Jul 28, 2022

4.1.0 Graphics Upgrade, Combat Adjustments, 100+ Changes

Lodestar - BlueFire

Hi all, we've been releasing regular hotfixes to the game and listing the changes in Discord. We're going to be pushing more of these announcements to Steam as well but this will cover all past hotfix patches. We've broken out what was in hotfixes for those of you who have been following on Discord.

This patch has over 80 changes! Including visual upgrades, bug fixes, performance, and player requested features/changes. We've fixed a lot of the pain points players have addressed in just two weeks. We'll continue listening to this feedback but you should also expect more content in terms of puzzles and upgrades as well in the next few weeks. Thank you for your early support of Lodestar and hope we can continue to meet and exceed your expectations!

Features:

- The main ship visuals have been overhauled. Would love to get feedback on this!
- Production UI changed significantly to better help players understand how it works.
- Mining ship controls have been reworked. Should control much better.
- Sniper now has a zoom.
- Lore spots have been adjusted to better reflect the lore.
- Visuals of planet 1 have been changed significantly to give it more life and better shadows
- Irradiated area on planet 2 now looks more dead and dangerous

Hotfix Features:

- Keymapping on nearly everything should now work. If yours are still broken please delete your file found at
C:\Users\shaun\AppData\Local\Lodestar\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\Input.ini [replace shaun with your windows user]
- New icons for all Plants and None Icon
- Shotgun has been reworked. Now should work better at ultra close range.
- Biotech UI reworked to make it more clear
- Aim Mechanic: Shotgun and SMG can both be aimed (default right click). Aiming reduces bullet spread. We will expand this mechanic to additional weapons.
- Bug Reporter: You can now report bugs to us directly in the game! Bug reporter will:
- Gather your in-game location
- Get your key bindings, configs and logs for Lodestar
- Immediately autosave and attach that save to the report (if you are host).

NOTE: We will keep the Report-A-Bug channel open if you'd prefer to use it, but the in-game Bug Reporter will give us a lot more information up front to help understand, reproduce, and solve your issue and is the best way to let us know of problems moving forward. The in-game report also directly pings us in Discord!
- The music on the ship has been updated! Each level of the ship has a slightly different flavor of the music to help keep things fresh.

Performance:

- The game should load significantly faster now
- Performance on Planet 3 should be comparable to other planets now
- Performance in the ship should be much higher
- Performance when having many production buildings should be much higher
- The game should no longer hitch on mining ores and asteroids.
- Looking at the drop prod should not cause as much of an FPS drop.

Player Feedback Changes:

- The beginning of the game missions now require much less waiting!
- Grappling hook locations have been added to planet 2 to help guide players to boss in a subtle way
- Increased Autosave timer to 5 minutes to prevent all autosaves from being overwritten during a crash.
- Waypoints on early missions around the ship will now help guide the player.
- When the camera gets close to the player they will no turn slightly transparent.
- Lots of small UI adjustments
- Skipping the intro sequence now is a bit more clear, showing a progress bar filling up.
- Some rocks on planet 4 are no longer ridicously shiny.
- Buildings now materialize faster! (5s-1s)
- Healshrooms that you can mine now appear on planet 1

Hotfix Player Feedback Changes:

- Added that the scanner for equipment upgrades is in cockpit to reduce player confusion with the mining ship scanner.
- Bolt Rifle cost reduced 2000 to 500 zinc plate (10k ore -> 2.5k ore)
- Blue crab health increased 300->400
- Cooker inventory reduced from 100 to 10 (to stop players from losing all their mushrooms unintentionally, use a storage crate to buff storage)
- Production buildings now show two decimal places of precision if under 10 total is in its current inventory to better show production on slower buildings (like the cooker)
- Power from forging levels reduced by 80% while I take time to rebalance it.
- Dishes should have a bit more reasonable numbers.
- Falling into the 4th boss will now kill you instantly rather than a slow death
- Increased cost of some T3 upgrades to encourage players to move forward to earn more mining power.
- Reduced strength of later level damage upgrades to prevent 1-shotting in more cases.
- Reduced forging power on all upgrades to encourage building more production buildings
- Reduced movement speed buff from 5% to 2% so upon unlocking all 20 you are no longer Sonic.
- Fixed a pricing error on Tier 5 health regen.
- Cookers will now play a "ding", stop spinning, and light up your cooked food once they run out of ingredients or fill up.
- Production buildings that cannot fulfill their recipe cannot have the boost button pressed, making it more clear when you're out of ingredients or the building is full. (e.g. if you run out of ore in the Foundry)
- Shotgun muzzle flash improved
- For clarity, you can no longer click "Collect" on empty production buildings (button is disabled until some output is stored)
- Waypoints for the planet 1 mission should help players better navigate the first planet.

BugFixes:

- Fixed bug on load that would cause you to have to reconfigure buildings to get correct figures.
- Fixed bug on load that could cause buildings to not appear
- Fixed bug on load that could cause equipment to not appear on the hud.
- Fixed bug on joining that could cause joining players to lose their progress if game saved while they joined.
- Inventory will no longer show tin ore when you have nothing
- Fixed bugs around aiming and changing your equipment
- Fixed a bug that could cause players to get stuck on Mushroom quest.
- Health bars should no longer hang around after a boss dies
- Fixed a crash on clients when falling into abysses
- Shotgun shells should now look correct in multiplayer
- Dead players and bats no longer fall through planet 3

Hotfix Bugs:

- Fixed Hole Near Grappling Range Upgrade
- Several locations fixed on planet 1 where you could get outside the map
- Several locations fixed on Planet 2 where you could get outside the map
- Scanner should be more reliable on clients.
- Negative numbers now display better
- Players joining games should no longer freeze on load
- Unstuck will now unfreeze you character if you get the bug on rejoining a game where you float and can't move. (you can also try loading the game with them in the lobby) Thanks everyone for reporting and helping us narrow down.
- Unstuck will now remove infinite grapple hangtime
- Fixed Infinite Grapple Hang Time (please report if you see it come back)
- Crystalline Creeper renamed to Crystal Creeper
- Fixed a bug that would cause some resources to push off the right side of the screen when collected.
- Fixed crashes that could occur when two players fell in the same lava pit
- Fixed bugs where client lava pit effects could apply to server and vice versa.
- Fixed crash that would occur on phase 2 of the third boss when playing multiplayer
- Fixed typos in missions
- Planters and Production should now show correct resources on a loaded game
- You can no longer lose focus and fail to close production menus.
- Fixed a bunch of lighting artifacts on the ship which also increased performance
- Fixed a bug where things previous discovered could appear as undiscovered on load
- Production Particles should be more reliable
- Buildings should now materialize properly on clients when returning to the ship.
- Fixed collision on some coral on planet 2 that accidentally had it turned on instead of off
- Foundries will now appropriately show production smoke when the game is loaded if they are producing something.
- Foundries will now appropriately STOP showing production smoke/sparks when running out of ingredients or filling up.
- You can now press "C" to collect while the production menu is open
- Habitation rooms now have proper clipping and cannot be entered. If you built something in there, consider it part of a museum now!
- Shotgun should be much more consistent for your buddies that connect to you with slow internet or from far away.
- Buildings must produce at least once before being collected. Essentially, spamming "Collect" on buildings is no longer faster than normal building production speed. PROTIP: Building multiple buildings helps you produce way faster!
- You can now properly rebind Z (better AZERTY keyboard support)
- Fixed bug where opening the ESC or O menu while in a ship would prevent all game interaction, forcing you to restart the game.
- Fixed edge case where widgets for production could still appear when out of range.

What we're working on now:

- Updating to Unreal Engine 5
- Localization (if you want to help feel free to reach out to us on Discord)
- New puzzles!
- Visual upgrading the planets to match the new fidelity of the ship.
- Planet 5

Thank you again for all the feedback and reviews. A big shoutout to those using the bug reporter and helping provide feedback on Discord as well. We hope to see you there to help us continue to make the best game we can!