AttackBots, GuardBot & Plantgenetics (4.0.3)
Open World Foreva News — March 20, 2022
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
I have purposely waited longer than expected with this update. I found myself focusing on solving a lot of issues, bugs & improving performance in general. I wanted to have a big update which also introduces features which gives it more gameplay elements. Even if no one else is online. So that new players still have a purpose if no one is yet online & are more challenged.
Mainly there have been performance improvements on the client & server. A new terrain algorithm have been developed to make a more natural shape of the ground. There have been LOTS of bugfixes & much more testing done. Many things which prevented gameplay before have been fixed.
Furthermore there are THREE new bigger features. These are: Attack bots, Guard bots & Plant genetics.
Attackbots
The first new feature has been added. As a result of few players in the initial stages. I have decided to focus on adding features which make the game challenging even if not many players are online.
Since this game is primarily meant as an MMO where the main part is to survive in a world amongst other players. This new feature is one step in the direction of making things a bit more enjoyable as player base hopefully grows over time.
The feature includes a small view in the upper-left corner. Where a timer will start after some time has passed in-game. This timer will only start if you seem to have a functioning base.
Once the XX:XX disappears and a countdown starts. An incoming attack of 1-3 bots will come. They may come up to 2 minutes after the timer finished. Depending on distance to your base etc.
Each bot will try to kill you and hit you. But they might also just choose to attack your base with C4Bombs. Currently each bot can place out 2 C4 each. After they have used all their C4 they will go away.
This make you have to make your base well-protected and repaired after attacks. You also have to make sure you have food in-case you get injured.
To prevent a bot-attack. You have to dig gold and pay the timer to stop it. You can also delay the attack at a cost of one additional bot. If you're not ready quite yet. However, you cannot delay the attack when 3 bots have been acccumulated.
Therefore. Now improving your base and finding technology becomes more important. Since the only way to find gold is through digmachines. More ways will be added in future updates.
Guard bot
GuardBot is a new thing to help cope with the new Attack Bots. One guardbot costs you 15 copperbars. Which are found when breaking rocks.
You place it outside your base. Once you have done that. You can open its inventory. To give it bullets. Bullets are needed so it will shoot players or attackbots. You can also increase the guard bot's health by putting FoodPackages in its inventory.
The original health of a Guard Bot is 400 hp. There are TWO bullet types. BrickBullets and CopperBullets. You have the blueprint of BrickBullets by default. The other one can be found.
Copprebullets will do 20 hp damage per shot, whereas brickbullets do 10 hp worth of damage.
Keep in mind the Guard only have two itemstacks available in its inventory. One for food and one for bullets.
Plant genetics
Each plant now has its own genetics. Once you right-click a plant you can see 4 unique genetic properties. Heatresistance, coldresistance, immunity & growth.
Each plant now also grows slower or faster based on:
- Daylight
- Temperature
- Growth genetics
A plant with higher resistance to cold and hot temperatures grows faster in wider ranges of temperature changes. The ideal temperature is always in the middle of min & max temp of the given plant.
Once a FoodPackage is collected of a plant. You can eat it, or convert it into 3 babyplants. These babyplants now gets the original plant's gentics. BUT, each plant gets slightly different gentics. So over time a great plant will get worse or better. If you don't purposefully control which plants you choose to grow further.
Important fixes & improvements
Simplified hitsystem
Previously knowing how much damage hitting things would do was complicated. Now you simply right-click your player while carrying an item in-hand to see the damage it does each hit.
Previously hit damage was based on time and hits per minute. Averaging a certain damage per minute
Now you have a set amount of damage for tree, stone and living things for each tool. For instance a knife will do 1.9 damage rather than 1.0 for living things. But will do worse for trees and stones.
Client FPS greatly improved (fo low-end users)
Previously running the game required something like a GTX 1050 graphics card. Now through some improvement. Even an integrated GPU such as A8-7600(CPU with integrated GPU) can run the game at steady 60 fps.
Furthermore, a slow RAM-leak which after 20 minutes caused the game to lag has been fixed.
Important fixes
- - Relogging too quickly will disconnect that user to prevent inconsistencies
- - You are now prevented from logging in while having another window open (Popup will display)
- - A deadlock and concurrency issues with inventories has been fixed.
- - A deadlock caused by an extremely rare situation when respawning has been fixed
- - Walls now completely prevent from outside interference & protect fully against bombs and such
More fixes & improvements
- - Snakes would sometimes not choose a new target because of a bug
- - Animals could get stuck targeting unreachable targets over & over
- - Animals now target only things that can likely be reached
- - Lamp lights reach further
- - Generally entities have better paths/movement now
- - Decayed walls didn't delete themselves correctly before
- - Popup messages can be displayed even if game isn't open at time of receiving them
FPS smoother
Recently I have found a way to improve the smoothnees of the FPS even in areas with lots of grass. Besides that the FPS should be slightly increased. Again.
Walking by click
The new update has also implemented the option of walking, to a position, by right-clicking outside your interaction range. So if you right-click outside the radius where you can interact with things. It will attempt to walk you there automatically.
This improves ease for walking diagonally. And you can alternate between clicking or using movement keys.
More fixes
- New: Increase chance of blueprint drops for stones & trees
- New: Functionality for image shooting projectile.
- Fixed: When planting a plant. No interaction with other plant is possible.
To allow placing out plants even when one is covering a free position.
- Fixed: Switching walking direction sometimes caused a temporary stop in movement.
- Fixed: Lower parts of letters were sometimes not drawn.
- Fixed: Client would sometimes crash when a socket was done.
- Fixed: Client now loads removals & addings of worldareas on same thread. To prevent misordering.
- Fixed: Plants were incorrectly placed when restarting servers.
- Improved: Opening a view with inputfields now automatically focuses on it.
- Fixed: Placing electrical wires is now possible onto walls.
- Improved: Player data inconsistencies further prevented by only allowing one change at a time.
- Fixed: Some minor issues with Heater and Cooler are now fixed.
- Fixed: Transferring foodpackages between inventories caused error.
- Fixed: Right-clicking items when holding an item. Now prevents placing it into the world.
- Improved: Plants now get "magnetized" to an ideal position.
Tools + craftingguides
In this update you will also find that there now exists pickaxes & axes. There are two different types. BrickAxes & BrickPickAxe for which blueprints are aquired by default. And also MetalPickAxe and MetalAxe. The latter ones lasts longer and aquires stones/tree faster.
Usually a stone takes 75 hits before being broken. With BrickPickAxe it will be twice as fast. Whereas MetalPickAxe is almost three times as fast.
Furthermore, DigMachineBlueprint & InventoryBlueprint are now default for new players. So you don't need to find these blueprints.
Visual guides for understanding how to craft & convert things also are found in the escape menu.
Notes
Keep in mind the game is still somewhat early in the process. And bugs are still expected. However, the past few months have been focused mainly on fixing bugs and improving performance. To make it playable by more players and so that issues doesn't arise.
The main focus will always be fixing bugs and errors. And more features will come when things are stable. This is why you are now seeing new features. Because lots of bugs which weren't apparent at release has been sought out and fixed one by one.
The price is now 4.99 euro rather than 8.99 euro. The current price is only temporary & will rise with more updates & as the value the game provides increases. If you play less than 2 hours you can ask steam for a refund within 2 weeks.