Tyron

Vintage Story has an amazing community following and within that community, there are creative stars that we aim to promote and share with everyone. One of those stars is Balduranne. You may have seen her suggestions and projects in the VS forums, chatted with her in the Discord or followed her work on DeviantArt. Even if you’ve never heard of her before, have no fear! This is a quick chat where I had the unique opportunity to catch up with the creative mind behind the work and get some answers to the questions I had. Show your support of this talented creator by checking out the links at the end of the interview and check out her topics on the VS forums to keep up to date with current and future projects. Robin: You have a real passion for 3d modelling and artistic design with an emphasis on Pixel based artwork. Where did your love for that style begin and what draws you to it specifically? Balduranne: I guess that depends on how far you want to go; I've always loved video games. Back when I was a kid, I used to have a bootleg NES, so I guess that's my first contact with pixel art, although I don't think anyone called it that back then. I've always had a fondness for the graphics in Tibia, an ancient FTP game akin to Runescape, but in 2D. It's still up, so you can check out their wiki for the lovely pixel art it uses. Other than that... I've always been an artistic person really – Playing with plasticine, LEGOs, and of course drawing. Inspired by games like Baldur's Gate, or what have you, I'd draw little pictures of swords, armors, monsters etc in all of my notepads. All throughout my school years, I always had a separate one just for drawings. Before I got to pixel art, I've dabbled in other media. My earliest mod attempts were changing texture graphics in MS Paint with games that allowed that. Later on I tried 3D modelling and texturing for Mount&Blade mods, but never really got any good at it. I tried to transfer some of that skills into Garry's Mod, with little success. I only have a few things to show from this period, as most of my files are at a computer in Europe. Later on I got a graphics tablet to try digital painting, but again, not much success with it. I've always seemed to have a knack for minimalism and small forms instead, so pixel art came much easier to me, especially after all my previous artistic endeavours. My pixel art career starts in 2010, when I started playing Minecraft. I could never find a texture pack that suited my taste perfectly, so I ended up customizing it with other elements and, eventually, trying to make my own sprites. At some point, Terraria came out with its charming artstyle, so after playing countless hour of it, I started making 'fan art' for it. Terraria was my most active stage, and I've made hundreds of sprites, though next to none ended up being used in mods. Unfortunately, some very unhappy things were going on IRL, so I've moved away from any and all communities. Since then I've only been making commissions, until I got into VS at least. So to reiterate, minimalism is my jam. Robin: Moving into Vintage Story, you've been extremely active in the community with suggestions, mods and other creative submissions in the forums and on the Discord. What is it about Vintage Story and its community that appeals to you? Balduranne: I'm generally quick to dismiss Minecraft clones, so when Tyron originally contacted me to do artwork for it I declined, which I regret now; I promptly forgot about it, and about a year later Tatsu showed the game to me and I wanted to try it out. It felt fresh. It's trying to do something different than other Minecraft-like games, instead of just trying to copy it. It's very nice to be able to directly suggest additions and changes to a game in progress, and actually talk to the team directly to offer feedback. It's also much easier to mod than most other games I've played. For basics like just adding new blocks and items with recipes, even I can do that with my non existent coding skills. Robin: Your tutorial for the 3d Model Creator on the forums is extremely useful. If you could expand your tutorials and help more people with the creation of assets for the game, where would you start? Balduranne: I should write a basic pixel art tutorial and maybe rewrite the model one (as Saraty wants all the items to be 3D). Still, it's easier to make a reasonably good-looking model than a good texture for it. Robin: Your ideas include clothing systems with a loom and herbology for player healing, as well as a bunch of other stuff. You must enjoy immersive systems. What sort of games have you played that have had really immersive systems that inspire you to want more from Vintage Story? Balduranne: It's funny that you say that, because I generally value convenience over what most people consider immersive! Immersion, for me, lies more in how the world engages you, be it with lore, design or otherwise. It's little things like being able to shape and decorate the world around you, gathering ingredients and materials with the knowledge that you will be able to use them to make something cool or pretty later. For specific examples, it's a bit hard for me to recall, as immersion is more about atmosphere for me, but let's see... Crafting in Final Fantasy 14, while a morbidly complex affair, had a really cool element to it – Everything you could create, from potions, through armor, to furniture, used elementally- aspected crystals. You get said crystals from killing monsters, gathering (you can pick a resource or a crystal), and some quests. Crystals are a really big deal in the lore, so it's really cool to see them reflected in crafting. Gothic 1 didn't really have a crafting system per say, but it had a very basic sword smithing mechanic. It was mostly meant as an animation for NPCs, but you first warmed up the steel in a furnace, then hammered it on an anvil, followed by quenching the blade in water and using a sharpening wheel for finishing. The result was... A very crappy sword that was only good for barter, but the mechanic felt very immersive. Gothic had a lot of little animations like that – NPCs using an alchemy lab and grinding herbs in a mortar, stirring a cauldron, hammering a wall, etc. Little things like that went a long way to make the world feel more alive. I also really like the more... simplified crafting systems in Starbound and Terraria, where you pick what to craft with the resources you have available. It could be incorporated with a sort of blueprint system, where you pick your end goal, and then add the necessary materials and go through the steps to finish it, rather than just using the crafting grid and trying to figure out recipe variants. Robin: If you could pick three things to add to Vintage Story, what would they be? Balduranne: I assume stuff that's not already planned? I would generally like the world to be more original and have more fictional plants and such. I often make comparisons to Morrowind, which is technically a fantasy game, but it's one of the most unique settings ever. Block animations and multiblocks Plants that only bloom at night A Starbound/Terraria crafting system where the same set of materials can create many different things Robin: And finally, you have an active and interesting Deviantart account with a range of excellent work. Can we share it with the community as well as any social media profiles that could show off your work and energy for creation? Balduranne: I only use deviantART because I don't like social media, but I'm actively working on a mobile app/game called PickCrafter. It's not the most ambitious project (It's a cookie clicker), but it seems very popular, and I'm proud of the work I've done for it. I think at this point, over half of the artwork has been done by me. And believe me when I say that seeing your own artwork in a popular game evokes a feeling of pure, childlike glee. I used to be pretty active in an online self-help website called Habitica, but I unfortunately I pulled out of any and all communities when my depression was too crippling at the time. I keep meaning to return to it one day though.. But to end on a more positive note, it's nice to have a community again, where I can contribute and show off. Balduranne’s DeviantArt Profile: https://www.deviantart.com/balduranne PickCrafter Mobile Game: https://pickcrafter.com/ From myself and the VS team, thank you for taking the time to talk to me and answer all my annoying questions. We look forward to see more of your work as time goes on! (Interview written by @99 Blocks and @Balduranne, thank you both of you!)

Version 1.7.4, a stable release, is now ready for download in the account manager. 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

Version 1.7.2, a stable release, is now ready for download in the account manager. [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 1.7.1, a stable release, is now ready for download in the account manager. 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

Version 1.7.0, a stable release, is now ready for download in the account manager. 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

So many bugs. Now its a few less. Maybe reaching stable soon? Time will tell. Game updates Fixed: Bucket filling/emptying weirdness Fixed: Lag spikes when opening the inventory (+rare crash) Fixed: Missing death message translation when killed by foxes Fixed: Wooden club not craftable from kapok Fixed: Baby chick sound issues Fixed: Bucket water filling crash Fixed: Quern grinding not visible to other players in multiplayer Fixed: Knapping with stones also threw a stone Fixed: Entities falling through stone path (raised stone path collision box to a full block) (Fixed): Low chance of fixing client side block entity renderers not disappearing when they should

28 tweaks/fixes in 24 hours. More than one bugfix/tweak per hour this time. Yay! Game updates Tweak: Creative inventory search now also searches the item/block description texts (+caches the texts for faster search) Tweak: Slightly shortened range for med/high/very high quality shadows, at the gain of higher quality near shadows Tweak: Animals require more food to reproduce Tweak: Slightly increased chance of sulfur surface deposits Tweak: Testing versions now will also notify you if a newer stable release is out! \o/ Tweak: Crash reporter also logs game version number Tweak: Ingot mold / Tool mod no longer displaying "liquid" below 80% melting point, instead it now writes "soft", and then "hardened" when below the usual 20% temp Fixed: Right clicking bloomery with empty hands crashing the game Fixed: Wrong particle color spawned by lantern breaking Fixed: Smithing and metal pouring particles blue colored Fixed: Alt+F9 crashing the game Fixed: Might fix held torch light not working after loading the game until player moved a chunk Fixed: May fix the weird issues blockentities are not removed property, leaving behind various artifacts Fixed: Sun/Moon disappearing when dynamic shadow is on and an item is held in hands Fixed: Eggs in meals not adding any saturation to the meals Fixed: Breaking time for glass slabs too long Fixed: Should prevent the game from crashing when trying to use a crucible thats in an invalid state Fixed: Client side fire columns of death emanating from charcoal pits Fixed: Should fix fire pit not redrawing after its contents changed Fixed: Should avoid a crash with the trough blocks Fixed: Worldgen deleting itemstacks in ruins and logging errors Fixed: Game crashing when clicking singleplayer in the main menu while another game/server is running. Instead now prevents you from launching or editing a savegame that is not writable Fixed: Player rotation resetting when cycling from 3rd person to overhead mode Fixed: Mod asset load order reversed, preventing asset overrides Fixed: Unclear naming on some of the ore blocks Fixed: Cube particles not getting shaded when dynamic shadows are on Fixed: Some missing/broken/incorrect blocks/items in ruins Fixed: Chest type in tooltip text in code form and not name form

28 tweaks and bugfixes in about 46 hours. Not even one bugfix per hour. Pathetic! Don't worry, I'm just kidding! This update might fix the constant InvalidOperation crashes, and if it doesn't then it will bring me one step closer in finding it, if you keep sending me those juicy hawt crash reports Game updates Tweak: Farmland now rarely grows horsetails as weeds and also recovers nutrients when dry Tweak: Added "Optimize Ram" setting to gfx options. If off it will disable some of the ram optimizations the game does Tweak: Made it so now that continuously fleeing entities reduce their flee sound play chance after some time Tweak: Leaf decay now happens 6 times slower, therefore bigger chunks can now decay and also is randomly triggered for nearby blocks meaning pre1.7 floating leaves blocks have a chance of decaying now Tweak: Snow layers on top of decayed leaves now drops on the ground Tweak: The 3 solid sides of a bloomery are now flagged as solid, i.e. can attach a torch to it Tweak: Increased range at which animals find a trough (from 25 to 32 blocks) Tweak: Added random rotations to eggs Tweak: Added farmland to creative inventory Tweak: Added command feature: "/time add X days" Tweak: Gameplay balancing changes: Increased pine sapling drop rate by 200% Increased acacia sapling drop rate by 20% Reduced chance of chickens laying 2 and 3 eggs Tweak: Block breaking particle tweaks Fixed: Animals able to immediately reproduce after growing up causing them to multiply very quickly Fixed: Chickens spamming eggs after the world was fast forwarded many days (e.g. on servers) Fixed: Stack merging issues with buckets Fixed: Filling a half full bucket with water removing water Fixed: Land claiming ineffective for same-rank players Fixed: Possible source that would cause the intro music play in game Fixed: Redundant Full GC Collect every 2 minutes causing lag spikes every 2 minutes. One major source of lag spikes gone! \o/ Fixed: VSEssentials mod reference incorrect for source mods Fixed: Bloomery chimney not place-able on bloomery base. Removed ability to place chimney anywhere else other than the base Fixed: Stew cooking too slowly and other meals cooking too quickly Fixed: Mushrooms in pots/planters not dropping upon breaking them Fixed: Logger crashing game when trying to log after it's being disposed Fixed: Might fix rare occasion when knapping a flint causes the renderer thing to wave. Fixed: Might fix rendering a disposed texture issue, causing crashes with some players. Fixed: Breaking torch holder not dropping torch Fixed: Block breaking particles to far offseted when breaking in negative x/z direction

Version 1.7-rc.2, a testing release, is now ready for download in the account manager. If you update from 1.6: Please use the full installer, and remember to apply the remappings for old worlds Game Updates Fixed typing sounds gone in login screen Fixed game crashing on opengl errors Fixed login screen trying to render disposed textures causing the game to crash Fixed bucket + flour recipe broken (and hopefully didn't break other recipes >.>) Fixed torch and chicken hurt sounds in stereo (causing them to be not distance attenuated) Fixed a server side exception spam Fixed entity generations not copied over when becoming an adult. Fixed player able to have more hp than max hp Fixed nutrient levels not draining when not eating them Fixed some typos and missing block titles Fixed create server button wrongly named Fixed memory not freed after leaving world. Again.

Version 1.7-rc.1, a testing release, is now ready for download in the account manager. The goal of version 1.7 was to add more gameplay mechanics and boy do we have lots of new gameplay. I'm still the sole programmer for all the gameplay content but nonetheless we somehow managed to cram in a huge amount of tweaks and features into this update. The trader update didn't make it, the mechanics are basically finished, but I find it needs some more balancing and also is probably better bundled with a future worldgen update. We added some experimental new sounds and animations - for the spear, axe and pickaxe. These might change still if they don't feel pleasant during long-term play. Enjoy! Pretty pictures Animal Husbandry: Boars, Bighhorn sheep and Chicken can now be fed with Troughs, which will cause them to reproduce. Chickens will lay eggs every 8-15 days. Each generation of raised animal will be less afraid of players. Cooking System: You can now cook porridge, stew, cooked vegetables and soup in a pot over the fire pit. Each of them are dynamically composed based on the ingredients you put, allowing for a huge variety of meals. Nutrient System: Reduced base Health points from 20 down to 15 points. Can now raise max health points until 25 hp when eating food from every nutrient category. Much Improved Dropped Items: Dropped items now behave more realistically and move out of blocks 3D Models for Meat, Bread, Ingots and Stones. More Meat varieties Improved farming: You're no longer need to plant besides water, you can water your farmland with a watering can, which keeps the soil moist for 24 in-game hours. Hoeing the ground is no longer instant. Added cabbage crop. All crops require twice as much time to grow. Improved bucketry: Buckets now can hold up to 10 litres of water or honey. Dough crafting recipe is now much more liberal as it is now shapeless simply consumes 1 litre of water per dough. Can now pour honey into the bucket and take it out again Combat improvements: Spear Attack animation is now much improved and the hit feedback is now instant instead of delayed Drag left click to distribute items in inventory. Also can now do CTLR + Left/right cursor to jump words when editing text Improved Lava: Now more glowy and has bubbles Improved mining experience More particles, custom rock mining sounds, custom rock breaking sounds Improved brightness The game should be less of an eye strain now New blocks - stone path stairs and glass slabs Full game updates list Feature: Animal husbandry Chicken now lay eggs every 8-15 days on the ground, be sure to check regularly though, as they disappear after 2 days Chickens, Boars and Bighorn sheep can now be fed through troughs which will cause them to reproduce. Every generation you raise will become less afraid of the player (and should no longer be afraid after 50 generations) Chicken: Feed with small trough, fill with any grain Boars & Sheep: Feed with large trough, fill with any grain or dry grass Feature: Cooking System Added clay pot, can placed in a firepit to have 4 cooking slots available Can now cook 4 kinds of meals which will yield the combined saturation and health gains when eaten.Here are the valid recipes. Note: the vegetable part encompasses all the crop vegetables, mushrooms, pumpkin and soybeans. Fill each slot with max. one item for one serving. Porridge: 2-4 grain, 0-2 berry, 0-2 vegetable, 0-1 honey Soup: 1 water (from bucket), 0-3 vegetable, 0-1 redmeat/poultry/egg Stew: 2-4 redmeat/poultry, 0-2 eggs, 0-2 vegetables, 0-1 berry, 0-1 honey Vegetable Stew: 2-4 vegetable To eat a meal, place the pot on the table and take a serving with a clay bow in hands, or vice versa Don't forget, you can also cook multiple servings at once in the clay pot! Feature: Improved dropped items No longer bobbing and rotating Cast shadows Bob in the water instead Are now larger Added throw sound Now push themselves out of blocks Feature: Farming Improvements Can now water farmland with watering cans, which makes it watered for 24 ingame hours Creating farmland with the hoe is now animated and no longer instant Crops take now twice as long to grow New Crop: Cabbage. Can be found in loot vessels (seeds and farming vessels). Feature: Food improvements Bread is now in 3D Meat is now in 3D and is now divided up in Bushmeat, Red meat and Poultry Feature: Nutrient System The player now has a base max health of 15 points Different foods supply different nutrients. Eating a healthy balance of all foods will raise the max-hp to 25 points In the character dialog one can now see the current nutrients levels Feature: Basic Leaf Decay Decays small chunks of leaves if a nearby leaves block has been broken. Large chunks of leaves still will keep floating in mid-air Feature: Poultice Now intended as the main healing item, crafted from reed/linen plus horsetail or honey+sulfur. Depending on ingredients it heals 2-7 hp Nerfed honey bowl eating properties. Now only heals 0.5h instead of 4 hp, therefore gives 60 saturation. Feature: Combat improvements Hit feedback now instant (used to be 50-100 milliseconds delayed) Greatly Improved spear attack animation. Actual impact now also delayed. Feature: Mining improvements Stones and Ingots are now 3D Models Breaking ore/rock with a pick now plays a more distinct sound Breaking and Hitting sounds can now differ. Added rock falling apart sounds upon breakage More particles! Mining with a pick sometimes creates sparks and a lot of sparks when trying to break a block whose mining tier is too high Feature: Rusty gears now randomly spawn on cave floors Feature: Added entity spawner block (creative mode only feature) Feature: Improved chunk generation and chunk loading performance by 40 to 100%. (techical details: Worldgen now longer runs expensive sunlight flooding algos on empty chunks above ground (doubles chunk gen speed on a 2048 high creative world), Client now tesselates multiple chunks per tick if they are empty.) Feature: Reduced lag spikes. Particularly when the game loads world chunks (technical details: the large object heap compacter tries to not compact during normal gameplay, increased the chunk data pool size and uncached chunk data elements are now released at a slower rate) Feature: Improved bucketry Buckets can now hold honey Easier to create dough as the recipe is shapeless and just consumed 1 out of 10 litres of water from the bucket Can be thrown in water for filling Feature: Left click drag item stacks to evenly distribute them Feature: Better Lava Graphics - now more glowy and bubbly Feature: Improved godray shader performance by ~25% Feature: Improved overall cpu performance by ~1.5% (technical detail: Now using Environment.TickCount instead of Stopwatch.EllapseMs in chunk.Unpack() which is way more performant. Since Unpack() is called *very* often inside a lock(), it seem to have caused notable lock contention of 2.5seconds over a 2 minute period. This is now down to 80ms) Feature: The game now remembers the maximized window state Feature: Added credits page Feature: Can now hold CTRL + Left/Right cursor to jump words when editing text Feature: Improved crash reporter, now also displays the last 3 entries of the event log, should help us find hard to track crashes Feature: Block info hud now also shows infos on the targeted entity Tweak: Increased overall brightness of the game by 25% Tweak: Gameplay Balancing changes Wolves, Hyenas and Foxes now drop less nutritious bush meat Boosted worldgen spawn rates for chicken by 50% Reduced respawn rates of creatures Hyenas 33% less Locusts 65% less Chicken, Boards and Bighorn sheep: 70% less Log => Firewood recipe now yields 4 firewood instead of 3 Halved the health gain from vegetables Fixed Smelting quartz in the Bloomery yielding half as much glass than it should have Breaking a harvestable skep now returns some of the cattails Knifes now break plant blocks a little faster, including reeds. E.g. iron knife gets a 2x break speed boost Buffed arrows: Chicken now drop 6 feathers instead of 4 Arrows that impacted creatures now have a 50% chance of not getting destroyed. 65% chance for metal arrows. Used to be 0% for either Tweak: Coordinate hud now displays absolute y position Tweak: Standing still now drains saturation 3 times slower Tweak: Reduced default mouse smoothing value from 50 down to 30 Tweak: Beehives are now a bit more informative - they will now show if the hive is going to swarm Tweak: Shovel and Axe smithing recipes now only require 1 ingot to smith Tweak: 3 new tabs in the creative inventory: Creatures, Tools, Clothing Tweak: Added a writable check for savegames for better error reporting Tweak: Standing still now drains saturation 3 times slower Tweak: Axe and Shovel smithing recipes are now smaller so that they only consume 1 ingot Tweak: Can now transfer a portion from a held bucket into a placed bucket Tweak: Added command .reload sounds Tweak: Added glass slabs and path stairs Tweak: New chop sounds when chopping a tree with an axe Tweak: Straw dummies can now be picked up by their owner with sneak+right click. Pre 1.7 dummies can be picked by anyone. Fixed: Might fix the issue where a multiplayer server sends a disconnect message to the client but the client only errors with "No bytes were received" Fixed: Filling multiple wooden buckets in the same slot deleting all but 1 bucket Fixed: 3rd person camera clipping into the terrain in some cases Fixed: The check to ensure that Vintage Story runs only once was not working Fixed: Scrolling through creative inventory with mousewheel now consistent and independent of total height Fixed: Protected areas (through land claiming) not reverted on the client side, making it look like breaking/using blocks suceeded Fixed: Worldedit mirroring of slabs and trapdoors did not work correctly Fixed: Raw clay blocks not blocking light Removed: Crafting recipe for grass covered soil blocks Removed: server.sh - replaced with server-old.sh Removed: Player starting bread. Therefore the player is not hungry for the first 12 minutes (unless he dies) Mod API Updates Feature: The survival inventory now has a scrollbar, allowing ~infinite extension of the survival inventory Feature: Player start items are now moddable (survival/config.json) Feature: Vanilla mods refactor. There is now an VSEssentials mod that includes the json asset loader code, which used to be in the survival mod. Survival mod can now be disabled and that also disables all the survival assets, without disabling the json asset loader. TL;DR: More Blank Slate engine! \o/ Feature: Added variant groups system also for Entities \o/ Feature: Refactored random block color system. Now has a notably cleaner api. Feature: Mods are now sorted by dependency again Feature: Added api methods api.TesselatorManager.GetDefaultBlockMeshRef() and api.TesselatorManager.GetDefaultItemMeshRef(), Feature: Added new api methods that lets you more conveniently update the texture atlas during runtime: CompositeTexture.RuntimeBake() ITextureAtlasAPI.InsertTexture() Feature: New particle property - particles can now spawn new particles upon death. See Lava block as example. Feature: Refactored all attack/interact methods of Blocks and Items they now take in the ref argument EnumHandHandling handling that gives you more fine grained control over the engines behavior. Removed the boolean return value as it is now obsolete. Feature: Crafting recipes now allow multiple wildcards in the ingredients Feature: Buckets can now handle modded liquids Feature: Block hit/break sounds are now separate. Can now have tool specific block hitting/breaking sounds. See rock.json for example Tweak: Highlight blocks system now also available client side Tweak: Converted most of the client side events to C#-Style Events, sorry for the breakage Tweak: Smeltables/Cookables can now have a maxTemperature (example: cooking pot) Fixed: Removed hardcoded check on entity render LoadShape thing (as found by doan) Fixed: Block json property AllowSpawnCreatureGroups not properly loaded. New recipes: (Clay pot and watering can are made with clayforming)