Homesteading part 2 (v1.16.0-pre.1)

Dear Homesteaders
v1.16.0-pre.1, a preview release, can now be downloaded through the account manager. (section "Other Goodies").

For this update we wanted to complete some of features that didn't make it into 1.15 as well as a few unplanned ones. It includes several features that some of our VS Team very much has been looking forward too. I personally am very happy with the new wind sway system - its programming is now way cleaner, more powerful, and likely a tad more performant. But also visually it feels way richer. Together with the new forest floors and new mushrooms, wandering the forests now feels amazing to me. That being said, the community will be the ultimate judge of that

Server owners will be very happy to see that one large barrier for players will soon be gone - the manual installation of mods. Highly frequented servers should now also become a lot more interesting with the addition of the auction house - as you can finally fully live out your merchant dreams.

The long promised bears, despite the teams large efforts, something like in the 200 man-hour range, are still not done yet, but we hope to have some version of them until rc.1.

Anyhow, we hope you'll enjoy the new updates. Thanks for playing and sharing your experiences and screenshots with us
 

Still planned for rc.1
Bears, Torch rework, Mushroom regrowth, fine tuning to mushroom world generation, a clock maker exclusive item, one more special drifter behavior, installing mods via command line, in-game mod browser, functional uses for alcohol, and maybe rifts

Please notice
1. This is an unfinished update, mostly intended for modders and very adventurous players. You will encounter major bugs, incomplete features, performance issues and crashes. Worldgen might also significantly change and produce unknown blocks until rc.1
2. New "pre" updates will only be posted in discord #news and not on the blog. A new v1.16 blog post will come when the first release candidate is ready.

Screenshots & Gifs

Server wide auction house: Buy and sell on a global scale...for a price

Crates: Beautiful single item mass storage, with item labels and visible contents


Trunks: Like 2 chests together, but better!


Alcohol making: A fruit press, juice fermentation and a distillery for the ultimate drunken VS experience \o/

Liquid system rework: Now easier and more satisfying to use for modders and players alike!


Fruit Trees: 9 types of seasonal fruit producers. A flowery delight in spring!

Fruit tree dynamic growth: A fruit tree takes a while to mature


Fruit tree grafting: Fruit trees are propagated by taking and planting a cutting, but you can also graft it onto an existing fruit tree


Forest floors: Forests are so much more foresty now.


Mushroom bonanza: Over 26 new types of mushrooms (WIP! Mushroom regrowth still subject to change)




Improved wind effects: Rewritten and triple polished wind sway effects. Example - here's a wind swaying sunflower, before and after
   

Wind effects editor: VSMC, our official model editor now allows you to configure the wind say mode in great detail and with live preview


Ground storage tweaks: Can now 4x4 place pots, bowls and also optionally center place them
 

Ground storage tweaks: Can now place shoes on the ground and on shelves


Easy modded server joining: The game now tries to download mods from the VS Mod DB, no more manual installing required

Armor Stand Feature: They can now carry tools and weapons


Drifter Rework: They will now throw stones at you. Added a rare variant that spawns only during temporal storms


Improved hit knockback (experimental)


3D Models for berries and for the new fruits from fruit trees


Permadeath mode: Disabled by default, but now available for those that like the extra challenge


45° Signs: Can now also place signs at a 45 degree angle



Game updates

• Feature: Auction house! Every trader now gives you access to a server wide auction house where players can buy and sell items
  • To still encourage direct trade, the auction house comes with multiple (configurable) fees:
    • 1 rusty gear for each week of having your item listed
    • 10% sales cut for each item sold
    • Transpot costs of 1 to 8 gears or direct pickup for free
  • Everytime you join the server, you get a status update send to you in chat about your active auctions
  • Server owners can configure the cost or disable the auction house altogether
• Feature: Crates
  • Can now use any pigment to draw the contents of the crate. Added crafting recipes.
  • Paper
• Feature: Added trunk block, a double sized chest
• Feature Distillery and Fruit press
  • All fruits can now be juiced in the fruit press
  • Juice can now be fermented into cider
  • Cider can be further distilled into spirit
  • Drinking Cider and Spirit makes you drunk. Functional uses will be added soon.
• Feature: Fruit trees
  • Trees for red apple, pink apple, yellow apple, peach, pear, cherry, orange, olive, mango now spawn in newly generated chunks. Break the side branches for a chance to retrieve a cutting.
  • This cutting, when planted, should sprout after a couple of days and eventually mature into a full tree (does not require fertilizer or watering for the time being)
  • Fruit trees will yield fruit once a year, depending on the sort. They'll go through various distinct cycles: Flowering, Fruiting, Ripe fruit, No fruit and then Dormant for decidious trees, which is a leafless version only with branches. The evergreens (mango, orange and olive) stay green all year round.
  • Ripe fruit can then be used for cooking and juicing
  • Fruit trees planted in an unsuitable climate will die
• Feature: 26 new types of mushrooms, some of them now growing on the sides of trees
• Feature: Greatly improved mod support
  • Integrated moddb browser! You can now 1-click install and remove mods through the mod manager
  • Auto-modded server install! You can now 1-click install mods that you need to join a modded server. These are only enabled when you join said server.
• Feature: Shoes are now neatly placeable on shelves and on the ground
• Feature: Drifter rework
  • Added two-headed drifter as a rare variant of nightmare drifter.
  • Drifters now throw stones at players
  • Adjusted drifter animation names to clearly differentiate between Standing and Crawling.
  • Added a drifter attack sound
  • Fixed alternate version of the spiked drifter never spawned
• Feature: Wind shader rework
  • Much improved code, making it easier for modders to add wind sway effects to their blocks and items through VS Model Creator
  • Fixes heavy wind sway derp on sunflowers and other plants
  • Made storm level winds more impactful
  • Added water storm particles
• Feature: Ground storage rework
  • Any 2x2 storable can now be placed in the middle
  • Pots, bowls and crocks are now 2x2 ground storable, while still able to transfer foods between them
• Feature: Liquid system rework
  • When operating with liquids, instead of showing the stack size it shows the amount in litre. Implemented min. transfer size. Buckets let you transfer 1 litre each, bowls 0.1 litre each
  • more work on liquid system, liquids are now edible
  • Addded water bowl+flour dough recipe
  • Fixed handbook dough recipe showed an empty bucket instead of a bucket with 1 litre of water inside
  • Added sound and particle effects when moving liquids
• Feature: Character class rebalance (WIP)
  • Added sling tool. Exclusive ranged weapon for the malefactor (improviser trait)
  • Tailor can now craft Tailored Gambeson armor, which is more resistant and easier to move in than normal gambeson.
  • Traders now buy sewing kits and more craftable clothes.
  • Rebalanced character classes. Blackguard buffed to 30% melee damage instead of 20% and -15% armor durability loss instead of -10%. Hunter buffed to 20% ranged damage instead of 10%. Malefactor buffed to 35% reduced animal seeking range instead of 20% and 10% chance to get whole loot vessel instead of 5%
  • The Blackguard class is now less affected by the walk speed penalties of armor
• Feature: Can now use WASD keys to scroll the expanded world map
• Feature: Added isolated, handcrafted underground lakes
• Feature: Signs can now be placed at 45 degree angles
• Feature: Armor stands can now hold tools in one hand
• Feature: Improved hit knockback on creatures and players. WIP, Experimental.
• Feature: Improved animal pitch step rotation when stepping up and down blocks (and disabled it for bipedals)
• Feature: New 3d models for fruit
• Feature: Store location, seed and worldconfig when saving a screenshot. Could be used to autocreate a new world and teleport to this location and tons of other fancy things. (WIP)
• Feature: The handbook now shows if an item is being sold or bought by a trader
• Feature/Tweak: Can no longer sleep during temporal storms for standard and wilderness survival.
• Tweak: Fine tune wind affected particles
• Tweak: Doubled sound range of echo chambers
• Tweak: Can now place bees wax, fired bricks, candles, clay, dyed cloth, all crushed resources, blasting powder, fat, flax fibers and flax twine on the shelf
• Tweak: Added pit kiln burn times by fuel to the handbook entry
• Tweak: Added more debug logging for the shift+click item disappearance bug
• Tweak: Locust drills more drill-looking
• Tweak: Buffed each bow by .25 damage.
• Tweak: The selected chiseling material is now remembered across chiseled blocks
• Tweak: Performance: Don't render dynamic shadows when shadow intensity falls below 10% (during night or rain)
• Tweak: Disable seasonal grass coverage changes. Causes large stutter with radeon cards, as it has to retesselate lots of chunks
• Tweak: Added mod<=>engine version check and crash the client/server if they mismatch, to prevent undefined behavior
• Tweak: Added additional handbook info, and a link to the wiki, when describing block reinforcement system
• Tweak: Barrels now visually show contents for some more items/blocks
• Tweak: Ignore corrupted map parts instead of crashing
• Tweak: Unlit chimney now hollow for particles, allows smoke to rise through it from below (or snow to fall through it!)
• Tweak: Made knockback from bighorn sheep stronger
• Tweak: Add appconfig thing to maybe fix the game being launchable with too old versions of .net
• Tweak: De-Jank: Mouse wheel no longer changes the values of drop down ui elements just from hovering over them
• Tweak: De-Jank: The World configuration attributes are now grouped by category
• Tweak: Can now use {plr} placeholder in command block commands
• Tweak: Yellow dye is now made with onions. Orange dye is now made by adding more onions to yellow dye.
• Tweak: When making dyes, barrels now produce the same amount of liquid as the ingredients, e.g. if you put in 4 diluted alum, you get 4 dye.
• Tweak: Fine tuned explosion particle spawning a bit and made them more proportional to the explosion radius
• Tweak: Gambeson no longer High Damage Tier Resistant
• Tweak: Forest rain sound a bit more pronounced
• Tweak: Farmland now uses the configurable HoursPerDay instead of 24 hours to time crop growth
• Tweak: Grid crafting with spoiled ingredients now will also result in a spoiled crafting output
• Tweak: Shelves are now very suited for drying items if they are not in a cellar
• Tweak: Farmland now uses the configurable HoursPerDay instead of 24 hours to time crop growth
• Tweak: Added hunter backpack recipe that uses 3 small pelts
• Tweak: Kapok leaves now less neon green
• Tweak: Made mountains less faded in the distance
• Tweak: Torches thrown into water now also go out
• Fixed: Meals in a pot or bowl spawning white particles when broken
• Fixed: Chiseling a light emitting block now emits light as well
• Fixed: Wrong texture resolution on croton plants, therefore more fluffly now
• Fixed: The Balanced trader had a broken sprint animation
• Fixed: Spears and arrows sometimes flying through creatures
• Fixed: Liquid containers accepting non liquids from hoppers/chutes
• Fixed: Light color jitter on the worldmap when chunks are updated
• Fixed: Pit kiln not emitting light
• Fixed: Farmland perma boosters still applicable multiple times
• Fixed: Coloring lanterns did not update lighting server side, causing them to get lost after server restart
• Fixed: Fence gates not remembering their reinforcement level when opened or closed
• Fixed: Vintagehosting Server Status screen showing wrong server state in some cases
• Fixed: Various z-fighting issues with armor
• Fixed neighbour block lighting visual issue for Wallpaper and other Decor blocks
• Fixed: Alignment issue in the transform editor
• Fixed: Updated the character trait descriptions to match previous balance changes.
• Fixed: Dragging around a dialog was janky on non-8 gui scales
• Fixed: /wgen regen not removing entities on the client side. Might fix duplicate ghost players? ??
• Fixed: Crash reporter launching twice

API Updates

• Feature: Some simple implementation of a generic multiblock system, to hopefully avoid custom multiblocking everywhere. Used for the distillery.
• Feature: Added capi.Gui.LoadSvg() and capi.Gui.LoadSvgWithPadding() which allows for use of external SVG vector files to be loaded. For a first code sample, check out ItemProspectingPick.cs
• Feature: Improved mounting system. Should now be properly network synced \o/
  • Sneak to unmount a IMountable is no longer hardcoded. It must now be handled by the IMountable itself, see BEBed.cs as example.
• Feature: Ability for custom itemstack renderers, register via api.Event.RegisterItemstackRenderer()
• Feature: *byType precedence: For the Json assets blocktype, itemtype and entitytype, can now define an attribute as well as a *byType attribute, whereas the latter takes precedence, e.g. stackSize: 32 would be overwritten by stackSizeByType: { "*": 16 }
• Feature: Explosion code upgrades
  • Explosions radii have an upper limit, which is now doubled, reaching it nonetheless now throws a more informative exception
  • Fixed particle lag and upper cap issues, as they now spawn async
  • Fixed a crash in the lighting engine when explosions go beyond chunk boundaries
  • Added blockDropChanceMultiplier argument to CreateExplosion() to reduce block drops by explosions (large explosions drop *a lot* of blocks)
• Feature: .gltf models now support most flags
• Feature: Added api.Render.RenderItemStackToAtlas(), allows rendering of an itemstack into a texture atlas
• Feature: Can now set amount of inventory columns for GenericTypedContainer
• Feature: Add initialDelayOffsetMs arg to Event.RegisterGameTickListener() to mitigate lag spikes from many listeners running code at the same time
• Feature: Added withInheritance argument to api.ModLoader.GetModSystem()
• Feature: In the Json assets, can now define ucontents property for containers. Example implementation: A wood bucket filled with water in the creative inventory
• Feature: Added new render stage EnumRenderStage.AfterBlit
• Feature: Added client side api death event
• Feature: Added permadeath mode, disabled by default for all play styles
• Feature: Added sapi.HandleCommand()
• Feature: In the json assets, can now define a "ucontents" property to define contents of containers. Example implementation: A wood bucket filled with water in the creative inventory
• Refactor: Massive Windwave/VertexFlags refactor. All wind related vertex flags are now consolidated into 2 properties - windMode and windData. Can now define these 2 values *per vertex* in VS Model creator
• Refactor: Rework mesh generation of displayed items, such as items in shelves or ground storage. This is now done through the interface IContainedMeshSource for the contained item, instead of hardcoded in each container.
• Refactor: BlockEntity.OnBlockBroken() now has a new argument IPlayer byPlayer
• Refactor: Rename AddDecor() to SetDecor() and allow passing air blocks to remove decor
• Refactor: Merged BreakDecor() and BreakDecorPart() into one method
• Refactor: Remove API.Common.Action, replaced with System.Action
• Refactor: GuiElementCellList is now generic
• Refactor: GuiElementHandbookList is now GuiElementFlatList (now a slightly more basic version than GuiElementCellList)
• Refactor: Renamed entity "Hitbox" to "Collisionbox" (Hitbox can still be used but is marked obsolete)
• Refactor: Removed world argument from all methods in ILiquidSink & ILiquidSource
• Tweak: Seperated creature hitbox into collisionbox and selectionbox (the later is used for attacking and interacting with creatures)
• Tweak: Removed and consolidated a lot of crushed shape files since they were all essentially the same.
• Tweak: Doubled block, item and entity texture atlas size
• Tweak: Added property IBulkBlockAccessor.StagedBlocks for jakecools dynamic trees
• Tweak: Made clayforming system more flexible towards new types of clay
• Tweak: .AddDynamicText() removed argument for EnumTextOrientation, it can be set in the font.
• Tweak: GuiElementTextButton now has a Visible flag
• Tweak: Client and server now (lazy) load all language entries. Can now send text from server to client in the clients language. (Contribution by Apache#8842, edits by Tyron)
• Tweak: Added ability to disable durability averaging during grid crafting
• Tweak: Added rndIndex argument to Block.GetRandomColor()
• Tweak: .tfedit now allows editing of ground transforms for ground storable items and blocks (also fixed that blocks did not apply the ground transform)
• Tweak: Clean up reeds and papyrus assets. Drops are no longer hardcoded, only 1 blocktype file instead of 3, all shapes in the same folder, added frozen variant for papyrus
• Tweak: Can now define knockback strength in AiTaskMeleeAttack
• Tweak: capi.World.Player.Entity.OnFootStep and capi.World.Player.Entity.OnImpact are now events instead of Action fields
• Tweak: Added IParticlePropertiesProvider.Async to make particle spawn asynchronously (for particle spawn calls on the server)
• Tweak: Specially treat empty string variant code for blocks, items or entities: They are now treated as "skip this variant group" and not add an extra dash to the block/item/entity code
• Tweak: Clean up, unify and simplify GetModData and SetModData for chunks, map chunks and map regions
• Tweak: Added EnumFoodCategory.NoNutrition for foods that provide no nutrition
• Fixed: Calling GetClimate() for a specific date returned fundamentally broken values
• Fixed: Some items set to be placeable in backpack slots crashed the game for no (apparent) reason
• Fixed: Small values ignored in shape: { offsetX/Y/Z: 0.01 }
• Fixed: OnTrySpawnEntity event did not handle multiple event listeners correctly
• Fixed: Entity shape alternates didn't work (see example entities/land/drifter.json, make sure the alternate shape textures have different texture codes)
• Fixed: Liquid in barrel textures defaulted to the game domain
• Fixed: Health boosts in meals should now respect serving size and spoilage rate
• Fixed: Should fix night sky textures not moddable