This week, we’re celebrating some of the great suggestions our community have given us, along with our new ‘Free Build’ tool for our construction mechanics.
You’ll also find improvements to the entire building system with the addition of some new constructible variants and the return of some old ones. To cap it off, we’ve made it easier for those who wish to mod Icarus to access core game data.
Free Build
Builders, get your hammers. We’re introducing Free Building options to Icarus, giving you the ability to construct structures without having to follow the laws of ‘snap-placing’ as you have done so far. This mode can be toggled on and off with the Home key, which will allow you to place your constructible in the exact position you’re envisioning. You can also press End to unfocus the current grid that you are snapping to.
With great power, comes great responsibility, however. Our physics system is still in effect, so be aware that your constructibles will still need to be supported properly to bear any weight or maintain integrity, so pay attention if you want to get creative.
To take it one step further, we’ve also added the ability to nudge pieces up and down (with PageUp and PageDown keys by default) so they don’t clip into the landscape around you, allowing for more refined buildings. Again, you will still have to provide adequate support, so if it’s floating - you’ll have a problem.
Free Build is ideal for the more advanced builders, but ‘snap-building’ will still be the default so don’t worry if you prefer a simpler system - this won’t affect your experience.
Building Improvements
We’ve added/re-introduced a bunch of constructible variants alongside our Free Build option to give you more variety as you take to your hammer and nails. Double doors and windows are now available in thatch, interior wood, glass and concrete and aluminum walls, completing the set.
We’ve also improved the durability of reinforced glass, which will now have the same endurance as stone building pieces, ideal for those stormy nights in the arctic.
As noted in the past we are laying the foundations for how to improve the T4 and above experience. The last six months have taught us a valuable and hard lesson in how we need to approach the late game, how we need to blend the experience of building bases with the excitement of doing missions - but mostly how delicate achieving this is. As such, expect that we have a great deal more work to do here. Improving the building mechanics, outposts, balance, and pressures from enemies are vital steps to take towards improving the late game.
As always, please do let us know both here, on discord, and in feature upvote. We do take all this feedback on board, while still being careful to make cautious steps forward.
Modding Support Efforts
As part of our commitment to make the game more accessible to the community to run servers, evens and mod we reached out on a community subreddit for ideas to help support these efforts. One suggestion was to start shipping "PDB" files with our builds. This gives a rough sort of blueprint about how we built the game, and is useful to those making mods or cheats. Normally these aren't shipped with commercial builds but they will help a great deal with modding. Additionally, they provide more information for us to source crashes and bugs.
We will continue to work with the community to look at how we can expand content that can be changed and manipulated for new and exciting experiences by those in the community.
Our studio Stationeers Team celebrates! Check it out!
We have a number of projects across different teams in the studio, spanning a multitude of backgrounds and experiences. One of the great benefits of this is our teams being able to share ideas and approaches - both those that work and those that don't. All our teams have spent the last six months as part of a process of applying a "lessons learned" from the past to revamp and redevelop our studio, and it's approach to games across all our teams.
Recently the Stationeers team released a massive refactor, changing entirely how the game worked resulting in huge optimizations both for singleplayer and multiplayer. The game is now on a special weekend sale, and rocketed up to the top fifty global sellers. In fact, in the last few hours we sold 1% of the total copies sold ever for the title! We're all enormously proud of the team, and encourage you to check the game out. You'll notice a lot of the same approach to regular content, transparency, and developer relations.
We strive hard to get better at everything we do, sharing our process mistakes and all with the community. We work hard to maintain our independence and open approach to development. If you like what we do and how we work, please do consider checking out our other titles
https://store.steampowered.com/app/544550/Stationeers/
UPCOMING: Work on DLC and major future plans
As part of making our process fully transparent, and making builds easier, you will see a lot of early work being committed to the changelogs that don't appear in the game properly yet. This is important because it means we spend less time making these posts and changelogs, and more time working on the game. Additionally, it means users have an idea of these changes going in - as even though they aren't fully enabled they may cause bugs. So there are several upsides in sharing our interim progress with the community.
I was recently in a meeting watching the work on Mounts, and was extremely excited for what this means for our plans with the DLC. While this might seem odd compared to doing vehicles, mounts offer us a safe interim step as transport options. Additionally it has fitted in very well with our existing systems for animals. We're hoping we might try showing off some of the work in progress on future streams, and share some of our internal processes so you can be part of the journey as we add this to the game.
As noted previously, the major DLC will also be released with a free update to the game, striking a balance to not lock too much content behind a DLC and fracture the community. Additionally, we will be making the DLC as permissive as possible so that if some don't have the DLC it won't cause issues playing.
UPCOMING: Work towards Dedicated Servers and Decentralization
Better than expected progress has been made on this regard, so we are advancing our work towards having some limited external testing with game server providers. We will continue to provide information and discuss on Discord how we are looking at approaching various challenges as we roll this out. Our team, at this stage, are keeping quite an open mind - opting to get the tools working using the rough approaches before settling on firm decisions for functionality.
Community-driven Changes
Our community feedback system FeatureUpvote hit a milestone this week of 100,000 contributions through tickets, comments and upvotes. It’s crazy to us that so many of you have poured your time and love into this game, and we’re celebrating with a slew of bug fixes and changes, as suggested by you guys.
Outpost Drop Zone selection
View on feature upvote
Changed how players return to Outposts instead of always returning by dropship:
- If you leave by "Return to Character Select" button then rejoin you'll return to the place you left like on normal prospects
- If you leave by dropship you'll return by dropship and bring with you the loadout you selected
Concrete Durability
- Increased concrete building pieces durability.
Incorrect Prospect Difficulty
- Fixed incorrect difficulty of Prospect shown in Join Prospect screen
Wood Composter not making fertilizer
- Fixed issue causing wood composter recipe to not process
After 100,000 contributions, it’s safe to say you guys have had a big influence on what we do. Many of the most popular requests have already made it in to the game, such as talent respecs, an in-game timer, Olympus as an Outpost and even carrying torches and picks at the same time. We’ve come a long way since the ‘dark ages’ of blind mining. Thank you all again for your help.
Changelog v1.2.6.98371
- Changed how players return to Outposts instead of always returning by dropship:
- If you leave by "Return to Character Select" button then rejoin you'll return to the place you left like on normal prospects
- If you leave by dropship you'll return by dropship and bring with you the loadout you selected
Free Build/Building Update
- Added ability for players to turn off auto building grid focus(Home Key), to allow players to place building pieces near one another without grid snapping being enforced. Buildings placed on separate grids will not provide structural stability to one another.
- Added ability for players to manually adjust the height of newly placed buildings grids (PgUp and PgDn keys). Buildings must still properly touch an anchorable surface to receive anchored stability.
- The Defocus Grid command (End key), in addition to starting a new grid, now also resets grid auto focus, and resets grid manual height adjustments.
- Fixed an issue where terrain trace hits could fail to snap to buildings and also not allow new building placement.
- Added double doors and windows to thatch, interior wood, glass, concrete and aluminum walls.
- Added keybindings for building Unfocus Grid and Raise/Lower Grid
- Reinforced Glass now comes with a health and wind resistance buffs so its on par with stone
- Removed wood beam variant that is not yet implemented.
- Increased concrete building pieces durability. [Suggestion] Concrete Durability should be higher than stone
- Add average quad reflection strength audio parameter and use for some basic automation of reverb volume - audio team will do another pass for further tweaks. Renamed all quad delay FMOD parameters for better clarity on what they now do.
- Adjusting quad delay from audio group feedback session.
- Adding quad delay tweaks as a starting base point for testing
- Adding new event notify for when a player launches a dropship
- Updating Exploration and Recon missions with extra quest step explaining that launching their dropship will end the mission, removed the interact trigger that was previously used as it was confusing to players
- Committing missing outpost file which was causing a build break
- Fixing up missing talent widget which required pins to be refreshed after modifying underlying data structure
- Adding new outposts table to store extra setup data such as mission / flag requirements to unlock
- Remove unnecessary values from D_Talents json and pointing outpost talents to use the new outpost row handle for setup
- Reducing outpost talent setup to be the base talent setup with the appropriate extra data so we arent storing information no longer required
- Added a description to the crocodile and kea carcasses.
- Fixed incorrect hardcore and insurance settings in Join Prospect screen
- Fixed incorrect difficulty of Prospect shown in Join Prospect screen [Bug] Mission difficulty not visible when joining a session
- Fix crevasse audio not working. BP_Crevasse needed an update in order to work correctly with recent changes to AudioListenerCollider.
- New FMOD parameter which can be used to make mix adjustments when the player is under cover of trees. Updated existing FLOD overlap check behavior to perform an alt test using a smaller radius which seems to do the trick. Not yet implemented in FMOD.
- Set grass density to 0 for unused grass type that was getting generated
- Removed Wood Composter workaround as this has been fixed.
- Further fixes to wood composter processing.
- Fixed issue causing wood composter recipe to not process. [BUG] Wood Composter timer for making fertilizer is broken
- Adding a system which allows adding extra stats to crafting benches if the crafting bench has an available resource of a specific type
- The Glassworking bench can now be connected to a water network
- Adding new stat for Reinforced Glass
- Crafting Glass building pieces at a Glassworking bench which is connected to a water system will be produce Reinforced Glass which increases the building tier by 3 making it the same strength as stone building pieces for stability and weather damage
- Take fractional millijoules into account across ticks. When ticks are very small sometimes the increment is less than one (an int). Also means we now track the displayed remaining build time in seconds more closely. Problems were specifically reported on the Wood Composter.
- Adding some Hint text which displays on the Glassmaking Bench to let users know they can now craft reinforced glass buildings with an active water connection
- Added blackberry item to the project
- Fixed Rain Reservoir not resetting stored water when the floor below it is destroyed.
- Fixed typo in Polar Bear Head Armor flavor text
- Added MF_Dolerite to M_RockMacroMaster
- Ensured all Knives and Axes are throwable, adding support to Shengong, Printed, Machete and Taxidermy items, Fixed some Physics Assets
- Modifying Error Text when there is no stat description from No Stats to Undefined Stat Description and adding a stat description for Overencumbered so the Heavy modifier no longer displays No Stats
- Tweaks to Meta Smoke and Explosion
- Adjustments to Meta Mista and Eruption VFX, also set delay to 0 for SFX
- Improved description on Healing and Strength Boost modules and their modifiers to clarify buffs do not apply to wearer
- Add icons for new Thatch, Stone, Iron, Glass and Concrete Double Door/Window building pieces
- Fix default settings for Icon Scene for Building Walls
- Changed font colour and added background blur to bench description.
- Tweaks to Meta Smoke and Explosion
- Updating Glassworking Bench and Electric Extractor Power and Water Resource Connection Points so they make more sense with the objects they are connecting to
- Fixed crafting bench description UI.
- Fixed glass door texture when damaged.
- Allowed glass doors and windows to benefit from reinforcement upgrade.
- Re-enabling the in world tool tips for resource networks which where accidently removed during a previous refactor
Art
- Added first pass for SW_Cypress_Var1 2 and 3 SpeedTree imposter
- Added validation check function for gfur components
- Edited underwater LOD materials, added a cave, cliffs and decals, added ore deposit and polished riverbanks and landscape, Desert Outpost 007
- Added SW_GroundCoverA with 4 variants
- Updated collision, added RVTs to shaders and tweaked normals on billboard for SW_Mangrove_Var1
- Fix several Enzyme Geyser misalignment with terrain in Olympus
- Fixed landscape blocking cave in I7, Green Quad, Styx
- Fixed shadow geometry meshes for angled stone roofs
- Added missing physical materials to desert impassables