Windreach 0.5.0: Holds and homesteads

The fourth test build. Warden castles and forts, armed goblins, a grappling hook, fruit to pick, brewing, a farmstead that grinds, churns and smokes, great trees you grow limb by limb, nine new sets of armour, and multiplayer improvements.

New

• When the host leaves a multiplayer world, they can hand it over to a friend who's still playing, and it carries on for everyone without loading again.
• A cartography table keeps a chart of the land. Sync your map with it to put what you've explored on the chart and take what others have charted onto your own map.
• Warden holds. Castles and forts stand across the islands, each one built differently, with curtain walls, towers, a gatehouse and a keep three floors high. Fight your way up the keep to the Castellan or the Watch Captain and the hoard they guard.
  
• Goblins come armed now. Archers keep their distance and shoot, swordsmen turn your blows with a shield, and firecallers throw embers and fireballs from a stone on a stick. Back at camp they sit round the fire, and every camp keeps a stash worth opening.
  
• A new foe, the Cursed Knight. It climbs out of the ground at night in the Highs and the Redlands, turns your blows with its shield until you break its guard, and at half health bursts out in a wrath that throws you back.
• Nine new sets of armour, from Bonehide to Crystalweave. Each piece is light, medium or heavy, made for close fighting, the bow or calling, and a whole set makes you hit harder, draw faster or call stronger. Heavy armour makes stamina cost more.
  
• Charged heavy blows. Hold the right mouse button with a dagger, greatsword, spear, maul, battle axe or scythe to wind up its heavy, and let go to strike. The longer you hold, the harder it lands.
  
• A grappling hook. Throw it where the ring on the crosshair shows it will bite, over a ledge or into a tree, then climb the rope hand over hand, swing and let go. Forge it at the anvil once you've learned Grappling.
  
• Brewing. Grow hops and grapes or find them wild, malt grain at a fire, boil the wort in a brew kettle and leave it in a cask for ale, beer, mead, wine or cider, or run them through a copper still for brandy. A cup or two makes you merry, a few more unsteady.
  
• A farmstead to build. A rain barrel, a feed trough, a bee skep for a swarm you catch with the bug net, hurdles and a stile, a seep pot that keeps the crops round it watered, a hay rick, and a weathervane that tells you what the weather will do next.
  
• A windmill that grinds your grain into flour while the wind blows, a hand quern and a butter churn, a cheese press and a smokehouse, and long-lasting meals to make with them.
  
• Crops grow at half speed out in the cold of the Whitelands and the Highs. A cold frame or a walk-in glasshouse grows them at full speed anywhere.
  
• Sow trees. A felled tree's limbs can give you its seed, and a sown tree grows up in a little over an hour of play, faster when watered. Feed a grown one Heart Mulch and it becomes a great tree nearly 100 m tall, and you choose where each limb grows.
  
• Fruit to pick. Apples hang on the wild apple trees and coconuts on every palm, and pear, cherry, plum, orange and banana trees grow wild among their kin. Pick fruit one at a time or shake down what's out of reach, and sow the trees at home.
  
• Storage chests in six sizes, from a wicker basket to the Great Chest. Upgrade one where it stands with the hammer and it keeps everything inside.
  
• Hang a sap tap on a living tree and its cup fills with resin, quicker on pines, spruces and other needle trees.
  
• Plant fiber comes from cutting grass now, and a swing through a meadow brings its flowers down too. Nine wild flowers, the wild rose among them, to plant and grow, to turn into dyes, and the rose into a healing salve.
  
• Fire catches you. Walk into flames, stand in burning grass or take a fireball too close and you burn until it goes out. Water, snow or a bucket over your head puts it out at once.
  
• Fires burn fuel. A campfire, a cooking pot or a placed torch burns down and goes out unless you stoke it with wood, sticks, charcoal or coal. A furnace or forge keeps burning its fuel with no ore in it, and iron needs a burning forge beside the anvil.
  
• Age and build. Give your character an age, from Youthful to Elder, and grey hair to go with it. In a new world with body traits on, the body you made plays its part: brawny hits harder, wiry is light on a rock face, well-padded keeps warm.
  
• In those worlds a clumsy body can trip at a run, and a hard landing or a heavy blow can break a leg or an arm or crack your ribs. A splint, a sling or strapping helps it knit.
  
• The guide goes on after the glider is mended. Ten more parts on the objective card lead you through a place to work, fishing, farming, a bed, copper and tin, bronze, the anvil, traders, the sea, and iron and gold, and show you what each ore looks like.
  
• More to do in a balloon. Let go of the burner and walk round the basket, hang a pannier for cargo, dye the envelope, and fit upgrades from a drift sail to a fowling net and a trail rope that keeps you riding low over the land.
  
• Traders can move in. Build a house with a free bed and ask one, and they'll keep their stall in your yard by day and sleep there at night. Between visits the pedlar and the drover camp out in the world.
  
• Boats and balloons take damage when they hit something hard, more the faster they were going. The helm shows the hull and the burner shows the envelope.
  
• Stuck in the rock or wedged between trees? A new button in the pause menu moves you to the nearest place you can stand.
• Eat far too much and you're Stuffed, slower on your feet until it settles.
  
• Boats throw spray off the hull, more of it the faster they go, and their wake foams white behind them.
  

Improved

• Up to eight players can share a multiplayer world now, the host included, where it was four.
• On the map the other players show as their faces, and the host keeps each friend's map along with their pack, so it's there when they come back.
• In multiplayer, more of what one player does now shows for everyone, and many multiplayer bugs are fixed.
• The Low preset runs on graphics cards with 4 GB of memory now, and every preset uses less of it. Low and Medium load smaller textures, which takes effect the next time the game starts.
• Camps, ruins, shrines, watch posts and goblin camps stand on land now instead of out in the sea, and there are far more villages, forts and castles across the islands.
• Nothing can be placed hanging in the air any more. Stations, furniture and farm pieces need the ground or a floor under them, and fall when that floor goes.
• Dogs and cows come in nine coats each, and the cows in a herd mostly share one.
• A day lasts 30 minutes instead of 20, so there's more daylight to get ready for the night.
• Fallen sticks lie on the forest floor and across the plains to pick up, a sapling you punch down gives a Wood as well, and there's a little more loose stone about.
• A lantern stays lit at your hip while a pickaxe has both hands.
• Petting, feeding or playing fetch with one of your animals shows what it did for it over its head, like +22% Affection.
• Underhall entrances stand out from far off: a stone gateway, an avenue of standing stones and a tall marker with a light on top. A hold or a hall goes on your map as soon as you've seen it.
• Monsters in an Underhall or a hold follow you out of it, and back in.
• Every axe fells every tree. A stone axe is slower on oak and slower still on acacia, but it gets there.
• Axes and pickaxes hurt creatures, though less than a weapon does.
• A pickaxe on a mountain's rock or a cave wall gives stone.
• Tin turns up as often as copper, in the same lands, and more of both lie near the surface.
• The crafting menu is one list of everything you can make, each recipe marked with the station it needs. At a station the strokes come by themselves, no need to hold the button.
• Crafting pays twice the XP it did, Mining three times, and a crop you grow and harvest more than twice.
• Equipping something from the quickbar leaves it in its slot.
• Swimming and gliding cost about a third of the stamina they did, and a jump while climbing costs less.
• A jump goes 2 m high instead of 3, with the same time in the air.
• A glider always opens level.
• The camera no longer goes through rock in tight spaces or through the walls you've built, and the free camera stays within 50 m of you.
• Keys you press in a menu stay in the menu.
• At low health the edges of the view turn red and beat with your heart.
• Every creature leaves in a puff of its own smoke when it dies.
• A wild horse that's had its fill still takes a treat, and one you've fed stays when its herd bolts.
• Gear you were wearing goes back on when you take it from your grave.
• The bug net catches what it plainly swept past.
• Boulders lie with the slope instead of hanging off it.
• The map shows an ore vein as a pickaxe on a gem of the ore's colour, and your own arrow is smaller.
• Messages show as a line at the top of the screen, and the shovel's and hammer's mode wheels have an icon for every mode.
• Every settings tab is laid out alike, and Resolution works in Borderless and Fullscreen too.
• The pause menu puts Back to Main Menu just before Quit Game.
• The game opens on a calm evening over the coast, under the Windreach title.
• The scan (middle mouse) shows only the footprints now, each in its creature's own shape, out to the scan's full reach and even in tall grass. Green prints are close or fresh, orange ones further off or older, red ones far and old.
• Building snaps where you mean it. A floor joins a floor at its edge, a wall stands along a floor's edge or carries on from another wall, two walls meet in a corner, and a piece set down near a building lines up with it.
• The whirl is a sword's move now. Hold the right mouse button and you spin with the blade out at arm's length, leaning back against its pull.
• The shovel digs with both hands, scooping the earth up and tossing it aside.
• Gliders leave air curling off their wingtips, and every glider's cloth ripples in the wind.
• The farm pieces are built with the same care as the house pieces: the garden bed, compost bin, scarecrow, well, gates, chicken coop and wing house, and the hoe, watering can and seed pouch too.
• An erupting firefell reads from far off: a fire fountain up to 220 m tall, and lava that runs faster and glows by day and by night.
• A blast shakes the ground under you and throws up far more earth.
• A felled tree cracks and creaks as it goes over, and its crown rushes through the air on every fall.
• Reefs have a third as many corals, so you can make each one out.
• You set the difficulty when you create a world: Relaxed, Standard, Harsh, or Custom with a slider for each part. It stays as it is for that world.
• Settings has one Graphics tab for everything on the screen. The rest is under General.
• Nearly all the game's text is translated into every language now, items, tips, trader lines and menus included.
• Walking downhill follows the ground without a bounce, and small steps are climbed smoothly.
• Fuller body shapes no longer pass through themselves at the thighs.

Fixed

• Spruces, firs and pines on the mountains no longer wear snow outside the tundra.
• You can no longer walk on deep water after wading out into it.
• A wayring on a steep slope no longer holds you in its opening.
• The shovel no longer flips half a turn in your hands as you dig.
• A river pouring into the sea keeps its last waterfall.
• A sapling or tree that could be struck forever without going down now goes, and what you take stays gone.
• Flattening the ground under your feet no longer drops you through the world.
• Naming a pet no longer turns the world black.
• Zooming the camera in no longer makes the game louder, and the mouse wheel no longer zooms behind a menu.
• Your Graphics settings come back as you left them after a restart.
• Playing with no character opens the character creator first, instead of a world where you can't do anything.
• No clouds, wind or snow under an Underhall's roof.
• A torch inside a cloud draws in front of it.
• Holes no longer open in a stormy sea far out.
• The condition card no longer flickers when you hover over it.

Known issues

• A world from before 0.5.0 loses the ground you dug, raised or flattened the first time it loads, as the castles and villages move onto land. Your buildings stay where they are.
• Worlds started before 0.4.0 can get a firefell where nothing was dug or built. Start a new world for the best experience.
• The download is large, about 11 GB. Trimming the assets the game doesn't use is planned.
• Starting a new world can take about a minute.
• Busy places like big fights, storms and thick forest can drop the frame rate on the High preset. Medium or Low helps on older machines.
• Some of the newest text, like the holds, brewing and the farmstead, is still in English when the game is set to another language.
• Achievements and Steam Cloud saves only work when you start the game through Steam.
• If the host's game crashes, everyone in the world goes back to the title screen. A world can only be handed over when the host leaves through the menu.
• If something goes wrong, the log is in %APPDATA%\Windreach\logs. Please send it along with what you were doing at the time.