Hey everyone,
A new experimental build (0.79.00) is now live!
This build adds the ability to craft piles of items. This is part of our recent work to encourage organization and discourage players from gathering large piles of items that negatively affect performance. We know there is a reward and feeling of satisfaction from accruing large piles of stuff, so we don’t want to take that away! ‘Piles’ are an efficient way to show off your hoarding skills! See the patch notes below for more details on how to craft and use the new piles...
Have fun :)
Stay Alive!
Beam Team
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New Features
- Added new craftable item Piles!
You can create a pile by looking at or holding an item that you have 2 or more of in the surrounding area. Use the Quick Craft menu to craft a ‘pile’ of that item, which is shown by a new pile icon in blue. Piles are free to create and store 1 type of crafting item. So far, the supported items are: Sticks, Rocks, Palm Fonds, Lashings, Fibrous Leaves, Clay and Logs. The capacity for most items is 50x, but can vary depending on the item.
You withdraw and deposit items just like a storage container. The first item stored assigns the type of pile it is. You can remove all items and re-assign a pile at any time. When you withdraw all items from a pile, it will simply disappear.
Items stored in a pile are available and can be used when crafting without having to manually remove them from a pile. Note: Pile materials will be used last.
We’re still fine-tuning the mechanics; the pile’s physics collider currently adapts to the quantity and size of items, which is nice for player collisions, but there may be some issues there if players stack other objects on top of piles…
For those interested in the tech side of things, the benefits of the new piles are:
- Faster zone loading: 1 item to load, instead of 50x individual objects.
- Batched rendering for 50x items. Rendering multiple items was batched before, but the new method is even more efficient.
- Less physics overhead! Piles are a static object with 1 collider, instead of 50x physics bodies and colliders.
- Less overhead from individual Unity GameObjects. GameObjects and Components in Unity incur a small amount of overhead to validate state and run callbacks on every instance. This all adds up, so is good to mitigate.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed glitchy Foundation placing on terrain, introduced by 0.78.02
- Fixed font missing in dev console spawner menu.
- Fixed font missing on dev FPS widget.