Crafted in Color Update 8.7.0

Greetings, Wayfarers!

Crafted in Color Update 8.7.0 is on the way, bringing new finishes and decorating controls to your builds. Preview a surface directly on an object before spending supplies to apply it, with more choices for the materials that make a place your own.

 

Building and Painting

Updated Fabricator window

The Fabricator window now includes a dedicated set of Style controls alongside its existing building tools. Select a placed object to work on its appearance.

• Design (paint palette): Opens the appearance editor for the selected object. Choose a surface region, browse or search for a finish, and preview supported color and pattern changes.
• Copy (eyedropper): Copies the selected object’s appearance, including its finishes, colors, and pattern settings. You can use Ctrl-C for this (and it is remappable).
• Paste (paint brush): Applies the copied style to another object’s compatible surface regions. You’ll need the appropriate finishes and paints in your backpack. You can use Ctrl-V for this (and it is remappable).
• Reset (eraser): Removes the selected object’s custom appearance and restores its original look. This does not refund the supplies previously used.
• Grid (uh… grid): Shows or hides the building grid, letting you switch between an alignment reference and an unobstructed view of your work. The grid no longer follows your cursor, and instead stays within the bounds of the homestead.

The existing Undo and Redo controls also support pasted styles and appearance resets. Duplicate preserves an object’s customized appearance, provided you have the required building and decorating supplies.

We moved the Fabricator window to the right side so that you have a less obstructed view of your building area.

 

Design your surfaces

The Design window previews changes directly on the selected object, so you can see how a finish looks before committing. Objects with multiple supported surface regions can have those regions styled separately.

Browse finishes by category or search for a particular material. The player’s available finishes and paint colors come from supplies in their backpack, with quantities shown in the editor.

For supported finishes, you can also adjust pattern scale and orientation—useful for changing the size or direction of repeating textures.

• OK applies your changes and consumes the required supplies.
• Cancel, Escape, or closing the window discards the preview without spending anything.
• Reset inside Design discards changes made since opening the editor while keeping it open. This differs from the Fabricator’s Style Reset, which restores the object’s original appearance.

You can move and adjust your camera outside the Design panel to inspect your work from different angles.

 

Craftable finishes

New finish recipes and skill unlocks expand the ways you can decorate:

• Metal: A broad selection of metal surfaces, including brushed, polished, patterned, and anodized finishes.
• Stone: Dressed and polished stone, gem finishes, and manufactured surfaces, plus dedicated paintable stone finishes.
• Wood: Natural grains, boards, panels, parquet patterns, and painted or coated wood.
• Plastic: Solid-color, two-tone mottled, and three-color hex finishes, including an emissive option.
• Rubber: Rubber surface finishes for your builds.

Finishes are inventory items that can be crafted, stacked, stored, and applied to compatible objects. Their names and appearance distinguish the material, selected grain, and crafted colors.

Plastic, anodized, and rubber recipes use dyes during crafting: one color for solid plastic, two for mottled plastic, and three for hex finishes. Emissive hex plastic also requires a Phosphor Crystal.

 

Painting progression

Three skills in the Crafting tree progressively unlock more control over paintable finishes:

• Basic Painting: One paint color applied across the finish’s linked paintable channels.
• Detail Painting: An independently colored detail, alongside the remaining linked coat.
• Advanced Painting: Independent control over every supported paint channel.

The effect of each channel depends on the finish: it might control the base coat, grain, cracks, gaps, or another accent.

Painting requires an applied, paintable finish. An object’s original material does not automatically make it paintable. Natural stone and gems, uncoated wood, and crafted dyed surfaces retain their material character.

 

Carpentry and colored crafting

Carpentry is a crafting profession with its own XP and recipe collection. Its progression includes:

• Basic hardwood, softwood, and plywood finishes, including painted and weathered variants.
• Wood Selection for decorative grains such as burl, curly, flame, quilted, and spalted wood.
• Joinery for supported beam, board, and panel patterns that preserve the selected grain.
• Parquetry for decorative arrangements.
• Coated Joinery and Painted Parquets for painted versions of those surfaces.

Painted and coated wood recipes use paint. Their crafted color travels with the finish item and is included when that finish is applied.

 

Supplies, costs, and saved styles

Applying or changing a surface finish consumes the matching finish supply. Painting consumes one paint for each changed linked group or independently controlled channel.

Previewing, cancelling, or accepting an unchanged appearance costs nothing. Applying a crafted colored finish includes its existing color; repainting it afterward uses paint where supported.

Copying a style is free. Pasting and duplicating check the required supplies before making changes. If something is missing, the operation is rejected without partially spending your materials. Undo and Redo restore an already-paid appearance without charging again or refunding supplies.

Applied finishes and colors remain on your builds when you leave and return.

 

Paints and dyes at the starbase

The starbase Tool Shop now sells paints and dyes in 12 subdued colors, covering neutrals, warm tones, blues, and violet.

Each purchase provides 50 uses for 1,000 klaatu. Paint is used for painting and applicable wood recipes; dye is used in colored crafting recipes. They are separate supplies and cannot substitute for each other.

 

New Generic Building Pieces

We are adding close to 100 new generic building pieces that can accept finishes applied by the new paints and finishes system. These new parts will be built with recipes in the Construction skill tree.

 

Known Issues and limitations

• We have not rolled out fabrics or wallpapers yet.
• Some of the wood grains and other textures are not sufficiently differentiated yet.
• Players cannot craft dyes and paints yet.
• The UI is still a bit dense; we expect to keep refining it.
• We added a lot of recipes and skills, and it results in a lot more items for inventory if you want a wide range of materials. We will be exploring raising the skill cap.

 

Creature AI and Pathfinding

• Added additional pathfinding to creatures to help prevent them from jumping off cliffs
• Creatures can now attempt to jump to get out of holes, climb hills, or get over obstacles
• Brought back basic creature melee attacks and adjusted some basic characteristics of several of the creatures

 

Improved Missions

We have improvements coming for the mission system.

• Introduced multi-step missions to the Mission Board. These mission chains may chain differently each time you see them.
• Support for player choice branching missions. For some missions, this is a direct pop-up that allows players to choose what action they’d like to take. For others, you may receive multiple objectives and the outcome of the main mission is routed based on which objective you choose to complete. Similar to Chaining missions, making the same choices may not always yield the same end result.
• Better fallback and “mission location failed” support, to help with missions failing to work on populated or inhospitable planets. You should see far fewer disappearing missions or alerts saying “The TPL has made an embarrassing clerical error.”
• Until now, Kill Mission targets have been using legacy creature data. Now they will use the new creatures
• Kill Missions now support requiring killing multiple creatures
• Mission Boards now restock missions randomly and periodically do a full refresh instead of trying to maintain a specific spread of mission types
• The “Mission Carry” limit has been changed from “1 of each type of mission”, to a simple limit of 3 Mission Board missions. You can select the same mission type multiple times.
• Fixed a bug that limited mission selection to 4 planets
• The existing simple missions have been given more flavor

Additional mission content and variety will be added at a later point.

 

Improved Performance Monitor

We’re upgrading the performance monitor that you can reach with F9, to change it to something nicer looking and that offers new information such as your ping, packet loss, and server load info.

• The “traffic lights” will change from blue to yellow to red depending on performance. These are colorblind friendly.
• You can hover over each traffic light to get plain language descriptions of what is going on.
• FPS is scaled off of your framerate cap and your VSync settings, so the yellow and red states are dependent on what you have those set to.
• Ping measures your internet connection to the servers.
• Server gives an indication of whether the server is under heavy load.
• Memory tracks memory usage on your client.

You can also click the down arrow to get a more detailed view; it now has a text summary at the top, followed by more technical details underneath.

 

Party UI Improvements

Party members can now open a compact roster from the Party Members option beside the chat box.

The sidebar:

• Displays up to 10 party members, with the leader listed first.
• Shows each member’s name, health, wounds, and relevant status-effect icons.
• Marks your character with (You).
• Marks members beyond tracking range as (out of range).
• Warns when a member is critically injured or dead.
• Supports right-click interactions, including leader actions such as promoting or kicking members.
• Allows individual or party-wide HUD waypoints to be shown or hidden.
• Respects HUD visibility, scale, and screen-width settings.
• The sidebar can display offline party members.

 

Homestead Terrain Shield

We have added a simple invisible shield to the homestead to help prevent materials from flowing into a homestead when turned on.

• Shield will be turned on by default and will cover the edge of your homestead in any empty cell.
• You can turn the shield on/off by accessing the Homestead control unit

 

Client Telemetry

• We are going to add slightly more detailed data collection to our client telemetry in order to better diagnose issues. This data is all anonymized. There will be a new popup the first time you log into the client so you can accept or decline submitting this anonymized data. After that, it will be available as an accountwide option setting.

 

GovBot Improvements

• The initial GovBot screen shows the same info to both citizens and non-citizens: mayor name, population, edicts, non-Anyone restrictions.
• Initial screen no longer shows deposit progress to citizens – that’s already on the deposit screen and the initial screen was too long.
• Farming and xyloslicing now have separate planet-wide permission settings. Once a GovBot reaches level 10, the mayor can choose whether each activity is open to everyone, citizens, licensed citizens, or the mayor. Mayors can grant farming and xyloslicing licenses to individual citizens.

 

Misc. Fixes and Changes

• Correct an issue with Grav Mesh durability that allowed it to continue to work even though it was broken. Make sure to repair your Grav Mesh if needed.
• Updated the information that is provided as you travel through a portal.
  • Information such as Mayor or Servitor edicts are now shown
• Fixed an issue that caused several titles to not be selectable
• Small updates to the Character Controller to help with player jitter