v1.20-rc.6 - Lore Update: The Journey

Dear Extraordinary Survivalists 
v1.20.0-rc.6, a release candidate, can now be downloaded through the account manager.

Another week, another release candidate! With a bit of luck we are now not far off a final version of 1.20.0... so if this rc.6 is decently stable, we should be able to get to an officially stable release in 1 to 3 weeks. While my hope was to release stable this year still, only one week of 2024 now remains. So it looks like we may just miss getting a 2024 date onto it by a hairline. Let's see!

This -rc.6 should fix the issue which a small proportion of players had in multiplayer games, with creatures not moving properly.  [For the technical details, it depended on the player's internet connectivity.  New game systems in 1.20.0 use UDP communication with the server as well as regular TCP: it's a bit more efficient when sending large numbers of real-time updates, as we do for creatures.  Some ISPs or routers do not support UDP well enough, for example giving priority always to TCP packets or discarding UDP packets completely.  The solution we have found is to add some smart monitoring, so now we use UDP communication for connections which support it, with an automatic drop down to TCP for the connections which do not support UDP.]

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

Screenshot by Axebeard, shared in Discord #screenshots

Game updates

• Tweaks to gameplay and balance:
  • Reduce knock-back y-motion when the attack is mostly vertical
  • Reduced Tuning spear damage from 4 to 2. Intended to give Clockmakers more opportunities to hack a locust.
  • Nerfed ruins clothing loot, and adjusted other loot generation. Various tweaks and fixes to story locations
  • Adjusted surface ruin generation for balancing reasons, and to better support large ruins
• Tweak: Disallow hopper pushing items into the clay oven (it caused undefined behavior anyway)
• Tweak: Added tooltip warning players to preheat the clay oven
• Tweak: Further charcoal pile improvements, updated charcoal burning handbook entry
• Tweak: Add distillation properties to handbook (by jacopouggeri)
• A few HUD tweaks and fixes:
  • Center block name in info HUD
  • Chiseled Block displays "Chiseled Block" instead of its name a second time in block info HUD
  • Show the greenhouse information on a beehive's tool-tip when it has the greenhouse bonus
  • Fixed: Ingot Mold block info describing contents as "x units of liquid Y ingot"
• A few tweaks and fixes to the Settings menus:
  • In the Controls tab, add a Search box (many thanks to Dana for this!)
  • In the Graphics tab, tool-tip for Sepia, add the explanation that it is disabled (automatic) if Dynamic Color Grading is on
  • In the Graphics tab, fixed the incorrect tooltip for Contrast
  • In the Graphics tab, the View Distance slider now has consistent tooltips before and after interaction. Same fix in the main menu Customise World screen for the World Height slider. [Github #4526]
  • In the Sounds tab, the boss music track volume is now affected by the Music slider instead of by the Ambient Sounds slider
• Tweak: The command "/we chisel setchiseleditable false" is now "/we microblock editable false"
• Tweak: The Windows installer can be configured to not run the game after install, with the /verysilent command line argument
• Fixed: Should fix all UDP connectivity issues. The game engine now seamlessly (and automatically) falls back to using TCP only, if it detects that a UDP connection cannot be established
• Fixed: Beehive Kiln no longer working in -rc.5, also fixed ground storage bricks going invisible
• Fixed: Missing recipe for fire brick kiln door
• Fixed: Topsoil blocks were not necessarily drawn correctly with many mods loaded (which created multiple texture atlasses)
• Fixed: Client crash with many mods loaded (Technical info: multi-texture atlas support for runtime insertions requiring new atlasses, a potential issue for players using many mods. [Github #4693])
• Fixed: Attaching ropes to creatures applied to the entire stack of ropes, causing all kinds of undefined behavior. Attached rope is now not stackable.
• Fixed: In Creative mode, Large wooden gear (rim) and Pulverizer frame (top section) giving an invisible block when Pick Block used
• Fixed: Metal doors and trapdoors still had the wood combustible properties, making them burn when obviously they shouldn't
• Fixed: Flowing water now properly accounts for barriers facing inward and outward in all instances
• Fixed: Resonance Archives armor stands sometimes did not have the proper armor on them
• Fixed: Tapestry Schematic C (Bloody) not uncovering Schematic C lore. This change might shift everyone's tapestry discoveries over by 1?
• Fixed: A long-standing minor exploit where players could have 100% health on joining a game, if when they last left the game nutrition gave higher than 15hp of max heath and they were already over 15hp but less than full health. [Github #2250]
• Fixed: Bugs with liquids during meal ingredient matching
• Fixed: Issue after using a barrel to take liquid from another container, and placing the barrel. [Github #4734]
• Fixed: Possible liquid duplication when filling a stack of multiple bowls from another item in inventory. [Github #4708]
• Fixed: Hunter's green shirt was using wrong wear location (moved from upperbodyover to upperbody)
• Fixed: log spam relating to animation elements for clothing on the seraph shape
• Visual fixes:
  • Clouds too visible against waterfalls
  • Wrong arm rotation on bamboo raft
  • After mounting, switching from third person to first person lacked the player sitting animation
  • Fixed a long-standing issue where charcoal piles and snow layers [and anything else using BlockLayer drawtype] appeared visually to remove material from the bottom layer of the pile, not the top of the pile, when material was removed
  • Tool heads displayed in the handbook should render on top of the Creative inventory, if that is open at the same time
  • Many pieces of footwear would clip through leather leg armor quite badly.
  • Small issues with Alchemist and Peasant Kaftan texture
• Fixed: Multiple issues with the Fruitpress - note: it now requires Ctrl + right-click to activate it!
• Fixed: Crimson maple leaves properly registered for tree-felling purposes, should allow more precise felling of individual trees if they are close together
• Fixed: Spirits not listed in the Survival Handbook
• Fixed: In the Survival Handbook, Tutorial steps 4 onwards were missing their step number in the text shown
• Fixed: Doors and Trapdoors solid sides detection and miscellaneous other Door/Trapdoor bugs (pizza2004)
  • Trapdoors would not place against the bottom of blocks like they used to
  • Fixes neighboring block updates so they are sent to all blocks next to every block in the door whenever the doors are placed, broken, opened, or closed
  • Doors will also no longer attempt to rotate themselves to match other doors or link up with doors that are rotated the wrong way
  • Some doors turning into other doors upon placing a double door
  • Doors should now correctly block water in all cases
• Fixed: Chiseled blocks with Blocklayer blocks could lose them when imported/copied in WorldEdit
• Fixed: Chiseled block could have no held item name when hovering over it in inventory
• Fixed: Kelp top pieces at water surface accumulating snow
• Fixed various rare crashes in -rc.5:
  • Attempt to fix crash in AmbientManager. [Github #4778]
  • Client-side crashloop with certain modded items in left hand (eg. oillamp?), hot item in right hand. [Github #4735]
  • Additional logging for rare server crash in PhysicsManager. [Github #4754 and #4783]  (It will be properly fixed in version -rc.7)
• Fixed: Command "/allowCharSelOnce" no longer working
• Fixed: Add missing translation entries
• Fixed: New game version text in the main menu was cut off for some translations
• Fixed: Worldmap mods such as AutoMapMarkers unable to load on Linux [Detail: an SVG icon was inconsistently named with uppercase letter]
• Fixed: Rarely, in the event of a forced game shutdown immediately following updating the game version, the world could appear corrupted with wrong block mappings. These affected the plants and terrain and everything else seen in the game. [Detail: remappings - both kinds, both internal automatic ID remapping and explicit code remappings from config - would not necessarily be recorded in the savegame on a forced server shutdown or certain exceptions. Manifested as (rarely) apparently wacky worldgen, and/or the game asking to remap blocks unnecessarily on next game start]
• API Tweak: Allow mods to define their own worldproperties/block/metal.json instead of needing to patch the file
• API Tweak: Add "MinSpawnDistance" support for village schematics. Lets you define a certain distance constraint from the spawnpoint
• API Tweak: Allow BlockBehaviorHarvestable to have multiple drops
• API Tweak: Make barrels more moddable
• API Tweak: Cooking system - allow modded meal names
• API Tweak: new Lang.GetWithFallback(key, fallbackKey) method to allow us to replace an existing lang key seamlessly
• API Tweak: Renamed 'The Seraph' music track, allowing it to be used in the music meta block for mods
• API Fixed: Texture to index mapping now depends on file name