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!