It might seem like a couple weeks since the last update but I've done a whole bunch of mini updates in the meantime to make sure everything was as stable as possible. Rather than making a post for each update I edited the previous patch notes and added the changes onto the bottom. However a couple of weeks of intense bug fixing in a row takes its toll so for this update I've thrown in a couple of small features as a way for me to take a break.
I love how the butterflies look in Aiyana and felt like it was time to lean into them a little more by having a wider variety of them. So there are now 6 more of them to find in various biomes.
Since there are more butterflies, it felt like it was time to also add trophies for insects, similar to the trophies for animals and fish. There are unlocked as a tech at your Totem.
A bug was found with volumetric lighting that would result in you seeing strange artifacts at various times of the day. Fixing this turned out to be quite easy and involved turning off a setting for noise. The nice thing about this is that it means lighting renders a bit quicker than before however with the tradeoff that light is now a bit brighter overall. So if things are feeling a bit different, this is why.
It turns out that deserts are spawning really inconsistently. In some worlds they spawn right near your base and in others you need to walk for Miles to find even one. Since Deserts host a crop this felt particularly harsh so until I can sort of a better way to ensure deserts spawn more consistently it felt best to prevent them from spawning crops. To properly fix Deserts will mean changing world generation formulas which will break how worlds look when loading an existing world so its something I try to do as little as possible and bundle as many reasons into the same update whenever it does need done.
Various issues have come up with portals that this update attempts to address. For example too often they would spawn really close to each other. I've tried to fix as many of the issues as I can but if you have discovered portals in your world world they are now less likely to work and teleport you back to the same position. This is because its failing to find a portal where it expects to in the world. New worlds 'should' generate portals that link correctly to each other and placed at more consistent distances from each other.
Its always bothered me how much of a wall of text the lore screen looks like so its Biome tab has been given a slight overhaul to be more visual.
I've also updated the Creatures tab to be much clearer about needing to defeat 10 of each creature before you can learn more about it.
Well since I opened the can of bashing Unity in the last commit I might as well continue and show how much of a fight it can be. For example, occasionally Aiyana will crash when quitting and from what I can tell its because of this bug:
Now I normally wouldn't mind, but its been 5 months now with no further updates (so far as I can tell) and I've seen some bugs take over a year to be fixed so it doesn't fill me with confidence that this will be fixed any time soon.
I'll keep an eye on this though and hopefully I can find a workaround in the meantime.
Increased the spawn rate of Boudleja in Plains
Reduced how much hunger raw lion meat gives since it was the same as raw bear meat
Added animal head icons to Claw animal drops so its clearer what they are
Same for Treant Heart
Updated the emission texture for the savanna dragonfly
Added more crafting recipes to sit under the furniture tab
Insects prewarm their starting positions so you don't see them all appear from the ground at the same time during a load
Added a primitive change to enemy spawning so less are spawned at a lower draw distance and more at larger draw distances
Fixed portal icons not always being registered with the map if you explore a Lot and discover various portals in one play through
Fixed animals like a charging night deer being able to launch you into the air
Fixed a typo in the chop trees achievement
Fixed animal claws having a bit of a nonsense description
Fixed being able to always sprint if you use the hold to sprint setting
Fixed animals not resetting their position properly when they are reset. I'm not sure what issues this may have caused!
Fixed not being able to paste seeds with 10 characters that are also negative
Fixed the hide completed checkbox for Achievements leaving empty space at the top of the screen if you have completed a lot of achievements
Same fix applied to the protection totems and their challenge rewards
Fixed butterfly/insect wing rendering to look better at night when affected by light
Fixed leather strips not having a description in inventory
Fixed onion not counting as an alchemy ingredient when other crops do
Fixed a scenario that would cause the moon to not render at all
Fixed the moon rendering in front of the clouds again
Updated how water renders fog so its clipped at max fog strength. This prevents seeing a strange blend when the moon renders over water
Fixed charging deer never being able to disengage combat
Fixed animal bones not being updated at all during none looping animations. Resulted in things like the night deer lights not moving during its animation
Fixed an obscure scenario with inventory items that would snap items back to their slots if you use shift click to store/retrieve things
Updated logic for detecting when the player is stuck to prevent being trapped in a block until you dig yourself out
Prevented reeds from spawning on stones during world generation
Fixed the selection effect for alchemy stations and compost bins going away whenever you select something else
Fixed alchemy bench lighting affecting clouds at night
Updated alchemy UI slightly to make it clearer when two ingredients wont produce a potion when combined
Fixed various typos and missing item descriptions
Fixed the biomes top button of the lore page not being clickable if you scrolled left hand group down to the bottom
Fixed the Plains biome listing a tree in the Biomes tab even though it doesn't spawn any trees
Fixed the sprint icon staying active after sprinting until you are fully out of energy
Reworked where tech data is stored to be behave more consistently when moving characters between worlds.
I was working towards another small release before starting work on combat improvements and found a few things that could do with going live now. Mainly an attempt to reduce the crashes on launch.
Fixed large blocks like Feed Troughs being able to be placed even though their preview is red
Placed grass now randomises its rotation and scale so it matches naturally spawned grass
Added corner versions of the hay roofing
Fixed a very specific scenario around shift clicking full stacks of items from chests to the hotbar not updating item counts properly
Prevented the source of a crash on launch
Fixed a tiny memory leak with Fish data
Fixed wolf bones having an excessively high max stack count
Updated the wording of burger cooking recipes to be clear they require bread instead of a 'bun'
Fixed feeding troughs not saving/loading their current food left properly
Fixed tamed animal nameplates being invisible after teleporting
Fixed energy blast homing trying to hit tamed animals (it would do no damage)
Reworked how energy blast homing selects targets to drastically prefer those closest to the center of the screen
Fixed frogs not being able to consistently jump up blocks
Fixed tamed animals appear to duplicate after heading to the Lost Civ
Updated the descriptions for fertility treats and incubators to be clearer how they work
Updated the logic for zipping backups to happen on a thread. As a result sleeping and entering large worlds is significantly quicker
Added an auto save icon to show when backups are being zipped
Fixed not being able to open the animal incubator
Fixed animal incubator tooltips saying "Resting" when the bar is full and the animal needs more milk
Fixed feed troughs showing their food visuals in hand after destroying a full trough
Fixed feed troughs not clearing their data when destroyed
Fixed boudleja sometimes rendering strangely in dark oak forests
Increased the spawn rate of boudleja in Dark Oak Forest
Fixed a typo with Night Panthers
Fixed the kill all animal types achievement not consistently registering when an animal is killed
Fixed fluttering lavender being invisible when first placed
Fixed seeing a block of ice behind the throne room after defeating the lava lord
Fixed flowers being off center from their block
Fixed grass and flowers still rendering when you break the block below them
Fixed sign posts looking like wall signs after scrolling around the hotbar
Fixed there being an inconsistency with how animals spawn on a fresh chunk vs a loaded one that could result in excessive amounts of animals spawning
Fixed item pickups appearing to dance when dropped on steps and slopes
Fixed vines not showing in creative mode
Fixed blocks like signs appearing to be unbreakable due to an error with their breaking block logic
Fixed signs still showing the blinking caret after editing them
Fixed grass that regrows from always being uniform
Fixed tamed animals attempting to transform into their night versions
Fixed the mouse being invisible after first opening the creative mode menu and then pressing Tab to open inventory
Fixed a memory leak caused by the previous fix for crashes