Hello everyone!
This one starts with an apology.
Steam Workshop content could not be imported. At all.
If you subscribed to something and tried to load it, the button did nothing — no error, no message, nothing.
It had been that way for longer than I'd like to admit, and I only discovered it because I went to play someone else's work and couldn't.
A Shoutout, and a Sorry
Creationskelly uploaded content to the Workshop. I subscribed to it, went to play it — and couldn't.
I'm sorry it took me this long to notice. You put the work in, published it, and the game quietly refused to load it.
And having now been able to play it: it's excellent work.
I especially want to call out that they translated it themselves — both English and Simplified Chinese are included, which is considerably more effort than most Workshop content in any game ever receives.
Right now, both languages appear together in the same text, so everyone gets a combined version regardless of their language setting.
That's my fault, not theirs.
The Workshop currently has no way for an author to provide English and Chinese as separate localized fields. I'll be adding proper per-language support, so players will see whichever language they're actually playing in, without authors having to choose one language or put both into every field.
Why the Import Was Broken
The game was calling Steam's Workshop functions by the wrong names.
Not one of them.
Most of them.
Every incorrect call quietly returned nothing, so the game simply concluded that there was no Workshop content available to import — and gave you no indication that anything had gone wrong.
Finding the full problem took several attempts because each layer of the failure was hiding the one underneath it.
That's also why I've changed more than the broken calls themselves.
Workshop importing now reports every step it takes in a log panel directly inside the Workshop screen.
If importing ever breaks again, you won't be left wondering whether the button did anything. The log is selectable and includes a copy button, so you can paste the entire result directly into a bug report.
Quest Item Handling Is Now a General System
While playing Creationskelly's content, I also discovered a gap in the way the engine handles quest items.
For the individual quests I've created myself, I've been building safeguards into their quest logic for some time — controlling when their items can drop and cleaning them up as part of the quest's lifecycle.
What I hadn't built was a general set of protections that automatically applies to quest items themselves.
That distinction became important with the Workshop.
A Workshop author shouldn't need to know about — and manually recreate — all of the special handling I've been putting into individual quests. Without those protections at the engine level, a Workshop quest item could drop before its quest was accepted, remain after the quest was completed, and leave the player with no normal way to dismantle, sell, or destroy it.
So I've moved those protections into the general quest-item system.
Now:
Quest items only drop while you're actually on the quest that requires them.
They're removed when you complete that quest.
Any orphaned quest items already stuck in your inventory are cleaned up the next time you load.
You can manually destroy a quest item if one ever manages to slip through.
Manual destruction requires confirmation first. If the item belongs to a quest you still have active, the game also warns you clearly before allowing it — because deleting something you still need should never happen because of a mis-click.
This means Workshop authors now get these basic quest-item protections automatically, without having to build them separately into every quest they create.
Other Workshop Fixes
Workshop quests could be accepted repeatedly. Completing one wasn't properly recording that you'd already done it. Fixed.
Publishing created a brand-new Workshop item every time. If you published a realm twice, subscribers to the original version would never receive the update. Publishing now updates the existing Workshop item instead.
Subscribed items appeared as names like Steam Workshop Item 3777069852 instead of showing their actual titles. Fixed.
The Workshop closed itself after every import. Importing several pieces of content meant reopening the Workshop every single time. It now stays open and confirms each successful import in place.
A CLEAR LOCAL PUBLICATION FILES button has also been added for authors, allowing you to clean up leftover local publication records created through repeated publishing.
Finally, the Obsidian Forge guide realm is no longer enabled by default.
It's a small teaching example intended to demonstrate how Workshop content works, not a full piece of playable content. It was nevertheless appearing as a portal in Oakhaven — which I suspect led at least a few of you to walk through it expecting considerably more than a tutorial example.
This Isn't the Workshop Overhaul
I also want to set expectations about what this update is — and what it isn't.
This pass was primarily about making sure the existing Portal Workshop actually works and remains usable. The much larger overhaul is planned for after the Hero systems are in place.
There's a reason I'm waiting.
The systems I'm currently building for Heroes are going to substantially expand what Portalborn itself is capable of doing. Once those mechanics exist, I want Workshop authors to be able to build with them too, rather than redesigning the Workshop now and then having to redesign it again immediately afterward.
After Heroes, I'll be coming back for a much more comprehensive Workshop pass, with plans including:
much easier quest creation
support for far more kinds of creations and objectives
access to newly implemented combat and gameplay mechanics
full level-scaling support
proper per-language authoring
a substantially better creation interface
The long-term goal is for the Workshop to expose far more of the same tools and systems I'm using to build Portalborn itself.
For now, though, the priority was simpler:
If someone takes the time to create and publish something, other players should actually be able to play it.
Thank you all, as always.
And Creationskelly — thank you for creating something for Portalborn, for going to the additional effort of writing it in both English and Chinese, and for the patience while I discovered that my own Workshop system wasn't actually letting people play it.
Your content didn't just give me something new to play. It exposed several places where the Workshop wasn't yet ready to properly support the people creating for it, and the game is better for having found them.
— TheHand