As described in the latest newsletter, the development branch has been out for quite some time now, but we were waiting on addressing some issues before announcing an update in this post. The creature spawning/reputation/rune changes are in and after going through some iterations, is at a good level of polish now. We have also been adding tons of new things as well (like usual). Just a recap for those not following along:
Tile targeting for actions (including ranged targeting).
Runes and deities now have unique effects to do with creature spawning.
Less bugs?
More bugs?
There’s a few issues that are remaining, but we are getting close to a new release! If you are feeling like doing a playthrough with the new system in place, we would love to hear your feedback!
Here Be Dragons Drakes
As always, we would encourage you to back up your saves before trying this development branch of the game. By default, you can find your backups and save folders in the main Wayward directory. You can also export saves and global save data in-game if needed.
Welcome the 13th iteration of the Wayward newsletter, featuring a long-awaited status update, showcasing mods, and other tidbits!
Status Update
Firstly, no, Wayward is not dead. Behind the scenes, but not super behind the scenes, we have been pushing updates to the development branch pretty much the whole time. Unfortunately, we ran into several design snags while attempting to rid the game of that pesky reputation mechanic. Read more about that in the last newsletter if you haven’t already:
In order to satisfy all the playstyles with the new rune/deity-based systems, we still had to cling on to flawed progression metrics that could easily be gamed and circumvented to min/max the difficulty all the while being nearly as tedious/confusing as the previous system. We are now scraping that plan and coming up with something completely different. Deities and runes will still be in the mix, but not as a means to curb difficulty, at least directly.
Our current plan is that progression in the game (as in, harder creatures, access to new/better materials) will work more closely like other overworld RPG games instead of creatures of all types randomly spawning around you all based around a flawed, magical number.
Instead, creatures will have territories that increase in difficulty the further away from your spawn point and the further away from your starting island. These creatures like to stay close to their territory and will no longer chase you half across the world. This will allow players to keep their current playstyle and progress further only when they want to (or they run out of resources/things to do).
More information on this system is coming up soon!
Tile Targeting
This hasn’t been the only thing we have been working on of course. We have also implemented tile targeting, meaning you can now hover over a tile and perform actions there using the action menu (via right-click), which means you can actually aim your ranged attacks now!
You can also action slot these types of actions as well to save a few clicks/key presses:
Improved Creature Control
Tamed creatures now have a symbol above them to easily spot which creatures are tamed or not. You can now also control a group of creatures within a small radius using new flute items which can give multiple creatures commands at the same time without having to try to navigate to each of them.
These are just a few small previews of what is to come in what has become the biggest major update to date! Sorry about the wait!
Mod Showcase
Check out some of the recent modifications the community has created!
Blood Rites by SKIPPY
Do something with all that blood laying around! Blood containers, blood drinking, vampires and more!
We always like to draw attention to our feature voting site which serves as an informal roadmap for the game. Take a look and vote on the features you’d like to see next:
Along with Steam earlier this year, Wayward, going forward will be required to cease Windows 7 support due to upstream software changes.This means the next major release will no longer be supported on Windows 7. That being said, there are technically ways around this and of course, we offer the latest major release versions dating all the way back to May 11, 2016 (beta 2.0.5).
Leave A Review!
If you have a few minutes, please leave us a review on Steam. We use any feedback we get to make the game better!
Hot off the heels of our latest newsletter, we are opening up our development branch to test all the latest additions and a poll to help name this release.
If you plan to partake in the testing of this release, after loading the game you will be greeted with a new special dialog explaining the current issues and/or status of the development branch including some bugs we are looking for feedback on. It will be quite buggy for the first little while!
These are mostly deities related, but there are other new things in the update as well to draw inspiration from. Comment any new ones you can think of and/or vote for your pick!
Here Be Dragons Drakes
As always, we would encourage you to back up your saves before trying this development branch of the game. By default, you can find your backups and save folders in the main Wayward directory. You can also export saves and global save data in-game if needed.
Welcome the 12th iteration of the Wayward newsletter, featuring future plans, dissecting current issues, showcasing mods/media, and more!
Beacon’s Call Postmortem
The last major update and the patches thereafter were a big step in improving player experience and smoothing out the starting of the game. Whether it was the addition of dripstones, adding freshwater rivers to the starting island, reputation tweaks, spawning location improvements, or additions to the Starter Quest – there was tons done to refine the early game. While there’s still lots of work to be done here, the feedback has been pretty positive there.
That’s not to say mid-late game players also didn’t get some goodies here either. Ports and shippers offer up a way to transport items across islands. Gems and golems provide a late-game milestone to search out and create. Creature cages add an easy method of transporting creatures, especially across islands. Creature commands provide incentives for making long-time friends with your tamed companions. Bookcases adds bonuses for keeping all the lore and text in the game. These are just a few of the features added in the last major update if you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet.
New Beginner’s Guide Video
Speaking of new players, I recently put out a new updated beginner’s guide video going through the Starter Quest and handing out a few additional tips and tricks while doing so.
Upcoming Reputation Changes
You may have already seen a hint of this change with the renaming of “Reputation” to “Ferocity” which better explains its effects. This is just the beginning of it though. To explain, reputation in Wayward has always been a “difficulty slider”, but one done through in-game mechanics and lore. The whole purpose of it has not been one of ecological commentary, but rather, to provide players a way to modify the game to their liking and playstyle. The issues with it are many but include:
What increases/decreases reputation is unknown to the player natively and must be discovered.
Actions can sometimes increase and decrease reputation at the same time, leading to net-neutral changes.
Some actions can be exploited to gain or lower reputation, leading to a lot of tedious gameplay like using the same action/mechanic over and over again.
It forces some actions/playstyles that a player may not want to do just because they want to keep a certain difficulty.
It’s confusing to new players, but new players have to be aware of it so they can tweak their difficulty.
It’s balanced in a way that over time, the game is supposed to get harder; however, depending on the player’s playstyle this intent can be lost.
Deities to save the day! As paying homage to its roguelike roots, Wayward will be introducing deities, invoking, and sacrifice; a common staple of the genre. While this has been planned for years now, it was always meant to augment reputation, but now it will be replacing it. This system will solve every point above as actions no longer impact the difficulty of the game. You are free to do whatever you want. As you play, the difficulty of the game will increase naturally, but, the player has direct control over this. They can devote themselves to the deities of the island to offset this. Later on, they can even sacrifice collectable runes (dropped to the player when performing actions) to swing difficulty in either direction with a single action.
We would consider adding an in-game difficulty slider to be a failure. We would rather continue to iterate on the concept of dynamic difficulty and I really think we got it feeling really good this time around.
Upcoming Inventory/Container Overhaul
The next piece of the old UI is on the chopping block!
If you are not familiar with the backstory here; we slowly have been redoing pieces of UI to modernize it (maintenance-wise) and provide new features/improvements all of which eventually will allow us to do full controller support. This is something we have to work on over time as it is a huge undertaking and a lot of it is near-invisible to most players. After this one, the next and final one to port over is the crafting dialog.
As an added bonus this time around, we will be adding a much-requested feature that is very much visible to players. Item stacking! Simply CTRL+click an item to stack it together. Hold CTRL to preview the stack, and CTRL+click it again to unstack it.
Development Branch
The development branch where you can test all these changes should be live soon. We are planning by the end of this week to reenable it for all the eager testers out there. Stay tuned for the development branch announcement!
Feature Voting
Something that we always like to mention in these newsletters is that our feature voting page works as an impromptu roadmap for the game – but one where players get to pick what they see as most important. Check it out and cast your vote for upcoming features:
As has become a yearly-ish tradition, Splattercat has recently released a new video on Wayward. Funnily enough, he mentions the reputation issues mentioned above, leading to the impetus for us to focus on that system.
If you have been keeping up on the updates during this lull in updates, you probably have already seen these teaser videos, but if not, check out a preview of armor stands and wheelbarrows, two highly requested features coming up in the next release:
Mod Showcase
Check out some of the recent modifications the community has created!
Player-Owned Areas by HDJam
Adds the ability to claim areas, protecting them from other players. A great utility for dedicated servers to prevent griefing or setting up custom scenarios/challenges.
An unofficial port/update of the once-popular mod, Jeeves by Cringe which allows management of items on the ground – showing them in a container dialog.
If you have a few moments to spare after reading this, we would love it if you shared your feedback on the game with us in the form of a Steam review. It helps us a lot!
Okay, I’ve almost lost track of the times I said this would be the last patch for Beacon’s Call, yet, here’s another one! This one is another small patch that fixes some issues that are a bit more pressing and we would rather not wait until the next major release to get them out there to the players. See the details below!
Bonus Promo: I recently did a new Beginner’s Guide video for Wayward. Check it out here if you are having trouble starting out in Wayward:
Bonus Tip: For a more continuous fresh water collection, try out wells! Wells can be built in many locations, but only some provide fresh water. When trying to find a good spot, a rope is your best friend. Use the “Test Depth” action on a rope after placing a well to see its water status. Some locations will provide water over time, and some will be infinite (although this is rare). This all depends on what exists under the well within the caves. If you are getting swamp or seawater in your well, you are too close to a swamp or seawater source and will need to move the well, or move the offending water. Non-infinite wells will fill over time, so you must wait for them to gather water; so one strategy would be to build several of them for a good supply.
New
Action slots that aren’t configured to use specific items are now automatically brought into new saves by default. This functionality can be disabled in the action bar options.
Added an option to configure the screen position of the Steam Input Keyboard on Steam Deck.
Improvements
Using the + and – buttons in the action bar now add and remove whole rows at a time instead of individual action slots. You can hold shift if you want to add/remove individual slots still.
Only automatically open the Steam Input Keyboard on Steam Deck when the text input is important or when the input is clicked again.
You can now change the default modifier order for action bar rows. (For example, by default the rows are None, Ctrl, Shift, Alt, and you can change it to None, Shift, Ctrl, Alt, among all other possible combinations.) This feature can still be overridden by setting custom slot bindables.
The primary resource of basalt ground is now basalt.
Balance
You can no longer learn recipes from crafted items from other players when using the Rouseabout milestone modifier.
Bug Fixes
Fixed sleeping/resting taking too long/locking up the game. (Thanks CaptainSparklebutt!)
Fixed action slots becoming very slow on islands with an excessive amount of items. (Thanks Veeyu!)
Fixed multiple items that could go under 0.1 weight using featherweight and refining. (Thanks King Smidgens!)
Fixed glowing magical properties not stacking with torches properly. (Thanks Aresff!)
Fixed exuding leading to decimal values sometimes.
Fixed “void” being able to be a treasure location. Note that this fix will only apply to treasure maps for islands generated after this update. (Thanks Veeyu!)
Fixed rare multiplayer desyncs related to magic properties.
Fixed multiplayer desyncs when using the upgrade action. (Thanks Veeyu!)
Fixed {1} after crafting efficacy in messages. (Thanks Nameless!)
Fixed soem typos.
Modding
Mod compilation should now be faster due to no longer typechecking the base game definitions when compiling a mod.
Fixed "@Register.stat" requiring a tooltip. (Thanks Sensakuma!)
So, it looks like the last patch wasn’t the last one after all. We have another small patch that fixes some new issues that popped up and adds some other smaller improvements. Now, this should be the last one as we work on the next major update.
Bonus Promo: The Steam Summer sale is still live! Enjoy -30% off Wayward or -10% off the soundtracks until the 13th.
Bonus Tip: Feeling stuck? Check out the Starter Quest, available by default by pressing “U”, clicking the “Quests” icon in the top button bar, or clicking the pinned “Welcome” box near your messages.
Improvements
You can now hold the mouse down on action slots to keep using them.
You can now “auto-use” action slots when overburdened — when no slots are usable, the “walk to tile” path will be cancelled. When overburdened, “walk to tile” is no longer available.
The “eat” action now prefers using items with less decay time remaining first. (Thanks httpsnet!)
“Auto-use” now no longer automatically uses actions when you have no stamina. (Thanks Grub!)
Island distance calculations are now circular — sailing in any direction changes things at a fixed rate, rather than diagonals increasing faster.
The Starter Quest now explains input sequences for assigning items to action slots.
The Starter Quest now teaches how to use action slots without items.
Bug Fixes
Magical item properties are now absorbed and exuded as percentages, fixing issues with featherweight and other properties based on item stats. (Thanks Veeyu!)
Fixed action bar bindings being used over context menu bindings. (Thanks Aresff!)
Fixed “Move All” actions in the item actions menu not displaying type & quality anymore. (Thanks Kargen Dracos!)
Fixed being able to move on top of other players while they are connecting.
Fixed far-away islands not having tooltips or being clickable in the islands dialog. (Thanks Deadpull!)
Fixed taking damage sometimes not stopping path to tile. (Thanks Grub!)
Fixed multiplayer desyncs related to dangerous movement animations. (Thanks Veeyu!)
Fixed multiplayer desyncs that occurred when multiple players, who were on different islands, were all joining at the same time.
Fixed multiplayer desyncs that occurred when traveling. (Thanks Veeyu!)
Fixed certain plants being spawned as “bare”. (Thanks Veeyu!)
Fixed action slot action icons no longer having transparency when not usable. (Thanks Rainshine!)
Fixed outdated references to old recipes in the Starter Quest. (Thanks Storm!)
Fixed action slot tooltips being incredibly laggy and flickery. (They are now only slightly laggy and flickery. (Further down the line we’ll rework the internal systems behind tooltips to get them faster. (Hopefully.)))
Fixed the active container icon being broken on higher interface scales. (Thanks ChrisLivingIt!)
Fixed tile quality not transferring in some cases.
Here’s what will likely be the last update in the “Beacon’s Call” series culminating in a huge batch of bug fixes and improvements to smooth out the game while we switch focuses on the next big update. Thank you for all the feedback and support!
Bonus Promo: Please consider leaving us a review on Steam. This helps us get the feedback we need to keep improving the game while we work towards our major upcoming milestone – a full, non-Early Access release.
Bonus Tip: Tin tools are considered blunt due to the softness of the materials, making them great at things like mining, repairing, and providing defense in the form of armor, but a poor choice for lumberjacking and cutting (things that require a sharpened tool).
New
Added support for Apple Silicon.
Improvements
Action slot tooltips now filter the item information down to only what’s relevant to the item in the slot. You can still hold “shift” by default to show the hidden information.
Badderlocks no longer decay, aloe vera bandages no longer disassemble with aloe vera leaves, and cactus scarecrows now use cactus ribs for crafting. These changes prevent issues where disassembling caused decay values for the sub-components to “freeze” in place.
The sorting and direction of all dialogs will now be saved. (Thanks 柯箴之!)
Action tier information is now displayed in action menus and slots.
Action slot tooltips now display the current “item mode”, whether it’s an exact item, by type & quality, by type, or any item.
Backups are now contained within a folder based on the current active Steam account.
Dismantling items will no longer provide two prompts when attempting to dismantle with an item that will break on use (if both on use/on dismantle were set). (Thanks Kargen Dracos!)
You can now drink and pour directly from peeled coconuts without making a container out of them first.
Peeled coconuts now act as a liquid when broken or placed on a fire and can be used in crafts.
The “tap” input in bindings now appears as an icon.
Action slots now display a * symbol by the action when they’re in “any item of type” and “any item of quality” modes.
The active dialog (where quick-moved items will go) is now indicated via an icon and a white border.
The “Use When Moving” feature has been renamed to “Auto-Use”.
You can now use ctrl + enter “Submit” binding in the actions drawer to accept the current configuration.
Some icons in bindings now have tooltips describing what they mean.
Hints are no longer displayed in action slot tooltips when showing more information, to save screen space.
The text “hover item” is no longer shown on every binding in the bindings menu.
Mods that aren’t enabled now appear white in the mod list tooltip on multiplayer servers, and mods that can’t be found appear orange.
The “mods” button on the main menu now has a tooltip displaying which mods are enabled.
The viewport now resizes when screen DPI changes.
The “Locksmith” milestone modifier description now should be more clear on its effects. (Thanks Veeyu!)
Stat bars no longer appear to refill when at 0 or below.
Unpublished mods (mods without "publishedFileId") are now displayed on the “mods” icon in the multiplayer menu, and when joining the server, only other unpublished copies of the mod can be used. (Thanks HDJam!)
Added a warning when hosting a server when unpublished mods (mods without "publishedFileId"s) are enabled. (Thanks HDJam!)
Some places in the game that previously couldn’t show the left click icon and instead would show “Left Click” as text now show the left click icon. (Thanks 柯箴之!)
Improved consistency of water/ice particle colors.
Testing well depth now creates puddles.
Balance
Friendly and Pacifier milestones will now prefer land-based creatures to spawn.
Claw worms now skip the turn they were stirred up on. (Thanks httpsnet!)
Reverted a change to small bags so their preservation rate is back to previous values, but reduced their storage capacity instead.
Scarecrows now provide civilization score.
Peeled coconuts now decay into coconut meat first before rotting vegetation.
Reduced maximum decay of coconut meat and peeled coconuts.
Bug Fixes
Fixed solar stills not refilling properly. (Thanks psusi!)
Fixed not being able to set action slots to “any item” and an action if all items currently matching are protected. (Thanks Kargen Dracos!)
Fixed shooting ranged weapons not adhering to protection in some cases. (Thanks Hiran!)
Fixed screen flickering when resizing inventory, container, and crafting dialogs.
Fixed disassembling items resetting their base component decay values. (Thanks Kargen Dracos!)
Fixed “Abnormalizer” spawning aberrant versions of creatures via item interactions. (Thanks DerSimon!)
Fixed a decay exploit with torches among other decay inconsistencies. (Thanks httpsnet!)
Fixed many tile quality inconsistencies.
Fixed stat bars transitioning between widths when UI effects are disabled.
Fixed lava/cooling lava not animating correctly.
Fixed some actions not checking whether they’re truly applicable on specific items, such as whether an item can be refueled. (Thanks Feral Grumpicorn!)
Fixed a strange “scan-line” like effect when stamina is very low, above zero, and UI effects are disabled.
Fixed movement-related bindings sometimes taking precedence over context menu ones. (Thanks Eudae!)
Fixed templates generating with wrong-facing doors and fence gates. (Thanks Veeyu!)
Fixed being able to click/interact/hover over invisible islands in the islands dialog. (Thanks httpsnet!)
Fixed not being able to use “x with y” actions in “any item of type” mode.
Fixed slither suckers persisting in containers and on the ground after throwing them. (Thanks httpsnet!)
Fixed the “mod not installed” error displaying the text “{name}@{version}” when failing to connect to a server.
Fixed movement in vehicles being blocked by creatures (fish) and doodads being under you. (Thanks httpsnet!)
Fixed thrown weapons costing two durability when hitting creatures/doodads. (Thanks Grub!)
Potentially fixed some issues that could cause broken drawn and tattered maps. (Thanks Crows!)
Fixed messages not being scrolled all the way down when first loading a save.
Fixed not getting visual feedback for the context menu option you chose when using its binding.
Fixed the Helmsman milestone not counting biomes correctly. (Thanks httpsnet!)
Fixed some “x with y” actions no longer being slottable if the item is not currently able to be “x”d.
Fixed pressing enter while in the actions drawer filter input making the actions drawer always close no matter what you try to do in it.
Fixed some incorrect liquid particle colors on swamp/fresh/freezing water.
Fixed “show more” binding not working in action menus.
Fixed some cases where actions could be unusable due to missing requirements without a message.
Fixed removed or modified modded quests sometimes appearing to be incomplete for players when in the “completed” category. (Thanks Gyuri (kustox)!)
Fixed quests dialog failing to display quests or displaying the wrong quests when modded quests have been changed or modified. (Thanks Gyuri (kustox)!)
Fixed future potential issues regarding duplicate/incorrect notes being granted via the Notekeeper milestone. (Thanks Matthew Cline!)
Fixed various issues for modded world layers
Fixed some issues with tile qualities.
Fixed some actions not being named properly for the “Operator” milestone. (Thanks 柯箴之!)
Fixed the “Trapper” milestone modifier not reducing skill gain rate. (Thanks Veeyu!)
Fixed the close button being able to be pushed off of the map dialog. (Thanks Gyuri (kustox)!)
Fixed incorrect item animation positions when attaching/detaching containers from solar stills.
Fixed the “disable all” mods button sometimes causing prompts to appear.
Fixed some mods incorrectly scrolling to the “other” section in options on enable. (Thanks 柯箴之!)
Fixed tooltip position shifting when toggling more information shown.
Fixed mod images not getting scaled using bilinear filtering.
Fixed pinned message borders being cut off.
Fixed website links in messages not working.
Technical
Miscellaneous multiplayer matchmaking server improvements.
Migrated Discord integration to the Discord GameSDK.
Upgraded to Electron 22.3.14
Modding
Prompts are now more easily moddable.
Reduced the chance of publishing the same mod separately multiple times.
This beefy update brings a further smoothing out of the early gameplay and mechanics to help new players get into the game a bit easier among many bug fixes and other improvements.
The biggest overhaul here is to do with water – the coastal biome is generally richer with fresh water in the form of rivers scattered throughout the mountains leading you to not require a still in most cases. Speaking of which, a still might not be your best bet for desalination any longer due to the introduction of dripstones, which desalinate water without the use of fire or extra containers, making them a much easier-to-understand device.
There are tons of other changes as well that will help early and late-game players alike including stat gains no longer producing reputation losses among other reputation tweaks and modifications; there’s more to come on this system as a whole coming in the next major update.
Bonus Promo: A special shoutout to both Splattercat and Nookirum who both have recently covered the game on their channels:
Bonus Tip: Going forward, exploring your island is even more important. You want to find as many freshwater sources as possible. You may want to do this before setting up a base of operations.
New
Added “dripstones”, a simplified desalination device.
Required Steam Workshop mods are now automatically downloaded when joining multiplayer servers.
Added a “drop on disassemble” option.
Added “fairy rings” to the wetlands biome.
Improvements
Changed the reputation stat display to instead display “Ferocity”, the threat level of spawned creatures, based on your reputation.
Added icons to container dialog titles.
Naturally created caves can no longer generate side by side to each other.
Improved cave entrance generation. Cave entrances can no longer be narrow corridors and may generate in more interesting spots on the overworld.
Items now appear at half resolution in 0.5x interface scale.
Normal quality items now have a faint border to help darker items pop out from dialogs.
NPCs will now swap positions with players if they are on a cave entrance when they ascend or descend.
Randomly discovering and digging up treasure is now more of a surprise and doesn’t spawn treasure guardians.
Item decay now displays the exact turns remaining when less than 200.
Item piles are now distributed around doodads instead of on top of them.
When dropping items on piles of items that are visually full, the placement will now cycle through the top row.
Piles of items are now shown visually larger/more spread out.
Protected spyglasses or sextants can no longer be used for travel if they would break. (Thanks DerSimon!)
You can no longer attempt to start fires on cave entrances; however, you can now set fire to collapsed cave entrances. (Thanks httpsnet!)
Add internal “contexts” to bindables in order to reduce the number of conflict warnings in the bindings menu.
“Toggle container” is now the default action for containers instead of “open container”.
Improved and fixed some issues with the defense inspection. There are now tooltips on some details in this inspection to help players understand how insulation works a bit better.
Lit or unlit torches can no longer receive the elemental damage magical property. (Thanks DerSimon!)
FOV transitions are now disabled when movement animation is disabled.
The “Not for Sale item” grouping is no longer visible to players.
Balance
Coastal islands now can have fresh water springs located in large mountain ranges.
Water now has a chance of being depleted when routing it and not being from a large enough source.
Water stills have been converted to metal-based boiler devices; a more advanced craft and desalination device.
Gaining stats no longer affects reputation.
Treasure chest guardians will now only spawn when digging chests at lower reputation levels.
Water stills will now desalinate water slightly faster.
Krakens no longer spawn by default in cave water on coastal.
When digging/mining up cave entrances, you can no longer dig/mine into single tile caves.
Water stills have been removed from the Starter Quest and replaced with a boiling fresh water quest.
When using the Starter Quest on the coastal biome, you will now spawn by a pond.
New players can no longer start with unpurified forms of water.
Increased the size at which a water source becomes “permanent” where no water is lost on gather.
The wetlands biome no longer produces as much fertile soil (or civilization score). (Thanks Chernosliv84!)
Increased the distance in which cave entrances can appear next to each other when digging/mining.
You now have to see your trap go off to get skill from it; however, building traps now raises your trapping skill.
Reduced the chance of drake firebreathing when in combat.
Increased the lockpicking difficulty and durability of chests above wooden.
Reduced preservation chance of small bags.
Backpacks now provide 2 defense instead of 1.
Bug Fixes
Fixed attempting to sleep/rest nearby hostile creatures not waking the player. (Thanks Dragons!)
Fixed multiple treasures spawning in the same locations with identical treasure maps to go along with them. Note that this fix will only apply to new islands. (Thanks num ca nem vi!)
Fixed being able to replace unpassable tiles with water using puddles. (Thanks httpsnet!)
Fixed doodad and item spawn chances being distributed incorrectly.
Upon upgrading a save to Beacon’s Call (Update 2), any temperature will be recalculated, potentially fixing strange artifacts where heat appears to be generated from nothing. (Thanks httpsnet!)
Fixed temperature persisting on lit doodad. (Thanks psusi!)
Fixed digging for treasure still producing tile resources/changes when failing a skill check at digging up the treasure.
Fixed many issues with lower interface scales.
Fixed being able to set things down out of bounds or on void tiles. (Thanks Gyuri (kustox)!)
Fixed bows not displaying the correct attack value in their tooltip. (Thanks Axxron, Scourge of the tts!)
Fixed several issues when attempting to spawn water creatures when dropping food. (Thanks DerSimon!)
Fixed “fire extinguisher” items not triggering “melted” properties. (Thanks Kitsune!)
Fixed the “Template” biome from showing up in custom game mode options.
Fixed swapping tiles with fish allowing them to go on to land. (Thanks DerSimon!)
Fixed not being able to open item containers when facing an NPC.
Fixed containers reporting the wrong weight when performing certain actions with items. (Thanks sechsauge!)
Fixed skeletal remains not spawning correctly on wetlands biomes.
Fixed cypress trees spawning on shallow fresh water on the coastal and wetlands biome (this should have been shallow swamp water).
Fixed items with damage modifiers not burning into other items properly. (Thanks DerSimon!)
Fix selected save count in the load game menu not getting updated when deleting an individual save.
Fixed some plants and mushrooms spawning on grass in the wetlands biome.
Fixed certain types of puddles not being removed properly. (Thanks tr1ger1n86!)
Fixed stat bar color when empty and UI effects are disabled.
Fixed a multiplayer desync that occurred when joining a server. (Thanks Kitsune!)
Some old messages that appear in the message log have been fixed.
Fixed an instance where lit doodads could show embers even though the stage of the fire was greater. (Thanks Petalwing!)
The “Turns” value on save slot tooltips now matches the “Turns” value in the Reputation tooltip. (Thanks httpsnet!)
Fixed mods list not always updating when removing mods.
Fixed the loading screen being able to get stuck when failing to join a server that has mods.
Fixed “alter” action not working on elemental damage type magical properties. (Thanks DerSimon!)
Fixed mod count on the main menu not always being correct.
Fixed the action slot icon persisting on an item after it had been cleared using the “Clear Slot” button in the actions drawer. (Thanks Petalwing!)
Fixed “You cannot do that” messages appearing when pathing to tiles while using a “use slot while moving” action slot. (Thanks DerSimon!)
Fixed Starter Quest dialog not remembering the last selection when re-opening the dialog.
Fixed player names being incorrectly cased when used in messages where the sentence starts with their name.
Fixed issues when attempting to load the same mod locally and through the workshop. (Thanks 柯箴之!)
Fixed opened containers within chests not re-opening when loading a game.
Modding
Stat gain (ie, Metabolism, Dexterity, and Strength) has been refactored to give modders full control over how custom stats are gained. (Thanks Sensakuma!)
Added "@Register.override", a new, automatically-handled way of tweaking vanilla content. (Thanks Sensakuma!)
Fixed app.asar not extracting properly. (Thanks huck!)
When creating or updating a +script mod, your Node.js version is now compared to the version we recommend, and a warning is shown if it’s out of date.
Added "@Register.equipType", allowing modders to add their own equipment slots. (Thanks olatuf!)
We have a quite sizable update ready to end this weekend off with.
In terms of balance changes, we are striving to make the early game more accessible to new players, but further the challenge as you play. You’ll see some more significant changes in the next couple of updates.
Speaking about one such change, “Player spawns on coastal islands have been rebalanced so starting on small off-shore islands should no longer be possible.”, you can see what effect this has on some previously “harder” spawns here:
The arrows show the old spawn pointing to the new one after this change.
We still have some things we want to improve and definitely more bugs to squish so stay tuned for more patches on the horizon.
Bonus Promo: If you have a spare moment, please leave us a review on Steam! This is a key metric for Steam to promote Wayward to more new/old players and helps us understand what players like/don’t like about the game so we can improve it.
Bonus Tip:Does using actions via the (right-click) action menu feel tedious? Add them to your action bar instead! Simply click on an action slot to bind an action to it. Some good starting actions to set up in each slot is “Chop”, “Mine”, “Butcher”, “Start Fire”, and “Stoke Fire”. These slots will automatically use the best tool or item for the job in your inventory.
New
Departing an island with a lit lighthouse on it now adds a bonus to your travel range.
You can now put “drop all” in an action slot to drop every item in your inventory. (Up to what fills the tile.)
Improvements
Removed messages, action, and item actions from the menu bar for a simplified new user experience and better compatibility for lower resolutions/higher interface scaling.
Improved the appearance of the crafting/dismantle dialog tabs.
Dialog titles now display their current keybinding.
Tweaked the UI for when the game is paused to hopefully make it easier to tell that the game is paused, and what to do to unpause.
Merchants will now never stock past 75% of their weight. (Thanks Gyuri (kustox)!)
Increased maximum width of tooltips on low resolutions, and reduced maximum width of tooltips on high resolutions, to result in a more consistent tooltip size overall.
Improved the readability of the island name/arrival text on small resolution/higher interface scaling.
Dialog titles now display their icons.
The warning when crafting with items that may break is now disabled by default for a better new player experience.
Improved the default column size in category/skill views in the crafting dialog when using interface scales above 1.
You can now dismount boats when over top of corpses.
Some creatures now count as a fire source when being comforted while resting/sleeping.
Updated some outdated areas of the help menu.
Older UI buttons now use the same click sound effect as newer UI buttons.
Balance
Player spawns on coastal islands have been rebalanced so starting on small off-shore islands should no longer be possible.
Standing by heat sources will now increase the chance of healing the frostbite status, but may also hurt you further if the heat source is too hot.
Decreased skeleton difficulty.
Hobgoblins, acid spitter demons, ice elementals, and dryads now have blunt damage vulnerability while increasing/adding their resistance to slashing or piercing.
Increased the rarity of x3/x4 thirst/hunger challenges and increased their difficulty rating in challenge mode.
Bug Fixes
Fixed nearby items not being usable with the action bar.
Fixed a save corruption leading to the game not loading correctly. (Thanks mathematico!)
Fixed filtering not being applied to new items.
Potentially fixed mod bindings, actions, and other mod registrations not loading or overlapping in certain situations. (Thanks 柯箴之, Hiran, Lilac, and Umbra Animo!)
Fixed tattered map tiles flickering every turn.
Fixed “slotted in action bar” icons sometimes getting stuck on items.
Fixed field of view flickering in multiplayer.
Fixed subtitle spacing on lower interface scaling. (Thanks Heart!)
Fixed action bar add/remove buttons appearing far out from the rest of the action slots.
Fixed errors when traveling to a new island. (Thanks Torrin and wolfram!)
Fixed field of view/lighting-related multiplayer desyncs.
Fixed “Drop All” and “Drop All of Quality” actions only being slottable when operating on an exact item.
Fixed being able to drop things where not allowed using the “Drop Items at Feet When Facing Tile is Blocked” option.
Fixed the “Drop” actions not displaying a red message and preventing use when there’s something in the way.
Fixed “Drop All (of Quality)” not dropping the correct quality. (Thanks King Smidgens!)
Fixed “Drop” actions not displaying a red message and preventing use when the item(s) don’t fit in a container.
Fixed multiple styling issues relating to input/dropdown menus in dialogs.
Fixed being able to load the mods menu before all mods are initialized.
Fixed UI quadrant changes resetting when rejoining a server.
Fixed merchant/shipper container dialogs staying open after the NPC dies.
Fixed action slots incorrectly appearing as though they had no action bound in some cases. (Thanks Petalwing!)
Fixed renderer not updating correctly for other players when moving to/from caves.
Fixed text describing a book not using the same format as other book description text. (Thanks 柯箴之!)
Message conversions/upgrades now happen for all players (even disconnected ones) on the save.
Fixed being able to enter screenshot mode when in the pause menu.
Fixed pressing escape no longer exiting screenshot mode.
Fixed the message UI getting squished when starting a game with it in the top right quadrant.
Fixed dialog/container sort selection not being saved for clients in multiplayer games.
Fixed some issues with how native scaling is handled.
Fixed the crafting dialog being blank when joining a multiplayer game that is paused.
Fix the action bar moving to the bottom left when the messages are switched to a dialog.
Fixed the title bar not showing when you’re using the development branch.
Fixed the back button on mods overlapping text if the description was too big.
Fixed a few embeds in the news menu displaying as links.
Fixed ports in the islands dialog having an unintentional extra white line underneath them.
Technical
Fixed some seeded generators sharing internal state objects.
Modding
Improved the file generation/updating of "+mod create" and "+mod update" to hopefully result in less stumbling points for new modders.
Wayward players, it’s time to answer the call of the beacon! The highly anticipated update is finally here and promises to guide you to new horizons and adventures.
After our last major release being the largest update to date, we thought we would scale back this time around and offer another pretty beefy update, but without such a long wait between the releases. Our last one was 280 days between the major releases, but this one clocks in at 218 days instead. We hope to keep this pace up in the future, and hopefully even faster; we always seem to get carried away.
Some stand-out features from this release include:
Added the concept of “ports” and lighthouses for mass island-to-island transfer and faster travel.
Added wooden bookcases that can hold books for added benefits.
Added tamed creature commands that unlock new behaviors as skill increases and creatures are tamed multiple times.
Added a new magical golem creature, crafted out of various and sometimes rare resources.
Creatures now have a combat strength and danger level, shown in their tooltip.
Added cages for picking up creatures for easy travel (and possibly shipment) of tamed creatures.
Added various rare gems for unique recipes and trading value.
Weapons and armor can now have a variable range of bonus damage and base defense based on their quality. Creatures have been rebalanced with this in mind.
You can preview some of these changes in the below video:
This release has been pretty content or feature-heavy compared to previous updates, but there are still plenty of performance and quality-of-life updates sprinkled in as well. Check them all out below:
