New Features

The last few updates have been pretty big, but all of the new features were minor. Let's change that.

Chat

The first addition worth mentioning is not really that important to gameplay, but it's still one step closer to a full chat system. Instead of the placeholder data we never really took out, the player list in the right side pullout menu will list all online players (we don't have a friend or direct messaging system yet). We also now have unread message notifications, so the tab will flash red when there is a new message in a chat you do not have open. When you hover over the tab, any chats with unread messages will have a flashing red icon. Once you open the chat with new messages, it will stop flashing until the next message comes in (if you don't still have it open).

 

 

 

 

You can now use basic inline HTML markup to format your chat messages:

• <b>bold</b> or <strong>bold</strong>
• <i>italic</i> or <em>italic</em>
• <del>strikethrough</del>
• <u>underline</u>

Emoticons were added in the last update, but in this update we have added the ability to send links to items. Just click on the chat box you want to send it to (if you're not already typing in it), shift + click an item in your inventory, and #item_id_here# (eg. #fancy_pick#) will show up in the box. You can also type the ID of an item you don't have (they are usually all lowercase, spaces replaced with underscores). Once you send the message, it will show the item icon and a link to open the item's information window.

Entities

Batterflies finally decided to come out of hiding recently, so you'll see a few of them around. They're still far too nervous to consider pooping in front of you, though. Wormholes (or "Collision-Triggered Teleporters", as Tiny Speck called them), are up and running. Go to the Great Hole to Ix, Northwest Passage, or any other street with one to try it out.

In the last release, I included a last-minute change that made mystery quoins flip the screen. Some people didn't like it, or didn't know why it happened, etc. So, in this update, they now have another purpose: increasing your quoin multiplier! It increases by a random number 0.1 to 0.9 each time, and all quoin values (except mystery quoins) are multiplied by it. Now you can get currants, iMG, energy, mood, and everything else much faster.

Audio

I know you all missed the new day sound, so it now plays when the new day screen appears. Speaking of sound, the correct music now plays on most streets! Some streets may not play the correct music yet, so please submit a bug report if the SoundCloud box at the bottom is not working for a street.

Interface

The "Interact With..." window has been changed yet again, so that entities now appear correctly.

Users with large and/or high-resolution monitors, rejoice! Instead of using the width and height of the smallest street in the game as the maximum size the world can be, the game now uses the width and height of the street you are on to size the game. Most streets are large enough to fill a pretty good sized monitor. Just note that this technique is sometimes buggy and leaves blank space around the world layers. Please report any streets that it is incompatible with, and they will be set to use the standard game viewport size.

"Sorry, but it had to be done" changes

There are a few things we have finally implemented that you may not like, such as:

• Quoin limits (currently set at 100, but reset each new game day)
• We now track every street everyone has been to, so Quarazy Quoins will only show up once per street for each person, however, the record starts now for when we have completion achievements!
• Each emblem from a giant will take 100 more favor than the last (this is per-giant, not group-scaled, so they can have different requirements)

Saving the best for last

I know you saw the title and got excited. Now you'll find out why.

You can craft things! If you bought any of these tools and you were disappointed they didn't work yet, be disappointed no more. In fact, be happy. You don't need any skills to use these tools yet, just the items. Just pick up the tool, choose to use it, and you'll get a list of recipes. The recipes that are greyed out above are marked that way because I don't have enough cherries to make them. But I can still choose them to see what I need to get to make them (on the right).

Tools with recipes that will work in this update:

• Alchemical Tongs
• Awesome Pot
• Beaker (warning: no-no powder has no effect yet)
• Bean Seasoner (warning: beans cannot be planted yet)
• Blender
• Bubble Tuner
• Cocktail Shaker
• Egg Seasoner (warning: eggs cannot be incubated yet)
• Famous Pugilist Grill
• Fruit Changing Machine
• Frying Pan
• Gassifier
• Grinder & Grand Ol' Grinder
• Knife and Board
• Loomer
• Saucepan
• Smelter
• Spice Mill
• Test Tube
• Tincturing Kit (warning: tinctures have no effects yet)

Tools with recipes that you cannot make yet:

• Cauldron (many ingredients are still unavailable, and potions do not work yet)
• Construction Tool (no Sloths to get Snails from)
• Tinkertool (Tools do not need repairing yet)
• Crystalmalizing Chamber (Fireflies are not collectible yet)
• Place-and-use machines (Blockmaker, Fuelmaker, etc)
• Any tools not listed in the working category. Please let us know of any tools we missed in the comments!

And because you'll need cheese and butter for cooking, you can now make them from butterfly milk in your inventory.

One more thing

After crafting all of these things, you'll need more than 10 slots to put them in, which you will now be able to have. You can buy bags from hardware vendors, however, they are very expensive. Better save up! Using them is pretty easy. A plus button will appear on the bag icon when it is in your inventory. Click it to open the bag, and again to close it.

 

 

In addition, you can now sort your inventory however you want to. Just drag items into other slots to move them, including in and out of bags.

Optimization

If you struggled with slowness before (I know I did), you'll really love the fact that weather no longer makes your computer cry. The raindrops are prerendered in a sheet that falls, instead of computing and updating the position of every single drop. Robert also spent many hours with his computer rendering the hundreds of decos on each street into just a few layer images (to still achieve the parallax effect), so walking should be much smoother now. If the speed increase this time wasn't enough for you, just wait until the next release, when we're using StageXL (WebGL) to render the layers, entities, and everything else in the world screen. We're very sorry it wasn't ready sooner, but we can't use it for the street and the old way for the entities, having them render in different ways is very headache-inducing. So stay tuned. Our old bug system was very buggy itself (I wrote the report manager with an idea in mind and it didn't fit, so it became very messy very quickly). So now, all of the bug reports submitted in-game go to a special GitHub repository (cou-issues) where they are publicly available. We also had hundreds of bug reports dating back months that hadn't been tracked, so most have been fixed but are not marked as such. With this update, all previous reports have been cleared, so please feel free to report any bugs, even ones that you have reported before.

Bugs Fixed

• Spriggan gets the same amount of favor from favor quoins as every other giant
• Bug report titles are actually required
• Ice Nubbins no longer strangely resemble Jellisac
• The Bubble Tuner inventory icon has been fixed
• Vendor +/-/max buttons are functional again
• Server communication is more secure
• Street data updates can be pulled in with a normal reload, no more hard refreshing to mark streets as broken
• Your keys will no longer "stick" if you switch focus (usually by level up/new day/iMG menu)
• Exit sign poles are positioned better (no more signs floating next to them!)
• Favor quoins will no longer set your favor over the max

As always, report any new bugs we caused and let us know if you need help. Happy crafting!

— Klikini