Patch Notes: 0.9.0.0 - New Rendering Engine: Graphics and Performance Update!

Greetings, survivors!

This update brings a fundamental change to the game's core, vastly improving performance across the board. We are also introducing highly requested features, such as the ability to rename your villagers, set up advanced camps with the Survival Chest and more!

Engine & Graphics Migration

We have fully transitioned the game's graphics engine from HDRP to the Universal Render Pipeline (URP).

• It significantly reduces the strain on your hardware, leading to much smoother and more consistent framerates.
• To accommodate the new pipeline, we have updated and refined several graphical elements, including lighting presets, day/night cycles, vegetation, fog, the skybox, and the Plague environment visuals.
• New water system: better rivers and lakes, plus a new water shader.
• Fog draw distance is longer, and the player camera distance was adjusted slightly.
• New Beech Tree set with new models and textures.
• New tree placements and nature props in the North Plains.
• Better ground textures in the North Plains and the Silent Forest.
• A lot of animation adjustments and improvements.

New Features & Structures

• You can now build a Training Dummy in your village, granting guards a combat bonus!
• You are no longer restricted to storing items just inside your village. You can now build Survival Chests out in the wild to establish advanced forward operating camps.
• You can now fully customize the names of your villagers to personalize your settlement.

Gameplay & Quality of Life

• You must act quickly when an enemy begs for mercy! If you take too long to decide their fate, the NPC will automatically recover and run away.
• Reclaiming your items after dying is much less tedious. When you recover your backpack, your previously equipped quickslot items will automatically return to their respective hotbar spaces.
• Improved the player jump animations for a more natural feel.

Multiplayer & UI Enhancements

• The game now automatically saves your data upon a client disconnect or when safely exiting to the main menu. Additionally, interactable locks (like chests or crafting stations) are immediately released if a player disconnects while using them.
• Added clear color coordination for multiplayer sessions. Player names and their corresponding map markers now share distinct colors so you can easily tell who is who.
• Increased the font size of the multiplayer chat text and added colored player names to room messages for better readability.
• Added new markers to the minimap and ensured that Quest Board UI notes correctly display over the map instead of being hidden.

Balance & Tuning

• Re-balanced the drop values for feathers, adjusted North Plains loot setups, tweaked weapon dismantle values, and refined various construction and upgrade costs.
• Lowered the wait timer between raid waves from 300 seconds down to 150 seconds to keep the pacing of settlement defense engaging.

Performance & Bug Fixes

• Further Optimizations:
• Greatly reduced the performance cost of the Shallow Water Simulation near coastlines.
• Optimized NPC background animations and the minimap's update cycle.
• Disabled cloth physics calculations on objects that are far away from the player and added global cloth settings.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed an issue where client players would get stuck on the loading screen if the host had a villager with no assigned profession.
• Fixed multiplayer desynchronization issues specifically related to the Farm station.
• Prevented players from accidentally sleeping in tents that are already occupied by someone else.
• Fixed NPC clothing stretching unnaturally during death and dismemberment, and improved overall ragdoll scaling.
• Fixed NPC torch behavior during combat and ensured their torches are properly visible when they are outside the village.

We are excited to bring more amazing updates to Nested Lands. We are listening and reading all of your feedback and acting on it as fast as we can. We hope you enjoy new performance and graphics — please share your experience with us! More updates are coming in the future, so stay tuned.

Until then, godspeed!