Valley 1:Beta Series 1 Release Notes

Beta 0.519

(Note: this prerelease is not available yet, we're still working on it)

• Fixed up the interior seeding logic -- no more rhinos or eagles indoors!
  • Thanks to Bossman for reporting the eagles.

• Microboss health has been dropped by half compared to the prior version.
  • Thanks to infernalmachine, Tayrtahn, FallingStar, and Jerebaldo1 for suggesting.

• The health of the giant shadow bat minibosses have been quadrupled.
  • Thanks to FallingStar for suggesting.

• The damage done to players over time by being on fire is now back into the realms of sanity instead of being an insta-kill situation.
  • Previously it was incorrectly basing its attack power on the player's on attack power, so that really made for fast death.
  • Now the formula is based on the level of the chunk you are in, relative to your current level, and also accounting for the action difficulty of the game.
  • For the math minded, here's the formula:
    • Base damage:
      • Featherweight: 5
      • Apprentice: 10
      • Hero: 15
      • Master Hero: 20
      • The Chosen One: 25
    • Relative level percentage calculated as:
      • Base Relative level: Chunk Level - Civ Level, clamped to -10/10.
      • Multiply base relative level times two, and add 20, to double the scale of changes.
      • Divide the new number by 10, and that gives you a percentage ranging from 0 (when you are 10 levels higher than enemies) to 4 (when you are 10+ levels lower than the chunk).
    • Final damage = base damage multiplied by the relative level percentage.
  • Thanks to many players for reporting how out of control the prior fire over time damage was; the dragon breath and fire bats won't be nearly so insane anymore.

• Put in a change so that the game always clears the depth buffer even when it's not clearing the main draw buffers.
  • Hopefully this will solve the graphical issues when alt-tabbing out of the deep when in fullscreen mode on some machines.
  • Thanks to c4sc4 for reporting.

• Previously, boss enemies were "randomized" in their stat allocations, but the differences were so trivial that I don't think a single player ever noticed this.
  • A new system of randomization has now been put in place for the boss monsters, causing their health, magic attack, physical attack, and magic casting speed to get randomized for each boss.
  • Details? Sure:
    • There are 20 "allocation points" that the bosses all get. Each time it randomly tries to slot them into one of 10 categories:
    • Categories 1-3: Max Health is increased by 5% of its current value (so it compounds increases).
    • Categories 4-6: Magical attack is increased by 1% of its current value (again compounding). If the boss has no magical attack, it just re-rolls to get a different category instead.
    • Category 7: Magical casting speed is increased by 1 on a 10 point scale (same scale used by characters). This category takes up only one category slot, to make increases here a lot less frequent compared to the other categories.
    • Categories 8-10: Physical attack is increased by 1% of its current value (again compounding). If the boss has no physical attack, it just re-rolls to get a different category instead.
  • As with any enemy, you can see the stats of a boss by looking at them with the game paused, to help you plan your attack on them.

• Previously, the speed degradation from the ice bats was so trivial that it wasn't even noticeable (3% for 5 seconds).
  • This was a holdover from the days when there were swarms of bats, but now that it's a lot less common to face many ice bats and they can't hit you repeatedly as much, it's time for a much more severe speed penalty from them: it's now 50% for 5 seconds.

• There is now a very clear visual effect when you are slowed from being frosted, or when you are on fire in general.

• For enemies with a magical attack, their magical casting speed is now shown in the pause menu tooltips.
  • This is particularly relevant now that boss stats vary.

• Fixed it up so that enemies are now seeding better in interior stairwells and other interior locations.
  • Previously these tended to be devoid of enemies because of some seeding logic issues, but no longer.

• Fixed an issue in the prior version where the four warp potions you started out with were not really valid warp potions that could be used.
  • Thanks to Tayrtahn for reporting.

• Previously when players warped into various kinds of dungeon nodes, it was possible for them to get stuck in the wall or even to go blipping several chunks to the left if it was an outdoor chunk. Now your character might appear in midair and fall, but that's just the nature of warping. ;) Anyway, fixed.
  • Additionally, fixed the cases of bosses, NPCs, lieutenants, and so on spawning into the upper-left corner of rooms and getting stuck in the wall.
  • Thanks to many players, including Toll, orzelek, Sherlock, and Spork for reporting this and related issues.

• Attractive drops (right now just used for consciousness shards) are now able to pass through ground and floor/walls, to make their movement look smoother and nicer, and to prevent them from ever being stuck in walls, etc.
  • Thanks to mrhanman, Cyborg, GrimerX, and c4sc4 for reporting or suggesting.

• Attractive drops will no longer be attracted or absorbed by any non-player entities like NPCs and decoy fireworks.
  • Thanks to Bossman for reporting.

• The profession books for spellgem crafting, spellscroll crafting, and outfitter crafting have all been removed.
  • You'll still see profession books again in the future, for crests, enchants, and spellshaping gems -- but those aren't availablet to play with yet, and don't come until level 10+ anyhow even once they are in the game.
  • The prior method of profession books just added confusion for new players, didn't add anything that was fun that couldn't be achieved in a better way elsewhere, and generally just made crafting seem more complex than it really should have.

• The dungeon map is now enabled by default, due to popular support.
  • Thanks to jerith for originally bringing this up.

• The description of all of the materials now automatically includes the minimum level the chunk must be in order to find these materials.
  • For anyone curious the current level-gating that was already in place is as follows:
    • 2: Quartz Rock
    • 5: Copper Ore, Sunstone, Moonstone
    • 8: Cherry
    • 10: Iron Ore, Magma
    • 14: Plum
    • 70: Coral
  • There are currently a great many material types (earth essence, etc) which aren't yet seeded at all, but once they are being used by crafting recipes they will start being seeded into the world and chunk-level-gated at the same time. Most further unlocks coming up prior to 1.0 will probably fall in the level 10-80 range.

• 30 blue consciousness shards are no longer seeded in the first settlement when the game is started.
  • Thanks to c4sc4 for suggesting.

• To make world map travel a little more interesting and "textured", added new macrogame location type: Vortex Pylon.
  • Cannot seed closer than 10 tiles to another pylon.
  • Cannot seed closer than 16 tiles to the 0,0 region (initial settlement).
  • If within 13 tiles of another pylon, the regions on the line between the two pylons are "blocked by vortex" (an abnormal concentration of the presence that drives normal humans insane if they spend much time away from something that can shelter them from it) and cannot be entered at all on the world map.
    • The pylon "endpoint" regions will not be blocked by this line, though in theory a pylon region could be blocked by being on a line between two other pylons. Probably not possible due to seeding distance rules though.
    • If connected to at least one other pylon it also blocks a couple other nearby regions (the ones facing away from the origin) to make it less likely that you can "skip" through the block by going through the pylon region itself.
  • Very similar to resource deposits and consciousness nodes it has a group of guarding monsters and is not actually physically present in any of the region's chunks (that may change later to actually being present). If you defeat the monsters the pylon is destroyed and no longer blocks any regions.
  • Also added a new "Destroy Pylon" strategy order that takes 100 TUs and 200 red shards. All the strategy-map orders are basically "overland spells", this is just more obviously one.
  • Note: the game now has to generate regions further out from your current world map location to make sure you can't possibly be standing on a region that will become blocked by a newly generated pylon, which may slow down moves near the "edge" of the known world a bit. If it's too much some optimization can be done.

• Fixed a bug where consciousness nodes were being seeded in hostile terrain and sometimes too close together.

Beta 0.518

(Released October 5th, 2011)

• Fixed an issue where previously if the game were paused, trying to warp out of the current chunk or trying to exit to the main menu would cause the game to stop responding.
  • Thanks to Baleyg, Toll, and allison for reporting.

• Put in protection against several potential infinite loop situations that could happen on machines where the CPU speed far outstripped the hard disk speed.
  • Thanks to Armanant and jerith for reporting.

• The game now starts out new characters with four warp potions rather than four warp scrolls.
  • Thanks to Bossman for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where the junkyard clouds in the dynamic skies were not being set to green.

• Added in a new Eagle enemy type which you can meet in the forest surface areas.
  • These also have their own bird nest monster type.
  • I'll leave you to discover the particulars about them both.
  • Note that they use the bat attack sound effect temporarily, but just until a permanent effect can be made for them.

• Fixed an issue where enemies that are supposed to die when they reach the edge of the ground level chunks were instead turning around to avoid death. This applied to rhinos, skelebots, and so on. They were even jumping some before they turned around, in some cases. Fixed.

• The movement speed of all monsters is now randomized per monster between 0.9 and 1.2 of their base rate.
  • This makes it so that monsters are less likely to stack up on one another when a bunch of them are going in the same direction, as well as simply making the overall effect of the monsters that much more organic.

• Settlement-management: Removed the shard cost from the Upgrade Structure action. It wasn't being displayed properly, and upon reflection we don't see a need for it.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox for reporting that upgrade was mysteriously requiring resources it didn't say it required.

• The way that the trees rotate and thrash around during windstorms is no longer remotely so extreme. This prevents a need to mess with their hitboxes, among other benefits (and it's simply a bit more realistic, anyhow).
  • Thanks to ambartos for reporting.

• Trees and bushes are all now randomized a substantial amount in their size, making forests and other tree-ful areas a lot more dynamic-looking without adding any new art.
  • Thanks to jerith and Spork for suggesting.

• Added Eagle Diver enemies, which start appearing around level 25, and then way more heavily at level 50.
  • These are basically the first general sort of "elite" monster. They are mostly like the regular eagles, but their behavior is much more threatening, they are faster, and have a bit of a stronger attack.

• The crafting tiers have been changed from corresponding to every 5 civ levels, to instead corresponding to every 10 civ levels.
  • It was just way too fast the other way, and there was no time to even build remotely a full loadout NOW, let alone when we have lots more spells. And it really made the progression feel like a constant grind to replace your ailing inventory.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for suggesting this.

• All old world files have had their item tiers retroactively upgraded to the new scale.
  • The way we did this was to multiply the old tier by 5, then divide it by 10, and round up to the nearest tier.
    • So this means that old tier 3 and 4 equipment is now tier 2, old 5 and 6 are both now tier 3, etc.

• The health for the micro-bosses has been increased 4x.
  • Thanks to FallingStar for suggesting.

• To aid with clarity, a new Target Crafting Tier is now shown in the stats menu below the XP count.
  • This lets players know what the baseline crafting tier for their current civ level is.

• Also to aid with clarity, the base magical power of just the spell itself is now shown in the tooltips and crafting screen, in parentheses after the total damage output factoring in your character's magical prowess.

• The cost of lower-tier spells now goes down 4x slower, whereas the cost of higher-tier spells now goes up 4x faster.
  • Thanks to Toll and FallingStar for suggesting.

• Additionally, the "range of obsolescence" for character equipment and spells has been drastically increased. Previously your stuff would be completely obsolete and doing something like 1 damage/healing after about 10 levels. Now it takes 20 levels for things to get THAT obsolete, leading to far more time for players to work on getting better equipment without having to feel a constant time pressure to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade.
  • The other effect of this is that higher-tier spells that are gotten early now provide less insane of a bonus. There's still incentive there to get better stuff to get concentrated firepower, but it's no longer any sort of golden ticket to success.
  • Thanks to several players for inspiring this, but none more than BobTheJanitor!

• The magic point cost of all spells have been linearly doubled.
  • Except for douse monster nest, which is now a lot cheaper than before due to its extremely lowered utility, though; now it's a more viable way to suppress monster nests in a boss room if you don't have time to kill them.
  • Also, teleport, seize, shrink, and flash of light have not been doubled, meaning that they are now the equivalent of half as expensive as it once was.
  • Thanks to FallingStar for suggesting the doubled costs of all the spells in light of the much higher available MP compared to before; this brings the game back into a more middle-ground area of balance, hopefully.

• Another seven boss room templates have been added, courtesy of Josh.

Beta 0.517

(Released October 5th, 2011)

• Toned down the power of the ball lightning spell from 3600 to 2400. This makes it 2.4x the power of the fireball for 2.4x the cost, rather than 4.5x the power for 2.4x the cost.
  • Given that these are both the basic ranged spells in their respective elements, having them have equivalent power-for-cost is important.
  • Thanks to zebramatt for reporting.

• In the prior version, monster health scaling was backwards by relative level. So monsters that were higher-level than you had a lot less health than those lower-tier than you.
  • Too much testing of the same-tier values on my part -- whoops!
  • Thanks to Baleyg and PaxTechnomancer for reporting.

• The attack power and cost of forest rage have both been increased slightly, making them equivalent multiples of the fireball cost.

• Quartered the power of energy pulse and halved its cost, making it more equivalent with the fireball baseline although a little less powerful when attacking one enemy (given that it can hit multiple enemies).
  • Thanks to FallingStar for reporting.

• Doubled the MP cost of launch rock.

• Halved the attack power of creeping death, as it can hit multiple enemies.

• Increased the cost of death touch by 50%.

• Fixed an issue where the power of the various spells was being handled as if they were a tier higher than they were supposed to be; this had been substantially overpowering the player, as if they had gear from five civ levels above what they should have.

• Made it so that the magic point cost of spells is actually scaling properly now.
  • Rather than going up linearly by tier, which was the old way of doing things, it now scales based on the tier level relative to the current tier level of the civilization.
  • Thus more powerful tiers cost more if you get them early, but do more damage; and older tiers cost a lot less but also do less damage.
  • Thanks to Baleyg for reporting that the costs were getting unplayably high in the prior version at higher tiers.

• Attack power bonuses for monsters were not properly working in the prior version. This mainly matters at the moment for when they were in a windstorm; their buffs were not being applied.

• Character and monster attack powers and health values were previously not correctly applied due to some math precision issues.
  • The values were not grossly off, but two very similar proficiencies in a stat category could incorrectly yield the same result, and the final numbers of all these stats were often off by a 10% to 20% or so margin in general.
  • The magic point values, and the spell attack values, were working just fine.
  • Thanks to Baleyg for reporting.

• The health bars of damaged objects no longer show on the screen if you haven't actually damaged those enemies yourself and the enemy is offscreen and the enemy isn't a boss.
  • Thanks to jerith for suggesting.

• Put in some robustness additions that allows for certain kinds of corrupt savegames to be loaded, losing only the chunk the player had been in and whatever was in that chunk, but returning them to the world map.
  • These are savegames where that chunk was already corrupt for whatever reason (such as having copied the world files to a backup before the game had saved all the data about the chunk to the disk), and previously those would make the entire world file unreadable, but now it's not remotely such a blocker.
  • Thanks to Armanant for providing such a save.

Beta 0.516

(Released October 4th, 2011)

• Fixed End-Turn tooltip to note that it takes blue shards, not just shards in general.
  • Thanks to azarakus for the report.

• Fixed an issue in the prior version where desert burrowers and decoy fireworks were invisible.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• The colors of shards in consciousness shard caches in the deep were not matching what they were supposed to. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Baleyg for reporting.

• Fixed up the game so that when there is an invalid link to a room that does not exist, the game now creates a little "sky box room" that you fall into, rather than just crashing and dying.
  • These invalid links should never be seeding anymore anyway -- that was fixed in a prior version -- but for old links that were created in that fashion this now prevents the crash.
  • Thanks to Efrencecht and Vampyre for reporting.

• Icicle leapers now jump noticeably higher than they previously did.

• Monsters now realize when they are able to jump up a cliff to get out of a hole, and now do so.
  • This was always the intended logic, and at one point in the past this was working, but sometime in the months prior to alpha it got busted.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with the ocean shallows sometimes having odd angled water sticking up out of itself.
  • Thanks to Kronic for reporting.

• All of the inescapable-to-normal-monsters holes in the ground are supposed to have water at their lowest extents; this kills the monsters and lets them respawn and walk a different path, making a sort of pachinko effect that keeps caves and exterior surface tunnels interesting.
  • However, in recent versions it wasn't putting in the water when there were goodies or doors down in the water. Fixed.
    • This also keeps things more interesting for players in terms of having more water or lava (as the case may be) to avoid.

• Except in oceans, ocean shallows, and underwater caverns, the game is now vastly less likely to put regular underground passages and goodies under the water. Holes in the wall will still potentially be in them just as much as ever.

• Previously, entering underground buildings would cause undesirable overlap in the region map, making some nodes impossible to enter because of it. Fixed to make this now draw the underground building nodes to the right of the underground cavern nodes they came from, which makes better use of space anyhow.
  • Thanks to Tayrtahn for reporting.

• Fixed the blur on the world map after leaving The Deep areas.
  • Thanks to c4sc4 for reporting.

• Previously, the lava flats, the deep, and the ocean shallows were sucking the player into the middle of them on the first steps into those regions, rather than the second.
  • This was apparently an intentional decision I made a while back from looking at the code, but I don't know what I was thinking.
  • Thanks to c4sc4, BobTheJanitor, and Sherlock for reporting.

• Previously, ocean shallows could be used by clever players to jump back and forth between them and ocean tiles to get way out into the middle of the ocean relatively safely. Fixed.

• Fixed an issue that was causing the outermost chunk of a surface region to always count as having been visited no matter what, which made it trivial to warp out of ocean tiles using this.
  • Thanks to Kemeno for reporting.

• Settlement Management: it is now possible to execute a build action without sufficient time units (you do need at least 1 TU):
  • The resulting structure will be unfinished (and drawn half faded-out with the time units icon on top of it) and won't provide any of the benefits of the completed structure.
  • By left-clicking on an unfinished structure you can order your selected NPC to continue the construction. This also only requires 1 TU, and deducts from the remaining TUs required. Once TUs-left-to-build hits zero the building is completed and acts like a normal building.

• Fifteen new boss room arenas have been designed by Josh and added in, really upping the variety in the interior boss fights (it well more than doubles the number of boss room templates).

• Completely -- and I mean _completely_ redid the balance of the game in terms of character and monster health, magic points, and attacks.
  • The old system did not scale well at all beyond a few levels, and arguably the difficulty curve wasn't even that great early-on.
  • Additionally, the old system would have gotten into absurd numbers for things like health once you got into the thousands of civ levels; worse, any fix to the first problem of difficulty progression would have skyrocketed these numbers into the billions or larger.
  • The new system is a lot simpler, in that everything is relative.
    • You start with a certain amount of max health, max magic points, magical attack power, and those values no longer ever fluctuate.
      • This is a pretty sharp change from your traditional RPG flow, but this game has never claimed to be an RPG and this change is needed in order to allow for game worlds to get progressively larger while still maintaining difficulty balance in a fun way throughout.
    • Enemies also have a certain amount of max health, magical/physical attack power, and so on. Their values varies based on their relative level to the civ level, however -- an enemy that is lower-level than you will have correspondingly worse stats off their baseline, and an enemy that is higher-level than you will have correspondingly better stats. But the general scale of the stats doesn't increase over time. Every time you level up the world, all the enemies stats get incrementally worse down to a floor, rather than yours getting incrementally better up to infinity.
    • Likewise, your equipment goes through the exact same process as the enemies do -- as your civ level goes up, your spellgems do progressively less damage down to a floor, until you craft a new one. This drop is exactly corresponding to the drop in same-level enemy health and stats, though, so you're not actually losing any ground; technically, since your stats stay the same each civ level up, you're still gaining ground on all the enemies each time you level up. But you still need new equipment every 5 levels or so to avoid losing ground against the enemies, same as it always has been.
  • Thanks very much to Armanant for bringing up the difficulty over time issues, and to many players on the forums for weighing in on this revised design.

• All existing world files will have all living entities returned to full health.

• When looking at the magical attack power of a spell, it now includes the attack power of the player's character to avoid there having to be a bunch of mental math that has to be done on exactly what damage would be dealt.

• When looking at the stats of characters, the parenthetical 1-10 value is no longer shown. That is now no longer needed since the values don't scale with the civ level, and it makes these parts of the interface surprisingly cleaner and easier to understand.

• The above changes have really required a complete rebalance of ALL enemies and spells we have so far. We're getting there on that, but there's likely to be gaps where something is trivial or insta-kills you when we don't mean it to be like that. Feedback very welcome as we go through the rebalancement phase of this change!

• The targeting line between the player and their target is no longer affected by darkness dimming.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• While the game is paused, hovering over entities on the screen now shows you tooltips showing the type name, name, health, physical, and magical attack powers of the entity (omitting lines where not relevant there, of course).
  • For some things, such as the minibosses and up, this is the only way to actually see the type name in the game since the name of the specific boss is generally what shows.
  • This is also a handy tool for us in terms of balancing enemies, as we can directly look at the attack powers and so on here. But longer-term this is something that will act more as a training aid, with added descriptions and so on.
  • Thanks to Admiral for suggesting this all the way back in alpha (what, two weeks ago now? Stone Age!).

• When the game is paused, more of the animations are now halted -- jumping players no longer endlessly rotate, bats no longer bob up and down helplessly, precipitation no longer falls, monster spawner smoke no longer rises, shaken lights no longer flicker, etc.
  • One thing that still DOES animate is the clouds and day/night cycle, both of which are considered external to the local chunk and are based on the global world passage of time, which cannot be paused (but which also doesn't affect a whole lot).
  • Thanks to Admiral for reporting.

• The decoy fireworks now only last for five minutes if no monsters kill it first. You still can't attack them directly, but this keeps them from hanging around forever in your settlements.
  • Thanks to PlasmaChroma for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where microbosses were sometimes not dropping any shards.

• Made Rare Commodity Tower icons draw a bit higher up to reduce confusion about which region they're in.

• Added new macrogame location type: Consciousness Node.
  • A node is marked on the map by the icon of the color of shard that it produces.
  • Starts with guarding monsters in the same way as resource deposits, but the monsters are stronger.
  • Once the monsters are cleared away, you can use the new Link Node strategy order (the default left-click action on a region with a node and no other relevant actions that get checked first).
  • Linked nodes produce 100 of the corresponding shard per strategy turn.
    • Currently this gets put in your personal inventory (so you'll need to donate them to a settlement if you want that settlement to use them) but we're planning to move shard storage to a global stockpile and that's where they'll go then.
  • However, linked nodes also represent a more serious threat to the overlords and other mysterious antagonists of the world, and they'll start throwing rampaging monsters at you periodically (in addition to the other periodic spawns). Their retaliations will be greatly fleshed out over time, for now it's always "send in the goons".
  • There's also an Unlink Node strategy order if you find that you want to back down the rate at which those attacks are sent at you. Naturally, you'll also lose the income unless you link it again.

• Increased the differential between region levels in terms of the attack power of enemies. As the region level goes up or down, enemies get vastly more or less effectual in that +-10 region levels range. By the time you hit about 7 region levels above your own, even the weakest enemies will pretty much one-shot you.
  • Of course, with the coming shield spells and such, and even with the existing auto-potions, the meaning of "one shot you" really isn't what it once was.
  • The differential between a level 1 chunk and a level 2 chunk are incredibly tamer now than they used to be, however. It's all been normalized, and the difference in attack powers between a civ level 1 and a region level 2 is now about 36%, rather than the previous 100% jump in attack power.

Beta 0.515

(Released October 3rd, 2011)

• Fixed a crash bug in 0.514 when loading some worlds.
  • Thanks to Bossman for reporting.

Beta 0.514

(Released October 3rd, 2011)

• Removed obsolete dev note from grave detail text.

• Improved ability for code to set angle of emission of particles from particle emitters.
  • This allows for various spells, such as fireball for instance, to have a narrower emission profile.

• Shrunk the apparent size of the tidal pulse and the amoeba shots so that there is less splashing outside of the core collision box.
  • Also vastly improved their performance during this, cutting their number of draw calls down to 20% of what it was before.

• Fixed a null exception when ending turn from a settlement with no NPCs.
  • Thanks to Tagek for the report and save.

• Made it so that the particle effect behavior definitions are defined in an external xml file that is loaded at runtime. This xml file can be reloaded at any time by pressing Ctrl+F4. This makes it way faster to edit and tune particle effects, and makes it so that modders can actually tune more of the effects than just the raw images.

• Fireballs and ball lightning have had their visual behavior completely reworked to be less overwhelming of the screen and to be easier able to tell where the actual projectile is.

• The forest rage visuals have been completely redone.

• Strategy/Settlement-Management: The morale, happiness, and time units pieces of text in the description above the NPC now have tooltips explaning the computation of those values (or the next turn's values, in the case of TUs). It's the same info as the tooltips on the NPC detail window but a bit easier to get at.

• Fixed the tooltip for The Deep to include the same warning as lava flats and ocean tiles about getting sucked in.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Fixed an oddity where rampaging monsters led by rhinos could spawn out in the middle of the ocean. Changed to not spawn rampaging monsters in hostile regions.
  • Thanks to martyn_van_buren for the report.

• Fixed bug where if there was a rescuable npc in the caves of a region that has a settlement, you could try to rescue the npc but it would tell you that they were already safely in a settlement. Now the rescue should work normally.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Creeping death has gotten the particle makeover, and is now much smaller to match it's collision box better as well as looking nicer and using half the draw calls it previously did.

• The skelebot and NPC sniper shots have now gotten the visual upgrade/clarity/shrinkage treatment.

• Shrunk down the energy pulse collision box a bit so that it's easier to shoot through small gaps (and possible to shoot through some passages at all.

• Fixed up some issues with very slow-moving particle balls that would make their particles actually offset from where their collision box was. For amoeba shots against a wall, as one example, this would previously be an issue.

• Greatly improved the death smoke visuals of the launch rock spell.

• Shrunk the trail of launch meteor, and got that also being more efficient to render.

• Fixed an issue with the collision profile of the ball of light not being correctly aligned with the light itself.

• Lightning esper shots are now vastly smaller to match their collision box, as well. And correspondingly more efficient, too.

• Completely redid the visuals for the shrink shot and seize shot.

• The dragon breath attack from crippled dragons is now a lot more clear as to where the collision box of the fire actually is, and the fire also uses less GPU resources like many of the other effects now do.
• Likewise on the magma blobs from the hanging traps.

• The miasma effect from the vengeful ghosts has been visually reworked extremely heavily, making it more attractive and interesting and easier to tell the collision box on it.
  • Also, as per the request of a number of players, miasma blobs can be attacked and destroyed now, in the manner of fire breath.
  • Thanks to c4sc4 for suggesting.

• Strategy/City: changed most shard costs to use different colors than just blue:
  • Build-Structure and Upgrade-Structure now cost white shards.
  • Destroy-Object (i.e. Salvage) now costs red shards.
  • Rescue Stranded NPC now costs green shards.
  • Build Wind Shelter now costs white shards and green shards (and significantly more wood and stone).
  • Explore Region now costs yellow shards.
  • Also added 200 of each non-blue color shard to each settlement's stockpile to avoid stalling anybody's game immediately upon update.

• Made some fundamental changes to how the particles are getting a dark underlay for an additive blending base. The result is startlingly better, especially for effects like the fireball where I decided to keep the "underlay" actually mixed in with the main particle flow itself to simulate debris.

• Fixed a bug where the decoy fireworks had a name like you could talk to them.
  • Thanks to Kemeno for reporting.

• Did a similar improvement to the visuals of the icicle leaper's underlay.

• Got the heal and restore magic effects updated to the new scripted particle system, and in the process made them use about 1/3 as many draw calls and draw with a better background than before.

• The basic melee hit effects are now slightly better, and in the new particle scripting system.

• Revamped the visuals of Ride The Lightning as part of the transition of it to the new scripted particle system.

• The ice bat, fire bat, and lightning esper visual effects have been tweaked as they were converted to the new particle scripting format.

• Added in a new "Mouse Cursor Dynamically Moves Camera" settings option.
  • When this toggle is enabled (by default it is not), the mouse is able to pan the camera. The distance panned is roughly half the distance between the cursor and your character.
  • When this mode is enabled, the "Look Ahead" key changes from its normal function to instead making the camera pan further and faster based on your mouse movements.
  • Thanks to Spork for suggesting this.

Beta 0.513

(Released October 2nd, 2011)

• Fixed an issue from 0.512 that could cause jumps to be stunted at certain framerates.
  • Thanks to JamesMowery for reporting.

Beta 0.512

(Released October 2nd, 2011)

• Fixed a bug with the escape menu in the previous version where the abandon character button would still draw and overlap another button in the submenus.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for the report.

• Fixed some tooltips that were still referring to the no-longer-true "get 100 shards when you level up" rule.
  • Thanks to Baleyg for the report.

• Removed the 999 stacking limit on inventory slots. For almost everything it simply never came into play and for the newly dropped shards it was being annoying. We may add stacking rules back in later for some items, but it's opened up for now.
  • Thanks to c4sc4 for inspiring this change.

• Settlement-Management: Now when drawing the "person" icon on top of a structure with someone assigned to it, it draws a yellow version of that icon for structures to which the highlighted npc is assigned. Hopefully this will make it easier to know what they're assigned to and what to click to un-assign them, etc.

• Settlement Management: added new button to the left of the npc-list area (to the right of the structure-type-list area) labeled "Open Build List" if the build list is not showing or "Close Build List" if the build list is showing.
  • By default, the build list is now not shown, to let people move their mouse cursor around without a building ghost chasing it if they like.
  • Also added a new keybind "Settlement Management: Toggle Build List".
    • Pressing this while the settlement management window is open (and non of the inner detail windows are showing) will toggle the build list between open and closed.
    • Defaults to the "B" key.
  • Thanks to Toll for inspiring this change.

• Improved the error-case handling for the 3 different types of temporary buffers (used to minimize transient heap) so that they'll still put an entry in the error log if something goes wrong but they won't keep spamming the log every single simulation step.

• Added new keybind: "Strategy Map: Next Settlement":
  • Pressing this while the strategy map or settlement management windows are open will try to switch to the next settlement.
  • Also added similar keybind "Strategy Map: Previous Settlement".
  • Neither one has a default binding, just there if you want to use them.
  • Thanks to c4sc4 for the suggestion.

• Made the controls window fit better on 800-wide resolutions.

• Added a step-by-step calculation explanation tooltip to the production numbers on the structure-detail-window (opened by right-clicking an actual existing structure on the settlement map).

• Fixed an index-out-of-bounds exception in the inventory dragging code.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for the report.

• Put in some logic to prevent serial saving of the same identical chunk over top of itself repeatedly when no sim steps have been run since the last save of that chunk.
  • This may have been causing some issues since 0.509.
  • Thanks to JamesMowery and jerith for putting us on the lookout for this sort of thing affecting OSX in the last few versions.

• Put in some logic to prevent any chance of an infinite loop in saving the list of chunks in memory.

• Put in a fix to the ice cross and circle of fire still being able to go through walls in some circumstances in the prior version.
  • Also put in a safety check here to prevent any remote possibility of infinite loops in the related check code for this.
  • Thanks to Baleyg for reporting.

• Monsters that die in water who aren't immune to water (such as those who drown in water in general) no longer grant loot drops.
  • This was something we'd planned on doing, and used to have in the game a long while ago, but just forgot to put back in there for the prior version.
  • Thanks to martyn_van_buren and GrimerX for reminding us.

Beta 0.511

(Released September 30th, 2011)

• The Escape menu now does not show the Inventories, Maps, or Abandon Character buttons when you're on the world map, because they can't work when you're not in a chunk at all.
  • Thanks to Vampyre for pointing out the do-nothingness of the Inventories sub menus while on the world map.

• The Achievements button on the Escape menu has been temporarily removed, will be back when there's something to show there.

• Strategy: fixed a bug where mousing over a settlement that you had not entered would say that you build a wind shelter there.
  • Thanks to orzelek for the report.

• Strategy: fixed bug where rescuable-npcs in caves would show icons on the strategy map but would not show any info in the region tooltip or region detail window.
  • Thanks to Bossman for the report.

• The descriptions for ball lightning and tidal pulse have been updated to note that they slide along walls.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where a hearth guardian stone in a wind shelter chunk (not a settlement) was still letting you try to open the strategy map, which would cause errors.
  • Thanks to Buffered for the report and save.

• Fixed bugs where the announcements or deaths of lieutenants or overlords were being filed as Turn 1 events instead of whatever turn they actually happened on.
  • Regrettably there's no way to fix these retroactively, but ones from this point on should be fine.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Strategy/Settlement-management: Added display of Time-Unit costs to the Structure Type Detail Window (mousing over an item in the structures-you-can-build-list) and the Structure Detail Window (right-click an existing structure on the settlement map) for how much it costs to Build, Upgrade, and/or Salvage an object (fyi, only trees and boulders can be salvaged).

• Rather than there being one kind of consciousness shard, there are now six colors of them.
  • All old consciousness shards have been converted to blue shards in the new system, and all the prior costs involving shards have been converted to blue shard costs for the time being.
  • Over time these will be used for more differentiated costs on the macro-game side.
  • When you find a cache of shards in the world, it now contains a mix of 1-2 shard colors based on the region type you're exploring. The colors correspond to where you find gems and Ilari by color, too.

• Item pickups that have more than one kind of item in them now show the graphic that used to be the consciousness shard graphic.
  • The colored consciousness shards now use a completely different graphic.

• When the civilization level goes up, players no longer get any consciousness shards as a part of that.
  • This was trouble to balance for multiplayer, and there's plenty of rewards for each civ level up at this point anyhow, and we have a better way of getting you more consciousness shards anyhow.

• Previously, the "can't warp out of boss room" logic was actually being applied to warping IN to boss rooms instead of out. Fixed.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where interior boss nodes were not counting as boss nodes for a number of purposes, but including not being able to warp out of them as one example.
  • Thanks to Josh Knapp and jerith for reporting.

• There was an issue with warping to the current chunk if the current chunk was not a surface ground level chunk (which shouldn't have been allowed anyway). Fixed it so that you can't warp to the current chunk in those circumstances.
  • Thanks to Spork for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where items would not pop out properly in water. So if you burst a gem vein underwater, you'd get nothing.
  • Thanks to Baleyg and

• Monsters all now have drops, although they don't always drop something.
  • Standard monsters have about a 5/8 chance of dropping 1-4 consciousness shards at the moment, with the color(s) based on the monster type in question.
    • Soon, standard monsters will have a 5/10 chance of dropping those shards, and an added 1/10 chance each for dropping either a minor insta-heal or insta-mana-restore ball.
  • Boss monsters have a 100% change of dropping a much larger cache of consciousness shards:
  • Vengeful ghosts drop nothing, as that would be way too easy to farm.
    • Microbosses drop 25x whatever their base type would drop; so in the 25-100 range.
    • Minibosses drop 100-400. By the way, the actual values are randomized in a much smaller range for all these, based on the difficulty of the boss type in question.
    • Lieutenants drop 4x what their base miniboss type would drop. So this means a 400-1600 range for these.
    • For now, Overlords drop 12x what their base miniboss type would drop, but not less than 3000 shards. Later, when overlords have their own specific monster types not seen anywhere else, this will be revised. Right now the range is 3000-4800, but later it might be more like 5000 in general.

• The items that are dropped are new "attractive pickups" which float in the air and are attracted to players that walk vaguely near them, making them convenient to collect.

• Made not having the "Aim Keyboard-Triggered Abilities At Mouse Cursor" toggle on more aggressive about interpreting keyboard-triggered abilities as not targetted at the mouse cursor.

• The caches of consciousness shards that you find underground, in interiors, and so on have had the following range changes:
  • Underground 3-6 becomes 45-75.
  • Surface 2-4 becomes 20-35
  • Library/study/office 8-13 becomes 75-100
  • General interior rooms 2-4 becomes 25-45;

• The attractive items that get sucked over to you now play a more subtle sound effect when you pick them up, don't cause your character to do the pickup animation, and don't display any sort of message about what you are absorbing (you can always check your inventory, but the generalities should be pretty clear and the message spam overruns the log otherwise).

• Fixed a bug where paid-off rampaging monsters would stick around the region they were in despite disappearing from the world map and strategy map.
  • Thanks to Yuugi for the report and save.

• Red amoeba shots are now more visible against red or light backgrounds.
  • Thanks to Spork for reporting.

• Icicle leapers now have a bit of shadowing behind them, making them a lot easier to see against white backgrounds.
  • Additionally, the base skelebot graphics have been altered to be higher-contrast with light backgrounds as well.
  • Thanks to JamesMowery and jerith for suggesting.

• Improved the contrast of the actual image used for the opal dust rather than doing more with sparkles or what have you.
  • Thanks to jerith for suggesting.

• Non-boss-room building interiors now spawn just monsters instead of any monster spawners.
  • This really changes the feel of exploring interiors compared to exteriors and undergrounds, in a way we think players will really like (based on many of them suggesting just this, partly).
  • These monsters also do not respawn, at present. No given room has that much backtracking in the main case to where that should be needed, but we can experiment more with that in the future if needed.

• The icy bat's frost now properly follows the icy bat as they bob up and down. Same with the fire bat's fire.

• Moved the "Switch Active Ability Bar" and "Switch Active Ability Bar (Reverse)" keybinds to the Abilities tab of the controls window.

• Renamed the "Switch First Mouse Ability Slot" bind to "Switch Highlighted Ability Slot To Next", but did not change its function.

• Added new "Switch Highlighted Ability Slot To Previous" bind, it does the same thing as the existing "To Next" bind but moves to the left instead of to the right.
  • No default binding.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for the suggestion.

• Added new "Use Highlighted Ability 1" bind:
  • Tries to trigger the ability in the highlighted slot of the currently active ability bar.
  • With default keybindings this is what would fire if you clicked the left mouse button. The difference is that this binding will not automatically use mouse aiming.
  • Added corresponding binds for 2 through 9.
  • No default bindings for any of these, just there if you're a play-by-keyboard sort of person and want them.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for inspiring this addition.

• The color difference between entered and not entered interior room icons is now a lot clearer (darker green versus the unexplored yellow).

• Destroyed rooms now show their door as visibly damaged and with a red symbol on them, rather than showing the bomb icon.
  • This makes these doors look more realistic and the damage that's on the other side more expected. It also makes these doors easier to quickly discard as you're running around a room.
  • Thanks to huw for suggesting.

• Ice cross and circle of fire no longer get blocked by the wooden platforms the player can create.
  • Thanks to arcee for reporting.

• The giant shadow bats now have a bit of a narrower collision profile so that they can slide through smaller openings.

• Fixed an issue with giant shadow bats being unable to seed quite often in the undergrounds these days, and with that also fixed some other related seeding issues with bosses in general.
  • Thanks to many players for reporting the "boss not spawning" issue. Please let us know if you see it again!

Beta 0.510

(Released September 30th, 2011)

• Fixed a null exception bug in the settlement-management interface when mousing over a resource stockpile icon.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Messages are now shown when you fail to put on a suit or turn into a bat, explaining why you can't do the thing in question (usually already having a suit on or being transmogrified, but in the case of being a skelebot you can't put on suits since they are too small).

• You are now allowed to warp to the same chunk you are already in, when that chunk exits to the world map. This way when you are down in surface tunnels you can quickly get to the exit of this chunk.

• When you are in a boss room, you can no longer use warp scrolls directly from there; instead the following message is shown:
  • The power of the boss prevents you from warping out of here -- run for the exit and warp away from the other side if you wish!

• Bats now bob up and down more in the air, making them easier to see and making it stop looking strange when they are near the edge of the ground.
  • Thanks to Efrencecht for reporting the strangeness.

• Strategy/Settlement-management: Fixed bug where the next-settlement and previous-settlement buttons were not being consistently disabled when detail windows were open (and thus supposed to be blocking input to the rest of the interface).
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• The player bat now draws in front of the ground in such a way that it's no longer possible to lose sight of your bat behind the grass.
  • Thanks to kerzain for reporting.

• The granularity of the way that the minimap is revealed has been decreased so that generally it is now revealed in larger pieces.

• Fixed an issue in the last version where settlements could have guardian stones overlapping workbenches, and things of that nature.
  • Thanks to Cougar_DK for reporting.

• Ride The Lightning now has a 2 second casting speed instead of 1 second, to prevent being able to fly across the sky.
  • Additionally, it is no longer sped up or slowed down by the magical casting speed of the character, making this consistent across all characters.
  • Thanks to kerzain for reporting.

• Monster spawners now have 68% of the health that they previously did, making them not such a pain to actually kill.
  • Thanks to a number of players for this feedback.

Beta 0.509

(Released September 30th, 2011)

• Fixed some bugs where mouse-aiming was overriding the targeting of keyboard abilities even with the aim-keyboard-abilities-at-mouse-cursor toggle turned off.

• Strategy/Settlement-management: Converted intra-turn "time management" for NPCs from "one action per turn and one workplace assignment" (and one residence assignment, but it's not really related to all this) to:
  • At the beginning of each turn an NPC's Time Units is increased by their current morale value.
  • If they have an assigned workplace, they only gain half as many Time Units.
  • Each action has a Time Unit cost, a few examples:
    • Scouting is currently 20/tile, or 10/tile for NPCs with the Explorer trait.
      • Note that now scouting only "charges" you for the number of tiles you actually reveal (this is one of the reasons we like TUs better than has-acted/has-not-acted).
    • Building a wind shelter costs 200 TU, so an NPC might theoretically have to "save up" for a few turns without doing any actions, particularly if they're working a farm or whatever.
    • Constructing/Upgrading a building depends on the building (wells and houses are cheap, lumber mills take a lot of TU... later we hope to have you be able to start a building without full TU and build it in stages with multiple npcs and/or multiple turns).
    • "Salvaging" a tree takes 50 TU.
    • "Salvaging" a boulder takes 100 TU.
  • Instead of moving to the next non-acted NPC in the list after taking an action, it will only move on if the NPC is down to a non-useful (lower-than-scouting-cost) number of TUs. There's a number of related interface changes like this one, really.
  • If you mouse-over the Time Units listing in the NPC detail window (right click an NPC portrait to get to that) it will explain how many TUs it projects the NPC will have at the beginning of next turn. This can be inaccurate if something during the end-turn process changes the NPC's morale (like a food shortage).
  • We're sure this all needs a ton more balancing, but it's at least ready for testing at this stage, have fun!

• Fixed an issue where the ladders down into the underground were drawing behind other game entities sometimes.

• Fixed an issue where the ladders down into the underground were sometimes drawing on floating islands in the sky, which made no sense. Now they always are on the lowest area of ground if possible.
  • Thanks to Eduardo X and mrhanman for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where the minimap would blink fully revealed right before entering a newly-created chunk.
  • Thanks to mrhanman, dumpsterKEEPER, and Procyon for reporting.

• Bats are no longer able to fly through walls/floors. That goes for the giant shadow ones and all the other kinds of bats.
  • This prevents the bats from getting so crazy inside maze rooms and interiors and caves in general, and allows players to use the cave terrain to fight the shadow bat minibosses more strategically.

• Improved the way that collision detection is handled on flying enemies with the terrain and other solid objects. Both spells and enemies and player bats should all slide along the terrain now; all of the above were getting stuck sometimes depending on their movement angle, previously.
  • Thanks to mrhanman, Admiral, and AragonLA for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the guardian stones would only refresh you to 4 warp potions if you had fewer than 2 warp potions.
  • Thanks to Baleyg for reporting.

• Vastly improved the melee attack range logic; previously it was possible for melee enemies to hit you through walls or other solid obstacles at times.

• After a lot of thought and ongoing testing, decided to make it so that spells like ice cross and ring of fire and so on can no longer pass through walls. It just seemed like a bug to players, and it made dwarf skelebots extra annoying, and it made it really easy to cheese certain bosses (giant skelebot, for instance) in certain boss room templates.
  • One reason that these were originally designed to pass through walls was to have a defense against bats and other future enemies that might be able to go through walls. But now that bats can no longer go through walls (that was also problematic), any desire for spells that can go through walls also evaporates.

• Fixed an issue where ball lightning and energy pulse and similar could get caught in the wall if you were firing away from the wall with your back to it.
  • Thanks to Admiral for reporting.

• In addition to the speed scaling that happens based on the relative region level, monster SPELLS (not monsters themselves) now have the following modifiers based on the action difficulty:
  • Featherweight: 0.4x;
  • Apprentice: 0.6x;
  • Hero (the default): 0.8x;
  • Master Hero: 1x;
  • The Chosen One: 1.2x;
  • This makes it so that spells can be substantially easier to dodge depending on the settings.

• Simplified tracking of "chunks in memory", hopefully this will at least reduce the number of "loot or bosses respawned when I left and came back"-type bugs, if not eliminate them altogether.
  • Please let us know if you see another one of those in 0.509!

• Ride The Lightning now has a 1 second cooldown instead of 3 seconds.
  • Until recent versions apparently a bug was preventing the 3 seconds from kicking in, but 3 seconds is too long.
  • Thanks to FallingStar for reporting.

• Magic Potions/scrolls now have a new cooldown type of Magic Restoration instead of Logistical. Their cooldown time has also been increased from 10s to 15s.
  • This keeps the magic potions from interfering with other logistical spells for long periods, but also makes it impossible to spam magic restoration (and thus major offensive spells).

• Ambient Cold and Heat damage is now prevented by the presence of the ilari. So NPCs no longer have to put on snowsuits in ice age settlements, and if a player chooses a non-ice-age character they no longer take damage and die in the settlement itself.

Beta 0.508

(Released September 29th, 2011)

• The guardian stones now refresh you back up to 4 warp scrolls rather than 2.
  • Thanks to yuastnav and zebramatt for suggesting.

• There is now a new tip in the adviser guardian stone's list of tips, right after the first 5 that it makes you read. This new tip says "I've told you really all you need to know for now -- but I have more advice for you, so do come back later!"
  • The idea being that we don't want people to feel like they have to read 35 tips before they do anything.

• Fixed a crash bug that could occur when getting lost in the lava flats.

• Dwarf Skelebots no longer cause knockback with their attacks.
  • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting.

• The knockback from the skelebot giant is now about 50% as potent.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• A tip is now shown to the player when they try to use a warp scroll from their ability bar:
  • Tip: to use a warp scroll, open the region map and choose the dungeon you want to warp into. Then choose the node in the dungeon that you want to warp to. It must be a node you have already visited, but you can go back to anywhere you've already been in the current region.

• Warp potions have now been added. These are identical to warp scrolls, but cannot be crafted. Instead you gain these as a gift from the local illari instead of warp scrolls.
  • The benefit of this is that you can now craft "extra" warp scrolls to have on hand without that impacting your ability to get the freebies refreshed every time you visit town.
  • There is also now a 1% chance of finding these warp potions as you explore through buildings.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• Warp Scrolls can now be dropped again, but Warp Potions now cannot.

• Fixed a typo in the name of Log Cabin Lodge.
  • Thanks to mithrandi for reporting.

• The power of healing potions/scrolls has been quadrupled. The power of magic restoration potions/scrolls has been doubled.

• Fixed a bug that was causing monsters that were your same level to be 0.6 the speed that they should have been.
  • Thanks to Baleyg for reporting.

• Monster nests no longer respawn except in boss rooms. So you can now permanently clear an area of monsters if you wish.
  • Thanks to Achillies for bringing this up, and many other players for weighing in.

• Going along with the above, monsters themselves are now saved when the chunk is saved. So rather than all the monsters being cleared and then freshly respawning when you come back into a chunk, the monsters are where you left them.

• Overlord keeps and evil outposts now have their own awesome music tracks that they play, rather than using more generalized interior soundtracks for their region.

Beta 0.507

(Released September 29th, 2011)

• Fixed a crash that players could get on some instances with chunks.
  • Thanks to leb0fh for reporting.

Beta 0.506

(Released September 29th, 2011)

• The maximum movement rate of giant red amoeba shots has been doubled, and the time to live (TTL) of their shots has been halved.

• Similarly, for the giant blue amoebas, their shots have had their TTL halved, but in this case their max speed and their acceleration have been doubled.
  • Thanks to Tayrtahn for suggesting.

• Put in an extra check that should help prevent situations where a chunk is re-loaded from disk before its last state has actually been written to disk.

• Fixed minor typo in rampaging monsters description.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• In the prior version there was a bug where only the giant skelebot melee attacks would do any damage to you (out of all the various monster melee attacks). Fixed.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor, Toll, Kemeno, arcee, PaxTechnomancer, Tayrtahn, SNAFU, Moonshine Fox, and Nenad for reporting.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where low-jump could accidentally be triggered by pressing the down key before a jump, rather than after.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for providing the method for finally finding this one, and to Lars Bull for the initial report, and to many other players for the report.

• When you drop items out of your inventory, it now drops the entire stack you are dragging rather than just one item from the stack.
  • Thanks to c4sc4 for suggesting.

• Put in logic to prevent Unity 3D from suiciding if it fails to take a screenshot for some reason.
  • Thanks to leb0fh for reporting.

• Mouse buttons beyond the left and right mouse button are no longer disabled by having your cursor over HUD elements. The left and right mouse buttons are, because they actually have alternate functions in those windows; but that's not true of the other mouse buttons, and so we now let them continue to function as normal.
  • Thanks to OpalMonkey for reporting.

• The "Left Mouse <=> Right Mouse" was previously working in most of the GUI, but not in the inventory bar or in actual gameplay. Now it works everywhere that we've been able to think to test. If you find any more places where it doesn't work, please let us know!
  • Thanks to RedSeraph for reporting.

Beta 0.505

(Released September 28th, 2011)

• Gem veins, quartz outcrops, and the like now all draw in the foreground, so that the player and enemies walk behind them and so that they are never hidden behind mushrooms or whatever else.
  • Gem veins in particular now also emit a low-level light source, making them even more obvious.
  • Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for suggesting.

• Dropped items (gem dust, etc) now have a bit of a sparkle to them to make them easier to see.
  • Thanks to a number of players for suggesting.

• Previously there was a bug with the most recent log message getting cropped if you had more than 200 messages, rather than the oldest message being cropped. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• When the gem vein has been cleared out of an underground gem vein room, and you are in that room, it will now change the color of that room on the dungeon map to the regular underground color, and call it a former gem vein node instead of a gem vein node. That way you can actually tell where you've been.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• The neutral Ilari sites on the dungeon map now show up with a blue node rather than yellow, so you can tell them apart from the gem veins at a glance.
  • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

• The shots from the giant amoebas and giant red amoebas now live for 10 seconds instead fof 2, making them not trivial to kite from an extreme distance.
  • They also will now fire at you from a much further distance than before.

• The skelebot giants also will now fire at you from vastly further away now.
  • And now when the skelebot giants hit you at melee range, not only do they knock you back, they send you really flying for several screens, and then shoot at you more with their fireballs.

• The skelebot dwarves have had their movement speed and acceleration both halved.

• The way that knockback is calculated is now a lot more accurate, and thus works smoothly with knockbacks that are extremely long-range like the skelebot giant. Before it was very jolt-y and only good for very short knockback.

• Fixed a bug where the higher amount of damage from the spell component of a player bat attack was still being applied.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Fixed a typo in the tidal pulse spell description, and another in the transmogrify into bat description.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• Brought back functionality where the game version is shown in the upper left when the in-game escape menu is visible.
  • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

• It is now possible to use either/or of the custom and OS mouse cursors. The default is just to the OS cursor now. This can be controlled in the first tab of the settings window.
  • Thanks to GrimerX, mrhanman, huw, and other players for suggesting.

• When a chunk is touched at all, such as each frame during a fade-out, the game now resets its seconds to keep alive.
  • This should hopefully solve the last of the issues with rooms that you can exit and return to and see things reset.
  • Thanks to Vampyre and Bossman for reporting.

• Put in code that will prevent a possible crash due to garbage collector suicide when custom textures are being created in memory after a long time playing in one session.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• Put in some logic to prevent a crash when the OS says that access is denied on saving the world file. Now it simply shows a warning message to the player and tries again later.
  • Thanks to FallingStar reporting this happening sometimes on certain Windows 7 setups.

• Instead of showing a glowing border around enemies that are targeted with a the direct keyboard targeting controls -- which wasted a lot of RAM on the extra textures and also causes some hitching with really large enemies -- the game now instead draws a thin, color-pulsing line to the target. This is actually a lot more clear in the first place.
  • Thanks to AragonLA for reporting.

• Bosses and vengeful ghosts can now be targeted using the direct keyboard targeting even if they are offscreen at the time.

• Non-player entities no longer draw as moving on the world map. This again keeps their memory footprint lower with regard to the colored outlines that we're drawing around them; and it makes the players a lot more noticeable, too, by contrast.

• Fixed an issue where "overflow" vents were being seeded from destroyed rooms to other destroyed rooms, and creating the "vents to nowhere" that would bug out on players.
  • Thanks to a ton of players for reporting this.

Beta 0.504

(Released September 28th, 2011)

• Really revamped what happens under the hood with your character as you transition between chunks (going through doors, etc). Previously you could wind up falling before or after going through a door, or even getting hit by monsters or acid water or whatever during the brief period of paralysis that you'd have while the game was fading in and out.
  • Now it freezes you and makes you invincible during that period, in a way that will be multiplayer-safe, and thus the overall feel is much better.
  • There is also now no longer a 0.6 second delay before you can move after going through doors and such. Now you can move as soon as the fade-in has finished. You could already cast spells that soon, so the disconnect was jarring anyhow -- old logic, really. The issues that movement-delay was originally fixing are now fixed by the fade-ins and this freeze logic.
  • It's possible this will introduce some new issues (this is always the risk with any central change like this), so we'll be doing a release during the middle of the day today to make sure we're around to catch any backwash from this. But so far it seems clean!
  • Thanks to Lars Bull for reporting the issues related to this.

• Fixed a number of typos of "keyboard."
  • Thanks to arcee for reporting.

• The health bar is no longer shown over the little fire that is there when the player dies (it was showing at full health, to boot, which was even more confusing).
  • Thanks to Admiral for reporting this.

• Fixed bug where it was still possible to multi-generate a chunk the first time it was requested.

• The monster movement speed scales have been altered as follows (based on the differential between their level and yours -- with them moving slower the more overpowered you are against them):
  • <= -3: 0.3 becomes 0.8
  • -2: 0.4 becomes 0.9
  • -1: 0.5 becomes 0.95
  • 0: 0.6 becomes 1
  • 1: 0.8 becomes 1.1
  • 2: 1 becomes 1.2
  • 3: 1.2 becomes 1.3
  • 4: 1.2 becomes 1.5
  • 5: 1.2 becomes 1.75
  • >= 6: 1.2 becomes 2
  • The difficulty of monsters has been altered in other ways with the difficulty level settings and such anyhow, and so the original need to slow everything down isn't there as much.
  • And related to that, the framerates for the animations of the monsters simply aren't geared to look good below 1.0 speed, so we don't want players playing with those low speeds so much as it winds up looking jerky and bad when there's no good reason for that.
  • And lastly, when you play way up in region levels (six or more), the monsters are really a lot faster now, which adds to the challenge for players who are that good. As someone who always liked to play Mario 2 in double-speed, that sort of thing is neat to have as an option.
  • Thanks to GrimerX for inspiring this change.

• Warp scrolls can no longer be dropped, since doing so would allow for various infinite warp scroll exploits with guardian stones.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• Douse Monster Nest and Ball Of Light spells now leave a light blue blip on the minimap.
  • This lets players leave a trail for themselves with balls of light, and it lets them see when monster nest dousings expire (presuming they use them at all now, since monster nests can also just be destroyed -- though dousings persist past chunk unloads and reloads, unlike killing a monster nest).
  • Thanks to wigglestick for suggesting.

• Transmogrify into bat rebalance:
  • Player bats are now resistant to cold damage, but still not heat damage.
  • Player bats previously were supposedly taking more damage from enemies, but that wasn't ever fully implemented (looks like I got distracted before finishing that). All mention of that has now been removed, as I don't think it would have been fun anyway.
  • Player bats now only have 5% as much magical attack strength as normal, however.
    • This applies not just to their base magical attack value, but actually the attack power of the spells they use, too (those two components are generally added together).
  • Thanks to QuantumGoblin for originally bringing this up, and a variety of players for weighing in.

• When using healing items or mana-restoration items, the magical attack value of the character was previously being included, which was a problem for a lot of reasons.
  • Now it's just the base power of the item itself, which means that the effectiveness of these items is character-agnostic, which is a good thing so that you don't have to choose a good offensive character just to be able to heal.
  • Additionally, mana-restoration stuff had some really outdated logic that was tripling its effectiveness invisibly and behind the scenes. Now it does what it says on the tin, too.
  • The base effectiveness of tier 1 mana-restoration has been bumped up from 400 to 600 to compensate for these other changes.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• When healing potions are auto-applied, the logic for which one it chooses (if any) is now necessarily more complex.
  • At each step, it tries to find the lowest-tier health potion or health scroll that will fill the criteria, still preferring potions over scrolls if there are two of the same tier.
  • Step 1: If there are any potions/scrolls that will restore you to 3/4 health or greater, it chooses the lowest-tier one that will do so.
  • Step 2: If step 1 came up with nothing, then it looks for something to get you to 1/2 health or greater.
  • Step 3: If step 2 came up with nothing, then it looks for something to get you to 1/4 health or greater.
  • Step 4: If step 3 came up with nothing, then it looks for something to get you to 1 health or greater (hey, at least you'd be alive).
  • If none of the four steps come up with anything, then you're just plain dead and it doesn't waste a healing item.

• Settlement-management: added new "Boulder" obstacle type. Basically a copy of the Tree obstacle type except:
  • Different graphics (which are placeholder, please note).
  • Gives 10 Granite instead of 10 Cedar Logs when destroyed.
  • Seeds in 1/4 the locations that would previously have been trees.
    • This is retroactive (1/4 of trees in settlement maps from old versions will mysteriously become very rock-like in this version).

• Previously, all of the offensive spells shared one cooldown type. This really devalued having multiple offensive spells to use in a short-term succession.
  • Now the offensive spells are broken out by the six colors -- so color of spells will be an ongoing consideration when you are making combos of spells to use against enemies; you can't easily combo two offensive spells of the same color, but you can combo ones cross-color.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for pointing this out.

• Decreased the standard global spell cooldown from 0.7 seconds to 0.5 seconds.

• Fixed a crash bug that could happen in rare circumstances (about 5% of the time at absolute most) if you died while running.
  • Thanks to kerzain for reporting.

• Fixed up all the destroyed room templates to be taller and thus not trap players who are neutral skelebots or similar.

• Put in some logic to prevent a crash when collision checks apparently were trying to run in an invalid chunk.
  • Thanks to Vampyre for reporting.

Beta 0.503

(Released September 27th, 2011)

• Put in a fix to reduce or remove the mouse lag depending on the game setup. Doesn't seem to fully reduce it on OSX for me, but for windows it keeps the cursor underlay and the cursor at 1:1 movement. And it's better on OSX. Unity has two different mouse subsystems, and instead of just using the GUI one now we're using both in conjunction for setting the mouse coordinate that the game actually uses for spells, etc. This is what AI War and Tidalis do, not sure why we didn't do that here before.

• Fixed a new crash issue from the prior version relating to killing guarding bosses and similar quasi-NPCs.
  • Thanks to GrimerX and mrhanman for reporting.

Beta 0.502

(Released September 27th, 2011)

• Fixed bug where guardian stones were... well, apparently eating food, sometimes. We're going to just try to forget about this one.

• Fixed bug where an npc dying would not actually remove them from the settlement list properly and they'd keep eating food and keep their previous residence and work assignments. Nevermind sick days, apparently you can't even call in dead on Environ.
  • This should also work retroactively with old worlds.
  • Thanks to arcee and others for reporting this.

• Fixed bug where dead NPCs would keep showing back up in the strategy/settlement-management layers after save/load.
  • This should also work retroactively with old worlds, so if your agricultural economy is largely based on ghost labor you'll have some adjusting to do.
  • Thanks to whoever reported this, we can't find it in mantis so it was probably during the earlier part of the alpha.

• Fixed a null-exception that could occur when dropping items (sometimes the drop would be caused inadvertently, and then hit this bug).
  • Thanks to kerzain for the report.

• Fixed alignment of the you-cannot-scout-that-region notice on the strategy map to not go off the top of the screen.
  • Thanks to Admiral for the report.

• Fixed a crash bug when clicking Buy License in the demo.
  • Thanks to Bossman for reporting.

• Now when you unlock a new tech it is announced in the chat log with the name of the recipe, the name of the profession (workbench), and the ingredients in the recipe.
  • Thanks to Admiral for inspiring this.

• Fixed an exception that could occur when walking across multiple hostile world map tiles.
  • Thanks to Kemeno for reporting.

• Fixed a couple of issues with the key binding screen:
  • Some general stickiness that was not intended with it staying in selection mode for a key even after you chose the key.
  • The mouse button binding was just blinking past your selection and not actually keeping it.
  • Thanks to kingisaaclinksr for reporting.

• Put in some safety garbage-collection calls for just before the save-world-metadata, save-all-region-metadata, save-specific-region-interior-metadata, and save-chunk operations, if the managed heap is over certain thresholds at the time. Hopefully this will prevent out-of-memory crashes due to the garbage collector being depressed and deciding that it'd be better to just let it happen.
  • Thanks to c4sc4 for the report and save.

• Fixed a super rare crash bug that could occur when loading a chunk from disk.
  • Thanks to mithrandi for reporting.

• Changed a bunch of resource and resource-gathering-related tooltips to hopefully clarify how to use the deposits visible on the world map.

• Fixed a bug where the "previous structure type" and "next structure type" buttons on the settlement-management interface were shifting around based on which structure type was currently selected.
  • Thanks to Toll for the report.

• Fixed bug where the Explorer trait was having no effect on scouting radius.
  • Thanks to shinseitom for the report.

• Added "Movement-Directed Keyboard Aiming" toggle to Game tab of Settings window.
  • When this toggle is enabled (by default it is not), and the "Aim Keyboard-Triggered Abilities At Mouse Cursor" toggle is disabled, and the keyboard reticule is disabled or inactive, then all your keyboard-triggered abilities will be aimed in the direction indicated by your movement keys. If you're not holding any direction keys down the default direction is straight ahead according to your facing.
  • If you're not clear on what this does, just give it a shot.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for the suggestion.

• Fixed several collision bugs relating to fire touch in particular, but really improving the collision of any spells that explode or pierce when touching other stuff.
  • It's possible that this might also have fixed that unintended splash damage thing with the amoeba shots, but I've not tested that. Feedback on that would be great!
  • Thanks to Lars Bull for reporting.

• Made it so that monster spawners can now be attacked by spells that hurt the background tiles, such as fire touch, energy pulse, ice cross, etc.
  • These have a huge amount of health, however, so with fire touch it would take like 30+ hits to kill an equal-level monster nest. Not done with this change yet, more coming below before tonight's release!
  • Thanks to a huge, huge number of players for suggesting that monster spawners being kill-able would be more fun.

• The "Just entered chunk invincibility" effect is now less subtle and more interestingly colored. This makes it more obvious where your character is when you start, and more obvious when you do and do not have the invincibility happening to you.

• The flame that shows after your character has died is no longer able to receive the just-entered-chunk invincibility.

• After leaving a chunk in the game, the chunk gets removed from memory after about ten seconds. This is not new -- it's when you see all the monsters that have spawned get reset, and so on. Now the following also happens:
  • All bosses, vengeful ghosts, and monster spawners get returned to full health.
    • This is to prevent various ways of "cheesing" high level bosses by throwing characters into the meat grinder, using warp scrolls cheaply, or otherwise. It also makes each boss fight something you have to win in a single stretch, rather than something you can whittle down over many return visits, which we prefer.
    • Thanks to Toll for reporting a specific exploit that hurried us to change this.
  • Any missing monsters nests that were previously destroyed are loaded back in. This is to prevent the game from getting boringly empty if you revisit areas you have already been, but while you are in an area you can still clear out the monster nests thanks to the recent changes.
    • As an added twist, the locations of these nests will be completely randomly added back in. They might cluster with other nests, or go to completely new locations, or be kind of where they were before. This makes for a much interesting return visit if you have some reason to make a return visit (such as a boss you failed to defeat, etc).
    • Thanks to several players for suggesting this.

• When you enter a chunk, you no longer get any invincibility added to yourself if you were in that chunk within the last ten seconds. This prevents abuse of running into and out of chunks to regain invincibility and attack bosses from that cover, for instance. And given that within that 10 second window most likely nothing should have moved within the room you left (multiplayer aside), the invincibility really isn't needed, anyway.
  • Assuming that you do make a mistake and exit a fight with a boss, you can either go back in inside the 10 second limit and pick up right whre you left off; or you can wait at least 10 second, heal up and do anything else you want to do, and then restart the boss fight with full invincibility.
  • Thanks again to Toll for the exploit that also required this change.

• Giant Shadow Bats, Giant Amoebas (both kinds), and dragon breath are all now immune to knockback from player spells. That was making it too easy.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Improved the tooltip on Fire Touch to include more wording to make it clear to use them on gem veins.
  • Thanks to many players for suggesting this.

• Added a powerful new death touch spell that can be crafted.
  • Very strong touch-range spell. Extremely useful for destroying or harvesting background entities like monster spawners, gem veins, trees, and other resource deposits.
  • Thanks to Itchykobu, Procyon, and Toll for suggesting.

• Made the deploy-item abilities (platforms, bear traps, etc) ignore direct-targeting ("tab-targeting") and the new movement-directed targeting since all that generally accomplished was making it impossible to use those without the mouse, etc.
  • Thanks to Admiral for the report.

• Fixed a bug that's been around since before alpha where while you were fading from one chunk to another chunk, the destination chunk might get loaded from disk (or generated from scratch!) every single processing frame because it wasn't considered "pinned" by the game unless a player entity was in it and was forgetting about them. Now the chunk is considered pinned for a certain number of seconds after it was created (from disk or from scratch) in memory or since the last frame a player was in that chunk, whichever is later.
  • This was likely the cause of various issues, but the multiple boss notifications spam was one of them and there were a number of others that this likely solves.
  • Thanks to Toll for the report and save that finally put us on the trail of this one.

• The world map generation algorithm has been improved so that you are always now guaranteed at least one non-ocean region of levels 1-1000 in your world. Previously it was often skipping 11-19, as an example.
  • This will take effect for existing worlds as well, but you will most likely have a "crust" of higher-level regions before you get back to the missing lower-level regions on the other side of them, if you were having missing lower-level regions.
  • Thanks to eRe4s3r, Kemeno, Kronic, Toll, GabrielKronos, orzelek, brianc, and probably others for reporting.

• Added KeyBind "Switch Active Ability Bar (Reverse)" (Game tab of the Controls window).
  • Switches to the previous ability bar.
  • Has no default binding, it's just here for folks who want it enough to pick a key for it.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for the suggestion.

• Added in a custom mouse pointer that gets displayed under the regular mouse cursor. This adds to the contrast of where you'll be firing, especially in very white background areas, which can make aiming easier while still keeping the fluid speed of the OS cursor at any framerate, with vsync, etc.
  • For OSX players where the game is actually detecting their cursor in the wrong place, too, this underlay cursor should be reflecting the wrong location rather than the right one, which will aid in finding and fixing that bug.

• Put in a change to hopefully circumvent an odd bug in Unity OSX where if you hit a keyboard key when the trackpad isn't actively moving, the Y coordinates of the mouse would mysteriously flip negative. This only manifests in the compiled version of AVWW, not in the unity editor, which is why we never saw this until now.
  • This seems to fix all of the OSX mouse-related bugs, but please let us know if you see anything else with it (you'll be able to tell because the little custom cursor won't be under your mouse cursor like normal).
  • Thanks to oobleckthegreen, Admiral, RedSeraph, JaguarUSF, Sherlock, and martyn_van_buren for reporting.

• Added the "Left Mouse <=>; Right Mouse" keybind from AI War and Tidalis.
  • While this key is held, all Left clicks are treated as Right clicks, and vice versa. Very helpful for folks with one-button mice. It automatically is bound to the left apple key on OSX.
  • Thanks for RedSeraph for suggesting we bring this over.

Beta 0.501

(Released September 26th, 2011)

• Disabled memory archives since both the interface and the underlying story system need significant redesign.
  • Memory crystals are still being seeded in Rare Commodity Towers, but have a note about not being useful in their tooltip.

• Fixed a typo in the gem vein descriptions.

• Strategy Layer: The rescue-stranded-NPC action now requires that the settlement to which they would be moved have at least a net food production of 40, to help prevent players from getting into food consumption holes that can take many turns to get back out of.
  • As a result, the rescue-stranded-NPC action is now available at level 6 instead of level 4, because before level 4 there's no way to actually manage a settlement's food production (food consumption doesn't actually happen before level 6, but you'd still be in a tricky situation if you'd invited tons of npcs already).
  • Thanks to Toll and others for reporting the food-consumption vicious cycles that were happening.

• Fixed a bug where the rescuable-NPC icon was being drawn on regions and in region tooltips/detail-windows before it was possible to actually execute a rescue order.

• Fixed a bug where the rescuable-NPC icon would draw on the region but not the details.
  • Thanks to GrimerX for the report.

• Crafting: if your inventory already contains some of the item that would result from the currently selected recipe, the number you're holding (broken out into 3 numbers: how many of the same tier, how many of a lower tier, and how many of a higher tier; unless it's an item with no tier in which case it just shows one number) is displayed to the right of the big result card.
  • Thanks to Admiral and others for reminding us of the need to know if they're about to duplicate a spellgem, etc.

Previous Release Notes

AVWW - Pre-Beta Release Notes