It’s been a long road (longer than we had hoped for) with many additional things we wanted to get in the game before releasing. We wanted the step from 1.9.2 to 2.0 to be significant and meaningful in comparison and we hope that we have achieved that in the minds of old and new players alike.
There’s no time for a break though! Wayward Beta 2.0 on Steam marks a new era for Wayward – one with continual and faster updates once again. There’s no plans of stopping development for Wayward, with plenty left on the todo. We hope that you come a long for the ride and never stop posting feedback!
Are you down to mod Wayward beta 2.0? We now have a written guide on how to get started available on GitHub. But you’ll have to wait until the 22nd to fully test of course! 😢
As with most things Wayward, this is a working draft, and we will continue to improve and expand on the guide and the modding system in general. Let us know your thoughts/questions!
Today, we have sent out a special email to all the previous Wayward donators.
I am posting this here just in case some of you have not received it. Many of the emails date back as far as 2012; I realize many of the emails may not even be active or in use any longer. If this is the case for you, please contact me as soon as possible.
To answer a question I get a couple times here and there: Donations for Wayward have been disabled for awhile now, and we have no plans to re-open them.
Oh, and that Discord thing? Yep, we are doing that too now! Come hang out and chat! https://discord.gg/wayward
Two of the questions I get asked the most is “When is Beta 2.0 coming out?” and the next one is “Is this dead? What is taking so long?”. Well, you now know the answer to the first one, and for the second, wait… that’s actually two questions. Jeez, one at a time please. It’s a bit of a long explanation. But here goes:
I (and everybody now involved) work on Wayward as a part-time hobby. Because I found a couple new guys to help me on the project, beta 2.0 has taken a lot longer than I thought. We have scrapped most of the old code. We have a brand new rendering engine (new graphics), we have a fully-featured modding system/support (through Steam Workshop), and a lot of things were re-written. This is on top of the massive changelog of other new features/changes and fixes.
New updates will not take a year+ to bring out. And because we are on Steam now, those updates will get pushed out sooner than before and make their way to everybody, automatically (well, if you have auto updates on Steam). We will also be doing a special developer branch in case you want to try brand new shiny features before everybody else. Steam Workshop will also make it easy for players to make their own changes, add content, features and more – and you can add it to your game in two clicks.
Yes, Wayward is Early Access, and Wayward is beta. Early Access can get a bad rap on Steam. Early Access means the exact same thing as beta does to us. I have no plans to stop development on Wayward. I hope our work over the past 4-5 years has convinced you of this.
Thanks to all that have helped on Wayward in some way over the years! Your support is awesome!
Some of you are getting antsy about beta 2.0, and rightfully so. Our default answer about when it’s coming out is “soon”. It’s mostly been said as a type of “in-joke”, but I can see how that would be a bit frustrating if you weren’t in on it. So when is beta 2.0 coming out?
The truth is, we don’t know. That is why we say “soon”. You could replace that with “when it’s ready”, “when it’s out”, or any other form of indeterministic sayings. When we know, you will know. The Steam page will be up where our release date will be shown to all.
For now, we can offer some new screenshots and some updates to what I said in the last developer log and the last post.
Oh ya, and it really is “soon” now, as you can see by the nearly barren Trello. We are in final testing and polishing mode.
Screenshots
Winter Keep
Beach House
Caves
Dialogs
Terrain Generation
Treasure Hunting
Updates of Note
You can now drag and drop to the ground from your inventory.
You can now place containers within containers.
Crafting now will look through containers in your inventory to find valid items for recipes.
Containers will now show their contained item weight in the title/tooltip.
You can now use items from containers inside your inventory.
You can now sort crafts by category (shows up in unique formatted listing). Many new item categories added with this change.
A completely overhauled interface/UI has been implemented with new art and design.
Craft recipes will now unlock if you have only a single of each item required in the craft.
You can now “Drop All” in to water.
Fog of war added (black areas that you have not yet explored).
A new dither style of fog of war/line of sight has been added. You can toggle between the two via options.
All monsters now have facing direction graphics and attack animations.
This is just a taste of things to come. You can read about the other things in the Changelog as per usual.
If you’ve missed our last social updates with the field of the view, line of sight and other lighting things, here’s a handy history of stuff since our last progress video:
I’m here tonight to showcase some new experiments done by Sassafrass that plays around with a neat dithering effect. We have also done away with the limited black radius around the character, and re-added the mini-map functionality, in a new way, while zooming out. There’s also some lighting changes thrown in for good measure. Without further ado:
Many of you have probably noticed a subscribe option on the site when commenting or registering. I was eventually going to use this feature to mail out announcements and the like.
Unbeknownst to me, this wasn’t actually saving any data, so it looks like we are going to start over. If you want to keep in the know on everything Unlok and Wayward, then you can head on over here to subscribe:
Umm (lol), wow, it’s been awhile. Here’s the much requested developer log #10. I go over a lot of the upcoming changes in beta 2.0. I miss a few things as usual, but you should get the idea. A lot is changing!
Special shout-outs to Sassafrass, Spacetech and Goaticide!
It’s been awhile since I’ve done an update on the blog. As some of you know, I have been streaming Wayward development quite a lot, but otherwise, I haven’t been doing the proper blog updates. A lot has been done for 2.0 so far, and while we are getting close, there’s still a long road ahead from the looks of it. For day to day updates, make sure to check out the Trello Todo page. If you want to see how much work has gone into 2.0 so far, make sure to scroll through the giant “Done” list. Wayward is not dead.
You may also notice the immediate Wayward team has grown a bit in the last little while. We now have 5 active contributors with us:
Sassafrass (Programming)
Spacetech (Programming)
Dusty “Goaticide” Melling (Illustrations, Art)
Vaughn “Drath” Royko (Design, Programming, Art, Sound, Public Relations, Website)
Richard “Orillian” Hobson (Programming)
But enough about that, here’s a preview of what Wayward looks like so far in beta 2.0 through the help of the new Wayward team! Keep in mind, it’s still a work in progress (no lighting/no line of sight).
Not only does it look better with all of it’s fancy tile-mapping and new graphics, it also performs better. Wayward has moved to WebGL, making rendering blazing fast. None of this would be possible without the help from Sassafrass, Spacetech or Goaticide, so special thanks for them are in order.
Sometimes less options are better, as we’ve come to find out with gathering.
I gave every player the option to gather with any item they wanted. Which lead to confusion and unwanted cases where torches, shields and other valuable items were sacrificed unknowingly. Coming up in 2.0 we will see gathering get an overhaul.
1. “Gather” is now a specific item use. If you do not have a “gathering” item equipped, then you will use your hands. Things like torches and shields do not have gather capabilities.
2. Gathering no longer randomly chooses a hand. If your right hand has a gathering item, it will use that. If not, it looks at your left hand next.
3. There is now a text-based and sound feedback when the tool you are using is effective or not for the certain type of gathering you are performing.
4. There is a new “gathered” message type visible in messages instead of simply “picked up” which was used before.
5. Adding an option to gather with a non-equipped item.
6. A bug was preventing higher tiered tools from benefiting gathering at all (besides durability). Now the attack value, mixed with the effectiveness from each tool will be used as extra chances at gathering. For example, using an Iron Pickaxe (+6 attack) for mining will give you the chance to get up to 8 items from a single gather. If you tried to use that same tool for lumberjacking, it would give 2 chances (it’s not effective for lumberjacking). 2 chances is the base amount for gathering with any tool, which is why the Iron Pickaxe gives 8 (6+2) for mining.
