VEIN Weekly: Early Access Tune-Ups, Part II

Hi everyone! Welcome to another VEIN Weekly. We're gearing up rapidly for Early Access on October 24th, so most of this week's update is bugfixing, polish, and other tune-ups.

Remember that these news posts are not comprehensive! There have been a lot more changes than what's listed here. We do our best to summarize the major changes, but many changes and fixes to the game are not posted here – you'll have to wait for an update to see them in the changelog.

Items

Burn cream was made usable with Hotfix 2. When applied, burns will start to heal. We fixed a bug with canned food's open state not syncing in multiplayer. When a workbench is full, items from in-progress recipes will now overflow, and we fixed fireplaces and fires causing burn damage even when off.

I wrote a new system for loot spawning in some containers in the world. Essentially, for some really-hard-to-open containers, you're more likely to receive something at the bare minimum instead of an empty container.

A few exploits have been fixed. Some of our craftable items would dismantle into more than they cost to make, such as notepads or bandages, allowing you to just loop that process and hit the level cap with no effort. We've fixed these to not have loops like this.

All inventories, like workbenches and forges, will now drop their contents when destroyed into a loot bag, similar to player deaths. We heard some players were losing their workbench contents this way and had no idea.

The dropping algorithm has been improved to handle dropping items in vehicles, close to a wall, etc. Dropping items while in vehicles has been dangerous for a while because it could fling the vehicle due to physics penetration, but that should be all fixed now.

UI

We now account for rounding in numeric prompts: sometimes you'd see you can pour 29.7 mL into something, but in reality you had 29.68 rounded up, so typing 29.7 would block you. We took this into account and now deal with this.

We now pause the game when the Steam overlay is open.

We added an 'Exit Chair/Vehicle' keybind you can bind to quickly exit a vehicle, and added vehicle camera settings so you can turn off a fixed vehicle-following camera.

You can now type directly into most settings widgets to specify exact values without the slider. In addition there are visual indicators to help link setting names to the values.

Notifications can now replace each other. We added this to combat the 'vertical wall' of notifications you get when dismantling. Now, each dismantling notification replaces the previous one. Notifications like in-progress saving also go into this system.

We now show battery amount on items, where the stack would normally go. This applies to both batteries and battery-containing items.

Page Up and Page Down now function exactly as the mouse wheel does, in case you have a broken mouse.

Wiring & Systems

We added some door functionality, such as trap-doors and door flaps, in preparation for the upcoming Clinton Correctional Facility.

"Examine Connections" will now tell you if the device is connected to anything right in the UI.

We optimized performance for TVs when multiple TVs are showing the same camera, and did some work on banks of TV monitors. In addition, we fixed a bug where TVs would not correctly select local player movie files and instead play something else. We also fixed an issue where paused videos would continue playing if you traveled away from your base and came back.

We also fixed a bug where some streetlights would initially appear on.

Characters

We improved player and corpse death physics. You now get dirty far slower, and we reworked how dirtiness transfers between clothing and your character.

We've had a bug reported for a while that zombies could one-shot-kill you. This ended up being due to the game's Headshot Multiplier setting also applying to damage to players, not just from them, so zombies would punch you in the head and immediately kill you. That's been fixed. We also fixed a bug with Always Become Zombie causing some strange bugs upon death.

Vehicles

We fixed driving into fences not causing any sound. We reduced the intensity of headlights, and tweaked the Tadellini Cobra engine setup such that it is now definitely the fastest car in the game.

We fixed a long-standing and widely-experienced bug where placing furniture on vehicles might cause them to fling away violently.

We've added motorcycles to VEIN! They can be found, rarely, in some Early Access map sections. They're quite fast but have no storage, and can accommodate a passenger on the pillion seat. If you hit someone while driving one, you're going to fall off.

We added more vehicle impact sounds to vehicles to break up the monotony when you drive over a bunch of bodies.

We fixed an exploit where players could use vehicles as battering rams on doors, even with base damage turned off.

Finally we've been doing some work on currently known bugs, like vehicles despawning from players' saves.

Building

We removed a buggy restriction to building Utility Cabinets that would cause some stat desync. Many people playing multiplayer reported an inability to place UCs and receiving infinite construction XP that way. Sadly the construction XP they gained was completely an illusion and not really happening – we've fixed the issue now and you should be able to place UCs normally. In addition, from now on, all stat/XP/leveling notifications will only reflect real XP gain.

We've increased the quantity of seeds you get from harvesting crops. You should generally get at least one seed back from farming.

World

We've increased, again, the distance you can move furniture. We're planning on replacing this at some point after Early Access with a system where you physically grab and hold furniture on your person, and get movement penalties because of it, but will no longer have to continue placing and grabbing the same thing.

The reasoning behind this system is that when we wrote it we had no idea people would start moving furniture to their base. At the time, years ago, we expected people to use furniture to barricade their base and not much else outside of dismantling. Now it's clear that players want to do long-distance moving of furniture and stations, so we need a better system.

I did some level design work on the side to help Azi out as we get closer to Early Access.

Storage totes are now labelable. This is really easy to set up, so we're probably going to add this functionality to more containers.

We've added climbing sounds to ladders, and added support for non-vertical ladders.

Finally, I fixed a bug to do with the Bowen Hill storage building. It turns out somehow there were two buildings overlapping each other, so when you flicked a switch, it was a 50/50 to flick the switch in one building vs. the other.

Backend & Misc.

For server hosts, we added some more endpoints to the HTTP API. You can now retrieve weather and time details from the respective endpoints. For an example of what hosts are doing with this, check out https://vein-germany.de/!

We've added a variety of editor tools to help enrich the world's detail, like placing footsteps or bullet spray.

We added a couple new settings. One is a Rich Presence setting, allowing you to turn off regional updates to Steam and Discord (e.g. hiding your general location). The second is a content-friendly censor, which changes (for example) the names of drug items, for YouTubers and streamers.

Finally, we've as usual been working on performance and trying to polish out as much as we can in that regard for Early Access.

Azi has been hard at work polishing the Early Access map. It's very large, so there's a lot to cover, and I'm sure there will be minor bugs upon the Early Access release, but we're doing our best to catch everything we can & doing multiple tests to find them. We think most people will be impressed by it.

So that's it for our VEIN Weekly! Thanks for reading. With Early Access so close, we're excited to see how people like it. We've recently hit 500,000 Steam wishlists, which is a huge milestone for us. Adding the game to your wishlist on Steam is the primary measure of how Steam boosts visibility of a game, so if you haven't yet, be sure to add VEIN to your wishlist – it helps us a lot!

See you next week!