This week we have been busy tweaking new player interaction, improving UI/UX, and fixing some of the bugs in our backlog. Unless there is anything game-breaking that comes up, this will be the last minor patch in the 2.3 series. We are eager to get to work on some of the bigger features and additions in beta 2.4 (and also hopefully clear out our Bug Reports forum).
Today marks the first anniversary of Wayward’s Steam debut. Of course, I, and now, “we” have been working on Wayward much longer than that; although, the exact start date and therefore real anniversary is a bit tougher to track down. So, let’s go with April 22nd, the new semi-official Wayward anniversary day!
Let’s take a look back at how far Wayward has come:
Now that’s some prime Wayward nostalgia! Is anybody interested in a commentated version of something like this?
We just released beta 2.3.3 yesterday and have already got started on 2.3.4, which will probably wrap the 2.3.x series up once released. Then, on to bigger and better things in 2.4! Stay tuned for our 2.4 wishlist discussion thread and poll coming up soon.
As always, we thank you for your continued support with our project and hope it continues to grow at a steady pace for years to come.
We’re pleased tonight to release the third patch in the 2.3 series.
We have some pretty exciting stuff, including some brand new features and many improvements/balancing tweaks. We may have went a little overboard this week.
Some of these changes and additions may seem a bit odd for a minor patch, but they are actually part of our ongoing not-so-secret multiplayer testing that we are now actively developing for a future major release.
We’re coming at you with another minor patch in the 2.3.x series, this time focusing even heavier on bugs with some more improvements to last week’s item weight changes.
Our plan currently is to do these weekly minor updates until our priority list has been exhausted or we think it’s time to move on to working on beta 2.4. It’s looking like we will have a 2.3.3 and possibly a 2.3.4 as well at our current rate.
I’ve also had a few questions about the team and development schedule in general as of late, so I just wanted to clear some of those questions up:
Wayward is a hobby project, and all the development happens in our free time. It’s a big game with an even bigger todo list. We are constantly improving and adding to it and have no plans to stop that. Thanks for all the support ya’ll!
We have a small patch for you tonight with a handful of fixes and improvements. We are just getting started on the 2.3.x series of minor patches, but we wanted to get this one quickly as it includes some priority fixes for modders/modifications.
We have also reworked a lot of weight systems in the game – making sure items stick to their normal ranges, especially when we change things in between versions. Things were quickly getting out of hand, especially with all the iron changes recently.
You may also notice some “thanks” at the end of fixes. We have started keeping track and crediting bug reports. It’s no secret we rely heavily on the community for bug discovery. It makes sense to credit you all with finding any bugs. We have some additional ideas for this in the future as well.
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.
Excuse the silence on the upcoming beta 2.3 as of late. We have decided to release these newsletters roughly in the middle of the wait for each major release for Wayward, instead of the original bi-monthly plan. We are still working hard on all the new planned changes, and even some yet-to-be-announced-ultra-mega-secret ones. More on that another time; let’s start it off with the postmortem on beta 2.2.
Beta 2.2 Postmortem
With beta 2.2, we saw the biggest major patch to date with close to 150 changes and additions. It wasn’t without its issues though, prompting a couple quick hotfixes and quicker patches after the release. We try to mitigate this as much as possible, but our resources are limited as always. We appreciate all the early access players coming along for the ride and helping us discover the bugs and help improve Wayward with suggestions.
We were pretty happy with the release overall, and players seemed to enjoy all the new goodies as well. There was a large focus on balance and new-player experience improvements in beta 2.2, as well as the subsequent minor patches. We would like to continue that trend with beta 2.3; however, we would maybe like to skew it more to the general improvements, bug fixes, and new additions side of things a bit more to keep the older players coming back for the major releases as well.
For a long time now, playing the free version of beta 1.9.3 has been reserved for online browser play only. Tonight, we are releasing the offline version for download.
While this is not a huge deal, it could be useful for getting some new players into the game. I also know of a few people who have requested a downloadable copy of 1.9.3. So here’s an early Christmas present to them! All files and assets are now easily editable/hackable as well. Everything exists within the package.nw (or app.nw on Mac OS X) directory.
Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 or later
OS X Mavericks 10.9 or later
64-bit Ubuntu 14.04+, Debian 8+, openSUSE 13.1+, or Fedora Linux 21+
In other news, we changed up our schedule a bit and are now working on beta 2.3 instead of another patch in the 2.2 series. We don’t have anything new to share a the moment, but will probably share some updates in the upcoming weeks. As always, you can follow along with the development via our Trello.
We are continuing our work on the 2.2 release with this minor patch. This one includes some more bug fixes, improvements, UI updates, and some significant modding changes.
We normally keep the modding changes minimal so as to not break any Workshop submissions after the major releases, but we wanted to provide better options to the modders during the longer wait while we work on beta 2.3. Apologies in advance, but we hope the new options and changes are exciting for your projects.
I think we might still have another patch 2.2 patch in us yet!
New
Added support for shift + right clicking on items within containers to move all of the same type.
Added a creature taming hint.
Added ability to enable and disable all mods.
Bugs
Fixed an issue where an invisible help window was blocking input inside the options window (caused by a change in beta 2.2.2).
Fixed a bug where deleting game data did not reload the game afterwards.
Fixed a bug where the height was incorrectly set on the hint windows that popped up during the loading a game and removed the ability for some hints to be shown during load.
Fixed some improper title-cased strings in the language file. Literally minor text fixes.
Fixed the preserve action showing up as “preservative with..”.
Fixed a player head graphic issue that caused some pixels to be improperly offset while swimming.
Fixed a bug where if you had a doodad placed on a flammable tile, it would not require a fuel for the fire.
Fixed an issue that caused either duped, invisible, or broken items when they were moved too quickly between containers and inventory while also passing a turn/moving.
Fixed an issue that caused poor accuracy when sorting item in inventory while there were items quickslotted.
Fixed a broken text string when deleting your game “you want to delete this game?”.
Balance
Aberrant creatures will now always give negative malignity on death regardless of type.
Dismantling and disassembling items now increase or decrease malignity opposite to the value used when crafting said item.
Improvements
The malignity hint now mentions the special rules regarding caves and night creature spawns.
Renamed items should now show the renamed name whenever possible.
The “enter” bind can now be used for selecting “Yes” inside confirmation screens.
You can now use a raft in any depth of water, making it so you can equip a lit torch before rafting.
Fixed aberrant creatures not making alternate creature noises when tamed or while making idle sounds.
Default actions for thistle seeds, acorns, and poison ivy seeds changed to “plant” from “eat”.
Tinder has been renamed “wooden shavings” as to not conflict with the new “tinder” grouping.
The main menu now allows more content to be displayed, especially on lower resolutions. Additionally, some new menu animations have been added.
Other improvements to main menu design with added effects and improved readability.
UI elements that are not clickable no longer have hover effects.
Added a small delay when moving and turning into a resource tile to prevent accidental gathering.
The Starter Quest will now update the quest objectives when an item is dropped or destroyed (removed) as well.
Containers in your inventory will now show the 50% reduced weight totals within the tooltip.
The mage cloak has been renamed to “mage robe”. Since it’s a robe…
The in-world graphic for the raft now matches the item more closely.
Fixed an issue where some highscores text would overflow due to their length.
Let’s fix up some more of those bugs and balance issues!
We still have some work to do in the 2.2.x series, but here’s another medium batch of balance tweaks, bug fixes, and miscellaneous smaller improvements. Oh, and a couple minor new things too! There’s a good chance if you’ve reported something in the last week or so, you’ll see it in the list below. But if not, like I said, we still have some plans for more of these quicker minor patches.
Have fun!
Bugs
Fixed a bug that did not allow water routing (digging pathways of water).
Fixed an issue where tile animations would continue to occur after a lava tile was changed into something else.
Fixed a bug that was showing the corpse carving hint when walking over blood instead of corpses.
Fishing on to land no longer produces a water sound effect.
Fixed an issue where a never-ending saving screen would occur when saving an older game that used mods that added creatures.
Added a check to stop errors when dismantling an impossibly weighted item (that appeared in beta 2.0).
Fixed an issue that changed doodads into other doodads when travelling to a new island after reloading that game (due to save conversion).
Fixed a bug where the character’s facing direction was not updated when a confirmation screen was triggered.
Fixed a bug where breaking open a locked chest would not spill its contents.
You are no longer allowed to place tiles or build doodads over lava.
Fixed an issue where the new milestone fix was causing the game not to load. This was hot-fixed within the 2.1.1 update.
Balance
Hostile creatures now break aggression more commonly.
Malignity from skill use now occurs whether or not you gained in that skill. To counter-balance this, many skills have a much decreased malignity gain. Additionally, some skills now reduce malignity as well (new feature).
The malignity you gain from stat gains is now scaled based on the stat itself. The malignity gained from this method now starts off lower than previously.
Decreased spawning chance of claw worms slightly.
Aberrant creatures now have a cap on attack damage values.
Aberrant creature scaling now uses a linear progression, rather than a step/staircase; more smoothly ramping the difficulty.
Reduced plant spreading chance slightly.
Increased the damage of the flintlock pistol slightly.
Slightly increased chances of resources on digging.
Decreased effectiveness of equipment/armor and parrying against burn damage.
Improvements
Increased overall performance and reduced CPU/memory usage. These changes will have a greater impact on lower-end systems.
Plants now heal themselves over time (durability repairs itself).
Fade in/out transitions of windows/overlays are now a bit smoother.
Added coconuts palms to oasis templates.
Gathering plants and other environmental doodads no longer reduce their default durability.
Digging lava with hands now burns you.
You now receive the completion point for a Starter Quest as soon as you have reached it automatically so you can skip it if you missed clicking on the “Complete Quest” if going back a quest.
Added a “Close” button to the ending of the Starter Quest.
Added a “Start Quest” button to the beginning of the Starter Quest.
New
Added more different types of lava templates and tweaked existing ones.
Casting your net/line out (via fishing) on to items will now pick them up.
Modding
Added ability to specify amount of damage with onCreatureDamage.
