Hey Shopkeepers!
We're incredibly excited to bring you another patch today!
We've got a couple of cool new items that should help you light the way on your adventures and some all-around improvements to various systems!
Highlights
- Hip lantern accessory
- Option to keep items on death
- New light spell
- Cloaked electricity wiring
Hip Lantern Equipment
One piece of feedback we often get from newer players is that maneuvering and surviving at night can be difficult.
While you can always sleep in a bed to avoid the night, sometimes you're out in the middle of an adventure when dusk falls, and you have to get home in the dark. Torches are great for this but can be a little hard to juggle alongside your normal weapons and equipment.
In the late game, you unlock the waist light, which solves a lot of this for you, but we wanted to introduce an earlier game tool for hands-free light: the Hip Lantern.
Put together with scrap and charcoal, it's not as powerful as the waist light, but we hope it will help fill the gap for your nighttime adventures while you work on researching up to the late game.
The key binding for turning on and off the waist light will work for the hip lantern as well.
Keep Items On Death Option
We're adding an option to disable dropping your items in a death box so you can customize your experience if you want to.
The intended goal of the death box mechanic is to have players eventually overcome the challenge through dimensional insurance with Ambrosia. More recently, we have also made some improvements to the quality of life for this mechanic with the introduction of Burke's death box recovery service in Kazai Village.
However, we are big proponents of allowing you all to play the game the way you want to and have the most fun. So, after hearing that this feature was still frustrating to some players, we added the option to turn it off this patch.
When you're setting up your lobby, tick on the Keep Items on Death option, and then when anyone in your lobby dies, they will keep all of their items and not drop a death box.
The 20% Telemed fee from your held money remains right now.
Burke and Ambrosia will know if you have this setting on so you don't inadvertently waste money on death box related features with this option enabled.
This setting has also been enabled for the Peaceful Shopkeeping Experience preset in dedicated servers.
Light Spell
While we were creating the hip lantern, it got us thinking about what other useful illumination tools we could add. One that we ended up really enjoying is a light spellbook.
This spell can be purchased from Rohbar Doun or Lili Hunt.
It provides more comparable light to the waist light but is more area-based than directional.
While you have to cast the light spell every 5 real minutes, it doesn't take up an accessory slot, and it has some additional arcane functionality!
By default, the light orb will follow you once you cast it, but you can cast again using the spellbook to send the orb out in front of you around 10-15 meters.
While the orb is moving away from you, you can right-click with the spellbook to stop it from moving and right-click again to call it back to hover near you.
With the orb hovering near you, you can cast it to an enemy where it will hover near them to light up your target during a battle.
You can also disperse the orb manually by right-clicking when it is hovering near you while you are standing still.
We've been enjoying using the spell as hands-free light, a scouting tool, and a support role in combat at night. We hope this adds another exciting spell to your repertoire.
Expanded Healing Spell Functionality
For the light spell, we added additional input functionality to spellbooks. This has allowed us to implement a very commonly requested spell-related feature: self-healing for the healing spell.
As before, you can left-click to cast the spell and heal your friends, but now you can also hold block (right-click) to heal yourself!
Healing yourself will consume hunger as all spells do, but this change brings a lot more use and fun to this spell.
Cloaked Electricity Wiring Tool
Another frequent request we've seen is the ability to hide electricity wires, and we're excited to say that this update adds a new wiring tool that creates invisible wires!
Visible wires are meant to give some fun depth to setting up your electricity grid where you have a purpose for wiring your electronics out of sight and in maintenance gaps.
However, many players wanted a more straightforward way to hide the wires.
That's what the Cloaked Electricity Wiring Tool allows. Wires placed with this tool are invisible and can only be seen when holding a wiring tool.
Visible Electricity Wiring Tool Range Increase
To give the normal wiring tool its own niche and reward players who tackle the challenge of visible wire management, we have also greatly extended the wire length for the visible wiring tool.
The cloaked wiring tool keeps the same length as the wiring tool had in previous versions of the game.
Old max wire distance (front) vs new, longer max wire distance (rear).
We hope that this means the most optimal wiring solution will be combining visible and invisible wires.
You can use visible wires in your backroom warehouse areas for the longer range and then transition to invisible wires for the last leg to get to the electricity item inside your shop itself.
Stamina Potion Rework
We've felt for a while that stamina potions were not as useful as the other potions and consumables. To improve their usefulness, we've reworked them to give stamina over time, similar to health potions.
This should allow you to drink stamina potions during a fight - or even before - and benefit from improved stamina regeneration during your combat or test of endurance.
Updated Hot Spring VFX
We saw that the Island's healing hot springs weren't getting the use they deserved, partially because the previous VFX looked a little foreboding and scary.
They should now look a lot more like a hot spring in which you want to rest and recover.
The VFX looked this way following an optimization pass many updates ago, and for this update, we were able to overhaul the visuals to look a lot more steamy and inviting without compromising on the previous performance optimizations!
Come on in, the water's warm!
Community Corner
For today's community corner, we have an absolutely mind-blowing build to share from player Tayron LAYDES.
This huge carbon-iron skyscraper is an engineering marvel.
Inside, each floor has rooms with different themes, from cafes to fish markets to concert halls. And you can't forget the bathrooms, which look pretty nice themselves.
The employees are even dressed up like important NPCs, which is super cool to see.
Tayron LAYDES says they're not done decorating the build, so hopefully, they'll share it with us again when it's all finished. We are very impressed.
If you want to share your creation, post it in the #share-your-creations channel on our Discord. 🔨
v0.14.9.4 Patch Notes
➡️ Changes
- Added a new hip lantern accessory
- Added a new lobby option to disable dropping items in a death box on death
- Added a new light spell
- Added a cloaked electricity wiring tool
- The healing spell can now heal the user
- Stamina potions now refill stamina over time
- Overhauled the Hot Springs VFX
- Torches now craft 3 at a time so players can get more of them more easily
- Candles now use plant fiber instead of charcoal to craft so players can still make light sources without charcoal
- Increased the light amount and cone size for the electrical waist light so it is still a major improvement over the hip lantern
- Increased the damage for the Kinkara-hitsujikai-tanken (Leyasoon's dagger)
- Slightly increased the damage for the Kinkara-hitsujikai-tachi (Leyasoon's sword)
- Increased the HP for the scrap bar item so it drops more scrap when destroyed
- Removed the sound that plays when equipping an item that has been enchanted with radiation after player feedback
- Added large bamboo cluster seeds to the seed shop in Kazai Village
- Adjusted the orientation of the pet rocks when placed in displays so they face outward
- Plot Seller NPCs no longer run in fear when they see violence
⚙️ Optimizations
- Optimized electricity icon and wire rendering and batching
- Optimized electricity power propagation logic to improve loading time for shops with lots of electrical items
- Upgraded and optimized some packages that were causing some stuttering lag
🛠️ General Fixes
- Fixed an issue that caused save file metadata to get scrambled, causing the game to not recognize your save file in the load screen
- Fixed various issues with crafting employees not simulating properly
- Improved the employee simulation logic so they no longer favor specific randomly selected displays, improving the distribution of items sold
- Fixed some simulation timestep inaccuracies
- Using the healing spell on an NPC should no longer cause them to get mad at you
- Fixed the reading lamp sometimes becoming invisible in shops
- Fixed Clay Moore introducing himself even after you have already met him
- Fixed a bad Chinese translation in Ambrosia's dialogue
- Fixed various disconnect exceptions
🖥️ Dedicated Server
Because of the new items and system changes to things like electricity, we have incremented the version compatibility for dedicated servers with this patch.
You will have to save and close your server, update the console tool, and rehost to play with users on version number 14.9.4
📜 Known Issues
- If you rename your save file, there is a chance the game will no longer be able to load your save from the load game menu. We discovered this was an issue that was live on the previous patch as well, so if this has happened to you already, the next hotfix should resolve it for you. So, for the time being, please do not rename your save file.
- Electric furnaces are sometimes not simulating properly while you are away
Hotfix 14.9.41 is now available that resolves these issues.