A Recruit No More – The Crucible Update

Welcome, Reachers, to a new interplanetary update!

In our previous update, we shared a new game pathway to help new players explore the aspects of the game (such as mining, combat, crafting, …), but it was not completely done yet, as one last space-jump was missing: Crucible.

The onboarding experience has now been updated as follows:

Preamble => Hallway => Haven => Crucible => TPL Starbase and Beyond

You must create a new character to experience this part of the new player experience. Existing characters cannot go back to Haven and Crucible, yet.

Note: We hear the feedback that the current iteration of Haven quests is a little too theme park. We agree, but have been working on overhauling the missions framework and systems to give ourselves the tools to create more varied and custom missions. Now that most of that tooling is in place, we’ll start refining and improving the mission flow to give you a little more freedom and agency.

So, What is Crucible?

Crucible is the planet that Haven is orbiting, and it has a very hostile environment that is not suitable for colonization, but is rich in resources. If you want to experience a nice hot tub, this could be the right place for some of you.
Anyway, the Transplanetary League (TPL) has erected a satellite training base that you will visit on your initial journey.

Completing your initial training on Haven and earning your PIP’s (Points in Progress), you will be granted access to Crucible.

Once you arrive on Crucible, you will be greeted by members of the TPL who assist you in surviving on the planet. You’ll receive Klaatu and XP awards along the way, as well as earn your Space Suit, needed to travel to the TPL Starbase in space.

Everything else should be self-explanatory, and if it’s not, that’s exactly why we’re running these playtests; please let us know if anything is confusing or tedious! We’d even enjoy hearing if you think it’s fun! (Or if Crucible is too hot)

Systems Pioneered for Crucible

• Enhanced our mission system to support training on the Crucible planet.
• Introduced a group travel system for moving all players to and from a planet when needed.

Gameplay Updates

Movement

As some of you have noted, our traversal speeds were way too fast and made moment-to-moment gameplay too slippery, and the worlds feel smaller.
Movement speeds across the board have had a balance pass to be closer to our vision, including characters, creatures, and projectiles.

With this change, you’ll be able to see more and react to the surroundings, such as creature attacks. Slowing things down a bit opens up opportunities for us to add more ways to increase your speed in the future. We will continue to balance the movement changes as the gameplay progresses, keeping a close eye on community feedback – aka – your feedback!

GravMesh

The GravMesh has been updated to use Battery instead of Stamina, with a lower max Battery and a faster regen rate than what you’re used to, so you’ll have shorter but more frequent usage.

Grenade Launchers

A new weapon type has been added with a focus on arc projectiles e AoE attacks. You can acquire these via new crafting recipes that are unlocked through the crafting skill.

The Skills menu has a few new abilities to unlock for Grenade Launchers as well as nodes to upgrade them.

Fire a Singularity grenade to pull multiple enemies in and then use Uplift to fire an antigrav grenade to lift them into the air, where you can DPS them with ease!

Note that the Grenade Launcher tree is still getting worked on and will have more to unlock soon.

Goodbye, Old Weapons!

With this update, we’ve started to move away from the original placeholder weapons like the Omniblaster and Companion Orbs, and are heading towards the intended design of fuller weapon trees.

The legacy placeholder weapons will no longer be acquirable, but you can keep them if you have them until the next wipe.

Ability Loadouts

This update contains the first iteration of Customizable Abilities (a.k.a. specials or active skills) loadouts.

You will now find Loadout Kiosks available in Camps (of all tiers) and certain pre-determined locations, like in the TPL Starbase. Accessing a Loadout Kiosk will allow you to swap out the Abilities attached to the E and Q keys on your currently equipped tool.

For most existing tools, you won’t be able to do much yet, but Pistols and Grenade Launchers have a couple of Abilities you can experiment with. Our focus for this release was the base system itself, and we’re working on adding content to it next.

Map overhaul

Previously, we allowed you to create a simple ASCII-based map (2D map) to assist you in the survey game with the Pathfinder. We have moved this to a dynamic terrain map (M key) that you can unveil by surveying with the Pathfinder. Eventually, we intend to make map data tradeable, allowing you to add custom waypoints.

Healix

We updated the model used for the Healix and slightly increased its targeting radius. It should now be more effective.
What are you waiting for? Go grab one, you squad needs healing!

User Interface (UI) Updates

We have been continuing to move away from how our UI worked under the hood. You will notice new graphics and an overall enhancement. Affected UI elements:

• Public Events – Those appearing on the left side of the screen, displaying data about special events like meteorites and boss invasions.
• Navigation points – The waypoints you see for missions and other locations in the world.
• World UI – Emotes over creatures, and nameplates over characters.
• Worldspace UI Updated – Nameplates and other UI you see that are not in general ui windows. This should make them more accurate, have less jitter, and the colors have been adjusted.
• Crafting UI – The crafting screen is still in progress, so the version you will see in-game is going to have a little less functionality than the previous version. Applying this temporal change helps us solve several problems that were under the hood.
• Chat Style – We added some simple customization options that allow you to change the color and appearance of some of the chat messages. These options can be found on the ESC menu under ‘Gameplay’.
• Key Rebinding – Yes, we heard you! Several keys can now be customized through the Controls section on the ESC menus to allow key binding.
• Consumable Assignment – Now added to the inventory screen. On the right side, you can select consumables and then drag and drop your consumables into the radial menus for quick access with the F key.
• Fixed a bug that would center your mouse cursor on screen when selecting tabs in the inventory UI.
• Fixed an issue where placing Fabricator tiles would be blocked by a few areas of the UI.
• Updated our mission tracking to include a counter in case the mission requests more than a single item.

What else is in the Update?

• Added some new movement animations for when you are going up or down a slope.
• Improved dodge roll animations and made changes to animation time and dodge durations. Previously, it was a 0.25s animation with the same time in dodge duration. Now it’s 0.5s of animation with 0.75s of dodge duration, giving players a little more defensive leeway.
• Shields have been simplified to no longer have a passthrough damage threshold. Previously, they would only block up to a certain amount of damage from a projectile and destroy it if the projectile was weaker than that threshold. Now they’ll block projectiles regardless of damage unless they break the shield’s remaining capacity, in which case the projectile will keep only its excess damage.
• Made a significant improvement to the performance of trees. Dense forest planets should give a noticeably higher FPS, as distant trees now use our new custom billboard tech. This tech upgrade will soon be applied to building blocks.
• Fixed several issues with how we hold and animate tool swapping that could leave your arm in a very painful-looking position that the Healix power could not fix. In addition, we fixed a few issues with tools needing to be holstered/unholstered to get them to work properly.
• Fixed a bug with tools not functioning correctly when holstering them while climbing and vaulting.
• Fixed a bug making tools equipped on slots 2-4 not function properly after loading back into the game.
• Resolved some issues with the collections system, making it more accurate when updating.
• Building tiles should now have outlines around them when selected with the fabricator.
• New 2×2 floor tile variations and 1×1 rugs have been added.

Known Issues

• When traveling through a portal, you may find yourself a short distance from it, as if you were still walking.
• Newer creature drops sometimes show up as purple boxes while in the world.
• Moving midair after jumping is currently still a little faster than the new walk/run speeds. This will be fixed, so enjoy your bunny hopping while you can…
• You might occasionally see 2 public event alerts on the left side of your screen for a single event. This is visual only and goes away if you open a full-screen menu like the Inventory.
• The new slope animations might not end (or ‘exit’) as early as they should in some cases.

We thank you once again for all the feedback and bug reports you’ve shared with us so far. We hope you’ll have a great time playing this update – let us know what you think!