Wildmender February 7, 2024 Release Notes

Hi Wildmenders!

We’re getting the new year rolling with a patch focused on performance! Build 207a has just been released on all platforms (Steam, XBox, and Playstation). This patch also includes a large number of bug fixes and a little help in some confusing quests.

Many of these improvements are focused on improving Wildmender’s playability on the Steam Deck. If you’re a Deck player, please give it a try and let us know how it feels!

Changes:

• Removed automatic teleportation when players are stuck in terrain. Use chat command /unstuck if you find yourself stuck and unable to escape terrain.
• Added a map marker for uncollected Shards of the Guide Spirit during the first major quest sequence.

Fixes:

• Fixed an error that could cause buried item drop points to not respawn when a storm spawned.
• Fixed the poison fog in the Canyons interrupting the Sigil Gate menu
• (XBox/PS5) Fixed plants sometimes failing to load as the player traveled (Steam players saw this fix as 202b)
• Fixed some cases where soil would stop improving or not respond to placed plants.
• Fixed some plants revived with Life Flames having unreasonably long harvest times
• Fixed the cheaper sigil construction in the Gleb temple not applying correctly to guest players, leading to issues advancing that quest.
• Fixed the tutorial not advancing if you collected exactly enough essence and no more
• Fixed a bug that could cause Vidyas to wander far from the oasis
• Fixed canceling placement of a carried object in multiplayer sometimes causing that object to vanish for guests
• Fixed lightning strikes sometimes leaving behind extra blue rings
• Fixed some abrupt music changes
• Fixed some wraith AI issues that could cause them to be stuck and make it difficult to advance various “defeat all the wraiths” quests
• Fixed some pathfinding issues that could cause ghosts, spirit darters, and frogs to get stuck inside rocks
• Fixed rejoining guest players spawning underground if the terrain was modified after they left
• Fixed an error in settings parsing that could cause bright glowing skin and hair colors when switching system languages
• Fixed the last wraith scroll of a type applying the wrong penalty
• Fixed chests and Mystical Springs not visibility culling
• Fixed Dust Devils and Tumbleweeds spawning at an accelerated rate when resting or advancing time during the tutorial
• Fixed player name overflowing on the title screen in some languages
• Fixed Photo Mode’s “Brightness” and “Bloom” options failing to update if the player exited to main menu and reloaded the save
• Fixed Dry items from some random drops failing to stack with other Dry items of the same type
• Fixed improved biomes sometimes not appearing correctly for guest players
• Fixed some UI inconsistencies when unlocking memories with a controller

Performance:

• Improved performance of plant and leaves rendering
• Improved performance of soil and biome updates
• Improved performance of water updates
• Improved performance of UI layout process
• Improved behavior of visibility culling, fixing several things that were not culled as intended
• Reduced framerate spikes from simulation and procedural plant generation (particularly noticeable in dense gardens)
• On Simple graphics Quality, more aggressively reduce shadow quality and range and render less ground cover
• On Simple Effects Quality, reduce the number of wind particles and more aggressively disable cloth on NPCs
• Water is now culled when very distant - the distance at which this triggers is tied to the View Distance setting
• Additionally, we’ve added some specific support for the Steam Deck:
  • The Steam Deck now has its own set of graphics settings defaults
  • Removed the Frame Rate Limit setting on the Deck; please use its own built-in framerate controls instead.
  • On the Deck, applied some upscaling to the game world to improve frame rate
  • The Steam Deck now uses the same reduced simulation rate for water and objects as consoles

Thank you for all your support, and stay tuned for more updates!