Sail Forth · build 16837752 · published
Hello, here's a quick Christmas patch with some fixes and tweaks! This includes a couple changes that should hopefully address some issues people have encountered with the open world.
The first one is the introduction of a timed auto save feature. An unintended side-effect of the new Deep Blue open ocean was that saving occurred far less frequently as it was only triggered upon entering a location. This meant it was possible to spend a bunch of time in the open ocean without saving, and if you were sunk you could lose a lot of progress. To address this I'm adding a 5 minute auto save timer which will save when out of combat.
The second thing is more subtle and if it works right shouldn't even be noticeable. During a recent play session in a new game I noticed that it was possible to not encounter any NPC boats for quite a while if you just happened to not cross paths with them as they wander. I think this isn't ideal as it can lead to having a pretty boring experience if you get unlucky, and new players might not even realize that there *are* NPC boats out there. To address this I've made some tweaks to the NPC wandering logic which makes them more likely to cross paths with you if it's been a while since you last encountered something 'fun'. This should *not* result in a constant stream of ships heading your way, the aim is just to prevent long stretches of encountering nothing.
Thanks to everyone for your continued support, and happy holidays!