Nikki Severin

Done

Hiya! Done!

Hiya! Done!

Hiya! This has an easy fix! You need to have a ship built, then you need to claim it and when you are holding the helm/ship wheel, you can then go to the map and travel to another yland

Hi there! We ran into a bug that caused people to have a second slot that they shouldn't have. This should now be fixed so you indeed would need to buy a second slot if you wanted to claim another ship. Have you sent us an in game report about not being able to unclaim a ship? If not, please do so. Thank you and apologies about the bug.

Ahoy Ylanders! Welcome to another entry in our developer diary! Today, we’re excited to take you on a journey through the lush, diverse vegetation that breathes life into the world of Ylands. Our team of 3D artists has worked tirelessly to craft the unique plant life that populates each of our distinct biomes. These plants not only add to the beauty of the game but also play a crucial role in your survival and adventure. Vegetation Categories In Ylands, the vegetation is divided into five main categories: Trees, Bushes, Plants, Mushrooms, and Underwater vegetation. Each category plays a crucial role in the ecosystem and offers different resources and interactions for players. Trees, Bushes, and Plants are dynamic elements in the game, each going through three distinct growth stages. These stages represent the plant’s life cycle, from a small sapling to a fully mature form. Over time, you’ll see these changes reflected in the game world, adding depth and immersion to your experience. Notably, trees can be cut down to gather essential resources, which is vital for crafting and building in Ylands. In Ylands, we have six biomes, each with its own climate and environment. While some are rich in flora, others are more barren and challenging. Here's a closer look at the vegetation that you'll encounter as you explore these varied landscapes: Polar Biome The Polar Biome is an unforgiving and hostile environment. Here, ice and snow dominate the landscape, creating a barren wasteland where nothing can grow. The lack of vegetation in this biome highlights the extreme conditions adventurers face, emphasizing the importance of preparation and resource management. Arid Biome The Arid Biome is characterized by its hot and dry conditions, with landscapes that range from savannas to deserts. In this challenging environment, vegetation is sparse but resilient. You’ll find iconic Saguaro cactuses, Opuntias, Sisal agave, and tough savanna grasses. Scattered savanna shrubs and hardy Acacia trees add to the landscape’s rugged beauty. Each plant in the Arid biome is a testament to survival, thriving in one of the harshest climates in Ylands. Temperate Biome In the Temperate Biome, the world comes alive with fresh, green growth. This biome is home to rich meadows and sprawling woodlands, featuring a diverse range of vegetation. Majestic Oaks and elegant Birch trees form the backbone of the forests, while Maples and sunflowers add splashes of color and variety. Cow parsnip can be found in open meadows, its tall stalks and broad leaves swaying gently in the breeze. This biome offers a peaceful and vibrant environment, perfect for those who appreciate nature’s beauty. Monsoonal Biome The Monsoonal Biome is a place of contrasts, with a humid, green environment that experiences dramatic seasonal changes. This biome is lush and teeming with life, featuring towering Willows, ancient Metasequoias, and sturdy Cedar trees. The vibrant Rhododendrons and delicate Prunella plants add a burst of color to the landscape, while the iconic Bamboo and Cherry trees bring an exotic touch. This biome’s dense vegetation provides a stunning backdrop for any adventure. Taiga Biome The Taiga Biome offers a cold, quiet environment where coniferous forests dominate the landscape. Here, you’ll find towering Spruce and Larch trees, alongside resilient Dwarf pines. The undergrowth is rich with ferns and other hardy plants that can withstand the biome’s chilly conditions. The Taiga’s serene atmosphere, with its dense conifer woods, is perfect for those who seek solitude and peace in the wilderness. Tropical Biome Finally, the Tropical Biome is a humid, overgrown paradise brimming with life. This lush environment is dominated by Rainforest trees and towering palms, creating a dense canopy that shelters a vibrant undergrowth. Banana trees, colorful orchids, and sumac add to the biome’s rich diversity, creating a thriving ecosystem where life flourishes. The Tropical biome’s dense vegetation and vibrant colors make it a truly immersive experience for any adventurer. Crafting the vegetation for Ylands has been a labor of love. Each plant, tree, and shrub was carefully designed to reflect the unique conditions of its respective biome. We aimed to create a world that feels alive, where every piece of vegetation contributes to the overall experience, whether you're gathering resources, building a shelter, or simply taking in the scenery. We hope you enjoy exploring these diverse environments as much as we enjoyed creating them. Stay tuned for more insights into the world of Ylands in future diaries. Stay Classy!

Ahoy Ylanders! Today, we spoke with our Art department about what's coming to Ylands! And we bring you a short peek into the brand new guardian of Arid caves! Conceptualizing the Arid Hyena The creation of our new hyena creature for the Arid region in Ylands started with the need for a guardian of the dark, mysterious caves. We chose a hyena for its reputation as a cunning and resilient animal, aiming to evoke a sense of danger and challenge. The goal was to create a creature that fits the harsh, unforgiving nature of its environment. This creature is meant to add a new layer of depth and excitement to the game, challenging players in unexpected ways. From 3D Model to Life: Crafting the Hyena We built the hyena directly in Blender, focusing on sharp edges and glowing green crystals to emphasize its role as a cave guardian. Following our pipeline, we skinned the model in Maya to ensure smooth integration with our animation workflow. The final model, with its intimidating stance and piercing eyes, meets our vision of a menacing creature. Every detail was crafted to enhance the creature’s unique and formidable presence within the game world. Animating the Guardian: Breathing Life into Our Creation For the animation, we reused the set from the Wendigo, as both creatures share the same skeleton. This approach allowed our artists to add more variations while enabling our animators to focus on other critical tasks. Creating a new animation set is very time-demanding, so reusing existing animations was a practical solution. By optimizing our resources this way, we were able to enrich the game’s animation quality overall. What are your thoughts? Are you looking forward the the hyena? Let us know! Stay Classy!

⭐ HIGHLIGHTS ⭐ Tutorial gameplay tweaked, finally everyone can jump across the first ditch in the starting chapter Audio is not broken anymore once you finish the Elmwood's Outpost story General bug fixes FIXED [YLD-52720] Fixed: There is no music in game after disconnecting at wrong time from Story Land. [YLD-52785] Fixed: VS: Custom tools: get/set obsolete position/rotation script tiles do not work with preview objects. [YLD-52717] Fixed: VS: new Set position tiles do not work correctly with animated single entities/GLs and Move to script tile. [YLD-52710] Fixed: Editor: Group templates supports Event listeners, Position animators and Rotation animators again.

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Ahoy Ylanders! After the exciting news of last week (watch here ICYMI) we are back with another announcement: Update 2.3 is live now and packed with content! Are you ready to get your ELVEN EXPEDITIONS started? Random Encounter Objectives Random Encounters were given mini quests! Each Encounter now has a quest you can complete and to make sure you know exactly what to do, we included a way to track its progress. Luring lighthouse A new chapter of the story takes you to the Monsoonal region where strange things started happening. Could this have something to do with the arrival of elves into the region? It is up to you (and Horatio Reginald Elmwood, of course) to find out what's going on! Gamepad support FINALLY! You can play Ylands with a gamepad, including an aim-assist support to help you during combat. New Random Encounters created by community Ros Bobb has been given a makeover by our community. In each region, you can find new stalls, galleries, and houses made for Ross Bob! Quality of life improvements You may now use the free-placing feature for your blueprints, it can be freely rotated and snapped to ground at your will. And a few more things here and there EDITOR improvements Polished ease of use of input fields throughout the editor. Merged Terrain and Advanced Terrain Tools and split Game Logics into Basic Logics and Script Logics. Custom Enums are now a standalone Visual Script Category. Custom Localizations basic workflow introduced - create your own localization tables for custom games. Positions and Rotations in Visual Scripting reworked to be more intuitive. New Project Browser makes searching and opening Editor Scenarios much easier. Are you curious about other new features, fixes and additions? See the Changelog for update 2.3 here: 2.3 Elven Expeditions - Changelog - Changelogs - Ylands

Ahoy Ylanders, We've been hard at work on the upcoming update, which we titled Elven Expeditions. And before we release it, we bring you the experimental build! Available only to Steam users, the Experimental build offers you guys a chance to: test upcoming features & changes report any bugs & provide early feedback (#experimental_build room on our Discord server is a great way to do that) HOW TO TRY THE EXPERIMENTAL BUILD Go to your Steam library and right-click Ylands Select Properties, click the "Betas" tab, and enter "YExperimentalPublic" as the password (excluding the double quotes) This will unlock the "i_will_back_up_my_saves" branch. (Please note that you don't need to back up your saves anymore this is just the name of the branch). After selecting the branch and confirming it, Steam will begin downloading the new experimental branch SUPER IMPORTANT INFO! Any progress you make on the experimental build DOES NOT carry over to your live game!!! When you start playing experimental, we will now copy your live progress into experimental for you. You can try your actual progress in the new update right away (remember that you are playing in a separate environment so it will not affect your progress on live by any means). What WILL be copied: Adventure mode progress, All editor scenarios and tools, Non-protected workshop scenarios and all the blueprints you have uploaded to the workshop All your purchased blueprints All your local blueprints What WILL NOT be copied: Sharegames Rented servers (if you want any of those maps on experimental, you will need to turn them into singleplayer maps before you start experimental for the first time) Any workshop assets with global user data (leaderboards, game sets, etc) Do not copy any local files! Any TAMPERING with local data can lead to irreversible loss of progress!!! Not all features that will be released in the full release are necessarily available in the Experimental build. It is possible that some features available in the Experimental build might be changed, balanced, or removed before the full release. ...with that out of the way...onto the good stuff! Highlights Random Encounter Objectives We improved random encounters so now you are able to keep track of RE objective progress. We hope it will motivate you and your friends to explore ylands even more now. Luring lighthouse A new chapter of the story takes you to the Monsoonal region where strange things started happening. Could this have something to do with the arrival of elves into the region? It is up to you (and Horatio Reginald Elmwood, of course) to find out what's going on! Gamepad Gamepad controls is finally here for you. Do not forget that with gamepad we help you a little bit during the combat with the aim assist. Quality of life improvements You may now use freeplace feature for your blueprints, it can be freely rotate and snap to ground at your will. EDITOR improvements: Polished ease of use of input fields throughout the editor. Merged Terrain and Advanced Terrain Tools and split Game Logics into Basic Logics and Script Logics. Custom Enums are now a standalone Visual Script Category. Custom Localizations basic workflow introduced - create your own localization tables for custom games. Positions and Rotations in Visual Scripting reworked to be more intuitive. New Project Browser makes searching and opening Editor Scenarios much easier.

Ahoy Ylanders! Today, let's for once leave the seas of Ylands and instead dive into what it's like to be a tester. In general, us testers get to shine when a new feature or asset is introduced and given to us in its raw state. Here it's important to keep two mindsets: one of a tester, but also one of a player. But let's get to the latter in a little bit. Generally, as testers, we basically have one important job - to grab what we've received and attempt to break it in any way imaginable. Already knowing all that is doable in the game, this is where we do that "all" and way more. We get to wreak havoc and investigate all that could possibly go wrong, and this is where being creative and imaginative really pays off. Finding as many ways to break every new thing as possible lets us, after all, try our very best to bring you everything in the most polished, pristine state after it's reported, fixed and retested. The mindset of a player comes into the picture when we also have to consider the question of: is this user friendly? As most of us already have our fair share of experience with games, we know fairly well if not only the usability but also design is something that would generally please a player. Overall, it's important to us that every new thing is easy to understand, can be used well, but also looks a way that would catch our eye as players. As such, not only do we find bugs, but also bring our own feedback to the table. When a release is knocking on the door, that's when the most things can possibly go wrong. Instead of testing rather specific things, we now have to look through every single corner of the game to make sure nothing has been broken in the process. Even things that until now seemed minor are important to test so that we can try our best to make the experience we bring you, our players, as flawless as it could be. And then the release comes, maintenance happens, and we have the job and last chance of checking that everything is fine, so we split the most important parts of the game amongst our lovely team of testers and go through all Story ylands, intro, shop etc., basically all that absolutely has to be in a proper state no matter what. And we have to manage in time so that you can get the finished product and continue sailing as soon as possible. Overall, seeing that progress that newly added things go through is really exciting, as it goes from a sometimes rather broken state to a finished feature and we get to experience all those stages. Sometimes that results in funny bugs that we would not otherwise experience while being simply players, which we then get to share with you, our community, afterwards. At the same time, it can be a difficult job since we're not just playing the game. It can sometimes take us days to find how a specific bug happens, which often results in us just doing the same thing over and over and over again until we figure it out, and then once more after it's fixed. It takes a lot of effort, thinking, and patience, but in the end it's always worth it. If you run into a bug or simply need help with something, let us know in our Discord! That's it for this week! Stay Classy!

Ahoy Ylanders! This week, our programmer Radek will share a few insights about our internal system called Notice Board. This nice addition to our game is a digital bulletin board, crafted to enhance your gaming experience by bringing you relevant information happening around the Ylands game. Key Features Dynamic Content Updates: Keeping players informed and engaged is crucial, so we've developed a dynamic hub filled with content to ensure you never miss out on the essential happenings in the Ylands universe. Stay updated on upcoming patches, new shop content, latest features, and game changes. Visual Experience: To get your attention, we have designed an aesthetic board with a charming board theme. Our UI Designer carefully crafted the variants of paper notes that are easily integrated into the dynamic system we developed. Technical Aspects Originally the tool was required by the marketing team and it was intended to be just a place with brief notes served to the players updated approximately once a month. Because of this simplified design and underestimation of the potential size of that system, we encountered several complications during the development process. We chose a more simplistic approach inspired by the classic blog systems but we had to work with static data uploaded on the server. We chose the JSON file format for storage. The JSON file you upload to the server needs to be manually edited, which can be easy for a tech-savvy person, but can be a nightmare for the average PC user. That's why it's important to choose the right tools while simplifying the editing process itself, which was also underestimated at first. If you're building a tool that requires the work of others while giving you the ability to update content fairly frequently, reach for a database solution rather than static data and expose some simple frontend app with convenient editing tools. Unfortunately, we were limited by time and did not expect that the system would become such an integral tool. Fortunately, there are ways to automate these things, so we created a spreadsheet where the marketing team can update their data while keeping track of what has been published. They then generate a JSON file from that table and just send it to the backend server. While this process still requires the involvement of at least 3 people, editing such a spreadsheet and then uploading the final changes to the server takes much less time. In conclusion, we'd just like to point out that it's always a good idea to consider the importance and potential workload of such a system and invest time in developing tools and then working with them more efficiently accordingly. Since its release, the Notice Board has become one of the most visited places in Ylands. We are constantly working on improving the Notice Board and have some exciting additions planned for the next update. Is there something you'd like to see on the Notice Board? Let us know! Stay classy, ylanders!

⭐ HIGHLIGHTS ⭐ Tech Tree - When you select a known recipe in the Tech Tree, it will now also be selected in the crafting menu. Continue on your Adventure - Some of you who skipped the last two updates couldn't continue playing. Not anymore! Handbook Rewards - Some players didn't receive their rewards during multiplayer gameplay, but now they will have them back. Elmwood's outpost - A few Ylanders had their progress in this story Yland restarted; we have reverted it. Low memory optimization - You might have experienced a crash on Crimson Shores Yland - this issue is now fixed. FIXED [YLD-50689] Fixed: Handbook rewards: Collectibles rewards can be claimed for clients again. Affected players will receive all rewards they should have gotten after the loading of exploration map. [YLD-50630] Fixed: Reduced memory consumed by lights shadow maps to manageable amount. [YLD-50644] Fixed: Exploration map compatibility issues for saves made in before 1.10. [YLD-50645] Fixed: Editor: Freeze when you start PC only empty world. [YLD-50666] Fixed: Editor: Custom transactions in scenarios without gameset/scenario data never finished, always resulted in refund. [YLD-50674] Fixed: Editor: Is group tile does not work correctly in custom tools when you provide them anything else than Group/Entity/Game logic. Fixed: Entity thumbnails in inventory can sometimes disappear or get switched with different ones. TWEAKED Tweaked: Improved readability of table view.

Ahoy Ylanders, In today's dev diary, we will look at a significant change in the history of Ylands development that fundamentally influenced the creation of new assets and significantly improved players' ability to personalize their game creations and equipment. In the initial stages of game development, it was essential for us to design a specific visual style that would be unique and have great potential to not visually age soon. This key aspect was further influenced by other particular requirements, such as the need for a smooth change in the time of day, weather, and editable terrain. With an increasing number of players and the amount of time they spent in the game, there came a need for a more significant variability in-game assets, even though the game already contained thousands of unique objects. After testing various options for solving this problem, we decided to make all game objects colorable. On the one hand, this decision was great because it potentially created infinite variations of current assets without negatively impacting the data size. However, on the other hand, it brought a tremendous amount of work for the entire graphics team. To preserve the original visual style, we designed a system that would keep the artistically stylized shading of the model while also adding the possibility to colorize this model with three different colors. We achieved this effect by adding a second UV set to each model, which contains information about which part of the model is colored with one of these three colors. The original shading of the model remained stored in the first UV set, which now only contains different shades of gray. The final visual of the model is created inside the game engine using a custom shader, where the black-and-white shading is multiplied by the defined colors. In the game, there is a database where each object has its base colors stored, so the resulting visual corresponds to the original one, with the new option to change this coloration anytime. This new feature allowed us to create even more beautiful and diverse game environments, and more importantly, it allowed you, our players, to unlimitedly customize your creations, such as building your dream house and coloring it according to your preferences at any time in the future. Do you use this option in the game? What is your favorite way to use it? Let us know! Stay Classy!