Tyron

Version 1.5.0.2, a stable release, is now ready for download in the account manager. It is very refreshing to see the sudden, and seemingly continuous influx of new members in our community. Let me take this opportunity to welcome you here one more time, show my appreciation for your support and hope that you are having a good time with what we've created :-) Also thanks to everyone that reported bugs, suggested features or helped spread the word of Vintage Story, makes for a very positive community climate, I find I decided to push another bugfix release, so that we have at least one very stable version of the game. Then I can worry less on creating unstable testing releases ^_^ Game updates Feature: Player view bobbing can now be disabled in the graphics settings (for @Milo Christiansen) Feature: The mouse Y-Axis can now be inverted in the controls settings (for @Shaun Graham) API Feature: Moved player/creature rendering system to the game content mod, several tweaks to the shape rendering system. Mods can now attach their own rendering stuff to players (for @copygirl) Tweak: Wooden paths now have a move speed bonus of 12% Tweak: Replaced fast graphics mode with a resolution slider. This now lets you reduce only the resolution without the weird side effects of backface culling. A value like 50% is recommended for MacOS Users with very high screen resolutions (for @ACE) Fixed/Tweak: Stone paths only yielding a 8% move speed bonus instead of 15%. Increase move speed bonus now to 20%. Fixed: The mouse cursor issues on MacOS and Linux should be a thing of the past now \o/ Fixed: Some shader errors printed to console on macos (and probably affecting moon rendering) Fixed: Increased move speed from blocks not increasing walk animation speed Fixed: Leaving, then re-entering a chunk causing some blocks to not fully disappear upon breaking (i.e. metal layer on molds, sign texts on signs, etc.) Fixed: Help dialog can be interacted with while the create character dialog is opened. Fixed: Foliage in some areas very uniformly colored (i.e. very rainy jungle areas) Fixed: Dying with GUIs disabled prevents to from enable again. Upon death guis are shown now if they were hidden. Fixed: Dying then rage quitting and reloading the world caused the player to be alive again with 0 health. Fixed: When Show/hide chat mapped to a letter then that letter can no longer be typed in chat without hiding the chat too. Fixed: /announce command not printing the message Fixed: 2 layer or thicker charcoal pits only yielding charcoal for the first layer Fixed: Placing fire pits in creative mode only producing a client side firepit that doesn't work Fixed: Minor Moon rendering issues Fixed: Hitboxes not tightly fitting baskets and crucibles Specially for copygirl, I made it possible that Mods can do this now (this is not in the game, but a sample mod) - back packs

Version 1.5.0.1, a stable release, is now ready for download in the account manager. As some of you may have experienced by now, ore blasting bombs are a very useful tool that enables you to quickly mine large deposits. They were however practically harmless to the player, which was not intentional. This update makes them literally deadly if you are too careless. Unlike in Minecraft however, an explosion will not hurt you if you take cover behind a blast resistant wall. So in case of ore blasting bombs either stand behind a 2 block thick rock wall, or a 1 block thick wall at a distance of 5 blocks and you should be save. Game updates Feature/Fixed: Explosions hardly hurting players. An ore blasting bomb explosion in the immediate vicinity (< 1.5 blocks) will now instantly kill the player. Explosion range and injury range are now separate. The ore blasting bomb now has an explosion range of 4 blocks and an injury range of 10 blocks. So from now on, when you go blast mining, you better take cover. Tweak: Some descriptive texts for the clothes Tweak: Game no longer crashes when the music and sound folders are deleted. Tweak: Hot metal in tool / ingot molds now cool down 3 times slower Tweak: Wolf pups no longer drop anything Tweak: Improved performance of large burning fires by disabling terrain collision tests for the fires smoke and spark particles Tweak: /we blu now places all blocks that are also in the creative inventory. /we blu all places all existing blocks. Tweak: Reduced surface copper and flint deposit occurrence by 25%. Reduced size of flint deposits by 25%. Fixed: Other player name tags not adjusting to their sitting/sneaking height Fixed: Distant players getting transparent and eventually fading out Fixed: Exception thrown by worldedit when using world edit tools right after world reload without changing any settings Fixed: Finally fixed the bug where the player wouldn't step on stairs Fixed: Animations broken on all baby animals Fixed: Clay forming and flint knapping textures slightly off again Fixed: The server default permissions did not allow players to build or use blocks Fixed: Player screen shaking when another player got hurt Since there's nothing new to show visually, here's 2 mildly interesting testing screenshots of a bombs ray cast and a large fire test O_O

Stylish Vintarians Version 1.5.0, a testing release, is now ready for download in the account manager. This update will make multiplayer a bit more user friendly due to the addition of customizable player outfits, so we can each look not the same. Yay! I wanted to add some more game content but decided for an early release since there's were a few bad bugs in the previous version. Game updates Feature: Customizable player outfits! Everytime you start a new world or join server for the first time you will be able to select from a small range of dress pieces. We'll definitely add a greater selection in the future and make some acquirable only through ruin scavenging and trading. Dress pieces otherwise act just like normal items that can be stored and traded with other players Feature: When picking up items from the ground, the inventory slot they landed in will now vibrate to better visualize that you collected something. Feature: Mushrooms are now 3D! Feature: Added survival mode crafting recipes for stone path blocks (made from 5 stones and any soil) and wooden paths (made from aged planks). Feature: Getting damaged now shakes the screen API Feature: Added api methods for rendering a texture into a texture, Added api method to reserve texture space in the entity/block/item texture atlas Refactored TesselatorAPI texture atlas parts into their own texture atlas with some more functionality. We can now basically stream in and out of textures during runtime. More mod friendly way of setting the time speed (via time speed modifiers) Added ability for the engine to load mods from the data folder as well Tweak: Sign texts are now black and centered Tweak: The grid recipe for arrows now only results in a single arrow instead of 3 Tweak: Rewrote many server commands to be grouped together into logical components: /player and /role Tweak: Added ability to set default spawn point through command /serverconfig defaultspawn x y z Tweak: Improved the shape and textures of the bloomery, wooden chest, stationary basket, bucket and sign block Tweak: Some shader tweaks for the moon at dawn and dusk. Could potentially be used for further celestial objects that are also visible during daytime Tweak: Re-addded new opentk version built by copygirl, might fix linux mouse issues without breaking the game this time. Tweak: Animals only grow up if there is enough space to grow. This prevents them from suffocating if they are pushed to a block edge at the moment of growth. Tweak: Tweaked sound distance attenuation to play at 100% within a 3 block radius, should fix some sounds being very low volumne Tweak: Item/Block tool tip box now shows the item/block at 250% the normal size instead of 150% Fixed: /times speed command resetting on world reload Fixed: Killed animals still growing up and reproducing Fixed: Game crashing when trying to place a bow on a tool rack Fixed: Game crashing when igniting a block with a torch and then looking away. Fixed: Server crashing and breaking save games when breaking broken firewood piles (that contained shirts O_O) Fixed: Player block break animation not playing when nothing in hands Fixed: Tweaked the sizes / positions of many items and blocks in the inventory guis Fixed: Block schematic rotation issue when rotating by 180 degrees. Affects world edit schematics and structures created by world generation. Fixes ruins sometimes containing wrongly rotated beds.

Version 1.4.9.3, a stable release, is now ready for download in the account manager. Our multiplayer experience revealed quite some bugs, this should remedy all notable ones. Make sure to get this one before connecting to the server. Game updates Feature: Cow Skulls can now be placed on walls (by skodone) Tweak: Increased tree chopping speeds when using metal axes Fixed: Shift + Left Click items out of the 3x3 crafting output slot disconnecting players and doing all kinds of weird things Fixed: Sitting animation not shown to other players and right mouse click not released Fixed: Downgraded opentk.dll again, as it breaks current versions of mono Fixed: Custom kick messages not displayed Fixed: Disconnected screen had a black background Fixed: Player eating animation not playing correctly Fixed: Textures on wood piles, fire pits, ingot piles and plate piles going all wonky on rare occasions Fixed: Sneak + Left click in the air with clay in hands crashing the game Fixed: Several sounds in stereo and thus playing not respecting positional sound rules Fixed: 3rd person transforms for some blocks reaaaally wrong. Improved some others

Graciously hosted by @Geartwo I have finally decided to launch a (semi-)official multiplayer server for Vintage Story v1.4.9.2. I'll try to keep it somewhat moderated and more or less up-to-date with the latest stable version I'll be playing for an hour or 2 tonight at 9pm (gmt+1), so if you like, come join me for a round of plain old survival at chrometech.at. I also made a forum post where we can further discuss server related topics. So see you tonight, maybe

Version 1.4.9.2, a stable release, is now ready for download in the account manager. Looks like 1.4.9.1 is pretty stable, so this version contains mostly minor bug fixes. I'll be bold and declare this as a stable release. Many thanks to @copygirl and @skol for providing me with several fixes for the Linux version. Game updates Feature: Can now sneak + right click fuel and cookable items into the firepit without opening the firepit dialog Feature: The saw can no be used to break logs like the axe, but won't break the whole tree Tweak: In the 3rd person camera the body now lags behind the camera rotation which looks much nicer Tweak: Added commandline argument --dataPath Tweak: Doubled the time it takes before the char coal pit starts burning, thus doubling the time you can have to close it up (from 15 to 30 seconds) Tweak: Disabled creature reproduction if any nearby chunks are unloaded. This might fix the massive uncontrollable creature reproduction that sometimes happens. Tweak: Large kapok trees now have 2x2 size trunks instead of 1x1 Fixed: Updated OpenTK Library to latest version, might fix some linux mouse issues (copygirl) Fixed: Fixed install.sh and server.sh (skol) Fixed: Filled Sword molds not returning anything Fixed: Mega screenshot hotkey (ctrl+alt+f12) not working Fixed: Setting a new hotkey in the controls doing weird stuff if one of the keys was assigned already Fixed: Sitting down not synced to the server, making it believe the player was still standing Fixed: Knapping sounds not exactly playing where the knapping happens Fixed: FPS graph displaying wrong values because it was offseted by 20 pixels vertically Fixed: Wolves suffocating when walking into 1 block high gaps Fixed: Firepit model not updating properly on extinction/ignition Fixed: Player able to place the first stage of a firepit in mid-air Fixed: Player sitting animation not easing out Fixed: Player walk animation not playing when pressing the sit key while walking Fixed: Firewood piles in underground structures dropping quartz instead of firewood Fixed: Ladder placing behaving unexpectedly (when placing at a steep angle or when trying to stack vertically on the first ladder piece with a ground in front) Fixed: Shadows not dropping on water surfaces Fixed: Rare crash bug that can crash the server when overloaded Fixed: Chat dialog swallowing first key if remapped to Enter key Wiki Updates Added a page to help you with version upgrade world incompatbilities (Updating Old Worlds) Added all new recipes from 1.4.9 Added some important notes to the fire pit and surface ores to the starter guide

Phew Version 1.4.9/1.4.9.1, a testing release, is now ready for download in the account manager. Always makes me a little nervous to release a new version with so many changes, but here we go... Welcome to Version 1.4.9 - a massive amount of time went into one single new feature - the new player model. We went quite overboard on this one. There's dozens of major and minor new features now working behind the scenes to give you a much better player avatar. Instead of one single walk animation there's now 30+ different animations for all kinds of activities that also dynamically blend together. One disclaimer though, animations have been one of the most difficult / work intensive features we've added so far, so there's bound to be glitches and unlucky situations where the animations will look wrong. We definitely want to still tweak the system to make it look just right. Attention Linux/Mac Users: The location of the folder where your savegames are stored has changed, you might need to move the VintageStoryData folder manually to get back your saves. For the upcoming version 1.5.0 I would like to improve some on the game play content, such as an ability to set the spawn point and have player skin customization ready to use. I hope you like what you see! As for me, I already look forward to the next release! Game updates on v1.4.9.1 Tweak: Improved tree recognition when chopping trees. Harvesting acacia trees should be more pleasant again. Tweak: Axes no longer loose durability from broken leaves Tweak: Chopping trees with an axe drops more sticks now Tweak: Shears now loose durability from each broken leaves block, but also now have 5 times more durability. Tweak: Increased durability for all metal tools, particularly copper ones (50-100% durability gain) Fixed: Lowered player height so one can fit through 2 block high windows Fixed: Vintage Story on mono not using appdata folder Fixed: Knapping recipes now also drop tool heads Fixed: Game Server sometimes pausing and no longer resuming, causing it to act like crashed Game updates on v1.4.9 Feature: Complete overhaul of the player model New model! New texture! 35+ new animations! Seamless animations blending, i.e. can aim with a bow and walk, sneak or run at the same time! Can now see what the player holds in his hands in 3rd person mode! As always, all is configurable through json files for modders Feature: New camera mode "Overhead". To see the new player model in all it's glory you can now use the Overhead camera to look at the player in all angles Feature: Colored glass: 7 pretty variants of colored glass <3 (only for creative mode for now) Feature: All tool recipes now produce tool heads instead of the full tool. Combine with a stick to get your complete tool Feature: Complete overhaul of all tools models. Axes, Hammers, Hoes, Knifes, Pickaxes, Prospecting Picks, Saws, Shears, Shovels, Spears and Swords now look better than ever! Feature: Straw dummy. Test your skills on a stationary, defenseless dummy Feature: Wooden Club. Crude but effective tool for brute forcing your way out of sticky situations Feature: Added all creatures to the creative inventory Feature: Sleeping in beds to skip time. Straw beds let you skip 3.5 hours, wooden beds 4.5 hours and aged wooden beds 5 hours. Does not set the spawn point. Feature: One new cute animation for piglets and one attack animation for roosters. Tweaked the animation speeds for other creatures. Feature/Fixed: Single Key Hotkeys now fire even with modifiers pressed. Result: Can now make screenshots while sneaking/running or change slots via keyboard keys 1-9 while running. Feature: Added clay forming recipe for 4x crucibles, 4 clay bowls, 4x flower pots and 2x ingot molds Feature: Added knapping recipe for arrowheads. Tweaked existing knapping recipes Feature: Ore blocks now drop themselves when mined all around, just like stone blocks do Feature: Minimal intro dialog to redirect people to the wiki Feature: The /stats command is now more informative, debug screen now shows avg. amount of draw calls per frame Feature: Added Flint deposits near surface in rock types sandstone, shale, claystone, chalk API Feature: More modding abilities! Dropped the code obfuscation on the game content mod (VSGameContent.dll), this means modders have better access to the internal workings of the game content features In addition, I moved about 15.000 lines of game content code out of the engine and into the game content mod or the api library. This migration also surfaced a few shortcomings in the mod api, which are now fixed! Added a global event bus for mod/block communication (via api.Event.PushEvent) Tweak: Loose flint blocks now drop 50% more flint Tweak: Restyled most gui buttons to look like actual buttons Tweak: Shears now multibreak leaves and branchy leaves together Tweak: Enabled sideways running again Tweak: Enabled swimming up with the jump button again, but works better now Tweak: Significant performance optimized certain situations when there is *a lot* of creatures in a small space Tweak: Held item walk wobble now depends on the walk speed Tweak: Improved limonite texture Fixed: Glass blocks getting all white when looked at a very steep angle Fixed: Domain casing issue when loading assets from other origins (mod api) Fixed: More issue with spear/arrow hit detection Fixed: Player shadow not visible in first person mode Fixed: Added missing smithing recipe for pro pick Fixed: Game crashing when breaking leaves with shears on near 0 durability Fixed: Item dupe and more issues on falling block entities like tool and ingot molds Fixed: Client and Server Temperature fall-off of filled ingot and tool molds no longer drift apart Fixed: Game crashing if no blocks were loaded Fixed: Planting seeds not updating stack size on the client Fixed: A number of GPU memory leaks causing memory usage to increase notably when opening and closing many worlds without restarting Fixed: Mod lang files not loaded if no domain prefix was used Fixed: Game Server crashing on startup and not exiting properly when typing /stop in console >.< Fixed: Game Server tick rate not at the targeted 40 TPS but at 35ish Fixed: Overall scene too bright during daytime, causing snow to appear almost entirely white and sandstone sand almost entirely yellow. Screenshots New player model Beating a Straw Dummy with a straw dummy New glass blocks and flint deposits New Grid crafting Recipes

Fellow Vintarians We hope you all had a great Christmas celebration! Let me use this time to organize my thoughts and give you an update on the current state of development. I've decided to take my time on this update instead of squeezing it into our usual 2 week release cycle. For one part because there's a big feature incoming and furthermore, on a rare occasions, Saraty and me took the holidays to play a game, which was "Don't starve together". What a punishing game Anyhow, we hope the bulk of our "don't starve" addiction is now over and we can continue on VS again Luke, Saraty and Ben were improving and animating our new player model while I was spending a lot of time working out all the kinks and quirks to make animation blending configurable and good looking. Only that allows a player to aim with a bow and walk/sneak/jump at the same time. I would love to make it even more feature rich, but for now I will probably focus on the ability to customize your characters looks. Just in recent days I decided to ditch the idea of MC style skin customization in favor of a more refined concept of ingame cloth pieces, I hope I can pull it off within a reasonable time frame. Wish me luck! Saraty also overhauled all the tools to be actual 3D models and now just voxelized textures, which combined with the new player model, look pretty awesome if i may say so. And finally, behind the scenes Ivan keeps building amazing stuff that makes me want to spend an entire month working solely on integrating structures and dungeons into worldgen! I'm super excited for when I can finally see them seamlessly integrated into our game. Survey Time In the essence of our constant strive to improve the game, I cordially invite you to help us make the best sandbox game we can by filling out a short survey. If you own a copy of Vintage Story, please fill in the Player Survey, for everyone else there is the Visitory Survey. Thanks! Moving v1.4.8 to stable Since I've heard no major bug reports on v1.4.8 I've now declared it stable. Pretty shadows for everyone! Version 1.4.9 Teaser Video Happy new year everyone!

Hey everybody, welcome to our new community spotlight section! I’m Luke, the team’s lead writer. Since we have such a great community, all of whom play the game their own unique way, we’d like to take the time to highlight and talk to some of our dedicated players and learn more about how and why they play Vintage Story. Our first guest is an exceptionally dedicated player called UmbraCreations! He’s a builder that has taken full advantage of Creative Mode and the world height potential to create a massive medieval city (which is still growing). Our team is always excited to see more of his epic work. Luke: The scale and detail your creations have are incredible. Where does your interest in building these giant structures come from, and how do you maintain the dedication to keep working on them for so long? UmbraCreations: I originated from the creative era of Minecraft before the survival "Let's Plays" became really popular on Youtube. Videos of build teams or community build-servers with epic music (no "Content ID" system yet, so all kinds of good copyrighted music) inspired me back then and it stuck with me. People back then just built whatever they wanted to build and it wasn't as competitive as it is now. A more creative and free time for Minecraft builders. The reason I always build over-sized projects is my personal interest in "epicness". The feeling of looking at a huge castle with good graphics/shaders on, is just something I appreciate far more than the "average" person. Unfortunately I always spend far too long looking at my projects instead of continuing my work on it xD. „ This project in particular is my dream project. “ Big projects in general are usually very rewarding in the end. So a little bit of "tunnel vision" is always required. Unfortunately my mindset continuously drifts towards emptiness and a general feeling of an overwhelming situation. Back in the days I could work for months without have to take a break but nowadays I just need to stop every few days for a day and even several weeks or more, once I'm really fed up with it. The only good development is that whenever I come back from a big "break" I always come back bigger and more epic than before. Other than that I can only say for this project in particular is my dream project, so I will always come back to it. Luke: Do you have a vision/blueprint for each project before it starts or is it more of an "experiment and see what I like" sort of approach? Umbra: This is a classic question of how it should be and how one does it x) A general idea and even a little bit more detailed plan should always come first. It gives structure and a better overview and can limit the "overwhelming feeling". But I'm certainly too spontaneous right now. Many things were not built the way as planned or even completely improvised. Real detailed "blueprints" are planned for the future especially for creating the epic landscapes of the map, but right now I plan everything in my head and not too detailed either. Luke: What is it about Vintage Story that drew your interest and keeps you building here? Umbra: Back in November 2016 I’d been contacted and asked to become a beta tester for this game by Tyron. I'm usually not interested in Minecraft-like games, but I looked into in a bit more and saw amazing potential as well as a lot of features or potential features that would make it far easier to create my dream-project. Funny enough, what really caught my attention was the amazing height limit for building. Minecraft always frustrated me. I always wanted to build something bigger than last time but the height was in the way over and over again. This was the main reason at first why I downloaded the game and gave it a try. Once I was part of this community I started see how nice and respectful people were on the forum and in the chat. Coming from the pvp-server community of Minecraft and being quite literally being bullied out of the scene back then, I found it amazing how the atmosphere was in here. The staff, especially Tyron and Saraty, welcomed me with open arms and supported me all the way. „ I'm usually not interested in Minecraft-like games, but I looked into in a bit more and saw amazing potential. “ Particularly, I have to point out how much "support" I mean: Buggy maps fixed, new blocks introduced just for creative mode, as well as some ideas like crates that have been implemented. Even world edit tools have been added on my suggestion like the mirror tool which I still use to this day and much more. And of course the positive feedback whenever I uploaded pictures or ideas. Luke: What's your favorite creative tool to use in Vintage Story, and do you have any quick tips for others who might be interested in building their own massive cities? Umbra: With a bit of shame I naturally have to say that the import tool and therefore everything that helps "copy-pasting" is my most used and beloved tool. Quite different than the Minecraft version but once you understand, easy to execute and very effective. As for tips for other people that have no background in building big projects etc, I can only say what I already indicated. Plan it out first! A city is a difficult project. With my building style in particular it took sometimes more than an hour or even two for a single building. A gigantic city contains many buildings, so having a limit in number to count down or break down effectively as in "today I build 5 -7 buildings, that's my goal" will help in a huge project like this. Also you will likely have less expectations on quality and style. I didn't copy paste a single building in my city yet but for other styles as well as different levels of detail and quality I highly suggest exactly that. Of course do it clever and don’t just place the same buildings next to each other over and over. Look at real cities or how other games designed their cities to get a feeling on what looks nice. But always be ready to put in a lot of effort anyways. Luke: What are some new features you would like to see someday in Vintage Story? Umbra: It's really hard to say for me Already a lot of features have been introduced to which I was saying "Great! It will save me so much time," but I've never actually thought of it before for some reasons. It's great to have a team that is so close to its community that you can even give them suggestions on what would be nice to have and to introduce at least a discussion about that, not to speak of even the probability that it will be included in the next update. „ It's great to have a team that is so close to its community. “ So for right now I can only think of graphic or ambiance additions. Like good water shaders with reflections or colored glass blocks that change the color of the light that shines through it. Ambient sounds that are more lively and realistic could enhance my future experience as well. Being able to tilt ("rotate") your view for cinematic camera paths would also affect me directly in a few months. Also I anticipate the mechanical power system greatly. I know it is not something I thought of personally (in a sense of enhancing my own game experience). But I do think it will greatly add to the overall survival experience. And that’s despite the fact that it doesn't actually affect me that much directly. I hope that it will be something that will bring more interest and popularity to the game. But everything in time! Luke: Do you have a social media presence that you'd like to share for anyone interested in seeing more of your work? Umbra: More than this on the forum and maybe the Vintage Story Discord server will probably not happen too soon. But in maybe 6 months or something I hope I can restart my Youtube channel and upload great videos of my map. I have great ideas for trailers and cinematics and my editing skills have increased as well. I will redesign everything and change it to VS. UmbraCreations on Youtube and of course my Twitter where I will certainly announce everything and maybe even exclusively upload spoilers for my future video projects. From all the VS Team, thank you Umbra for taking the time to do this interview and to show us your work! <3