finally the world generation update is available! This is a real game changer, because the game now provides a very varied, randomly generated world.
The game now generates various huge islands surrounded by an infinite ocean. These islands contain many details like bays, lakes and mountains. Tall mountain peaks are covered with snow.
There are also temperate climate biomes available, like diverse forests, and the game also generates various terrain details to keep the landscape rich in variety.
Water is now dynamic (albeit still experimental), this means it will adapt to the terrain if you dig up the banks of a lake, for example. In creative mode, you can either place dynamic water or static water (which makes building a bit easier sometimes) - there are also various new water-related tools available in creative mode now. However, this isn't the final water implementation yet, so this still has some limitations. There will be another, dedicated water update in the future.
In order to travel between islands, this update introduces two boats: A rowboat and a rigid-inflatable boat. More vessels, especially larger ships are planned.
When creating a new world, you can now also create superflat worlds (similar to how they worked in the Java version). Old demo worlds (created prior to this update) also stay compatible. If you wish to create a new demo world, just use the seed "Demo" ;)
There are also new ores available (which spawn underground), a new pumpkin plant as well as various new items, including a measuring tape, which allows you to measure the distance between two points (which is quite helpful when building).
Another handy change affects the paint roller and paint brush: right click now brings up a color selection dialog, including a color picker.
There is now a ton of other Quality-of-Life features available (hotkeys for inventory, preview on blueprint items etc), backup functionality (especially relevant for multiplayer), we've done some optimizations to speed up the creative mode terrain and removal tools and of course we've also fixed a lot of bugs.
Apart from the new content, we've also reworked the Steam P2P multiplayer mode (i.e. the "Play with friends" option). It's now based on Steams new "Networking Sockets", which should provide better performance compared to the legacy P2P networking.
The game spawns a lot more vegetation now, which may have performance implications unfortunately, especially on lower hardware. We're aware of this problem and we're working on some optimizations which will handle vegetation much more efficiently. Unfortunately this wasn't ready in time, but we will get it ready as soon as possible.
As always, if you find any bugs or if you have questions or feedback, please let us know! Stay tuned for the next update, which will introduce NPCs! :)
Changelog 2022-10-31 (0.5):
- [New] World generation[list]
- Random island generation
- Infinite ocean
- Random generation of bays and lakes
- Random generation of tall mountains
- High mountain peaks are covered with snow
- Randomly distributed temperate climate biomes (forests, meadows etc)
- Randomly generated terrain details
