We've now sent out over 200 game keys to press and influencers and posted on reddit, let's hope the word arrives as well

Game updates

• Tweak: More ore spawn balancing
• Tweak: Updated russian translations 
• Fixed: Some memory leaks when leaving a world
• Fixed: Breaking flint-in-rock by hands also removed the rock
• Fixed: Not properly loading english for default translations when having another language selected
• Fixed: Several missing/wrong translation entries
• Fixed: Daytime length not at the intended 48 minutes

API Updates

• Feature: Added .ignore file for zip and folder mods. Works like .gitignore
• Feature: Added api.LoadModConfig and api.StoreModConfig to offer a universal convention on how to store/load mod configs
• Fixed: ModSystem.Dispose() was never called on server/client unload
   

Close to 6 month since the first stable v1.8 release. I can't believe how much time and effort this took. Future updates will be on a shorter release cycle again for sure 
 

For a full changes list see

- The rc.1 blog post 

- The updates since the previous unstable release, v1.9.0-rc.9

• Tweak: When playing the game in a non-english language, the missing translation entries now default to english
• Tweak: Some more UI cleanups
• Tweak: Made wooden rail blocks connect in a super basic way for creative play
• Tweak: Reduced surface copper deposits by 50%
• Tweak: Players no longer spawn with bread 
• Fixed: Quern sound always playing at full volume
• Fixed: /entity removebyid not working
• Fixed: Able to glitch the Quern into grinding on its own
• Fixed: Opening 2 quern dialogs caused the previous one to become black
• Fixed: Aged log not being burnable
• Fixed: Placing a pot with food crashing the game in some cases 
• Fixed: Taking out food from a pot inside a fire pit allowed gave on extra meal
• API Fixed: survival/config.json still not properly loaded... moved it to configs/general.json    

- and all updates during the release candidates. Summary:

• Feature: Added info log chat channel. Added new messages notification thing - chat tabs turn white when there's new messages. Propick readings now go into the info log.
• Feature: Added panning mechanic: Find copper nuggets and other rare goodies by sifting through sand and gravel
• Feature: Small hacked in fun feature: Creatures that walk up or down blocks now rock back or forth a bit
• Feature: Added public server listing, added ability to advertise servers on the listing
• Feature: Added ability to set server name during runtime via /serverconfig name
• Feature: Added "/time stop" and "/time resume" to stop the calendar without changing the time speed
• Tweak: Dead harvest-able creatures now also show the interaction help HUD
• Tweak: Set default sprint key back to CTRL key
• Tweak: Reduced surface ruins by ~30%, reduced ruined villages by 50%
• Tweak: Doubled chance for locust nests to spawn
• Tweak: Significantly reduced animal spawn during worldgen, especially for wolves
• Tweak: Harvesting carcass now costs 3 durability with the knife
• Tweak: Increased surface copper deposit size and chance of it spawning surface bits
• Tweak: Increased clay/peat/soil deposit size by 20%
• Tweak: Reduced village spawning chance by another 50%
• Tweak: Slightly more fitting fox death sound
• Tweak: Snappier sand walk sounds and removed an odd noise spike in sand2.ogg
• Tweak: Increased surface ore bits commonness by a bit
• Tweak: Buffed cooked meals, should make you not hungry for 40% longer now
• Tweak: Major deposit rebalancing
• Tweak: Removed three debug hotkeys (togglewireframe, lagsimulation, toggleoffsreenrender) because nobody needs those.
• Tweak: Made fireflies also spawn in slightly colder climates
• Tweak: Hematite ore yield one extra nugget, Gold ore on less nugget and Tin ore significantly less nuggets
• Tweak: Updated trader buying/selling lists
• Tweak: Made the default font color 3% brighter to increase contrast against the background 
• Tweak: Made loading screen and chat hud background 10% more opaque to increase contrast against the background
• Tweak: Made chat notifications more transparent to not stand out as much as player chat messages
• Tweak: Server info chat tab only visible when developer mode i
• Tweak: Sort public server listing in descending order by player count 
• Tweak: Changed prospecting pick readout to hopefully be more explicit and intuitive. Made propick readings translatable.
• Tweak: Some deposit gen numbers tweaked, made pentlandite, fluorite and phosphorite spawn.
• Tweak: Added creative mode first-launch-help-dialog 
• Tweak: Worldedit Erode tool now much less noisy
• Tweak: A Bunch of other minor polishing things.
• Tweak: Stones now also can go into the mining bag
• [dozens of bugfixes....]

It's happening?
Two major events will occur in the nearest future: The stable release of Version 1.9, the biggest update ever, and launch of the marketing campaign to let the world know this game exists. And then, maybe, just maybe I finally no longer need to drive myself into financial ruin by developing VS

I will be contacting several hundred YouTubers to whom I believe this game could be really interesting to play as well as contacting all major press outlets that I believe would be interested in covering Vintage Story. We'll be shooting for the moon... I only hope our chance of hitting is more than 0%

Game price
I've decided that upon release of v1.9 stable I will raise the price of VS to 15 Eur/17 USD. I'd like to believe the amount of content VS now offers justifies that. Furthermore, from what I've seen, in comparison to other games in the genre, such price is still below average.
 

Game updates list

• Feature: Added "/time stop" and "/time resume" to stop the calendar without changing the time speed
• Tweak: Made the default font color 3% brighter to increase contrast against the background 
• Tweak: Made loading screen and chat hud background 10% more opaque to increase contrast against the background
• Tweak: Made chat notifications more transparent to not stand out as much as player chat messages
• Tweak: Server info chat tab only visible when developer mode i
• Tweak: Sort public server listing in descending order by player count 
• Tweak: Changed prospecting pick readout to hopefully be more explicit and intuitive. Made propick readings translatable.
• Tweak: Some deposit gen numbers tweaked, made pentlandite, fluorite and phosphorite spawn.
• Tweak: Added creative mode first-launch-help-dialog 
• Tweak: Worldedit Erode tool now much less noisy
• Tweak: A Bunch of other minor polishing things.
• Tweak: Stones now also can go into the mining bag
• Fixed: Rand entropy still broken. Replaced Rand and ThreadSafeRand with ThreadLocal<Rand>. Maybe this fixes it.
• Fixed: Shearing leaves crashed the game
• Fixed: Added another magnitude of precision to client->server player position sync. Maybe fixes unreliable fall damage issues?
• Fixed: Prospecting pick showing lower than actual readings when the probed column had its rock mined away
• Fixed: WorldEdit Grow/Shrink and Raise/Lower tool not removing the broken block
• Fixed: Starting a creative world did not put the player in creative mode
• Fixed: Crafting Recipes in the Survival Handbook showing variants of the recipes that did not exist (was not respecting allowedVariants on wildcard recipes and also ignoring itemclass)
• Fixed: Mining bag not craftable in survival
• Fixed: Dedicated game servers not stopping game calendar when nobody is online
• Fixed: Chat Hud ungrabbing mouse when it shouldn't
   

Game account manager Updates

• Added basic support for CDN Hosted files, meaning faster download speeds \o/

Web Api updates

• The stable and unstable apis now include the download urls for either cdn or local hosted files.

Game updates

• Feature: Added info log chat channel. Added new messages notification thing - chat tabs turn white when there's new messages. Propick readings now go into the info log.
• Tweak: Major deposit rebalancing
• Tweak: Removed three debug hotkeys (togglewireframe, lagsimulation, toggleoffsreenrender) because nobody needs those.
• Tweak: Made fireflies also spawn in slightly colder climates
• Tweak: Hematite ore yield one extra nugget, Gold ore on less nugget and Tin ore significantly less nuggets
• Tweak: Updated trader buying/selling lists
• Fixed: One more entropy loss bug in BEBeehive.cs
• Fixed: Dozens of bugs in the deposit generator. Resulted in wrong propick readings and gold/silver never spawned altogether
• Fixed: /wgen regen command not threadsafe and throwing exceptions from that
• Fixed: Quartz not smeltable into glass
• Fixed: Should fix a server side crash due to race conditions
   

Game updates

• Tweak: Made beehives spawn also in temperate areas
• Fixed: Random events becoming no longer random after some time
• Fixed: Issues with gamma slider in survival mode
• Fixed: Ore blocks and clear quartz not placeable in mining bag

Game API Updates

• Feature: Moddata attached to server chunks are now synced to the client and can be read there as well. Added Get/SetServerModdata for server side only data
• Refactor: Added worldGenRand arg to Block.TryPlaceBlockForWorldGen()
• Tweak: Added IWorldAccessor.ThreadSafeRand
• Tweak: Added method INetworkChannel.RegisterMessageType<T>()
   

To alleviate the additional challenge of finding copper in v1.9 I've decided to quickly add a panning mechanic. It lets you sift through sand and gravel to find copper nuggets amongst other goodies. Some of the finds can be very valuable

I've also added additional sand and gravel deposits to world generation.

    

Game updates 

• Feature: Added panning mechanic: Find copper nuggets and other rare goodies by sifting through sand and gravel
• Tweak: Snappier sand walk sounds and removed an odd noise spike in sand2.ogg
• Tweak: Increased surface ore bits commonness by a bit
• Tweak: Buffed cooked meals, should make you not hungry for 40% longer now
• Fixed: Game clients crashing when toggling advertising on the server
• Fixed: Correct collision and selection boxes for stalagmite/ctite
• Fixed: Clear quartz didn't use the new 3d model
• Fixed: Wolves not banished to the forests (they were supposed to only spawn in forests)
• Fixed: Quartz ore not dropping quartz
• Fixed: Hoe heads vanishing when breaking a block with it
• Fixed: Peridotite quern not craftable
• Fixed: Signs on wall text invisible 
• Fixed: Issues with the public server listing
• Fixed: Malachite nuggets not smeltable
• Fixed: Issues when trying to add fuel to the bloomery 
• Fixed: Meteoric iron bits not smeltable
• Fixed: Malachite ores not crushable into nuggets
• Fixed: Game crashing when teleporting out of the world bounds
• API Refactor: Added firstEvent boolean arg to Collectible.OnHeldInteractStart()
   

Account manager updates

• Fixed: Using > or < in passwords caused players to be unable to log in ingame.

In this update you can browser for game servers that are currently running ingame! Head on to the multiplayer section and click on "Browse public servers" \o/
The feature is pretty basic right now, but it works! 

Game updates

• Feature: Added public server listing, added ability to advertise servers on the listing
• Feature: Added ability to set server name during runtime via /serverconfig name
• Tweak: Significantly reduced animal spawn during worldgen, especially for wolves
• Tweak: Harvesting carcass now costs 3 durability with the knife
• Tweak: Increased surface copper deposit size and chance of it spawning surface bits
• Tweak: Increased clay/peat/soil deposit size by 20%
• Tweak: Reduced village spawning chance by another 50%
• Tweak: Slightly more fitting fox death sound
• Fixed: Some oddities with dead animal physics
• Fixed: Animal carcasses deleting water blocks
• Fixed: Some oddities with dead animal inventory after harvesting
• Fixed: Creating alloys sometimes yielding 99 units instead of 100 (untested ^_^;)
• Fixed: Patched more places where the random number generator could get out of whack and have a weird impact on gameplay
• Fixed: Removing all voxels from a clay form did not remove the block
• Fixed: Knapping making a knapping sound on empty voxels
• Fixed: A buch of block/item names were missing 
• Fixed: Missing texture when knapping peridot
• Fixed: Quartz no longer dropping clear quartz (untested ^_^;)
• Fixed: Hematite not smeltable into iron

API Updates

• Fixed: Player starting items not moddable
• Fixed: Dependency errors not logged
   

rc.2 introduced a crash whenever one tried to throw a spear or a stone, this is pretty severe so I've decided to patch this despite very little changes. 

In other news
The public test server chrometech.at is now updated to v1.9-rc.3 come hop in and enjoy some relaxed multiplayer with friends  
We have a fancy world seed by @redram!

Game updates

• Fixed: Game crashing when throwing rocks or spears 
• Fixed: Game crashing when trying to connect to an rc.1 server, now it tells you its an incompatible version instead
• Fixed: On a fresh install, creating a creative building world did instead create a survival world
• Fixed: Lupines in a flowerpot not marked as bee/butterfly feed

Contains bugfixes. And stuff.

Game updates:

• Feature: Small hacked in fun feature: Creatures that walk up or down blocks now rock back or forth a bit
• Tweak: Dead harvest-able creatures now also show the interaction help HUD
• Tweak: Set default sprint key back to CTRL key
• Tweak: Reduced surface ruins by ~30%, reduced ruined villages by 50%
• Tweak: Doubled chance for locust nests to spawn
• API Tweak: CollectibleObject.OnAttackingWith() added arg for attackingEntity
• Fixed: Loot vessels not making sounds when broken by tools
• Fixed: Clayform crashing when not selecting a recipe
• Fixed: Trader names and stock resetting on world reload
• Fixed: Rare crash in the sound system, hopefully
• Fixed: Wolves and Foxes not spawning
• Fixed: Carcass contents dialog not closing itself when walking away from the carcass
• Fixed: Several fire brick block/items hidden from the survival handbook
• Fixed: Player starting items not added to players inventory
• Fixed: Loose ore info did not display parent rock
• Fixed: Many ores did not have a mining tier

We're finally there. The largest and longest update in the history of this game is ready. Around 250 individual features, changes and fixes have been completed. It was a huge undertaking and hell a lot of work. Enjoy! 

Important notice: World generation changed significantly. You should create a new world with this update. If you do want to load old worlds, make sure to create a backup and apply the remappings.
 

Screenshots 

Traders now spawn throughout the world. Sell goods for profit and buy rare items. Gears are now a currency.




Geology overhaul. Many new rock types and many new ores

 

Ores are now graded and spawn only in certain rock types.

Much improved user interface. Prettier, leaner and more functional.

 

Much improved world generation. More natural looking and more variety. Added ruined villages.







Improved ambient, such as particles for waterfalls and better lighting overall and around lava

Improved cave system. They are now more diverse, host locust nests and stalactites/stalagmites. Can spawn larger empty caverns of lava covered in patches of basalt. Greater variety of ruins with occasional odd technical devices






 
Many new blocks, such as lupine flowers and labeled chests

Block interaction help. Shows you how you can interact with blocks

Full Game Updates List

• Feature: Geology overhaul
  • 16 new rock types
    • 7 of which can be used for crafting all cobble, polished and brick versions as full blocks, slabs or stairs 
    • 3 marble types that can be polished
    • 6 other rock types
  • 16 new ores: For use in future updates
  • Rock dependent ore spawning: All ores will now only spawn in certain rock types with certain grades
  • Rock typed ores: All ores now drop together with their parent rock, of which pure nuggets can be extracted from with a hammer
  • Graded ores: All metal bearing ores now come graded depicting their metal content: Poor, Medium, Rich and Bountiful
  • New graphics: All ores and gems now are 3D models
• Feature: Worldgen overhaul
  • Realistic climate bands ("biome" temperature no longer varies in randomly but increases/decreases on the north-south axis, experimental)
  • More natural
    • Reworked rock strata generator: Should now generate some more interesting varieties
    • Improved clay and peat deposits
      • No longer perfectly circular / elliptic but more randomly shaped now
      • Has soil beneath it so grass can regrow once excavated
      • Is rounded of at the edges
      • Grass now spreads onto barren clay and peat
    • Fixed snow layer generation bugs that produced visible weird patterns in the worldmap
    • Fixed structures sometimes overlapping each other
    • Improved block layer transitions (e.g. from grass to sand), they should now look more natural and seamless
    • Added post processing filter to remove small clumps free floating blocks
    • Ruins less likely to be incorrectly placed during world generation
    • Increased soil layer thickness
  • More decorative
    • Added lupines flower: They come in 5 different colors - purple, blue, red, orange and white 
    • Added ruined villages which come with 25+ new and unique ruins
    • Added locust nests. Locusts no longer spawn randomly but spawn from nests.
    • Added termite mounds
    • Added a secret world generation feature
    • New and more decorative ruins: A lot of the ruins have been filled with new content and several new ones have been added
    • Updated the contents of loot vessels. They now also rarely drop some special things
    • Added sticks on the ground in forests
    • Improved grass color map to be a bit less noisy and not as dark on certain spots
  • Land form improvements
    • The terrain is now somewhat more "detailed" looking due to the addition of a new high frequency noise octave
    • Added a stretch&squeeze mechanic that gives greater variety to land forms
    • Added over 10 new land forms, improved many of existing land forms. One of the new land forms is just pure sea.
  • Improved caves
    • Spawns Stalactites and Stalagmites 
    • Caves can now become very narrow or very shallow
    • Cave ceilings are more rough and cave-like
    • Caves are more frequent.  
    • May be a bit more chaotic in some places
    • Rarely generates very large ravines and very large caverns
    • Likes to produce large caverns near lava level
    • Now spawns lava rivers near the lava level
    • Lava lakes are now covered in patches of basalt
       
• Feature: Major User Interface Improvements: Fewer stylistic errors! More smooth! More links! More user friendly! More immersive! \o/
  • Block Interaction help HUD: Shows you how you can interact with a block. Hit keyboard key 'N' to toggle on/off
  • All HUD Elements can now be toggled through Settings->Interface as well
  • Added graphics quality presets. Most graphics settings are now hidden by default. More fine grained configuration for the view distance.
  • New, immersive world joining/leaving screens 
  • The joining multiplayer server screen now shows the download progress
  • Various invalid interactions with the game world now show the player an error message
  • Add a thick border around dialogs and a glow on the edges
  • Added a glow around item slots, redesign active slot overlay
  • Hotbar slots now display their assigned hotkeys
  • Added a glow around the health and satiety bar. More intense flashing when low on health/food.
  • Random quote on the main screen
  • Fixed countless oddities, inconsistencies and alignment issues
  • Prettier credits page
  • Snapped screenshots are now linked with the physical file in the chat box
  • Added a developer tab to the Settings
• Feature: Improved water
  • Water falls now have an ambient sound and spawn "foam" particles
  • Flowing water now pushes players, creatures and items. The pushing speed depends on the items density.
• Feature: More music
  • New daytime track: "Hallowcroft"
  • The echo chamber now works: Right click with any of the 9 resonance archive to play the track. This comes with some 5 new tracks! You can now find all resonance archives in ruins and buy some them at the traders.
• Feature: Better ambient sounds
  • Improved ambient sound system management. No longer plays dozens of lava sounds simultaneously near a large lava lake.
  • Increased volume of water stream sounds
  • Added ambient sound slider to the sound settings
• Feature: New blocks
  • Labeled chests: Combine a chest with a sign to have a writable chest!  (use sneak + a pigment such as coal, chalk or lapis to write on it)
  • Aged Logs
  • Stone Path Slabs
  • Chandelier
  • Locust nests and metal spikes
  • Scrap piles that spawn in ruins and drop re-smeltable metals or usable parts
  • Cob: Primitive building block, made from straw and soil
• Feature: New items
  • 10 slot mining bag: Extra bag space, but can therefore only hold ores and metals
  • Hundreds of new ores and nuggets
  • A wearable face mask 
  • Peridotite stone tools
• Feature: Improved sign blocks: Can now write in various colors using pigments (coal, chalk, limestone, lapis and malachite). Can now attach signs to stairs, slabs and some other blocks.
• Feature: Cooking pot slots max stack size are now equivalent to their max portion size (= 6 items per slot). This allows for much quicker insertion of ingredients into the slots.
• Feature: Added '.' and '/' hotkey for instant command typing
• Feature: Flavor texts on a number of clothes
• Tweak: More game juice
  • Lanterns and Torches now have their own third person pose when held in hands
  • Knapping now spawns particles of chipped flint/rock
  • Breaking blocks no longer drop 1 stack of X items but instead X stacks of 1 item because it looks more satisfying
  • Improved fp/tp/gui position/size/rotation on a bunch of items (including all toolheads). Made bow texture brighter
  • Mushrooms now have a custom model when in inventory or in hands
  • Improved the graphics for rocks and bricks
  • Increased overall scene contrast by 30%
  • Improved player third person pose when holding full blocks in hands
  • Player physics tweak: A bit more grip when walking down a slopes - should make it a bit easier to walk down a narrow or step path.
  • When closing your inventory with items in the crafting grid the game will first try putting the items into the inventory before dropping on the ground
  • Improved butterfly AI. They now fly slower, are more attracted to flowers and more easily find the center of the flower
• Tweak: Gameplay balancing changes
  • Day/Night cycle now twice as long (from 24 minutes to 48 minutes) 
  • Animal herds (chicken, boars, wolves and bighorn sheep) now alarm each other when getting attacked, i.e. will also become aggressive
  • Foxes and Wolves no longer spawn in lit areas. This lets you put light sources in/around your chicken pens to prevent fox/wolves spawning inside them and killing all the chickens.
  • Increased scythe durability by 50%
  • Increased range at which creatures find food in troughs by 50%
  • Backpacks now require twice as much leather
  • Bloomery tweaks
    • No longer accepts smeltables with a melting point below 1000 deg. these would vaporize under the high temperatures
    • Now accepts as much ores as to generate 6 output items, e.g. 120 nuggets
    • Can now place up to 5x items at once into the Bloomery when holding the sneak key
       
• Tweak: More game content always costs some performance, but we also improved performance in some areas
  • Improved god ray shader performance! (e.g. for MarcAFK: Before 40-80 fluctuating FPS, After: Solid 80-90 FPS)
  • Improved occlusion culling system performance. Should yield notable FPS gains for everyone \o/
  • Major performance improvement in the lighting engine, especially near many light sources
  • Increased chunk tesselation speed by 10% (=pre-generated chunks should load ~10% faster)
  • Vastly improved creative inventory search performance 
• Tweak: Can no longer stack berry bushes higher than 2 blocks
• Tweak: Replaced the players ring slot with a face slot. Added one face mask
• Tweak: Sneaking lowers player first person camera a bit further down than before
• Tweak: Added new creative Tab "Special" for all the meta blocks
• Tweak: Updated/Added It/Russian language files
• Tweak: Added error message when trying to knap with a soft stone. Knapping with a flint now also swings the flint in hands
• Tweak: Bee hives now also recognize flowers in pots and planters
• Tweak: Crash reporter a bit more user friendly (crash log appears right away instead of a few seconds after)
• Tweak: Added health and satiety stats to character screen
• Tweak: Added super thin collision box on the thinnest snow layer, so maybe dropped items don't disappear completely when they fall on snow layers on top of snow blocks
• Tweak: Beds make some simple attempts to teleport the player off the bed to prevent player heads getting stuck in ceilings
• Tweak: Might Fix some issues with the anvil/clayform/knapping surface (was resetting voxels sometimes)
• Fixed: Closing the anvil recipe selector dialog doing weird stuff to the anvil work item
• Fixed: Trees growing through walls
• Fixed: Bony remains generating on top of lakes
• Fixed: Searching for blocks/items in a creative tab buggy
• Fixed: Grain nutrition levels draining faster than intended.
• Fixed: Decaying animals deleting water blocks when they die in water
• Fixed: Player eating also animating an item/block held in the off hand
• Fixed: Dropping linen sacks, backpacks and hand baskets on the ground falling through the block
• Fixed: Crops not growing in unloaded chunks
• Fixed: Fix forge deleting items when trying to take them out while the players inventory is full
• Fixed: Quern not open-able if a block is above
• Fixed: Fox yip sounds didn't play, Hyena death sounded like wolf death
• Fixed: Some minor memory leaks
• Fixed: Smoke particles not affected by fog
• Fixed: /clear command also deleting contents of any other opened inventory (e.g. from a trader) 
• Fixed: Using the mouse wheel on mac os was really clunky
• Fixed: Might fix the very rare case where creatures are invisible for the player, but still attack and thus hurt the player
• Fixed: The item name box that's displayed when changing the active hotbar slot was sometimes not shown
• Fixed: Pot in Firepit cooking sound restarting every second
• Fixed: mouse hover + hotbar slot key to add items from the creative inventory not working when in a category tab
• Fixed: On large view distances the game loaded a few extra chunks that were a out of place
• Fixed: Holding a torch in hands made the near or distant red glow of lava light disappear
• Fixed: Intro screen no longer playing music
• Fixed: Waterfalls no longer weirdly spread at the source when they can't spread horizontally 
• Fixed: Water flow animation no longer working
• Fixed: Game crashing when placing a windmill rotor from the creative inventory
• Fixed: Offhand items not rendered in third person
• Fixed: Single ingot molds had a weird half hitbox from where ingots can be taken out, so one could only click the south half to retrieve ingots
• Fixed: Loose gears could be placed on walls without a solid block below
• Fixed: Might fix some rare cases where text on signs is waving like water
• Fixed: Some block placing/breaking delay issues that sometimes happen at the start of a new world
• Fixed: Survival Handbook bugging out for items that is used in many recipes (or generally that made the detail page overflow)
• Fixed: Should fix random generator breaking down after some time and doing weird stuff to tree growth and similar
• Fixed: Might fix meat reappearing in partially harvested carcasses, 
• Fixed: Not able to type unicode characters with keyboard (broke typing e.g. with russian keyboards)
• Fixed: Land protection issues with buckets
• Refactor: Renamed serverconfig blockTickSamplesPerChunk to randomBlockTicksPerChunk

Dedicated Server Updates

• Tweak: Improved server.sh script - can now run multiple servers on the same machine as long as the datapaths differ
• Fixed: Servers running on linux sometimes causing the players Respawn button to not do anything
• Fixed: Running a dedicated linux server exhibiting odd behaviors where e.g. the world edit commands would no longer exist (was cause by runtime mod reloading)

Creative Mode Updates

• Feature: Improved creative inventory
  • The creative tabs are now sorted and grouped
  • Increased size from 10x9 slots to 15x9 slots and the dialog is now anchored to the hotbar
• Feature: New "Worldedit GUI Tools 
  • Move Tool: Lets you move around the contents of selected areas 
  • Mirror/Repeat Tool: As the name suggests, lets you mirror or repeat blocks inside selected areas
  • Select tool: Lets you make selections with the magic wand in hands. Includes some buttons to change the selection and a magic select mode for selecting structures very quickly in superflat worlds
• Feature: Can now drag&drop schematic files into the game window while using the import tool to very quickly load and place structures
• Feature: Can now use "/we mexc" to export selected areas but instead of saving the file on the server, its sent to the client and saved there (which is disabled by default for security reasons. Enable via command .clientconfigcreate allowSaveFilesFromServer bool 1)
• Feature: New command "/we impres [0|1]" - when importing schematics that have filler blocks or loot randomizers in them, calling /we impres 0 prevents them from being replaced. 
• Tweak: Improved block/item export/import support, particularly when these contained other blocks/items in some form.
• Tweak: Starting a creative build style world now puts players in creative mode and sets picking distance to 100 blocks
• Fixed: Game crashing when importing a schematic with size 1x1x1
• Fixed: Schematic sizes wrongly exported
• Fixed: Worldedit gui settings for the tree tool were missing the large kapook and redwood pine
• Fixed: Worldedit Repeat and Undo commands did not properly place/restore block entities

Modding/API Updates

• Feature: Entity/Block/Item variant paradigm shift: You can now figure its variant by using the Variant property. E.g. kapokLogBlock.Variant["wood"] will return "kapok"
• Feature: Moddable playstyles (semi-finished)
• Feature: Added File Drop Events (fires when a file was dropped into the client game window)
• Feature: Added ability in the engine to show multiple block highlights. This could come very handy in the future for potential worldedit selection masking operations.
• Feature: Added a multiple select drop down gui element 
• Feature: Added ability to show error messages without using the chat window. (via clientapi.TriggerIngameError or serverapi.SendIngameError)
• Feature: Structures placed by worldgen now store their boundaries in MapRegions. Added api method BlockAccessor.WalkStructures
• Feature: Added ability to set render range on name tags via json 
• Feature: Added offhand slot player pose support (you can now declare in the block/item json files what animation the player should use when holding a block/item in the off hand))
• Feature: Added ability to rotate textures in block/item/entity jsons (note: consumes extra texture atlas space) (syntax: Rotation: 0/90/180/270)
• Feature: Added .OnBlockExploded to block behaviors
• Feature: Dropped obfuscation on all client gui/hud code (about 6600 lines of code)
• Feature: Can now define multiple grid recipes in one recipe file
• Feature: Added block/item/entity property "SkipVariants" and "AllowedVariants", to selectively whitelist variants defined in the variantgroups property (also, skipvariants still exists)
• Feature: Added variant group property "loadFromPropertiesCombine", works the same as loadFromProperties but can define multiple property sources
• Feature: command /blockitempngexport now accepts a domain to only export blocks/items of given domain
• Feature: Cooking / Bowl system should now be more modding friendly
• Feature: Added Block.GetColorWithoutTint() in preparation for server world map export ability
• Feature: Added WildCardUtil utility class
• Feature: Added server side event 'SaveGameCreated'
• Feature: Added world.Collectibles to quickly iterate over all non-placeholder items and blocks
• Feature: Added ObjectCacheUtil.GetOrCreate to quickly retrieve or create a cached object (useful for blocks and items)
• Feature: Added capi.Renderer.FrameBuffers property to access the engines frame  buffers
• Feature: Addded capi.World.Player.TriggerFpAnimation() to run the engine native place/break animations
• Feature: ItemSlot.TryPutInto now accepts a quantity value
• Feature: Added block.GetPlacedBlockName() 
   
• Tweak: Worldgen structure schematics are now validated and print errors if theres missing items/blocks
• Tweak: Language list from the settings now loaded from lang/settings.json
• Tweak: Added amount argument to CollectibleObject.DamageItem
• Tweak: Tree Sapling growth time can now be configured in the blocktype json file
• Tweak: Bee feed can now be configured in the blocktype json file
• Tweak: Plant and Water tint textures can now be modded
• Tweak: OnEntityLoaded now always called when an entity gets loaded from chunks but never when it spawned and the other way round for OnEntitySpawned
• Tweak: When overriding Item/Block.OnLoaded you no longer need to call the base method
• Tweak: The octaves in landforms.json now have double the frequency, you need to delete the first octave from your custom landforms to counter that.
• Tweak: More explicit handling of liquids and their physics. Blocks now have a property called LiquidCode. Anything with liquid code "water" can supply water to farmland)
• Tweak: Clay forming surface can now have custom texture depending on the clay used
• Tweak: Block.OnEntityCollide now has a param for the impact speed
• Tweak: Block.OnClientGameTick now has a param of how many seconds this particular block has been ticking already
• Tweak: capi.Event.BlockChanged now has a param of the old block so one can compare new vs. old block
• Tweak: Block.TryPlaceBlock now has a new ref parm for the failureCode which is used to display an ingame error to the player. You can return __ignore__ to not show an error to the player
• Tweak: Block.ShouldReceiveServerGameTicks now has a param "offThreadRandom" since the default random is used in the main thread and Random is not thread safe
• Fixed: Some major issues with multiple block behaviors not working well together
• Fixed: Uppercase letters in the block type code breaks wildcard matching. 
• Fixed: A number of bugs related to the /wgen commands
• Fixed: Game crashing when modding in smithing or clay forming recipes above 16x16 in size
• Fixed: Texture overlays not working on textures that weren't squares
• Fixed: Modloader crashing when there were files in the assets/ root folder
• Fixed: Some worldgen crashes when landforms go all the way to max world height
• Fixed: Texture overlays didn't work if they weren't in the game domain
• Fixed: Broken collectible combustibleproperties crashing the client
• Fixed: Worldgen structure schematics should no longer crash on missing items/blocks
• Fixed: Grid Recipe output no longer ignoring mod domain it was loaded from
• Refactor: OnCollectTextures changed arg "OrderedDictionary<AssetLocationAndSource, bool> textureDict)" to "IBlockTextureLocationDictionary textureDict"
• Refactor: Moved Block.WildCardMatch to WildcardUtil.Match
• Refactor: Chunk loading api got reworked
• Refactor: Renamed EnumHandling.NotHandled to EnumHandling.PassThrough
• Refactor: Rename worldgen/blocklayerconfig.json to worldgen/blocklayers.json and worldgen/blockpatchconfig.json to worldgen/blockpatches.json
• Refactor: The deposits in worldgen/deposits.json are now split up into individual files in worldgen/deposits/*
• Refactor: Rename Block.WildCardPop to Block.WildCardReplace 
• Removed: IItemSlot

I should probably post a bit more often here.

The Development of the game is still (almost) as active as ever with some small short breaks here and there. Purely due to convenience I have been posting most updates on our official discord chat server. There are even some pre-release versions of v1.9 available for download.

What I also posted there was a small brain snapshot: As much as I want to complete v1.9 as soon as possible myself and it bugs me immensely that the update takes so long, no crunch time was able to remedy that, and only burned me out in the end. So I took a 2 day break and continue at a normal pace again, which means v1.9 will come out "when its done". There's some things where I can't just take shortcuts without compromising the overall quality of the experience. It'll have to take as long as it takes. That being said though, there is very few features left to be added and mostly gameplay balancing and bug fixing remains to be tackled. 

Thanks for your patience,
  Tyron

We've been hard at work on the next release, which will become version 1.9 - the world generation update. I suspect it will still take another 3 to 6 weeks until the first pre-releases.

With this version we want to focus on 2 major aspects: Get as many planned worldgen updates in as possible and getting the game (more) ready for a major marketing push. Once v1.9 is released and stable enough we will contact media and influencers.

Part of the road to v1.9 included building a web-based story & asset management tool for the vintage story gamedev team, as we've been struggling for 2 years to find a suitable tool for the task. As with everything, we don't wait for the right circumstances, we create them. Here's a screenshot of it:

The VSDB. Coded from scratch, in the hopes of being our salvation to the documentation chaos we had before

But back to the game itself. I'm very happy how it turning out, so much in fact that I start to quite dislike the current v1.8 release and that makes me really eager to release v1.9 as soon as possible. 

Here's a sneak peek of the upcoming features.

Some parts that are completed for v1.9

• Lot's and lots of user interface polishing, for example the improved hotbar:
  
  
  There are also vastly improved screens when connecting to a server or loading a game world.
   
• Improved shadow quality (at the cost of somewhat shorter ranges), improved game performance due to optimizations in the occlusion culling system and god rays shader. Caveat: Chunk generation may become a tad slower, but should not be very noticeable.
   
• Improved cave systems: Greater variety, sometimes generates narrow or very low passages. Rarely generates large dome like or ravine like caves, now much less uniform, likes to generate large lava caves, lava now generates with basalt on top
  
   
• Trader Outposts: Caravans and small Settlements of Traders ready to outbargain you on your goods and hard earned money. They talk and act with 3 unique personalities.
  
   
• Many new worldedit gui additions, making it easier than ever to import and export structures, for example, the magic wand:

Still Planned for v1.9
Disclaimer: No guarantees on how much we actually can get done.

• New and improved rock layer generator that will allow us to have much more dynamic rock layers
• 6-10 new rock types (and maybe a few new tree types)
• Locust nests
• New ores and more varied deposit generation
• Milky quartz crystals in geodes
• Two-Way Teleporters in Survival mode, which can be activated at high cost and then can be used to teleport to fixed locations in the world
• More ruins, maybe ruined villages and piles of metal scraps that can be scavenged for useful stuff
• Configurable world generation
• Climate bands, in preparation for seasons in v1.10
• some more plant and animal life
• more ingame guidance to make the game more intuitive to play
• ...and a bunch more

So I think there's plenty to be excited about, at least I am! Until the next post!

This update fixes minor issues for mac os users as well as with the games frame rate and horizon fog.

Calling out all Mac OS Users: I noticed the in-game mouse position seemed to be off by 5 pixels vertically (e.g. a button click event was only registered 5 pixels lower), and some texts were not vertically centered. I have added corrections for this now. Please let me know if this caused any issues for you. 

Game updates

• Tweak: Mouse smoothing now depends on frame rate
• Tweak: Found and mitigated a significant performance drain in the cloud system. Most notable on high view distances. See below.
• Fixed: The wavy horizon fog motion went super speed at high frame rates. 
• Fixed: Might fix water blocks rarely dropping itself
• Fixed: Falling sand and gravel sometimes floating on top of water

Frame rate on v1.8.5, right after upping to 1024 view distance

Frame rate on v1.8.6, right after upping to 1024 view distance

In this version I ended up heavily tweaking the color, brightness,contrast and blending of the games ambient, fog and cloud system, as it was still not quite the way I envisioned. It may very well be that some colors are thrown out of balance again, please do let me know if that occurs to you. Other than that I do hope that particularly the blending of far terrain and fog is notably improved as well as the blending of fog against the sky. The fog near the horizon no longer follows a flat line but is wavy and in motion, albeit very subtly (see below screenshot). Let's see how that feels during gameplay.

Version 1.8.4 should also be the first version that finally works for MacOS, sorry about that >.>

As always, your feedback and bug reports are invaluable to the development of the game, thank you so much for your continuous diligence in playing and testing the Vintage Story 

[Edit:] Uploaded v1.8.5 to fix a server startup issue.

Game updates

• Feature: ModMaker.exe now ships with the game. This small tool detects any .json file that you may have modified in your assets folder and creates a mod from those changes. This way, if you install an update of VS, those changes are not lost. 
• Tweak: Tweaked color, contrast, brightness, etc. for the ingame fog, sky, ambient and cloud system
• Fixed: MacOS version still crashing
• Fixed: Water ambient not applied when inside underwater reeds or seaweed
• Fixed: Vertical scrolling in the handbook not working correctly
• Fixed: Some non-standard GUI scale issues. Particularly the settings screen should behave nicer at different gui scales.
• Fixed: A client thread crash did not exit the game as it should

Looks like we got a pretty stable state already. Here's a few more notable bug fixes and tweaks. Also you can now craft basalt brick blocks, stairs and slabs as well as increased spear damage output. 

[Edit:] The v1.8.2 windows updater download has issues, so it's no longer available for download. Please use the full installer or wait until v1.8.3
[Edit 2:] v1.8.3 is now out. Fixes the windows updater, a basalt dupe glitch thing, water meeting lava creating unknown blocks and adds some debugging tools for land claims

Game updates

• Tweak/Fixed: Basalt blocks were twice in the game, this will break your previously collected basalt blocks, sorry about that.  Therefore you can now craft basalt brick blocks, stairs and slabs in survival mode. 
• Tweak: Significantly boosted melee damage output of low tier spears, significantly boosted thrown damage output for all spears
• Tweak: Updated language files to latest version
• Tweak: Mantle block now makes the same sounds as other rock
• Fixed: MacOS version not starting at all
• Fixed: Incorrect bamboo sapling model
• Fixed: Some blocks craftable that shouldn't be (yet)
• Fixed: Item dupe bug on the crafting output slot
• Fixed: Visual oddities when looking at distant berry bushes and flowers

Game updates

• Feature: Added block selectionbox editor (access via .bsedit).
• Tweak: Added notice to mono users that .vrec is not supported there
• Tweak: Added "alloy for" to recipe handbook
• Fixed: Carcass harvesting bugged (black square instead of dialog) 
• Fixed: "No privilege" notification missing when trying to place/break blocks in protected areas
• Fixed Exception when saving land claims (/land claim save [name])
• Fixed: A weird crash during connecting
• Fixed: Home screen black in some cases
• Fixed: Mac os version crashing on first startup
• Fixed: A number of other crashes

Game updates

• Tweak: Clouds somewhat darker during the night
• Fixed: Changing keymapping no longer working
• Fixed: Left hand item animated when breaking blocks
• Fixed: Hares and racoons spawning (they are incomplete so they shouldn't be spawning)
• Fixed: Decay behavior replacing blocks that it shouldn't
• Fixed: Animals getting stuck after some time
• (Maybe) Fixed: Some parts of the world not getting unloaded properly on rare occasions
• Fixed: Drifters using wrong hit box
• Fixed: Holding alt-key no longer let you move the camera while a dialog is opened (in normal mouse mode)
• Fixed: Moving fp camera broken on some systems
• Fixed: Cloud very slightly jittering up/down on normal time speed, every 30 seconds or so
• Fixed: 3-6 second long freeze every time the escape menu was being opened on mac os

• 140.000 lines of code are under a readable source license and on github (vsapi, vsessentialsmod, vssurvivalmod) for everyone to take a peek
• 47.000 lines of code are not obfuscated, meaning with an off-the-shelf decompiler you can look at the code, albeit without code comments
• 50.000 lines of code remain obfuscated, at least half of which I still plan to drop the obfuscation for
   

No time to loose
As always, this update took way longer than what I would have hoped for. The improved macOS support alone about 30 hours of my time. Nevertheless, I did and always will continue to strive to bring you new updates as fast as possible, while still ensuring that I can also do so in the long term. As hinted in the last updates my wife Saraty and I are currently forced to prioritize our health issues over everything else, of which there are bunch.... not counting our other adult responsibilities of ensuring a livable income and raising a child. Le sigh.

Screenshots

Butterflies now spawn in the world

All creatures now have a death animation and linger around. Drops need to be harvested from their dead bodies. Unharvested dead animals will decay to bones after 3 days, bones decay after another 3.


A survival handbook that lets you look up all blocks and items and their crafting recipes. Press 'H' to open.

Improved Hotbar UI and left hand slot. The left hand slot can only hold light sources right now.


"Open To Internet" for easy multiplayer setups


 

Game updates

• Feature: Butterflies flutter around to brighten up your day
• Feature: Can now craft stone bricks and polished rock in survival mode (see recipes below)
• Feature: Improved creature death. Killed creatures no long poof out of existence, they leave a carcass behind that can be harvested for resources and will eventually decay when left untouched. Dead creatures decay to bones after 3 days. Bones decay after another 3.
• Feature: Ingame Block and Item Handbook 
  • Let's you look up crafting recipes, what items are used for and how to obtain them. Open by typing 'H'
  • You can also mouse over an item in your inventory to open the detail page of that item by pressing ‘H’
  • Please note, this feature is a work in progress and thus not all information is listed there yet
• Feature: Improved macOS Support
  • Fixed: Typing special letters not fully supported (i.e. could not type @ on german keyboards)
  • Fixed: Copy&Paste not working
  • Fixed: While ingame shaking the mouse cursor enabled the "Shake mouse pointer to locate" feature of macOS
  • Fixed: While ingame moving the mouse cursor quickly caused it to escape the game window and interact with the desktop
  • Fixed: Game icon in the menu bar very blurry
  • Fixed: Game not using custom cursor graphics
  • Fixed: Crash reporter not launching and "Client Thread crash" message box crashing the game
• Feature: Simplified hotbar - removed username and exp bar. Health and Saturation numbers now visible only when hovered over with the mouse cursor
• Feature: Added left hand slot. Can only hold light sources and holding an item in your left hand drains hunger 25% faster
• Feature: Implemented UPnP and NAT-PMP discovery. Players can now "Open To Internet" \o/
• Feature: Added creature bots for creative mode and/or video making (ask tyron if you want to use them) 
• Feature: Can now left click into the empty area of the creative dialog to get rid of items (previously needed to click on a slot)
• Feature: When pressing Q or shift+q to drop items and hovering a slot the items of that hovered slot are dropped instead
• Feature: Rich text support in some selected areas
• Feature: Added context sensitive cursors icons. Text fields now have a text cursor and rich text links now have a finger cursor
• Feature: The screens single player, multiplayer and mod manager now resize to fit the window height
• Feature: Main screen background image now pans and zooms weirdly and no longer gets stretched or squeezed when the window is resized
• Feature: Added server setting to disable fire spreading
   
• Tweak: Gameplay balancing changes
  • Rebalanced player nutrition system. Nutrients should drain slower now.
  • Locusts now spawn only below y < 93 
  • Eating cooked meals now have double the saturation loss delay (=doubled the time when saturation will start dropping again)
• Tweak: Categorized keyboard controls list, should be now more intuitive to read
• Tweak: Jumping makes the first person held items lag behind for more immersion
• Tweak: Bamboo blocks can no longer be used as a replacement for wooden planks during crafting
• Tweak: Notably improved performance in case where there are hundreds of entities in small spaces
• Tweak: Removed fast animations settings, now always on fancy animations. Sorry low end users. Therefore fancy animations are now slightly faster and aforementioned gains should mitigate the performance drop. Fancy animations was required for other features to work.
• Tweak: Significantly improve server performance when there is thousands or tens of thousands of land claims.
• Tweak: Small performance improvement on the particle system
• Tweak: Dropped items now have the players velocity added
• Tweak: /land info command now a bit more informative. Added server privilege debug mode
• Tweak: Tool racks now show their contents in the block info
• Tweak: Made default dropped ground transform larger, made default fp held block transform larger 
• Tweak: Breaking snow/coal layers in creative mode now breaks all of them
• Tweak: The game tries to pre-select a more suitable window width/height and GUI scale on the very first startup
• Tweak: The settings tab now has toggle buttons instead of plain text buttons because they were not intuitively recognizable as tabs
• Tweak: In the settings interface tab, add a notice that the translations are community created and may be incomplete
• Tweak: More api documentation and language entries
• Tweak: Minor performance improvements
• Tweak: Reduce CPU overhead for occlusion culling by 25% but might overcull. We need to test and see how well it works.
• Tweak: copygirls floaty gui tweaks
  •    Floaty GUIs have been re-positioned a little to show up closer to the center of the block.
  •    Holding Ctrl to move the view while block dialogs are open has been removed, but replaced with the ability to hold Alt while in mouse-look to get the cursor back temporarily
  •    This works well with the new GUI Mouse Lock setting which you can find under "Interface" just below Floaty GUIs. Having both enabled allows you to open in-world block GUIs like containers, fire pits and the quern, without the game taking away your character's camera controls. You can then move items between dialogs using your crosshairs or use the previously mentioned Alt key method which is the only way interact with your hotbar and inventory with the new settings on, currently.
  •    Sneaking while a dialog is opened is now possible again to allow for sneak-interactions with held blocks / items.
  •    Opening a dialog doesn't suddenly stop you from walking around
     
• Fixed: Incorrect textures on molds 
• Fixed: Hitting straw dummies does not wobble for other players in multiplayer
• Fixed: Should fix some wonkiness with crucibles when placed down in creative mode
• Fixed: Charcoal pits not smoking until relogged
• Fixed: Fences not attaching to paper lanterns
• Fixed: Server crashing on some linux shells
• Fixed: Might fix server exception spam / crash in some rare situations
• Fixed: A crash when digging/building on y=0
• Fixed: Standalone server not verifying player auth, added server config to disable it
• Fixed: A rare sqlite exception during server shutdown
• Fixed: Resetting key mapping not updating the player control keys until the game is reloaded
• Fixed: Should fix players able to sleep in beds they have no permission on (due to land claims)
• Fixed: Lanterns and chests having the wrong model/texture for other players in multiplayer right after placing them
• Fixed: Eliminated a bunch of memory leaks
• Fixed: After dying and reviving the player was stuck in the death animation until restart
• Fixed: Mods are now unpacked outside the temp folder. This should fix some server runtime issues on certain linux systems as well as mod loading issues on clients
• Fixed: Microblock chisel textured the log wrongly
• Fixed: Carpets popping off when trying to place them on upside down slabs
• Fixed: CTRL+C on Linux and Mac not firing proper server shutdown sequence
• Fixed: Memory leak related to chest GUIs
• Fixed: Sign texts not showing after being imported by worldediit
• Fixed: Command .noclip crashing the game
• Fixed: Crucible empty after placing and picking it up again
   

Modding updates

• Feature: Variant placeholders (e.g. {rock}) in blocktypes, itemtypes and entitytpyes can now be used everywhere.
• Feature: Added ability for items to add custom journal texts
• Tweak: Made chiseled blocks resistant against blockid changes (now stores block codes instead of block ids)
• Tweak: Made saplings more easily moddable. Can now supply treegen code in the sapling json file
• Tweak: Added trailer effects mod for the last scene of the trailer. Can be activated with /slomo, /glitch and /rain
• Fixed: Don't crash and instead log a readable error if a tree generator code has no associated registered tree generator
• Fixed: Game crashing on invalid texture definitions. Now logs an error instead
   

Mod api code changes

• Feature: Added EntitySpawn and EntityDespawn events to the client and server event api
• Feature: Added CollectibleObject.GetHeldItemName() for custom block/item names
• Feature: Added sound memory leak debugging
• Tweak: Implemented a common method for vertex warping for all shaders. Moved all shader uniforms into IRenderAPI.ShaderUniforms
• Tweak: Entity behavior classes CollectEntities, EmotionStates and Health are now public 
• Tweak: Game time speed is now a float instead of an int. Added a global time speed modifier: GlobalConstants.OverallSpeedMultiplier
• Tweak: copygirls inventory tweaks
  • Create slot indexer (get and set) for inventories
  • Tweaks to IInventory 
  • Now has this[slotId] indexer which can also be set!
  • Now also an IReadOnlyCollection<ItemSlot> (Which means we can now do foreach (var slot in inventory) { ... })
  • Marked GetSlot and QuantitySlots obsolete
• Tweak: Improve ActiveHotbarSlotChanged event
  • This event can now be cancelled on both the client and server sides.
  • Removed the old ActiveHotbarSlotChangedEvent / ChangedActiveHotbarSlot from APIs.
• Removed: Ditched IEntity, IEntityAgent, IEntityPlayer and IEntityNpc. Use Entity, EntityAgent, EntityPlayer and EntityNPC directly instead

New Crafting Recipes

I would like to provide you with an update on what has been happening so far and where Vintage Story is currently standing. 

Saraty and me have been having a number of hardships so we've been feeling pretty drained the last dozen days and could only get very little done on the game. Yet as always, our plans remain unchanged. We hope that in a few days we will be able to go back to a decent level of productivity and resume work on version 1.8.

The upcoming update will focus on making some parts of the game feel more complete. It contains a lot of stability improvements for MacOS users, an ingame recipe lookup (comparable to minecrafts JEI/NEI mods), support for rich text in some selective areas and a few pretties

Sneak preview of the ingame recipe book:

Anyhow, we hope that we can release version 1.8 and then focus on the promised world gen changes and hopefully also some progress on mechanical power. Until then we wish you happy gaming!

- Tyron

This version should fix a number of uncommon crashes and hopefully fix the missing grid for knapping and clay form on MacOS. It also improves the multiplayer experience in various ways. Please note, for multiplayer both sides need to be on v1.7.6 as this version is not backwards compatible, networking wise. 

[Edit:] Released v1.7.7 to fix players getting kicked from SMP servers when trying to open the worldmap
[Edit2:] Released v1.7.8 to fix crafting recipes all wonky and broken

In other news Saraty and me are hard at work on a new trailer that includes all the recent additions, as our current trailer is sorely outdated by now. You won't believe how much time doing just that really takes
Some >30% of the time I spent fixing bugs and smoothing out rough edges so that they do not show up in the trailer, which allowed us to do multiplayer scenes with cinematic camera flyovers that look good. We're over half way done by now and its shaping up to be a great trailer. Can't wait to share it with everyone. Here's some semi-related screenshots 

Something went awry...

Locusts in the pitch black cave

Tired after a long day of recording

Game updates

• Feature: Locusts now emit light when aggro-ed
• Tweak: Added ability to do block/item png export for all blocks/items (not just the ones listed in the creative inventory)
• Tweak: Reduced memory usage by about 20mb
• Tweak: Creatures are fairly heavy on the network, now reduced their network load by about 25%
• Tweak: Eating now also spawns particles for other players
• Tweak: Changes to reduce Creature/Player rubber banding in singleplayer
• Tweak: Improved motion interpolation of creatures and other players. Also they no longer jitter while moving
• Tweak: Added command /entity remove as an alias to /entity removebytpe
• Tweak: Improved the cinematic camera system: Fixed jitteriness while recording. Can now teleport to points via .cam goto pointnumber and update points via .cam up pointnumber  (pointnumber being the n-th added point, starting from 0)
• Tweak: Lit forges now smoke a little
• Fixed: Eggs not contributing saturation to meals
• Fixed: Multiplayer glitch where one player can control another players current hotbar slot
• Fixed: One crash and other issues related to the /group commands
• Fixed: Crafted wooden chests not stacking with picked up chests
• Fixed: Rare race condition crash after teleporting
• Fixed: Might fix a very rare client side crash. And maybe even optimize networking a little.
• Fixed: Firepit not updating its model when contents changed for other players
• Fixed: Straw dummy could be picked up with sneak + left click (should only be possible with right click)
• Fixed: Cinematic camera path invisible
• Fixed: Game crashing on macos when joining a lan game
• Fixed: Black screen when failing to join a multiplayer server
• Fixed: Cinematic camera very jittery
• Fixed: Multiplayer bug where one person controlled the hotbar slot of another player and had cloned client side hotbar slots items
• Fixed: Picking up and placing items not updating held item for other players in multiplayer
• Fixed: Rare server crash
• Fixed: All kinds of wireframes probably (?) broken on macos
• Fixed: Other players body not quite facing running direction
• Fixed: /we mcopy also copied players, now ignored
• Fixed: Should fix some adjacent chunks turning invisible in some cases when occlusion culling is enabled
• Fixed: In memory chunk compression basically not working at all >.>
• Fixed: Distant creatures/players not correctly illuminated by dynamic lights
• Fixed: Hefty fly agaric meal not damaging by 30 hp (instead only 10hp)
• Fixed: Worldmap memory leak
• Fixed: Should fix players able to ignite fire in land claimed areas
• Fixed: Firepit spits where there shouldn't be
• Fixed: Maaaybe fixed knapping surfaces sometimes invisible
• Fixed: Should fix game sometimes crashing when trying to smith something
• Fixed: Wrong tool tip for work items + not smelting back into ingots when put into the crucible

Mod API Updates

• Feature: Added BlockBehavior.OnBlockPlaced
• Fixed: Certain recipe variants crashing the game
• Fixed: Folder mods not shown in the mod manager
• Fixed: The Creature grow behavior no longer crashes when an invalid adult entity code was supplied, instead it logs an error now

Thanks to the work of some lovely folk in our community the game now officially ships with italian translations. Some areas of the game do not have translation support just yet, but we are continuously working on improving that. If you want to help translate the game into your language, you are more than welcome to contribute on our translation center!

As always this version ships with the usual accumulation of bugfixes. Please note, version 1.7.4 does not let you connect to servers of version 1.7.3 or lower and may be a little less stable than 1.7.3.

[Update:] Had to release also v1.7.5 to fix issues with dedicated game servers.

Pics

Reduced shadowing issues on stairs besides walls

New Interface tab to change language and some other extras. Try out floaty guis!

Game updates

• Feature: Added new settings tab "Interface". Can now switch languages. Added italian translations.
• Feature: Added auto show/hide chat hud. This hides the chat hud after 15 seconds of inactivity and shows it when a chat message arrives.
• Feature: Added fox snow dive animation
• Tweak: Gameplay balancing changes
  • Increased velocity of shot arrows
  • Ore blasting bomb recipe reduced to 8 (from 10)
• Tweak: Dropping items start out a little higher up, so they fall a little further now
• Tweak: Logs now are placed in the direction of the targeted faces instead of the players viewing angle
• Tweak: Increased charcoal pit size from 8 to 12 blocks max width/height/length
• Tweak: Minimum dynamic lights now set to 1 instead of 0
• Tweak: Speed up loading times for the mod manager.     
• Fixed: Ambient Occlusion unprettiness on walls running alongside stairs blocks
• Fixed: Quick hack to fix some cases where block sides and/or particles are black
• Fixed: Sheets and Plates not re-meltable
• Fixed: Mobs able to hit through thing walls 
• Fixed: Animals spinning wildly upon spawn by worldgen
• Fixed: /waypoint list showing wrong y-coord
• Fixed: Floaty guis placed too far down o.o
• Fixed: openal errors not logged to file
• Fixed: Z-ordering issue in the main menu screens
• Fixed: Not able to sell to the trader 
• Fixed: Grass coverage growing on soil where it shouldn't
• Fixed: Should fix a crash related to the quern
• Fixed: Game crashing when breaking a tool rack that had a propick in it
• Fixed: Might fix a crash in the compress chunks thread (serverside)
• Fixed: Green particles from breaking barren soil
• Fixed: Sparks and explosion fire from blasting bombs blue and not yellow
• Maybe Fixed: Underwater sound still playing after player gets out of water
• Fixed: Explosion particles wrong color and not visible 
   

API Updates

• Feature: Add ITreeAttribute.GetOrAddTreeAttribute
• Feature: Allow custom walk speed modifiers on agents
• API Tweak: Made BETransient.CheckTransition public 
• API Tweak: Added requiresFood property to entity multiply behavior
• API Tweak: Added support for "smoother" sand<->soil transitions during worldgen
• Fixed: Should fix various issues with loading source mods

[Edit:] Due to constant crashes I've decided to retract v1.7.2. If you already have it please downgrade to 1.7.1. I'm Working on v1.7.3 to fix the issues.
[Edit2:] v1.7.3 is now released, which should fix all worldmap related crashes known to me

This update comes we a new graphics option called "Occlusion culling", but it's disabled by default as its somewhat experimental. Please do enable it and tell me how your FPS is in the forum please! It has the chance to drastically improve FPS for some players and may worsen it for others, so I'm looking for feedback on how well it performs on a multitude of graphics cards.

Occlusion Culling - Technical Info
Occlusion culling is a method to determine which parts of the scene are invisible and thus do not need to be drawn, saving on extra computation time on the graphics card. The challenge is however that occlusion culling itself is computationally expensive and has to be carefully programmed in order to actually gain something from it. In our case we are trading in cpu computation for gpu computation. I implemented my own custom flavor of a ray casting system that currently shoots out 2 rays for each chunk on every chunk at the edge of the view distance, any chunk it can pass through will be marked visible, all other chunks are marked invisible. The idea is based on Tommos Cave Culling Algorithm but instead of doing a breadth-first searching I am actually doing full ray casts. I did try the Bfs method and it seemed to doing a very underwhelming job, but understandably so, since a Bfs does not really model the physical properties of light transport. Tommo claims it would require 119 000 ray casts for a view distance of, I presume 16 minecraft chunks, which is 256 meters. I seem to be able to do it in about 2 300 ray casts for a view distance of 320 meters, so that's pretty freaking nice. Sorry, I'm totally nerding out about this now  
Let's hope it actually works for everyone. 

Also, look at these brand new rooster graphics, trying to be even fancier in front of the ladies now!

Game updates:

• Feature: Added Occlusion culling system. This can improve FPS in some cases, particularly on low-mid range graphics cards
• Feature: Prettier Roosters!
• Tweak: Entering the graphics settings will now also show FPS and fps graph.
• Tweak: Boosted Saturation for grain when inside a meal (120 sat -> 180 sat)
• Tweak: Nerfed cabbage healing value (3 hp -> 1.5 hp)
• Tweak: Slightly Reduced chance and size of surface tin deposits
• Fixed: Crash when filling honey from a bucket into a bucket
• Fixed: Other players crashing when placing a watering can
• Fixed: May fix a very rare crash when chopping a tree thats near to invalid blocks
• Fixed: Some minor memory leaks after exiting the game
• Fixed: Game crashing when trying to add the keepContents rule to the player.json
• Fixed: May fix crash reporter not launching on linux
• Fixed: /land info showing absolute coords
• Fixed: Potentially fixes a rare client crash
• Fixed: Name and Texture cabbage inside a meal missing
• Fixed: Breaking plaster blocks doesn't stack with crafted ones and had the wrong name
• Fixed: Anvil sounds not positional (was stereo)
• Fixed: Large mods causing a buffer overflow and crashing the client.

Version 1.7.0 was literally unplayable because particles stopped glowing, so I had to make this emergency update
Other than that, it contains only minor fixes/adjustments and a fix for one very elusive rare multiplayer server deadlock. Gotta catch 'em all. 

Game updates

• Tweak: Added crafting recipe to turn hay blocks back into 6 dry grass
• Tweak: Sign texts now updates as you type
• Tweak: Honey bowls can now also be emptied/filled through the cooking pot
• Tweak: Made all wood based blocks play the planks sound upon hitting/breaking it
• Tweak: Soil recovers fertility 50% slower
• Tweak: Added itemstack info for troughs
• Fixed: Rare server deadlock upon player join
• Fixed: Dropped items rotating mid-air when the game is paused 
• Fixed: Typos in pro pick texts
• Fixed: Low to decent chance of fixing lake and rivulet world generation issues
• Fixed: Decent chance of fixing left-mouse item-distribute messing up when done too fast
• Fixed: Other players in multiplayer forever stuck in death anim loop upon death
• Fixed: Bed not unmounting players upon death
• Fixed: Cube particles not glowing anymore
• Fixed: Leaves from grown saplings deleting its own logs/bamboo stakes
• Fixed: Sign block placeable sound playing when trying to place a sign on a wall twice
• Fixed: Able to place clay forming surfaces on top of non solid surfaces
• Fixed: Using tree gen tool did not remove the placed block
• Fixed: Missing bracers icon in the character dialog
• Fixed: Removed useless Left/Right buttons for gloves during the create character dialog
• Fixed: "/gamemode survival" did not reset the movespeed to 1
• Fixed: Shears fp hand transform
• Fixed: Wrong block breaking particle color and map color for troughs 
• Fixed: Pouring honey into a bucket also makes the player attempt to eat the honey
• Fixed: Spam hovering over buttons plays the button sound for several seconds
• Fixed: Copy&Paste weirdness. Pasting text into the game now filters the utf8-bom 
• Fixed: Adding removing mods while the game runs does not update the scrollbar height on the mod manager screen

Mod API Updates

• Tweak: Arm slot dress pieces now has highest draw order priority 
• Fixed: Game crashing when it encounters 2 mods with the same mod id

All common crashes and major issues seem now gone. I think that warrants a stable release now. 
The cooking system now has a wiki page and either me or one of the lovely wiki editors will try to add the rest of the 1.7 content there very soon. 

Enjoy 1.7 everyone \o/

Game updates

• Tweak: The grain in a porridge now gives double the saturation
• Tweak: Some debug stuff to find a rare server lock up
• Tweak: Can now place gears on the ground. Placed gears break faster
• Tweak: Increase drop quantities of various items from the loot vessel 
• Tweak: Added sound when using a poultice
• Fixed: Fence block getting deleted from inventory when placing it while standing on the same block
• Fixed: Loose gears generated during worldgen replaces rock
• Fixed: Using a poultice consumed it twice
• Fixed: Some meal eating oddities and a crash 
• Fixed: Cooking slots and text not disappearing after a meal was cooked
• Fixed: Cooking text sometimes cut off
• Fixed: Not able to make a stew from 4 meat