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.

Overview:

By the ever awesome Jiivita.

Release Notes:

Crafting + Resources + Equipment: Fixed the Atlas so that it only accepts a single augment even if you drag an entire stack on to it (The improvements for ejection help alleviate side-effects caused by this when working with largely saturated inventories). Beacon Plotters now have durability. Added the Centraforge: Please note, this is an early-pre-release look at this feature, and there is still polish and balance to be done. Please feed back on all aspects of the feature, but allow leeway for the fact this is not a final feature. The Centraforge is a machine used to enhance and modify any item of Gear (weapons, tools, grapples, spanners, chisels) to make them more powerful and have different effects and capabilities. After using the Centraforge the result is Gear with one or more Traits applied to them. Traits come in three flavours: Boons (positive Traits), Defects (negative Traits) and Quirks (strange Traits which are normally negative). After placing a Centraforge you will need one or more items of Gear and some Centraforge ingredients to start the process. The only ingredient you have to have is Setting Resin, which ends the process and Sets the Traits onto the item of Gear. You are also very likely to want one or more type of Boon Compound to apply Boons, unless you are wanting to create something very strange! There are numerous other types of ingredients you can use to control what Traits you get and how powerful they are. All Centraforge ingredients are crafted in an Extractor. There are various attributes which affect your chances of success in the Centraforge: your Intelligence, Vitality and Power. The Gear’s Flexibility. The Centraforge’s Power. Your Intelligence, the Gear’s Flexibility and the Centraforge’s Power all influence the Effectiveness of the Centraforge session. The higher the Effectiveness the more Boon points get added and the better the Boons will be. Getting a successful result with low Effectiveness will demand high-quality ingredients and a steady nerve. Your Vitality determines how much Stability the Centraforge session has. Using ingredients will reduce the Stability, if it ever reaches zero the Gear and all used ingredients are disintegrated. Keep an eye on the Stability! Your Power determines how much Vigour the Centraforge session has. Vigour is used up when using some ingredients. There is no penalty for running out of Vigour, apart from not being able to use ingredients that need Vigour. All the attributes that affect a Centraforge session are captured at the beginning of the session based on the person who started the session. Increasing the attributes during the session will not have an effect until the next time Centraforging is started. You can Centraforge a smart stack of Gear, in which case all the items get the same Traits (good or bad). Weapons and tools have been rebalanced to be less extreme in their original form so there is more fun to be had adding the extra features in the Centraforge. This also means that there is more choice of the type of weapon you want. For example it used to be that if you wanted to do Blast damage you were stuck with the 5 shot pattern of a Diamond Slingbow, whereas now a standard Diamond Slingbow is pretty standard, but using the Centraforge you can make it multi-shot, do damage over time, apply status effects, do more damage, fire quicker, or some combination of all of those things. Right-click menu of items now shows the stats including the characters attributes, and breaks down what things have affected the final value. Please note, the weapon and tool balance is still work in progress, and will change further with the new skills and skill balance. Please bear with us while we get this right. Feedback on balance is always appreciated.

Creatures + Combat + Characters: Creature projectile fix that stopped them hitting you when you were at too different a height to them. Cuttletrunk rapid homing attack speed has been reduced.

GUI + HUD: Quick move and augment-ejection improvements: When ejecting augments from an Atlas/Totem/Slingbow, the augment will try to stack with existing items, or stack inside existing smart stacks, or create new smart stacks, before ever trying to fill an entirely empty slot in the inventory. When quick-moving items between inventories, this will also apply, as well as ensuring that whenever possible the entire item or smart stack of items that is being quick-moved, will be entirely moved rather than only partially. This makes quick-moving especially much more useful as it will prevent the inventory getting too spread-out, keeping it as compact and flat as possible. Improved quick-moving in furnace and portal GUI screens so that you can quick move into either inventories (automatically picks the correct one), machine outputs will also quick move into the machine inputs when the backpack is full instead of just failing. Fixed the beacon-colour screen hiding the item that is referenced when dragging it onto the colour slot. Stop some news flashes from queuing up (entered world, entered settlement and meteorite discovered). Added action logs for entering a world, entering a settlement, and levelling up. Quick use auto-switch on modify is disabled when modifying the quickuse bar of a hand that has a deployed grapple, except when modifying the grapple item explicitly. Contextual messages have been added to the Knowledge panel. Contextual messages (or tips) can now be learned by holding the corresponding button when the tip is on the screen. This removes the tip and prevents it from appearing again. The tip is added to the Knowledge menu in the Tips section. You can select the tip to see more information and allow the tip to appear on the screen again if you need. New contextual messages have been added for the Forge, Chat System, Compacting Fuel, Fuel Types, Beacon Fuel and many more. Added phrases to chat. Increased height of expanded chat. Fix incorrect lighting and effects when picking up torches in to smart stacks.

Engine: New weather and clouds system. There is a new environmental weather system (data setup still ongoing) which enables weather and ambient effects to differ across both worlds, different biomes of a single world, within caves and the fluids of a single world. This is all driven by a weather simulation on the server driven by the biomes and distributions within the world itself so that all worlds will have their own unique weather patterns. The weather simulation also drives the new cloud system which will tie together with the weather effects allowing overcast skies and fluffy clouds that evolve dynamically and appear the same to all users, but varies around the world. If the weather looks overcast to the East, then if you head East the weather will get worse. If the weather looks clear to the West, then if you head West the weather will improve. If you see elemental clouds to the North, then GO SOUTH! As part of this (once data is fully set up) we will have new elemental effects on higher tier elemental worlds as part of the atmosphere damage system and new per-biome sounds. The clouds are volumetric and ray traced, and fully procedural with semi-realistic lighting effects especially as the sun or moon shines through them. Ambient effects will also vary by biome and time of day. The full weather system requires additional world data that will only be available when we generate new worlds. (Coming soon!) For the current worlds which don’t have the per biome information the simulation still runs but without the specialisation per biome and hence will continue to seem thematically out of sync, ie. snowing in deserts.

World Builder: Block colours and world palettes have been fully revamped to enable the generation of extremely varied worlds. Instead of individual colour palettes distributions per block, there is now a single global root palette of 255 colours generated to evenly cover all hues with a wide range of luminance and saturation. This means there will no longer be 2 colours of a block that look exactly the same but wont stack, and allows us to assign all the colours sensible names in a future. The root palette is then customised per material. This structure will also enable in the future extracting pigment from one material and transferring it into another. If Red Gleam is hard to find, then extract the red pigment from some Red Foliage which are bountiful and dye another plentiful gleam red. This system would also support mixing pigments to synthesis hard to find pigments. This doesn’t mean that Red Gleam will be visually identical to Red Foliage. Each block material is still customised to make it’s individual interpretation of red unique, interesting, and fitting for the material. This system introduces a large amount of new logic to the World Builder with new nodes to define recipes to generate a palette of colours for a world that will then be assigned out of the 255 base palette instead of manually picking colours (this will be used to get ‘procedural’ coloured worlds for all new worlds in future) and also now drives creature colours so we have a way in future to have coloured drops from both blocks and creatures if we wish. Existing worlds and inventories will all migrate automatically to the nearest colour in the new palettes so you will find all colours subtly change.

Bug fixes: Fixed an issue where PC’s which are very slow at loading the game could fail authorisation via Steam.



Resolved Known Issues:

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

Breaking any machine during crafting will destroy the ingredients in use.

Machines sometimes stop crafting after reaching 0s from the Currently Crafting list.

Testing 193.1: