Devlog 17: Bigger fish to fry!
Era of Survival Patch Notes — November 28, 2020
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Hello Everyone,
This build brings new features, new craftable items, new animals, new tools, new sounds, new animations, and a wide range of big and small bug fixes. This build introduces a new triangular wooden foundation, dams filled with fish, and a fishing rod to fight them out of the water. These changes bring new ways you can play and explore Era.
Updated Start Menu
To show what's possible with Era of Survival's build system, we decided to change the start menu screen. This structure took about 20 minutes to put together with InstaCraft and Creative mode enabled.
New Animals
We introduce 3 new fish, the Perch, the Pike, and the Trout. They can be found swimming together in dams minding their own business. If you cast your rod into the water, they might take the bait, or might pass on it. They may change their mind, patience is key in fishing. Every dam will have a different amount of fish in it, ranging from 30 to 50 fish. Dams are depletable but will respawn fish after a few days.
Fishing and the fishing rod
With a new fishing rod in hand, you can now go fishing! Go up to one of the four dams on the map, stand outside on the terrain, use the red dot in the middle of your screen to aim where you'd like to cast, look up or down depending on how far you'd like to cast and then cast. Wait until you see your line move, indicating a fish took the bait and then strike. Use a combination of pulling and reeling to fight the fish out of the water. The fish are temperamental and will use all their strength to avoid getting pulled out of water. There are 3 different species of fish, whose fillets, once cooked, influences hunger and thirst differently. Just don't throw in obviously shallow waters near the shore, unless you see a fish there, don't cast there..
Triangular wooden foundations
A real delay causer.. Some extra TLC was needed to get the last squeaks out of this one. They said I would never use anything I learned in school in real life.. And out of nowhere, bam! Trigonometry. This foundation opens a world of new designs for your structures. You can now build pentagonal structures attached to your squared structures or build triangular posts against your home. Place one down and you will easily see how to build onwards from there.
Bug Fixes:
Error when the server starts. This relates to an issue involving upper armor and lower armor interfering with the hunger and thirst system. The error means that there's an error processing a number trying to be hunger/thirst when it's supposed to be a leather vest.. This fix solves issues with all these systems together. They will all sync properly now.
Split/Discard option for all. These options are now defaulted options for everything in the backpack and can be found aligned bottom right in the backpack.
Improve the look of water. 
In one of our first builds, when we introduced dams the first time, we introduced a sleek looking water body as our dam, but many players experienced frame drops and even temp pauses when moving around the water, so we decided to rather lower the quality on the body seeing that we couldn't find what was causing these performance issues.. Whilst implementing the fishing system, I finally found what the cause was (wayyy by accident) and managed to fix it. Now we have nice looking water, without strange performance drops.
Placement issue. When you placed doorways or fences and equipping a wall or construction part to snap like a wall, you would see the white placeholder flicker on and off constantly. This will now just be switched off or on as it should. I also found issues with other construction parts that under certain circumstances when placing would not place (denied) or the white placeholder would just not be shown, preventing you from placing your wall. I reviewed all of their compatibilities with one another and fixed any issues I could find. Let me know if you find anything buggy or unstable in the build system :)
Raining through the roof. A personal pest.. Whilst the roof parts look simple in design, they actually consist of quite a few parts, and finding out where all these intermittent and unpredictable roof leaks come from, was frustrating, to say the least.. It turns out this was related to the collision quality of the raindrops, after some tweaking, all the leaks disappeared!
Carry over:
We will have to carry over key mapping again. Unfortunately, we need to do more research to find a different approach, what we have currently does not pass internal tests and is unstable.. We had to revert all key mapping efforts to what players have come to know.
It was fun testing these features, I find being able to now build in different directions changes the picture when it comes to designing a home. The fishing system was also fun, like everything Era, no fish battle is the same. I hope players enjoy them as much as I did. We thank every person that takes the time to leave us an encouraging comment, send us a happy email or send us ideas and new insights, any support on any level is heavily valued. Whether financial, technical, creative or even just a nice comment, it has big impact, I say thank you to you for being part of our community!
Cheers,
Jean