Hi everyone,
In this experimental build we focused mainly on fixing bugs. We also added exciting new features too, requested by the community. These are: Hill Island, Degrading Skills and the long awaited Item Holders.
To switch between stable and experimental game builds make sure game properties in your Steam client are set to either "Experimental" or "None" (which is the stable branch)
Hill Island
You can now explore a brand new island of type “Big Forest Island with Hill feature”. Besides enjoying beautiful scenery views with various Hill types, this feature offers new possibilities to build a homestead in different weather conditions: While the wind is stronger at the top of the hill, the foothold of the hill can provide shade and protection.
“The newly added Hill Island feature will provide a plethora of possibilities not only for us as developers, but also for the players. Imagine building your homestead at the top of the hill, with a fresh water pond, where you can fish fresh water fish and use in new cooking recipes. Or imagine building your base at the foothold of the island with a beautiful waterfall in the background, providing a gravity fed piping mechanism to water your garden. How cool would that be? Peter, Developer & CEO”
Degrading Skills
A true game changer is the new skills mechanic, where acquired skills slowly degrade if not used. This makes the game more challenging and the achieved skill levels more valuable. Once a skill starts degrading, regaining it back happens much faster, up until it reaches the initial level before it started degrading.
Example:
- Player achieved diving skill level 7
- Player doesn’t dive for a longer period of time
- The diving skill slowly degraded to level 6
- Player dives again and regains diving skill level 7, which happens much faster than it initially took to achieve diving level 7
- After regaining the skill back, gaining higher levels happens at the usual normal pace
“Implementing the mechanics of degrading skills is a topic that we were talking about internally for a long time and I am very happy to see it finally come to life. Sure, this is the first iteration and it will require balancing based on player feedback, however, this new mechanic will enable us to build interactive quests and tutorials around it and we hope it will motivate the player to explore new areas and value achieved skills even more. Radu, Game Designer”
Item Holders
Your survivalist life just got easier and more organized. Clean up around your base, bring resources from other islands back to your homestead safely or keep them nice and tidy attached to your raft.
The following item holders were added:
- Small Stick Holder
- Fire Stick Holder
- Leaves Holder
- Coconut Holder
They work like the Trunk Holder and can be attached to the raft too.
Surprise Feature
Can you guess from our teaser video what this surprise feature is about? This one goes hand in hand with the new Hill Island. We will let you find this one out on your own ;)
Changelog:
New features:
1. Hill Island
2. Skill Degradation
3. Small Stick Holder
4. Fire Stick Holder
5. Leaves Holder
6. Coconut Holder
Fixes (highlights):
1. Object picking up issues
2. Object dragging issues
3. Broken raft modules after loading the game
4. Too dark ambient lighting at night
5. Sometimes disappearing collectibles and sunken ships
6. Sometimes disappearing dropped objects
7. Raft disappearing when exiting the Cluster perimeter
For the complete list of all (~38) bugfixes please see our hotfix list (english only):
Hotfix 1
Hotfix 2
Hotfix 3
Hotfix 4
Hotfix 5
Hotfix 6
Hotfix 7
We will continue prioritizing fixing new bugs while also revisiting older ones too.
The next planned additions are: Mud material, Primitive Stove, Water filtering, Reworked tutorials, Map UI, Old Telescope, Old Pistol, Spear, Dolphins, Simple Quests, Building modules aging and many more.
More new features are in the development pipeline and we will share them with you once we start actively working on them. First, we will deal with the implementation of the planned features and fixing bugs.
We have set up a Patreon for those who wish to support game development. Announcement page is here: Patreon News.
Thank you for your patience and for your constructive feedbacks helping us to get rid of the issues as fast as is possible.
Do you like our game and want to help even more during development? We look forward to every positive review posted on our Steam page and thank everyone who decides to support us along the way!
Please be aware that during early access phase game code could change as much as affecting gameplay when loading/saving savegames from earlier versions. To always be on the safe side make sure to start a new game with each update. Thank you!
G4GTeam.
If you have any further questions do not hesitate to ask us. We will try to answer your questions in detail.
gamers4gamersteam.com
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Special thanks to Carlos Garcia aka "Malkavnos" for helping out with the Spanish translation on short notice.