Update 0.8.1 has landed, so Steam should lovingly hurl it at your computer soon. And here's what's in it:
----- CONSTRUCTION MODE -----
You can now press "C" (or "Select" if you're a gamepad kind of person) to activate Construction Mode. While active, you can move any structures you've crafted by interacting with them - just hold down the Interact button and drag them wherever you want.
I separated out this moving functionality into its own mode so it didn't interfere with any of the regular functions of structures, like lighting a Campfire or aiming a Spotlight.
And Construction Mode also has another use...
----- CRAFTABLE HOUSES -----
In the "Structures" section of the Crafting menu, you'll find you're now able to build a "Modular House Tile".
When initially crafted, it'll just be a simple square of flooring. However, activate the new Construction Mode as described above and Interact with one, and you'll be shown a bunch of options allowing you to move/rotate it, add walls, corners, a roof, and also fiddle with some colour sliders to create a global style for all your house tiles.
These tiles neatly snap together as well, so it should make it relatively simple to expand your house as and when you have the resources to spare.
You'll also find you can craft a "Door" now as well. I'm sure this is pretty obvious, but this is a door that auto-snaps on to the walls of your Modular House. Using it basically just teleports you from one side of a wall to another. Simple, but it does the job for now! And, on the plus side, beasties don't understand how they work :)
This is very much Version 1 of House Building, and it won't offer much to you other than a roof over your head and a windowless room to put your structures in, but it does feel nice to have a place to come home to after a hard day's exploring! But it's probably wise to stick to bungalows for now as you can't craft stairs :) I imagine I'll add furniture, lights, interior walls, windows, and continue to expand on this in other ways in future too (like automatically changing an indoor campfire into a stove or something), but hopefully this gives us a nice starting point.
A couple of not-very-interesting limitations that I thought I should mention anyway:
- Once the game detects there's a roof over your head, it hides any weather effects that are going on in the outside world, because snowing inside is not cool. This is fine as long as your house is fully closed off with walls, however, if you've left a gap in a wall, you could technically see the weather visibility toggle on and off as you walk under a section of roof. Unfortunately, there isn't much I can do about that without redeveloping the whole weather system, and that's a pretty large task; a definite possibility for the future, but I think I can live with this for the moment while I focus on more important tasks.
- There are a couple of things that can result in some lighting weirdness when inside a house:
A) If you have shadows set to "Low" in the Graphics Settings (which disables them altogether), you might get bits of light seeping through the walls where the tiles snap together. I'm still researching this to see if I can find a fix, but so far it just seems to be a quirk of the Unreal Engine. Bright Spotlights pointing at your house can make this worse, too.
B) Even with shadows on, if you have a particularly large house, you might see light creeping under walls in the distance. Because the world is completely dynamically lit (which is generally the biggest hit to performance in the game), the level of detail you see in the way the world is shadowed changes based on the distance from the camera, so if your house is big enough, the walls on the far side of your house will only cast lower-quality shadows, resulting in potential lighting weirdness.
C) And the inside of your house will still be affected by the day/night changes to global illumination, meaning it'll still be darker inside your house at night than it is during the day, but I suppose that'll make more sense once I add windows.
----- OTHER CRAFTING THINGS -----
The Stone Wall has been completely redeveloped, with the new version replacing the old version. No longer do you craft individual pillars that auto-connect together; instead, you craft a full section of wall which contains 3 pillars and 2 connecting walls. You can use Construction Mode to grab the pillars and drag them around; the connecting walls expand as necessary (up to a maximum length), and the pillars snap onto any other pillars nearby, so I think this makes it much easier to make, modify and expand the walls around your base as needed. Also, the walls are taller now, so no more Slugs leaping over them (unless they manage to climb over one of the pillars, which are two-tiered to allow you to climb over them). Any of the old style of wall you have in your save games will still be loaded, but you won't be able to build any more of them. If people really miss the old style, just let me know and I'll have a think about putting them back into the game, but, for now, consider them a casualty of early access!
Literally just before launching this update, I was testing the new Stone Walls some more and noticed that I don't appear to have updated the tooltip for them in the Crafting Menu, so it still shows the old Stone Wall tooltip. Didn't seem worth delaying the update for a few more hours while I updated that, repackaged the game, re-uploaded etc., so just ignore that for the moment :)
You can also build Spike Traps now as well (which can be reset after they've been sprung). They don't do much damage (20, like a single hit from a powerful weapon), but it's amusing to get a beastie to chase you through a bunch of them and die without ever needing a direct whomping from yourself. Personally, I combined them with the new walls to make a nice "Corridor of Doom" :)
Oh, and you can now use a Smelter to turn a Gold Ore into a Coin and back again.
----- NEW POINTS OF INTEREST -----
Several new points of interest have been added to the game (you'll need to start a new world to see these as they're spawned and have their locations randomised when the world is initially generated). A couple of minor ones that'll be dotted around the world in multiple places, and a few unique ones...
----- TAME A TRUSTY STEED -----
As far as I'm aware, "steed" specifically refers to an actual horse, so that headline above isn't strictly true. But, as part of one of the new points of interest, you can now get yourself a mount and go riding around the world, climbing any cliffs you encounter along the way :)
----- EVENTS -----
I've added a couple of new random events to the game, and gone back over the existing events to make sure that the addition of houses with roofs hasn't broken them too much. Also, side note: I hate the word "roofs". To me, the plural of "roof" should be "rooves", as I think it was once upon a time. Ah, the good old days!
----- THE PROBE CONSOLE -----
The Probe Console has been expanded on and given it's own UI. Locations it can find are initially marked "?????", which are slowly unlocked as it searches around and finds things. A word of note: One of the locations it can track down for you is a new point of interest which won't exist in older saves, which means part of that UI will forever be "?????" in those save games.
----- COLLISION UPGRADES -----
I've carried out some more collision upgrades to hopefully prevent beasties from going through the landscape and walls. This issue was something I wasn't ever able to recreate, which made tracking down the cause an absolute nightmare, however, this time, I found a way to recreate the problem, and the changes I've put in place have stopped it happening for me, so I'm hopeful this will have fixed it for other people. Please feel free to let me know either way.
I'm aware of a few other circumstances in which beasties can sometimes sneak through some of the details around the landscape (such as the big icy pillars in a snowy biome, for instance), and I'll be tackling those issues soon, but this fix mainly relates to the landscape - the actual floor of the world. Frog Beasts might still suffer from the problem, though, because they use a different system of movement to most of the other beasties, but, assuming this fix does actually solve the issue for people, I'll update the froggies as well to get it fixed for them too.
As part of this fix, the way the beasties launch themselves at you during an attack (or launch away from you after receiving damage) has been changed, so you might notice beasts being a little more "jumpy" or sliding around slightly differently than before.
----- NEW ACHIEVEMENTS -----
I've also added a few new Steam Achievements that relate to the new points of interest.
----- RANDOM UPDATES/FIXES -----
- Changing equipment now cancels interacting, which fixes a problem that could potentially result in a precious weapon breaking instead of your tool (Thanks for the heads-up, Eric!).
- Updated the Fuel Cell tooltip because it lied (Thanks, Stylez!).
- Changed the order of the logic that runs if you die. It now updates your saved amount of XP at the same time as deleting your save game. Previously, it deleted your save game and then only updated your XP a few seconds later, so if the game crashed between those two events, you'd lose your save but not get the XP you deserved (Sorry about that, John!).
- Added a tooltip to the Brightness setting that I added in the last update.
- Slightly tweaked the potential loot from crates.
- Fixed a couple of issues with the Rabbit Beast's teleport.
- Updated the Frog Beast's dive attack particle effect a little, because it looked 100% lame. Now it only looks 97% lame.
- Lowered the intensity of Spotlights.
- You can now bomb floating crates to get the goodies out of them. Just don't blame me if you get nibbled to death by the sea monster thing in the process.
- Added an on-screen message when someone tries to call the number of the phone they're currently using to help explain how they work.
- Added a message to the warning screen that's shown when entering a boss's lair if you've already completed it, just to let people know that they'll be repeating content.
- Fixed an exploit/save issue with the Pyramid event. And you can now bomb the little statues if you want. Previously, they did an excellent job at shrugging off explosions because I'm stupid.
- Made the UFO a little less persistent in its abduction attempts, and it'll generally leave you alone pretty quickly if you cower inside your house.
- The Obsidiman and the giant Snow Yeti now detect when you're in a house, so they shouldn't punch you through the walls. They'll still lurk outside forever, though, waiting to squish you.
- Lowered the probable lifespan of the Tornado a little (again), and it won't actively follow you or suck you up if you're inside your house (although its random movement pattern means that it may still stray through your house and look ridiculous in the process, but it won't affect you).
I think that's everything! Thanks to anyone else who provided feedback but I forgot to mention here.
As always, if you do have any feedback or encounter any problems, please just let me know. And feel free to come and say hello on the Wrongworld Discord!