World Improvements Update

Hello everyone! We are happy to announce we are releasing a smaller follow-up update to Anvil Update 4!

This update contains QoL improvements to the world of Orebound, giving more life to the world in the form of new Poi's, Greenspawn behaviour in camps, major optimization improvements and some new content!

AI Improvements

Following up from the combat improvements we made in Anvil Update 4, AI have had some work done to give them more life in the world. Greenspawn will now:

Patrol around POI's that they spawn within, walking around their camps on the look out for any pesky dwarves A smoothing algorithm has been applied for patrolling Greenspawn so their movement is more fluid. AI Spawning in camps will no longer spawn in the air Patrolling AI now has a lower angle of movement and will not attempt to walk vertically up tents or walls.

New Poi's

This will mark the first of many steps we are going to be taking in improving the exploration based content within the game. These rarer locations are lost landmarks of the ancient Thandorian Empire.

The Defiled Outpost

A huge dwarven building which once served the empire as an important waypoint for travelling dwarves. Now ruined and overrun with foul Greenspawn, it holds valuable treasures but it will be a tough fight to reach them...

The Defiled Watchtower

Another landmark once serving the Thandorian Empire. These watchtowers are spread across both cave layers and are also overrun with Greenspawn. A slightly easier challenge than that of the Defiled Outpost, these Watchtowers hold new chests where you will find a variety of weapons and ammunition.

Crumbling Ruin

Lost to the ages these crumbling ruins are found in the darkest of caves, who knows what structure once stood here? But within these ruins lies an ancient chest in which hold valuable ancient gears you can use to overclock your steam-machinery.

New Steam Tanks

To match the new tiers of water pumps and steam boilers, we are adding 3 tiers of steam tanks into the game to allow for a more balanced storage of steam power! Make use of them to hold steam in case there is a power cut within your factory.

New Character Customisables

To follow up with the new character customiser we are releasing a lot of new cosmetics to customise your dwarf with! Including:

5 new moustache variants 10 new tattoo variants 16 new eyebrow variants

Optimization improvements

A ton of optimization work on the CPU side has been done to the belt item transport system which improves performance for very large factories by a considerable margin.

We have focused on optimizing how belts move items considerably, for example we used to update the locations of all items even if only one item along the belt has moved, we now record the item that moved and don't process all the items that had no movement in the belt.

We've also split the rendering of items from their backend movement on belts so that we can ignore rendering when the belt is not visible, we used to do it before but not the current extent. We also have been making notes on a lot more optimizations that we'll be trickling in periodically across the next few patches. Like optimizing the Steam Pipe Network system, optimizing Machine crafting, etc

The Minecart movement system has also seen optimization improvements, carts used to have collision and having them all move in a complex voxel map was really taxing on the CPU. Because the collision has been removed. you can't stand on the carts anymore. But we'll be introducing a fully interactive cart riding system at sometime in the future.

Other changes and additions

By holding R on ranged weapons, you will now swap to the next available ammo type. Fixed the auto market input not fitting with the new machine UI Fixed a bug where you could not craft Improved the visual of steam quantity within steam tanks Tweaked the texture of the airships wooden planks Changed the loot within Orc Camp chests to be of lower tier loot & more thematic Added the new Weapons Chest containing melee & ranged weapons and ammo Added a new higher tier loot Orc Chest containing high valuable items Added the Dwarven Loot Chest containing factory and building items Added pickup effect for ancient chests that spawn randomly in the world Changed the dwarven axe damage from 35 to 50 Fixed a bug where the pop-up guiding icon for the three tombs would dart around the screen as you get closer

We are very happy with the QoL improvements to the game in this smaller update and soon we will be able to announce Anvil Update 5 and all the exciting things to come with it. Please leave a review if you haven't already, it helps us to continue to grow the game.

Dig deep and hold!