Tons of exciting new features and improvements are part of this large update! Wanted to prioritize a bunch of the bigger community requests over the past few weeks, needed to do a ton of rendering updates and optimizations to get it all in. Excited to get this out and see what everyone thinks!
A few QoL features have been added that are new settings options in the gameplay settings screen. You can now change the camera angle to be lower to see more in the distance (has a small performance hit), you can enable speed-up functionality on almost all interactions like chopping or building, and you can enable "quick pickups" to make the picking up or gathering process instant.
Features:
- New camera angle gameplay setting - a slider that adjusts the camera angles ingame. The "higher" side is the old camera angles from before. Keep in mind, lower angles require more to be rendered in the distance and will result in poorer performance.
- Quick pickups - a new checkbox that allows instant pickup and gathering of items
- Speed-up all interactions - new dropdown setting with "off", "some" and "all" options. The default and previous level was "some" which includes crafting, harvesting, and repairing. The "all" option allows you to speed up things like chopping, building and taking apart buildings.
- Predator culling - killing predators enough will now prevent them from re-spawning in an area for a certain amount of time. This feature still needs a lot of testing and balance, please provide your feedback on how it's working!
- Added a "camera cursor movement" gameplay option to control how much the camera moves as you move the mouse. Setting it to 0% will prevent all movement
- Added a blood spray effect when attacking creatures
- Added a progress bar above the player showing the strength of held-down attacks (since not everyone was aware of this before)
Performance:
- Removed useless physics events for items near bushes (ex. in forests) that was eating up CPU for no reason
- Reworked cloud rendering to be a bit more performant
- Increased performance of rain particle system greatly, but with the loss of rain drop effects on the water - will be added back later
- Enabled multi-threaded CPU-time rendering on the Windows build to increase performance when many objects on screen
- May be a performance hit from the new SSAO effects and new fog rendering system
Visuals:
- Better SSAO effect, but may have more of a performance impact - medium vs. high quality will have more of a difference now
- New fog effects written from the ground up to account for lower camera angles - still requires tweaks and updates to look better in the future
- Tweaked water rendering to look better at the shore when looking at an angle
- Adjusted rain rendering to look more consistent regardless of time of day
- Increased ambient light at night
Balance:
- Drastically decreased bear health
- Increased axe damage
- Reduced amount of iron ore drops generated near outcrops
- Increased pickaxe effectiveness
- Reduced material requirements for stick wattle walls
- Increased mud requirements for wattle & daub upgrade
Fixes:
- Fixed placing dirt with shovel not showing dirt on the terrain
- Fixed more repair menu refreshing inconsistencies
- Fixed wattle & daub wall being shorter than the wattle wall it upgrades from
- Fixed building process not showing clay bricks when building the clay brick based buildings
- Fixed stack overflow crash when moving an item from within a held leather bag into the hand-slot the bag is in
- Prevented case of double-click of a two handed container like a crucible or clay pot from mistakenly placing it into the inventory and emptying it
- Fixed issue where using a workbench and selecting a tool causing that tool to stay selected when opening the crafting menu elsewhere, making the recipe break in certain cases
- Fixed stockpiles from being placeable at far distances from the player
- Fixed fence posts from placeable with less than 4 sticks in inventory
- Fixed bronze anvil popping out from the clay mold when it's done hardening
- Fixed the autosave timer so that it factors in main menu time and paused time properly
Other changes:
- The speed-up process now adds a radial blur effect to the screen to better signify when time is sped up
- Bronze axe blades, saw blades, and bronze knife now are 50% condition out of the mold, and can now be sharpened up to 70% with a sandstone chunk
- Added a ranged attack cursor when holding a thrown item like a stone or spear
- Adjusted a few animations and events so that chopping and attacks are triggered at the exact right time
- Increased strength of the "smooth ground" option with the shovel
- Added "Repair..." context menu option for items that have a repair possible
- Reduced the disease exposure screen effect when eating lightly contaminated foods like rabbits. It now scales properly based on the level of infection from the food eaten