AVWW Post-Release 1.016-1.017 "Slimy T-Rex Infestation" Released!

This one is, again, kind of all over the place.  On the one hand there are some fixes for multiplayer plus some new admin commands to help with yet another anti-griefing case as well as to be able to rename either your character or your profile.  Very useful.

On the other hand we've got some changes to make the transition to the second continent easier and less grindy when you're going for those early NPCs and settlement structures.  To some extent I think it was a communications issue with players missing things that were actually already there, but we've done a great deal to make it more robust in general so that that doesn't come up.

Next up are three more enemies and a new miniboss.  One of those enemy types actually has four variants, and another of them has eighteen variants.  So, yeah.

Also new this release is the concept of chunks having "infestations" of hostile background stuff.  If you don't want spoilers I won't give them in this summary.  But suffice it to say, some of the new enemies don't seed like other enemies -- they either show up like the crashed landspeeder or dread gazebo as part of region-specific seeding, or they show up during an infestation in addition to normal enemies.

Players have been asking for more environmental dangers and traps and such for a while, as well as more variance on a per-chunk basis as opposed to a per-region basis, and the infestations provide us for a pretty interesting vector for providing both in one.  We'll be doing more with it over time, but right now there are three broad types of infestations that can happen, each with three differing severities and some region-specific tie-ins.

Sorry that was kind of vague, but given this is a game partly about exploration I thought you might prefer just finding it in the game yourself.  If not, then have at the release notes themselves, because all the details are there!

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

UPDATE: 1.017 is now out and improves the balance on the new infestations based on early feedback, as well as making the monster whips work properly in multiplayer.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.