Its been a busy month, a little too busy. I was pushing myself hard to try and get multiplayer ready in some early form for the upcoming Survival Fest that Aiyana is a part of but I pushed too hard and needed some time off once I realised I just couldn't hit the deadline. So instead I stopped and focused on what I could get done in time, hence this update a little out of nowhere.
I've known for quite some time that Desert spawn chances were not as high as they should have been but in order to fix it means changing with biome generation formulas, which is something I try to avoid because it corrupts existing worlds. With the new wood types ready and the event looming it felt like the right time to fix this but in an effort to reduce how often worlds need regenerated I've packed as much as I can into this update.
First up, biome generation has changed to be Much more consistent so it should be far easier to find rarer biomes. Next, this coupled with the new biomes made finding all the crops a bit too easy so to compensate biomes are now about 30% larger.
Finally, this prompted me to add a slider to let you customise biome size to be up to 10x larger than the default.
One of the earliest ways I generated biomes was based on temperature and rainfall data. The idea is that each biome has a temperature and rainfall value that determines how it spawns. E.G a Desert is high temp and low rain. Jungle is high rain and temp. Tundra is low temp and low rain. Etc, etc. The idea behind this is that so long as temperature and rainfall are generated in a nice smooth flowing formula, then you would never see unnatural things like a cold Tundra beside a hot Desert. The problem with this though is that although its more realistic, its worse for gameplay. Biomes either need to be very small so you can get good variety or you walk forever to find the rarer biomes. Up until now I had already started to ignore these systems more in favour of better gameplay but this update takes it a step further so that these numbers are almost meaningless now. Instead biomes are setup to spawn with consistent percentages, this way your worlds will always contain 5% Desert rather than getting unlucky and almost never seeing them. As a result temperature is becoming almost meaningless in Aiyana. The values will jump around wildly and wont really match the nearby biomes much either so I will likely remove temperature in a future update. Currently all it influences is where you can grow trees so I will come up with new constraints for them instead.
Five new biomes have been added. They are:
Bamboo Forest
Cherry Blossom Forest
Ebony Forest
Lush Meadows
Volcano
Nine points of interest have been added to the world that you can find whilst exploring and most of them will have a chest nearby with some loot. I wont spoil all of them but here are some examples
Something has been bothering me about combat lately which is hard to summarise properly other than its missing more meaningful distinctions between spells and swords. To help address this swinging a sword now costs a little stamina and if you don't have enough, you swing Far slower. Coupled with this, when you completely run out of stamina there is now a short cooldown before it starts regenerating. The aim of these changes is that if you exhaust yourself with expensive spells, you can't just whack with the sword until it recovers. This way you need to make a conscious choice between spells or the sword as well as keep a better eye on your stamina instead of just spamming everything at once. I'm not convinced these changes are properly balanced yet, they do tick the box to make me think about combat more carefully but I suspect they will need a bit of tweaking until I'm happy with them.
A new block has been added to help decorate houses and help them look a little more modern.
Hitting the claim all button for achievements was a bit underwhelming so to help address this now you will see a summary of the rewards and achievements claimed.
Plenty of fixes as usual but a good chunk of these are me fixing why the last update went to beta instead of the main branch.
Fixed standing candles having a durability instead of breaking in one hit
Fixed magic light droplets influencing clouds in a strange way
Increased the size of fried egg visuals
Fixed some cactus branches looking dark when damaged
Fixed doors looking dark when you damage them
Fixed the claim all achievements summary getting stuck if you tabbed away before it could finish its animation
Fixed sometimes being able to see through the world at a distance when flying over deserts
Green crystals now render using instancing/culling for a slight performance gain
Upped the temperature range for dark oak trees so they grow in more places
Added crop spawns to deserts
Fixed the large coffin having the wrong material whilst breaking
Updated the icon for the large coffin to be clearer
Fixed the descriptions of the venison burger and steak dinner cooking recipe
Fixed some issues in the Lost Civ resulting a gap you need to jump between some buildings
Fixed Corrupted Venison Steak Dinner missing the word Corrupted from its title
Updated the titles for steak dinners in the cooking UI to be a bit clearer to read
Made a lot of small changes to how cooking recipes are organised to be cleaner/clearer
Fixed raw fish restoring far more hunger than intended
Added the Full English meal and cooking recipe
Fixed a whole bunch of cooking recipes not being lootable!
Generic messages for things like new recipe unlocked can now be closed with the Esc or Enter keys
Fixed the times eaten text of meals in the Lore screen displaying the value for different meals when looking at once you have yet to cook
Fixed sometimes being able to see through the world when looking at certain angles (fairly rare to occur)
Fixed seeing an excessive amount of animals at level 1 when exploring a lot
Fixed various issues with the cactus roots
Desert flowers can now be placed in creative mode
Desert flowers can now be broken and placed in the world
Attempted to fix a source of seeing too many animals on the same chunk
Fixed issues with the learn all enchantments achievement incorrectly saying there is an enchantment still to find (sorry!)
Fixed crops sometimes rendering as though its always at night and glowing
Fixed blocks like Cicas spawning their pickups when replacing grass
Fixed the cow hide rug not having a selection effect
Fixed obsidian having the wrong settings
Fixed the candlestick having a high durability instead of breaking in 1 hit as intended
Updated the wording of some enchantments to be more consistent
Fixed enchanting not consuming exp as intended
Added a LOD to lanterns so they are cheaper to render
Lantern chains are now dynamic. If there is no block above the lantern, the chains are hidden
Added info for when a dungeon is cleared to the list of Dungeons at a portal
Attempted to fix another source of inventory corruptions
Fixed the warrior statue showing a decorative sword and shield at its feet
Fixed the dirt visuals for compost bins not rendering after teleporting
Fixed blocks sometimes not rendering after teleporting when holding the same block type in your hand. Only happened to a subset of blocks like chests
Changed Enchanting essence gatherers to only give a specific essence in Dungeons and Lost Civ in an effort to make it clearer how they work and fix them giving inconsistent types in those worlds
Fixed Mining Light looking excessively bright at higher magic power
Fixed the Lava Lords health bar being stuck on the HUD if you teleport away mid fight
Fixed Multi Block Place telling you its blocked by water when its blocked by a water plant
Fixed errors being thrown if you move the block you where laying out a grid for with Multi Block Place into your inventory mid way through placing
Fixed the Brew 10 button of alchemy not actually brewing 10 potions but still removing 10x materials
Fixed the count for available glass vials increasing in strange ways when crafting lots of potions at once
Fixed damaging the block underneath some foliage in water acting strangely in various ways
Fixed various issues with placing blocks with a custom scale/rotation
Fixed some snapped blocks like standing candles not placing in the correct position
Fixed various issues with ebony planks
Fixed a bunch of issues with the new blocks (E.G the cherry, ebony, bamboo crafting benches, beds etc)
Fixed blocks sometimes being invisible once placed
Fixed the achievement for beating waves in a challenge displaying as though you found a volcano
Fixed old worlds upgrading to the new biome formulas being able to see through the world
Added biome size info to the load game screen
Updated the "Got Wood" achievement to account for the new tree types
Fixed snow pine tree roots being invisible
Fixed various tree roots dropping a grass block pickup instead of dirt
Added a preview when placing campfires
Fixed cherry trees not fading out nicely once they are destroyed
Fixed dungeons generating as utter gibberish and leaving you hanging in mid air after using a portal