Build Log #07
The Calm Before the Storm
The seventh biweekly report of the MLM beta
After the arrival of lootable death, these were quiet two weeks. It is the middle of summer, and the pace reflected it. No landmark mechanic went live. Instead the work went into making the world run smoothly under the weight it has gained: half a million objects, endless corpse piles, and a map that keeps growing. This is the calm before the storm. PvP looting is what everyone is waiting for, and it is close.
A slower log this time, because a slower two weeks. The next one will not be.
01What changed on the server side
Grouped by subject.
Fighting the frame rate
- Corpse piles were the enemy. With lootable death live and bodies accumulating, dead bodies became the main drag on performance. The fight to keep frame rates up ran through the whole period.
- A same-look checkmark. A client option was added that makes all dead bodies look the same, which improves FPS at the cost of being able to tell corpses apart. It is optional: leave it off to keep distinguishing bodies, turn it on when the piles get heavy.
- Level of Detail. A Level of Detail setting was added to the client, giving players another lever to trade visual detail for performance.
- Optimizations landed. By the end of the period, new optimizations had reached the point where corpse piles were largely no longer the problem they had been. Corpses continued to be cleared from the world periodically as well.
Winter takes hold
- Freezing begins to bite. During a Freeze you need a campfire at all times. Freezing raises your chance to catch a cold and other ailments. How often a Freeze occurs can be checked on the site.
- Firewood is the advice. The developer's repeated counsel through the period was to gather as much firewood as possible. As he put it, porn cards will not keep your room warm.
- Fire can be put out. Strong wind can extinguish a flame right after it is lit, and windows without glass let the weather in, so shelter and fuel both matter.
Living with lootable death
- Offline is not safe. A character left outside can be killed by lightning while the player is offline, and all their loot is lost. Even a roof is not fully safe, since other players can push you out from under it and loot you.
- The developer learned it firsthand. He logged in to find his own character emptied, everything gone from the pockets. His own remark: good that keys on a string were added before looting, or losing the vehicle key would have meant losing everything.
- Respawn is a refuge, for now. Logging out on the respawn point keeps a player untargetable there. It was described as a temporary measure until more mechanics are added.
- Bury your valuables. The standing advice was to bury things so a single death does not cost you everything. Rain removes the signs of digging, and heavier rain removes them faster, so burying in the rain stays the safer practice. A reminder went out to check whether pavement had been laid over anything buried.
World and items
- Map changes. Some changes were made to the map, with players prompted to update their local map file to match.
- New items and models. New items and models were added across several client updates through the period.
- Psy mycelia. Psy mycelia can be picked up accidentally during any action involving a needleleaf tree, such as searching for sticks or chopping one down. The developer noted it is hard to come by, having found none himself in testing.
- Hurricane lantern. Testing continued on how the hurricane lantern consumes lamp oil.
02What changed on the client side
Releases
Several client builds shipped across the period, focused on performance rather than features. The headline additions were the corpse-pile same-look checkmark, the Level of Detail setting, and the optimizations that followed. New items and models were folded in along the way, and map changes required players to update their local map file.
Version 17
The v17 line was where most of this landed, iterating on the frame-rate problem across several releases until corpse piles stopped being the bottleneck they had been at the start of the period.
03Community contributions
If your name isn't here and you contributed, post in the forum and we'll catch you in Build Log #08.
04Events
A quiet stretch over the summer, with no scheduled events. The activity was in testing and bug-hunting rather than staged happenings.
The developer's own loss, August 5. The clearest moment of the period was the developer logging in to find his character looted clean by an offline lightning death, a live reminder that the new rules apply to everyone, and that keys on a string were added just in time.
Corpse purges, throughout. Dead bodies were removed from the world periodically to keep performance manageable while the optimizations were being tuned.
05On the bench
Named but not yet shipped:
- PvP looting. The storm this calm precedes. It is the next major change, and the question "when is PvP looting on, ready?" was openly on the table by early August. Once live, killing another player will let you take everything they carry.
- Fragmentation grenades. Frags were named as something to be tested soon.
- More survival mechanics. The respawn safe zone is a temporary measure until further mechanics are added, and freezing effects will deepen as winter continues.
- Eating. Still being finished. Meat was suggested as the answer when hunger, not thirst, is the problem.
06By the numbers
A quick snapshot of the period:
07Closing
Build Log #08 will cover August 16 through August 29.
Quiet weeks matter too. The world now runs smoothly enough to carry what comes next, and what comes next is the change everything has been building toward. When PvP looting arrives, the calm ends. Gather your firewood, bury what you cannot lose, and watch the horizon.