Update 0.80.00! New Item Piles and Storage Improvements!

Hi everyone,

A new stable build (0.80.00) is live!

The 0.80.00 update transitions our recent work on the experimental branch to the stable branch, including the new Piles, Inventory improvements, quality-of-life changes, bug fixes and polish.

This build features some changes and improvements to the Inventory mechanics. We recognized that the idea of your hands acting as an extra ‘slot’ for your held item and not being visible in the inventory was confusing. This mechanic also made it difficult to transfer held items into storage. Now the item you’re holding is displayed in the first inventory slot. The slot to the left of this is reserved for other inventory actions, like empty hands, or navigating between storage.

This build also adds the ability to craft Piles of items. This is part of our recent work to encourage organization and discourage players from gathering large piles of items that negatively affect performance. We know there is a reward and feeling of satisfaction from accruing large piles of stuff, so we don’t want to take that away! ‘Piles’ are an efficient way to show off your hoarding skills! See the patch notes for more info on how to use the new piles feature.

There’s also a very important fix for a frustrating bug where objects left on the Aircraft carrier would fall though when loading the zone.

Have fun :)

Stay Alive!
:: Beam Team
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0.76.00-0.80.00 Stable Change Log

New Features

- Added new craftable item Piles!

You can create a pile by looking at or holding an item that you have 2 or more of in the surrounding area. Use the Quick Craft menu to craft a ‘pile’ of that item, which is shown by a new pile icon in blue. Piles are free to create and store 1 type of crafting item. So far, the supported items are: Sticks, Rocks, Palm Fonds, Lashings, Fibrous Leaves, Clay and Logs. The capacity for most items is 50x, but can vary depending on the item.

You withdraw and deposit items just like a storage container. The first item stored assigns the type of pile it is. You can remove all items and re-assign a pile at any time. When you withdraw all items from a pile, it will simply disappear.

Items stored in a pile are available and can be used when crafting without having to manually remove them from a pile. Note: Pile materials will be used last.

We’re still fine-tuning the mechanics; the pile’s physics collider currently adapts to the quantity and size of items, which is nice for player collisions, but there may be some issues there if players stack other objects on top of piles…

For those interested in the tech side of things, the benefits of the new piles are:
- Faster zone loading: 1 item to load, instead of 50x individual objects.
- Batched rendering for 50x items. Rendering multiple items was batched before, but the new method is even more efficient.
- Less physics overhead! Piles are a static object with 1 collider, instead of 50x physics bodies and colliders.
- Less overhead from individual Unity GameObjects. GameObjects and Components in Unity incur a small amount of overhead to validate state and run callbacks on every instance. This all adds up, so is good to mitigate.

Changes

- Increased Storage Container slots from 3  5.
- Increased Inventory slots from 10  12.
- Changed Inventory to display the item the player is holding in slot 1.
- Changed Inventory to pop an item that matches the sub-type if it can’t find a matching item of the full type, ie: a player will switch to holding a Crude spear after using all their Refined Spears.
- Changed Inventory drop action from secondary ‘click’ to ‘short press’ (only in menus)
- Changed Wood Crates to be craftable.
- Changed Wood Crates to refund materials.
- Changed ‘Play’ button to enter New Game menu if no save game available to continue.
- Changed Boat Motor to function as a rudder when out of fuel.
- Changed Medical Consumables to refund Coconut Flasks after consuming.
- Increased Meat inventory capacity from 4 to 8.
- Increased Fish inventory capacity from 4 to 8.
- Increased Fruit inventory capacity from 4 to 8.
- Added crafting placing controls on screen when placing.
- Improved Pinned Crafting Combo display. Changed pinned crafting combo UI to display craftsmanship skill level required to avoid confusion when a player has all materials, but skill is not high enough.
- Improved Watch feedback when displaying player Skills; Removed clamped values on skill bars making it easier to monitor skill progress.

Bug Fixes

- Fixed objects on the extremities of large islands not being saved.
- Fixed physics objects falling through Aircraft Carrier when loading, ie: Gyro parts and supplies.
- Fixed Storage pointer drawing behind slot icons.
- Fixed Tutorial not resuming when re-loading. Please note this fix is not retro-active as old save files will be missing the completed objective data.
- Fixed Projectiles (spears, etc) drifting out of player hands when held.
- Fixed objects attached to Spears not saving if player holding spear.
- Fixed being able to place Craftable objects inside terrain rocks. The crafting ghost will snap to terrain rocks for visualization but placing is not allowed. Foliage does not affect placements.
- Fixed Loading Screen changing color between Boot and Main Menu scene.
- Fixed Leaderboards list not focusing active leaderboard button when scrolling with keys/controller.
- Fixed not being able to place Water Bottles when crafted.
- Fixed not being able to rotate some Craftables when placing, ie: Shelter, Furniture, etc.
- Fixed being able to place Furniture inside the terrain.
- Fixed Foliage Spawner losing track of player if travelling too fast.
- Fixed Rafts falling through other Rafts/pieces when crafting a new Raft piece.
- Fixed Sea Anchor able to deploy when overturned.

Dev Notes

- Upgraded to Unity 2019.4.20f1.

0.79.01-0.80.00 Experimental->Stable Change Log

Bug Fixes

- Fixes Logs retrieved from pile storage not able to transfer into Crates.
- Fixed being able to craft items with Logs still connected as Palm Tree.