The Homesteading update (v1.15-pre.1)

Dear Community
v1.15.0-pre.1, a preview release, can now be downloaded through the account manager. (section "Other Goodies").

As the community requested by popular vote, for v1.15 are adding new content centered around the topic of Homesteading. If you voted you might notice that a significant portion of the originally planned feature set for the Homesteading Update is not yet implemented! This was in part due to me getting "a tiny bit" side-tracked with two entirely new services - Vintagehosting and VS ModDB.
We are delighted that both are flourishing - there are, at the time of writing, 192 mods in the ModDB, each made with love and care, huge thanks to our awesome modding community!

We will be adding a few more features to 1.15 over the coming weeks, up to the stage of the first release candidate. It still will not be everything that was originally planned, but we want to get it released. On the other hand, I'd like to believe we have also added some really really nice content that we did not announce during the v1.15 poll.

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

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.
2. New "pre" updates will only be posted in discord #news and not on the blog. A new v1.15 blog post will come when the first release candidate is ready.


Screenshots

Decor system: Carpets, Wallpapers and other quasi-blocks that do not obstruct normal blocks!

Slanted roof blocks: Diagonal never looked so good! Diagonal is the new square! Square is so last century...

Pies! Craft lovely looking pastry (WIP)


Epic tree update: 6 new tree variants with new logs and planks. 2x2 logs for redwood trees.


Tropics update: New farmable tropical crops, new ferns, improved world generation for bamboo, ferntrees and more

Tropics update: Bamboo sways in the wind


Farming update: Many new crops, improved crop information and upgraded fertilizers


New crafting mechanic: Clay oven bread baking. The perfect bread needs a perfect bake.


New crafting mechanic: Pit kilns. Will replace firing of clay products in firepits (WIP)


Even more new building blocks: Like full metal blocks - Steampunky metal builds here we goooooo


Prettier trader carts: Now with actual wheels!

Experimental rope simulation (VERY WIP)


Henboxes - chickens now realistically lay eggs in boxes and brood them into little chicklets


Smooth Stair Stepping


Weapon and Tool update: 2 new higher end bows (one is archer exclusive), bones can now be used as handles for stone age axes and knifes


Improved seasonal foliage: Brings more colors to the world \o/



Game updates

• Feature: Decor system - place blocks inside blocks!
  • Carpets, Linen, Rushmats, Wallpaper, Wool and fallen leaves can now be attached to any block without occupying that block space. Fallen leaves and wallpaper are creative mode only currently.
     
• Feature: Slanted roof blocks - added slanted roofing for clay shingles, copper, slate, thatch and straw
   
• Feature: Pies!
  • Craft lovely pastry from any fruit, vegetable or meat
  • Right click with dough in hands on a table to begin crafting pastry, add filling, and lastly you may still add one of three covers - repeated clicks lets you select the type of pastry.
  • WIP: You cant properly cook or eat them yet, will be in pre.2
     
• Feature: Epic music update
  • Some music tracks now play based on season+latitude
  • Added 3 new seasonal tracks for Summer and Fall. Tweaked Winter track to play during winter.
  • New main menu track "Roots"
  • "Through the grass at night" now also plays in survival and creative mode
  • Fixed many music tracks not playing in the exploration and wilderness survival mode
     
• Feature: Replaced the seraph's Tyron-voice with Instrumental player voices. 6 voices + selection in the character selector (test via command .charsel). Experimental! Needs a lot more tweaking.
   
• Feature: Epic tree update
  • Tree leaves no longer drop saplings, but plantable seeds, which grow into saplings
  • Added new tree types cypress, purple heartwood, ebony, crimson king maple, walnut and larch
  • Ebony and Purpleheart logs will be a rare valuable resource as these are rare and difficult to propagate trees
  • The 2x2 redwood trees now have actual 2x2 trunks
  • The world configuration "sapling growth days" as been changed into "sapling growth rate". This means if you have a custom setting (or play exploration / wilderness survival) you have to re-apply the config via /worldConfig saplingGrowthRate [0.1 20]. It's now a growth speed multiplier with 1 being the normal rate.
  • Maple seeds swirl when they fall, Walnuts are edible
  • Richer seasonal leaf colors
     
• Feature: Tropics update!
  • Improved bamboo! Richer leaves, the canes now sway in the wind, improved wind sway for bamboo leaves
  • Added 4 new varieties of ferns - Deer fern, Eagle fern, Cinnamon fern, Hart's tongue (some also spawn in temperate zones)
  • Much improved bamboo generation - added more leaves, now grow in larger patches, greater height variety and spawns bamboo shoots
  • Improved fern tree generation - they now also spawn in groups
  • Improved kapok tree generation - added a few different generators, greater height variation
  • More luscious leaf colors
     
• Feature: Farming update
  • New crops: There's now Pineapple, Cassava, Amaranth, Sunflower and Peanuts
  • Added new food types - Pineapple jam, 3 new bread types for Cassava, Amaranth and Sunflower
  • Cassava is a versatile crop that can be either used as vegetable or grain, depending on how it is prepared. Includes an extensive preparation process.
  • Farmland improvements
    • Applying potash permanently increases max k fertility on farmland by 15% (only once)
    • Increased nutrient release from fertilized soil
    • Improved farmland info text. Made moisture levels a stronger factor in the crop growth
    • Rot in barrel now produces compost items for instead of full blocks, can be used as fertilizer or to craft full compost blocks
       
• New crafting mechanic: The clay oven
  • New baking mechanic for creating bread and baking pies
  • Dough cooked on a firepit now only produces charred bread
     
• New crafting mechanic: Pit Kilns (WIP)
  • Can be used to bulk fire clay products
  • Will eventually replace firing in the firepit
     
• Feature: Chicken immersion update
  • Hens now lay eggs in henboxes
    • Broody hens will sit on henboxes for several days to hatch the eggs
    • Chicks now hatch from those eggs instead of the old ‘pregnancies’!
    • If henboxes are unavailable, hens will still lay eggs on the ground but these will not hatch!
  • Chicks grow in size as they get older
    • New juvenile stage (pullets and cockerels) before chickens reach adulthood: juveniles look like small adults, but do not lay eggs or fight.
       
• Feature: Baby animals update
  • Baby animals grow in size as they age
  • Most baby animals (apart from hares) are now a bit smaller when newborn
     
• Feature: 3D Models update!
  • All player belts are now 3D Models
  • All powdered/crushed resources are now 3D
  • Flax twine and flax fibers
  • Fat and beeswax
  • Cattail and Papyrus roots
  • Other stuff
     
• Feature: Smooth stair stepping (thanks to @noname)
   
• Feature: Mega Performance update - over 100 smaller and larger tweaks to improve performance, focused on chunk loading speed as well as cpu, memory and graphics overhead. We still need to measure exact values, but it should be plenty to offset the performance cost of all newly added features. Game loading time is also a few seconds faster, especially single player.
   
• Feature: Trader outpost aesthetic update: All trader carts now come with much prettier wheels and a Arkan-polished exterior
   
• Feature: More New blocks
  • Drystone blocks and Drystone fences for each rock type + one very fancy mixed stone variant
  • Full metal blocks, made from 6 metal plates
  • Pre copper age doors called a Rough door. Can be made without saw, but also has a 10% chance of breaking.
  • Added polished rock variants for suevite and kimberlite
  • Rope ladders (WIP)
  • 8 new paintings
  • 5 new tapestries
  • Added 1 new flower: Cornflower
  • 2 types of cart wheels (for creative mode)
  • Generic wood block (for creative mode)
     
• Feature: More piles
  • We've rewritten how ground storage works, so that in the future we can much more easily make stuff "ground storable"
  • Clay and stone bricks can now be piled up like ingots
     
• Feature: Experimental cloth and rope simulation
  • The survival crafted rope can now be used to attach animals and fence posts in various ways
  • Disclaimer: Highly experimental! Very WIP! Ropes are not synced to other players and are not stored with the save game right now
     
• Feature: Bow & Spear rebalance
  • Added longbow and recurve bow as a new tier of missile weapon. Longbow has highest durability, but recurve has better damage. Requires sawing and drying a bowstave before you can craft either
  • Reduced break chance for all arrows to half of their current values
  • Improved damage and durability for ornate spears. They're now the strongest spears in game, but they can only be purchased via trader
     
• Feature: Improved 4k Monitor support
  • Background textures now scale with gui scale and pre-selects a higher gui scale on first startup. If the screen width is over 3000 pixels, the gui scale slider max value increases to from 16 to 24
  • Fixed wrong sizing of the 'confirm remapping' dialog non large or small gui scales
  • Fixed wrong padding inside icon buttons (e.g. world edit toolbar)
  • Fixed non vertical centered texts in the world edit guis, hover colors if drop downs and number inputs were off as well, no embossing on the number input buttons.
  • Fixed unsharp text in the crash reporter
  • Fixed button texts not vertically centered, most notable on 4k monitors
  • Some parts of the handbook not scaling with UI Scale, most apparent on 4k monitors
     
• Feature: Added Traits tab to the player character gui - so you can see the features of your chosen character class any time
• Feature: Improved fall foliage: Many foliage types now got their own seasonal colors and some others received some fine tuning
   
• Feature: Bone handle tools. Some stone age tools now be crafted with bones as handles for a bit of extra durability
• Feature: Added termites (spawn as item from breaking termite mounds)
• Feature: Added silver solder and lead solder ingots with alloy recipe, to be used to craft the distillery in v1.15-rc.1
• Feature: Added powdered sulfur; sulfur-based recipes now require that instead of the sulfur chunk. Sulfur chunk needs to be ground in the quern before being used in recipes. To compensate, the poultice recipes require less sulfur.
• Feature: Papyrus now drops papyrus tops and roots
• Feature: Auto-Replace behavior from the Spear now applied to all tools as well. If a tool breaks and there is one extra in the players inventory, it is placed into the now empty slot.
• Feature: New sounds for metal doors
• Feature: SSAO support for cube particles
• Feature: Added SRV record support for multiplayer hosts
• Feature: Some plants (Fern, Tree Fern, Croton, Rafflesia) now rendered with random size
• Feature: Added new worldedit flood fill option: "/we trl [0-9999]" lets you set the replacable level (default 6000). Set to 9000 to not replace water
• Feature: Fuller flower models for Heather, Dwarf Furze and Orange Mallow
• Feature: Added ability to disable death messages (/worldconfigcreate bool disableDeathMessages true)
• Tweak: Increased tool durability costs for crafting mechanical blocks
• Tweak: Changed various stack sizes, including most mechanical parts, and many non-mold clay items, as well as anvil, bed, and quern.
• Tweak: Chert is now a knappable stone
• Tweak: Polished horizontal tabs ui element
• Tweak: Renamed foods trader to agriculture trader. Now also sells seeds.
• Tweak: Added alternate ladder recipe that requires less sticks
• Tweak: Omok table top now falls if the table falls
• Tweak: Disabling developer mode now disables all the debug settings, as one would expect it to do
• Tweak: Crash the game if the graphics card reports being out of memory instead of silently erroring - a crash is preferable to a screen freeze which cannot be exited from
• Tweak: Mitigate dark spots caused by SSAO (cheaply capped to 67% min brightness)
• Tweak: Added "/player [name] entity temp" subcommand to read body temperature
• Tweak: Bees no longer actively produce honey or fly around below 0°C. And timers reset below -10°
• Tweak: Increase Bouncy effect for hail particles (and any other bouncy particles)
• Tweak: Various wordings and spelling improvements
• Tweak: Some blocks (eg mechanicals) now have custom hitboxes for snow and other particles
• Tweak: Making a screenshot checks for folder write access, maybe helps us narrow down screenshotting issues
• Tweak: Renamed /clear command to /clearinv
• Fixed: Ruined villages not seed-determistic
• Fixed: drop down list menu scrollbar not scrolling all the way down?
• Fixed: Wrong SSAO on chicken toes
• Fixed: Breaking beds left players in a sleeping position
• Fixed: Attempt to fix z-fighting on middle-distance Glacier Ice next to Snow blocks
• Fixed: Worldedit: Moving or Rotating a selection with chiseled block corrupts the build in various ways
• Fixed: Small cumulative performance leak in the character dialog
• Fixed: Server crash when adding and removing a mod that adds lots of item ids
• Fixed: Could use /waypoint commands when maps were disabled
• Fixed: Could find out coordinates using land claiming when showing coordinate HUD was disabled
• Fixed: Dupe bug with crafting inventory on death
• Fixed: Rare issue where game crashed if (corrupted?) save file contained no blocks data for a chunk

API Updates

• Feature: New datastructure: CollectibleBehavior - allows to define behaviors that can be applied to blocks and items. First collectible behavior: GroundStorable
• Feature: Generic ground storage system: Can now easily make an item "ground storable" by adding a collectible behavior to it in the itemtype/blocktype, no programming required
• Feature: Added class GuiDialogCharacterBase to the api to allow modding of the character dialog. Moved the environnment and stats dialog code from the vanilla game into the survival mod (CharacterExtraDialogs).
• Feature: Added grid recipe property "recipeGroup" allows you to visually separate grid recipes in the handbook, see ladder recipe as example
• Feature: Added "/debug blockcodes" to export a full list of all block codes
• Feature: 3 new treegen parameters (for branches: randomWidthLoss, widthLossCurve; for treeBlocks: leaveslevels)
• Feature: New shapes JSON element property: disableRandomDrawOffset (used for Coopers Reed in ice)
• Feature: New shapes JSON element property: foliageWaveSpecial (used for custom foliage wind wave shaders for crops)
• Feature: New blocktype property: randomSizeAdjust used similarly to randomRotation, see Croton or Tree Fern for examples
• Feature: In blocktype, to enable swaying like bamboo canes, set VertexFlags { WindSway = true } In code this can also be achieved in VertexFlags by setting both grassWindWave and leavesWindWave (together) to true
• Feature: Two new FaceCullMode options for blocks: FlushExceptTop (example: farmland or path) and Stairs
• Feature: Renamed FaceCullMode MergeIce to ”Callback”. Calls method Block.ShouldMergeFace() for custom face culling
• Feature: Added server events MapRegionLoaded, MapRegionUnloaded
• Refactor: Renamed BlockEntityBehavior.FromTreeAtributes to BlockEntityBehavior.FromTreeAttributes
• Refactor: The block entity BEFire is now BEBehaviorBurning
• Refactor: Add method Block.GetBlockMaterial() as a partial replacement over querying Block.BlockMaterial. Implemented for miningspeeds, blast resistances & heat retention. Not implemented for face culling, worldgen, leaf decay, snow related stuff and similar.
• Refactor: All of Vintage Story now references .Net Framework 4.6.1
• Refactor: Huge refactor of all leaves and wood related assets.    
• Refactor: musicconfig.json Removed "playstyle" property, replaced with "onPlayList" property
• Refactor: Playstyles now have a new property "playListCode"    
• Refactor: The mechpower shaders are now renamed into "instanced" and also used by the rope system
• Refactor: Full rewrite of runtime texture reloading
  • The behavior of "atlas.InsertTextureCached" changed as a consequence These textures now get automatically reloaded by the game engine. Modders no longer need to manually reload those. Subsequent calls to this methods with the same arguments now updates the texture at runtime, instead of allocating yet another new area
  • A runtime texture reload can now only happen between same resolution texture files. You can not runtime reload a texture with changed textures sizes
  • This should fix all previous issues related to runtime texture reloading
  • Reload about 2 to 5 times faster \o/
• Refactor: Moved the data structures JsonObject, IntDataMap2D, FloatDataMap3D, Rectangled, Rectanglef, StackMatrix4, RotatableCube, ListDictionary and the interface IBlockFlowing into the correct namespace
• Notice: In AssetLocation, the domain and path should always be lowercase; the core game engine automatically sets them to lowercase if creating an AssetLocation from a filename on disk, or from a domain:path element in a JSON file
• Tweak: AssetLocation.Domain: harmonise code, use supplied methods such as .Create and .BeginsWith where appropriate
• Tweak: Block.OnJsonTesselation parameters changed, old version deprecated
• Tweak: Removed obsolete method GameMath.FastSqrt
• Tweak: JsonObject.AsBool/AsInt/AsFloat/etc. did not set the default value properly if it couldn't parse the value from string
• Tweak: Block.DoEmitSideAo() and Block.DoEmitSaidAoByFlag() parameters changed
• Tweak: Added map region arg to MapRegionUnloaded event
• Tweak: Added Get/Set/RemoveModData methods to IMapRegion
• Tweak: Added 2 new tree gen properties: "bool noLog" and "NatFloat sizeVar"
• Tweak: Renamed physics entity property airDragFallingFactor to airDragFactor, but the old one will still work
• Tweak: Better error reporting and ability to set a domain for workitem basematerials so modders can have custom ingots in their own mod domain
• Tweak: MeshData.RenderPasses is now obsolete, use RenderPassesAndExtraBits instead
• Tweak: Added property sapi.WorldManager.CurrentPlayStyle
• Tweak: Added api.Shader.GetProgramByName()
• Tweak: Added SerializerUtil.DeserializeInto()
• Fixed: Various naming inconsistencies (wattlefence<->hewnfence, incorrect naming schemes, etc.)
• Fixed: Subsequent calls to RegisterBlockEntityType not overwriting the registered block entity
• Fixed: Non-contigous ore maps for default scaled ores. 1.5 scale ones are still broken I think.
• Fixed: Runtime texture reloading should no longer crash now and is notably faster
• Fixed: Some oddities when using shape { voxelizeTexture: true }
• Fixed: Several crashes/issues with the survival mod disabled
• Fixed: SaveGameCreated event never called
• Fixed: Various issues and crashes with the survival mod disabled
• Fixed: The playstyles of disabled mods now no longer show up in the Create World screen
• Fixed: Entity weight property not synced to client
• Fixed: Should finally fix mesh.data normals not working properly (mostly because facing.PackedNormal was borky)
• Fixed: Slot.CanTakeFrom() not passing the priority arg during stack merges from Collectible.TryMergeStacks    
• Fixed: RequiredOnClient = false not loading mod on client
• Fixed: Logging special characters no longer crashes the game