This update is accessible via the “Testing” release of Boundless on Steam.

Please report all issues discovered with the update to this support thread.

Please restart Steam to make sure you get the latest version of Boundless. If the update happens whilst Steam is open it’s unlikely you’ll get the latest version.

Important:

Please be aware that this Testing release is pretty rough, but we’ve released it for everyone to checkout. Remember the Testing releases are for testing and not long term playing. Take a look at it, report any issues you discover and then return to the Live release to continue playing. We want to be able to release Testing weekly so that everyone can see the progress between (more) stable Live releases.

There are a few outstanding crashes on Windows PC and Mac OS X that we’ve not reproduced yet. The creature threat system is pretty aggressive - they’re definitely out for justice for past crimes against their kind. There will likely be 1 or 2 more Testing releases before these features are ready for Live. Especially with the new Creature balancing and Block Level mining balancing. These systems aim to make the game accessible and feel good for new players, whilst giving longer term players a challenge and reward for progressing their character when experiencing the higher level worlds.

Release Notes:

Crafting + Resources + Equipment: Adjusted experience received from ancient technology seams to be a fair amount, and flowers to be a small amount (to reduce the effectiveness of picking them up and placing them as a cheap XP gain). Blocks on moons (Level 2 worlds) now have more health than on home planets, and ring (Level 3) worlds have even more. This allows us to better balance the speed and progression of mining.

Creatures + Combat + Characters: Improved creature spawning so creatures should spawn much more often. Spawn creatures ahead of the player when they are traveling. Despawn creatures far away from players more quickly and decreased spawn in/out distances. This increases the number of creatures closer to players. Reduced creature counts so the game is not overly cluttered with creatures (after the above changes). Optimised the spawning system server for CPU load. Improved the hud damage indicators. Let the character look almost perfectly straight/up down again so that you can select planets directly above your head again etc. Re-balanced creature health, damage and armour values to make them much more challenging. Re-balanced creature variants spawning on each world. Different power creatures on some worlds. Rate of fire and projectile speed variations.

Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression: Modifications in the objectives system: All the completed objectives have to be claimed to obtain the reward. Created new daily/weekly panel at the top of the feats screen. Now the feats can be tracked. Tracking shortcut with right click for feats and regular objectives. Moved Equipment crafting skills earlier in the progression unlock order. Removing level 35 level cap and going back to 50 Removing the need to build a portal on another world to complete the objective

GUI + HUD: Added hotkey (K) to toggle the social screen. Added new air bar in the hud. Certain Crafter feats have been repositioned in the GUI Certain Explorer feats have been repositioned in the GUI Fighter feats have been renamed to Combat Moved “chunk cache size”, and “chunk download rate” settings into a Network tab on the setting GUI. Added a new game option in the network settings tab which disables all of the bad-connection flow, including inputs being reset to 0 server-side when the connect falters, allowing people to play with bad-behaviour and rubber banding if they choose to do so, instead of being returned to the sanctum or prevented from playing on that server. Added segmented health bars to help communicate health and level variation of players, creatures and blocks. Added Quickmove (shift and click LMB or RMB) from backpack to quickuse in Inventory menu

Engine: Client inputs are now reset to 0 server-side when the client is unresponsive on the network. This will halt players when their connection is temporarily lost. The bad-connection screen is modified to prevent changing the camera view until only 10 seconds are left in the countdown, the character equally will not go into the logging-out pose until such a time. The bad-connection “return more quickly” button, is replaced with a “return now” button that will (pending server communications) return you instantly back to the sanctum instead of waiting another 10 seconds. The bad-connection logic is slightly tweaked to delay putting you into the bad-connection state by an extra second in the hope the network improves first. An extra second is also added to the recovery logic. This should help reduce flip-flopping between the states too often. Fix some short/long-term physics issues: Continuous collisions against unloaded chunks may have put you into the world, whilst we generally resolve that with auto-unstuck feature added recently, this should make it just happen less often. That unstuck feature also only occurs server-side, and this issue was causing players to sometimes be stuck in the ground when returning to the sanctum too. Fix in building the initial set of physics chunk data after optimisations to split physics on y-levels, this would only very rarely have caused any issues and only since the recent releases. Fix bug in the sanctum where you could fall into the floor beside the warp that opens when “returning” to the sanctum from a game world (initial play of the game was unaffected). Many optimisations for the game client that should, in particular, make portal transitions much smoother in terms of frame-rate, and being in areas with lots of portals much smoother in terms of frame-rate. Improved quality of the anti-aliasing in the game removing certain artefacts that can appear especially in areas like the characters eyes, and removing the majority of unintended “blurring” in the image. Reduced the maximum speed in physics achievable to be about 90mph, adjusting the drag to reach this speed asymptotically now instead of clamping. This is largely speaking an optimisation as the speed achievable in physics by any entity has a direct cost in unrelated server-side systems that need to work in a such a way as to take into account client’s point of views at varying latencies, as they need to “cast a wider net” as it were, to take into account entities which from the clients point of view may have been much closer. Tweaked some physics values and slightly how stairs work in the physics to help fix/counteract issues that came about from us dropping the frame-rate of simulation from 30fps to 16fps when sprinting at high speeds.

Bug fixes: Fixed a bug where one side of an open portal could end up with bad data allowing the user to fall into the ground next to it. Fixed an issue where you could get stuck in the bad connection screen after recovery. Fixed client crash when trying to add more than 255 columns (not individual plots, but unique columns) to a beacon. Fixed completed warps/portals not having their breaking decals correctly removed when the damage is reset without being fully broken. Fixed footfall not being generated by players without permissions… a bug introduced meant the opposite was happening and users “with” permissions were trying to generate footfall instead. oops! Fixed issues in shader that could lead to weird colour artefacts around blackened areas of textures and the lack of specularity in those areas (eg the blacks of characters eyes). Fixed not being able to generally walk onto slabs/steps from a low-friction material like ice. Fixed showing a timeout bar on other warp in sanctum now that it does not close on a timer.



Resolved Known Issues:

The following items were known issues in previous releases and have now been resolved.

World Builder currently does not work on Mac.

Known Issues:

The following items are known issues in this release.