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Alpha 63 Update


[h2]Base Furniture:[/h2]
Based on many suggestions from the community I've added a selection of home furniture. These are primarily cosmetic enhancements for builders wanting to customize and decorate their bases.

Several new chair types have been added (the older sofa and armchair can still be crafted). I've also updated the build system to allow base items to be placed on top of rugs.

Like the previous bed, the new beds also serve as respawn points for players (respawns need to be purchased when accessing the beds).

Many of the furniture items come with storage space, although they do not offer as much capacity as the dedicated storage chests.

[h2]All New Trees:[/h2]
All of the trees in the game (other than those in the most recent map expansion) have been completely replaced. The world will look quite visually different from how it did before the update.

I created the old trees using an old version of SpeedTree. This was presenting issues for future plans I have for the game, as well as performance problems. There is now not a single SpeedTree in the game.

The new trees use a custom system which primarily relies on static meshes, and handles movement/wind/seasons purely through the material vertex and pixel shaders. This takes pressure off the CPU.

Most of the new trees are significantly more detailed than the old, and I've worked hard to keep the poly-count low, and the LOD and instancing system robust enough to handle rendering large open vistas.


[h2]Regional Ore/Mineral Mining (Drilling):[/h2]
The mining drill has been updated with the capability to target region-specific ore/minerals where it was placed.

Some of less common ore/minerals will take longer to extract (50% speed). The UI has been updated to display the new resources, and a label will highlight those that take longer to extract.

This change will reward players that invest in building mining outposts across the map. However they will need to consider power production and self-sufficiency at these outposts (as only the primary base with auto-generate power).
[h3]Stored Mining Progress:[/h3]
When switching resource types in the mining drill, the individual progress of each resource type will be stored so it can be resumed from the same progress point later. Moving a mining drill will reset it's mining progress for each ore type.

[h2]Reduced Cost of Wood Building:[/h2]
I've reduced the cost of all wooden building pieces, reducing the number of wood planks and nails required for each recipe.

This will reduce the grind for players focusing on building, and relieve some pressure on wood gathering to focus on further progression in the game.

[h2]New Wind Foliage Effects:[/h2]
I've implemented an all-new wind system to the games weather dynamics. Previously as wind speeds would pick up, foliage and trees movement would remain unchanged, with only audio and rain/snow particles simulating the wind effects.

With the new system trees, grass and all other foliage (including harvestable foliage) will respond accordingly. Seeing trees and foliage blow violently during a storm should greatly help immersion during gameplay.

[h2]Furniture Workbench:[/h2]
Crafted from the BCU, the Furniture Workbench is now where players can craft all base furniture (including the old sofa and armchair) and decorative items (more will come in the future).

It must be placed within range of a BCU or range extender and has 12 slots of storage.

[h2]Coal Tar:[/h2]
Coal now has a second use (other than being used for fuel for fires). It can now be refined in the Refinery to extract Coal Tar.

[h2]Wood Varnish:[/h2]
Many of the new furniture items require Wood Varnish to craft. Wood Varnish can be crafted at the Furniture Workbench using Coal Tar and Alcohol.


[h2]Health Kit Speed:[/h2]
Health Kits are no longer an instant-effect item. Now, when using a health kit, the health gain will show as a gray bar on the health meter. It will then apply the health at a rate of 5 hit points per second until the bar is consumed.

Although the health will be applied very quickly, this change will prevent spamming/exploiting health-kits to overcome a combat situation and reward more considered strategies. It should also offer more fair balance on PVP servers.


[h2]Crafting Tier Unlocks:[/h2]
Crafting base items now has an unlock tier system. As certain base items are crafted and placed in a base, it will unlock other crafting recipes.

This was intended since the very first release as a way to streamline the crafting progression. For seasoned players this will mostly be only cosmetic and not restrictive (other than some considerations when setting up outpost bases). For new players, base progression should be a little more clear.

[h2]Offline Base Protection:[/h2]
Servers now have the option to protect bases of offline players. This option is enabled by default (unless disabled by the server host).

[h3]How it works:[/h3]
  • Base items within range of a BCU or Range Extender will not take any damage when all of it's members are offline from the server.
  • There is a 10 minute cooldown after the last base member logs off before the base protection takes effect.
  • BCU Crackers and Breaching Charges cannot be used on a base while offline-protection is in effect for that base.

This means players do not have to worry about their bases being damaged/destroyed while they are offline. However they have to be mindful of the 10 minute cooldown, as logging off while your base is under attack does not give immediate protection (so this can't be exploited).

You can view whether this setting is enabled for any server via the in-game server browser:

Note: This will not protect abandoned bases from base decay (if the server has a base decay setting). Base decay allows for abandoned bases to decay and be cleaned up after a long period of it's base members not logging on to the server. This allows servers to maintain performance and run indefinitely without manual cleanup by admins (and is recommended for all server hosts).

[h2]Corpses Impact Effects:[/h2]
Previously when animals or humans would die and ragdoll, their corpses would not react to any further projectile or melee impacts.

Now the corpses will react as they should, and can lead to some interesting ragdoll moments during gunfights.

[h2]Reduced Cost of Solar Panels and Windmills:[/h2]
As requested by many players, the cost of Solar and Windmills has been reduced (one less circuit board).


[h2]Reduced Cost of Large Storage Unit[/h2]
The number of planks, alloy sheets and crystal have all been reduced for this recipe.


[h2]Improved Rendering On Roof Tiling:[/h2]
I've smoothed out the geometry of the roof tiles while also reducing the poly-count for higher performance.


[h2]Fixed Vehicles & Corpses Falling Through Floors:[/h2]
For players that had built huge structures in their profiles (or on servers with lots of large bases) players may have noticed ragdoll corpses that would fall through the world geometry. More concerningly this would also happen to vehicles, as they also use the same physics engine as ragdolls.

This was being caused by the physics-enabled world collision becoming too complex and overloading the physics engine. I've now updated the game to only "wake-up" the world collision in a radius around things that need it (only when they need it). This should have totally fixed the previously mentioned clipping issue, as well as drastically reduced pressure on the games physics engine for better performance.

[h2]LOD Overhaul:[/h2]
To further increase performance at scale, I've gone through all of the building pieces and optimized (or completely replaced) the LOD's for each. This allows bases to render at much lower geometry when viewed from a far, without any noticeable decrease in detail.

[h2]Fixed Player Positioning While Unseating:[/h2]
Previously when standing up from sitting on a chair, the player would simply transition to standing in the same position. This resulted in the player being partially clipped into the chair and needing to jump out to free themselves. Now the game will look for an appropriate open space around the chair to unseat the player smoothly.

[h2]Rotating World Globe Decoration Item:[/h2]
Just a small decorative item that can be crafted at the Furniture Workbench.

It will glow in the dark but does not require any base power. I hope to add more decorative items in the future.

[h2]Bush Collision Now Enabled Worldwide:[/h2]
All of the old bushes have been replaced with new ones. These all have collision so will make sounds as the humans/animals move through them.

[h2]Recurve Bow Predator Skin:[/h2]
Can be found in the Steam Item Store, which completes the Predator collection for the existing weapons. Thanks for the continued support! 🙏


[h2]Other Notable Updates:[/h2]
  • Windmill turning animation is now rendered using only the material renderer (rather than ticking a mesh). This leads to greater CPU performance when many windmills are rendered on screen.
  • Fixed dropped kit beacon not showing if killed while driving a vehicle.
  • Improved snow rendering on distant trees.
  • Fixed bug where potato plants would render as white at a certain distance.
  • Fixed health bars or plane debris not showing for clients of multiplayer games.
  • Hunters will engage/fire at longer range when using rifles and the revolver.
  • Hunters better trained at using the lever-action rifle.
  • Fixed crash that would occur if an animal was killed by the resulting explosion of attacking a vehicle.
  • Hunter AI updated to prevent/reduce them losing sights on the player when the player enters water.
  • Fixed bug where it was not possible to open plane cargo crates if they were under a river surface. (Released in previous hotfix).
  • Increased max health to garage door. You may notice existing garage doors (prior to Alpha 63) are below full health because of this change.
  • Reduced cost of old sofa and arm-chair.


Note: Graphics settings will be reset to default after downloading the update, so please adjust as necessary when you first enter the game.

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Steam Forums: https://steamcommunity.com/app/418030/discussions/

[h3]Hosting Your Own Server:[/h3]
If you would like to host your own dedicated server, I would recommend Nitrado (as I work closely with their team to support the game). You are also free to host on your own hardware, and the server files are freely available on SteamCMD.

You can view a detailed guide to hosting here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2201638184

Continued Translation Support Credits (in no particular order): Thank you so much for the support.
Spanish (David Lascasas, MusicMan)
Hungarian (Erb Ármin)
Portuguese BR (Thiago Schumacke)
Portuguese European (João C. H. Jorge)
German (Philipp J. Rackl (LPCaiser))
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French (Anthony Charrault)
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Danish (Jesper Vestergaard Bæk)
Russian (FRAME)
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