The Sacred Scrolls expansion is an update I've worked on for a long time. It is the foundation for all future expansions of Odd Realm, and can be thought of as the creation of the planet Odd. Previous versions were more of a proof-of-concept. I'm excited to have this update finally completed because it means I can start to tell the story of the world, and add in all the great content I've planned with the help of the community. New playable races, overworld kingdoms, overworld diplomacy, more items, more blueprints, more everything. There's a lot of work to do, but I'm stoked! I wouldn't be here without the support from all of you. You've been incredibly patient waiting for me to add things to the game, and I want to express how thankful I am for your interest in the game, and your support. As a solo dev, it has never felt lonely because I've had all of you keeping me company. Thank you!

Also, because this expansion had to change a lot of the core systems (namely, variable world sizes), your saves from previous version, are not backwards compatible. I do apologize to those that have to start new games and have lost hard work. This isn't something I like doing, and is avoided at all costs.

Now, let's take a look at what went into this expansion!




This was a huge task and was the main setback for this expansion's lengthy development. I had to rebuild my world engine from the ground up. I guess this is to be expected when you start building a settlement building game for the first time. Lots of lessons learned!

Alright, you can now edit two sets of dimensions when starting a new realm. The Map Size settings are what determine the actual in-game block world dimensions. The Overworld is simply the map with continents you see when choosing a place to settle. Keep in mind when selecting Map Size dimensions that, the bigger you go, the more demand it will have on your computer. If your machine isn't super beefy and you notice the biggest maps are lowering FPS, it's probably a good idea to drop down a size. You can mix and match sizes (i.e., 128x16x64, 16x16x16, 16x256x16, etc), so, go nuts!

All the available sizes are:

Map Sizes
X: 16, 32, 64, 128, 256
Y: 16, 32, 64, 128, 256
Z: 16, 32, 64

Overworld Sizes
X: 64, 80, 96, 112
y: 64, 80, 96, 112


Previously, a game save was directly tied to a tile you settle. Now, your progression is saved globally, and individual tiles save out on their own. This is to allow for my future plan of kingdoms. Players will be able to control many settlements (tiles) that will simulate as they play. You'll expand your kingdom by exploring and settling new tiles, and, often, you'll need to fight for them!







Having Ren as some HUD stat was way too gamey for my liking. Ren is now a physical item in the world. I want players to build big vaults and banks and see their wealth. As well, I want thieves and bandits to come hunting for it. You can still use the Ren to trade with merchants, and when buying things from you, they'll drop it off in the new "Vault" room.




There are too many to list! Plus, I won't spoil the surprise of finding them. A lot you can unlock from the Saga window (more on that later!) and quite a few are found in dungeons and on bosses. Happy hunting!




Tomes are an item that have three purposes. First, and most importantly, they can be used to unlock new blueprints and rooms from the Saga window (again, more on this later.) Second, they can be equipped to buff skills, Third, they can be sold to merchants as a fairly decent export item.

Settlers have the chance to write down their learnings as they work. The Tome given is determined by the skill that was last used. For example, the Tome of Industry will spawn for a miner digging a tunnel.




Item carrying efficiency has seen a lot of work in this expansion, and backpacks are a great way to increase how much an entity can move around. Later on, I'll be adding other items to equip to the back slot. Things like capes and back armor come to mind!






Wood log block, wood beam, and thatch roofs are just some of them. You can see all the great blueprints the game has from the Saga window (I'm getting there!) and they are no longer hidden. Take a look!

Cages are a new addition as well. These replace the old taming system where you'd tell a settler to go and attack an entity and it somehow became tamed. Now, you must build cages to first capture entities before you can try to tame them. This is a common way to get other races into your settlement as well. Capturing an entity in a cage has a chance of failing based on the target's evasion rating. Once the entity is in the cage, you can use the capture job on it. This also has a chance of failing, and can cause the entity to become hostile and attack. The Tame skill is used here, and the Shepherd is the best bet to handle these jobs.






First, let's stop and stare at the elephant in the room, stockpiles. What the heck is a stockpile? They're zones, but in a different location (the rooms menu) and with a different name (stockpiles). That's right, there's no zones menu toolbar. Don't fret, you can still designate areas on the map to put items. You do so by placing a stockpile room. However, you now have the added functionality of assigning settlers to this room. One thing to note about rooms in general, you can assign items and item categories to any room, not just stockpiles. Stockpiles are just an easy access template to designate areas for item storage, but you can add item storage to any room you have. Want raw meat brought to the kitchen? Add a Raw Meat item category to its stockpile settings and settlers will do so.

One of my first tasks for the next update is to add stockpile priorities. I know it is desperately needed, and it's at the top of my list!

Another nice change to rooms is that they no longer have to be contiguous. By this I mean, you can have one room with designated points spread all over the map, and on different z levels. Want one home to fill a seven story condo? You can do this!

Let's look at all the rooms! Not all of these are new, but they have definitely changed in some form. Here is the list of all the rooms so far. :)

Home - used by Humans for sleeping and procreation. Humans will move their families into a Home if it is big enough.
Farm - where you can grow crops.
Animal Enclosure - where Shepherds can feed and house Animals.
Wood Mill - used for crafting various wood materials and items.
Foundry - where metal-based materials are produced.
Kitchen - used to prepare food.
Smithy - where metal ingots can be converted into items.
Barracks - melee training ground.
Range - ranged training ground.
Distillery - where alcoholic beverages are produced.
Grain Mill - where grain items can be processed into food components such as Flour.
Chaos Construct - used for creating void-based materials.
Summoning Chamber - used to create a bridge between Odd Realm and the Void Realm.
Immortallity Tomb - used by Ancients to maintain their immortality. Without it, they succumb to Void Sickness, and perish.
Transmuation Chamber - used to forcibly convert raw materials into Void Crystals and Void Shards.
Wellhouse - where water can be produced.
Tailor - where cloth-based materials are produced.
Tannery - where leather-based materials are produced.
Market - will attract merchants to your settlement. It's also where items are spawned when buying from a merchant.
Arboretum - where saplings can be planted to grow trees.
Library - where ink, paper, and books are created.
Stockpile - used to group and organize items.
Arcane Study - a magic training ground.
Masonry Shop - where stone-based materials and items are produced.
Vault - where Ren is placed when trading with merchants.

Coming soon:
Prison Cell - where prisoners are housed.
Guard Room - used by militia to patrol and keep watch on designated locations.
Town Hall - where non-militia go during combat/raids, and is required to run a kingdom and elect leaders.
Apothecary - where alchemists make potions and heal the sick.

Many rooms produce items and have unique jobs. I'll cover this more in the Production section later.






Water is no longer blue lava! I've added an oxygen attribute to entities so that they can submerge themselves in water and hold their breath. Some entities, like Ancients, don't need oxygen and can chill underwater forever. Most are not so lucky, so be cautious when building your underwater base.

If you choose, you can settle the ocean tiles. This is a fun challenge for trying to survive on a raft. Try it out!




Your castle walls actually do something now! Huzzah! Settlers can no longer climb blocks that are higher than 1 block. Ladders will let you create vertical paths higher than this if you don't want to make stair shaped paths into your mine. There's a handy overlay on the bottom bar to show you vertical pathing, if you are unsure what can be climbed.

A quick note about invaders; if they can't path into your base, they will either try and build ladders to scale things, or try and mine through the obstacle. Keep this in mind when building your defenses.









You can now equip items directly from the inventory window. Any of the uniform, entity window, and entity tooltip equipment slots can have items dragged onto them from the inventory window. The slots will change color while dragging to indicate valid equipment permissions.

The uniform window has seen a lot of work to help better communicate uniform priority and allow easier management. Players can still designate individual, control group, and profession uniforms which can be prioritized. The game will automatically create individual uniforms for every entity that spawns, and these are by default the lowest priority uniform. As well, every profession has an empty uniform already created which players can edit, copy, paste, etc.




Ok, finally, we have arrived.

One big problem I had with the old version of Odd Realm was that players missed a lot of blueprints because I never communicated how they were unlocked. You just had to find the right item requirements and some new blueprint would appear. This caused a lot of chaotic player progression. Now, players can see all the available blueprints and rooms from the Saga window. These unlocks are tied to the realm, so you can start new settlements and keep this progression. To unlock the blueprints/rooms, you have to unlock each node using the required tomes. Some trees will only be available if you have certain races in your settlement. Homes, for example, will only be unlockable when you have a Human settler. This window also allows Humans to use magic, but you'll still need to obtain Tomes of Arcana from exploring or merchants.

Lots more will be added to this window as I go, and I'd say it's only 50% filled.




Some rooms provide production jobs to make items and summon entities. To automate and create these jobs, you can use the Production window. The window provides a robust set of tools to determine when and how these jobs get queued. For example, auto-queue 10 "Craft Stone Brick" jobs every time your Stone Brick inventory drops below a count of 10. Or, alternatively, auto-queue 1 "Summon Void Woken" job when the Void Woken population drops below a count of 1.






Sick of having your cows eat your raw meats? Well, now they have customized diets to make sure they don't!

This system is mostly finished, but I still have to add some sicknesses related to a poor diet, but it's coming soon!




Pretty straight-forward. You can now see the output of your settler work and attacks. If this is something you don't want to see, there are options in the settings menu to hide action text, or only show it for selected entities.










This is one of those tasks that never really ends, however, for the expansion I've gone through a lot of UI elements and added helpful tooltips. The block tooltip, for example, will now list all its contents. You can select a block, by holding TAB and clicking the block you want to inspect. Once it's selected its tooltip will be locked and you can hover over the contents of the block to see further tooltips about items, plants, and general block info.




You can add any item or entity to the top HUD to track. For items, you can toggle their tracking from the inventory window. For entities, you do so from the settlers window.






Jobs, rooms, priorities, quantities, settler icons, temperature, and layers can be toggled from the bottom left bar. My personal favorite is the "All" overlay which can be toggled by holding TAB. It's extremely helpful for seeing rooms and jobs without needing to open their menus.




You can filter lists and find settlers by holding "Shift' and typing the name of your target. For example, with the inventory open, swords will be listed if you hold shift and type "sword". Sometimes it's handy to jump to a settler by typing in their name. Give it a go.




No more limit to the amount of saves you can have! Plus, there's a lot more info provided, including a preview of image of your settlement.




Without spoiling things, let's just say they are much more spicy. Their attacks and abilities are unique, and will provide different challenges when discovering them. Not all of them are hostile, so keep that in mind before issuing the attack orders.






This is also one of those things I'll continue to add probably until the end of my days. This expansion adds a lot of fun cave/dungeon gen, especially when first settling.




Well, this is something that was requested for ages! Want to settle in the middle of a lake? You can, and it'll also create a nice little raft. As well, all of your items will be put into containers. You should be able to spawn your people pretty much anywhere you want.


There's now a "StreamingAssets" folder in the "Data" folder where your executable of the game is located. In there you can find the texture atlas and game data files. There's a lot you can edit from these. This is very much a prototype of what I want modding to be. I will soon be replacing that giant text file with separate data files for each data group. Lots more work to do with mod support, but we're moving in that direction steadily.





Water now has mass and will evaporate and fill basins. I have lots of plans to add water-focused props such as sluice gates, pumps, pipes, and drains. This change is the beginning of all that fun.




Torches, fire pits, and other heat sources will now propagate heat outwards. Some things, like being open to the sky, can limit heat transfer. Greenhouses can be built in the Tundra biome to help grow plants when it's cold. Many plants are sensitive to hot and cold. You can see this info from their tooltip.


There are a lot of new systems., andI've upgraded the tutorial to cover all of them. It can be enabled/disabled/reset from the settings menu as before.


The next update is the Ardyn expansion. It will introduce a caste system, new professions, new rooms, and, what many have been waiting for, a new playable race, the Ardyn. Going forward, development is going to be all about content. I know a lot of people have been waiting for the game to get rounded out, and now is the time!

Before I say goodbye, I'd like to again say thank you for the support. It means a lot that so many people are interested in my game. If you'd like to be part of its development, like so many in the community already have been, please join the discussions on the forum and in our discord server. I'm active every day and am happy to discuss new ideas and suggestions. :)

Anyway, thanks for reading this far, and stay tuned for more Odd Realm stuff in the future!

Waylon

Hey gang!



This is (please god) the final hotfix patch before beta goes to the live production branch. Apologies for how long this is taking to go live! I'm at the point where I'm doing several hour playtests to find those bugs and tuning issues that arise during long play sessions. I found a few more things which I've listed below:

-Fixed a bug where some settings windows weren't showing.
-Low Food and Low Beverages notification should now only be seen for Humans.
-The game is now paused when the camera does cinematic moves, to avoid entities running off before the camera arrives at its target.
-Fixed a bug where the game could get stuck paused if an auto-save happened at the same time as a scenario.
-Fixed a bug where entities with all combat skills disabled would still fight. Now, they will flee away from their assailant.
-Changed some plant heat resistances so that not all plants can survive in extremely hot climates.
-Changed a few blueprints to use the Misc skill instead of Craft Wood. i.e., Thatch Roof, Dirt Wall, Cobble Floor, etc.
-Increased resource spawn rate for Human inherent buff. It was 0.5%, and is now 5%.
-Fixed a bug where the dim witted debuff was positive instead of negative.
-Entity notifications now show the profession icon.
-Fodder is now produced in the Kitchen instead of the Animal Enclosure.
-Fixed an issue where jobs could clog up rooms. Essentially, a job would get auto-added by a room, then the required items would become unavailable and the job would never start if the items weren't found. This would block other jobs from being placed. Now, jobs that sit for long enough without being started will be removed to let other jobs get added.
-Fixed a bug where entities could get assigned jobs they didn't have the skill for. Hilariously, a cow or other animal would sometimes have this happen. Please do let me know if you see an animal going to town on a hammer at the wood mill. This is entertaining, but not intended.

Alright, the plan is to push this version live tomorrow! I want to be safe and let it see some beta testing before flipping the switch. I'm fairly confident this version is stable, but you never know. I could have missed something. Stares at settings menu nervously. Also, I need to write up the post detailing all the 0.10 changes in the interim. There are a few!

Thanks everyone!

W

Hello and happiest of Fridays to you!

I was hoping that today I would be switching the beta branch over to the live branch. Sadly, I ran into a lot of tuning/progression stuff that I wasn't comfortable pushing live just yet. Today's patch should fix a few things that stood out to me, and I'm sure they stand out for you too.



I've altered how bandits, and other threats get activated. Previously, I activated threats based on how much time had passed. As well, to get certain threats such as bandits, you'd have to settle a 'bandit' tile, or some such. I felt that this was rather tough to tune, and didn't seem that organic. Plus, it doesn't quite align with how I want interactions in the world to play out in the future. Now, to move the design in that direction, threats will activate more often as you acquire wealth. For now, I'm only looking at Ren, but, later, I will factor in other items, especially rare unique artifacts. I know some of you don't want ANY threats to appear, so I've also added a setting in the settings menu to change the threat frequency to 'never, low, normal, or high.'

In addition to that, I've done some work to improve the loadout generation of baddies. Items and attributes NPC's start out with will now be generated based on the player's average settler level. Before, the entities would pull from a pool of items that were predefined. This wasn't terribly accurate to the player's progression. With items/attributes generating based on settler level, the threats should be much more challenging while still being fair.

You'll notice a few new things to build in the patch notes. I definitely didn't want to add new content to this patch as I only want to move beta to live, however, there's a bit of a gap in the early game content, that I felt needed addressing. Without unlocking the wood research, you were pretty limited to in what you could build. I've gone ahead and added some new things to build with wood and plant fiber, to help fix this. There's no end of things to add, but I think this should be a good small addition.

This patch also has a significant merchant item value change. I noticed that you could quite easily acquire Ren, so I'm making things much more expensive in addition to lowering the price things can be sold for. Wealth should be slowly acquired, and your settlement should earn it by working hard to fabricate and find valuable items. Please let me know if you find ways to easily acquire Ren by cheesing the game. I'd love to know, so I can tune things.

Notes:
-Fixed a bug where changing priority on a started job might remove it.
-Added extra tooltip info for block traps. Entity capture size (for cages), and general trap functions are now displayed.
-Tuned research costs to be a bit cheaper.
-Added blueprints to recycle tomes back into paper.
-Tuned lighting color overlay back a bit to make things easier to see.
-Fixed a bug where tree leaves weren't changing color on season change.
-Tuned merchant prices.
-Enemies will drop their items in a stoneleaf bag upon death. This bag will disappear when emptied.
-Wood Plank block now drops 1 wood plank instead of 1 wood log.
-Added a wood log block to make with wood logs.
-Added a thatch roof platform to make with plant fiber.
-Added a wood beam block to make with wood logs.
-Added a Threat Difficulty setting in the settings menu.
-Dangerous events ("Threats") will now use the player's settlement value to determine frequency. The higher a settlement's value, the more often the player will encounter threats like bandits. The threat frequency can be changed from the settings menu.
-Entity threats will now use the average player settler level to determine item and attribute loadouts.
-Fixed a pathing bug where entities could get stuck after logging trees.
-Added entity size to entity overlay.
-Natural plant growth will no longer happen in rooms.
-Auto job blueprints are now ordered with those that can be built at the top.
-More optimizations to improve FPS.

Ok, I'm going to let this new patch test over the weekend to see how things play out. I'll probably have some small fixes and tuning changes to patch in early next week, but the build is just about ready to be live. I will update you all next week! :)

Thanks!

W

Hello!



This is a shorter list of patch notes today as I focused a lot of last week fixing up and adding in-game events. There are quite a few fixes related to combat in there as well. Plus, I've done some optimizing related to a GPU bottleneck some players might have been experiencing.

Regarding events, I've gone through a bunch that were disabled for the beta and have enabled them and fixed issues that kept them from working properly. As well, some of the game's bosses are now quite a bit more involved and powerful. Each has their own special set of abilities. As you can see in the above gif, the Dweller shoots a beam of energy at nearby player entities, carving out any terrain (or critters!) in the way. I won't spoil the other bosses and their abilities, but be careful! They're out there.

The Ancients now have a bit more challenge as I've added a faction called the Ancient Hunters that may appear. They see Ancients and magic as a threat to the world and have devoted themselves to finding and eliminating all Ancients. After all, magic was used to cause the Fracture. I've always intended for Ancients to have a bit more threat from other factions to help balance out their easier playstyle.

Here are the notes:
-Optimized rendering performance.
-Re-enabled several scenarios.
-Upgraded boss scenarios to provide more of a challenge.
-The 'Game Saved' overlay should appear before the save to make it more noticeable.
-Fixed a bug where entities weren't attacking.
-Fixed a bug where ranged attackers could attack enemies if they didn't have the same pathing room.
-Improved combat behavior and entity control.
-Fixed an attack timing bug that caused projectiles to be fired at the beginning of an animation.
-Fixed a bug that kept fire from updating while on water or in the air. This would keep it from disappearing.
-Updated the game's loco art assets.
-Fixed a bug where battle music could continue playing after re-loading a save.

I'm very, very close to moving the current game out of beta and into production. This week, I'm only going to be tuning and testing. By Friday, it should be ready to move over.

Last, but not least, I am very excited to tell you all that Matt Creamer, the talented composer behind Odd Realm's music, is working on a bunch more music tracks for the game. Currently, there are only two tracks that play while you manage your settlement, so he'll be working on making more to fill that gameplay. I want to extend a special thanks to the Patreon supporters for helping bring these new tracks into the game. All the money raised in the Patreon has gone towards that! :)

Thanks everyone!

Waylon

Hi everyone!



Phew! This one took me a bit longer to get out the door because I had to get my hands dirty with a bunch of pathfinding stuff. Thanks for waiting patiently for me to put this one out. :) Also, thank you to those of you that were sending me builds and helping me find issues. Your help is so appreciated!

You should notice some improvements to the pathfinding speed. I went through and optimized several things, but I also worked on how paths are prioritized. Entities with the shortest paths or the most urgent paths (i.e., given a move order) should be calculated first. Also, NPC's are prioritized last, giving the player first dibs on pathing. In 0.10.0.17, you'd see a lot of entities hang up when given a move order, and that's because they were waiting for someone ahead of them to calculate a huge path. That should be much better. Now, having said that, you'll probably still see entities with the 'Routing' state, especially with a higher population or massive distance to travel. I've got a couple more things to add to reduce this wait for them, but, at the end of the day, it's either wait to calculate a long path, or tank your FPS. I'll continue to improve as we go.

Ok, so I needed to make this change to help with an issue where entities couldn't craft things if carry was disabled. Now, haul jobs use the carry skill and are issued by stockpiles, and gather jobs are used by crafting jobs to collect required items. Just like the equip item job, gather uses the survival skill. That's a temporary solution until I implement some code to assign the same skill as the job issuing the gather job, but I didn't have time this week!

As I was testing this week, I noticed that a lot of carry jobs were chilling while perfectly capable settlers sat on their hands. This would happen when a settler with a lot already on their plate was issued some carry jobs by a stockpile room. I've added in new code that checks to see how long a job idles, and, if it exceeds a specific time threshold, it un-assigns the entity (the one that's busy) from the job. This lets other entities pick up the slack. Hopefully you see some efficiency improvements as a result the next time you play.

I've fixed an absolute ton of combat related things BUT I wasn't able to get them all. I will continue to polish that up for the following patch. However, I was able to implement some line-of-sight logic for ranged fighters. You should no longer be attacked through the ground, and entities will try (as long as they aren't in a hold position order) to get closer if they don't see their target. I am going to add an overlay option that displays a line connecting an entity to their target. It will indicate line of sight and who's targeted.

Some entity notifications have been re-enabled. You should see them when you don't have a settler assigned to a profession, when a settler becomes an adult, when a settler is stuck, and when a settler can't reach a job. My suspicion is that these might be somewhat annoying at first, and will need some tuning. Do let me know which ones bother you, if any.

As this patch is mostly about bug fixing, tuning, and performance improvements, I don't have too much else to share, so here are the notes.

-Fixed a bug where the dialogue indicator would get stuck above entities.
-Fixed a bug where tooltips could have repeating text in the Saga window.
-Fixed a bug where disabling the tutorial from the tutorial popup wasn't working.
-Fixed an FPS drop from having lots of inaccessible jobs.
-Fixed some issues where entities wouldn't find a path to far away, usually underground, move points.
-Fixed a bug where entities would start mating while in combat or during a move order. Yep.
-Added 'gather item' job and renamed 'pick up/drop off item' to 'haul item'.
-Void Woken should be a default permitted race in most rooms now.
-Removed the loot skill as it's not used for anything.
-The selection box is no longer shown for right clicks during entity selections.
-Fixed a small memory leak.
-Fixed a bug where orders couldn't be given if one of the selected entities was dead.
-Fixed a bug where entities in hold positions couldn't attack close enemies.
-Fixed a bug where entities would stop moving randomly after being given a move order.
-Archers will now only fire an arrow if they have line-of-sight.
-Fixed a bug where health bar color was incorrect when loading a save.
-Increased landmine damage.
-Fixed a bug where entities would get stuck doing a job if the job they had started was no longer accessible.
-Fixed a bug where unlocking a door didn't open pathing to the room which had been locked.
-Fixed a visual bug where the lock icon wasn't updated on save file load.
-Added a tooltip for the entity state to show the full state display name.
-Fixed a bug where several entity notifications wouldn't show up.
-Fixed a bug where 'Remaining Days In Season' was incorrect.
-Re-enabled the lode overlay. You can see it when holding TAB.
-Ancients now start out with more Tomes of Arcana.
-All Arcana research is much cheaper.
-Fixed a bug where suggested props weren't showing when hovering over a room while placing jobs.
-Auto-job threshold amount to set will now look at queued and active jobs when attempting to queue jobs.
-Fixed a bug where entities in water could not be attacked.
-Minimap input will now stop entity follow if it's active.
-Fixed a bug that would keep some lists from not updating correctly.
-The kitchen now has the Misc skill as a default. That way, anyone with misc can join and do the butcher jobs.
-Added blueprint summon visuals for the Void Imp and Void Woken.
-Fixed a typo where Void Catalyst was shown as Void Crystal.
-Fixed a visual issue with jobs not updating shadows when removed.
-The Wood/Stone Bin can now also hold Refined Materials.
-Entities will now unassign themselves from stockpile carry jobs if the job sits for long enough without starting. This is to help free up carry jobs for other settlers that can do them.

There are still a few bugs to fix and performance improvements to make before I can push beta to production. As well, I still haven't re-enabled a few scenarios that I had planned to this week. I'm going to focus on those things and see where we're at by the middle of next week. I think by then things will be looking pretty good. :)

As always, thanks so much for the support! Have a great day.

Waylon

Hello!

0.10.0.17 has been uploaded to the BETA branch!



There are lots of goodies in this one!

First off, there's a new tutorial. I think it needs a bit of trimming, and some better timing, but it's mostly there. I want to add one or two more tips, but let me know if there's anything you think is missing. I'm also going to make a video tutorial on YouTube because I know some people prefer that. I'll keep you posted on its status.

Another big change is the tuning for entity attribute update intervals. Previously, I was updating attributes every 1 minute of game time, and, now, I'm updating them every 5. I felt that, when a settler started to starve or dehydrate, there wasn't a lot of time to address emergencies. With increased intervals, there's way less pressure on the player to scramble for water and food. We'll see how 5 minute intervals feel. I might even go higher because these higher intervals also give me more room for buff values. Time will tell! Or maybe you will. Let me know what you think.

I've slightly changed how pathfinding works to help with some lag in the later game. The problem was that entities would pathfind all at once, especially once you got more than 25 entities. This would cause some FPS drop as the pathfinding manager tried to process them all. Now, I'm processing pathfinding requests one at a time, and I prioritize closest move targets first. The request also checks to see how long it's taking and it will delay a frame (to let other processes continue), then continue on in the next frame. The downside to this change is that you might see a settler standing there waiting for a path to be found, usually if the path end point is extremely far away. I was playing with some pretty big populations and I didn't notice any serious delays in pathfinding. In fact, I think this system responds faster because I'm delaying using the ms process time instead of the number of iterations a pathfinding process goes through. Of course, any time I touch the pathfinding, there's the chance I've inadvertently broken something else, so do let me know if your people just never move at all.



You'll notice now that containers can hold more and that some of them have special permissions. Bins, for example, can only hold seeds and resources, but they can hold up to 150 items. Whereas, crates, can hold any item category, but only up to 75 items. Chests will also hold way more to make up for their cost to build. Lastly, there's a new item category, Books, so you can hold tomes and spellbooks in bookcases.







I've added some extra info to tooltips to show what sorts of benefits blueprints provide. Things like movement speed bonuses, container size/permissions, and decay buffs will now be shown. Oh! And you will now see prop requirements for room tooltips.

There are quite a few fixes in here too. Take a look!
-Entity attributes are now update at 5 minute intervals instead of 1 minute intervals.
-Entity attribute updates are now staggered so that not all entities get hungry all at once.
-Fixed a pathing bug that could cause entities to become stuck.
-Added some prop information to the room tooltips.
-Fixed a bug where entities were getting stuck in an equip item loop.
-Entities that cannot equip items will not longer have uniforms auto created. This should keep cows and chickens from having individual uniforms.
-Fixed a bug where entity intelligence type wasn't being set on load.
-Increased storage capacity for all containers.
-Added item category restrictions to certain containers. The trade off is that a container might hold more, but only be able to hold resources, and seeds. i.e., the Wood/Stone Bin.
-Added an item category for books.
-The bookcase can now hold books.
-Added more info to various tooltips.
-Improved pathfinding performance for larger populations.
-The clay roof is now unlocked with The Basics research.
-Fixed a bug where entities could get stuck in the mating state if they weren't in the same pathing room.
-Fixed a couple places where entities tried to start pathfinding to inaccessible areas.
-Fixed a bug where mating entities could get stuck in infinite move loops as they tried to move to the point the other entity was at simultaneously.
-Search input will now only affect the focused window at the time of search start. This is to avoid windows changing the selected target unintentionally. For example, using search to filter items in the inventory window, then dragging an item onto a uniform, only to have the uniform window change which uniform is selected because of search input.
-Settler search is now more accurate for name searching.
-Fixed an issue where some items would not be removed from rooms that didn't permit them.

This is the home stretch to get 0.10 out of beta and into the main branch. There are still a few behavior bugs and tuning things I need to address, but I also need to re-enable several scenarios. Once those things are done, the game should be stable and ready to go to mainline. I'm aiming for no later than the 20th!

That's all for now. Thanks and have a great day!

Waylon

Hello!

This is a smaller update to fix up some issues that were reported over the weekend.

-Fixed a bug that would cause loading a game to get hung up on, 'Generating World.'
-Fixed a bug where entities weren't starting jobs.
-Ancients now start with Arcane Dust.
-Fixed a bug where Void Crystals required the conjuring skill to build.
-Entities will now eat/drink at 50% (if they can). Additionally, entities will not take damage if they are on their way to eat/drink and are starving/dehydrating.
-Fixed a bug where the wood gate wouldn't open/close.
-Fixed a bug where removing a blueprint would leave ambient shadows on textures.
-Cutting grass should drop at least 1 plant fiber now.
-Holding alt will now place a new room instead of holding control. This is to avoid conflicts with the border select only hotkey.
-Added min/max temp and min skylight to plant tooltips.
-Fixed a bug where plants could grow underground. Mushrooms can still grow underground as they don't need light.
-Fixed a bug where saplings couldn't grow in cold weather.
-Fixed a bug where search lists would lose the search filter if the mouse left the window.
-Fixed a bug where the last toolbar selection wasn't re-selected when the toolbar re-opens if the toolbar was closed with the ESC key.
-Roofs and floors are now easier to build.
-Fixed a bug where a job wouldn't start if its prerequisite job wasn't the same priority.
-Fixed a bug where uniform items weren't being equipped.
-Fixed a bug where trees weren't spawning after the sapling matures.

Thanks,

Waylon

Hello!



Today's patch focuses on some performance issues. Hopefully you see an improvement when playing this new build. That said, I still have a few more things I need to improve before this is running at the level I want. I know there are GPU bound issues and next week I'm going to finish those up. Anyone running on a machine with a weak GPU will be running into this one. I noticed that some save times are a bit long. Will take a look at this too!

A few people have mentioned how overpowered cages and traps are. You *should* notice a difference in this build because the trigger will now take into account the target's evasion rating. The higher the evasion of an entity, the harder it is to trigger the cage or trap. Let me know what your experience is with the new change. Hopefully I haven't gone too far in the other direction. I do need to add some feedback to indicate that a trigger check was fired and failed. Will do soon!

I've slightly changed how caves generate in the game. You should notice that they have more of a buffer when spawning. Because this change affects biome generation, you might see a cave appearing when you first load your game. I still need to come up with a method that lets me change/tune biome generation without it messing up save files. So, I apologize if a cave messes up part of your settlement when you load!

I'm going to jump into the notes, but, before I do, I'd like to point out that I've increased the game time's speed. It used to be that 1 realtime second = 1 game minute. Now, it's setup so that 0.5 realtime second = 1 game minute. It takes ages for seasons to pass, so I thought this might be a nice change to help things move along. However, it also means things like damage from hunger are faster. This *might* result in your settlers dying super quick while starving or dehydrating. Don't worry, I can fix this by tuning some things. Just let me know what you experience so I can tune accordingly. :)

Ok, here are the notes:

-Fixed a bug where entities were not dying of old age. Now, entities (those with hearts) will have a small chance to go into cardiac arrest after becoming an elder. This is randomly applied over time, and the chances are higher the older they become.
-Newly spawned adult entities will now have their starting age closer to the age they need to become an adult. Adult Humans, for example, should start with an age between 16-27.
-Water put on fires will now have less starting mass. This should keep settlers from flooding large areas with water.
-Fixed a bug where the character sprite wasn't changing to represent a new entity appearance. For example, when becoming an elder, the sprite didn't show white hair.
-Fixed a bug where clicking a death notification didn't take you to the point of death.
-Fixed a bug where, if a population max wasn't set, the game wasn't using the default 99 limit.
-Fixed a bug where the attack labels in the entity window were overlapping.
-Increased dirt and stone spawn amounts.
-Added small chance to spawn stone chunks when mining dirt.
-Fixed a bug where extra items were being eaten/drunk.
-Fixed a bug where entities didn't show the climbing animation for ladders.
-Fixed a bug where items were discovered before being found in the world or unlocked in the saga research tree.
-Fixed a bug where blueprints would show up as blue (ready to start) when the room they are assigned to doesn't have anyone with the skill enabled. i.e., no one with the cooking skill to do cooking jobs in the kitchen, but someone in the world does have it.
-Item spawning will now favour spawn points in a room if it originated in one. i.e., butchering an animal's remains will try to spawn the produced meat inside the room (kitchen) that the job originated. This is intended to avoid spawning these items outside the room, or on the roof.
-Fixed a blueprint name typo where Sand Shrimp Meat was showing (Raw) instead of (Roasted).
-Fixed a bug where Chirpen Meat (Roasted) was showing up as Chicken Meat (Raw). Thanks Morin!
-Improved performance relating to jobs, and world rendering.
-Reduced loading times.
-Fixed a bug where Ancients would randomly start with non-magic professions, and humans would start with magic professions.
-Fixed a bug where windows would not automatically rotate.
-Props which clamp to fixtures like walls, should no longer fall from gravity.
-Fixed a bug where duplicating a uniform didn't copy the profession or control group.
-Fixed several bugs where entities would stick around in control groups after dying or leaving the settlement.
-Fixed a bug where inventory counts were sometimes incorrect.
-Attacks now show the icon of the skill used instead of a unique attack icon.
-Fixed some bugs with tooltips not showing when hovering over various UI elements.
-Tooltips that aren't locked (because the entity/block isn't selected) will now become 50% transparent if the mouse is over the tooltip.
-The temporal displacer now requires Arcane Dust instead of a Glass Pane to be constructed.
-Fixed a bug where a noticeable pattern could be seen in the terrain random offsets. This was most noticeable when zooming out and looking at the repetition of water.
-The Wyrm event no longer spawns items when creating a tunnel.
-Fixed a bug where caves weren't generating plants or props.
-Increased the buffer used to determine the position of caves in relation to visible blocks. The intention is to have them spawning farther away from the mine, rather than right on top of them.
-The glass window is now a glass block.
-Fixed a bug where crafting sand clods required metal crafting instead of stone crafting.
-Added a bunch of missing inline icons for blocks.
-Added wood plank item which can be manufactured at the Wood Mill for 1 Wood Log.
-Wood plank shingle/floor/block now require wood plank items to build.
-Fixed a bug where fences didn't transition with gates
-Rooms without auto job options will no longer show up in the production window.
-Cages and traps will now only trigger based on a roll beating the target's evasion. i.e., If the random roll (out of 100) is 15 and the target's evasion is 16, the cage or trap will fail to capture, drop, or damage them. The higher the evasion rating of the entity, the harder it is to trigger the block.
-Fixed a bug where NPC's would show equipping/unequipping uniform icon and feedback on item slots.

Thanks everyone!

Have a great weekend!

Waylon

Happy Friday/Saturday everyone!



This patch was initially just going to be some tuning and bug fixes, but, last night, I spent an hour adding in two new rooms, the Vault, and the Market. Like you, I get frustrated by where the merchant items spawn, so I thought I would remedy that with these rooms.

This room is needed for merchants to visit your settlement. Any items bought from the merchant will be spawned here, unless there's no room, in which case the items will spawn at the merchant. In the future, I am going to have merchants stick around in the settlement and hang out at the market, instead of leave immediately after a trade. That way, players can re-initiate trading while the merchant is around.



This room is where any Ren acquired from a trade will spawn. It starts with a Ren stockpile already set up as well.



I also added a bit of extra AI logic to neutral animals wandering around the map. They are now attracted to cages with their preferred foods inside them. You can put items in a cage using the stockpiles.



Additionally, neutral animals will also shy away from your settlers and they should be less inclined to enter rooms. Though, you'll still see them stealing your food.

Here are the notes:

-Added market room. Mechants will now only arrive when this room is placed. Merchants will leave any purchased items here.
-Added vault room. Merchants will leave newly acquired Ren here.
-Improved some performance issues with item tracking and saving.
-Fixed a bug where entities would run in air immediately after climbing.
-New settlements now start with enough containers for all items that are brought. Ex: If no items are brought, no containers are spawned. If 100 items are brought, 2 containers are spawned.
-Fixed a bug where all input would get locked if, in the overworld screen and with an active settlement loaded, you hit the ESC key while selecting a new settlement loadout.
-Fixed a bug where you would see items and entities in lists when they were not present in the world.
-Added some extra zoom levels.
-Fixed a bug where depth 16 worlds were not generating.
-Fixed a bug where the item edit list for migrating wasn't showing all items.
-Fixed several bugs for adding/removing items to the migration loadout.
-Fixed a bug where entities wouldn't spawn correctly when selecting a new starting point on the map.
-Neutral entities will be less inclined to pick rooms as random migration points.
-Neutral entities will now try to avoid player entities.
-Fixed a bug where non-player entities were using custom diets.
-Neutral entities will now be lured to cages with foods that match their diets.
-Fixed a bug where stockpiles showed custom and liquid category types.
-Fixed a bug where an entity being attacked wouldn't fight back.
-Fixed a bug where neutral animals would try to move to herd members that the player owned.
-Fixed a bug where cages wouldn't capture an entity if they had just held an entity.
-Fixed a bug where entities could get stuck in an infinite drop item loop.
-Fixed a bug where scenario entities could spawn and then immediately die.
-Berara trees no longer have leaves around the trunk to allow settlers easier access to cut them down.
-Fixed a bug where the debug paint tool wasn't showing the correct display name for entries.
-Fixed a bug where entities would ignore food/water that was close at hand if they were doing a job which produced food/water. This would result in entities going long distances to do the job, ignore food/water they ran by, and starve/dehydrate before reaching the job.
-XP is now only given to player entities. This is to keep hostile entities from levelling up during combat.
-Fixed a bug where entities wouldn't walk over hatches.
-Distillery blueprints now require stills instead of barrels.
-Cooked foods will now be worth more than their raw counterparts.
-Added sfx for when research is activated.
-Renamed the Water blueprint in the Wellhouse to Draw Water From Well.
-Fixed a tooltip bug which would occasionally cause some lag issues.

One last thing. For this build, I made some changes to clean up unused items (items you delete, items merchants take away, items eaten/drunk) so, there's the possibility you might see some newer weird item bugs. I hope I fixed any issues there, but something like that might appear as jobs disappearing immediately after being placed, or entities getting stuck in item pick up/drop off loops. I'm going to address any severe issues over the weekend. Please let me know if you see anything!

Thanks everyone! Have a fun weekend!

Waylon

Hello!

Here's another small patch to address some more serious issues that I missed with the last patch. This *should* stabilize the build quite a bit, but please do let me know if you see anything serious.

-The blueprint to make sand clods from stone chunks has been moved to the stonework tier in saga.
-Fixed a bug where entities weren't able to find food and water, even though it was clearly present. This happened most often with tamed animals.
-Fixed a bug where snow would not melt.
-Fixed a save/load error.
-Fixed a bug where room jobs were not evenly checked for auto-placement.
-Fixed a bug where freezing water spawned water items.
-Fixed a bug where plants in rooms weren't saving correctly.
-Fixed a bug where water wasn't moving into fire blocks.
-Fixed a bug where entities could not be summoned if a platform blueprint was under the required prop.
-Fixed a bug where an auto-job would say you needed a certain prop to build even if you had it in the room.
-Fixed a bug where skill buffs weren't saving.
-Fixed a bug where the evocation skill wasn't levelling up newly summoned entities.

Thanks!

Waylon