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

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.

Please report all issues discovered to new posts in the #support category.

The following release notes are not final and should not be considered complete or exhaustive.

Overview:

Added 18 new block designs.

Added a range of Closed Storage chests.

Video Overview:

(Thanks @Jiivita )

Testing 232:

Art + Animation + Assets:

Added a range of new building Blocks: Machined Metal Circuit Board: A patterned Metal Block used for decorative purposes. Resembles the intricacies of a circuit board. Decorative Metal Filigree: A beautiful Metal Block adorned with a filigree-style pattern. Used for decorative building. Machined Metal Grid: A surprisingly holey Block with an octagonal grid pattern. Nice, shiny and decorative. Wood Trellis: A nice, simple horizontal Trellis block. Use on it’s own for a spot of minimalist building or Craft with foliage for a leafy feel. Foliage Trellising: Foliage displayed on a simple Wooden Trellis. For decorative purposes. Mould Trellising: A mould covered Trellis Block for decoration. Because, why not? Decorative Gleam: A bright and beautiful Decorative Block. Looks particularly attractive at night. Decorative Ice: A delicately patterned Block of Ice for adding decorative flair to Beacon building. Decorative Marble Border: A decorative Marble Block with a uniform pattern, perfect for giving a more stylish look to edges and borders. Decorative Marble Frieze: A Decorative Marble block bearing a tribute to finest of Oortian Miners. Can be used with other Oortian Marbles to create a Frieze design. Available in 4 variations: Miner, Welcomer, Explorer, Grappler. Refined Mosaic: An orderly, linear Mosaic Block for Building. Great for Prestige. Decorative Fishscale Mosaic: A decorative Block adorned with a fishscale pattern. Wouldn’t go amiss in a merpersons bathroom! Refined Concrete: Plain, simple Concrete. Nothing more. Decorative Concrete: A less plain Block of Concrete. Simply patterned for a minimalist feel.

Added a range of Closed Storage: Plain Wood Chest: A simple yet sturdy Wood Chest for storing Items. Stylish Wood Barrel: A nice, stylish Barrel for keeping your stuff in. Ornate Wood Box: A useful storage box with an ornate design. Plain Stone Chest: Simply patterned and highly useful. Use it to store things.

More Closed Storage designs and materials are coming soon. Plain, Styling and Ornate variations will be added for Farmed, Wood, Stone, Metal and Gleam materials. Below are some work in progress concepts.

Crafting + Resources + Equipment:

You can now repair a Machine and all its attached Power Coils by using the Spanner on any part of the Machine or the Power Coils to repair all of them at the same time. The amount of repair done will be divided evenly between all the elements that are not already fully repaired so you don’t need to worry about where you are repairing to do the most repair - it doesn’t matter.

Change signs to merge together even if their colours are different; spray-paint made this possible to do, but in a way that was subtly broken and could introduce crashes to the server. A world migration will take place to ensure the looser rules on sign-merging does not introduce any bad instances of too-large-signs (in some rare cases, sign modules may be removed to enforce this). None of this effects signs that have already had text assigned to them, which no longer merge with neighbouring sign modules anyways.

Let Gravel, Mosaic and Marble all be spray tinted.

Let “Rock” type Resource Seams be spray tinted (so does not include Resource Seams embedded in Glacier blocks).

Added a new system for Closed Storage. Open Storage present the items on shelves for everyone to see. This generates significant networking and rendering overhead as all players need to be sent the details. Closed Storage will only present the items when opened. The items are loaded on-demand and then cached for efficiency. Closed Storage can contain: 8, 16, 24, 32, or 40 items depending on the storage setup. The Closed Storage recipes, XP, and prestige are a work in progress. The general idea is that the basic wood and stone storage should be easy to craft. The stylish and ornate designs offer more storage but are more expensive to craft. The closed storage designs should give players more options for decorating their builds.

Added a range of new building blocks and recipes: All new block recipes, XP, and prestige are a work in progress. The recipes for Concrete, Decorative Concrete and Decorative Ice are missing. Some of the original block designs have been simplified to make the designs have more natural crafting progression alongside the new blocks. These include: Mosaic: The original Mosaic block has become a Decorative Wave Mosaic alongside the new Decorative Fishscale Mosaic. These are a natural visual progression of the new base Refined Mosaic. All of these mosaic blocks are now crafted from Gravel. This makes gravel more useful to collect and craft with. The original Decorative Refined Gravel wasn’t terribly decorative and has been simplified to a cheaper Compact Gravel. Marble: The original Marble block has become a cheaper base Refined Marble. This makes room for the new Decorative Border and Decorative Frieze marble blocks.

IMPORTANT : Updated the plot reservation system to stop plots flagged as roads from generating reservations. Road plots are red in the plot viewer. The change is not currently enabled on the Testing release. Currently players are taking advantage of the reservation system to protect vast areas in the Live worlds by plotting networks of roads. This is claiming too much land too cheaply. We want to allow players to optionally protect their borders. But the current system to too easily manipulated. Hopefully this tweak will be sufficient. If not then we’ll need to revaluate the entire system. Removing the system fully remains an option, but we’re keen to avoid this as the system does help with players controlling who their neighbours can be.

: Updated the plot reservation system to stop plots flagged as roads from generating reservations. Road plots are red in the plot viewer.

Engine:

Reworked lighting of static non-voxel meshes to match the voxel lighting as closely as possible, including items displayed in storage or on plinths. This will resolve issues of sunlight “bleeding” through 1-thick walls when it comes to the non-voxel meshes and resolves any brightness or other lighting discrepancies between the voxels and the meshes (often was too dark, sometimes too bright, and just generally “different” lighting wise). Performance as a result of this change is actually to make the rendering of meshes cheaper overall in testing. Dynamic moving meshes (block drops, characters, creatures), as well as the text on Signs (which often goes far beyond a single voxel in size) and particle systems will continue to be lit using the more approximate spherical-harmonic lighting system.

Removed the “Smooth Normals” graphics option, this has been stripped from the game. The Smooth Normals option attempted to round-off the sharp edges in voxel geometry in terms of lighting, which it did manage to do (in the close by near-ground and only slightly at that), but at rather a large cost both in terms of CPU/GPU and development pain. Removing this option (which was enabled on PS4 and by-default on PC) should give higher frame-rates.

Removed the “Short-Range” Per-Pixel lighting option; the per-pixel lighting option is now simply an on-off switch. The short-range option allowed for full per-pixel lighting in the near-ground, blending out to vertex-lighting after approximately 24m. This was particularly important in combination with the Smooth-Normals graphics option where the “full” per-pixel setting made the Smooth-Normals effect much more expensive on both the CPU and GPU; with the Smooth-Normals effect removed, there is no longer a real need for this option as the Full per-pixel lighting option recently added should in most cases actually perform better with Smooth-Normals option now having been removed.

These 3 changes together should improve lighting consistency and improve rendering performance for everyone.

Bug fixes:

Fix clicking on item names on a pinned objective unpinning the objective instead of going to the knowledge item.

Fixes to the solid oil and amber sounds.

Fix the log of increasing/decreasing stamina/health values falling behind when using mega-speed tools.

Allow Crops that can grow on Rocks to also be able to grow on Rocks that have Ores embedded within them. This fixes a server crash caused by the Regeneration system inserting Ores underneath Crops!

Fix server getting stuck in a state where shopping queries would fail to ever complete correctly.

Fix not getting buy/sell listings for natural items like Trunks in the Knowledge screen.

Set the small standalone signs to have proper selection extents so that they don’t get in the way when placed onto shop stands or storage blocks etc.

Fix Dark Glass not appearing in the Knowledge screen.

Fix planting mesh-based crops (combustion fraction and ornamental crops) not checking the mesh-count limit!

Fixed augment positions on Lucent slingbows.

Fix objective task “Collect Request BasketItems” part of the “Restock Request” trade objective failing to count up.

Known Issues:

The crafting recipes for Concrete, Decorative Concrete and Decorative Ice are missing.

Placing any Forged item into the Closed Storage will crash the game client. If you restart and break the storage open all items will be recovered.

Testing 232.1:

“Roads” plots (red squares in the plot-visualisation map) will no longer be able to reserve neighbouring plots as part of the beacon-buffer system. This was including in the Testing 232 notes but wasn’t actually enabled.

Bug fixes:

Allow liquids to flow through the new Trellis blocks. There is no migration done here as only released on the testing server, so any existing liquid/trellis interactions wont update until you make some changes to the surrounding blocks.

Don’t allow the foliage-type Trellis blocks to be spray-tintable, foliage is not spray-tintable and these are classed as being variations of those foliage blocks rather than a variation of the trellis block. Foliage and Mould trellis blocks take their tint from the foliage or mould.

Fix the prestige calculation server crashes by forcing a migration of the world prestige in response to some of the recipes changing prestige rating.

Fixed closed-storage crashing when placing Forged items into the storage.

Fix fuel-type blocks (wood/peat/compact coals etc) not being usable as fuel in the Spark core and Furnaces after the last update.

Fix for z-fighting between internal faces of different alpha-cutout voxels like the new metal grid blocks.

Testing 232.2:

Crafting + Resources + Equipment:

Gatherer Epic can now be used to dig-up the Resource Seam blocks also to be sold/bought/moved around. As it stands, the dug-up resource seams can only be slope-chiselled. Decorate your builds with the original seams! Allows gathering all Coal, Metal, Gem, Lucent, and Ancient Resource seams.

Added block recipes: Concrete: Sand, Water and Kindling Shred in the Mixer. Patterned Concrete: Sand, Water, Kindling Shred and Opals in the Mixer. Decorative Ice: Ice, Glacier and Salt in the Compactor.

Added Compactor Recipes for converting Rock into Gravel, and Gravel into Sand. These recipes allow players to generate more colour options for Gravel and Sand. Early game players are still expected to collect natural Gravel and Sand. Gravel: Rock and Combustion Particle in the Compactor. Sand: Gravel and Combustion Particle in the Compactor.

Added Furnace Recipe for converting Ice into placeable Water. This was added to make sure that the new Concrete recipes are not locked behind a Forged gear.

Added storage recipes: Stylish Stone Cabinet: Refined Rock, Base Metal, Glue and Nails. Ornate Stone Box: Refined Rock, Precious Alloy, Glue, Nails and Wax.

Exposed the longer duration Beacon Fuels to new players at level 5 and 10 so that they have more visibility of the longer durations.

Setup the Prestige, Coin, Crafting and Building XP for the new blocks ranges.

Bug fixes: