Hello skyfarers!
We’re been hard at work preparing to release a big update, version 0.1.4.1, to the Worlds Adrift Closed Beta! We’ve continued to focus on fixing the bigger bugs and making a lot of tweaks and balance changes, but also managed to get in a few cool new features. For a bit of explanation on what’s coming (as well as some footage of the new stuff!) we’ve got a video for you:
Now here are the provisional patch notes in detail. The final patch notes will go live with the update itself next week:
NEW FEATURES
- Atlas cores have gained an on-interact ability to send a pulse through the whole ship. The pulse will detach all grappling hooks and climbers, and prevent grappling or climbing for a brief period. This function has a cooldown and uses an atlas shard.
- Atlas cores and their upgrades now provide additional lift based on the materials used in their construction.
- Players can now find and craft more convenient light sources than the torch. These are equippable in your character’s gear slots, freeing her hands for other tools. Equipped gear items are toggled with T, Spacebar, and V, depending on the slot they fit in.
- Players can now freely rotate ship parts when placing them. Tapping Z will continue to rotate an object by 90 degrees, but holding Z allows the player to rotate them more precisely. Some ship parts are still restricted to certain orientations (e.g., engines and wings).
- With free-rotate implemented, the schematics for railings are finally being seeded into the world.
- Player names no longer display indiscriminately. Crewmates (and in the future, Alliance mates) will display their names when in range, but other characters will only display their names if moused over. In addition, all character names are blocked by line of sight.
- Foliage and grass now blow in the wind.
NOTABLE BUGFIXES
- The distance calculation for nearby revival chamber now happens at death instead of respawn, and ignores vertical distance. Crewmates should rarely respawn at different islands now, much less different biomes.
- After players travelled some distance away from their registered shipyard and returned, they would sometimes enter a broken state where they couldn’t pick up ship parts with their shipbuilding tool. This has been fixed.
- Sometimes sunken, deteriorating ship frames would not be salvageable; this should be fixed now.
- Death bags should no longer smash into things and do damage.
- Ship docking should happen more smoothly and naturally again.
- Wings and engines are now mirrored instead of rotated 180 degrees when being placed on opposite sides of a hull, for the purposes of visual symmetry.
- Males now play the male vocalisations instead of the female ones now.
- Pressing Esc when placing an item cancels the placement instead of opening the menu. Quite the technical feat, we know.
- Impassable storms at the edge of the world no longer show a fully black screen – even if it ended up being a very clear indicator to turn around, it was unintended!
- Every once in a while a strange black void would appear on islands, rendering everything inside the sphere black. This has been fixed.
- Various UI fixes.
- Various optimisations and load balancing to improve framerates and client performance have been performed.
NOTABLE BALANCE CHANGES AND TWEAKS
- Stormwalls and sandstorms are more difficult to navigate through again, as they constantly turn ships off course now.
- The damage calculation formula from physics collisions has been revamped. The ultimate goal is to make ships less fragile, and to reduce the fear in your crewmates’ eyes when a loose part slides around your ship interior. Chain reactions should happen less often now, but this is a work in progress, with a comprehensive damage system rehaul to come in future patches.
- The Badlands are much less habitable now. Very few players will want to – or be able to – stay there indefinitely, as there will no longer be any revival chambers or fuel(!) in the entire biome.
- Resources’ stats have been rebalanced and some errors fixed. Farewell, golden combustion internals; your effectiveness was a spreadsheet error!
- Individual stats on schematics now have a minimum possible value that depends on the schematic’s rarity.
- Characters now need to be standing or rappelling (i.e., have their feet on a surface) to equip or unequip clothing and gear – including gliders and the new lights. In a future patch, there will be a larger rework of the glider to make it both more useful over short distances and less exploitable for long-distance travel.
- Tweaks have been made to how ships turn. Large ships can now turn more easily when not flying at speed.
- Grappling to a shell shot out of a cannon will snap your rope now.
- The placeholder crow’s nest model has been remade.
Herb
Producer
Ooh, this is very interesting. Looking forward to seeing these changes develop! Thanks, Herb!
I would still like to see some ship design revamps to allow for more varied design, such as the ability to place lateral segments (wider ships and catamaran designs), and redesigning the Atlas Core and it’s upgrades to start smaller and lower profile and gradually getting bulkier as upgrades are added, to allow for very small, sleek fighter type ships. This would apply to fuel tanks as well, again starting very small and low profile, and adding upgrades that expand capacity, as well as bulk. Furthermore, more variation in helm design would continue this Fighter type aesthetic, with seated helms akin to HOTAS or even a sport motorbike style.
Lovely stuff, good to see fixing performance is a top priority, traversing a sand or storm wall and having your game lag, then you instantly die due to some mad physics error is funny the first 200 times, but it’s starting to wear thin, hopefully it can be fixed for good soon
Thank you very much for your efforts!
>>Player names no longer display indiscriminately. Crewmates (and in the future, Alliance mates) will display their names when in range, but other characters will only display their names if moused over.
Please, add also the next feature: when the players wear the mask or a hat hiding his face, his name always hidden from anyone except his crew/alliance members. I will want to stay incognito when going to go pirating. I will always kill om sight players hiding their faces. Also please add an option to have player’s own name list, where one can put the names of his friends and foes, and his friend nicknames will appear , let’s say, blue color and enemy names will appear red color. It will help to create some kind of reputation and social interaction among players and will help to the player to keep the names of dangerous or helpful players in memory.
P.S. Should I bring this to the suggestion section of the forum? Right?
This sounds good! yes you should put it to the suggestions also.
devs:
Maybe (atleast friends/crewmates) names will be shown from longer distance also? maybe through spyglass? 😉
ps. more slots for crew mates would be also awesome.
-Reuben
No way, please do not add an incognito mode! Every pirate should be able to be identified, otherwise how else are people going to punish them? If a player decides to pirate, we should be able to hold them accountable by knowing who they are, especially in repeat encounters.
We are reading everywhere so you are good. It’s a cool suggestion, I’ll have a chat with the team about it!
Actually i have to change my support to these ideas a bit: the “incognito mode” not sure about that tho… maybe not a good idea.
-Reuben
My idea is when you see the player in incognito mode that means you see a pirate and you should better kill him on sight. May be there should be possibility to turn the incognito mode on/off while wearing the mask, because some people do wear the masks just because they love the design.
IMO: Dead players should still show their name when moused over and in range. Mask or not.
Great idea!^
The Badlands are much less habitable now. Very few players will want to – or be able to – stay there indefinitely, as there will no longer be any revival chambers or fuel(!) in the entire biome.
This is one of the best implementations EVER along with the names not showing if line of sight is blocked! Allowing for real guerilla play style! Crazy Frenchies ™ gang, i’m coming back to osiris!!! 😀
Glad to hear you’ll be coming back AND you are looking forward to this update. Welcome back 🙂
come on US then 😉
If you die in the badlands without a personal reviver and do a re spawn nearby how will it determine what zone to put you in? Will you go to the closest t3 zone or just whatever zone you were closest too at the time?
“Random” revival chamber will be disabled if your current zone has no ancient revival chambers. “Nearby” will put you in the nearest one – which will be in a neighboring zone.
Ooooooooh i’m so exited!
I’m really hyped for this new update! Optimising things will be great as i seem to always freeze for 5-10 seconds when approaching an island.
I feel like starving T4 players out of their area’s due to lack of resources could have some unintended and unfortunate consequences to the players adjacent to those areas. By which I mean to say, this is going to increase instances of player piracy, especially on newer players, to quickly attain large caches of fuel and return to T4 areas. They’ll also be less likely to attack each-other, a focus on the fresher targets, seeing as they’d have the full on advantage in power and armor from having been trawling the T4 areas for good loot.
As for the various wall changes, I’d only like to voice a stout desire that you not make them impossible for individual players, as the community has made me far to paranoid to really be friendly with others as a general rule. Everyone wants to nick my stuff real bad. -_-
If you make it extraordinarily difficult to progress for a solo player due to a need for reliance on others, I’d personally probably take a pass on that. I don’t want to entrust my labors to the hands of someone unknown, and I don’t have any close friends who play Worlds Adrift, or are even interested in it.
I don’t suppose you guys would be interested in adding another land based schematic for the Badlands, so as to not ‘completely’ remove the option of finding fuel there. Perhaps a little Bio Fuel factory that takes berries and a good long time to process it into Bio Fuel. Maybe 10 fuel per 5 minute cycle conversion rate, usually takes about 100-150 to get through walls, so you could build up enough to flee a T4 area in an hour or so, developing about 120 fuel.
Just a suggestion! Not only would having T4’s swooping in on my Noobie butt suck, but having some unfortunate incident and becoming stuck in the Badlands with no fuel would be ‘extremely’ unfortunate. I wouldn’t mind the experience of sailing around the Badlands, picking myself back up slowly, because of rarified resources. But the way its configured at the moment, sounds like if you mess up in the Badlands its just game over man. Respawn in some other random area when you die I guess?
Also I advocate for a server wipe with this next patch, as everyone should be experiencing the same intense conditions to acquire what is within the badlands. The way it is now seems more like its just going to increase piracy and difficulty for newer players and doesn’t really present any additional challenge to those who’ve already been there, but competing for these materials and area’s based on the newer dynamics sounds like fun to me.
Just my two cents.
(I also think all the barrier walls should be about 4x as thick.)
I too think a server wipe should be implemented to reset all t4 players to the same level and challenge as new players.
Question regarding the Core Pulse.
In order to activate (holding E) it, will we have to access the Core itself (as in the main unit), or will it work with any of its upgrades?
Because, as of right now, the sole reason my ship has survived every enemy attack or boarder my crew has encountered is because there’s a wall of pipes and boxes blocking the access to both the core and our respawners (they’re on the roof). And I really, really do not want to get rid of it in order to access the pulses…..
I’ve been looking around, maybe not well enough but I can’t find anywhere on how to update the steam version with new patches? Do I have to uninstall the game and reinstall it or how does it work?
Steam should automatically update the game when a patch is available.
Also if it doesn’t when you click to play the game it will update. You will know when the game isnt updated cause i dont think the server will let you in without the right version.
thanks so much for the hard work!
I’ve been waiting for better panel placement for so long! 😀
As a miserably unlucky player who can never find anything they need and can’t help but lose a ship almost daily to either pirates(seriously i get pirated AT LEAST every two days min.) or WWE style mantas who pin me down, this badlands patch really worries me because this game already has a small mistake=major consequence style. This makes this already difficult game almost impossible. Not to mention: THE STORM AND SAND WALLS WEREN’T ALREADY CRAZY HARD!?!?!? How am I ever gonna get through now?
This patch makes this game nearly impossible to get through to the end for people like me. Although I know this isn’t the intention it still feels as if this is almost a “Screw you. Deal with it” to me and people as unlucky as I.
Im having similar issue with sand walls I got lucky and found 2 tier 4 engines with almost maxed stats and made 2 more was at almost max weight I can go, but only made it 30 seconds till the engines exploded. How am i suppose to get rest of the core upgrades if i cant make it through the sand wall.
“How am i suppose to get rest of the core upgrades if i cant make it through the sand wall.”
If you are playing on EU-West I am willing to trade all core upgrades from t4 if you want them… Or alternatively, just ask players to put core upgrades in your assembler. I did that numerous times. Most people will put it in for you.
How did entirely removing fuel from t4 even begin to make sense to anyone?
Aside from bugs, the biggest complaint about this game is griefy game play. So we… allow griefers to deny access to 25% of the entire game… Pretty much the whole late game content in fact…
THAT’LL fix it….?
What happened to player driven content? What happened to giving players the tools and letting them create their own challenges? Where did that game disappear off to?