VEIN Weekly: Apple Seeds & Addictions

Hi everyone, and welcome to another VEIN Weekly! We have a decent amount to present this week, and we hope you enjoy it. As usual the changes in this post are not in the base game yet and will be in the next major update.

We've done a bunch of work on sleep. Multiplayer and singleplayer sleep systems are now unified. You can have multiple bed spawnpoints in singleplayer now, like in multiplayer. In multiplayer, you can now set a duration to sleep for. In addition, on locally hosted ("listen") servers, if everyone on the server is in bed, time can advance, similar to Minecraft. We also added an option for this behavior on dedicated servers, but it's off by default as an abusive player could exploit this to advance time significantly.

I've done more work on pseudostacking since our weekly update last week. You can now drag entire stacks, drop entire stacks, double/shift click stacks, etc. I also fixed some bugs cropping up from it. The selected inventory UI has received a small change, overlapping text on the icon, which allows for more space for use buttons and key-value info.

We've been hard at work rebalancing conditions. Stress, thirst, stimulated, well-fed, and poisoned conditions have all been rebalanced to be more difficult. Antibiotic items will now treat bacterial infections (rather than just preventing them). We've also added a few new medicines you can find – anti-anxiety pills, caffeine pills, and sleep gummies. We're looking forward to hearing feedback as we continue to balance the condition difficulty in the game.

Medical effects from foraged plants have been set up across the board. Most of these can now be crafted/cooked into salves, soups and teas, which have a much stronger effect. Some foraged plants are poisonous, but most are designed to be late-game replacements for medical items.

You now receive medical XP for suturing. Alongside our condition rebalance, we're also going to be treating injuries more seriously. Bandages will require more maintenance and will be subject to getting infections easier, which itself will be more difficult to treat.

The medical menu has also received a dedicated HP bar, where you can view the actual HP numbers of your character. This will also let you view temporary max. HP reductions, which are coming to a few different conditions as punishment.

The map has been receiving updates as we continue to work on Westwood, what we're calling the new area. Most of the unique buildings and houses have been assembled and are almost ready to go in. We think you guys will enjoy setting up bases in the new A-Frame houses. I've personally been working on some new waterfall systems for use in this area.

We added a sawmill workbench for use in the new map region. This simply rewards you with double the planks from logs that you get from a normal workbench (8 planks per log instead of 4).

The settings menu has been updated with a radio volume slider, so you can turn up or down in-game radio music.

We added a gameplay setting, "Retain Items On Death", that allows for you to keep all your items when you die. It's intended for more sandbox-y players who are more interested in the creative side of things.

We've added plantable trees. You can now plant apple trees via apple seeds; these do not need a planter to be planted. We're going to add a few different types of these over time.

You can now gut fish to get a fish guts item, which itself can be used as bait. Fish now also satisfy hunger according to their weight.

Admins can now see other people on the map, a community suggestion that was submitted on our Discord. Note that you won't be able to see literally everyone; we don't network things to you that are distant from you as a performance optimization. We intend to formalize being able to see your friends in multiplayer via the upcoming cell phone/internet systems.

We fixed addictions! Yahoo! They haven't worked in a long time because of a missing line of code, and now they're functional. You can be addicted to alcohol, caffeine, meth, cocaine, opioid painkillers, and nicotine. In celebration we've added 6 new uniquenesses which start you addicted to these and give you some basic drugs to satisfy the addiction. Addictions go away over time, but it takes a while and you need to suffer through withdrawal first.

We added spawn region thumbnails to the character creation screen.

Weather now affects post processing and mood of the world. Precipitation now causes the sun to dim much more, and it becomes more difficult to see at distances.

Parcel items have received a new set of artwork to replace the old one.

Skyler has been working hard on our new character art. We intend on a large variety of preset character types without sacrificing the creative control over what your character looks like.

Finally, we've started work on item container items. These are like bags which can hold other items. They can be waterproof and have a capacity limit, but you can drop/move the whole bag to quickly transfer multiple items.

So that's it for this week! We're hoping we can get 0.024 (and future updates) out faster than we did 0.023. Hopefully it'll only be a few more weeks before we can release it.

Are you interested in working with us? Please email jobs@ramjetstudios.com. We've received a lot of email over the last few weeks that we're getting through, but we do try to respond to everyone that mails in.

Thanks for reading, and we'll see you next week!