Greetings Colonists!

Early Access 4 (EA4) is getting closer and closer: We're finializing builds, running tests, drinking excessive amounts of coffee and energy drinks but it's nearly ready for you all to test!

Make sure you join our discord server for all updates and access to the client during the testing windows.

Well, we’ve been very busy for the last five months at Virtuverse - here are our v0.6.0 patch notes which will become available for the Backer Playtest and the public EA4 afterwards.

This patch has come with some pretty massive technological upgrades:

- We’ve upgraded the core version of Unreal that we use from 4.21 to 4.24, bringing a whole host of optimizations and new technologies we can take advantage of.
- Matured our server hosting and instancing technology using Terraform & AWS Gamelift, this should bring much smoother (and more) dungeon instances - and will enable other applications too (Instanced quest locations, instanced housing, instanced pvp etc...)!
- Integrated with Anzu for a pilot of programmatic in-game advertising - which will allow us to reduce the cost to play of Virtuverse by introducing a new revenue stream.

Engine:
- Upgraded to Unreal Engine version 4.24.3
- Added Anzu Integration
- Overhauled our Instancing Technology
- A lot of networking improvements and optimizations

Wipe!:
- Characters Skills and Inventories will be wiped before the backer EA4 test
- Due to the new loot and crafting changes we will have to wipe all previous progress :’(
- Aurum will be reset to 10,000

A Whole New Map:
- We’re moving away from the old peninsula map to a more permanent home of the Temrance island. The new map is half the size of its predecessor, but it’s far more lively, with new and exciting locations, points of interests, quests, biomes, and landscapes.
Peninsula had 4 biomes: woodlands, mountains, desert, and the crater. We’ve greatly diversified the new map to host a wider variety of biomes such as marshlands, new types of forests, plains, and much more.
- New flora and fauna. A huge variety of new plants will fill Temrance with new colours for an even more authentic and alien feel of planet Stig.
- Virtuverse Interdimensional Research and Training Utilities Facility - VIRTU - is the colonist’s first step in the new world of Virtuverse. A more defined and linear tutorial will get new colonists up to speed with some of the fundamental features of Virtuverse.
- Virtuverse Orientational Compound - VOC - is a reincarnation of the original VOC from the peninsula. A more densely packed and lively town, hosting a number of NPCs, all with unique dialogue and backstories, new and more engaging quests, easter eggs, and hidden story details.
- Deep within the mountains of Temrance runs a maze of caves for colonists to explore.
- Mobs will better integrate with their surrounding biomes and time of day. Nighttime canine attacks and nocturnal variants of new and existing creatures. The environment will play a bigger role in combat and quests.

Buff & Debuffs:
- Buffs and Debuffs are now in the game! These will show up on the nameplates of your targets or above your health bar if you are affected. You can hover over them to get a more in-depth description.
- Added buff cleansing systems and items you can use to clear debuffs from yourself and others.
- Stacks and ticking: Quite a lot of damaging buffs will deal damage to you over time. Certain effects may stack if applied several times.
- Added a range of tools which allow you to buff other players.
- Integrated the buff system with existing equipment - you should now be able to burn enemies with your energy weapons and freeze them with cryo-tech ones.
- Notable Buffs and Debuffs:
- Digital Sickness - a stacking debuff that increases respawn time with each time you die - see any Virtuverse Representative to get a code reset to fix this.
- Poison - a lot of the wildlife, especially in dungeons, can poison you on hit, these buffs stack and can quickly become a problem if you don’t have curatives.
- Regeneration - Sometimes applied when consuming cooked food, increases your base health regeneration.

Crafting 2.0:
- Crafting 2.0 is a pretty big change and departure from our old crafting system. A completely redesigned system, built from the ground up, adds a unique flavour to both crafting and its supporting professions.
- We’ve eliminated the need to have Recipe items and Recipe Books - these were just cluttering players inventory and have moved over to a new discovery system and researching.
A complete redo of the GUI streamlines the crafting process while also displaying more information than the old one. We’ve also added helper methods to allow players to auto-sell items and craft with crafting scraps.
- Some crafting tables will also allow you to preview the mesh before crafting, this forms a base for the modular optional slots and customizing the appearance of equippables (very early days). Researching:
- In order to discover new schematics, you will have to perform research which increases crafting time. With each item crafted, your research skill increases.
- Leveling up in crafting research may result in discovering a new schematic, earning crafting notes or other rare occurrences.
- Improvement levels allow players to gain extra familiarity and skill with certain schematics. These levels may increase the crafting speed for that schematic, increase the chance for a higher quality item and more!
- Durable items can now have quality tiers, these rarer items occur from an exceptional craft. Such items have increased stats or values not limited to
- Improvent areas can be (but not limited to): Faster attack speed, Higher minimum damage, Higher critical chance, Buffs and debuffs on enemies.
- Players can teach schematics they have learnt to other players using research notes found while researching.
- Although schematics can be taught to a player of any level, they will still need to reach an appropriate crafting level in order to use that schematic.
- Durable items can also have optional slots, these let you swap out the materials for certain components for others and have unique effects as a result. For example - Adding Phonoic ore to a weapon will add a chance for the weapon to deal damage over time effect.
- You can now auto sell your crafts and limit what quality version it sells. This will help keep inventories tidy and free of thousands of low-level armours!

Building:
- We’ve matured our building system and are happy to reveal the first occurrences of it in Virtuverse. The system is split up into a few distinct categories, player housing, businesses and guild housing (latter not released in 0.6 sadly!).
- Purchasing vs. leasing: players can either be owners or lease a plot of land. Owners have full control over their plots indefinitely whereas players who lease pay a set fee to the owner per lease interval. These intervals are configurable by the plot owner (1 month to 12 months).
- For EA4 we’re not running any sales of land, but all the available plots will be available for leasing within the community. (For free of-course during testing) - A player who places intractable items within their plots can use those to run a business.
- Players will be able to utilize the ingame (and instanced housing at a later date) to showcase items, store all their resources, have personal crafting terminals, and much much more.
- Access policies will be able to be set to restrict access to specific people, your team, or the general public for in-world housing.
- We’ll be starting up by allowing players to craft and place storage terminals on their plots. These devices will be configurable by their owners.
- A few clarifications to certain mechanics:
- To clarify some issues raised around players becoming inactive when holding land. If an in-world plot of land is marked as private and their player remains inactive past a certain timeframe (3 months currently without login, but subject to change) their plot will revert to being leasable. This will allow the community to take over the running of the plot, all rent revenue will be split 50-50 (also subject to change) between the owner and the world event pool. All revenues generated from the land or configured businesses will go to the leaser.
- Each plot has its own internal storage - if a booth, business or house lapses, all of its contents will be stored in a storage locked to its owner and will be retrievable at any time at no cost to the player.

Dungeons:
- We’ve completely reworked out dungeon procedural generation for EA4 - you should see more interesting layouts and reliability in size.
- Boss fights have now been worked into the cave dungeon system - beware the Broodmother.
- Improved pathing and collision
- Added new environmental effects and assets to interact with, or avoid.
- Teams are now persistent when joining or leaving dungeons
- You can now leave a dungeon and rejoin the same dungeon
- Some more enemies may have found their way into the cave system beneath Temrance Island.

Time Of Day:
- Time now passes on Virtuverse!
- A full day on Stig will last 3 hours: 2 hours of daytime, and an hour of nighttime.
- Some creatures on Stig only come out during the night, while others thrive during the day.
- Dynamic fog changes in density and colour throughout the day.

Pets:
- Travel around Planet Stig with your own little (or not so little) companions.
- Pets can fulfil either a Vanity, Combat or Utility purpose.
- Combat pets will assist you in combat, attacking your active target. They consume treats from your inventory to keep themselves well fed during these strenuous activities.
- Combat pets may also have situational combat abilities which can buff their owner, or debuff their target.
- Utility pets can have lots of different applications, for example the Laurietech support drone can fulfil the role of a supplementary healer or damage dealer, making venturing out into the more dangerous biomes on Stig a little safer.
- Mining drones are another addition that will fly around you and slowly mine discovered nodes, these need to be continually powered by Superior Energy Cells to function.
- Organic pets will need to be found in the wild and tamed with the process following the following steps.
- Purchase or find the resources needed to create a pheromone vial of the enemy type you want to tame.
- Find a Tamable Pico version of the animal you want to tame.
- Use the vial using an application tool, and wait out the debuff that’s applied (Don’t let it die!)
- Congratulations - you now have a new pet.
- Drone pets are manufactured and their creation will be gated behind a questline further into the story within Temrance Island.

Other Features:
- Help System - hold down the alt button when you mouse over certain UI elements and it will provide you with a more in-depth help description of what that UI element does and means. We’ll slowly be adding to this over time, so not everything will have help at release!
- We’ve made a lot of changes to the underlying systems dealing with enemy AI and you’ll see better movement, reactivity and overall better combat.
- Enemies can now have linked spawns and can cause other enemies to aggro a player. Be careful how you pull!
- Threat level - Enemies now have a built in threat level. This can be controlled via taunts and higher DPS.
- Added player storage.
- Reputation
- Full redesign of the player trading UI and system; now allows trading of Aurum.
- Player stats are now tracked within your V.I.D.A, you should be able to see how many hours you’ve definitely not wasted, fishes caught and time spent sitting, and many many more stats.
- We’ve added and fixed a number of emote animations.
- The Arena has undergone a significant overhaul, with some daily quests and related factions. And interesting mechanics to avoid, or use to kill your enemies.
- Natural health regen has been reduced.

Quest System:
- Added a bunch of new quest mechanics and interesting ways of progressing the lore behind Virtuverse

Skill & Passives Trees:
- New skill trees have been added. All functionality might not be available during EA4 as we expand all the systems.

Art:
- Brand new VOC building models.
- Brand new player modular building models.
- Completely new flora and fauna, with new custom made trees, plants, mushrooms, and more.
- New enemy models and attack visuals.
- Improved the mining scanner visual effects
- Added a fishing rod mesh.
- Improved post processing effects. Better exposure handling.

Sounds:
- Combat music will make every fight on Stig feel more action packed and intense.
- More ambient music that follows the player on their adventures around Temrance.
- Weapon projectiles make impact and passing sounds.
- Updated sound effects for some weapons
- Added VIDA voice-over for tutorial
- Improved ambience sounds which are now more reactive to the players environment
- Updated audio engine workflow improving optimization in game

Economy:
- A number of new items have been added
- Weapons, Armour and Tools have been rebalanced.

Network:
- A number of changes have been made to how data gets persisted on the server, in an attempt to reduce issues with very large inventory sizes.

Animations:
- New motion captured locomotion animations make gameplay feel considerably smoother.
- Tons of new NPC animations, giving them a more lively look. No more endless hand waving.

QOL:
- Added ability to see the ingame time in some menus
- Added markers to show your team members and enemies (and their threat level) into the world for easier marking.
- Devs & Admins have a VV logo on their name plate
- You can now heal other players

SECRET STUFF:
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But that's it (For now!). See you planetside!

Fin & The Virtuverse Team