Wild Wormholes!!!
Every playtest, when you go to Space, you’ll find a Wild Wormhole somewhere in the zone. This wormhole takes you to a planet that has never been seen before this test…and which will never be seen again after this test.
That world is using the new procedural generation systems (detailed below) and is a unique world for you to explore.
To use a Wild Wormhole, just fly into it. Once you do, you’ll transport through a wormhole to the frontier planet. For now, you’ll land at a portal (because we don’t have all the other systems we need, including starships, for you to land properly), but after that, you’re on your own.
To return to space, click the portal on that planet normally.
Each wild wormhole planet has its own selection of resources, flora, creatures, and geography.
For now, we’re going to run the wild wormholes every test, but later on, finding a wild wormhole will be an event that will take you to the truly bizarre planets that are outside of Servitor control and the wormhole you use to get there can collapse at any moment, stranding you on the other side if you’re not careful. But we’ll get to that. For now, rest assured that the planet will last until the end of the playtest and feel free to exploit it for its riches.
Procedural Generation of Planets
Previously, we have done a lot of hand-crafting of planets, refining the systems we wanted to use for procedural generation. Now we’re doing it the intended way and are testing it out with the Wild Wormhole feature.
A planet’s Climate (global heat and humidity) is generated at world creation now and that determines the types of soils on the world, which then determines the metals and gem types on that world also.
Flora is now generated in a new way. Bushes and trees now grow in a more natural-feeling way and the algorithms we’re using allow us to tweak it and customize spread patterns going forward.
The sky lighting and sky objects are calculated at time of world creation now. This will continue to improve in various ways in the future, but the system is set up properly now.
World geometry is procedurally generated.
The types of creatures and their placement in the world is procedurally generated now.
Basic Crafting Interface
The basic crafting UI got an overhaul. It’s now easier to see the various types of resources you can combine into a recipe, and more importantly, there is a “Craft Again” button on the interface so that if you want to make another of the same item you just crafted, you don’t have to set up the resources all over again each time. You can craft another item once every three seconds.
Chronophasing
A number of lithify and erode interactions were added to the game so that those two chronophasing modes do something to pretty much any rock or soil you target. You should get far fewer “no interaction” results. A number of the existing interactions were modified to work better with the new world generation routines. For example: Eroding Basalt no longer turns it into Sand. It turns it into Black Soil. You can then lithify Black Soil to turn it back into Basalt.
The F1 screen has been updated to reflect the changes.
Miscellaneous Updates
The Harror was updated with some combat improvements to make it a bit scarier in combat.
The Emberbloom Torch now drops seeds that match the color of the parent plant (so that you can plant groves of the same color if you’d like instead of just all blue).
The Instaformer preview can now accommodate many more blocks. You should no longer be limited to only 100 blocks at a time. In fact, you shouldn’t feel any limits at all except that placement still needs to occur within a Homestead you have permission to build on.
Creatures with the smallest size of projectile no longer create status effects. In other words, if you’re hit with a tiny fireball, it won’t set you on fire. A tiny iceball won’t freeze you in place. Etc.
A few creatures now explode on death. We’ll leave it to your own research to figure out which ones the hard way. 😉
Knockback has some teeth now. The larger the Kinetic projectile, the more knockback that will occur. (And there are some cool animations and special effects that occur with knockback also.)
The UI system is being overhauled. We’re trying to keep it so that you won’t notice many issues, but there may be some oddities here and there. Please pardon our dust. Construction engineers are hard at work.
Thickets are now discoverable with the Harvester and will be added to your collections.
The following recipes have been fixed and are usable now:
Copper Block
Laterite Block
Making Clay from Laterite Soil.
Under the hood, the resource system has been cleaned up and consolidated in preparation for work on Artisan Crafting. Nothing visible in-game yet, but progress is marching forward!
Creatures that end up under terrain somehow should die naturally and then respawn at their Maker later on. Fewer landsharks should be in existence now.
Trees were not randomizing tilt or rotation properly due to a recent bug and this is fixed now. There also should be more variations in many of the trees.
You should not be able to stand inside the large alpine trees any longer. (Collision shape is fixed.)
The issue that caused water to disappear at certain points of the Seasons cycle has been resolved and should no longer occur.
More new bushes and trees have been added:
Spore Pod and Organ Pipe trees (seen on dry, hot planets)
Paintbrush and Funnel Plant bushes (also seen on dry, hot planets)
The Kharvix have appeared as a new foe. They also have a new boss that comes along for the ride.
The very first steps have been taken toward a new First-Person User Experience. Most of it is placeholder, but progress is progress, so you’ll be seeing that when you make a new character. But please enjoy one of your early tastes of Servitors’ callous disregard for your meatbag experiences.
We are pleased to bring you a few new animations: Sliding, and AFK. The sliding happens when you slide down hills. The AFK one triggers if you’re idle too long or if you type /afk. Enjoy!