Ahoy mateys!
We hope you all had a good holiday season and are enjoying the new year. We're currently making great progress on the next update and we wanted to go over what you can expect in the next patch and when you can expect it.
Main Quest - Act 3
One of the major features of the next patch will be the third and final act of the main story. This act will conclude the story of the Silvervale Sanctuary and their battle against the Hand of Chaos. This act will also introduce a handful of new quests, brand new and unique points of interests, and new weapons and loot.
Crafting Improvements
Another focus of this update has been to improve the crafting experience. As part of this goal, we've added the ability to salvage weapons and armor. Now, almost all weapons and armor can be salvaged into crafting materials. The higher the rarity of the item, the better chance at rare materials. In addition to this, we've reduced the number of craftable weapons and armor. We realized it was a way too bloated and most of the gear you could craft wasn't all that interesting compared to gear you could just loot. So to remedy this, we reduced the pool of craftable weapons/armor, but added something called a "Crafting Bonus" to craftable gear. This means that crafted weapons and armor will essentially have a guaranteed talent of some kind in addition to their normal talent rolls, making them a bit more appealing to craft.
We've also made some improvements to the crafting user interface. Now you can click on an ingredient in a recipe, say a copper ingot for example, and it'll immediately take you to the recipe for that ingredient, provided it's at the crafting station you are working on.
Combat Improvements
In the next patch we are including some improvements to ragdoll physics, a new attack animation for enemies, and improvements to parrying. Parrying difficulty will now be tied to your combat difficulty setting and we've added a parry indicator that pops up the moment at which the parry window starts. This should help the learning curve and make it easier to predict when to parry an enemy. This indicator can be turned off in the settings as well.
Quest Locations In Your Journal
One feature we've seen requested a lot is the ability to see the location of quest coordinates in your actual quest journal instead of having to find the relevant map in your inventory. We're happy to say this will be a feature in the next update and in addition to seeing the coordinates for the quest, you'll also be able to click on a button in your quest log that will open up the map and put a waypoint at the quest location, provided you have the relevant map in your inventory or at least in your ship storage.
Steam Achievements
The next patch will also include Steam achievements. We've added over 30 new achievements to for you to unlock, some of which will be part of your normal adventure, but others will require you to explore every nook and cranny.
Performance Improvements and Steam Deck Compatibility
We've also been working hard at improving performance in this update, particularly at certain points of interest. In addition to that, we've been improving performance and compatibility on the Steam Deck and hope to be fully verified soon.
Multiplayer Progress
We are also still consistently working on multiplayer and that progress is coming along great. Right now we are working on syncing up dungeons and caves and making sure scene transitions work correctly. So far we've got ships, weather, enemies, loot, animations, the ocean, and the day/night cycle syncing up so it's starting to be very playable.
We still don't have an exact timeline on when you can expect multiplayer to be available but we do feel like we're getting close.
We expect this update to hit the beta branch within the next 4-6 weeks. As always thanks for reading and we'd love to hear your feedback!