Wayward Beta 2.9 “Seafarer” Released

Hey all!

Introducing, “Seafarer”, the 9th major release of Wayward on Steam, and the end of limited exploration in the game. You can now sail the seas and explore new worlds and sets of islands. A few stand-out features in this release also include:

Added infinite persistent travel to up to three different types of islands, “Coastal”, “Arid” and “Ice Cap”.
Players in multiplayer can now travel together to new islands using a new voting system.
Encumbrance, dehydration, starvation, and exhaustion are all now status effects that appear in the UI. Their tooltips provide additional information and are more accurate with increased anatomy skill.
Added new locked forms of all chests with varied/tiered loot and quality for both generated chests and unearthed treasure chests.
The “Traverse the Seas” action and functionality have been removed in exchange for the new traveling system. The bull boat/sail boat can now be used to “paddle” like the raft.
Water now has a depletable but slowly regenerative amount of fish and items. You will need to move to other areas to successfully fish when depleted.
Dying in casual mode or with the “respawn” option enabled now causes players to become a ghost with a “respawn” button available. The ghost can travel around to any revealed location in the world.

This release was one of those big ones. Adding infinite procedural generation while keeping the world feel smaller and meaningful was no easy task. But it’s also one of those things that tons of players were clamoring for. Like some of the other big releases under our belt like beta 2.5 which added multiplayer; a feature I previously said would probably never happen. This was also one of those things design wise I was pretty strongly against initially and thought tech-wise, we would probably never manage to do. Well, I am constantly proven wrong by both what I think players would want most, and what my co-developers are able to pull off. Shout-out to:

Gary ‘Spacetech’ Wilber (Programming)
Dusty ‘Goaticide’ Melling (Art/Design)
Mackenzie ‘Chiri’ McClane (Programming/UX)

We still have lots of iterate on with the concept of island types and seafaring in general. Our plan with this cycle is to focus on a pretty large content patch somewhere in the set of 2.9.x releases, so the releases might be a bit more sparse than normal after a major release. This is because we want to focus on some bigger additional content for Seafarer. Things like temperature, more biome content and other unique island-based features like charting/mapping features. We’ll still be providing bug fixes of course.

As with all major releases so far, I’ll be doing some streaming tonight as well as over this week at random points. This time I’ll be doing it live on the Wayward Steam store page. You can tune in from there, or from the Broadcasts page: https://steamcommunity.com/app/379210/broadcasts/

Check out our Discord for more information and future community news: https://discord.gg/wayward or just add me as a friend on Steam to chat.

Also, like other major releases, Wayward is currently on sale for -20% off for a full week.

Speaking of Steam, as most of you might know, that in the ashes of the recent Steam Summer sale, you might have some extra Steam “points” laying around. I would encourage everybody to give out some rewards to all the community contributors out there for Wayward. Reviews, guides, Workshop mods, screenshots, and more! Show them some love!

Have fun!
Vaughn ‘Drathy’ Royko

Wall of text changelog below:

New

Added infinite persistent travel to up to three different types of islands, “Coastal”, “Arid” and “Ice Cap”.
Added 6 new creatures, 3 new plants, 6 new terrain types and 12 new items, all to exist exclusively in the new “Ice Cap” island type.
There is a new “void” tile in the cave layer that acts as an impassable terrain type that can be used to remove items.
Players in multiplayer can now travel together to new islands using a new voting system.
At high cartography skill levels, you will now begin to reveal fog/unexplored tiles when decoding maps. Drawing maps will reveal all fog/unexplored tiles in the area at medium skill levels.
Inspecting a tile now opens a dialog containing all the information, rather than putting it into messages. The dialog automatically updates as the tile contents change.
Encumbrance, dehydration, starvation, and exhaustion are all now status effects that appear in the UI. Their tooltips provide additional information and are more accurate with increased anatomy skill.
You can now import and export your list of milestone modifiers.
You can now add “macro” bindings, a sequence of inputs such as double/triple click. Double click has been added as a default bind for showing context menus, to improve touch support.
Added new locked forms of all chests with varied/tiered loot and quality for both generated chests and unearthed treasure chests.
Dying in casual mode or with the “respawn” option enabled now causes players to become a ghost with a “respawn” button available. The ghost can travel around to any revealed location in the world.
Added a “shark tooth” item, a new brittle, but higher tiered sharpened item.
Added a saveDirectory launch option that will allow you to modify the save directory for the game.
Added the “Helmsman” milestone, for traveling to all the different island types.
Added a “aloe vera bandage” item, a new type of bandage that can heal health as well as cure both bleeding and burned status effects.
Added the milestone, “Multitasker”, for using each skill at least once.
Added a note for sailing to civilization.
Added a borderless launch option that will open the game without a frame (when not running in fullscreen).
Added two new books.

Improvements

The “Traverse the Seas” action and functionality have been removed in exchange for the new traveling system. The bull boat/sail boat can now be used to “paddle” like the raft.
You will now see a secondary preview of your path when holding down control (by default) when already moving along the path.
The “bleeding”, “poisoned”, and “burned” status effects now show additional information based on your anatomy skill.
Improved player path-finding when traversing over water.
You can now select multiple saves at once in the load game menu with right click or S for deletion.
You can now see the game’s averaged reputation between all players in the reputation tooltip.
You can now use ctrl+drag (by default) to move all of an item type.
The sextant will now show which island/area coordinates you are in as well as the normal x/y.
Crafts will only be updated after movement has stopped to avoid lag caused from adjacent containers/items.
Using drop, move or grab all actions while filtering items will now only apply those actions to the matching filtered items.
The game’s displayed difficulty now takes into account all players reputations.
The “skip splash screen” option now completely skips the splash screen.
Merchants will now wear and gather stock/inventory suitable to the island type they are in.
Dialogs no longer change their min/max sizes as the UI scale is changed.
Newly imported slots in the load game menu now appear with a yellow border.
When moving the mouse from a mini-button to the button it’s on, that button’s tooltip will now be shown.
Worlds no longer wrap in on themselves from the edges.
The new dialogs can now be moved and resized with touch.
Added “input”, “enable”, and “disable” sound effects, to improve audio cues on UI interactions.
Navigating between UI components with the keyboard now shows any tooltips for the focused component.
The skills dialog’s skill tooltips no longer show legendary items that are not equipped.
Tooltips now have slightly lighter backgrounds and a subtle border to more clearly separate them from other UI components.
You can now pet creatures that are tamed by other players.
Improved the order of rendering items and tile events over/above creatures and players.
Increased the maximum size of the player stats when viewed in a tooltip to allow space for larger values.
Redesigned context menus, as seen on newer UI components, to improve usability and increase consistency.
The “food” group has been removed/replaced by other groupings.
Certain terrain templates (houses, oases, etc.) will have individually set chances for items/doodads/skeletons to appear.
World tooltips are now event-based — changes will be reflected in the tooltip without it having to disappear and regenerate.
There are now two levels of height when creatures (or players) are flying over either short or tall objects/terrain.
Improved accuracy of sorting by craft requirements/consumables.
You can now reset the position of a dialog by right clicking on the dialog’s name.
Improved death animation so fog of war is not revealed first before fade-in.
Legendary featherweight items now also show their total weight instead of just their reduced weight.
The search bar in the help menu now sticks to the top of the menu rather than scrolling away. Filtered-out help articles that share rows with filtered-in help articles are now shown as transparent.
Switched the default positions of the “notes” and “quests” dialog in order to improve usability for new players.
Redesigned menu tabs. The active menu tabs are now highlighted as you scroll and navigate.
The default “drop all” bind has been changed to Ctrl+Q to match other “all item” binds.
Introduced many items that will now spawn on certain terrain types on world generation.
You now have to be in a sailboat to sail to civilization.
Certain terrain types will now reduce in durability and eventually be burned when there is an uncontained fire on them.
Items and item groups that are used in recipes are now searchable in the crafting dialog when filtering.
Improved the readability of disabled mods in save tooltips.
Tattered maps will no longer reset when traveling (and store which set of island(s) they belong to).
Sorting by name now takes legendary types into account.
Tweaked the background color of non-interactable UI elements in menus in order to make it more obvious that they’re non-interactable.
Slider inputs in menus can now be adjusted with the left and right arrow keys.
The skills dialog now shows more clearly when & which legendary items are applying bonuses to a skill.
Closing containers will now close any sub containers.
You can now cancel move-to-tile pathing with right click, by default.
The milestones dialog now updates after resetting milestone progress.

Bug Fixes

Fixed winning screen not showing to host in challenge mode.
Fixed water contamination spread not working or saving properly.
Fixed tilling removing tile qualities.
Fixed instances of burn damage occurring twice or protection not being used properly.
Fixed an oversight that resulted in items having higher decay values than intended.
Fixed an issue where hoarding legendary bonuses were not applied when crafting them.
Fixed fire being able to propagate over and be fueled from germinating plants.
Fixed being able to start fires in the caves with a lens. (Thanks fils.delaroche!)
Corrected an oversight so that auto save can now occur (depending on settings) in games with respawning, while host player is a ghost, and in dedicated servers.
Fixed creatures clipping into the top of tall doodads like trees.
Fixed gaining reputation when attempting to fish in areas with no fish (like, for example: LAND).
Fixed a bug where salvaging no items from disassembling an item could still lead to a salvaged message. (Thanks zuoanqh!)
Fixed the tooltips of multiple challenge modifiers not being accurate when playing multiple challenge games.
Fixed decay level not transferring to dismantled items. (Thanks riftborn!)
Fixed the dismantle warning not providing the item name that may break on use. (Thanks Matthew Cline!)
Fixed tall doodads clipping into player graphics while wearing a helmet.
Fixed differences between moveComplete and noInput events in multiplayer versus singleplayer. (Thanks DJAntonBruckner!)
Fixed inaccuracies in describing fire source bonuses in relation to sleeping/resting in the help menu. (Thanks zuoanqh!)
Fixed items clipping into trees and other tall doodads and obscuring players too much.
Square dialogs (IE, the map dialog) now can only be resized by the corners, they snap to other dialogs, and no matter how you resize them, will always remain square.
Fixed some sprite batches being out of sync on movement. (Thanks num ca nem vi!)
Fixed pathing through hitched and tamed creatures causing infinite movement. (Thanks num ca nem vi!)
Fixed players always spawning randomly on PVP-enabled multiplayer games when rejoining.
Fixed several server arguments not applying when loading an existing dedicated server game. (Thanks aikainnet!)
Fixed resting or sleeping on placed doodad bedding items being offset incorrectly.
Fixed an error when exporting the message history.
Fixed needing treasure in your main inventory to sail. (Thanks Azated!)
Fixed dropdowns not playing “select” and “activate” sounds when using keyboard support.
Fixed some actions from spamming messages when used in certain ways from quickslot hotkeys.
Fixed attributes cutting off when using alternate font style and interface scaling.
Fixed a bug where unlit torches/candles would automatically be destroyed when being lit from torches or have really low starting values when being lit through fire-making devices.
Fixed a rare bug in multiplayer games connected using the Steam Relay Network which could cause an “Unable to join game” dialog to appear while playing
Fixed instances where flying creatures did not “float” over certain tall/blocked objects.
Fixed carpet not being flammable.
Fixed an instance where the water still graphic could become corrupted or inaccurate to the amount of fuel it had.
Fixed a tattered map exploit where you could gather treasure in a guaranteed location in the world on maps that spawned on world generation.
Fixed the scrollbar being hidden in the message dialog when many messages were shown and scrolled to the bottom.
Possibly fixed some uncommon client-side mod loading issues in multiplayer games. (Thanks Amax!)
Fixed legendary featherweight containers not showing the weight of items contained inside within the item’s tooltip.
Fixed up/down arrows to re-send previous chat messages not working anymore.
Fixed the tile inspection tooltip not always showing when you first loaded a world or when you closed an interrupt in specific cases.
Fixed multiplayer settings being reset when loading a multiplayer save without hosting. (Thanks Amax!)
Fixed mods showing in red when viewing which mods are enabled while hosting a server. (Thanks Amax!)
Fixed choosing a new game from the multiplayer menu not appending “Untitled Save” with a number. (Thanks Amax!)
Fixed items that are renamed not being filtered properly.
Fixed no issues being reported when trying to join a multiplayer game with mods that could not be loaded.
Fixed container errors on older save games.
Fixed “killed by” messages appearing for save slots that were in casual mode/had re-spawning enabled.
Fixed crafting and consuming fish kebab not damaging the wooden pole. (Thanks riftborn!)
Fixed keyboard support for dropdowns.
Fixed multiple multiplayer desyncs.
Fixed some errors grammatical.
Fixed some fires going out instantly when being started from a lit torch.
Fixed performing actions on the tile you are facing counting as “under” you in some cases. (Thanks DJAntonBruckner!)
Fixed some graphical issues with clay water stills.
Fixed an exploit regarding moving a raft to a chest or selling it to a merchant while paddling. (Thanks AI Player 2!)
Fixed being able to “rest on ground” inside boats while on shallow water or while facing a placed bedding item.
Fixed wooden shields not burning properly. (Thanks Caerold!)
Fixed being able to use the keyboard to select and edit the seed input when “Daily Challenge” mode is enabled.
Fixed a rare instance where creatures could not be tamed from offerings on ground if two or more players were around and the closest player was not in line of sight to the creature.
Fixed static in-game UI elements overlapping status effects.

Balance

Water now has a depletable but slowly regenerative amount of fish and items. You will need to move to other areas to successfully fish when depleted.
Reduced slime splitting and combining chances heavily.
The Starter Quest has been reduced in complexity due to the removal of sandstone/desert accessibility features.
Attaching a container to stills is now only blocked by items if they fill the tile completely.
Desalinating water from water/solar stills now takes 250 turns instead of 300.
Tattered maps can now point to treasure in the cave layer uncommonly with negative reputation.
Decreased the chance of burning pain passing on its own.
Logs will now dismantle into 4 wooden poles (down from 5). Logs (and all crafts that use them) have been reduced in weight slightly.
Iron deposits have been reduced within the starting “Coastal” island type, but increased heavily in the other island types.
Quality will now have a much stronger impact on an item’s decay value.
Clay is now very rare within the “Coastal” island type (appearing in caves/swamps), but appears much more commonly in “Arid” island types.
Traveling and sailing to civilization will now no longer damage you based on food/water during the traveling sequence.
You can no longer use sundials to gain skills (or stats) after 40% camping skill.
You will now be able to tell the exact hour when using a sundial (instead of an estimate) when over 40% camping skill now instead of 50%.
You will now receive malignancy when overflowing fire by stoking the fire too much.
You will now receive malignancy when witnessing fire spreading uncontrollably.
Deeper water will now spawn more commonly in the caves.
Snow and lava is now rare on the starting “Coastal” island type.
You are now required to decode maps before they can be gathered or dug/fished up.
Item decay is now partially transferred to cooked/crafted results.
The “Navigator” milestone is no longer “hidden”, and the modifier now reduces your hunger/thirst less.
Increased drop rate of grass seeds when tilling/digging grass tiles, but increased gathering difficulty slightly and increased growth time of grass slightly.
Aberrant slimes/jelly cubes now have a chance to split into non-aberrant forms.
Unlocking locked chests will now have a chance to summon guardians. The “Locksmith” milestone modifier will now just increase this chance instead of adding that feature.

Modding

The Wayward Documentation and Modding Guide has been separated.
Added canMoveItem & canMoveItem events.
All UI colors are now set as variables, allowing for easier customization/modding and better consistency.
Improved translation support for item menu actions.
Items and doodads now have a spawnOnWorldGen property which allows you to control which biome, depth, and terrain they can spawn on world generation.
Doodad descriptions can now have custom variation calculations to choose which sprites to use based on the current doodad state.
You can now register new world layers, allowing multiple mods to add new world layers and coexist.
The “target” property in a mod’s tsconfig.json is now updated automatically with the +mod update command.
You can now use the arguments after +language and +stylesheet in the +mod create command in order to specify the paths to the language JSON and CSS files.
Added a +mod help command.
Fixed mod event handlers and injections being registered on init instead of load, causing mods that were not loaded in multiplayer games to still receive events.

Technical

Updated Wayward to Electron 8.3.1.
Input/simulation has been separated from the rendering loop, leading to more responsive/accurate inputs.
Game rendering no longer happens while no changes are taking place, reducing CPU and GPU usage.
You can now reload all stylesheets with F6.
The game’s input system was rewritten to be more performant and easier to work with.
Wayward has been upgraded to TypeScript 3.9.
Improved performance of pinned messages.
Added a new UI experiment “HQ font rendering” accessible in the developer options which uses workarounds to sharpen up the text in the pixel font (may cause performance issues).
Added more logging for rare save corruption instances to narrow down the issue.

Mods

Debug Tools

Fixed “add item to inventory” adding more items based on how many times the dialog was closed and opened again.
Fixed teleporting an entity between world layers not working.
Added an option to teleport between world layers.
Fixed plants not showing the proper growth cycle when generated with spawned templates.
Added a “refresh tile” button to the terrain inspection dialog.
Added the ability to disable individual layers from rendering.
Fixed fog not being updated properly as a ghost when reloading the game.
Improved the usability of the selection panel, adding an effectless “select” action and a label counting how many targets there are. The list is now logged to the console.
Fixed noclip speed and animations while over water.
Players can now be set with invulnerable and noclip statuses at the same time.

New