A faster game, a better editor, and dying that means something
Nothing was wiped. Your character, bag, skills and claim are where you left them. Please update: the itch app does it for you, and the web version is already current. Older downloads show "A new version is out" instead of connecting.
It runs a lot faster
The game could crawl, most of all zoomed out and after a lot of map editing. Both are fixed:
- A frame at normal zoom takes about a quarter less time, and the worst frames are less than half as long. The game now draws the world in 47 batches instead of 441.
- Zooming out no longer hitches. The map around you now streams in over several frames instead of all at once.
- On screens bigger than 1080p, the widest zoom no longer shows blank edges past what the world has sent you.
- Walking from one part of the map to the next used to resend about 260 kB of world state. It is now a few kB.
- Painting the map no longer gets slower the more has been painted: each stroke redraws only the ground it touched.
Trees: cutting moves on to the right one
After felling a tree, your character now moves on to the tree nearest the one just felled, not nearest to wherever you happened to stand. A tree a builder placed with a certain look prefers another of the same look. The round tree was also called "Oak Tree" when examined, which made it look like a real Oak; it is now just "Tree".
Dying
- When you die, the world goes dark and lifts again while you are carried home. A card says where your things lie and for how long.
- Left-click your remains to walk back and pick everything up. Hovering them lists what is there.
- Below 30% health your hearts beat red, and the first time it happens a message tells you to eat or get clear.
Clearer feedback
- A chest, station, claim stone or shopkeeper you can't reach now says so, with a cross on the tile. Before, nothing happened.
- The refusals a new player meets first (a full bag, a missing tool, untilled ground, no seed, no animal feed) now also say what to do about it.
- Long messages stay up long enough to read them.
- Placing a building lands with a thud and a puff of dust.
- The XP bar and your target's health move smoothly, and the target frame shows the creature you are fighting. Animals read "passive" instead of "hostile".
- Right-click cancels whatever you are about to place.
- The Jobs tab shows how many of each node stand within reach.
- The J, S and zoom keys now have proper key icons, and the controls list (H) includes Jobs and the bag's shift- and alt-clicks.
For builders: the editor
- Saving the world works again. Baking the live world into the game's map failed in several ways, especially on a big world. Painted tiles are now stored packed, a chunk at a time. Tiles flipped in the editor now look the same for everyone. A few flipped tiles on the live world show unflipped and need turning back by hand.
- F1 opens with the tool, layer, brush and tile you had last time.
- A round brush (O), and brush sizes of 12 and 16. Each tool keeps its own size.
- A fill bucket (G) for the connected area of the same ground or tile.
- Ctrl+click draws a straight line from the last point.
- A wide Nodes brush scatters trees or rocks at a chosen density.
- A tile and chunk grid (').
- The last eight tiles you placed stay one click away.
- Long strokes, big clears, big pastes and big drafts are sent in pieces the server accepts. Before, the server could reject them and undo all of it.
- Undo says what it took back and outlines where. Clearing a very large selection asks for a second Delete.
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