Beacon’s Call Update #2

This beefy update brings a further smoothing out of the early gameplay and mechanics to help new players get into the game a bit easier among many bug fixes and other improvements.

The biggest overhaul here is to do with water – the coastal biome is generally richer with fresh water in the form of rivers scattered throughout the mountains leading you to not require a still in most cases. Speaking of which, a still might not be your best bet for desalination any longer due to the introduction of dripstones, which desalinate water without the use of fire or extra containers, making them a much easier-to-understand device.

There are tons of other changes as well that will help early and late-game players alike including stat gains no longer producing reputation losses among other reputation tweaks and modifications; there’s more to come on this system as a whole coming in the next major update.

Bonus Promo: A special shoutout to both Splattercat and Nookirum who both have recently covered the game on their channels:

Bonus Tip: Going forward, exploring your island is even more important. You want to find as many freshwater sources as possible. You may want to do this before setting up a base of operations.

New

• Added “dripstones”, a simplified desalination device.

• Required Steam Workshop mods are now automatically downloaded when joining multiplayer servers.
• Added a “drop on disassemble” option.
• Added “fairy rings” to the wetlands biome.

Improvements

• Changed the reputation stat display to instead display “Ferocity”, the threat level of spawned creatures, based on your reputation.
• Added icons to container dialog titles.

• Naturally created caves can no longer generate side by side to each other.
• Improved cave entrance generation. Cave entrances can no longer be narrow corridors and may generate in more interesting spots on the overworld.
• Items now appear at half resolution in 0.5x interface scale.
• Normal quality items now have a faint border to help darker items pop out from dialogs.
• NPCs will now swap positions with players if they are on a cave entrance when they ascend or descend.
• Randomly discovering and digging up treasure is now more of a surprise and doesn’t spawn treasure guardians.
• Item decay now displays the exact turns remaining when less than 200.
• Item piles are now distributed around doodads instead of on top of them.
• When dropping items on piles of items that are visually full, the placement will now cycle through the top row.
• Piles of items are now shown visually larger/more spread out.
• Protected spyglasses or sextants can no longer be used for travel if they would break. (Thanks DerSimon!)
• You can no longer attempt to start fires on cave entrances; however, you can now set fire to collapsed cave entrances. (Thanks httpsnet!)
• Add internal “contexts” to bindables in order to reduce the number of conflict warnings in the bindings menu.
• “Toggle container” is now the default action for containers instead of “open container”.
• Improved and fixed some issues with the defense inspection. There are now tooltips on some details in this inspection to help players understand how insulation works a bit better.
• Lit or unlit torches can no longer receive the elemental damage magical property. (Thanks DerSimon!)
• FOV transitions are now disabled when movement animation is disabled.
• The “Not for Sale item” grouping is no longer visible to players.

Balance

• Coastal islands now can have fresh water springs located in large mountain ranges.

• Water now has a chance of being depleted when routing it and not being from a large enough source.
• Water stills have been converted to metal-based boiler devices; a more advanced craft and desalination device.
• Gaining stats no longer affects reputation.
• Treasure chest guardians will now only spawn when digging chests at lower reputation levels.
• Water stills will now desalinate water slightly faster.
• Krakens no longer spawn by default in cave water on coastal.
• When digging/mining up cave entrances, you can no longer dig/mine into single tile caves.
• Water stills have been removed from the Starter Quest and replaced with a boiling fresh water quest.
• When using the Starter Quest on the coastal biome, you will now spawn by a pond.
• New players can no longer start with unpurified forms of water.
• Increased the size at which a water source becomes “permanent” where no water is lost on gather.
• The wetlands biome no longer produces as much fertile soil (or civilization score). (Thanks Chernosliv84!)
• Increased the distance in which cave entrances can appear next to each other when digging/mining.
• You now have to see your trap go off to get skill from it; however, building traps now raises your trapping skill.
• Reduced the chance of drake firebreathing when in combat.
• Increased the lockpicking difficulty and durability of chests above wooden.
• Reduced preservation chance of small bags.
• Backpacks now provide 2 defense instead of 1.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed attempting to sleep/rest nearby hostile creatures not waking the player. (Thanks Dragons!)
• Fixed multiple treasures spawning in the same locations with identical treasure maps to go along with them. Note that this fix will only apply to new islands. (Thanks num ca nem vi!)
• Fixed being able to replace unpassable tiles with water using puddles. (Thanks httpsnet!)
• Fixed doodad and item spawn chances being distributed incorrectly.
• Upon upgrading a save to Beacon’s Call (Update 2), any temperature will be recalculated, potentially fixing strange artifacts where heat appears to be generated from nothing. (Thanks httpsnet!)
• Fixed temperature persisting on lit doodad. (Thanks psusi!)
• Fixed digging for treasure still producing tile resources/changes when failing a skill check at digging up the treasure.
• Fixed many issues with lower interface scales.
• Fixed being able to set things down out of bounds or on void tiles. (Thanks Gyuri (kustox)!)
• Fixed bows not displaying the correct attack value in their tooltip. (Thanks Axxron, Scourge of the tts!)
• Fixed several issues when attempting to spawn water creatures when dropping food. (Thanks DerSimon!)
• Fixed “fire extinguisher” items not triggering “melted” properties. (Thanks Kitsune!)
• Fixed the “Template” biome from showing up in custom game mode options.
• Fixed swapping tiles with fish allowing them to go on to land. (Thanks DerSimon!)
• Fixed not being able to open item containers when facing an NPC.
• Fixed containers reporting the wrong weight when performing certain actions with items. (Thanks sechsauge!)
• Fixed skeletal remains not spawning correctly on wetlands biomes.
• Fixed cypress trees spawning on shallow fresh water on the coastal and wetlands biome (this should have been shallow swamp water).
• Fixed items with damage modifiers not burning into other items properly. (Thanks DerSimon!)
• Fix selected save count in the load game menu not getting updated when deleting an individual save.
• Fixed some plants and mushrooms spawning on grass in the wetlands biome.
• Fixed certain types of puddles not being removed properly. (Thanks tr1ger1n86!)
• Fixed stat bar color when empty and UI effects are disabled.
• Fixed a multiplayer desync that occurred when joining a server. (Thanks Kitsune!)
• Some old messages that appear in the message log have been fixed.
• Fixed an instance where lit doodads could show embers even though the stage of the fire was greater. (Thanks Petalwing!)
• The “Turns” value on save slot tooltips now matches the “Turns” value in the Reputation tooltip. (Thanks httpsnet!)
• Fixed mods list not always updating when removing mods.
• Fixed the loading screen being able to get stuck when failing to join a server that has mods.
• Fixed “alter” action not working on elemental damage type magical properties. (Thanks DerSimon!)
• Fixed mod count on the main menu not always being correct.
• Fixed the action slot icon persisting on an item after it had been cleared using the “Clear Slot” button in the actions drawer. (Thanks Petalwing!)
• Fixed “You cannot do that” messages appearing when pathing to tiles while using a “use slot while moving” action slot. (Thanks DerSimon!)
• Fixed Starter Quest dialog not remembering the last selection when re-opening the dialog.
• Fixed player names being incorrectly cased when used in messages where the sentence starts with their name.
• Fixed issues when attempting to load the same mod locally and through the workshop. (Thanks 柯箴之!)
• Fixed opened containers within chests not re-opening when loading a game.

Modding

• Stat gain (ie, Metabolism, Dexterity, and Strength) has been refactored to give modders full control over how custom stats are gained. (Thanks Sensakuma!)
• Added "@Register.override", a new, automatically-handled way of tweaking vanilla content. (Thanks Sensakuma!)
• Fixed app.asar not extracting properly. (Thanks huck!)
• When creating or updating a +script mod, your Node.js version is now compared to the version we recommend, and a warning is shown if it’s out of date.
• Added "@Register.equipType", allowing modders to add their own equipment slots. (Thanks olatuf!)

Mods

Debug Tools

• You can now teleport to treasure positions.
• Fixed numerous issues with the island dropdown in the general panel.
• Fixed the “layers” dropdown.
• Fixed tooltip flickering due to tile temperature inspection.
• Remember the last selected panel when re-opening the dialog.