Hello Folks,
If you've spent time in Renown, you've probably felt it. It's not any single thing that's obviously broken — more like a thousand small moments of friction that add up over a session. The building menu takes one more click than it should. Swapping weapons feels too slow. The crafting panel is hard to read until you've already clicked into it. None of these are game-killers on their own, but together they create a kind of fatigue that wears players down. We've been calling it our "1000 bugs of death" in the team.
Over the past few weeks, Moxie has been focused on de-jank, targeting the areas that matter most: building, inventory, crafting, and the HUD. Here's what we're working on:
(This blog doesn't touch on the crash fixing and other critical bug smashing, but that is also ongoing at the moment.)
Building
The current build system is the biggest target. Right now, it's pretty generic — selection is overly sensitive (barely moving your mouse changes what's highlighted), and right-clicking doesn't consistently close the menu; sometimes it just opens another state instead.
We're looking at a new flow: a top category navbar with scroll and dropdown sub-selection, so you're not buried in nested wheels or hunting through pages. The goal is a system where pulling out your build tool and placing something takes as few clicks as possible, the menu closes cleanly when you want it to, and the last piece you selected is remembered so you're not starting from scratch every time.
We're also looking at a cull of the build pieces. Renown has close to 50 buildable elements, which we'd guess the majority of players have never used. Some of that complexity is making the UI feel overwhelming before you've even started building. That said, we're attempting to balance this against removing scope for our master builders, while making the actual day-to-day process of using the system into something cleaner to look at and smoother to use.
This effectively allows us to scrub the older building UI and its related systems for something that feels far more snappy to use, but also has better bones to work with as we re-build the major systems.
Alongside this, we're currently working on:
- The key bind popup UI is getting modernised.
- The clunky build mode entry animation is being removed.
- The crosshair will now switch to an X when you're in build mode, so it's always clear what state you're in.
- Equipping the mallet will automatically lock you into build mode rather than requiring an extra step/click. We're also looking at making the mallet just do building mode, so it's not interacting badly with the combat/swing system.
- Bug fix: You currently can't upgrade a structure to the same tier, which breaks certain upgrade flows in ways that aren't obvious. That's getting fixed.
Inventory & Hotbar
The gear slots and pockets are currently on opposite sides of the screen, which means a lot of unnecessary drag distance. Slot restrictions — like the bow only working in a specific slot — aren't communicated clearly, so players just feel like something is broken rather than understanding the rule.
In the short term, we're redesigning the slot icons to actually communicate what goes where (a proper bow silhouette on the bow slot, for example), and removing UI elements that exist but don't do anything. Long-term, we want to move toward a more flexible hotbar where items can go anywhere.
A few bugs worth calling out:
- Sometimes items in your inventory become non-interactive. You can't click, drag, or equip them. If this happens, a relog fixes it, or you can work around it by using Ctrl+Shift to transfer all items of that type if you have multiples. While a workaround is good, we're looking to properly fix this bug and others like it.
- Autosort is currently disabled. This was turned off to address a dupe bug and hasn't come back on yet, but it's on the list.
- If your inventory is full, you can't swap items between your hotbar and inventory without having at least one empty slot free. That shouldn't be the case in the near future.
Crafting
The crafting panel has a lot of space that isn't earning its place. There's a large description area on the right that provides a lot of text but not a lot of value, and the contrast between items and the background means things can be effectively invisible until you've already clicked on them. We're cutting the description area and reorganising the panel so crafting sits adjacent to your gear and pockets.
HUD
The compass is taking up more vertical space than it needs to and is blocking room for better things. We're shrinking it and using the freed-up space for a persistent building navbar when you're in build mode. This should help with visible hotkeys and resource info, without covering your screen the way a full wheel does.
Separately: weapon switching is being explicitly sped up. This one directly affects how you feel in combat, and it's been on the list long enough.
Party/Group UI Overhaul
The party/group creation and joining process is being entirely re-done. It'll now have a dedicated UI element so players don't need to search through some 80–100 names on the leaderboard to add their mates. Parties are now persistent after players log off.
We're also adding a Rank system inside parties, which will later tie into permission options for doors and other locks. This will also manage the public name of the group, its standing on the server, and its structure in terms of size and ranks. All of which has the potential to tie together to create a type of feudal competition between groups and factions on a server.
Tutorial
The in-game tutorial needs a visual pass and update. It currently doesn't match the quality bar of the rest of the game, and we want new players to get a better first impression.
Bugs & World
- Changing your gear currently causes your character to briefly go invisible. That's a known issue and it's been fixed.
- The crossbow trap can't currently be picked up because there's no way to deactivate it first. We're adding a deactivation mechanic so it can be retrieved properly.
- Persistent parties have been absent for a while and we're looking at bringing them back. This one is still ongoing but is fairly high up on the list.
- Economy: Merchant costs have been increased across the board by 2.5x. This was a deliberate change to reduce gold as an easy shortcut, but we'll be monitoring how it lands with players and are open to tuning it further.
- Mines are currently only producing gems, which wasn't the intent. Ore should be in there too and we're looking at why that's broken.
- Banner notifications are getting a rework. Right now they're too frequent and too visually noisy, and they can stack in ways that make them hard to parse. We're looking at consolidating them into a dedicated section within the inventory HUD so they're accessible without being constantly in your face.
- The map is also due for a review. This could be several dev blogs on its own, but we're in the initial stages of planning out our next map. This will likely be an ongoing thing for the next few months, as we work out how to apply our learning and some of the new tech that's come onto the market since our old map was created.
Next Steps After This
The research/tech tree is a known major pain point. The way it was coded is very unintuitive to work with and is basically locked in place due to this. This is why in the past we've had so many items that are just priced at 9999, as opposed to being able to cleanly remove them and adjust the tech tree.
This one will likely be another longer-term fix, but it's one of the last bottlenecks for the total overhaul of the game since we launched into early access. We've just been quietly keeping on keeping on. We'll have another dev blog coming in the next few weeks or so to update on our progress here.
A Note on Raid Mode
As it turns out, the old code for the save system does not support Raid Mode. This answers some unanswered questions we had for our previous programmer as to why it went away in the first place.
In this case, Raid Mode has been modernised and is otherwise ready to go. But without the save system, it means that several hours of playtime could be lost if the server crashes. The process of updating and completely redoing the save system is its own can of worms and distracts from the above-mentioned UI/UX work.
As such, we're still looking to bring back Raid Mode, but we're currently checking if it's easier to shorten Raid Mode into a 1–2 hour experience (reducing lost time in crashes) or if we can fix up the save system without it draining the mainline survival work.
A huge thank you to anyone who's stopped by to give us feedback since the free-to-play period. While it was a very rough experience, it did give us a ton of the needed data to fix the crashing issues and other historical bugs. We're hoping the next free-to-play period will be a lot smoother and a lot of fun.