After waiting a while, developer Craneballs has now fixed up the Linux version of Planet Nomads along with providing some optimisations. This is a welcome bit of good news I must say!

After trying to play Planet Nomads a few times since their bug updates, I came up against a repeatable bug where the game would freeze and/or crash during loading. I reported it back in August and it took a good while to track down. Turns out it was an issue with how they're using batch processing in SQLite. They sent me a build to test after finding it, I confirmed it was fixed through repeated runs and now today the official fix is out for everyone.

Honestly, Craneballs has gone up in my good books for really looking into this and fixing it—good stuff.

On top of that, they also fixed two other Linux-specific issues to make the Linux version of Planet Nomads look better than ever. They fixed their water shader depth calculation to show foam on shallow water and their fog shader calculation to prevent the sky from being fogged. Additionally, they did a few optimisations to the game too.

I have to admit, it's actually looking pretty good now too. On reasonable settings it's a massive amount smoother than it was a few months ago. They still have quite a bit of performance work left to do, but the improvements are definitely noticeable.

As for actual game content, they've added a lot recently including lots of new building blocks, Steam Workshop support and much more.

While it's a shame they're not doing multiplayer, at least now Linux gamers can get a much better experience. As long as they keep adding to it as they have been, it should still be a pretty interesting game.

Find it on Humble Store, GOG and Steam.