As we approach the end of Beta this week, we wanted to let everyone know that the Premium Shop Beta discount for Hexite Shards will be ending with the downtime prior to the update on Friday

Major Changes

World Select

In preparation for 1.0 and the fresh world release this week, you’ll notice that the login screen now features a drop down to choose which world you are connecting to. Once the new world launches you will be able to choose in the drop down which world you want to connect to. Currently you have just one character on each world.

Claim Stability and Maintenance

The claim stability changes outlined here are now live creating a much stronger requirement to ensure your claim is stable (lacking holes and large thin extensions). This change is paired with both reducing the maintenance cost for the same amount of tiles by 20-45% across all sizes of claims as well as granting all claims a further 10% additional tiles to place to allow you to easily get your claim up to stability. Going forward we believe that this will provide a reduction in claims used for unintended purposes like griefing.

Regional Marketplaces & Banks

After longer deliberation, we have decided to make some large changes to the connectivity of certain structures in the game. Going forward both Banks and Marketplaces are linked throughout the region. This means you can sell or buy to any other marketplace’s listings within the region and your items in the town bank can be accessed from any other bank in the region. That said there are a few limitations that are important to be aware of. These Banks and Marketplaces now require T7 Township research so beyond the ruined towns these will be much fewer and far between, leaving plenty of need for intra-region transporting of items and cargo. Further, in order to move items and cargo between regions they must still be taken by boat or teleported via waystones, leaving room for region to region arbitrage. The existing marketplaces have been grandfathered in, but the current settlement banks have been converted to town stashes, which behave as the old local banks behaved.

Settlement Research and Advancement

The previous system of “outpost” research has been overhauled and renamed to “Homesteads”. Our goal with this is to provide a better avenue for solo and small groups of players to have their own claims which are more viable to advance and maintain with a smaller group, while not taking away from the value that township settlements provide. Homesteads can be upgraded in tier for a fraction of the cost of Townships, but still require items crafted from townships to prevent them from getting ahead of townships in the world tier advancement. Homesteads have access to all profession crafting stations, but do not have access to empires, regional banks, marketplaces and destination waystones, among other more minor things. Further, homesteads cannot expand or alter the size of their claim and do not generate hex coins through settlement minting. Once you decide to upgrade your claim in the homestead route, you cannot backtrack to become a township, you would need to pick up and restart the claim if you wanted to go that route.

Resource Health and Visual Scale Update

All resources have had a pass on their maximum health and in many cases have been increased by 10x-200x. This change aims to reflect the scaling power of players through the tiers, the increased rarity or distance to reach these resources and an intended increase in time that higher tier resources last before being depleted. Additionally, we have set some resources to have infinite health in rare cases where this makes sense, such as large resources which only come from a single biome. With this change we have also updated the scale of many resources, the goal of this is to provide better sightlines, especially in forests, and allow us to thin out the number of resources to create both a more aesthetic and easy to navigate environment.

Farming Overhaul

The way farming works has been overhauled to no longer use passive crafting and instead leverage the placeable system to get you out of the UI and actually farming in the fields. Now you need to use the paving system to pave fertile ground to establish farmland which can be used by all players. Seeds are now directly planted from your inventory then add fertilizer (of the correct tier) and water from buckets (buckets are kept) to get the crops growing. After the wait you harvest the plants directly in the field saving the need to process plants as a second step. Crops have also been made “more dense” in that you are growing the equivalent of 5 passive slots worth of plants per tile. While this process of planting and harvesting is more involved it also now gives considerably more exp to balance out. This is just the foundation of the new system and we are looking to expand this by adding more variety of interactions and more varied crops as you level up in future updates.

Ocean Cities and River Platforms

We have added a new type of water platform and made some changes to the existing ones. You can now build and place Ocean Platforms which allows for building on them. These must be placed in the Open Ocean biome (which can be seen under the minimap) and can be placed without a settlement claim present. Once placed you can build on them, including setting up a settlement totem. Once claimed, they cannot be removed by other players who lack permission. You can build an entire settlement in the middle of the ocean with these and we are looking forward to seeing what awesome things people make. We will consider if the restrictions on these can be lightened in the future to allow them to be built closer to land without causing issues.

Further, we have added a new type of river platform which is protected from people deconstructing them but it must be built on a claim, this allows you claim to have a more permanent bridge you don’t need to worry about being ripped up. With this, both the new and existing makeshift river platforms can now be boated through. We are planning to make the visuals look more intuitive for this in the future, but we believe it makes sense to make this change now.

Empire Maintenance and Sieges

In order to move empires in the direction we envision, we have made a few tweaks to how they work. Sieges now have a 8 hour delay before starting, but after that progress much faster, the goal here is to still give defenders time to react but to have sieges progress more quickly so that they don’t drag out forever. Secondly we’ve tweaked the confusing way in which watchtower energy maintenance costs are calculated. Now Watchtowers drain energy based on the number of territory chunks in them multiplied by an empire-wide multiplier which has larger empires draining faster than small ones. This multiplier starts small but becomes noticeable when an empire starts to take up a substantial amount of a region and makes it near impossible for an empire to control the entire world. With these foundational improvements, we are looking forward to some more additions to empires in the near future.

Added

• New Scholar Content
  • Added a new mini dungeon for scholars. Find a dungeon using a Futuremaker’s map. Complete a short puzzle in the dungeon as fast as you can and harvest the stone carvings until time runs out.
  • Added surveyors. Place a surveyor and charge it with Hexite Energy. Once charged, a timer will start. When the timer expires, collect it for Stone Carvings
• Added grass shorts cosmetic override which all new players start with if you prefer shorts over the existing waistwrap
• Expanded starting options for hair and facial hair

• Added a Blocklist to empires. Emperors and ranking members can block and manage blocked players to prevent problem players from joining your empire.
  

• Many new Charms/Instruments for various professions
• Placeable items can now be put directly on the action bar and used to place them at your feet. This is especially useful for Farming.
• Added Hexite Meteors. Hexite Meteors randomly fall throughout the world. Once spawned, it’ll take some time for their fires to go out. Cool the smoldering meteors with water to harvest hexite cooperatively from them.
  

• Added new Mak enemies to First Temple and T3 Sentinel Dungeon
  • New loot and unlocks to be found from these
    

• Added a “bad luck protection” trade to convert pumpkins and sunflowers into rare halloween items that drop from them. Check the twins for the trade.

Changed

• Waystones have been split into two types: Departure and Destination. Departure waystones are unlocked early and allow you to teleport to any discovered destination waystone. Destination waystones are unlocked later through township research and allow both departing and teleporting to. Ruined towns contain destination waystones and any existing player-made waystones are now considered legacy waystones which are currently treated as destination waystones (no change in functionality).
• Updated the stack depth of all deployables and storage buildings to be deeper
• Water platforms can now be placed while swimming
• Custom Chat Channels now have unique colors for each channel. The colors are based on which slot the channel is in. We plan to add the ability to customize these further in the future.
• Regional channels (Region, Trade, Looking For Group) can now be messaged with commands /1 /2 /3.
• Starting Claim Radius has been increased and max supplies values have been updated to ensure even when using all tiles you have at least 45 days of supplies when fully supplied.
• With the above changes to Banks and Markets Waystones now no longer cost more energy for items in your inventory when travelling within the same region
• Adjusted lured animals.
  • Slightly increased roaming distance.
  • Tier 4 and Tier 5 lures can be used in more biomes.
  • Increased the health of distracted animals.
• Updated the login and loading screen art
• Added option to toggle traveler icons on the map
• Updated number of passive slots for ovens to 50 per players and 1000 total (this will only apply for newly built ones)
• Updated the claim border visual to be easier to see across changes in elevation and through grass
• Removed Dirt decal visual from under solid pavements
• Item “Funnel-up” Changes
  • Refined Items no longer require the tier below, but scale up the amount of items needed with each tier
  • Settlement Research (previously Codexes) now funnel up
  • In total, later tiers of settlement research require more late tier items. The goal is not to dramatically change the effort required but to push more of the effort to your current tier. There should still be a decent amount of lower tier items needed but it should allow players to spend more time gathering close to their current tier.
  • Existing codexes can be converted into Settlement Research.
    

Fixed

• Fixed an issue that could result in equipment disappearing when swapping gear.
• Fixed some incorrect deconstruction recipes for settlement structures
• Fixed some issues where a settlement tier was not being displayed correctly in the UI and map
• Fixed an issue where buildings which require settlement research were showing the wrong research in the UI
• Fixed an issue where resources being cleared from a claim could still spawn placeables and resources when destroyed
• Improved Server reconnection logic
• Fixed snap trap level requirements.
• Fixed building borders disappearing while building.
• Did an improved pass on the game’s localization into other languages. Let us know how it is!

Questions about 1.0

What would you like to know about BitCraft 1.0? Share your questions and concerns for a chance to have them answered in an upcoming Q&A on our blog. We’ll answer as many as we can, though we may not be able to cover every submission. Similar questions will be combined. Ask us here!