If you are part of what is now the massive Starbound community, you may have been taking a break from the game with the knowledge of the upcoming wipe. Wait no more, my friend, because the Furious Koala patch is out and character wipes are a thing of the past.
This patch brings new items, animations, persistent player drops, difficulty levels, a number of technical tweaks, and backwards compatibility for both character and ship data. The characters you had yesterday may be gone, but the ones you make from today on will be permanent.
The wealth of changes packed into Starbound for update are listed below, but those of you who play on public servers need to keep this in mind: PvP is now enabled in Sector X. You can avoid accidentally killing your friends by being in a party in Sector X, but players not in your party will be able to attack you and vice versa.
Of course, there are plenty of good things added this time around for any style of player. Take a look below (or in the links provided below) for a full rundown.
Furious Koala patch notes
These notes were split into two different blog posts, which can be seen here and here on the official Starbound site. They have been combined below and separated based on whether they’re fixes or additions.
Code Changes and Fixes:
- Absolutely massive changes to disk serialization (sorry reversers), which will allow us to never need to wipe players or ships again, and hopefully never need to wipe worlds again.
- Related, we now have a proper versioning system for save files.
- Added difficulty levels and permadeath characters to the game.
- Packed assets into databases (speeds up startup significantly), and included asset packing and unpacking utilities with the distribution.
- This should also allow for easier distribution of mods, and easier construction and management of slimmed down distributions for dedicated servers (official server paks coming soon.)
- Fix some graphical glitches with the wire nodes.
- Fixed some pretty nasty deadlocking bugs with networking.
- Fixed some very strange memory leak bugs stemming from a gcc lambda capture bug.
- Fixed various crash bugs related to a number of different issues (more specifics listed in “Info About the Upcoming Patch“– thanks for the bug reports, keep em coming)
- Speed up improvements with falling sand and other projectiles.
- More efficient databases storage layout.
- Documentation for lua functions have been written, and we’re going to release them soonish.
- Removed NaN floats from the code for performance reasons (reenabled -ffinite-math-only), we had been using them to signal that the float is disabled or in an invalid state, but we have a system for that now.
- Some internal changes that make maintaining code much happier for us, including better enum to string handling and much faster compiles.
- Other minor things, too numerous to list here (see “Info About the Upcoming Patch“).
- .ds_store issue affecting OSX 9.1 users (A bug where Finder created an invisible file called .ds_store in the player folder which caused the game to crash).
- A number of character creation/selection screen crashes related to loading corrupted save files
- An issue that could prevent the launcher from starting (MSVCRT.dll)
- DirectX crash bug (303 bug)
- Several memory leaks, including the slow-but-significant server memory leak a lot of people were experiencing and GUI memory leak
- Fixed a crash bug related to GUI controls
- Reduced memory load of FTL animation
- .abc files with comments no longer crash the game, plus various .abc fixes as far as key signatures/timing
- A number of issues with players spawning underground
- A bug where players spawned outside the ship if they’d previously saved the game while in the Captain’s Chair
- Right shift key was not working as a shift key, now it is
- An issue tech slots were unusable under certain conditions
- Wiring system fixes– wires are rendered below UI elements, wires no longer break when crossed into an unloaded sector
- Added image metadata caching, improved assets caching
- Added a jeep mech that was supposed to have been in the last patch, but had mysteriously gone missing!
- Object flipping issues
- Sped up the crafting window
- Fixed a sound issue that occurred after many concurrent weapon hits
- Characters no longer blink while sleeping in beds
- Assorted minor performance improvements
Additions:
- It’s no longer the holiday, so we’ve removed the holiday stuff for now, we’ll put them back when we have a better way of enabling it for holiday time.
- PVP is now forced enabled within Sector X. If you’re in a party there’s no team damage though.
- All player drops are persistent now. So if you accidentally throw your diamond drill down a mineshaft, you don’t have to suicide trying to get it back before it disappears.
- New Monster attacks (gravity slam! gust attacks! other stuff!)
- Fixed Legendary Weapons damage (adjusted up to be more… well… Legendary.)
- We’ve put in new Techs (such as a Glitch Mech).
- New biome type enabled. Savannah.
- Boss Lore!
- No more eating bandages and stims, they have their own thing now.
- Better, more featureful .abc file support, and we have Wanderlust music in the game now. (Thanks Leth and D2!)
- Made NPC chatter more configurable and slightly more varied.
- Added new objects (such as lava biome treasure chests).
- Added new items (like nightsticks and bonesaws).
- Sword swooshes are only active for 0.6 seconds instead of 0.9 seconds.
- Making cooldown times actually matter without slowing down combat. Also fine tuned their hitboxes.
- Viking helmet? Viking helmet.
- Watch out for landmines.
- Various changes to treasure drop pools (like Avian Guards actually dropping their guns…)
- Minor tweaks to existing armors to make them look better.
- Medieval Furnace now actually acts like a Furnace. (Rejoice).
- Graphical upgrades to some existing plants, and new plants.
- Lots more secret stuff! :OOO
- New game modes! Permadeath and drop-everything-on-death modes.
- Revolvers, pulse rifles, hand grenades, shivs, Floran needlers, Floran thorn hammer
- Human guards now wear soldier uniforms
- More decorative hats! Yay, hats!
- More random encounters
Published: Jan 26, 2014 12:38 pm