Caves are in! But only just! This is the absolute first wave of spelunking and only incoporates the cave generation, transportation, saving and loading, and so forth. There are no minerals, monsters, traps, nor special rooms to be found down in the caves yet!
In short, Solace Crafting up until now has been entirely based on terrain management. Where you are, what's there, how's the weather, all of these things no longer matter underground, but the same systems all have to be maintained and work nonetheless. For example building, dropping items on the ground, teleporting across long distances. There are a lot of things that are moving and hopefully not running into each other in the background and getting all of those to work properly with an entirely different system is not that easy.
Having said that, things look to be working well. Caves will only appear on new chunks! Chunk sizes are 8km x 8km. That means you may need to travel out a bit somewhere new before you see any. They will show up on the map just like towers do. Or you can always start a new world. If anything goes wrong you can always recall or use the /stuck command to return to the surface. For that purpose I would suggest that you do not set your home solace to an underground solace (yet). Though backing up your main world is always a good idea.
Some caves are long and skinny, some are big and fat, and there are some things that I'm aware of:
- Caves always go downward, and they always go West. This is temporary.
- There is only one texture being plastered onto everything. This is temporary.
- The camera tends to bleed through the floor when touching it letting you see through the walls. I will fix this.
- Torches do not stack, and I don't think they work from the hotbar. These I will change so they do/can.
- Ladders are needed to go backwards at some points where starting a whole new structure isn't really worth it. I will implement this.
- Caves do not currently shift for floating precision correction. Meaning it is possible to travel so far that things will start to jitter (10-20km+)
Gem veins, lava, traps, and some new monsters are planned as well as some hand-made rooms, as well as procedural dungeons made of brick and other "man"-made structures. Any other ideas/needs?
In the morning I am leaving town for a few days to celebrate my sister-in-laws wedding overseas, and will not be able to patch anything new until I get back. I will check the Steam forums and our Discord channel at night. I hope that despite the lack of decoration, everyone likes the new cave system and can see somewhat where I'm going with it!
v 0.2.2c - 2018.08.01
- Fixed solace storage not accepting resources of tiers above 999
- Fixed not being able to construct resource scanners past tier 999
- Added caves in place of half of the towers (will probably be more like 1/5 in the future)
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. The beta is only available to Windows 64-bit users.