We pushed the changes mentioned in our recent trailer to the unstable branch last night– rejoice! Anyone who’s been playing the nightly builds won’t see a huge difference, but anyone who makes the switch from stable to unstable will see some pretty massive changes.
So here’s what you need to know about the unstable update, starting with…
How to Switch to the Unstable Branch
There’s a handy tutorial right here about how to switch to the unstable or nightly branch of the beta. Be sure to follow the instructions to switch to unstable. :)
World/Character File Compatibility
If you choose to switch to the unstable branch, please know that your characters and worlds will not yet be compatible with the latest version of the game. Your old characters and worlds will still be there, but the unstable branch will use a different storage location than the stable branch for the time being, while we work out how to upgrade old characters.
We will try to maintain save file compatibility within unstable as much as possible, but it will depend on what sort of changes we have to make during unstable, so we cant make any promises.
If you are currently running nightly, then you probably already know how everything works already. FYI The unstable branch will use a ‘storage_unstable’ directory while we work on compatibility with stable.
Known Issues:
- Many progression quests aren’t final, some are placeholders for future missions
- Combat balance is still WIP
- Performance issues, particularly in dense areas like dungeons and the outpost
- Background parallaxes have problematic transitions between world layers, e.g. oceans
- Pixel costs and rewards not yet balanced
- Interface windows (containers, AI, etc) can remain open after switching worlds or moving away from the triggering object
- Cooking recipes for tier 5 and 6 crops need to be implemented
- Crops sometimes get out of sync when grown on ship
- Enemy hit/death sounds sometimes fail to play
- Some errors in enemy movement and pathfinding
- Rare crash when removing items from containers, appears as “(InventoryException) Not allowed to discard stack when locked.”
- The launcher, on some people’s machines, will spew dll errors about missing ordinals. This is not fatal however, and the launcher will still work after you close them.
- And a whole lot more (probably) We’ll keep everyone posted as we make more updates and plans evolve, but thank you all for being so patient! Have fun! — Tiy also did an AMA on the Starbound subreddit last night answering lots of questions about development and the unstable update, so be sure to check that out. :) Hope you all have a nice weekend and a lovely holiday. <3 :) ːSBHorseː
