Now live! Patch 0.7.6 adds our first set of Steam achievements, auto-looting, new camera controls, lots of new map features, and of course lots of bug fixes.
Please note that due to changes in how things are spawned, resources and encounters may shift around if playing on a save game from a previous version. The new updated methods used to determine town resource locations, for example, will no long be shifted around due to changes in decorations. Predetermined now are, in order: Large encounters, town resources, rare resources, tower ruins. Everything else is still generated on a per-area basis and subject to change if/when changes are made.
Tower ruins are a new addition just this week that have the first interactable source of the "light" currency. These are very common encounters and as such monolith spawns have been turned down a bit. I think it's important to point out that I do hope to use different assets for these rather than the standard building player pieces they're using right now, but I'm trying really hard to stick to my schedule of moving things forward towards 1.0. There is always more to do, and I don't want to get hung up on every little detail.
Speaking of which, I'd like to open up about my plans moving forward a bit. Tomorrow I want to start the process of finishing up the six encounter types that I have planned for progression. Currently you need silkenthread underwear to survive the temperature in certain areas and I want to expand this system with further "ranks" of materials.
Caves, Goblin Dungeons, and the soon to be Undead Dungeons will all be Cold 1, meaning that normal health/energy/mana regeneration will stop unless you have silkenthread underwear on. At the end of each of these 3 encounters will be special resources used for crafting the third rank of materials.
With rank 3 underwear you can proceed to temperature 2 zones: floating islands, lava caves, and water caves. Each of which will in turn have another set of special resources that will allow access to temperature 3 zones, though I don't plan to work on temerature 3 zones just yet.
Once these encounters are in and working I want to move into 0.8 where I plan to revamp the combat math, attributes, and skill trees, as well as finish the job and class trees. During this phase I'll also be working on combat animations and controls, as well as monster skills and abilities.
Moving then into 0.9 I largely plan to focus on improving performance, the user interface, color schemes, better controller support, as well as finishing up multi-lingual support. During 0.9 it's most likely that I'll be adding a main story quest line, though not set in stone.
The real goal is to get a version 1.0 game out that is bug-free, stable, and worth 15-20$, keeping in mind that nothing is capable of pleasing everyone. It's a really hard subject for me to talk about openly, but I haven't really made much profit from early access these past years, and have really just been funding myself with the money I make. Which is pretty cool, don't get me wrong, but Solace Crafting could be so much more if I had enough money to pay for an artist and an animator, for example. That's the real goal for a 1.0 release Q4 2021, because there's still a LOT of stuff we CAN add to make the game everything that it can be. Luckily 99% of the Steam user base has still never heard of Solace Crafting, so there's still a lot of potential to make that dream come true, and is why I think sticking to the core plan towards 1.0 is important.
All in all, progress continues, and there's a lot to look forward! As always I welcome everyone's comments on direction and features. We get into some great discussions in Discord. And a huge thanks to my Patreon supporters that very seriously make all the difference in allowing this project to continue!
Happy gaming!
Condensed patch note v 0.7.5.0 -> 0.7.6.0
- Added 62 Steam Achievements
- Added procedural tower ruins with lootable light sources
- Added rare stalk and timber nodes to underwater areas
- Rare resources and town resources are now generated on a per terrain, deterministic system
- Increased the default spawn rate of rare, elite, and legendary resources
- Changed 3 large cacti to trees for rare spawns
- Removal of items changed from displaying on the right as red to using the color rarity of the item
- Rare resources are now spawned 1 per terrain on default settings, resulting in less uncommon resources
- Toned down swamp flora a bit
Multiplayer
- Home solaces can now be set in multi-player on a per player basis
- Resource scanners now work in MP
System
- Upgraded terrain flattening to allow multiple inputs during generation
- Improved several AI scripts performance
- Added three new world settings and console commands: /showBiomes /showEncounters /showResources
- The will no longer be entirely visible if /showBiomes is disabled in world settings
- Large encounters and town resources can now be seen anywhere on the map if /showEncounters is enabled in world settings
- Rare resources can be scanned anywhere on the map if /showResources is enabled in world settings
- Increased inventory item tier and amount text resolution and added a shadow
- Added the ability to zoom the camera in and out when in targetting mode
- Added the ability to raise and lower the came with shift+mouse wheel
- Added shift+interact to auto-loot monsters
- Camera state and position in regards to player are now saved
Latest patch notes to live/beta:
- Fixed the possibility of tower ruins spawning too close to terrain borders causing errors
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
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