Wayward Major Update “Beacon’s Call” Released!

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:

New

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.
Players can now select a title to use from completed milestones. For example: Drathy (Boundless), or Drathy (Reaper of Souls).
Added a new skill bonus magical property found on doodads.
Added the new milestone Versatile, requiring the discovery of creatures’ vulnerabilities and resistances.
Added the “Retailer” milestone which unlocks instant merchant spawning at the cost of the merchant cap being halved.
Added the “Masochist” milestone allows every creature to spawn regardless of reputation or biome.
Added a new “glowing” magical property.
Added new “cold” and “heat” damage-type magical properties.
Added an item decay notifier that will pop up an icon when items are decaying in a container or tile.
Added a new crafting sort that will only display craftable items (unless filtering).
Rather than all vulnerabilities and resistances being visible based on your anatomy skill, individual vulnerabilities and resistances are now discovered as you engage in combat with creatures.
Merchants now call out to you from a distance when their inventory has changed.
Added two new books.
Added a button to toggle all “use when moving” actions that only appears when you’ve set some up.
Added item movement animations for chest-to-chest movement, grab all, and when moving multiple items.
Added an animation for the “Set Down” action.
Added a new jumping animation.
Implemented player and server name filtering.
Added a “/noclip” command.

Improvements

Protected items that can be damaged can no longer be used via action slots if they could break on use.
Redesigned the creature tooltip to match the style of the item tooltip and display additional information.
Protected equipped items now unequip automatically if they are about the break.
You can no longer equip protected items that would break on damage.
Doodads now show their civilization score in their tooltip.
You can now swap tiles with friendly NPCs.
Added a “Remember UI State for New Saves” option – enabling this allows newly created saves to re-use your previous game’s UI state (element/dialog positions) instead of the default state.
Replaced the popup confirmation on dangerous movement with your character instead bouncing back and stopping with audio queues, requiring you to press the input a second time to confirm that you want to move dangerously.
Added an option for smooth zooming.
Some tooltips around the game now have subtitles for important classification information about the thing you’re inspecting.
Added more information to merchant tooltips.
Fog of war now transitions smoothly.
You can now double click on containers, maps, books, and bottles to open them.
Transferring items with the “quick move” keybinds now transfers to the last container you interacted with.
Gloves and other hand equipment now have a “harvest” action.
Contextual actions (for example, the actions for the doodad, creature, or NPC you’re facing) are now placed in the top of the actions menu.
Skills and stats now show what they increased from and to.
Improve UX of tamed creature interactions.
Improved game start/load time by 40%.
Reduced file size and saving times.
Improved general game performance.
Improved performance when picking up chests with many items or doing other actions that involved moving many items around.
Improved general UI performance.
Improved performance of UI-based item updates, especially with bulk interactions such as crafting dialog updates, “move” and “drop” all actions and more.
Improved performance of the messages UI component when the message history is large.
Improved performance of opening containers with many items, or moving many items in containers.
Improved the performance of some milestone inspections.
Sorting crafts by category or skill will now show in columns and will now be sorted by name within each section. The positions of each craft will be static and feature a white border for visibility. This will be the new default view.
Improved default positionings and sizes of some dialogs.
All actions now have descriptions.
Zero damage events from creatures are now always shown for the player via the overhead notifier.
The “Island” in the multiplayer game menu now simply shows what the starting island is.
Improved readability of books by making sure notes/descriptions and book text is differentiated visually.
NPC tooltips no longer say their names when they haven’t been met yet.
Message log filter editing has been improved, now displaying previews and tooltips on messages to help assist in creating ideal filters. Made the “All” filter and source both editable to reduce confusion.
Messages from previous turns are now faded out slightly.
You can now resize the equipment dialog to be a single vertical column.
Some tree cones can now be used as kindling.
Minecarts now appear as though their wheels are spinning when moving.
Opened chest and merchant dialogs will now remember to reopen when loading a game.
The “open container” action now specifies the container that will be opened in its name.
Improved how older translations appear in the message log.
The sail button in the islands dialog now provides a detailed action tooltip, providing reasons why you can’t currently sail.
The Wayward version name text will no longer be impacted by UI scale.
Spawned creatures from items should prefer the tile you interacted with, and moving outwards instead of completely random within 3×3.
All items are now contained within at least one group.
Small item sprites are now shown on items that change their display graphic (like for tattered maps for example).
Reorganized the order of actions in the action menu to be more in line with normal/common/frequent use.
Protected items can no longer be used in any action that consumes or destroys the item.
Real-time games now load paused and no longer tick instantly. (Thanks Hiran!)
Reduced audio delay for UI sound effects.
Newer dialogs now display a highlight animation when trying to open them while they’re already open.
Other players can now swap positions with tamed creatures when PVP is disabled.
Messages are now grouped by turn.

Balance

Relic items can now have some magical properties upgraded past their normal limits.
Damage mitigation from parrying is now less randomized, leading to more overall damage blocked.
Damage for creatures attacking other creatures now takes into account their defense vulnerability and resistances.
“Hard” night-time spawns now start at -8000 reputation instead of -4000.
Sailing to civilization now resets your reputation.
Some creatures can now rarely damage items on the ground.
Reduced the delay after jumping slightly, allowing faster travel than normal movement.
Reduced monster spawn rate slightly.
When two creatures fight, their damage will now be reduced against each other when compared against players (since their attack values are balanced for players).
Importing a save game with more crafting recipes unlocked than are saved globally no longer automatically unlocks them for all saved games.
Thrown weapon damage has been reduced. Slung items are unaffected by this change.
Increased negative reputation given through lumberjacking, woodworking and blacksmithing.
Increased shark difficulty.
Increased the damage of non-weapon thrown items slightly (based on the weight of the item).
Shovels no longer have the “harvest” action and double axes have had their harvest tier reduced.

Bug Fixes

Fixed being able to repair some doodads that should have had repairability disabled. (Thanks num ca nem vi!)
Fixed being able to gather water/drink under boats. (Thanks num ca nem vi!)
Fixed “enter” not working for sending messages if the “Unfocus After Sending Message” option is disabled.
Fixed being able to use the navigate action without having a sextant. (Thanks DatSheepTho!)
Fixed errors when planting seeds under certain conditions. (Thanks riftborn!)
Fixed the “Unlock All Crafting Recipes” and “Reset Unlocked Crafting Recipes” buttons not working properly while not having a saved game loaded.
Fixed ‘may cause burns’ craft action prompt not working multiplayer.
Fixed “swamp” water being referred to as “sea” in treasure map riddles. (Thanks Shim Panzé III!)
Fixed a failure to load saved games with unloaded modded items. (Thanks Captain Tofu!)
Fixed a failure to save games due to an issue with merchant NPCs.
Fixed being able to equip/unequip/swap items while the game is paused.
Fixed dual-wielding only using the primary hand’s damage types. (Thanks King Smidgens!)
Fixed being able to drag equipment slot icons.
Fixed being able to rest/sleep when there was an NPC/untamed creature standing on you.
Fixed the “Grab All” button not respecting the filter text. (Thanks 柯箴之!)
Fixed NPC being able to duplicate. (Thanks num ca nem vi!)
Fixed Starter Quest not showing the “Welcome” quest when starting a new game after quitting a previous game. (Thanks Wolpertinger!)
Fixed doodads that broke on a tile not copying all properties back into the item that drops (and deleting all of their contents if it was a container).
Fixed only a single challenge getting assigned in “Challenge” mode.
Fixed inaccuracies in bartering prices. (Thanks Captain Tofu!)
Fixed being able to reveal fog as a ghost in “Casual Mode”.
Fixed some actions being usable incorrectly.
Fixed creatures being able to spawn on the same tile as players in rare instances.
Fixed the temperature system forgetting the calculated temperature of some tiles incorrectly, causing temperature to be recalculated too often.
Fixed being able to end up in objects after traveling.
Fixed tooltip memory leaks.
Fixed digging dirt in certain biomes producing incorrect tiles, resources and water types.
Fixed input sequences as action bindings not working if the first keystroke is a movement key.
Fixed creatures not losing interest when dealing no damage to another creature after some time (unless in attack mode).
Fixed slow saves due to large amounts of merchants.
Fixed multiple swamp water puddles not producing tiles. (Thanks Hiran!)
Fixed a rare issue where items could stay on your cursor when using the drop bind after starting a drag on an item. (Thanks Davnell!)
Fixed minimum sizes for dialogs not accounting for the native scale factor.
Fixed puddles not freezing properly.
Fixed neutral creatures not attacking tamed creatures back.
Fixed magical trap damage happening twice for players.
Fixed opening doodad containers not opening in a unique dialog position. (Thanks Ratha Wynter!)
Fixed multiple actions not being usable with items in protected containers. (Thanks riftborn!)
Fixed seawater always overtaking swamp water. (Thanks psusi!)
Fixed some fire-related errors.
Fixed thirst reducing too quickly. (Hotfixed) (Thanks Kadrak!)
Fixed magical skill properties on items not getting upgraded properly. (Thanks Anketam!)
Fixed randomly dropped completed tattered map items sometimes being maps that a player has drawn.
Fixed the “open container” action not being available when facing a merchant with a trade dialog open or a doodad container with the container dialog open. (Thanks Gyuri (kustox)!)
Fixed dismount/ride and attack being bound to the same key by default. (Thanks Vallivanting!)
Fixed swapping your weapons not working sometimes.
Fixed jumping not working correctly at high strength levels. (Thanks Arnkh!)
Fixed some tattered map riddle grammar. (Thanks DatSheepTho!)
Fixed ‘Grab All’ not showing moved item messages.
Fixed some items decaying into other items with incorrect starting decay values.
Fixed losing a turn when dismounting minecarts and boats. (Thanks riftborn!)
Fixed not being able to dismount from a vehicle if there’s an item on the tile. (Thanks riftborn!)
Fixed not being able to press shift to display “Hidden Unless Holding” tooltips outside of the main game (options, main menu, etc.)
Fixed butchering lava beetles releasing lava before the corpse is fully carved.
Fixed stamina reduction happening when exiting vehicles. (Thanks riftborn!)
Fixed creatures not leaving fire when they were being attacked.
Fixed NPCs not emitting light from their torches.
Fixed doodad containers not saving their position or sort order/direction.
Fixed skeletons collapsing and duplicating themselves. (Thanks daily vlog!)
Fixed dragging an equipped item out of the equipment dialog not making the previous spot look ghost-like.
Fixed “Close Container” being present in the action menu when an inventory container was opened. (Thanks Gyuri (kustox)!)
Fixed keeping your inventory items when dying while traveling (after respawning). (Thanks King Smidgens!)
Fixed a rare issue where you could continue moving automatically after a save was loaded if the game saved while moving down tracks. (Thanks Gyuri (kustox)!)
Fixed failure to damage creatures when attacking not giving skill/reputation. (Thank Gyuri (kustox)!)
Fixed some UI quadrants/positions for HUD elements shifting incorrectly.
Fixed ghosts not being able to spawn on applicable certain tiles.
Fixed ‘Invalid serializer island chain’ errors when saving. (Thanks Jesus05!)
Fixed issues revealing fog of war after traveling. (Thanks josephgbryan!)
Fixed item names in tooltips not reflecting tattered map status.
Fixed lava beetles not spawning on tiles on fire.
Fixed various errors that could occur when doing things near the edge of the world.
Fixed loading a multiplayer game set to “Simulated Turns” not pausing by default.
Fixed “Server Shutting Down” errors when attempting to connect to a server.
Fixed a save conversion/upgrade error.
Fixed mouse tooltips not having padding between them and the cursor.
Fixed undiscovered islands in the islands dialog not having a tooltip.
Fixed multiplayer clients sometimes timing out during island travel.
Fixed multiplayer desyncs related to “Alter” and “Exude” actions.
Fixed multiplayer desyncs related to opening chests that were on fire.
Fixed navigating through the in-game help leading to an inescapable greyed-out screen. (Thanks Dub!)
Fixed newly discovered crafts not showing up with highlighted color (yellow) if they couldn’t be crafted.
Fixed merchants not getting the proper equipment in some biomes.
Fixed pathing issues for tamed creatures that can break doodads.
Fixed reloading the game deleting messages past 50.
Fixed reorganising menu bar buttons making the button icons go waaaay off to the left.
Fixed slimes producing a sound and message stating they combined when they maybe didn’t.
Fixed some action tooltips with contextual names displaying duplicate action icons. (Thanks 柯箴之!)
Fixed some links not working correctly in the help menu.
Fixed some ores/mountain resources not generating correctly on some biomes.
Fixed item notifiers not showing the correct item types for the displayable item system (like those used with tattered maps).
Fixed menu bar button keybindings sometimes not working when the menu bar is hidden.
Fixed the win/death screens being blurry.
Fixed alpha not working correctly for overlays.
Fixed tamed mudskippers/fish blocking/freezing path to tile on occasion.
Fixed old or server saves showing an empty thumbnail.
Fixed temperature changes happening one turn later.
Fixed the default crafting/inventory/container view/sort not being selected properly when first loading a game.
Fixed the endurance magical property being applied incorrectly in some instances. (Thanks DerSimon!)
Fixed the first message that would appear to be invisible if it had no source type.
Fixed the game save tooltip reporting an incorrect save size when loading two saves consecutively.
Fixed throwing items not showing usage errors in tooltips. (Thanks Hiran!)
Fixed tooltip visibility options other than the default (hold shift to show more information) not being applied when loading the game.
Fixed the crafting dialog title being an incorrect size when changing interface scale.
Fixed some news formatting issues.

Technical

Running Wayward on the Steam Deck will now use the native Linux client by default instead of Proton.
Upgraded the pseudo-random algorithm for new islands to reduce artifacts and increase performance.
Hard crashes are now logged and dumped into a “crashes” folder in the main Wayward directory for diagnosis.
Improved rendering performance of multiple viewports.
Updated to Electron to version 22.3.5.

Modding

Breakpoints are now more useful for us and modders — when developer tools are enabled, if the game hasn’t been able to run the input (keyboard/mouse) loop in over a second, it considers all buttons “un-pressed.” This prevents getting keys stuck down if you triggered a breakpoint while moving or holding an action slot button down, for example.
Improved moddability of creatures, allowing special attacks to be set in creature descriptions.
The "+mod" commands now default to working with the current directory if a directory was not provided.
Added more commonly used revision control software folders to the ignore list when uploading mods. (Thanks 柯箴之!)
Fixed some documentation. (Thanks Amax!)

Mods

Magicology

Introducing “Magicology”, a mod that adds mana, magic wands, spells, and summonable creatures.

Debug Tools

You can now inspect items with right-click. The item inspector now supports modifying durability/decay, and viewing contents (for item containers.)
Added an option in the game end screen to “revert death,” which restores your inventory and equipped items along with a heal.
Fixed the heal action not healing the frostbite status effect.
Added a “decay” bulk item action.
Fixed durability bars not working and tooltips being inaccurate after using bulk actions to set durability higher than normal.
Added a new “Temperature” panel, listing some global temperature information and providing multiple overlays for tile-based temperature.
Fixed missing FOV updates when placing templates & updating growing stages.
Fixed spawning particles and sound effects not working.
Fixed setting “All” skills not working.
Fixed the game freezing when fully zooming out
FOV is now updated when painting tiles.
You can now teleport onto tiles with non-blockable things on them.
You can now set skills up to 200%.
FOV transition is now removed when toggling fog.
The tame button now keeps creatures tamed forever.

TARS

Will now run away further from creatures when trying to sleep.
Fixed TARS taking a long time thinking about what to do.
Fixed attempting to fish on improper tiles/spots.
Won’t fish near sharks when they can’t handle sharks.
Fixed attempting to perform actions after leaving a game.
Fixed hoarding water stills in their inventory instead of placing them down.
Fixed forgetting to desalinate seawater after gathering water.
Fixed trying to place things over tracks.
Fixed some memory issues related to the ‘Debug Logging’ option.

Balancing Tools

Added the ability to select the quality of the equipment created.

Bacon’s Call 🐷

New