VEIN Weekly: Hunting Special

Hi everyone! Welcome to another VEIN Weekly. We've made a lot of progress this week as we've been focusing on getting 0.023 features done so we can get that update out already. As usual the contents of this update aren't yet released outside of the Experimental beta branch.

We released Hotfix 18 on the 22nd, which seems to have caused no (new) issues. Hopefully that becomes the standard for hotfixes going forward.

I've continued working on foliage optimizations and fixes. As I've said before, I want the new foliage to run just as well or better than our old foliage, so it's something I've been focused on. I've also been fixing some of our issues regarding lighting and the sky. I did some work on our clouds, which should be ready by the time we release 0.023. Some placeholder art has been replaced (mostly for animal related items).

Projectors have been added to the map, so you can now find them and bring them back to your base.

I finished the first pass of the new hunting overhaul. You now have a variety of options to extract resources from corpses – human, zombie, or animal. I'm not sure if I've stated this in a previous update, but the Farming stat has been renamed to Survivalism to include the new hunting features.

You can butcher animals, giving you muscles and meat; gut them, giving you organs, usable as e.g. bait; bloodlet, extracting their blood for future use in blood transfusions and in bloodmeal for plants; dismember them, giving you bones for future use in crafting and cooking; and skin them, for use in repairing clothing and armor crafting– something that's planned in the future. We also have the ability to extend the system for other actions.

There are some extensions we'd like to make to the system as well, such as damaging hunting results based on the weapon used to kill the animal. These hunting interactions are separate from livestock, such as milking cows or shearing sheep, which will come in a future update.

Did you know certain food items have effects on stress and mood? We've now made it visible in food item properties.

Bird meat has been added, and you can "dismantle" birds that you've shot down.

We added functionality to bloodmeal and bonemeal. These can be added to planters to give bonuses to the soil. Both can improve resulting plant seed quality, but the larger bonus is that bloodmeal causes faster plant growth, and bonemeal causes larger harvests. These can be crafted from hunting results.

I've improved the visual and auditory responses from fishing, so it should be easier to figure out when you've caught a fish.

I did some behind-the-scenes work on the death stats screen. Nothing should visually change but it should help us add Steam achievements based on them down the line.

A peristaltic pump item has been added to the game. Its use right now is in extracting blood from corpses, but I can think of a couple more uses in e.g. power and wastewater plant maintenance once we reach that point in development.

Azi has been continuing work on the new map area to the west and south of Redford. It's still heavily work-in-progress.

I've rewritten how building temperatures work from scratch. Buildings (well, most of them) now have thermostats. You can use a thermostat to change the desired temperature in the building. The ability for a building to reach a desired temperature is based on the central air or heating (if it exists), radiators/space heaters, and air conditioning units. It's also influenced by the exterior temperature, so if it's extremely cold out, reaching higher temperatures will be more difficult.

Fishing bait is now swappable, so you can use different types of bait (which are consumed by different fish). You will need to use multiple types of bait to collect all the fish in the game.

Ani has been working on some animations for the .38 Special. Our first weapons we're planning on animating are the ones that are most unique, so that's typically revolvers, shotguns, and rifles.

So that about wraps up this weekly update! If you're interested, and looking for work, feel free to send an email with a portfolio over to jobs@ramjetstudios.com. We are still hiring for a variety of positions over the next few months.

Next week, I'm planning on working on more foliage performance fixes, Steam Deck support, and more controller support; we'll see what other stuff gets finished in that time. We're hoping to get 0.023 out soon, so we have to focus on the boring but necessary incomplete stuff before we can release it.

See you next week!