VEIN Weekly: Knitbone

Hi everyone, and welcome to another VEIN Weekly! There's a lot of behind the scenes work going on right now at the studio, but we're excited to show you a bit of what we're working on.

Starting off, we released Hotfix 2 shortly after the last weekly update, followed by Hotfix 3 due to a pretty rough crash. Players were able to crash servers by driving a car, then using it as a missile to destroy a piece of moved furniture – so we wanted to get rid of that immediately. There was also a UI issue with all crafting/workbench items saying 'x3' for quantity, which is just a result of redoing pretty much all text UI in 0.023. There are still some outstanding issues we'd like to fix in the next hotfix.

We're aware of an issue affecting Chinese and Japanese language users' input into text boxes. Sorry about that; we're working on a fix. We've also fixed a bug related to the DLSS/FSR upscaler settings in the settings menu not sticking properly.

Thanks to the new crash reporting systems we talked about last week, we've fixed a bunch of weird or difficult to fix crashes for the next hotfix.

Zoe has also done a ton of very tedious level design fixes, such as trees penetrating buildings or furniture clipping, which should be in the next hotfix.

In terms of stuff coming in 0.024, there's a few fun things.

We've done some balance changes to couch potato to appropriately give you conditions based on eating junk food versus fresh food. There have been some behind the scenes changes to the scent system to allow you to clean up (for example) the Lyon Mountain facility.

We fixed a UI issue that causes the stack count of an item to be displayed on selected items, even for items that don't stack. In general I think we'd like to address some UI issues for 0.024. We're probably going to be redoing a bit of the hunting UI over the next while as it's a bit hard to read/use.

We added some technology to the landscape called parallax occlusion mapping. This essentially allows us to add more visual/lighting/blend detail to the landscape for relatively cheap graphical cost.

I've done a little bit of work on modding. Don't get too excited, as we're still super early with this work, and it isn't a high priority at all as we need to do it properly in a future-proof way. We're looking at moving a bunch of assets over to a text based format in order to facilitate mods.

The biggest update in the last week has been the addition of foraging to the game. Wild plants now grow around you that you can pick and use. These plants have various medicinal uses, and are meant to be a late-game answer to medicine scarcity. They can be found in different areas – some mushrooms are found in caves, and some plants are only found at high elevations.

In the next few weeks, and probably for 0.024, we're planning on a massive overhaul of conditions and their impacts for difficulty balancing. Medical items are currently in excess, and we want to increase the difficulty and item requirements for your character's medical problems. Some condition changes may be unwelcome, and we're going to be listening especially closely to players on the experimental Steam branch (and post-0.024) for feedback on these in case we overdo it.

So, with that in mind, we wanted to add a way for players to be able to treat bad injuries when medical items are scarce. Foraged plants will be able to be crafted into teas or soups which have additionally beneficial effects. Some plants, such as knitbone, help with broken bones, and some such as red elderberries, are simply poisonous. You can identify which plants have which effects with the new Forager survivalism perk.

The next map expansion has been coming along steadily. The roads and layout are now done; next comes some new buildings to be placed in the area.

In weapons news, Ani has completed a medium-skill .38 revolver reload animation. As your character gains experience in weapon handling, your reloading ability improves.

So what else is happening? We're happy to announce that we have a character artist joining the team to redo our character and zombie art. We've always treated the characters as placeholders, so we're really excited to get some actually nice visuals on them. We're holding off on any introductions as they haven't formally joined the team as of this writing.

We're also happy to say we're going to be working with some talented hard surface artists over the next while to do a few important works for the game. We're planning on redoing our vehicles to be completely modular – doors will be openable and removable, tires will actually come off, the trunk will physically open, etc. We're also looking forward to replacing low quality art we have (and outright placeholders) with custom art.

We're also happy to announce that we're moving forward with localizing the game into Simplified Chinese, Spanish (LatAm), French, and Turkish, as well as fixing the issues with German, Japanese and Russian that currently exist.

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