbers are mostly Stormworks but around 14% are Carrier Command 2.



This is still a huge amount of feedback to process, and it is really important to us that we consider and react to everything we can. Around 6 months later we launched our internal tools for tracking tasks. So far we have planned 3115 pieces of work (most of which have been implemented and released, but many in progress and testing). These tasks are things we have internally planned to do and are usually a few hours to a few days of work. This gives us a central place to write notes and info about a task, track progress, testing, priority, milestones, and more. It helps our efficiency a lot, and also helps gamify the development in a way :-)

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.7.4

Fix - #16528 Diagonal surfaces interfering with surface culling
Fix - #16569 Pistol inventory block weight
Fix - #16755 Allow smoke colour effects when damage/overheating is off
Fix - #16942 Flare gun firing twice
Fix - #9462 Export 3D model crashing due to unsupported character glyphs
Fix - #17455 Mounted welder functionality on servers
Fix - #16146 Persisting issue with spawnVehicleRope not spawning as expected
Rework - #17394 Added Oil trading to arctic refinery and simplified default resource trading script

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is announcement week, with minors last week and next week!

This week we will briefly discuss some numbers around Stormworks!

Something that continues to amaze us is how long players engage with the game. Steam tells us that the average player has spent 100 hours and 32 minutes in game so far. We say 'so far' because this number has been steadily going up over the years and continues to climb as players continue to play. This is an extremely high average play time for a Steam game.



Meanwhile, SteamDB tells us that Stormworks peaks most days at over 3000 players playing at the same time. The "all time" history shows the game has grown in popularity steadily and is probably still growing. This is really unusual, and if you check out graphs for other games, you will mostly see big popularity at launch or big updates, with a steady falloff afterwards.



Having on average 2500 players around the clock means that for every minute that goes by, there is 41.7 hours of total playtime. This is awesome! Game development isn't really a high pressure job, but if you break something, then 41.7 hours of players time is potentially ruined every minute it takes you to come up with a fix. It can be very stressful!

In total, the game has 6500 years of total playtime across all players.



The Stormworks Workshop has now passed 200,000 creations! This in itself is incredible, but when you take the time to look at these creations, it is very striking how much time, skill, effort and patience has gone into each and every one. The Most popular creation has over 90,000 subscribers which means about 1 in 6 players have subscribed!



In terms of development, we are continuing to work on our minor updates, major updates, DLC, new game, and more. We are really excited to share more info soon!

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers

Dear Stormworkers,

This week we add new gimbal control to some lights, cameras, and laser components.

These components now include a new composite input allowing their direction to be controlled with logic. This makes it easier for builders to control and aim lights, cameras and lasers, where previously players would have had to use robotic parts and complex physics systems to move small parts.



This new feature is generally useful for targeting and viewing systems, where lasers are used to scan depth or cameras are used as aiming reticules with weapons systems, allowing the player to easily manage drop and movement. Aiming lights means it is now easier to target lights with fine control, even on small builds. For cosmetic purposes, the control of lights means you can aim small spotlights such as dipped headlights or any situation where you just want to direct light in a tuned direction such as illuminating an area with a spotlight.



As well as this new feature, there are several useful fixes! Please see the patch notes below on full details.

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.7.3

Feature - Gimbal controlled light, camera and laser components

Rework - #12014 Rescaled stabilized gimbal camera inputs after the deadzone to start from 0 (finer control)
Fix - #13615 Third person vehicle camera fixed yaw jitter
Fix - #16495 Fixed cooldown on MP Hangar glass door
Fix - #16724 Fog / rain changing underwater lighting colours
Fix - Fixed fog of war not correctly clearing beyond 256 tiles causing fogged regions to appear
Fix - #17263 Resolved data issue parsing composite write microcontroller modules
Fix - #17439 Fixed rotated edit grids detecting/reclaiming vehicles outside their bounds
Fix - #17857 Fixed gimbal camera laser raycast interacting with non-colliding physics

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is announcement week, with last week being a minor update, and next week also being a minor update (including new components!).

Next week will bring "gimbal" support to some components that players frequently need to rotate such as small cameras, lasers, spotlights, etc. These new parts will will allow logic to rotate their direction just one eighth of a turn, but for many players, this is very useful for creating laser scanners, tuning cameras, adding dipped headlights to vehicles, etc.



With Stormworks development, there are endless things to talk about! However, it doesn't make sense to talk about most of our most exciting stuff until later in development, once the risk of things being changed or cancelled is reduced. So, we are not ready to talk about this years major updates and DLC, but things are going great and we can release more info in the coming months.



So this week we keep it short! Catch you next week for the new components!

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers

Dear Stormworkers,

It is update week! This week is focused on fixes and improvements, as we regather ourselves from the big push getting the major update ready for release 2 weeks ago!

We have some important fixes including an important fix for some multiplayer issues. Please see the notes below for full details.

In addition to fixes, we also bring some quality updates to different aspects of Stormworks. Probably the most noticeable thing is a new warning notification that will appear on vehicle spawn. This warning only shows if there was not enough fuel in workbench inventory to fill all the vehicle tanks to desired level (a parameter that is set with a slider in the fluid spawner component, and premade fluid tanks).



We've also fixed some meshes and animations for occupational outfits and moved some of them under glasses category. You may need to re-equip your welding goggles or head-mirror in wardrobe and find some weird fun combinations there.

Small Steam Train Piston component got a slight re-mesh to be less tall and create bigger visual clearance on locomotives.

For all our addon Lua experts there, we've updated our API with new setSeated function that besides characters also support dogs. Old setCharacterSeated function will work as alias so your scripts will be fine.

Last but not least, we've improved the loop transitions for many sound effects that were recently added to our Buzzer component.



It seems that there also a good news for Stormworkers with AMD graphics cards. According to comments on our issue tracker and messages on our Discord server, it seems that the latest AMD graphics driver solves issue with Lua screens. We've tested both 23.3.1 and 23.3.2 drivers and can confirm that there is no more weird geometric artefacts, black pixels or entirely black screens on in-game monitors.

Thanks to all the players giving feedback on merch and sharing their suspicions of what could be in the upcoming updates! As usual, we will release details as we complete the new features so we can be completely confident in what we are announcing! This usually means that major updates are announced 3 weeks ahead and minor updates are announced as they release.

Work continues as normal on the upcoming new minor and major updates! We are having a lot of fun and can't wait to share more info on the really exciting things we are building at the moment :-)

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.7.2

Fix - #18587 #18618 Fix client sync issues with dynamic objects causing twilight-zone(lag/damage)
Fix - Added default oil survey addon to dedicated server default config
Fix - Several new outfit animation issues
Fix - #17620 Only reset display resolution after a crash
Fix - #17617 Display warnings when missing fuels on vehicle spawn
Fix - #17617 Update fuel rod description to mention uranium ingots
Fix - #17533 Adjusted small steam train piston mesh
Fix - #17336 Fixed Example Nuclear Reactor rods not dropping if spawned with inf-power enabled
Fix - #16470 #16380 Buzzer sound effect improvements
Fix - #16463 Added creature support to lua seat functions and callbacks
Fix - #11024 Speedster mission beacon not working correctly
Fix - #17564 Add safeguards to captain teleports for ai vehicles
Fix - #17794 Amended a minor typo

Rework - Moved welding goggles and head-mirror to glasses category (you may need to re-equip your outfits)

Addon Lua:
- Added seated_peer_id to seat data for seated players
- Updated setVehiclePosSafe documentation

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is announcement week, with last week and next week being content updates.

Thank you to all the players who tried out the new Oil Drilling Major Update! It is great to see all the creative drilling rig designs and how players are engaging with the new mechanics.



For a long time now, players have got in touch from time to time asking about official merchandise. We have remained focused only on the video game software, and wanted to avoid being distracted by other stuff. However, we would quite like to wear some Stormworks merch, and it would be good to make it happen for the players who want it. It may not be too big a distraction using service like Red Bubble. Is this something that you may want? Let us know if this is something you are interested in, and if it is something that players want, then we can make it happen!



We are continuing to plan out the rest of the year. We are planning 15 more free minor updates spread across the rest of the year (one for every second week), a free major update in summer time, a new paid DLC around October, and another free major update in early 2024!



Not all of these updates are fully planned out yet, while others are deep in development! We look forward to your ideas and theories on what these updates might be :-)

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers

Fix - Removed default coolant from fireboxes
Fix - Removed outdated info in wellhead description

Dear Stormworkers and Roughnecks,

The Oil Drilling Major Update is live now!

This new update introduces oil drilling to the world of Stormworks.

This update includes many new components and systems to allow players to design and operate oil rigs. Oil drilling is a massive business, with many different ways to drill oil, and loads of engineering. We have simplified oil drilling from real life to work with a set of blocks, but many of the design considerations, mechanics, and logistics remain. Lets talk about what this means:



Surveying For Oil

Players can just start drilling in the hope of striking black gold, but it's probably more sensible to purchase surveys. You can discover oil fields by purchasing survey data from the existing oil sites in game. Industrial Frontier DLC owners can also drill on land at any of the pre-established oil wells on the Meier Isles that include static workbenches for creating rigs.

Establishing A Well

The new oil well component is large and heavy. When placed down level and flat, it can be activated and will lock to the ground. This can be logistically difficult when drilling in the ocean, so you may need special purpose vehicles such as submersibles to assist in positioning the well.



Feeding Rods

The new drill rods are 10m lengths of drilling pipe. They can be stored in the rod holders, picked up and fed using the rod clamps, and threaded together using the rod threading clamp. You will need to thread together a long drill chain of rods as you feed it into your well.

Drilling

Once you have your rods assembled and fed into the top of your well, it is time to start drilling! For this you need to rotate the rods (by feeding them through a rod driver), and pump drilling slurry (using the rod pivot) into the rods to work as cutting fluid.



Extracting Oil

Once you have drilled down to the depth of the oil deposit, it is time to start extracting! For this you need the well pump, a huge piston type pump that needs to be actuated mechanically. Make a pump jack or otherwise drive the piston to pump oil!

Refining

Once you have extracted your oil, you can refine it in a tall custom tank with distillation. Heat the oil using a coal burner, or the new diesel burner or electric heater to 300C and the oil will start to separate. It can be extracted using the distillation taps which will condense jet fuel or diesel depending on their height in the column.



We can't wait to see what oil industry inspired creations players come up with and hope you enjoy these new components and mechanics! And we look forward to your feedback!

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.7.0

Feature - Oil Industry Major Update

Oil drilling is a new late-game activity for Stormworks, with high start up costs but a large return on investment.
Oil can be found under oil rig workbenches or under random ocean tiles (Purchase survey data from an oil company to reveal them on your map)
Once you have located an area rich in oil it's time to set up an oil rig and start drilling!

Oil Survey:
- Randomly generated ocean oil deposits
- Oil Data Vendors which sell oil deposit location information
- Oil deposit below the static oil rig base
- 4 Oil Well locations on the Meier Isles (Industrial Frontier DLC)

Attach a wellhead to the terrain above an oil deposit (These are pre-placed on the Meier Isles)
Drill Rods can be fed into the top of this component with assistance from Drill Clamps and Connectors to pick up and join the rods.
A rotary table and swivel provide rotation and slurry flow which are required for running the drill.
Once the drill is spinning and has a supply of slurry, the rods need to be physically pushed into the wellhead to advance the drill.
Drilling will saturate the slurry with mud and stone, which can be cleaned and recycled using a slurry filter and fresh water.
After the drill arrives at the oil deposit, the oil can be extracted with a Pumpjack component paired directly to a swivel. The Pumpjack requires mechanical action to draw up the oil from the well.

Oil Drilling:
- Drill Rod Storage
- Drill Clamp
- Drill Connector
- Rotary Table
- Drill Swivel
- Wellhead
- Pumpjack
- New Fluids: Slurry and Saturated Slurry
- Slurry filter

Now that you have an excess of oil you don't just have to sell!
Fractional Distillation is the process of separating crude oil into its more useful components.
Heat up oil inside a contained volume to >300 degrees and use the distillation port to tap off diesel and jet-fuel fractions.

Fractional Distillation:
- Diesel Furnace
- Electric Furnace
- Distillation Port

We have deprecated the fluid filter in this update for a much more simplified version of the component to emphasize the design challenge of fluid system building.
When we deprecate parts they remain in the game files, and a replacement version is added; this means that your old vehicles will still work as usual, but the old version of the part will no longer appear in the edit inventory.

General:
- New Fluid Filter

Fix - #1698 Improved terrain at scxeech trading yard
Rework - #16315 #15892 Resource trading addon now has surge pricing
Rework - Temperature Sensor now uses compartment temperature if placed inside a sealed volume
Rework - Radar now ignores moveable class objects
Balance - Desalinator re-balance

Addon Lua:
- Added getOilDeposits()
- Added large keypad support to setVehicleKeypad