The Game Challenge Update (v1.11-pre.1)

Underchallenged and Overchallenged Vintarians!
v1.11-pre.1 can now be downloaded through the account manager

This update was originally meant to be the seasons update but we (and the community on discord) decided to slide in a couple of other updates first, because this game is so esey! To all peaceful players, not to worry! Save-games can now be customized freely as to how easy or difficult they are.
I also snuck in some sweet sweet graphics updates, oh and mechanical power

Please notice
1. This is a (likely bug-ridden) preview release, mostly intended for modders and very adventorous players. Version 1.11 is not feature complete yet!
2. New "pre" updates will only be posted in discord #news and not on the blog. A new v1.11 blog post will come when the first release candidate is ready.

Known issues/still to be added:

• Armor is not implemented yet
• Mechanical power blocks sometimes turn in the wrong direction
• The singleplayer world mouseover tooltips need nicer formatting
• Clouds are derpy
• The way mechanical power blocks are crafted is a placeholder
• Creature sleeping behavior not implemented yet

Screenshots and Gifs/Videos

Added slope shading to world maps

Added beaches to world generation


Improved overall visuals on god rays, clouds, water and especially prettier sunsets, which now also vary day by day

World customizations: You can now easily customize your sandbox experience!

Playstyle presets. Based on the new customization options the game now offers you 4 carefully chosen presets. Much is still planned for the wilderness surival mode.
 

Extensive challenge update: Mobs now will act more intelligently through better path-finding and much harder variants of existing creatures have been introduced. Deep Drifters, Tainted Drifters, Corrupt Drifters, Nightmare Drifters and Corrupt locusts await your arrival

Locusts will now leap at the player

All surface animals now sometimes take a rest
   

Windmill Power now lets you automate your Quern. The daily grind has finally come to an end!

Selecting large world heights when creating a new world now also horizontally scales the world, which makes mountains look much more massive

Leatherworking: You now have to process hides in order to acquire leather. Hides now come in 4 different sizes.

Improved distant tree rendering

The items on tool racks look less derpy

Game updates

• Feature: Beaches now generate as part of world generation
• Feature: Extensive visual rework
  • Much improved distant tree rendering. They no longer look like generic blobs of green but like actual trees now
  • Much improved sunset/sunrise ambient. The intensity of it also changes day by day
  • Reduced default fog intensity, for greater distant viewing pleasure
  • Chiseled blocks now also have ambient occlusion applied to them
  • Reworked clouds: Now more opaque and less derpy, but still not quite working as intended
  • Reworked god ray shader: Looks a bit more impressive as it used to in v1.4.6, hopefully without breaking anything
  • Worldmap now with slope shading
  • More scene Brightness tweaks
• Feature: Mechanical Power: For now serving the one and only purpose to save you from the daily grind - quite literally. You can now power your querns using wind power.
• Feature: World customize screen
• Feature: Tougher adversaries
  • Feature: Locust nests now spawn additional locusts when players start breaking the nest
  • Feature: Locust now leap at the player
  • Feature: Deep locust nests now spawns corrupt locusts
  • Tweak: Locust nests spawn a bit more often
  • Added deep drifter variants. In order of increasing difficulty there are now normal, deep, tainted, corrupt and nightmare drifters.
  • Improved Path finding:
    • Creatures are now much less likely to wander of cliffs
    • Improved their ability to find their targets. Unreachable targets are now besieged (i.e. walk in circles around them, instead of walking into walls)
    • Fleeing creature are more likely to escape instead of running into walls
    • Bighorn sheep walk and run a bit faster
• Feature: Can now grant players or groups the right to access or un-reinforce reinforced blocks
• Feature: Large world height improvements
  • New worlds with increased the world height now not only scales the world vertically, but also horizontally
  • Distance fade out now only applied on the horizontal axis, not on the vertical so standing on a tall mountain will still let you see the ground
  • Tweaked how ram is allocated/freed, this should make tall worlds less memory hungry and not make your computer die as it runs out of ram. (Technical info: Distant chunks are now immediately compressed after being tesselated)
• Feature: Made tool rack tool transforms prettier
• Feature: Improved startup performance by doing less regexes and instead use simpler matching methods when possible.
• Feature: Basic leatherworking implemented
• Feature: Added sitting behaviors to all creatures
• Feature: Improved Barrel rendering. Its now allowed to have more brine than needed inside the barrel for pickling
• Feature: If a dialog is outside the window bounds its clamped to the window bounds so players can still move it around
• Feature: The game client now automatically enables or disables mods depending on what mods the server uses
   
• Tweak: Gameplay balancing tweaks
  • Applied new parameters to anthracite. Now less evenly distributed amongst the world.
  • Nerfed gold and silver ore: all ore pieces now yield 5 units
  • Cassiterite, instead of spawning between 0-60% depth from bottom to surface now spawns between 40-75%
  • Pickling now takes 14 days instead of 20
  • Increased max possible range of translocators
• Tweak: Added new version text hover and link cursor
• Tweak: Increased music frequency in the "Sometimes" and "Often" options.
• Tweak: Pickaxes can now be placed into mining bags
• Tweak: Gamma slider is no longer locked to creative mode only
   
• Fixed: Forgot to release unloaded chunk data into the chunk data pool Should reduce memory usage and lag spikes
• Fixed: Rivers on mountains not correctly fading out when at the edge of the view distance
• Fixed: Single player world edit screen displayed the wrong play style
• Fixed: Minor visual glitch on some falling block entities
• Fixed: Water lilies rendering behind water if looked at a distance

API Updates

• Feature: Added ore map noise parameter to deposits: oreMapScale, oreMapScale and oreMapSub
• Feature: Exposed more privilege / group stuff.
  • IServerCore has now 2 new properties
    • Groups: Lets you access the player groups that players created
    • PlayerData: Lets you access world-agnostic information on the player, even when the player is offline
  • IServerPlayer now has 2 methods: GetGroups() and GetGroup(groupid) to test in what group a player is
• Feature: Block entity behaviors. Can now attach behaviors to block entities. The block entity animation util is now a block entity behavior.
   
• Tweak: New client setting cameraShakeStrength: Lets you reduce the overall camera shake strength
• Tweak: Gui composer setups that could cause a stack overflow now throw an exception
• Tweak: sapi.even.OnChunkDirty(Vec3i chunkCoord, IWorldChunk chunk, EnumChunkDirtyReason reason) changed last argument from bool to EnumChunkDirtyReason
• Tweak: The OpenGL debug mode now also will log opengl debut output
• Tweak: New property: GuiDialog.ZSize allows to set how much z-space a dialog requires.
• Tweak: Changed mod asset loaded order to be no longer alphabetical but sorted by the order of dependencies
• Tweak: Json patches are now auto-sided if now side attribute was supplied
• Tweak: Rename json patch attribute sideType to side. (You can still use sideType until v1.12)
• Tweak: Improved json patch error feedback
   
• Refactor: Method string BlockEntity.GetBlockInfo(IPlayer forPlayer) is now void BlockEntity.GetBlockInfo(IPlayer forPlayer, StringBuilder dsc)
• Refactor: Block entity field changes:
  • Rename BlockPos pos => BlockPos Pos
  • Rename ICoreApi api => ICoreApi Api
  • New field : Block Block   (which is already set before at the time Initialize() gets called)
• Refactor: Interface IBlockShapeSupplier is now obsolete. OnTesselation is now always executed on block entities.
• Refactor: you'll need to add "override" to your OnTesselation methods
• Refactor: block.IsSuitablePosition(IWorldAccessor world, BlockPos pos, ref string failureCode) is now block.CanPlaceBlock(IWorldAccessor world, IPlayer byPlayer, BlockSelection blockSel, ref string failureCode)
• Refactor: Added method block.DoPlaceBlock(IWorldAccessor world, IPlayer byPlayer, BlockSelection blockSel, ItemStack byItemStack)
• Refactor: Added methods BlockBehavior.CanPlaceBlock and BlockBehavior.DoPlaceBlock
• Refactor: Changed min/maxY spawn behavior of entities 0..1 is now world bot to sealevel, 1..2 is sealevel to world top
• Refactor: IServerEventAPI.CanPlaceOrBreakBlock() and CanUseBlock() is now an event,
• Refactor: Renamed GenLakes to GenPonds in the Survival mod
• Refactor: The asset load order has changed. If you load sound or music files during StartClientSide(), you need to move that load into the BlockTexturesLoaded event.
• Fixed: The HighlightBlocks system crashed when more than one color was used