Hello Shopkeepers!
We hope you are all having a great week so far.
We've got a new patch for you, which has some highly requested features and improvements, both for standalone lobbies and dedicated servers, as well as several fixes to improve your experience.
Highlights
- Craft from storage option
- Backup save system rework for increased stability
- Full headless server support for dedicated servers
- Improved server management access for dedicated servers
- Various optimizations
Craft from Storage
Many of you have said this was the number one feature missing from the game, so we're incredibly excited to bring it to you now. We hope it smooths out crafting and makes interacting with a lot of different systems more enjoyable.
Thank you to everyone who provided this feedback, especially those of you who spoke to me on the Steam Forums about how to best add this feature. We appreciate it!
Crafting stations will now be able to utilize resources from any container within ~45m of the station.
This quality of life improvement only applies to items crafted directly by you. So, if you want to automate things without your input, you'll still need to set up your employees to do so.
When discussing this feature with some of you, we also heard that some players prefer the immersion and micro actions of the current system, so we wanted to make sure to provide the ability to turn this feature off.
You can use this toggle to turn off the ability to craft using resources in containers in the Gameplay Settings.
This can be configured for each player individually, so if your friend wants to craft from storage but you don't, they can turn it on, and you can turn it off and still play together!
In dedicated servers using the permission system, crafting from storage is bound to the Container Access permission.
So if someone has container access in an area you manage, they will be able to craft from storage with containers in your area. If you want to prevent them from doing so, make sure to limit their container access.
Craft from storage excludes any container that has the Output Items toggle turned off in the employee settings from craft from storage eligibility.
Reworked Backup Save System
With this patch, we also completed a major overhaul of the backup save system.
Previously, the game would keep your last 3 autosaves and allow you to roll back your world or character to them if you ran into any issues or needed to roll back for any reason.
However, these autosaves were overridden fairly frequently, which meant that sometimes an issue already infiltrated all 3 available backups by the time it was discovered.
To address this, we have moved 2 of the available backup saves into their own section and set them up to be manually saved and loaded.
Now you will have access to your latest autosave as well as 2 manual save slots that you can manage and name however you'd like.
This updated save system can be found in a new Save section in the ESC menu.
You can keep these manual backup saves for as long as you'd like or save over them as often as you'd like.
Maybe you want to make a manual backup before logging off every night. Or you want to make one before embarking on a risky journey. It's totally up to you!
Using these saves often will hopefully address any lingering rare issues with the save system if you run into any issues with your progress.
Hopefully, you will have 2 meaningfully placed backups and your last autosave to roll back to.
Save File Thumbnails
You may have noticed in the new backup save system that the UI has been updated with some additional information to help you figure out which file you want to load, including an image of your character where you made the save.
We also expanded this functionality to the loading UI for the main menu, so you can identify which file is which and remember which character you were using on that file more easily.
World Map Shop UI
To help you more easily keep track of your shops and check in on their status from wherever your adventures take you, we've improved the shop UI on the world map.
You can now see your shop name and star rating at a glance. You can hover over your shop icon to get a readout with more details, including your shop level, average beauty, and, most importantly, open status.
We hope this smooths the flow for checking in on your shops and managing worlds with many different shops. It also gives you a little reminder of how well your shopkeeping empire is running while you're out adventuring.
Particle Effect Optimization
As you know, we are always looking for places to improve performance.
We've received feedback from those of you with specific performance issues and are looking into various solutions to improve them both in the short term and with longer-form reworks.
A short-term improvement that should help a lot of lower-end systems and specific use cases where a lot of things are happening on screen is a rendering optimization for many of the particle VFX throughout the game.
We have reduced the rendering cost of these systems by about 10x with very little visual change.
This optimization will be most noticeable when there is a lot of VFX playing, but it will also help a bit for generic performance as there are many minor particle effects that play throughout normal gameplay.
The effects that received this optimization include:
- Smoke from fires
- Explosions
- Particles from damaging and destroying items
- Particles from picking up and placing items
- Particles from blood VFX
- Particles from dashing
Mouse Button Bindings
Another usability feature a lot of players have requested is the ability to bind controls to their mouse buttons.
This patch adds the toggle to the controls tab in the options menu. If you enable it, you will see another row of binding options for every available action that listens to the mouse buttons specifically. You can set an additional binding to any action for a mouse button.
This way you can bind reload to MB5 as well as R, or whatever configuration you'd like!
🖥️Dedicated Server
New Tool Version: win_release_net48_v1.0.0-beta4
Main Game Version Compatibility: v0.14.9.33 - v0.14.9.39
This patch features a substantial number of usability updates to our dedicated server tool to accommodate more setups and environments and make sure it is easily usable.
To get more information on the usage of these new features, please check out the Updated Dedicated Server Guide in the guides section!
We also recently updated the Dedicated Server tool to show up in your Steam Library under the Tools section.
So if you did not love using SteamCMD to access the server, you can now install it directly from your Steam Libary!
Full Headless Support
Dedicated servers can now be run on a headless machine without needing a console to control it. All you need to do is launch the .exe with some extra arguments.
Server Admin Client
You can now assign a list of SteamIDs as admin players of your server.
Admin players can open the server console in the game while playing and execute all the available commands on the server side.
If you are running a full headless setup, make sure to assign at least one admin so that you can control your server mid-session.
Server Configuration File
You can now save and start your server from a configuration JSON file with one extra launch argument.
You can use this whether you are running a full headless setup or not. Check out the guide for instructions on how to create and load one!
Server Game Version Compatibility Tolerance
Your dedicated server will now match a range of main game versions instead of checking for an exact match.
This means you will no longer have to close down your server to update the game for minor hotfixes.
You can see the range of compatible game versions when you open up the server.
Major updates will often be outside of this range and require an update and restart of your server in order to add new content or large reworks.
But this system should make maintaining a dedicated server across smaller updates a little less of a hassle.
Community Corner
User That Guy shared this incredible build on the Smithrock Shop Plot that I wanted to showcase for you all in this patch.
The complexity and detail of this compound are really well done here! It looks very cozy on this rainy day in the trees. Nice work, That Guy!
User lil beeb shared this very intricate brickwork build on the Dojo Shop Plot that I thought you would also want to see.
The beams definitely look necessary to hold this marvel up, but they're done in a way that adds an incredible flair to the build. One of the most interesting exteriors I've seen. And so tall, too!
If you have a cool build or screenshot you want to share, feel free to post it in the #share-your-creations channel on our Discord.
v0.14.9.33 Patch Notes
➡️ Changes
- Added a craft from storage option to the menu
- Added a new manual backup system for save files
- Added thumbnails to save files
- Added functionality to bind actions to mouse buttons
- Added the shop name and star rating to the world map
- Introduced a hover display for shops from the world map
- The building hammer UI now displays 5 items across to reduce scrolling
- Slightly reduced the forward movement caused by the casting animation for spellbooks
- Slightly reduced the damage for the charged attack on katana weapons
- Removed some water and waterfalls in the Desert
⚙️ Optimizations
- Optimized the loading and unloading of the research tree to reduce lag when using it
- Greatly reduced the rendering impact for many particle FX throughout the game
- Optimized saving and loading from file operations
🗣️ Localization
- Improved the German translation based on player feedback
🛠️ General Fixes
- Fixed an issue where the police could continually attack players after they were killed
- Fixed the building UI being cut off on certain resolutions, such as on the Steam Deck
- Failing to join a lobby will now time out the user and kick them back to the menu instead of getting stuck
- Fixed an issue where a host could see their own lobby after quitting and rejoining multiple times
- Fixed the new dialogue audio setting not adjusting some dialogue audio properly
- Fixed entering in player chat box to type does not block player input and movement after a map transfer
- Fixed some incorrect colliders in the Desert
- Fixed the bridge leading to the golf cart shop
- Fixed Samantha Cole's interaction name
- Updated some knowledge text in the Steal of a Deal quest
- Adjusted the held position for the antique cash register
- Fixed some missing wooden stair colliders in a cave in the Snowville Outskirts
- Fixed a case where a client could still see the minimap UI after placing a minimap item from their hotkey bar
- Fixed a case where clients would see employees with messed up clothing colorways
- Fixed various disconnect exceptions
🖥️ Dedicated Server
- Full headless server support
- SteamID based admin list for users who can launch the console and control the server completely from inside the game
- Server config file support
- Broadened server game version tolerance
- The change lobby size command can now be used properly anytime
- Fixed joining a dedicated server via friends list bypass server configurations like password and cloud character etc.
- Added console command to adjust server auto save interval seconds
- Adjusted save load commands to match the new backup system in the main game.
- Dedicated server builds switched to IL2CPP. This should boost your server performance. Let us know if you run into any issues.
- Fixed join by host name input field character limit preventing you to type in long host names.