Update 1.8 is finally here so hop in, WE'RE GOING EXPLORING! ⛵
We've done so much polishing, we can practically see ourselves in this shiny new update! We also added some great new features, which were based on the feedback from our player community!
With 1.8 we are staying on course with taking major steps to improve Exploration and give you the best possible experience when playing Ylands. We hope that these changes will give each type of player something to look forward to and spend some quality time in the beautiful world of Ylands.
Let's jump right into some of the new features and polishing that's been done!
A quick overview of what's happening in 1.8:
Multiplayer game flow polish Exploration Tutorial Achievements and Titles Support of larger maps and ylands Mass pickup action - collect all the items of the same name at once Traveling with your tamed animals New Mystery Ylands Quality of life improvements Mobile ambience improvements
Multiplayer game flow polish First of all, you've been asking for this on, loud and clear. Joining Multiplayer games was no easy feat. But worry not, we heard you. From now on, there are fewer steps, it's more intuitive and most importantly - it works!
Exploration Tutorial Have you tried surviving in the land of Ylands but it was too complicated to understand everything? Or you tried to bring in a friend but they didn't know what to do? From now on, you can use the tutorial, which teaches the basics of survival. You learn how to start a fire, how to craft basic tools, how to build a raft and much more! Grab your friend, sit them down, launch Exploration and have them do the tutorial. They can learn at their own pace, learn as much or as little as they want. The tutorial is optional and only launches when you start a new exploration adventure.
Achievements and Titles Being back on track with working on Exploration is an achievement for us for sure, but we also want you guys to have a sense of achievement, which is why we added Achievements! Some are hidden, some are not, some have multiple tiers, some do not, but all are awesome! They are even connected to Steam, so you will get to see them on your Steam profile as well! Some of these Achievements even give you titles, which can be displayed next to your name, so go ahead and show them off!
Support of larger maps and ylands Making maps smaller was something that wasn't a popular choice, no technical limitation is popular but this time, it was necessary. But larger maps are back! We put in a tremendous amount of work into giving you back larger maps, so with 1.8, a map can be up to 8x8 kilometers! That should give you some serious ground to cover on your exploration voyages! And what's more, we added more space between ylands so that navigation to those is a bit more challenging as well, so don't forget your compass!
Mass pickup action Gathering resources, especially in the early stages of the game was a bit of (or a lot of) a clickfest. Carpal tunnel level bad. But we got you. Mass pick up action is now in the game! Simply hold your right mouse button to pick up all the nearby resources of the same name. Go get all the grass. All the rocks! All the sticks! All the logs! This should make your early game much easier in terms of getting the stuff you need. Less clicking, more playing!
Traveling with your tamed animals Having a strong bond with your favorite animal is an extremely important part of our (not only) in-game lives. It breaks your heart when you have to leave your beloved horse, bear, deer, ostrich or you name it, behind. But we said: "No more heartbreak!" and ended this chapter of animal abandonment. You can now bring your animal Companions with you! Don't forget to build them a proper shelter though!
New Mystery Ylands Now that you have a lot more land to cover and discover, you can collect those Exploration Points and spend them on some brand new Mystery Ylands! We'll keep adding those in-between updates too, so don't forget to keep checking the game for new Mysteries to solve!
Quality of life improvements Ships were not easy to claim. Workstation tabs were switching in a strange manner. Which ship on the sea is mine actually? Which is my avatar holding this item in their hands but not this one? Yeah, it was pretty confusing. Which is why we grabbed some developer cloths and got to polishing. We polished away and made sure that many little annoying details are now all fixed up.
Mobile ambiance improvements And we didn't forget about our mobile players either! Apart from some less obvious fixes, we also made sure that everything just looks nicer! Colors look better and water effects look more realistic now!
There are of course many more changes, improvements, fixes, additions and tweaks. We honestly can't wait to hear what you guys have to say about this update. The best person to sum up the feelings of the dev team about the direction of Ylands is none other than the Project Lead, Aleš Ulm, himself:
"We’re very excited about seeing new and returning players coming back to Ylands and giving us their feedback. This is incredibly important and a major driving force for the dev team. Rate us on Steam if you like the direction in which we’ve been going, so that we know that our work is making people happy and is making sense. That thumbs up (which you can always change, if we fail you), telling your friend that devs at Ylands have come back to their senses, that's the fuel we're now running on."
Well, 1.8 is finally out, let us know what you think and most importantly...
Keep Exploring!
And even more importantly...
Stay classy!
Dev Diary #200 Above and Beyond the Ylands Horizon
Hey there, Ylanders!
We're starting this Dev Diary with the usual greeting, but this Diary will be a bit different, because we're celebrating the big number 200! 🥳🥳🥳 So this week, we'll be looking back a little bit, but also, we'll look at what lies just ahead of us too. It's a long one but it's also worth reading through!
The Ylands team has been hard at work since the very beginning, but especially the last few updates, we have stepped up the consistency and brought you many cool new features. Whether you've been with us since the start of the Ylands or you're a recent addition to our fantastic community, we want to remind you of some of these features.
A journey of discoveries
Let's venture into the past and have a look at updates 1.3 - Watery Water and 1.4 - Creative Call. These updates brought a lot of features to the Editor part of Ylands, which might not have been the most popular decision back then, but allows us to fully utilize the potential of Ylands in the most recent updates. With 1.4, maaaaaany new assets were also introduced, such as all of the Atlantean assets! Creators Club was also established! Are you a member?
In 1.5 we got the Editor and the platform into a state that we were happy with and we started Enhancing Exploration (yep, that was the name of the update!) and created one big Exploration world for your adventure to take place. This was the update, where editor features allowed us to start working on a better Exploration because every update from this point on would bring a huge new feature to Exploration.
With that said, it feels like 1.6 came out yesterday. And believe it or not, it's been over 7 months since Trading Territories. With this update we fixed many issues that Exploration had and which were heavily requested by the community, on our part, it was also a confirmation that we are serious about focusing on Exploration much more. Trading Territories also brought vendors into the game, which is particularly useful if you're planning big projects and want to get the necessary resources. Speaking of big projects, 1.6 made sure that Random Encounters make more sense and they became biome-specific.
Marvelous Mysteries, the 1.7 update, was jam packed full of new features, improvements and fixes (this Dev Diary is already long enough, so we're only gonna list a few of them). Yet another example of what wouldn't be possible without all the Editor features we have worked on in the past are Mystery Ylands. These yland-sized mysteries, puzzles, dungeons, stories or anything else you want to call them, are incredible creations that will draw you in and won't let go until you've solved them! With 1.7, our mobile players can also enjoy the wonders of Exploration and what's more, switching between mobile and PC is possible. And in case anyone is not sure if they want to commit to the Exploration DLC, we added a demo, which isn't time limited so adventurers can take as long as they need to decide! Not forgetting about our talented creators, we also continue improving Editor tools, this time it was Object Brush, which makes it easy to span a large number of objects over any terrain.
In between updates, we also added over 4500 unique entities to the game, ran Creator Competitions, streamed Ylands, answered your questions in various Q&A streams, gave out goodie packs, asked for your feedback, released several patches, showed you a bit of what goes on behind the scenes and well, released 200 Dev Diaries.
A perfect transition from what was to what will be is provided by Aleš Ulm, the Project Lead of Ylands: "Seeing how much we've improved the Exploration during this year makes me incredibly proud of our team. In a way, we're returning to a path that we left at some point and we are getting closer to the game we've always wanted to make with every passing day."
What lies ahead?
Next week is the week we'll finally get to share all the hard work with our players, who can look forward to larger maps, animal companions, Achievements and Titles, Exploration tutorial, mass pick up of items, multiplayer rework and oh so many more quality of life improvements that you, the players, have asked for. Oh, and a beautiful new main menu, it not only looks good but it is functional!
We're extremely excited about this update, not only because it symbolizes all that Ylands has achieved and how far we've come, but also because we believe you will love it as much as the CEO of Bohemia Interactive Marek Španěl, who beautifully summarized the journey and told us what he thinks about 1.8 - Awesome Achievements: "A small team of developers started a new project eight years ago that later turned into Ylands. Little could we imagine what an incredible journey it had started. Sometimes, it felt like we were reaching something extraordinary and unique. Sometimes we got utterly lost on the way, and everything looked bleak and hopeless. With update 1.8, I feel like we are getting close to the game's original vision. I think we are only a few more updates away until we can fully realize the nearly infinite potential of Ylands. Big kudos to the entire team for making it happen and the incredible community that stays with us. I hope you will enjoy update 1.8 as much as I do, and I am very much looking forward to what is beyond the horizon. Stay classy, Ylanders."
Looking beyond the horizon
Speaking of what is beyond the horizon, as we're nearing the release of 1.8, it would be appropriate to tease a little of what is to come in 1.9 and 1.10. All we're gonna say is that in 1.9 we will explore the ocean a bit more and give it some love and by 1.10 we will work on lore and everything we love about Ylands. Any guesses what that might be? 😉
What we can't forget to mention is to say thank you. Thank you to all of our players who have been with us since the start, thank you to our players who joined during major changes happening in the game, thank you to players who have joined more recently and stuck around and thank you to all future players who will bring a fresh new outlook to the world of Ylands. We can already see an uptake in new players and we hear your positive feedback on the changes we've been making, which makes us not only extremely happy but also very motivated to keep going and to keep bringing more amazing stuff to Ylands!
One big thank you also goes out to the team who's worked on Ylands. Without your hard work, there would be no Ylands, so thank you!
A lot was said, but as always, one more thing left to say in this Dev Diary and that is...
STAY CLASSY, YLANDERS!
Dev Diary #199 Feedback Fur-ever!
Hey there, Ylanders!
As we're nearing the release of the next update, which is jam packed full of fixes, quality of life improvements and polishing, we wanted to check in and say that it's looking great!
And since we're now past the datalock (remember datalock? we talked about it here), we're of course already working on future updates and thinking about what is going to be next for Ylands. One feature we would like to give more love to are pets. Pets deserve our love in real life but also in the game. And because we want you to have the pet that you like the best, we'd like to expand the choice of pets in Ylands. Soooo... what kind of pets would you like to see in the game?
Let us know what kinds of pets you would like, any details about pets in general or what you like and don't like about pets in their current state.
We're gonna get back to work, but please do let us know about pets!
Stay classy and healthy and the amazing players you are, Ylanders!
Dev Diary #198 Streaming Schedule
Hey there, Ylanders!
A new streaming season is upon us! And we kicked it off with yesterday's Q&A session with Aleš and Nikki. What did we talk about, where to watch it if you missed it live and what is this new streaming season?
In yesterday's stream we answered questions about the Editor, Exploration, 1.8 update and more! We started off by answering several Editor questions including those about adding half and quarter blocks, selecting multiple entities based on their color for quick color changes and entity pivot changes. In the Exploration block of questions, you were interested to hear, for example, about eating while sitting down, larger ships, turning off the freecamera on private ylands and also glowing paint being available in Exploration. Apart from these two sections, we also covered changes to clan management, controller and console plans and possible new assets. We also revealed the name of the 1.8 update!
If you missed the stream, head over to our Twitch channel to watch it! You can find the stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1182006596
This Q&A session was only the first of many streams and it was the start of a new schedule of streams. From now on, we will be streaming every two weeks and will cover a variety of topics with guests from the Ylands (and BI) team. Because we know that you enjoy gameplay streams as well, Nikki, our community manager, will be streaming weekly on our Discord server, so if you'd like to come explore together with her, head over to our Discord!
Oh, and speaking of 1.8 and all the good news we have for you guys - especially those playing on PCs. We did say that we'd added some cool optimizations that will make the game run faster in some cases, but we, quite unexpectedly, managed to implement yet another pretty sweet optimization, just before the datalock. This will make your graphic cards utilized more efficiently and we are very happy about this since this will result in many of you getting a quite significant rise in FPS.
Stay healthy and stay classy, Ylanders!
Dev Diary #197 Following Feedback
Hey there, fellow Ylanders!
Tomorrow is what we call a "Datalock". That's the day when all the Ylands features planned for 1.8 should be ready and we will mostly focus on testing, which will result in releasing the Experimental game branch and later on, the full-fledged release. It‘s only fitting that we reveal a bit more about what to expect from this update, which in terms of the sheer number of fixes, improvements and new features seems to be the biggest ever by far.
Most of what you will experience is the direct result of your feedback. We‘ve already mentioned some so let‘s add some more!
We want ships to play a larger role in your exploration endeavors. Up until now you could have (and many of you do have) super cozy ship rooms where you spend your seafaring days. But what good is it to have such a place when it rains inside? Many of you felt (and rightly so) that this totally broke the immersion. However, this was not a trivial thing to fix. Fortunately, one of our programmers has found a way and boom... no more rain inside your shippy home! And if you like ships and sailing, you will LOVE update 1.9 - but that‘s a story for another time ːsteamhappyː
And secondly - you complained about torches you hold not lighting caves properly. That‘s fixed as well. And for 1.9, we are also working on a fix for how lights work underwater.
What are some more things you reported and we work on fixing? Improved visibility of game hints. Fixes to Radial Menu. Additional Workstation fixes. Tons of Editor fixes and quality of life improvements.
We hope you are hyped about 1.8 as much as we are ːsteamhappyː
That‘s it for today and we‘ll talk to you in a week. Until then - stay classy and healthy, Ylanders!
Dev Diary #196 Client Scripting
Hey there, Ylanders!
Fall weather is settling in here in Prague and while we are excited about all the pretty colors of the trees around us, hot tea and fluffy sweaters, we are even more excited about bringing you news about the 1.8 update!
Exploration is getting a ton of love this update, but we are keeping lots of it to give to our wonderful creators too!
As a creator, have you ever wondered why your multiplayer game is sometimes a little bit laggy? The thing is that all the scripting within the game needs to be crunched by the server first and then synchronized with all the players, so that no cheater can break your game. However, we have put our heads together and came up with a new feature - Client Scripting! What does that mean? For selected Game Logics, it is possible to create locally executed script, which does not have to be synchronized with the server so it runs much faster. This is especially useful for creating a nice and reactive User Interface. You can now even create client-run 2D games within UI and it will not ruin your performance.
However, as with everything, there are a few things to keep in mind while using this feature. First of all, not all Game Logics are suitable for this kind of scripting. And second, there are also certain limitations to the script itself, which is not as extensive as the server script and has a limited set of instructions. We hope you will find Client Scripting useful and can't wait for your feedback!
That's it for this week and we'll be in touch with more news about 1.8 soon!
Stay classy, Ylanders!
Dev Diary #195 Showing off Achievements
Hey there, Ylanders!
While polishing and reworks are in full motion and 1.8 is coming along very nicely, we want to show off another new feature!
Speaking of showing off, we want you to be able to show off too, which is why we are bringing Achievements! Achievements are a form of in-game milestones, which you can obtain by completing certain tasks. It can be a matter of exploration, crafting, fighting or anything else really. These Achievements will only be a part of Exploration and we hope that PC players will be happy to hear that these will be connected to Steam so you can earn in-game and Steam Achievements at the same time!
To keep things interesting, there will be two kinds of Achievements in terms of how much information you get about the tasks you need to perform. One type will tell you what you'll need to do to receive this particular Achievement, while allowing you to track progress on that Achievement. And to not ruin the surprise, several Achievements will be hidden until you've completed them!
And to make showing off your Achievements easy, you will find Titles alongside some of them! Titles will be displayed next to your nickname in messages, menus and of course, in the game! There will be plenty of them to choose from, even though not all Achievements will come with a Title.
That's it for this week, everyone!
Stay classy, Ylanders!
Dev Diary #194 Over the Horizon
Hi there, fellow Ylanders!
One of the updates in the past has brought a very unpopular change to the game - the maps and ylands got smaller. It‘s something we had to do due to a bug in the engine we‘re using, Unity, which caused various problems as the players got further from the center of the map. This was something that many (quite understandably) felt was limiting the Exploration experience. It was a tough, very unpopular call but one that had to be made.
It is with great joy that I can announce that in update 1.8 you‘re going to see large maps return. With the issue on Unity‘s side mostly fixed and some clever programming our smart guys did we‘ve fixed yet another problem that prevented you from enjoying Exploration to its fullest.
Not only are the large maps returning but they can be even bigger than before. How big, you ask?
Currently, we are still experimenting with filling the larger area with content. It would be easy for us just to spawn a lot of similar ylands across a larger map but we feel that true Exploration comes from reaching new interesting places and facing new challenges so the last thing we want is for you to feel like we simply „stretched“ the current maps.
It‘s possible (actually it‘s more than likely) that the larger maps won‘t be used to their full potential in 1.8 and this feature will become more apparent when we also do the planned changes to landscapes so that it‘s generated more unique and interesting, but you‘ll surely start seeing the results of us getting past this issue in the upcoming update.
That‘s it for today and until we talk again - stay classy and healthy!
Dev Diary #193 Scripting goodies
Hi there, fellow Ylanders!
Here we are with yet another bunch of cool features you can expect in update 1.8. Because we plan to share some pretty cool 1.8 Exploration features in the next diary, today we‘ll take a look at the Editor, namely Visual Scripting.
So what new tools will those of you who create great new things expect to find in the next update?
Find out what platform is a player playing on and adjust anything in the game accordingly. Maybe you want to make something a bit easier for mobile players to compensate for the lack of precise controls? Or maybe you don‘t? :)
As always, we will provide an extension of your event listeners so that you can react to even more events than before.
And you know what‘s super fun? Now you can enable a ragdoll mode for the player's character and apply a force to it. Getting hit by a giant pendulum is way more fun if it makes your character fly across the room!
The last thing we‘re going to mention here is something that those who script games will surely love. A brand new panel displaying not only all the game errors (this much you can already see in the console), but something much more advanced, which lets you pick an error and see its details - specifically what instructions were processed before the game ran into this problem. If you are familiar with how a stack monitor works in Visual Studio or other similar programs, you surely see how much this will make your life easier (if not, just take our word for it).
Long story short - if you‘re creating and like to play with the Editor and Visual scripting, in update 1.8 you will find dozens of new features, improvements and fixed (and we still have something truly awesome left to show you some other time).
That‘s all for now and we will talk to you next week. Until then - stay classy and healthy!
Dev Diary #192 Working the Stations
Hi there, fellow Ylanders!
With the Competition already announced it‘s time to get back to talking about some of the improvements you can expect with update 1.8.
We‘ve already said in the past that in this update we are putting a lot of effort into implementing things that you asked us to add, fix or improve. We had a lot of streams where we discussed various ideas you came up and now it‘s time to show that we value the time you spent with us. Let me now mention two more things you can expect in 1.8.
You complained about confusing workstations and the fact that you have to switch between tabs (or they switch confusingly on their own) while using these workstations. This has been fixed and while we were at it, we made the workstation crafting more intuitive and responsive. Oh, and before you ask - yes, you will be able to craft things in stacks, so it would be possible to craft many more of them at once!
Another issue that many players complained about are items that are available in the Editor but can‘t be crafted in Exploration. Well, while we can‘t make everything craftable right away, I think you will find some interesting items that you will be able to craft from 1.8 onwards.
That‘s all for now and as always - stay healthy and classy!
