Early Access HotFix 8.4.5

Hello, Wayfarers!

Hotfix 8.4.5 is here!

Our maintenance window will begin at 1:00 PM Pacific / 4:00 PM Eastern, and we expect servers to be back online by 3:00 PM Pacific / 6:00 PM Eastern. If maintenance wraps up sooner, keep an eye on Server Status for the latest updates.

This update brings another round of performance and stability improvements, including fixes for a major source of server crashes, one source of rubberbanding, and performance issues on frozen planets.

We’ve also made improvements across inventory management, movement and stamina, crafting, homesteads, markets and vendors, and more!

We’re continuing to track down additional sources of lag and server instability as we work to improve the Early Access experience.

 

Performance and Stability

• Fixed lag and stability issues on frozen planets. Ironically, being frozen was making trees hyperactive. I know, that’s a strange sentence.
• Fixed an issue with Building Tiles not retaining their rotation when a server crashed.
  • Some of you have had cases where building tiles either rotated or moved from where you had them; this was because their state wasn’t getting saved immediately, but instead awaiting the next long-term save sweep, and if there was a server issue in the meantime they would rollback individually.
  • We’re making them always save the moment they are moved or rotated.
• The gradual release of the rubberbanding fix is now fully deployed and it does seem to have cleared one particular cause of the issue. We continue to work on other sources of lag.
• We identified a different specific issue that was a major source of server crashes and corrected it. We have more to track down, but incidence is much reduced.
• Fixed an issue with the Spores spawned on Haven and in Corruption Encounters to improve performance when these are active.
• Corrected an issue with some players getting stuck loading from zone to zone or during login. The issue was that loading timed out; we have extended the timeout time, and will be continuing to work on this so that the loading time speeds up more and the timeout is therefore never hit.

Inventory Management – Merge All, Filtering, Stacking

We are adding a “merge all” option on right-click which will combine all of that type of resource into one item. This will average the stats, just like doing a single stack combine does.

Along the way we will also make merging more robust so nothing is ever lost (we have fixed a bug that was losing items on merging), and allow merging of quantities under 1 unit (no more fractional amounts getting stuck).

We have added a Type selection to the Inventory to allow an additional filter when viewing your inventory.

We also addressed an issue that was causing item loss when moving things in and out of the toolbelt quickly while under latency.

Recipes are now marked as Stackable to help with inventory clutter.

 

Movement Speed Adjustments

We are adjusting the modifiers for various terrains that affect player speed.

• grassy terrain will become the new baseline and be around 10% faster than it was previously
• mud and other messy surfaces will slow you some from that baseline
• bare terrain will be slightly faster than grass
• roads and the like will be even faster

Stamina has been adjusted to allow sprinting much more often, and for a slightly longer duration, which should make the run/sprint cadence feel more like other games with stamina mechanics. The rate at which you accumulate stamina wounds (“Exhausted”) has been notably decreased to account for the increased usage.

 

Crafting Updates

Fabrication Lathe Recipe Fixes

• Tier II now requires Metal Plate and Hardpoint Mount from Machine Shop I.
• Tier IV now requires Polymer Sheet from Fabrication Lathe III.
• Tier VI now requires Smart Polymer from Fabrication Lathe V.
• Lab Bench I now requests Any Rock

Water and Fire Fixes

• Fresh Water and Salt Water are now extractable using the Terraformer – reliably if you mine frozen material, and with difficulty if you mine the bottom of the body of water. The majority of water on worlds right now is Salt Water, in the future there will be more worlds with Fresh Water as well.
• Cactus and Mature Saguaro can yield Fresh Water.
• Matrix Manifold Heat and Charged Canister now accept Any Reactive Gas as well as any other recipe that requires “Fire”.
• Fire is no longer included in the developer gas crate and existing Fire items safely convert to Methane.
• Ballhogs now have a smaller chance to drop Methane.

Updating clothing labels and recipe descriptions to match with items

• Normalized all 20 stale woven/knit labels and recipe descriptions.

• Saguaro Fiber now carries cactusFiber, desertFiber, and plantFiber.
• Added creature-specific hides and repair Loom leather recipes to make use of the tags

Added hide doobers and Skyshark skin with appropriate hide taxonomy tags.

• Repaired Loom leather recipes and updated Loom skill descriptions to match the revised materials.

Fix water harvestable textile fibers

• Cotton, hemp, jute, linen, and ramie and a few other resources that drop from bushes now fall into Any Plant Fiber and/or Any Bast Fiber on recipes.
• Added textile-fiber drops to Bush, Fan, Mangrove, and Parlour Palms.

Fixed medical and tech station recipe quantity errors and labels

• We now require bigger amounts of raw resources
• Group labels follow the Any < category name> format

Fix circular Prep Counter and Loom recipe dependencies

• Replaced Prep Counter IV self-gating requirement with an early tier Berry Tea Blend requirement.
• Reworked Heatproof and Pressure Membrane Sheets to use Flexible Membrane Sheets and appropriate gas categories.

Added new drops to Creatures.

Fixes for Homestead Storage Crates

• You were able to craft one sort of storage crate at Tier 2, and another at Tier 3. The tier 3 ones are placeable in homesteads using the Fabricator, and had a capacity of 10. The tier 2 ones though, were not placeable.
• We’re updating all the tier 2 ones to have a capacity of 10 and switch to the smaller art. The Tier 3 ones are therefore going to switch to bigger art, and go to a capacity of 25.
• Apologies if this messes up the look of things you have made with the crates!

Recipe Reimbursement

• We have recipe reimbursement in this update for people who lost recipes in the last crafting update. We hope we caught all the cases! A change to the recipe book in general is planned for an upcoming update.

Homestead Placement and Fixes

When you do place a homestead, it is now going to confirm that it is where you wanted it. If the homestead didn’t place correctly, just say “No” and it will return to your inventory.

This will also apply to placing zoning lots.

Both homesteads and zoning lots will now allow you to place them in the air such that the bottom edge is on the ground surface. This should make it a lot easier to place homesteads without underground portions or basement areas.

We found and fixed a bug which caused many types of placement to potentially zoom super far away (the preview was misleading because it was capped by distance and the actual target wasn’t; now they will share the same cap).

We also found a bug where if you placed directly from inventory, the preview would be missing, but if you placed from the consumables menu, it was there.

 

Bank, Vendor and Market Improvements

Vendor kiosks are now craftable with the Business skill! You can now start opening your own shops.

The market and vendor interface got a bit of an overhaul.

• We have identified several general optimizations that have made the market around 100x faster.
• As part of this backend work, display of items and listing integrity should be improved.
• Added in a search field that filters results based on the Item Name.
• Added a filter by type field for additional filtering!
• Added the ability to sort by any of the column headers in ascending or descending order; just click the column header. This sorting should work regardless of the filtering.

All of the above applies to both the public markets in starbases, and also to player-run vendors.

Known issue: the Sell tab sometimes becomes unresponsive; generally, closing and reopening the window fixes it.

We identified an issue where removing items from the bank could result in a truncated update back to the client, making it look like items had disappeared. We have a fix coming. This fix will also result in showing all empty slots in the bank, allowing you to arrange items on the grid as you prefer.

 

Other changes:

• Canned Emotes were being sent out zone wide , we have corrected the issue and should now only go out in a radius based on your characters location.
• There has been a lot of confusion over “easy” vs “hard” missions; they’re really basedon travel distance, so we are just going to say so. So now “easy/moderate/challenging” will be “near/mid/far” instead.

Known issues:

• We’ve identified an issue with the Wild Wormhole Planets in the Kai Sector, Kai-III & Kai-IV. This issue was causing players to be incorrectly removed from these planets when they should not have been. We’ve turned off access to these worlds whilst we address it.
• Public Market listings created prior to Hotfix 8.4.5 may not appear in your Sell tab. The listings are still active and will continue to count toward your listing limit. We have identified the issue and are working on a fix.
• The Sell tab on the market screen (market and vendors) sometimes isn’t responsive the first time you open the window; closing and reopening it generally solves that.
• We changed around the storage crates, so the appearance may change in your inventory. Not actually a bug; it’s supposed to be that way.
• The bank now shows a grid of empty tiles for empty slots. This looks a bit odd at the moment because this is the only inventory display that works this way.