Get your lactose on for August's official content update! After the feedback we got from last month's update, we've been doubling down this month on milking the most out of the game's features to increase replayability, moment-to-moment thrills, and addressing the community's most pressing desires and concerns from our recent balance changes! Grab a carton, and let's dive right in!
Features
Above: Our Cave Generator at Work
Revamped Procedural Generation! - By far this month's biggest focus was giving our procedural generation systems a much-needed kick in the udder! Both of our exterior Trench and interior Cave algorithms got a well-deserved revamping - changes including but not limited to:
- Diversified Levels: Each level generator has had a sizable new sampling of level styles and layouts added to generate from, ensuring more diversity and unpredictability for future playthroughs! This includes new claustrophobic areas that require players to crouch through, and open platforming areas to leap through!
- Multi-layered Caves: Caves can now be generated in a variety of different sizes and layers, ranging from small crab hovels to sprawling multi-floored caverns with branching paths!
- Sub-biomes: While exploring the Trench, you may occasionally come across smaller colored sub-biomes, restricted to generating certain kinds of wildlife and obstacles, to further diversify your moment-to-moment explorations.
- Spawn grouping: Individual cave chunks are now able to better control their spawning habits, creating more interesting clusters of rewards and danger at a whim. No longer will everything always be spread out thinly like butter, but in clusters! Come across a horde of crabs one moment, and a treasure trove the next!
Custom Game Options! - By far one of the most commonly requested features, Custom Game Options are finally here! No longer will your games be at the developers' mercy, for these first four option sliders (more to come) will allow you to customize just how challenging you want your adventure to be! Play your way!
The Custom Game Options are available to be enabled by the Host when in a game Lobby. WARNING: For balance reasons, Leaderboards and item unlocking are disabled when Custom Game Options are enabled.
Back-End Data Gathering! - While it may not be flashy, our newest build now has the ability to send the developers relevant in-game data so we can better track in-game events for important information! This data includes things like Connection Success Rates, Disconnects, Game Length, and so on!
With this juicy new information, we'll be able to better track and prioritize network stability and game balance across our whole userbase, and not just the vocal minority. As much as we appreciate having such an active community, this is the best way we figure we can ensure the game is still in a good place for our less-vocal players.
New Spawner Enemy Type! - A new class of enemies has started to appear in select biomes of The Living Infinite - the relentless Spawners! From hatching Egg piles in the Arctic, to miniature crawling Hives in the Infected Depths, Spawners will ensure that those who dare venture alone will have their work cut out for them...
New Relics to Discover! - Just what it says on the tin! A heaping helping of lore-filled relics have been added to The Living Infinite to be discovered, some of which will even help illuminate some of our future content...
Revamped Fuel Mechanics! - Last month's Fuel mechanic was quite the divisive one among our players; with some folks appreciating the new challenge that came with managing a new resource, while others felt like it was more of an annoyance. After reading a ton of your guys' feedback and deliberating, we think we may have hit the sweet spot with the mechanic!
Now no longer does Fuel automatically get spent when the engines are turned up, but instead, only gets used when the Driver wants to put the pedal to the metal, so to speak. (Or when firing an EMP)
When driving, you can BOOST using Fuel by holding down the Fire Button (Spacebar by default).
We think this new implementation makes the use of fuel much more deliberate, and honestly all-around more fun! We hope y'all will agree when you start using it yourselves!
Milky Cosmetics! - Last but not least, a few new cosmetics were added in honor of this month's update! Get your farmer tan on with the new Farmer Attire and Farm Hat, or Graze and Dive with the Bessie Mask!
Bug Fixes/Improvements
-A serious relay connection issue was found and fixed. The relays should now be correctly picking up the slack when other connection types fail (read: better connection success rates)
-Unity updated to 5.6, giving us the far improved new network transport system. This should dramatically reduce disconnects caused by packet buffering (read: more stable in-game connections).
-Updated our connection tool to get the latest fixes in Open NAT/UPNP functionality (read: better connection success rates)
-Updated our punchthrough facilitator to match the new connection tool update, which should increase punchthrough rates (read: better connection success rates)
-Cave enemies' target detection code has been greatly optimized and now does much fewer raycasts and no longer uses search functions to find players
-Fixed a bug where barrels were spawning their loot into the ground
-Updated Steamworks .NET plugin, which should reduce "Steam integration not initialized" errors
-Cheat checker should no longer be incorrectly flagging players as cheating (as always, if it does incorrectly flag you, please let us know on the forums so we can track down any edge cases)
-Fixed the loud time traveler sounds when the game is about to loop
Balance
-All base submarine speeds without fuel use have been increased
-Fuel consumption rate is now higher to accommodate for higher base speeds and boosting being optional
-Level length per water layer decreased by 20%
-Maximum caves per water layer decreased by 33% to match the lower level length and huge cave possiblities
-The camera following the sub now zooms in when the sub moves faster to help more careful shooting at low speeds and more hilarious crashes at high speeds.
-Cave enemy count now scales with player count
Other
-You can now rebind the driving and cannon rotation controls in the options menu (useful if you want to un-invert them!)
-All voice/text chat can be enabled or disabled in the options menu
-Removed the old IPv6 warning from the Play menu
-Added a new warning in the Play menu to tell players if they have a VPN network adapter turned on (this causes joining online to fail most of the time)
Community Highlights
::: Player of the Month :::
July's Player of the Month is... ADcrafter!
ADcrafter has been one of our most active community members since they first jumped into the game, and have been a great help in keeping the spirit alive during this busy month for us, where we were unable to deliver either an in-game event or a Crate Update to help with the mid-month lulls. ADcrafter has, in the meantime, been collaborating with other users on fan works, giving constant feedback/suggestions in the forums, and has been helping others troubleshoot their problems, including walking folks through on how to send us output logs (a great deal of the logs we have gotten this month came through thanks to ADcrafter's help, and have helped illuminate some new issues some of our newer players are experiencing!) Between ADcrafter's persistence, kindness, and creativity, ADcrafter has done more than enough to deserve this month's Player of the Month award.
As usual, our Player of the Month ADcrafter will be sent 4 copies of WNTGD as a reward for their efforts.
::: Community Content Highlight :::
There's been a lot of cool Deeper-related fan content this month, that I'm not even sure where to begin!
First up is this freakin' awesome 3D model of WNTGD's Tesla Gun, posted in the Official Discord by Discord user Silver0034. Its accuracy is top-notch and I want a printed model of this thing for my desk like, yesterday.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/319482214222004234/336904435194134539/unknown.png
Next up, "Lazy Robo" - a fan art piece by Steam user Legend of Jordy, depicting a We Need To Go Deeper styled automoton resting it up on the shore, drinking a nice cool glass of Fuel. This piece is both incredibly charming and quite faithful to the game's style!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1076637389
Next we have this lovely instructional video by Steam user Eok.Zero on how to properly use We Need To Go Deeper's Brig system - for griefing your friends. ːsteamhappyː
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=975346732
Next, this screenshot of an expertly synchronized team death by Steam user yuda0907 is oddly satisfying:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1082094487
... While Steam user Solger Barky-Sharky's snapshot of their crew's encounter with two giant boarding Boars is a pretty gnarly shot in its own right.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1080479651
Finally, we have a few highlights from the Steam Forums as well - with Steam user JJXDoge having recently put together an impressive Crevette submarine in Minecraft:
http://imgur.com/a/LWbu7
...and Steam users ADCrafter and Freemankiller at it with some more excellent collaborative fan fiction - this time with some additional classic literature influences thrown in for good measure!
http://steamcommunity.com/app/307110/discussions/0/1456202492186289176/
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As always, let us know what you think of the new update, and thanks for continuing to help us keep the WNTGD community strong and growing! We're 6 months out from when we first launched on Early Access now - and still going strong! In a large part thanks to all of y'all and your support! Keep helping us spread the word as always, and happy diving! :D
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Hotfixed changes since update:
-Fixed snail spawner type enemy producing way too many snails
-Fixed the cheat checker flagging catalog purchases as cheating (whoops!)
-Changed spawn distribution/number of enemies in caves to reduce "bald spots" where cave chunks contain nothing and prevent crazy overpopulated caves
-Fixed cave music not playing upon entering a cave
-Balanced EMP to no longer bias enemy spawning against the sub (fuel is the new cost)
-Fixed a painting in the Perle appearing behind a girder
-Slightly optimized cave spine destruction