Thanks for helping us test this patch! We have decided to keep the same friction that was in the game from the start. (Test A) We noticed that higher frictions changed how some creations work. We will instead give parts different friction. This will give
you mechanics a lot more control. So that is on our to do list.
Here are the patch notes:
We have improved the driving with less bumpy ground.
Kept default friction from Test A. We will instead add different friction to parts later.
Made an optimization for the ragdoll
Fixed crashes when exporting creations.
Fixed a startup crash.
Workshop download error handling.
The blueprint search in the lift UI is now improved with better search.
We just uploaded a new test.
This time we put some time into improving the driving.
Players often got into a bumpy ride even on flat terrain.
With our new fixes, the vehicle control is much more precise between the wheels and the ground and vehicle should handle better. However, it’s important to keep in mind that this is an improvement, but it’s still not perfect yet.
Now we need your help with testing!
We have also done some changes to the ground friction and the friction in general. So we have made two test branches this time with different friction settings that you can try out!
Test_A has the same friction that is in the game currently.
Test_B has a friction that is 40% higher than Test A.
Let us know which one you like better when driving your vehicles!
If you like to help us test our changes, you can do so now by following these steps:
Here is the full patch list:
We have improved the driving with less bumpy ground.
(Test B only) Tweaked the friction for better grip.
Fixed crashes when exporting creations.
Fixed a startup crash.
Workshop download error handling.
The blueprint search in the lift UI is now improved with better search.
Thanks for reading Mechanics! Let us know what you think!
It’s that time again - we’ve managed to sneak some Scrap Mechanic news past the Farmbots! These last few months have been pretty fantastic for us at Axolot, because we’ve managed to make a ton of progress on the game. As always we’ve loved watching the inventive ways you all find to use your scrap and we’re pleased to say that while we’ve been hard at work on Survival mode, we’ve also found the time to start developing some other cool new features too.
So, without further ado - let’s dive in to all the juicy new stuff!
-Pistons are in the works! Time and time again we get people pining for interactive parts, and pistons always top the list. Well, request no longer Mechanics, because it’s nearly time to get your pist-on! Eagle-eyed players may remember that a long time ago in a Devblog far,far,away we promised to add something special to the Pistons. Well folks, hold on to your tool belts because we’re happy to reveal that with the arrival of the piston comes a brand new feature! Players will be able to connect these new interactive parts to a controller, making them expand and contract in a sequence. Just thinking about the amount of awesome things you will be able to build with that function blows our mind so we hope you’re excited too!
As well as expanding and contracting, you will also be able to simply connect them to a trigger and set the extract length. Right now they can be up to 16 blocks long, but as this part is still fairly new, we’re still toying around with its maximum length. Unfortunately, it’s not quite ready yet because we have to find that sweet spot that also works well with Survival mode. We were originally planning to have this part come out alongside Survival, but after seeing such high demand for pistons we decided to shuffle them straight to the front of the queue! Exciting, eh? Work on pistons is well underway – and we can’t wait to see what you all choose to do with them. Thanks for your patience - pist and love to you all.
-Spooky warehouses Remember the glory days of Devblog 9? What a time to be alive! In that wondrous update we shared some really early images from a huge, spooky-looking warehouse that we were working on for Survival. Well fearless players, we’re happy to say that we’ve got a scary sneak peek for you all. Creepy, huh? While it’s already pretty cool, the good news is, the whole warehouse interior is also fully destructible! Obviously this is still a work in progress, so keep in mind that this place will soon get even darker and more sinister when we add the final lighting.…Well, if we aren’t too scared to finish building it anyway! As we mentioned in DB 9, more buildings are also in the works, but as we’re massive teases - that’s all we can say for now.
-Scaling wedges will make your life easier We don’t know about you, but we’re big fans of potato wedges here at Scrap Mechanic HQ. Whilst munching on those delicious, juicy chunks of carby goodness, we were struck with inspiration – WE CAN LET THEM SCALE THEIR WEDGES! We’ve heard what you’ve been saying, and we know that building with slanted parts can feel a bit tedious.That’s why we are working on scalable wedges so you can get that large slanted surface you all desire faster than ever before.Yep, that’s right - all blocks will be getting a slanted version! Depending on how the block is rotated, it will scale either vertically or horizontally,saving you all a ton of time. We can’t wait to get them in the game so you Mechanics don’t have to place wedge parts one by one. Now if you’ll excuse us, we have some potato wedges to attend to.
-Creative mode terrain update As long time players may have noticed, the creative mode terrain has been the same since release a little over a year ago.
Right now it’s made out of over 30 Terrain tiles in different sizes that get generated randomly every time a world is created. While this is all well and good, we thought it was time to live up to the mode’s namesake and add a little more creative variation! By carefully watching how you mechanics play the game, we think we now have a pretty good idea of how to make the terrain tiles even more fun to play around in. So we’re happy to announced that we will be adding over 20 big and small terrain tiles to the mix very shortly. Expect a lot of great jumps, ramps and even a cave or two! As we’re all about giving you control, we’re also planning to give mechanics access to the very terrain editor that we use in the studio. Yep, that means that soon everyone will be able to make their own terrain! You can expect more news on that exciting feature in the coming months.
-New outfits We all know that there’s nothing better than that feeling of rocking a fresh new outfit, so we thought we’d treat you all too some sweet new threads. Right now we have made over 50 pieces of new unique clothing that the player can equip! What can you expect from these classy new outfits, you ask? Well, that would be ruining the surprise wouldn’t it? ..OK,OK as we’re nice we’ll let you have a quick look at two outfits we managed to sneak past the Farmbots unnoticed! If you like what you see, remember there’s plenty more on the way, too. We love customizing our characters just as much as you do, so as well as these awesome new outfits, we’ll be adding even more cool outfits for you to try on when we launch Survival mode.
-Optimization Now that we have our shiny new engine in place, we can focus on making Scrap Mechanic run as smoothly as possible. As well as tweaking the engine to help you all get even better frame rates, we will also be updating the game so that bearings that aren’t moving will freeze. This should make creations with a lot of bearings run much smoother, hopefully making Scrap Mechanic even more fun. For us we’re always working on improving the game, whether that’s through tweaks, new content and even huge undertakings like Survival. As you can probably imagine, Scrap Mechanic is a pretty complex game to work on thanks to its unique physics and growing multiplayer component. Juggling the creation of a new mode, constant new content AND multiple tweaks takes a fair amount of time, but we’re almost there. The team’s working incredibly hard to get these optimization tweaks out to you soon, so thanks for being patient!
-Smoking hot particles Since we made our new particle engine, we have made a ton of sexy new particles that will be added to the game. Hottest on the list are these smoking hot particles...I mean, just look at them! We thought that you Mechanics could get a kick out of these, so here is an early look at an explosion in action and our dazzling new fire! Did we just confirm destruction? Well, that would be telling.
-When is Survival Mode coming out? Unsurprisingly, we are still hard at work on Survival, but we’re pleased to say that recently we’ve been really happy with the progress that we’ve made.
This is largely thanks to us bringing in more programming wizards to speed up development – and these new additions to the team have been a huge help. While we know you’re all patiently waiting to play it, we can’t stress enough that our ambitions are high for this mode and will not release it until we feel that Survival is a mode that is great fun and worthy of your time. We are basically making a whole new game...in a way.
-Mod support Firstly we’ve been blown away by all the great feedback from this, so thanks once again to everyone who’s helped us test the mod support. We were really impressed to see that so many brilliant mods where uploaded during the testing period. If you missed out on these, you can see all the mods made to date on our steam workshop page.
The first step to making this work for modders was to let them add their own parts and blocks in an easy and intuitive way. We’re really happy with how this worked out, and we’re working hard right now to given modders even more awesome options in the future. In fact, the whole Survival mode is pretty much being made like a mod from the ground up so that we can give modders a ton of possibilities straight off the bat. We will continue to tweak and add in improvements that you guys suggested.
That’s all for this devblog, thanks so much for hanging out with us and reading.
Until next time, Mechanics. Stay creative!
The official mod support is finally here!
We would like to give a big thanks to all mechanics that have been giving us feedback during the testing period. But also a big thanks to all the modders that have uploaded their amazing mods to the workshop!
You can check them out HERE
Right now it’s only possible to make blocks and part mods. But we will make more things possible as we keep developing Survival Mode. This is just the first step.
For all mechanics that are interested in making their own mods with blocks and parts.
We have made a guide to help you get started!
You can check it out here Mod Guide
We’ve also published a set of guidelines to help mechanics understand how to make the most of the new tool, along with some changes to our terms and conditions, including to explain:
Who can use the tools and mods
Who owns mods and how to respect the work of others
Some important rules and things to avoid when modding
Some guidance on how to make the most out of your mods
We think these changes and guidelines are important to make sure the Scrap Mechanic modding community continues to be an open, friendly and fun place, which encourages creativity, sharing and respect.
It’s finally time for a new test!
This time it’s our official mod tool. This first update will make it a lot easier for modders to create new parts and blocks and share them trough workshop. Making it possible to reach a lot more mechanics. We plan to keep adding new features to the mod tool as we keep work with survival mode, making more things possible.
We have added a simple guide on how to get started.
You can check it out here Mod Guide
If you like to play with these new mods and help us test things out, you can do so now by following these steps:
We’ve also published a set of guidelines to help mechanics understand how to make the most of the new tool, along with some changes to our terms and conditions, including to explain:
Who can use the tools and mods
Who owns mods and how to respect the work of others
Some important rules and things to avoid when modding
Some guidance on how to make the most out of your mods
We think these changes and guidelines are important to make sure the Scrap Mechanic modding community continues to be an open, friendly and fun place, which encourages creativity, sharing and respect.
Hi Mechanics! This time, we’ve been focusing on continuing to optimize the game further. We’ve spent a lot of time listening to what improvements and additions you all wanted to see and are pleased to say that we managed to add some of your requests in this update! We’ve also polished up the thrusters and added some fun new parts that we know you’ll get creative with.
Let’s go over things in more detail.
-Bathtub So you may have noticed that we have a sink and a toilet, but we couldn’t help thinking that when it came to bathrooms, something was missing. That’s right, we’ve added a bathtub. We all know you work very hard on your creations, so we thought you’d earned yourselves a bit of R&R. As we’re very generous hosts, when you choose to sit in a bath, your mechanic will be treated to a nice relaxing bubble bath. That is of course, unless you’ve decided to go all 2bath2furious and attach thrusters to it so you can fly it full speed across the terrain. Remember, even wash-time can be fun-time.
-Follow cameras Whenever we read through Scrap Mechanic discussions, we always come across requests for a camera that follows when your vehicle turns. Well, happy belated (or super early) new year people, because you’ve now got yourself a follow camera as well as a strict follow camera that also follows vertically. You can set the camera in the settings or change it while seated with the Ctrl key! We really like it, so please give it a go and let us know what you think!
-Toggle Hotbar As master mechanics ourselves, we know how annoying it can be when you fill up the hotbar and it takes that little bit longer to access everything. Well, now you can rotate between three hotbars at any time, simply by pressing Alt - Q and Alt - 1/2/3 for direct access. We’ve seen a few of you asking for this so we hope it will come in handy when you’re busy building creations with a lot of different parts!
-Optimization While you all know that the new engine is finally in the game, we still feel that there is a lot we can do to optimize the game further. As a first step, we’ve made some rendering optimizations that dramatically improve slowdowns when placing blocks on really large creations. We’re happy to say that it works a lot smoother now. Remember though, this is just the tip of the optimization iceberg, so strap yourself in, because there’s a whole lot more where that came from!
-Thruster fire Thanks to our lovely new particle engine, we can finally implement the kind of particle effects we always imagined for Scrap Mechanic. As we’ve been so impressed with this engine, our plan is to redo all the particles in the game from scratch, bringing them up to the same standard of visual quality that we’re aiming for with the upcoming survival mode.
The first glimpse of these nice new particles in action is in the brand new thruster fire. Thanks to the addition of dynamic lighting, your thrusters will not only look a lot more realistic, but they will even trigger dust when close to the ground.
Like all good mechanics, sometimes we also have to go back and give older parts some extra love.
-Mug We noticed a lot of players are using pipes as mugs when they build houses.
It’s creative and it’s how a true scrap mechanic should drink his coffee. However, as much as we like our beverages piping hot, we thought we’d treat you and add a proper mug as a building part. This one comes with a symbol that you might have seen before. What could it stand for? Hopefully it will all make sense in Survival mode...... hmm.
Please keep in mind that updates like this do not affect the work we do on survival mode. These updates are made to give you some fun new things to play with while we work on survival mode and bigger features.
Up next we will be dishing out the details on the official block mod support.
We are also working on a very special new interactive part that we have a hunch some of you might be excited about.
More on that later.
We have a new update coming soon!
But the awesome thing is that you can already try it now on our test branch.
As always we like to try things out before we add it to the main branch to make sure everything works great!
Here is what we added
Follow camera and a camera setting.
Updated thruster particles that now have dynamic lighting and trigger dust when close to the ground.
Rotate between three hotbars with alt+q or access them directly with alt+1/2/3.
Items are saved in the hotbar when joining other players.
Did some render optimizations that fix the slowdowns when placing/deleting blocks on huge creations.
Added bathtub. A new interactive part!
Added a mug part.
All of these have been requested by our awesome Scrap Mechanic community!
This is how you access the test branch!
We appreciate all bug reports so keep them coming!
There were quite a few issues in the 0.2.0 version. The hotfixes fixed some of them but far from all. We hope that this patch should help even more players who are having trouble playing the game!
Here is a list of things that have been fixed:
Uploading blueprints to the workshop should now work for players with special characters in their windows usernames.
Added an optimization that should be noticeable in worlds with many parts.
Using interfaces for some interactive parts while another player destroys it no longer crashes the game.
Removed d3dx11.dll dependency.
Various crash fixes.
Added more info to crash reports that will help us fix more things in the future.
We noticed that a lot of players were having issues with corrupted game data folders in the previous version. Hopefully, that shouldn't happen again. But if you get a crash on startup, try this:
Uninstall the game (don't worry, your saves are safe).
Remove the "Scrap Mechanic" folder from steam library folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common).
