INVALID

We are looking into this issue at the moment. Do you guys see the disconnect after logging on and playing for a few minutes (seconds?) Or is it after carrying out a certain action, such as opening a door, etc?

Ahoy Pathfinders! Catching this epic Naval battle with the Late Shift on Twitch put the wind in our sails and inspired us to put together this video of the collated highlights to share with you. Keep a weather eye open for more grand scale PvP as we continue to work on ATLAS and improve the game, with major server performance gains and new features coming soon! If you'd like to check out the full battle from the various perspectives, you can check them out here: Pirate Captain, BurkeBlack (https://twitter.com/0BurkeBlack0): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/361086462?t=06h56s Modern Day Knight, Fairlight Excalibur (https://twitter.com/FairlightEx): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/361091490?t=05h22m06s https://www.twitch.tv/videos/361091490?t=05h48m30s Bikiest Biker, BikeMan (https://twitter.com/BikeManStream): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/361180177?t=02m41s In other news, we also released major v11 today, a bit earlier than expected due to the need to resolve some critical game exploits which you may have seen being abused over some livestreams earlier today. We know how detrimental these can be, and we'll be keeping a lookout from the crow's nest to patch this out as soon as they arise! View full article

When we've got something to share, we'll yell about it from atop the crows nest

We're looking into it!

Just a note folks, I know you're bringing up a lot of different things in the post and I will read through them and discuss with the team -- just have some other things I'm looking into/working on atm. These blog posts of mine aren't intended to be final or cover all issues, just some hot topics that have come up recently. I am getting confirmations of trees reappearing on lawless servers too Make sure you download the latest client to get the updated structure prevention change

Should take a while before they start to appear again, but we're monitoring it.

New changes in a recent update: - Changed how custom blueprints are crafted for STACKABLE items when they're given a stat roll: > If a stackable item is crafted from the same blueprint and you already have an item crafted from that blueprint in your inventory, it will stack on that pre-existing item and not receive a different Intelligence Stat Bonus. > If you want a different roll from the same blueprint, you must make sure that you do not have an item which was crafted from that same BP in your inventory (stated or non) > This means that you can keep rolls by keeping the item in your inventory when crafting from the BP, even if you do not have the level of intelligence required to get the crafting bonus. Alternatively, you can remove the stated item from your inventory to get a new roll from the BP. - Resource respawn should now function as they did on Lawless servers prior to v10. - 50% reduction in the enemy structure prevention radius so that you can now build closer together on Lawless Servers.

Still being worked on by our team, we have some technical issues we need to resolve; stability is the primary concern but it is on our priority list and hope to have it available as soon as possible. Some further comments that came through social media: - Respecs. These should still work as they have done so previously, and we issued a force respec with v10. So presently, with each level up you're granted a respec if you wish to use it. If you skip to the next level, you lose your prior respec and this isn't retroactive. With the latest update, we made some tweaks to the level ramping due to adding in 50 more levels (which are obtained through discoveries) and it might have resulted in some players losing a few levels despite their EXP staying the same. In that situation, if you had a previous respec done at a higher level, it wouldn't be available at the moment, but once you get back to your previous level and all levels beyond that, you'll be able to respec. Though I am having the QA guys investigate if there are scenarios which cause respec to break in general, and we haven't seen anything out of the ordinary thus far. - Breeding. We want this to be more difficult than it was in ARK and for players to have to travel around the map to raise their species on ideal biomes. Whilst that does make it harder for smaller groups, arguably you could focus on breeding within your region and build up some beast mode tames to trade - Yes, we are looking at resources still, that's why I made the text gold! - Spawns are crazy in some parts of the ATLAS: aye, we're working on a technical solution to this so that the numbers and (types/tiers/sizes) of creatures are more balanced. Not sure when we'll get this in, but it's happening in the background! - Roadmap? Maybe at some point, still in FIX ALL THE THINGS mode atm. - Devkit? Soon! Got a day? no, but very soon. It's just having it's final bits touched up and prob needs to be updated for v10 now. - Linux Binaries -- see above

Yo! Trying something new here, this is more of an informal blog-style post where I’d like to do a bit of a post mortem on recent events. That could be following a large update, a tradeshow, an announcement of a new feature, etc. My aim with these kinds of posts is to provide some additional insight, it will be less about what’s coming/promotional content and more real talk from myself. Fair warning, my musings can be pretty verbose. Unlike the Captain’s Log, these won’t be made on a regular basis, but when I feel they might be necessary -- keep in mind, at indie studios people tend to wear many hats and whilst I am the Lead CM, I also work on the development side of the project, this was also the case for ARK too For the first Post Mortem, we can talk about Patch v10, bug reports, late-night deployments and the timelines surrounding them, support tickets, as well as rollbacks. Patch v10 So! This was a pretty big update, it dropped later than we intended due to some personal problems (people being sick), and then needing the extra time following that for people to get everything ready, as well as our QA team to run through it all. The delay did allow us to bring in more tweaks and fixes, which is always nice. I am not going to go into much detail about the patch itself because we’ve had two Captain Log’s which share the notes, but I do want to address some of the feedback and reports we’ve received since. If you want to know what came in v10, as well as our big announcements for the week, you can read about it on Captain’s Log #16: So this patch didn’t come without its flaws, and to be honest, it would be delusional to think any major one would, especially whilst we’re in this highly iterative state. Our development team, including QA (yes they exist, and they work damn hard and are often underappreciated in this industry), aim to catch and resolve every patch-related issue before it gets out to you, but we’re human and sometimes things can slip through the cracks -- whether that’s due to design, lack of numbers (tens of thousands are much more likely to identify problems!), or just something that was overlooked. Our style of development is to work hard, fast and get the changes out to you guys as soon as possible, though we still run checks to make sure it's stable and it meets our release goals. We don’t like to sit on updates, if it checks out, let’s get it out there! Hence the frequent late-night deployments, though some nights aren’t as lively as tonight, lol. Our goal is to ensure that ATLAS feels like a vastly different experience in a short period of time due to the improvements and changes we’re making on a frequent basis. This means that comparing ATLAS day 1 will be very different to ATLAS day 30 and then again to ATLAS day 100, so on so forth. This will come in the form of optimisation, bug squashing, rebalancing, and new content. This is how we develop titles as a studio, especially during Early Access. We find it effective and enjoyable. Sure it comes with its frustrations, and there could be adjustments made to our processes but the same could be said about any style. Not that we won’t make changes should we deem them necessary, but what you’re experiencing now in terms of the pace and size of updates, is most likely what you’ll be experiencing throughout Early Access. Updates coming at you harder and faster than the busted Ship of the Damned did in v10.72 . (Note: That patch did go through QA, sadly we didn’t expect our change to effect SOTD and had it patched out as soon as possible. My condolences to any seafarers who lost their lives and had their boats sunk). Now onto the hot topics! I may not cover everything, but I’ll try to cover what I believe are the important ones to address. If you think I’ve missed something, get at me: Discord: Jat#0001 Twitter: twitter.com/Jatheish Reddit: /u/Jatheish (not Jaton… also that was JATonreddit guys.. not Jaton…) Additionally, you could also reach out to Dollie! My co-captain on all things Community. You might recognize her from the forums, Discord, or from the Official ARK PVP Community. We’ll do a proper introduction post for her on Monday, in the Captain’s Log. Discord: Dollie#0001 I won’t reply to everything, in fact, I probably only respond to like 20-30% but I do read the majority of my messages, unless it gets super chaotic and impossible to keep up with. E.g you crash my browser/phone/discord (which has happened far more often than I’d like). This should be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway, I would like to reply to everything, but I learnt very early on that is not possible. I remember when I first started at Wildcard in 2015 and tried to respond to every Facebook and Steam comment. Mental. I will respond to the critical reports, assuming I am still actively investigating it (or the team is). OKAY. Now we’re really onto the hot topics. Sorry, I did say my musings can be pretty verbose. It’s crap when there are platforms with a word limit! Thankfully, I don’t think that’s the case on the forums, but I guess we’ll find out. Lawless Regions: Spawns, Resources, Temps. and Weather Shortly after launch, we temporarily hacked up a change which turned Lawless Regions into Homeservers and enabled some special settings on them which prevented Alpha Creatures from spawning, it had faster respawns when it comes to harvestables, and weather events (or might have just been rain) were disabled. In the latest update, we removed these changes and have set it back to our initial design. These servers are meant to be unclaimable land to allow players to gain a foothold once they’ve left Freeports, but they’re meant to be a temporary area before setting sail into the wide ATLAS! Based on our investigation thus far, resources are certainly respawning on these grids, and the signs point to the structure spawn-prevention radius causing confusion and leading to the reports. This system is native to the game but wasn't present during our initial launch due to Lawless Regions being listed as Homeservers, so from a technical point of view, it's intentional, however, I know better than to rule out possibilities for other issues (hence they're investigating). There's an argument that the radius itself needs to be adjusted, so we'll have to think on that. Keep in mind that this can change, whilst there may be some things we’re unlikely to change, it doesn’t mean that we’re set in stone. We’ll keep you posted if we have any updates! A quick note about the weather systems, these are the initial Early Access launch systems we have in place. We’d like to take it further, beyond just having fog, cold, heat, and rain! Though we believe there are certainly other things we need to prioritise which will have more of an impact on the game… such as volcanoes and of course the holy trinity of: bug fixes, optimisation, and balance! Plus. seeing that we’re on the topic of weather, I think I should mention temps too. Yes, they suck in some places, and we have resolved a lot of these in the most recent patch, as well as made it more clear when you’re experiencing a certain weather event, but there are more fixes to come, hopefully in the coming days. One of our designers is meticulously going through all the various biomes (we have a lot) and adjusting the temperature time of day and armour insulation values to make sure we’re hitting the sweet spot. Combat and Creatures: Guns, Melee Weapons, and Armour The overall goal with these changes was to ensure sure that weapons were more effective against higher armoured players, whilst not making the lower tiers completely worthless. The primary change you should notice is that the weapons themselves are more piercing and have had their base damage reduced to reflect this. Clearly, this had some knock-on effects on how players dealt with creatures (tamed and wild), which we expected but to know the full extent of the changes it is best witnessed in a live environment. The gameplay/balance team are consuming your feedback and will make adjustments when necessary, it’s possible that there may be some potential tweaks too with some multipliers which are being looked at right now. Not going to confirm anything is being changed right this instant, but just acknowledge that we’re aware of the feedback and it is actively being discussed internally. Tamed Creatures I figure this needed its own mini mention itself. ATLAS isn’t a taming orientated game. Yes, we have it, and we plan to expand on it, as well as introduce more creatures for you add to your arsenal, however, the creatures themselves are meant to be supplemental and not the main focal point. Prior to v10, we felt like certain aspects of the creatures made them too strong. Primarily how quickly they could restore health via shovelling food down their mouths and consuming corpses -- mechanics we weren’t really keen on with ARK either but for legacy reasons are necessary to that game. It’s understandable that we may have overshot with this update and we’re happy to bring some baselines back up, but it’s not likely we’ll adjust those healing mechanics. At this time, we’d rather have creatures that are inherently more powerful than having immense regen. Though we do understand the need to manage your tame’s health and we’ll be investigating additional ways we can do this beyond the skill/feat system. Something we’re toying around with now is the idea of custom cooking recipes for individual creatures (or more broad recipes that can affect multiple creatures) to heal em up. It’s safe to say that you can expect changes and content coming in the days/weeks/yadda yadda ahead revolving around this. PvE Exploits Not going to share what the exploits are, that would be unwise…although I suppose for those of you who weren’t aware, you might be with my post. Just wanted to say we are well aware of what’s happening and are exploring ways to deal with it. The obvious solutions won’t quite work due to some backend stuff, however, we are actively looking into a more delicate and effective solution. In the meantime, quit being jerks and griefing each other, otherwise, I might have to set Amberenix (our Game Master) on ya! I think that covers most of what I wanted to discuss about v10. I realise that doesn’t cover everything, but then we could literally be here for days on end and right now it’s 8 a.m and I’d like to get some rest soon haha. We had some hotfixes and patches go out today following the release, mostly just to resolve things that had been overlooked/missed in the update and some exploit fixing… as well as deal with the menacing rapid-firing Ship of the Damned that we introduced ourselves. Which kind of brings me to another topic... Server Deployments and ETAs! Typically when we have a release candidate that’s ready to go out, we announce it via a server broadcast in-game. The release candidate usually will go through some basic smoke checks to make sure everything is running smoothly. Assuming we do not encounter any problems and the fix checks out, we then begin the deployment immediately. Unfortunately, sometimes we run into issues that were unexpected and have to deal with it, or a player report has just come in and we want to get it fixed prior to deploying, saving us needing to deploy multiple times a night -- unless it calls for it. As for the comments asking why we don’t keep builds in QA for a week at a time, well, to be frank, running a full playthrough of all our content and having QA check every nook and cranny for every update would take longer than a week. It would increase our development time and is not incredibly useful to us in our current development cycle, and as mentioned previously, we don’t want to sit on updates. If we believe a patch is ready, we plan to roll it out as soon as possible. It’s not our intention to get these times wrong and we don’t plan to make you guys wait, it’s just how it happens. I will say though, as long as I’m around during the deployment process I will be keeping the Discord and Twitter fully in the loop when it comes to actual-actual deployments, as much as I can. In essence, if it’s mentioned on either of those platforms, it’s probably going to be incoming. This is when it comes to specific deployment messages such as: in 15 minutes major version etc is incoming and not in related to the larger ETA timelines we share (i.e 4 hours). It’s no secret that we’re not the best with time management, there’s no point hiding it. It is definitely something we need to improve on and I’ll be encouraging the team to do so, it’s been a quibble of mine for ages and not just because of all the hate messages I get about missed ETAs, but because I know how frustrating it can be. For those of you asking why we even bother giving you these inaccurate ETAs and not just say the moment the patch is ready to deploy. Well, when we share these ETAs, we believe they are accurate at the time and then XYZ thing happen. Some players would like to be informed ahead of time so they can try to plan out their day around our ETAs (to their own risk... might I add, I always get messages about folks taking off days from work or skipping dinner to hang around for a patch, I don’t recommend doing it! Even if we were the best damn ETA-deadline hitters in the world, ya never know what could happen and if you do decide to, hey that’s on you man :P). For those of you who don’t want to be informed and would rather wait until the very moment we are deploying, then I’d recommend ignoring our general broad ETAs and look out for the ‘15 minutes’ to deployment ones, those are the most accurate -- and especially if they’ve hit social platforms like Twitter/Discord, but ya, the criticism around how we handle this is warranted. As for late night deployments, well I think I’ve covered this a few times with this post but just to reiterate. We don’t like to sit on fixes and updates. If we’re confident in something and the team is available, we’re happy to set it live. Whether that’s at 4 AM or 4 PM. It’s a little more chaotic at the moment as we’ve just launched and soon enough we’ll have some more structure and planning to it, but generally, you can expect the same frequent updates. ATLAS launched as an early access title and we plan to update it often, and regularly with meaningful changes. Rollbacks Moving on from that, let’s discuss rollbacks as this was mentioned today shortly after the Ship of the Damned patch was released and some players, unfortunately, had their ships sunk. First of all, I’d like to apologize profusely for that. I feel for anyone who suffered a loss, it definitely sucks and we’ll always do our best within our process to ensure we’re able to avoid those scenarios as much as possible. When it comes to rollbacks, it is something we explore as an option in the event of a catastrophic game failure, as they could potentially introduce other problems. This means things such as an unintended wipe, data deletion, game content not being cooked properly, etc. There are other scenarios, but not feasible to list it all out. Just know that as a team we do not take these decisions very lightly, and everything is handled delicately on a case by case basis, if we determine that a rollback would be warranted, we would inform players as soon as possible. I know that doesn’t make up for the loss of boats, creatures, etc in the event that a deployment goes awry; please understand that due to the rate that the game is changing, this could also happen due to a balance change, or the introduction of new content. A lot of players had their boats sunk early on by the insane fire arrows (which may still need to be looked at), or cheaply sunk with metal picks; it could happen for a number of reasons and is a downside when playing a highly iterative and ever-changing title. On that note, we will do our best to ensure that we avoid these situations. Having a patch screw you over sucks, having a rollback sucks, so let’s stay away from both if we’re able to! Support Tickets, Player Reports & Bug Reports As of yesterday, we launched our support ticketing system. Right now we’re helping out folks with Company Ownership issues and Players getting stuck, though hopefully, the latter is not as necessary anymore due to the recent v10 changes. Over time, we’ll be increasing the options for how we can support players as we identify more areas where it is necessary and implement more tools to tackle these. Please note, that we’re always going to be leaning on the side of technical solutions to game problems versus direct Game Master intervention where we can help it. We’re a small team and our resources are better funnelled into development. We’re also going to be actively investigating player reports as they come in. I primarily want to shut down cheaters who are using hacks/3rd party progs or ridiculously exploiting unintended game mechanics to gain an unfair advantage over other users. Please keep in mind the final verdict of these punishments comes down to us, in a sandbox environment, monitoring your game is best done on a case by case situation. There is no silver bullet, but we will certainly invest time and resources into dealing with this. Not going to go into details because it’s best left close to our chest - but it won’t be tolerated. This isn’t solely just limited to cheaters though, but also ‘toxic’ users. That word is probably overused now and has lost some of it’s meaning, but to be clear; we understand when people are joking between each other, we know there’s an element of banter when playing a competitive game, especially one of pirating and world-conquering nature, however, we will not tolerate outright harassment, discrimination etc on our servers and have already taken action against multiple companies/individuals. And finally, bug reports! Right now the reports are coming in from a variety of different platforms. The forums, Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Twitch, Youtube, etc. We’ve got our eyes spread around but are looking into a more effective way to accept reports, as well as show you that we’re aware of them. Whilst I was working on ATLAS pre-launch, I know the ARK team created a custom bug report system on survivetheark. I’m looking to do something similar based on the Support Ticket system, but hopefully more customized with better user permission management, highlighting things like developer response, and upvoting. Not sure how much of that is doable based on our current systems, but going to be exploring it as an option with Chris. We’ll see how things pan out with the Support Tickets and Report Players system, if it holds up well then we can look into implementing the bug reports area. In the meantime, continue as you are -- we’ve got enough coverage around the multiple platforms and you can be sure that your reports are being investigated! OKAY. I think I have covered everything that I wanted to talk about in this blog post. It’s a lot wordier than I anticipated. If you prefer seeing posts like this, let me know and I’ll probably end up doing more in the future, but maybe not as wordy -- this was more so as it was the first and there was a lot to say. Anyways, take it easy, and here’s hoping you all continue to enjoy sailing the seas of ATLAS!

Aye, we're looking into the reports people have put in on the forums/discord, etc. The gun changes were made so that they would be more impactful versus higher armoured characters and as a result, their base damage was reduced. However, our gameplay team are investigating an issue where some damage multipliers may be impacting wild creatures as well as tamed. No worries! We will get there and I understand it's frustrating at the moment, but once we've had some more time to flesh out these systems we'll be taking a pretty firm stance against cheaters, BattlEye and the ticketing system will just be the beginning -- albeit, tickets are handled manually and by a human so they're not dealt with as rapidly, and we want to be confident before issuing a ban / wipe against a player. Which is why the sooner BattlEye and our other tools are in, the better -- and therefore a priority for us

We'll be investigating reports as they come in through our ticketing system and issuing sanctions where we feel like it's necessary, it takes a while to get all these systems running but we will be clearing out the trouble players. Though it shouldn't take us much longer to get BE ready, hopefully within the next few days it'll be good to set live. We just wanted to ensure that this major version was out the door first and deal with any critical issues that may arise from it. Could you elaborate? We're investigating reports now and whilst there are some issues and concerns we plan to address, the majority of the notes should be functional as intended as expected. Our QA team are investigating the resource reports at the moment

Ahoy Pathfinders! We hope you had a great weekend filled with adventure, action, and bountiful booty! The seas were much calmer for us as we put our heads down to work on the major update v10, which is now live on Steam! thar she deploys, v10! We won’t go into too much detail about this patch, as we covered it quite extensively in our last Captain’s Log. This is our biggest update thus far, taking into account various feedback we’ve received over the last 2.5 weeks since the game’s launch, as well as making design changes based on what we’ve experienced and witnessed ourselves. The patch notes have grown tremendously since we first put them up on Friday, and the full list of changes can be seen here (as well as on our dedicated patch note threads): current v10.42 Claim flag related changes - Claim Flags now have settings which allow other companies or players to build within them, with the specified tax rate applied to them. - You are also able to define an inclusion or exclusion list to these, to only allow or exclude specific company IDs (also used by players without companies). To grab someone's ID for the inclusion/exclusion list, you'll need to look at a structure they've placed which will list their Company ID; this number can be input into the flag's list system to prevent/enable building. Please note that exclusion/inclusion lists are not saved when altering building permissions, so switching from 'Everyone' can build to 'Company & Alliances' only will clear your list should you wish to return to 'Everyone' can build. - All claim flags will use the 'Everyone can build' as a default setting when placed, and this will also be a retroactive change. However, it will not function until Thursday the 10th of January, where we will release another server update to make this setting active. This means you will have two days, from Tuesday to Thursday, to decide and adjust the settings on your claim flag before the change is live. - Only admins and above will be able to make changes to company claims. - Claim Flags will have icons above them to represent their owner and setting. Your claim flags have a green icon. Claim Flags belonging to your allies that do not permit you to build, have a blue icon, or purple if they do belong to your allies and allow you to build. Claim Flags which belong to your enemies and do not allow you to build have red icons, or yellow if they belong to your enemies and enable you to build within them. - Fixed some bugs related to Sea Claims. - Enemy Claim Flags can now be directly pinged to identify any contesting enemies nearby - The time required to steal an enemy claim now decreases the more Claims that enemy team has. - Looking at your Claim Flag will show you how many land claims you have, and looking at an enemy one will show you how many land flags they have, note that this does not update dynamically on the client for server performance reasons. To always have the latest number, you can relog or re-enter stasis range of the Claim Flag. general changes - Server performance improvements - All Cannons/Turrets can now be pin code protected for lever activation/deactivation - There are 4x as many trade ships on the seas, and they now also sell commodity types for gold, as do NPC's at Freeports. - Lawless servers can no longer be specified as Homesevers. If your Homeserver was a lawless server, you'll be required to pick a new (Freeport) Homeserver upon respawn. This does not mean that land will be claimable on these servers, just that they cannot be selected as a server to respawn on. - You can now buy a "Ramshackle Sloop" from the NPC Shipyardsman at Freeports. The "Ramshackle Sloop" is a pre-built sloop which has permanently lower plank HP, carry weight, and crew limit, but is cheaper and faster to acquire if you want to get into sailing faster. - "Favorites" server selection drop-down is added for Unofficial - Joining through Steam browser server list with password now properly caches the password for ATLAS travel - Fixed up some temperature scalings and Weather events are now indicated on the HUD - Armour effectiveness and some values have been adjusted so that firearms are more useful in PVP - Fixed some bugs related to Sea Claims, Enemy Claim Flags can now be directly pinged to identify any contesting enemies nearby, and the time required to steal an enemy claim now decreases the more Claims that enemy team has. - Farming rebalances to be easier; water can now pipe uphill, region requirements for growing crops are more forgiving, and crop growth & yield is much faster and higher. Crops now take much longer to spoil when placed in a preserving bag. - Reduced shovel stamina cost. - You can now fill waterskins/jars from ground spouts. - Metal Tools can no longer damage the planks of anchored ships. - 50 more player levels added, and Skill Points per level increased. - Loot stat scaling has been boosted (retroactively) by 60% - Some ship costs have been adjusted, and in some cases reduced by approximately about 50% - Animals health regen rebalanced, so they're not regenerating high amounts whilst in combat! - Eating poop is now instant-death - Fixed an issue where you couldn't kill yourself by exhaustion (for stuck situations) - Pipes can now move water upwards and the vertical limit on underground junctions has been eliminated. Also, pipes can go farther without foundation requirement, and underground junctions can now be snapped onto existing pipes. - Guns and melee weapons have had their damage and penetration values adjusted to make them more effective against armour - Throwing Knife does significantly more damage when thrown to unarmoured targets (body and headshot) - Armour penetration has been reduced on spear throw to make it less effective versus higher armoured targets - Explosive Barrel weight has been increased - Stone Arrows now stack to 60 and a bow can fire them 60 times before breaking - Fire Arrows now stack to 40 and a bow can fire them 40 times before breaking - Puckle damage has been increased and also been made more effective against armour - Fixed Salted Animal & Fish Meat so that they naturally generate when placed in an active preserving bag (must use raw meats) - Updated some legacy sounds and icons - Updated stair collision on shipyards - Fixed a bug which prevented passive feats from applying after death - Fixed a bug with the torch which caused it to repair endlessly - Lighthouses can now be lit even if they are touching water - Using a bucket on a tamed cow now causes the bucket to lose durability - Fixed a bug where players would get stuck in the crouched position - Fixed a bug which sometimes would occur where players would disconnection when being invited to a company - Fixed a bug which prevented creatures from receiving experience points above a certain level - Fixed a bug which would cause NPC Crew to sink into foundations when exiting stasis range - Rewrote structure destruction logic to avoid cases of floating structures - Inventory ranks per structure and creature will now work for companies - Fixed a bug which prevented admins from accessing remote inventories with the F key when changing group ranks. - Autolock all structures in 'PvE only' with an inventory, except campfires and similar structures which can be placed without a claimflag. Unofficial Servers can run this with PvE enabled & ?ForceAllStructureLocking=true - Gunmounts are now colorizable - Gates and Gateway costs have been adjusted and now include metals (wood) and alloy (stone) - Gateways and Gates are now crafted in smithy instead of player inventory - Fixed an exploit with Prying Eyes - Can no longer glide up mountains with the glide suit - Fixed an exploit which allowed you to gain massive height when using the zipline - Fixed a building exploit which allowed you to float structures and fortify walls with floors Creature related changes - Sea Monsters' damage has been reduced by 66% - Tamed Creatures take 20% less damage - Wild Alpha creatures HP and Damage reduced by 20% - Tames HP and Damage scaling nerfed by about 40%, and Cannons/Explosions damage to tames increased 50% due to level increase and scaling possibility - Killing the Monsterous Sperm Whale or Blue Whales (as they're now named) provides (one-time) 50 Discovery Points each to everyone within 100k units of that event. - Penguin AoE insulation now scales by level, the higher the level, the more insulation. - Updated Mounted and Rider buffs to display icon while active, to better inform players the source of stat boosts. - Dolphins now periodically leap out of the water. If you're nearby to witness that at close-range, you'll gain a temporary Intelligence buff! - Updated affinity ineffectiveness values based on the recent x2 taming increase - Updated creature specific buffs and ability value clamps to be scaled across 130 levels, due to recent extra 30 level ups for tames. - Increased Wolf attack destination offset and increased some physics bounds to reduce clipping into players. Temporarily increased Wolf saddle scale in the engine to limit fur clipping. - Updated taming ineffectiveness values to allow the highest efficiency to only be achieved with Taming Proficiency skill 3. - Updated some undesired movement speed bonuses on tamed creatures - Adjusted Seagull and Crow aggro speeds (Would previously take a long time to de-aggro). Updated collision to allow player attacks to land more consistently. - Updated Vulture AI to only target sleeping humans if the player is connected. Updated attack logic to better harvest corpses, while reducing its melee swing radius (Was previously hitting from very far away) - Reduced Bee movement to allow player attacks to land. Reduced sting buff duration to better reflect its size. - Increased harvest amount of fur and milk from Sheep and Cow to incentivise taming and better compete with natural resource gathering amounts. Updated max yield timings to scale with creature level, similar to other creature abilities, instead of food value. - Added durability decreased to the bucket when milking. - Clamped amount of fur gained from harvesting wild sheep, again to incentivise taming. Wild sheep will also flee and may attack players after excessive shearing. We'll be adding recipes in an upcoming update which can be used to heal your creatures! - Added Lion roar animation. - Fixed fur stretching on Wolf's face and hind leg - Decreased Crocodile swim speed. - Creature health regen rebalanced and changed so that they no longer regen health when forcefed or from consuming corpses. With the exception of Wild Carnos, which still can consume corpses to heal at a reduced rate. - Baby breeding balance changes to compensate for the overall creature regen changes. - Wild Scorpions will no longer target large creatures, will no longer be aggressive towards Elephants, Giraffes, etc. - Lion will only dismount players that are on medium and less sized creatures, will no longer dismount players from Elephants, Giraffes, etc. - Updated taming foods to allow a variety of items to be used in taming creatures. Effectiveness left(more) to right(less): Tier 1 Chicken - Fruits, Berries Monkey - Fruits, Berries Parrot - Hardtack, or Berries Rabbit - Carrots, or Berries Sheep - Flowers, or Berries Tier 2 Bear - Honey, Vegetables, Fruits or Berries Cow/Bull - Rushes, Fronds, Vegetables, Fruits, or Berries Crow - Worms, Fruits, or Berries Horse - Sugarcane, Vegetables, Fruits, or Berries Ostrich - Chili, Vegetables, Fruits, or Berries Penguin - Prime Fish Meat, or Fish Meat Pig - Maize, Vegetables, Fruits, or Berries Seagull - Prime Fish Meat, or Fish Meat Vulture - Spoiled Meat, or Worms Wolf - Prime Animal Meat, Bones, or other Meats Tier 3 Elephant - Wheat, Vegetables, or Fruits Giraffe - Beets, Vegetables, or Fruits Lion - Prime Animal Meat, or other Meats Rhino - Turnip, Vegetables, or Fruits Tiger - Prime Animal Meat, or other Meats As mentioned previously, this is just the very beginning of our journey. We’ll continue to frequently pump out major patches every week to improve the state of the game, introducing QOL changes, bug and exploit fixes, rebalance adjustments, redesigns, and new content. ATLAS fans will have a lot to look forward to and we’re so excited for the future. We’re already working on some major content & feature additions in tangent with our frequent live game patches, so stay tuned for more information on that! As for what’s in the immediate future, well in addition to a current hot topic we’ll go into below, Pathfinders can expect to see a tremendous increase in server performance over the coming weeks. We are confident that we will be able to double it incrementally over forthcoming updates. Plus, you’ll be able to change your tattoos in freeports at your local Tattoo Artist NPC! And we have major changes incoming related to how you’ll be able to manage and benefit from the territories that you own, improvements and additions to sailing and crew mechanics, player-run shops and Freeport interactions, and much more. Finally, the biggest news is the ATLAS Dev Kit is finally nearly ready to release, and we intend to have it in your hands at the start of this coming week -- get your creative juices flowing to help make ATLAS bigger and better than it is! We’ll have more notes to come in the next Log, so please make sure you bookmark the page below to keep up to date with our latest changes! Link to complete Patch Notes: capt'n exploits and scummy seadogs! It goes without saying that cracking down on cheaters, exploits, and general misconduct is a priority of ours. One of the many items on a list which we are working to address over the time ahead, and here’s how we’re going to do it: Basics of Anti Cheat & Support: BattlEye Implementation Now that v10 is out the door, outside of dealing with critical issues that arise from that patch or are otherwise discovered, we’ll be working on intensely on enabling BattlEye Anti Cheat on our Official Network, as well as for Unofficial Servers to use, plus other underlying data-driven systems, to help put a stop to cheaters. Secrets of Anti Cheat & Support: playATLAS Tickets As of today, we’ll have launched our first phase of customer support. We will be (and have already done so) providing in-game assistance to players who have lost ownership of their companies, and players who have found themselves in a sticky situation that they cannot escape (outside of intended game mechanics). Additionally, we’ll be providing an option that players can use to report other users who have broken our Official Network’s Code of Conduct. Please note that this list isn’t entirely exhaustive and this is just the first phase of what we’d like to tackle as the game grows. CODE OF CONDUCT! You can click here if you’re seeking some assistance! Please be patient as we work through the kinks of the system and get it under control, we’re expecting a heavy influx of requests day one and there might be some lead time in responses, however, we plan to tackle these as quickly as possible in cases where we are providing assistance. We’ll be using these systems, in addition to general feedback, to help us identify what problems people are facing and how we can tackle them from a technical point of view. To be transparent and speak realistically, as a small studio, we’re better equipped to funnel our resources into dealing with game problems that arise through technical implementation rather than customer service, however, we do see the need for it and wanted to provide an option in some cases. Over time, these options will grow and expand as both the team and game do to address the needs of you guys and tackle some of your in-game problems which aren’t viably resolved with a technical change. Esotery of Anti-Cheat & Support: Additional Cheat Detection & Prevention Following the implementation of BattlEye and ensuring smooth seas on BE protected networks, we’ll be exploring additional internal options to help identify, track and catch cheaters as well as general player concerns and problems. We’re not going to go into too many details, it’s important to keep these bits close to our chest, however, we just wanted to iterate that BattlEye would just be the beginning and over time our team will continue to invest resources into sinking the ships of cheaters! Dynamic atlas maps round-up The ATLAS Dynamic Maps is a system that monitors live in-game territory ownership and indicates which companies dominate over the lands. Each week with our Captain’s Log, we’ll be including an image to monitor the progress of the maps, taking note of any exits or new arrivals and any drastic changes in the overall claim. Who will come to dominate the ATLAS may very well become clear in the days and weeks ahead, though maintaining a large Empire will likely come with its own longer-term challenges… Soon, the companies that have occupied islands for a certain period of time will gain the automatic privilege to name them on the in-game and web maps, as it is their land! Remember you can don your tribe’s company flag by stylizing it in the game with a paintbrush! Upload your own images or design it how you like, with the top company flags always being visible on https://map.playatlas.com/ [EU PVP] The Whale's Wrath Held: XSM???, Cobra, French & Ships, Bad Company, BLDX DOUYU56876, and Chem B Arrivals: LEGION, Enslaved, The French Monkeys, ETERNIA, and OOOOOOOOOF. Departures: PUBG GOLDEN HORDE, La Flotte Ancestrale, and Blackwater Company. [NA PVP] The Kraken's Maw Held: Dynasty, High Seas Booty Bandits, Order of Freedom, TPG, CSTG, and Barry Sails. Arrivals: OwO, The Federation, and The Late Shift. Departures: MAGA, INFINITE, The Goodship Misery, Radium, And whilst there isn’t active PvP on PVE servers, we’d like to recognize the following tribes for their claims! [EU PVE] The Siren's Call Held: Compagnie des Indes, M.E.R.C Spirit, Paragon, Rum ueber Bord, Woelfe des Rudels, Future Company (HUN), and Fenrirs Dogs Arrivals: Black Lotus, Tacorsair, and SouL SanD. Depatures: Forlorn Hope, I.C.E, PIRATES, Unlucky, [NA PVE] The Hydra's Den Held: Plunderers, Scales & Sails, The Salty Seamen, Dead Men Floating,The Exiles, Atlas Shrugged, East India Trading Co. Arrivals: CN-adilt supplies, Paragon, Narcos, Departures: Biz Enton Company, blublublu, and Sail, Fail, Repeat. Show 'n Tell Showcase Avast, Pathfinders and welcome to the results of our first Show n' Tell Showcase Yer entries to the Showcase shivered our timbers. 'twas a challenge to select jus' a few! We look forward to seein' what the community create in the future. Keep yer one good eye cast on the Creative sub forum and have your mighty fleets, paint pieces, flags & sails, impenetrable forts, hellish tats, scenic screenshots, 'n entertainin' videos ready to share for next week's Showcase. Congratulations to our winners who have scored themselves cash prizes! Winners SITHARIAS An exquisite build along with impressive editing and production. Witness someone exploring the building mechanics in ATLAS to breathtaking effect. SpookyAnonymous Source A beautifully wrought portrait of steely-eyed Captain surveying his fleet or a depiction of a certain Captain Fatbeard about to shout at his crew? Either way, we admire the amount of detail put into this original artwork! BPEPPERS The bold use of colour in this original fanart depicting a Pirate's best friend caught our attention. Did you know that a Parrot gives a player extra fortitude scaled by the creature's level? LOCKEMURDOCK We loved the sail design of this ship. Lady Luck was definitely on your side when you entered this competition. We hope she does likewise for you when you are on the high seas seeking treasure in this magnificent vessel. STONIEDUDE The intricacy of this tribal-style tattoo put wind in our sails and the menacing aspect of the ready-for-war facial decoration looks like it could blow them back down! Honorable Mentions JUKARI SCOTTY BLUEDRAGON AHRA BENTENPENNY KANE 5010 WOOKIEESTICK That wraps up this weeks' showcase. Congratulations to those of you we've featured! We’re looking forward to seeing what amazing new art the community can come up with next week! Thank you to all of ye scallywags, landlubbers and seadogs for the bootyful submissions ye shared with us 'ere rapscallions. Sail across to the submission thread if you would like to check out all of the past week's fantastic entries. Alrighty, that ’s it for this log! Thank you so much for becoming a part of our crew and we can't wait to show all you scallywags, landlubbers, captains, and seadogs what lies ahead! Happy Sailing, Grapeshot Games For the latest dispatch on #playATLAS keep yer one good eye trained on this here information Natter n' chatter on Discord: https://discord.gg/playatlas Navigate ye olde Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/playatlas Hear ye, hear ye on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sailtheatlas Watch us scallywags on Twitch: http://twitch.tv/sailtheatlas Plus ye can band with us Pirates on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/playatlasgame View full article

It'll be 2019, but no specific timeline to provide yet

Ahoy Pathfinders! Hang on... Captain’s Log on a Friday? Yes, it’s a little earlier than we had planned (first for everything, amirite?) but earlier this week we released a significant update based on Community feedback we had received as the game has now been available for two weeks. We’re going to do a quick rundown of the updates leading to v9.3, as well as discuss our huge incoming patch, v10 which will drop anchor on Monday Noon EST (or around then at least, we’ll keep you posted on social media!) All th' stuff 'n thin's If you wanna skip the meal and just check out the changelog, you can do so here: As highlighted in previous Captain’s Log, our number one priority was making sure that the game was stable from a client and server perspective, that there would be minimum connection issues, and we’d be handling data issues with a broadside of fixes! Since the launch itself, the game has tremendously improved in all 3 of these areas. Our crashes have statistically reduced by 97%+, players can get in and fully experience the ATLAS, and as of v9.3, we have solved many critical cases where Company and Alliance data would have been lost. There are still many more things we want to do in this area in the coming days and weeks ahead -- you can expect us not to rest until server baseline performance and hitches are much further improved. Released notes up to v9.3: - Resolved massive server-side stalls related to perf large companies - Company Member, Company Groups, and Alliance data loss issue should hopefully be resolved. - Official Network Companies are now hard limited to 500 members, and this is a current measure until the Company system receives a backend overhaul in the long-term. - Fixed some server crashes - Slightly improved server performance and generally reduced server stalls Upcoming changes in v10: - General note regarding server performance improvements, stalls, connection issues, etc (We’re going to work on improving this constantly!) However, that’s not all that we wanted to address! Since the launch, we have received so much support and feedback from our Community Hub, Steam Forums, Reddit, Discord, and social media. The team have been working hard on development, whilst watching with our prying eyes to see which to determine what needs addressing. Patches up to v9.3 and the incoming v10 have been planned to improve ATLAS’ as a game from its core based on most impactful, important, and how immediately we could see results. We won’t go into the thought-process details for each specific note, but we’ll try to give you guys a general idea around our decision making. Please note: these changes are not the only thing we’re going to do. There will be a boatload of updates following v10 too, every few days another major drop. ATLAS launched as an Early Access title, and we are a highly iterative development team. We’ll continue to pump out patches to improve the game and get it where it needs to be! So if there’s something in here you feel like we’ve missed, let us know on our Community Hub, Reddit, Discord, Twitter, etc. We’re watching like hawks and consuming like hogs; we will make adjustments; whether that’s introducing new things, tweaking, or taking a step back and redesigning. That’s what this development process is all about, shaping and growing the game rapidly with your input. It’s gonna get chaotic and messy at times, but we appreciate you weathering the storm as we sail into calmer waters! Lemme be a pirate, Grapes!@# Games! So two things. One of the coolest aspects, without a doubt, is that you can be a fully fledged pirate. You can captain a crew, sail one of many boats, have a fleet, hunt for treasure, explore and discover islands, pillage, plunder, salvage -- the list goes on! However, at launch, we perhaps made this a bit more difficult and tedious than it needed to be. We love being a bit hardcore but it was clear to us that adjustments were necessary. In no particular order... Released notes up to v9.3: - Default resource and taming speeds have been increased to 2x as the baseline. - Sailing against the wind now provides 30% of with-the-wind sailforce, as opposed to 0%. - Also increased the amount of sailforce provided by minimum windspeed conditions by 30%, and the sailforce provided by maximum windspeed conditions by 15%. - Increased the base carry Weight of all ships by +40% Upcoming changes in v10: - There are 4x as many trade ships on the seas, and they now also sell commodity types for gold, as do NPC's at Freeports. - You can now buy a "Ramshackle Sloop" from the NPC Shipyardsman at Freeports. The "Ramshackle Sloop" is a pre-built sloop which has permanently lower plank HP, carry weight, and crew limit, but is cheaper and faster to acquire if you want to get into sailing faster. - Some ship costs have been adjusted, and in some cases reduced by approximately about 50% We believe that these first steps will help us get players to experience the epic piracy side of the game much sooner, whilst overall not having too much of a heavy impact on our balance and design. Captain Grapeshot, why do you hurt us with these hardcore mechanics? Well, you know what they say… pain is love and love makes the world go ‘round. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) But in all seriousness, we can be a bit overzealous at times, what can we say? We like it a little rough but we understand when things go too far, sometimes it just takes the fun out and that’s when we need to consider, is this piece of the puzzle really worth it? Sometimes aye, but also, sometimes nay! At times we should consider not punching people in the face when all they want to do is sail their raft and build a thatched home. What are some of the nays? Cooking, land ownership, survivalism, progression, and creature balance. Here are some of the adjustments we’re going to make to deal with the nay; Released notes up to v9.3: - Every Tame can now get a minimum of 30 tame level-ups put into it, plus however many base levels it had when wild. So for example, a level 5 wild wolf would get 35 tame level-ups to apply, whereas a level 40 wild wolf would get 70 tame level-ups to use. - Melee weapons are now temporarily ineffective against ship planks. Later this will be changed so that it will only be ineffective against anchored ship planks. - Buffed Tamed creatures HP and Damage globally by 25% Upcoming changes in v10: - Claim Flags now allow a "Neutral Zone" setting which allows any other tribes to build within them, with the specified tax rate applied to them. You are also able to specify an inclusion or exclusion list to these, to only allow or exclude specific company ID's / player ID's. All claim flags will have this enabled as a default setting when placed, and this will also be a retroactive change. However, it will not function until Wednesday the 9th of January at NOON EST, where we will release another server update to make Neutral Zones active. This means you will have two days, from Monday to Wednesday, to decide and adjust the settings on your claim flag before the change is live. - Enemy Claim Flags can now be directly pinged to identify any contesting enemies nearby, and the time required to steal an enemy claim now decreases the more Claims that enemy team has. - Farming rebalances to be easier; water can now pipe uphill, region requirements for growing crops are more forgiving, and crop growth & yield is much faster and higher. - Reduced shovel stamina cost. - You can now fill waterskins/jars from ground spouts. - Metal Tools can no longer damage the planks of anchored ships. - 50 more player levels added, and Skill Points per level increased. - Loot stat scaling has been boosted (retroactively) by 60% - Sea Monsters' damage has been reduced by 66% - Animals health regen rebalanced, so they're not regenerating high amounts whilst in combat! - Fixed up some temperature scalings and adjusted Fortitude stat effect Alrighty, fair enough Grapeshot... but what else? Betcha didn't know that <thing> is <state>! Yes, there are still a number of things we plan to address and change going forward. This isn’t the be-all end-all of our updates. There are more fixes, balance changes, new game features and content just beyond the horizon (basically daily) so if there’s something which you feel is important and we haven’t addressed, let us know. It might have been something we’ve overlooked, it might be something we’re tackling in an upcoming patch, it might be something we’re still sitting on to see how things fair, guess you could call us seafarers XD! You can be reassured that as each night passes, we’re fully dedicated to ensuring that ATLAS gets one step closer to becoming one of the most ambitious online worlds of all time and fulfilling its destiny as the ultimate fantasy pirate adventure! And on that note, here are some additional patch notes that we’ve made up to v9.3 or will be making in v10 such as addressing fire-from-the-depths-of-hell arrows and gatling mortars. These notes are pretty miscellaneous and tackle many things at once. Released notes up to v9.3: - Reduced min damage and min percentage on flame arrow buff by 33%. - Reduced max damage done on flame arrow projectile hit to 50. - Increased gravity on flame arrows 20% to make it less ranged. - Increased firegel cost of flame arrows by 100%. - Added durability consumption to flame and stone arrows (1 dura per shot, 40 shots per bow repair). - Change bow durability from 50 to 40. - Fixed a bug which allowed Mortars to have rapid fire. - Fixed alliance chat sometimes duplicating messages - Fixed a bug where clients could end up invisible when demolishing a podium - Default resource and taming speeds have been increased to 2x as the baseline. - Fixed a bug which allowed Mortars to have rapid fire. - Fixed inland water buoy's being invisible and fixed buoys, so they no longer prevent resource respawn. - Prevent ship collision damage from occurring when caused by other player ships on PVE servers. - Fixed sunken-ship area indicator lingering even after a shipwreck has been entirely salvaged. Upcoming notes in v10:  - All Cannons/Turrets can now be pin code protected for lever activation/deactivation - Lawless servers can no longer be specified as Homeservers. If your Homeserver was a lawless server, you'll be required to pick a new (Freeport) Homeserver upon respawn.  - "Favorites" server selection drop-down is added for Unofficial - Joining through Steam browser server list with password now properly caches the password for ATLAS travel  - Weather events are now indicated on the HUD - Armour effectiveness will be adjusted so that firearms are more useful in PVP - Fixed some bugs related to Sea Claims - Eating poop is now instant-death - Fixed an issue where you couldn't kill yourself by exhaustion (for stuck situations) Show 'n Tell! Hear ye, hear ye! We be seekin’ fer the finest of ATLAS community creations! Show us yer mighty fleets, paint pieces, flags & sails, impenetrable forts, hellish tats, scenic screenshots, 'n entertainin' videos! Each week, we'll be runnin' a contest where we'll select th' best o' th' bunch 'n award tha winners wit' a cash prize! Entries can be posted in the Creative Section, the Steam Workshop, or shared via social media. We’ve created a dedicated thread for submissions, don’t hesitate to show us what you’ve got cause we’ve seen some pretty cool stuff so far! Alrighty, that ’s it for this post. We will have a general Captain’s Log on Monday, most likely late night as that’ll be patch day. Next week we’re also looking forward to getting the ATLAS Dev Kit into your content creator hands and seeing what amazing new gameplay mechanics and environments the community can come up with! Thank you so much for becoming a part of our crew and we can't wait to show all you scallywags, landlubbers, captains, and seadogs what lies ahead! Happy Sailing, Grapeshot Games For the latest dispatch on #playATLAS keep yer one good eye trained on this here information Natter n' chatter on Discord: https://discord.gg/playatlas Navigate ye olde Subreddit:https://www.reddit.com/r/playatlas Hear ye, hear ye on Twitter:https://twitter.com/sailtheatlas Watch us scallywags on Twitch:http://twitch.tv/sailtheatlas Plus ye can band with us Pirates on Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/playatlasgame View full article