Update 0.6.2 is finally here! Hurray!
Sorry it's been a while since the last one... Quite a lot of December seemed to get eaten up by various not-so-interesting admin/business-y things I had to deal with, and not as much development as I'd like. But as soon as January arrived, I got back into Maximum Development Mode, starting work on all the new content I want to add. A lot of the major new stuff isn't ready yet, and I don't want to rush things. I'm planning to get a bunch of new things finished and then launch them all at once, rather than trickle them out, because most of them are related to each other in one way or another. Anyway, rest assured that I'm still hard at work on new biomes, gear, points of interest, random events, beasties etc... It just might take a little longer than normal before it all launches in one big content explosion.
However, I've also been steadily making a bunch upgrades and improvements to the existing content, and I decided it was probably time to get those changes out there while I continue to work on the more exciting things :)
So, here come the details...
----- HEALTH REGENERATION AND FOOD BOOSTS -----
I know early-game health regeneration was causing headaches for a lot of people, so I've changed a couple of things to hopefully help smooth out the difficulty curve:
1) You now slowly regenerate Health automatically while your Hunger is above 90%. It works slightly differently depending on the difficulty setting:
EASY MODE - As Hunger ticks down from 100% to 90%, it's transferred directly to Health. In other words, you'll heal 10% during that time.
NORMAL MODE - The healing is half as effective in Normal Mode... As Hunger goes from 100% to 90%, you'll regain 5% Health.
HARD MODE - There's no automatic healing.
2) Health gains from food have also been boosted a little. Nothing major - just changed some of those 1-health foods to 2's and 3's.
I'm pretty sure that these Health changes will need some more tweaks and balancing after I've had more time to repeatedly test how it impacts the game, but I just wanted to get this version 1 Health Regen system out there to see what you guys think.
Thanks for all the suggestions and contributions about this on the forums, guys. Much appreciated :)
----- SAND TREES, ICE TREES AND OTHER TREE STUFF -----
The family of mutant trees has grown! Alongside your collection of Meat and Leather Trees, you'll now be able to grow some Sand and Ice Trees.
I've also slowed down the growth of those special trees, just a little, and here's why:
Normal wooden trees can drop a maximum of 5 Wood once they're fully grown, but these special trees just drop a maximum of 3 of their related loot. However, they were growing from the 1-loot stage to the 2-loot stage too quickly - in about 3 days - which meant you could effectively double all of your Meat and Leather supplies every 3 days, which was a little overpowered!
One of the other issues with the trees was that you never really knew how fully-grown they were, especially tricky and frustrating with these special trees, because they don't naturally spawn in the world so you had nothing to compare them with. But, hopefully, this won't be a problem any longer...
Now, when you look at a tree and the little "Chop Tree" text appears, it'll change based on how fully-grown the tree is, so you have a better idea of how many loot it'll drop. And it works like this:
"Chop Small Tree"
Normal Tree: 1 - 2 wood
Special Tree: 1 loot
"Chop Tree"
Normal Tree: 3 - 4 wood
Special Tree: 2 loot
"Chop Big Tree"
Normal Tree: 5 wood
Special Tree: 3 loot
----- CRAFTING TWEAKS -----
Plant Pots no longer require a Workbench, and the Alchemy Table doesn't require as much Leather.
----- ALCHEMY TIPS -----
Speaking of the Alchemy Table, you can now interact with the book on the table to read a little guide about flowers, plant pots, and transmuting.
----- NEW RECIPES HIGHLIGHTED -----
When you craft a structure for the first time and get the "New crafting recipes unlocked!" message, each of the new recipes will now be clearly marked in the Crafting Menu until you hover the mouse over them.
----- COMBAT LOCK-ON SYSTEM -----
Pressing Shift to lock on to enemies has been improved a little. Your current target now has an arrow over its head, and the camera should track them a little quicker. Let me know what you think.
----- LANDSCAPE COLLISION UPGRADES -----
I've gone through all of the landscapes in the game, searching for and updating particularly simple collision geometry around the cliff faces, which I believe was the main cause for the sneaky beasties you might have noticed walking through walls (Snakes and Pigs, mainly). I still haven't been able to recreate the problem myself, but I'm hopeful these changes will have gone some way to fixing the issue. I'm sure I'll have missed a few simple bits of collision dotted around the place, so please do let me know if you encounter beasties going through walls. And, ideally, send me a save file right next to where it happened! :)
----- UI MODE CAMERA CONTROL -----
Previously, when you had any element of the user interface open - like the Inventory, Crafting Menu, Fishing UI - you couldn't move the camera at all. Well, you can now... Yay for being able to keep an eye out for those Slugs while you're fishing :)
For keyboard users, use the movement controls (default: WSAD) to spin the camera around. But there's one special case: If you've got the Crafting Menu open, "W" and "S" will switch between the crafting tabs (as they always have), so you can't move the camera up and down. I couldn't decide whether that was an issue or not, so let me know if you think it is!
For gamepad users, you can control the camera with the Right Thumbstick. But there's a similar special case: If the mouse cursor is hovering over the Crafting Menu, up and down on the stick will scroll the recipes up and down instead of controlling the camera.
I think this system still needs a few more tweaks to make it work a little better/more naturally (and maybe a Preference to disable it completely), but I didn't want to delay this update any longer just to mess around with this some more. Let me know what you think anyway!
----- AUTO-CLOSE UI WHEN DAMAGED PREFERENCE -----
Previously, if you got attacked and damaged while you had part of the UI open, like the Inventory or Burying Menu, you had to manually close it before you could defend yourself. I've now changed it so that all menus will automatically close if you take damage.
I think it works better like that, but if you prefer it the old way, you can tweak a new option in the Settings > Preferences menu to change it back to how it was.
----- CAMERA SENSITIVITY -----
The Camera Sensitivity slider in the Settings > Controls menu was a little too subtle. I've now ramped up the range considerably, so hopefully everyone will be able to get the camera moving as fast or as slow as they want :)
----- FISHING BAIT COUNTER -----
If you've got some Bait in your Inventory when you go fishing, you'll now be able to see how many you've got left alongside the Fishing UI.
----- RANDOM UPDATES/FIXES -----
- Added a few new Tips that can appear up at the top-left. And they now animate/fly in, so hopefully nobody will ever miss that "hold Interact to auto-collect" one ever again! :)
- And I've added a few hints/little bits of guidance about what new players might want to craft first to the bottom of some of the Crafting Menu pages, which should also help clarify that a lot of the recipes are initially hidden. But, just like the other tips, you can disable them in the Settings > Preferences menu.
- When you cook "Cooked Meat", the on-screen message now simply says, "Cooking Meat", rather than "Cooking Cooked Meat" :)
- Fixed an issue that could cause you to get trapped in a certain structure immediately after building it.
- Improved the spawning logic for some of the points of interest... Hopefully no more spawning halfway through a wall.
- Fixed an issue that was preventing "Escape" from backing out of some of the UIs properly.
- Patched up a hole in the world... Thanks, Highrider!
- Tweaked a couple of tooltips.
- The Metal Detector now digs about twice as fast. And it's green light has been changed to orange/yellow (the green light made it harder to see the digging target sometimes).
- The Snow Yeti mini-boss is now a tiny bit slower at attacking... Attack animations running at 90% normal speed so you've got a fraction of a second more time to dodge.
- Slug Beasts automatically killed by The Sword In The Slug will now properly drop some loot.
- Sort of fixed an issue that allowed you to literally get an infinite boost of upwards physics from the Jet Pack.
- Fixed an issue that could cause the Hand of God to appear while you were busy floating around, being a Stonehenge ghost.
Phew!
As always, if you have any feedback or encounter any problems, just let me know!