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Introduction

Hello everyone! We’ve been working hard to get First Light out to you all, despite some major hurdles both in development and IRL. A lot of what we’ve been doing hasn’t been very post-worthy, but as it’s been a little while since our last dev post, we figure we should get everyone up to speed. I would personally like to thank everyone for sticking with us through this extended development process, we couldn’t’ve kept it up without you.

We're pleased to announce that over the past couple of weeks /u/Kenshin_Woo and TechSensei have both become a part of the core CivEx development team for First Light and the Next Iteration.

If you’re interested in keeping track of development between dev posts, we’ve set up a subreddit wiki page where you can see which things we’re focusing on, and all the things we’ve completed since the beginning of this month. You can check it out here or by clicking on the “Progress” link just to the left of the “Dev Posts” one in the top bar (for those of you not still on the old reddit theme change the url to old.reddit.com).

Now, onto our…

Progress

Programming

We’ve finished a basic version of the repair system that will be workable for First Light. Sometime after launch we will likely come back to it and fully implement our original idea as it is at least halfway complete in the code. CustomDurability (a plugin which allows us to vary the durability of tools) has been integrated into CivEnchant to allow for this.

Both custom armor sets now work and have set bonuses. When using the resource pack these appear as unique textures, both in inventory and on player models, which is, honestly, pretty dang awesome. These will make up the end-game tier of armors.

We’ve also implemented a method of storing experience points in emeralds. It was a surprisingly massive pain to do so as there is very little support for ensuring client-side consistency with the process. Getting this to work was a big priority as we intend to use these emeralds in crafting recipes.

I created a plugin that allows us to drop MythicMobs items from crops with a certain %chance in a given region. We’re currently planning to use these harvestable items to allow players to squeeze more value out of their alchemy items. These will be used in recipes with mob drops to turn mob drops into something more potent for alchemy.

Planning and Balance

All recipes that aren’t currently implemented have at least been tentatively planned out (this include FactoryMod recipes by the way). This is something we will likely tweak quite often during First Light, so definitely keep on top of the information we’re handing out regarding it.

All MythicMobs mobs and items have been sorted into categories based on rarity, difficulty, and value. From these we are currently working to plan out the specific item aspect values, and the dropchance/tables for all the different groups of mobs across the map. This has been the main hurdle to development over the past month and I can finally say we’re nearing the end of it.

Config and Implementation

We’ve finalized the ore tables for the Overworld. For those not “in the know”, we’re using HiddenOre so that we can dynamically tweak the regional values of ore, just in case we want to fix game-breaking ore rates, or (perhaps) add something in.

RealisticBiomes is fully implemented and working right now. We’ve made pretty much anything that can be persistent, well, persistent. Just in case that causes too much of a TPS issue we have alternate values for non-persistent versions of each crop at the ready.

A “rough draft” of the potion recipes has been implemented, but we will likely come back to finalize these after we finish the alchemy item configurations. That’s where most of our current focus has been, well that and tying it to MythicMobs drops, speaking of…

MythicMobs spawning has been fully implemented for the Overworld. It’s wonderful seeing the world come to life with all of the mobs we’ve worked on throughout development, and we can’t wait for you guys to see it as well. We fully expect the values to be faily out of whack on release, so don’t be too surprised if you can’t seem to find any mobs (or if you can’t go five minutes without accidentally running into what’s supposed to be a rare boss). We’re preparing to quickly change these values during the first week after launch based on player feedback. We should be able to find the right values in there somewhere!

Teaser

It’s also been a good long while since we’ve shown anything in-game, so here is a pic of the crimson steel armor set!