Beta 2.3 “Expression” Released

We’re happy to announce the release of Wayward beta 2.3 “Expression”.

Beta 2.3 marks the biggest major release to date, with over 180 additions, fixes, and improvements. And even then, we sadly couldn’t fit everything we wanted to put in due to time constraints.

Some bigger additions this release are:

Character customization with import/modding support
New game menu with seed selection/game name
Malignity is now “Reputation” with changes/improvements
New tilling and gardening changes
Spatial audio
Hand selection for gathering/combat

A lot of time was also spent developing a certain yet-to-be-complete feature which we kind have been teasing about in our Discord and in the last newsletter. Well, since somebody is going to find the references in the code sooner or later: multiplayer is now planned and in development. We can’t promise when this will be implemented, but it is coming… “soon”.

As always with major releases, we plan on supporting the 2.3 series with multiple faster patches and releases as the bugs/issues come in from the community.

Wayward is 15% off from March 31st to April 7th, 2017 on Steam, Humble Store, and our Website!

Happy Waywarding!

Full changelog below:

New

Added character customization. You can now choose a hair style, hair color, and skin tone. Included with this is the ability to import and export characters.
Added a new game menu that will allow you to choose a game save name, world seed, and character customization.
Added multiple new hair styles with small improvements to the old ones (more detail).
Fertile soil is now crafted and placed down to till and plant things in (instead of placing it over plants to increase fertility).
Added hoes and tilling functionality.
Spatial audio has been implemented. Sound effects will now sound more distant or directional, based on the source position.
Iron ore now weighs less and have more material per vein. This allows smaller iron crafts (lockpicks, bullets, arrowheads, etc.) to be dissembled again and take less resources. Iron craft requirements have been re-adjusted to accommodate this change resulting in many iron items weighing less.
Tongs have a new “Grasp” use that will allow you to pick-up items in fire/lava without hurting or burning yourself.
Separated out the pickaxe functionality from the stone axe. They are now two separate items. Also added an iron/wrought iron axe.
A changelog section has been added to the main menu, with support for viewing the current and previous changelogs.
Three new milestones added for -64,000/+64,000 reputation and animal taming.
The turn count is now listed in the malignity tooltip and in the highscore list.
You can now sort crafts by unlocked time.
Redesigned the skills and milestone dialogs with progress bars.
You will now be interrupted during resting or sleeping if a creature is damaging a wall or doodad within 5 tiles of you.
An “Un-equip all” button has been added to the equipment window.
You can now dismantle gravel into a pile of sand and stones. Its weight has been increased to accommodate this change.
Added a new creature with unique interactions.
Ash can now be placed down as a tile.
Containers now save their sorting after closing.
Creatures will now enter/exit caves if your reputation is lower than their spawning malignity (unless tamed).
You are now allowed to drop items on some doodads. If the doodad is lit, it will cause fire to propagate on the items if they are flammable.
“Keep Sort Active” will now also apply to containers.
Skeletal mages spawn skeletal remains instead of stone walls.
There is now a keybind to open the dismantle tab of the crafting dialog. The crafting keybind will open the crafting tab. Either key will close the dialog if the tab is already open.
Added a crafted reputation (malignity) rate in item tooltips.
You can now select which hand to use for attacking/gathering now. You will no longer attack/gather with both hands simultaneously.
Added our new developer, Aari to the credits.
Hide UI option added (for screenshots).
The icon for reputation (malignity) will now change based on good/bad reputation.
Wayward will now provide an error when running on an unsupported browser or system.
Added a combat hint.
Templates (houses, ponds, lava, etc.) are now mirrored and rotated to provide more variation.

Improvements

Malignity has been renamed to “Reputation” with two factors, malignity and benignity (bad/good). Positive values of reputation are good; negatives are bad.
Fertility of a plant is now boosted if planted or spread to a fertile dirt tile (placed via fertile soil). Additional fertility is given by watering exclusively (using the pouring action).
Trampling plants now removes durability from them instead of fertility, causing them to eventually break based on durability.
Plants no longer grow/spread/heal when there are items on top of them.
Improvements made to fire starting and torch lighting logic. Now only certain conditions will require kindling and fuel.
Improved creature performance, increasing movement speeds on lower-end machines.
Chickens will now lay eggs once again instead of them needing to be carved from the corpse.
You can no longer release and tame so quickly after each creature release.
Creatures now become scared when their health gets below 10% or 1 health instead of 3 for all creatures.
Tuned the sundial messages to more accurately represent the current time (with at least 50% camping skill).
Sound effects and particles no longer occur all at once after sleeping/resting.
Lit doodads (and fire on its own) will now produce ash as they burn.
Lava now damages or heals creatures.
Iron/wrought iron shields now bob on movement.
“Doodad Required” is now labeled as “Additional Requirements” as there can be multiple and non-doodads required.
Improved the UI of Crafting/Dismantle tabs.
Fixed some consistency issues with hover effects and background colors for help/options.
The loading/saving animation now starts and animates quicker.
Item groups are no longer listed with prefixes within item tooltips.
Saving your game from in-game now displays a “Saving Game…” message.
Corpses on lava will now trigger a fire to start.
Added sound effects for creature special abilities.
Creature special abilities are now logged in messages.
Healing actions are no longer notified/sounded on creatures when they are already at full health.
Animal pelts are now included in the “fabric” group.
You can now use animal fur to stoke fire.
Doodad/wall damaging sounds will now happen out of line of sight/field of view, within a large radius.
You will now turn to face used doodads/fire sources when dismantling/disassembling/crafting.
Daily Challenge and Normal play now have separate tabs in the Highscores submenu.
Added particle effects for more actions, including dropping items into water.
The save button is no longer displayed within the daily challenge.
Pulchritudinous, Prepared, Collector, and Treasurer milestones will now check if their requirements are met on game load.
Disabled the “enabled” checkbox on mods that only provide languages as switching their enabled status had no effect.
You can now use a raft in shallow water.
Added some hierarchical tweaks/improvements in the about/options menu.
Giant rat corpse colors are now consistent with their living graphics.
Added max lengths for all inputs and filters.
Improved the milestone earned message and grammar.
Added unique gained/lost messages for hunger and thirst.
Removed the quest that asked you to equip two held items in the Starter Quest.
Decreased chance of ash spawning on burning flammable doodads/plants.
Added hints in the form of messages to suggest using your hands to gather, dig, or resting without a bedroll was less effective than using items.
Improved dialog resizing by increasing the anchor size and adding proper space on the bottom tops of dialogs as not to interfere with other buttons or filters.
Traps now only display a message if you are within line of sight with them.
Extra items received from milestone completion will no longer modify/be randomized from seeds (which could corrupt the seed for player to player).
Improved many messages by replacing “item”, “this”, etc. with actual names of things used on/with.
The item graphics for iron/wrought iron items are now more consistently mirrored to differentiate them from each other.
Increased visual readability and consistency of stat bars and icons.
Added a button to the top button bar for opening/closing the Starter Quest window.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug that produced incorrect durability on harvested/gathered items from plants.
Fixed an issue where building up terrain over water and then digging that terrain would not give the correct item back.
Fixed a bug that caused tactics to only be raised on a creature’s death blow instead of when any damage was caused.
Moving or picking up over a tile with both fire and lava will no longer try to do burn damage twice.
Fixed the Collector milestone having one too many items, making obtaining it impossible without mods enabled.
Fixed not being able to ignite a torch from lava or doodads on fire.
Fixed autosave not working and displaying a save message in daily challenge mode.
Fixed an issue with quickslots where they would not detect new instances of an item when created through certain interactions.
Improved the transitions between caves and the overworld. You will no longer appear to slide into the entrance/exit.
Fixed a bug where a tamed creature could swap positions with you, and potentially corrupt any fish that was under you into a bugged state.
Fixed sort by decay not working correctly.
Inputs are no longer processed while the loading screen is shown, which fixed a bug that allowed you to move while resting/sleeping.
Collecting growing grass no longer returns the grass seeds.
Fixed an issue that did not recalculate lighting after an item changed states (when a torch was doused for example).
Fixed an issue where fire could not spread to tiles to the right/bottom of itself.
Fixed spyglass counting as a light source when equipped
Fixed a bug where uncraftable items were not being sorted when crafts were sorted by name.
Fixed a bug that did not produce a bare tree when gathering from a tree that was grown on a tile that was originally water.
Fixed an issue where fire elementals could spawn fire on non-flammable doodads.
Fixed container/inventory sorts reversing when loading the game with the “Keep Sort Active” option enabled.
Fixed a bug that caused warnings when switching language with no saves.
Fixed weapons and shields not rendering over hair when facing in a forward direction.
Fixed many incorrect offsets/missing pixels for several equipped items and other inconsistencies.
Fixed an instance where a creature could become instantly untamed after taming it.
Fixed an issue where saving/loading screens would sometimes open/close too quickly, causing a flash.
Changed the order of when player burning happened, so it no longer happens after movement (mod compatibility fix).
Fixed a bug that would produce inaccurate vulnerable/resistant armor messages when getting damaged by creatures.
Fixed a bug that did not propagate tile effects (getting burned, setting off traps, etc.) when using “Pick-up All Items” like it did with “Pick-up Item”.
Daily challenge no longer shows it is (falsely) saving the game when going back to main menu.
Fixed an issue where option tooltips would show up within the help/hint window.
Fixed an issue where being poisoned or burned while swimming would produce visual glitches.
Removed a message stating “you can always return back to these lands” for Daily Challenge mode when sailing to civilization (since you can’t).
Fixed several bugs where some mouse cursors were not showing properly or at all (loading cursor).
World tooltips are now hidden when the action menu is up.
Picking up lit torch doodad will now automatically equip it as torches should not be lit in your inventory.
Traversing the sea will no longer start a new Daily Challenge game when used in that mode.
Fixed an instance where creature taming was not effected by the seed’s randomization.
Fixed a bug where you could drag and drop dismantle/crafting tabs. They also no longer act as links, sometimes causing visual issues/browser artifacts.
Fixed a couple instances where messages appeared if the location was on screen rather than if a player could see the tile. For example: a water container breaking in fire.
Removed ability for explosive traps to be used more than once.

Balance

Aberrant scaling now uses a player’s tactics skill for their defense, strength stat for their health and parrying skill for their damage instead of all using strength previously.
Milestones no longer give bonuses in the current game. The benefits only apply at the start of new games.
Reduced the range in which monsters move and de-spawn in.
Creatures will now move around when you are on different levels (cave/overworld) than them.
Increased weight limit by 5 points (by default).
Fire may now spread to an adjacent tile if stoked past raging status.
Parrying is now considered peaceful and will increase reputation instead of decreasing it. Some other skills tweaked in reputation (malignity) values as well.
Transmogrification will now fully repair an item and re-roll any previous skill bonuses; however, will no longer exponentially increase in max durability (to insane levels).
Slightly reduced wall/doodads breaking chance for creatures.
Increased durability of all kilns.
Increased durability on all clay and stone structures/doodads like walls, floors, furnaces, etc. Stone is now highest durability tier. Sandstone/wood remains the same.
Chance of gathering resources bare-handed has been slightly increased.
Digging without a tool now decreases chance of resource gather.
The lowest weight an item can be has been lowered slightly in regards to item weight variance.
Explosive traps now do more damage and can set fires.
Slightly increased chance of trampling plants (due to it using durability instead of fertility now).
Advanced and expert crafts are now slightly harder to craft.
All creatures now have half their health due to the removal of double player attacks per turn.
Reduced drake spawning malignity slightly (so you don’t need to keep max malignity).
Sleeping no longer increases reputation.
You can no longer start or stoke a fire with a full tile of items over it.
Decreased chance of cave entrances when gathering/digging slightly.
Increased default durability slightly on all items that have no set durability.
Slightly increased the amount of malignity you receive on a strength stat gain.
Increased the life span of bark torches.
Added new, more varied ways to get each type of treasure.
Decreased rarity of tattered maps by allowing them to spawn in caves.
Traps now have variable amounts damage (shown in tooltip).
Grey wolves now accept bones as offerings (and added a new bone group).

Modding

Added support for .json language files, allowing translations without coding knowledge.
Updated the Modding Guide with new beta 2.3 information as well as new section on the new .json specifications.
Added a way for mods to register custom skills.
Added a customizations JSON file for mods to add custom hair/skin colors and hairstyles without requiring scripts.
Added OnContainerItemAdd, OnContainerItemRemove, and OnContainerItemUpdate hooks.
Added an OnPlayerDeath hook.
Modders can now use ui.appendStyle(id, css) for adding a custom stylesheet to their mod.
Implemented createButton/removeButton for adding/removing buttons from the top button bar.
Fixed an issue where input boxes would not accept characters that were keybinded to toggleable actions such as “o” for options.
New formatting added for language definition scripts for easier modding.
Mods no longer require onLoad, onUnload, or onSave event handlers.
Added onUninitialize method to mods.
Modifications can now use multiple files.
Added a “Developer Logging” option.
Equipped items are no longer tracked via an “.equipped” property. You can now use .isEquipped() instead of looping through inventory.
Refactored item onUse/use. These properties are now defined differently.
Added Mod.getFile to retrieve the text content of files in your mod directory (useful for CSS).
Removed the CalculateCreatureMoveType hook. creature.setMoveType is to be used instead.
Fixed the OnTurnComplete hook being called too early.
Mods that override game graphics/images no longer require scripts, they can be edited via a .json file.
mod.json formatting has been changed to use camelCasing for all properties.
Spaces within prefixes such as “an “, “a ” are no longer needed within translations.

Technical

Updated Wayward to TypeScript 2.2.1.
The Wayward codebase is now modular.
Wayward has been updated to use Electron 1.6.1.
The Steam overlay should now be working on most Windows 7/8 systems once again.
On select operating systems and hardware configurations, you can now use the “opengl” renderer to allow Open Broadcaster Software to capture Wayward directly (game/window capture) without needing to capture full display.
Implemented a new launch_options.json option: “renderer” with options: opengl, egl, osmesa, swiftshader and default (defaults to either egl or opengl depending on OS).
UI related messages are now in a new Dictionary, UiMessage, instead of Messages. As a result, ConfirmScreen, InputScreen, and other Ui classes that recieved Messages now take UiMessages as well.
Fixed a Archiver.bulk() warning message appearing in console when publishing a mod.
Added support for corpses and creatures to be light sources (via new lightSource property).
Added preliminary support for multiple players (and real-time mode).

Mods

Ridiculous Hairdos

Introduced this mod for all of your ridiculous hairstyle needs.

Developer Tools

Added a template spawner and the buttons Disable FOV and Zoom Out.
Added a “Play Sound” dropdown. The selected sound will play where you click the mouse, when active.
The day/night bar now updates in real time and has a numeric readout.

Troposphere

Added a new “Flying” skill and modified the effect of drinking a rainbow to change your hair style, skin color and hair color.

Pirate Language

Added more word replacements and converted the mod to use the new JSON language format.

Balancing Tools

Proper opacity added to input when not hovering over the Developer Tools dialog.

New