Patch #29

Whiskerwood is getting faster!

Now several weeks now since the big nautical update: we've fixed a ton of nautical bugs and balances. So instead players have grown their colonies and hit our eternal enemy: performance!

You might remember a number of patches back we had a series of optimization centric patches..... Well, good news is here! We're calling this patch the king of optimization patches!

The exact performance impact varies depending on save size, but for the largest save files: FPS IS DOUBLED!

We tested both a reasonable 100 Whiskerwood save file and the current largest reported save file of 3,400 Whiskers. The smallest save files achieved a respectivableextra 16% FPS, but those often already were 60+ fps. Instead the biggest improvements are on the larger save files!

The big take away: Now you can grow your colony 2x as big before hitting the same FPS! If in the past you slowed down growth to stay at playable FPS, now is the time to step on the gas! Please grow your colony larger!

Daniel

PS: One super critical point about mods. We upgraded from UE5.6 to UE5.8, this means all mods need to be updated. If you have any unupdated mods installed your game might not start or it might crash. They need the new compatibility version noted in their .uplugin. If you have a mod there are two choices to update, one is use the newly upgraded Modkit for ue5.8. The other is to use a newly developed "automatic upgrader", the link for that should be on the modder discord channel.

v0.7.208 Patch #29

Features

• Upgrade Unreal Engine to version 5.8 pulling in various crash fixes and improved performance on large save files

• Add whole colony instancing of meshes across buildings for improved render speed and rapid slice switching

• Ships now avoid known pirate islands in their pathing, unless they are tasked with attacking ships or towers, or their goal is within range of a pirate island.

• All pipes and valves can now be built underwater

Optimization

• Optimize lightning strikes. Now they no longer cast a shadow, avoiding the jitter when the primitives were united twice per frame each flash

• Optimize large building count save files by eliding a physics internal cache structure and instead calculating unchached

• Optimize generation of nautical islands, reducing load time by 1.5 seconds on all map sizes

• Optimize nautical ship plan by delaying spline rebuild until required

• Optimize pollution computation on heavily polluted maps by marking stable cells and skipping follow on computation

• Optimize away spiky frame times caused by long distance food requests. Rate limit such requests to one per frame to avoid pile ups and bad frames.

• Optimize warehouse lighting, fix recalculation by subtle motion which compounded by warehouse count

• Optimize pollution blockage computation

• Optimize crop mesh updates to reduce bounds rewalks

• Optimize scaffold by stopping to from triggering a full bounds rebuild

• Optimize belt item movement by 25% by front loading memory safety checks

• Optimize pollution computation by caching the neighborhood of simulated cells

• Optimize pollution visualization by batching 3D texture updates

• Parallelize pollution propagation logic

• Optimize pollution computation by improving how simulated cells are queued and merged

Gameplay

• Make Armed Barque construction recipe require 14 cannons by 12 to now match the simulated ship's count

• Supply ships again show their resources on deck during travel instead of only while docked.(Includes player Merchant Barge)

• Ships scuttled at a storage dock will recover contents of ship cargo hold

• Building support scaffolds can be hidden in settings

• Warehouse stockpile visuals can be hidden in settings

UI

• Make shift/ctrl/alt tax ship modifiers manipulate larger increments

• Problem indicators over Whiskers no longer linger on dock once boarding a ship.

Bugs

• Fix completing Act II not clearing on-offer pirate and claw radiant quests

• Fix bombard action preview leaking pirate island information

• Fix ships claiming it to be starving when they are fleeing home due to food stocks

• Fix belt sorters being able to stack endless amounts of resources if output is backed up.

• Fix distorted Whisker models in certain paused situations

• Fix Storage dock reporting erroneous storage values on UI.

• Fix approval cost not being charged when sending ship out to sea.

• Fix some cases of minecarts getting stuck or having inconsistent acceleration.

• Fix Schools not letting hungry whiskers out during the day.

• Fix Heating Stove not casting a shadow

• Fix save files not saving progress of sailor and officer training

Crash Fixes

• Fix a crash on load if various hotkeys were held during the load process

• Fix dlss causing crash on non-nvidia GPUs

Mod API

• Ensure LaunchURL is locked down to prevent mod bugs

• Make mod loader check uplugin engine version to avoid loading outdated mods which would cause crashes

Acknowledgements

• Buckminsterfullerene for maintaining and updating the modkit to ue5.8

• Pierrekin for developing the automatic mod updater

We'd really appreciate it if you could take a moment to share your thoughts about Whiskerwood in a Steam review. Each review helps us understand what you enjoy, what you'd like to see changed, and what you'd like to see added next. It's a powerful way for you to not only share feedback with us directly but also influence what comes next in a patch. We're carefully reading through all feedback, and your opinion matters!

We have some fantastic resources to help get you started on your colony building in Whiskerwood. Check out our beginner's guide and our official community wiki[wiki.hoodedhorse.com] page to help get you the answers you need.

We also have a compilation of tips and tricks sourced from the community to help you out right here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3604037222

Become part of the Whiskerwood community. Join us on Discord[discord.com] to chat with other players, share your villages, and see what others are creating. You can also follow updates and discussions on Reddit, stay informed through BlueSky[bsky.app] and Twitter[x.com].

Patch #28

Welcome to Patch #28! We've got optimizations, features, bug fixes, and even crash fixes!

These new storage piers let you park any unused ship. They are cheap and require no workers so you can park ships for later use!

If you truly do not wish to keep a ship, you can even scuttle using the new "Scuttle Ship" mechanic!

Big news for anyone prior impacted by the shadow pass crash! You can now set your shadow quality back up from low!

Sorry for this persistent bug. It turns out it was a race condition in the Unreal Engine and that explains why our prior attempts to fix it were futile. Namely we rewrote the entire flow for how save file thumbnails were rendered in the big nautical patch. Sadly that was not enough, but now we're pretty sure we've got the fix locked! This patch lands it, and a big thanks goes to the modder pierrekin on our Discord for finding the root cause!

Plus a bunch other fixes have landed. At the moment all reported crashes (besides hardware issues) should now be fixed!

This patch lands a number of optimizations, but I should give everyone a heads up: next patch is going to focus entirely on more optimizations and an engine upgrade. It pains me to hear some players are reducing how large they grow their colonies due to the performance impact. So we've made it a priority as a team to focus on getting the game to run faster.

Please do checkout the full changelog below, and beyond all that: Thank you for playing our game!

Daniel

Lead Programmer on Whiskerwood

PS: If you've been playing Whiskerwood and find yourself playing quite a bit of it... can I ask you to consider writing a review? The nautical update sale is ending today, and it would help a bunch if over the coming months we had more reviews.

v0.7.207 Patch #28

Features

• Add Storage Pier for storing unused ships

• Add scuttling of undesired ships at the Storage Pier

• Add Damage Report after bombardments to ease reconstruction

• Add memory of building configuration between destruction and rebuild

Optimization

• Build tracked lists of buildings by components instead of searching each frame

• Optimize aim item fulcrum culling by shifting check before an expensive copy

• Optimize pollution visualization by reducing cpu to gpu sync volume

Gameplay

• Add Tin Ore as possible trade offer

• Reduce cannon bombardment claw tax penalty from 25 to 13

• Optimize ship sails by simplifying animation

UI

• Add more problem indicator support to docks

• Fix 32:9 super ultrawide monitor players experience overlapping windows on docks

• Add ship docks & towers to workplace overview.

• Added sailor & officer icons to the work overview agent details.

Bugs

• Fix smuggler stuck at main dock

• Fix bounding boxes on, cannons, medicine, and guano to prevent them consuming too much space on belts

• Resolved edge cases where the initial colony ship could spawn in unintended locations.

• Fix farmers fertilizing fields even without fertilizer available.

• Fix inaccurate construction worker count

• Fix gears doubled in the acceptable items list

• Fix radiant quests offering same quest code in multiple quests

• Fix ships at edge of world can trigger notifications which if followed will lock the camera out of bounds

• Fix player defense towers attacking smugglers

• Fix lifeboat overworld model using broken material

• Fix teacher skill in school UI not correctly displaying sailor & officer skills

Crash Fixes

• Fix crash when smuggler spawns but no pirate islands are alive

• Fix crash when attempting to load a save containing an incorrectly stored water enclosure.

• Fix crash when a player ship sinks if the player is in process of issuing a command

• Fix mismatch between construction worker counts on HUD and workplace overview.

• Fix race condition crash in shadow renderer

Acknowledgements

• Thank you to the player who reported the crashing ship arrival over email

• Thank you to caelian on the Discord for reporting the crash related to loading invalid water enclosures.

• Thank you to the anonymous player over email who reported the crash when ships sink while attempting to issue commands

• Thank you to Jay over email for reporting the stuck smuggler

• Thank you to Locoparentus for reporting the overly large guano bags on belts

• Thank you to caelian on the Discord for reporting the menu overlaps

• Thank you to Siewy on the Discord for reporting that towers were missing from the workplace overview.

• Thank you to Klymenos on the Discord for reporting that construction worker counts on HUD and workplace overview were mismatched.

• Thank you to Vil-hatarn on the Discord for reporting that the initial colony ship could still occasionally spawn inside an island.

• Thank you to pierrekin and deuslinks on the Discord for reporting that farmers could fertilize fields without fertilizer available.

• Thank you to Fret on the Discord for reporting that sailor & officer icons where missing from the work overview agent details.

• Thank you to the many players who reported getting several duplicate random quests

• Thank you to Bacon for reporting the out of bounds jump to faraway ship notification bug

• Big thank you to pierrekin on the Discord for finding the root cause of the elusive shadow renderer engine crash!

• Thank you to Jethro on the Discord for reporting that teacher skill displays in the school UI were incorrect for sailors & officers.

We'd really appreciate it if you could take a moment to share your thoughts about Whiskerwood in a Steam review. Each review helps us understand what you enjoy, what you'd like to see changed, and what you'd like to see added next. It's a powerful way for you to not only share feedback with us directly but also influence what comes next in a patch. We're carefully reading through all feedback, and your opinion matters!

We have some fantastic resources to help get you started on your colony building in Whiskerwood. Check out our beginner's guide and our official community wiki[wiki.hoodedhorse.com] page to help get you the answers you need.

We also have a compilation of tips and tricks sourced from the community to help you out right here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3604037222

Become part of the Whiskerwood community. Join us on Discord[discord.com] to chat with other players, share your villages, and see what others are creating. You can also follow updates and discussions on Reddit, stay informed through BlueSky[bsky.app] and Twitter[x.com].