Version 0.4 is here, hot on the heels of 0.3. This one is all about Crafting, built right on top of the existing professions system, with a big batch of new content to fill out your world alongside it. I turned this one around quickly and have been working hard, so let me get straight into what has changed.
The headline feature. You can now design your own crafting professions, build out recipes, and watch players go hunting for materials to craft the items you have defined.It builds directly on the professions feature, so gatherables and raw materials finally have a purpose beyond sitting in a bag. Watch your Auction House spring to life as those mats take on a new role as crafting materials, with players gathering, listing and trading to feed the recipes you have designed. The whole economy loop starts to turn on its own.
The Classes screen has been reworked to be a far more faithful in-game view, and the Abilities screen has had the same treatment. Both now mirror what players actually see in the world, so what you design lines up with what you get.Abilities and professions also gain a cast bar, giving casts and gathering actions a clear, readable beat rather than resolving instantly.
A fresh wave of content landed to give your world more variety at a glance:New gatherable nodes and models. Fishing, crystal, mushroom, logs, berries, fiber and dig sites, so there is far more for players to go out and collect and feed into crafting. New tiles. Mud, Meadow, Ice and Blight, giving you more range when you paint your world. New decorations. Flowers, bush, boulder, palm, cactus, torch, crate, barrel, fountain, dead tree, gravestone and standing stone, for dressing everything from cosy towns to haunted ruins.The main menu logo has also been updated to reflect the new branding.
A batch of fixes and tidy-ups went in this update:Range is now an editable property on spells and abilities, so you set your own reach. Ranged and magic attacks now properly engage from a distance rather than closing in. Crafting tables can now be placed in Cities and Inns, the same way flight paths can. Friendlier starts. Sandbox now begins with a few simple items pre-defined in the item editor to give you a starting point, and you can delete them whenever you like, just as you can with the starter classes. Those starter classes have also been trimmed to Warrior, Priest, Ranger and Mage when classes are unlocked, so a new world stays clean and easy to build on. Less spam when painting. Error messages now appear only when an action actually fails, rather than firing on every tile you hover over.Readability fixes. The red unhappy-player thoughts had poor contrast and were hard to read, so those have been cleaned up. The white wishlist and join Discord text on the main menu also had contrast issues on hover, and those have been fixed too.
v0.4 gets crafting into your hands and rounds out the content you need to make it worthwhile. Next up is the big one: Mounts are coming in v0.5. That update is set to be the Steam Demo version, so it is getting a lot of polish alongside the new feature, and I am really excited to have mounts ready for it.Here is a sneak peek of the what's to come...As always, feedback is hugely welcome, so let me know what you craft and what you would like to see next.Thanks for playing.