This sounds like good news, I wish you guys the best of luck achieving your goals for the coming year!

I filled it out but I don't know why. There have been so many good suggestions from me, from others that have gone ignored. I feel that in general most features are lacking/incomplete, leading to a lack of possibilities. Crafting has been dumbed down multiple times to make things easier, which means there's less to do. Also creativity is something which happens mainly in the editor, whilst in exploration you lose 99% of the possibilities of placing items exactly where you want to make stunning things there. I think for this game to be worthwhile in the long term on larger servers the general game mechanics need to be easy to use but hard to master, like in Minecraft. The core game is easy to play and have fun whilst allowing advanced players to do amazing stuff with redstone, keeping the game challenging.

I'll use this as my wish list for ships. I think the exact ship in the screenshot is my biggest issue with ships: 99% of ships in Ylands look like this. Currently ships don't allow for enough creativity. I've come up with solutions and ideas many times before, but I'm pretty sure that's been a few years ago, so I'll put it down again: Modular hulls, so we can have different length ships. Also different styles and different widths. They would have a bow, stern and (multiple) middle pieces. Different sail types, basically square vs fore-and-aft sails. They should have different sailing characteristics. Make the wind not change every 2 seconds. Currently wind doesn't achieve anything, there's no purpose on changing the heading of the ship to be more efficient as it will change again soon. There should also be some form of weather prediction. Make hulls displace water, i.e. make it so we can have useful interior space in hulls. Overall the idea is that it will allow us to be more creative. Also for more advanced players they can optimize both their ships and their sailing.

I've pointed it out multiple times already that there are multiple other games which do this, even with completely custom/bespoke player built hulls. There's been loads of other suggestions about ships already anyways but nothing seems to ever come from it.

I've written multiple posts/topics about what ships need as a fix to make them more fun. Please add the following: - Modular hulls, existing of multiple pieces, so you can make boats of varying lengths. - Hollow hulls: please make it possible to go inside the hulls. - Make wind/sailing actual fun. The wind (used to?) change every 2 seconds. Make it so that different sail types have different speeds on the wind direction and make the wind steadier. This way sailing actually becomes a skill. It would be nice to have some sort of craftingstation/encounter quite lategame which will let you predict the weather including the wind.

I love seeing my suggestions make it into the game - the building station really sounds awesome and like it will make building in survival worthwhile, I'll check it out ASAP. Does the building station also support dragging (and thus clipping) blocks? This would give people creative building power in survival games and thus being able to build really satisfying homes and other builds.

I assume that you can have a passworded server with your friends, but then take your ship elsewhere (public servers) to raid or visit others?

It's good to see Ales back - I didn't knew you were no longer working on Ylands. I've met you in person and we had a good chat together. I couldn't really understand why Ylands was going the way it was going the last 2 years, knowing what your vision on the game was, but it makes sense now. Hope we can see results from your work soon!

I agree, when I bought this game I thought it was going into a completely different direction. To see I've got this game almost 4 years and how little advancement exploration has seen makes me sad. I honestly have given up hope for Ylands to become what I thought/hoped it would become, and just like DayZ it seems design mistake on design mistake. I feel that the exploration game mode has got moved to the side in favor of the editor and the mini games made with the editor, which may have to do with trying to push mobile where there is more money to make. The whole cosmetics/coyns blunder also failed, as did the dedicated server thing. Does anyone actually think any of these things through? The biggest ingame issue for Ylands I think is the split between the editor and survival. If it would be possible to switch to editor-like building in the protective barrier, that would give people more and easier building possibilities, especially if you want to change things. Building a house is already difficult, but having to rebuild/change it is a lot worse. Building in exploration is a chore and because of that all I see on servers is just some crafting stations on the beach. There are almost no game mechanics that need you to build anything nice. I'd love to make a greenhouse to grow food on the arctic but why should I? I can grow banana's at -30 degrees. I'm not sure how tied in the Ylands team is with the DayZ team but it seems that not much was learned from the DayZ experience overall. Edit: The topic is actually called "What makes you enjoy Exploration mode?", so I'll answer that as well: I really like the lush environments and the actual exploration. Working the voxel landscape has so much new potential to make amazing things, which I would love to enjoy together with my friends or in an online community. Adrie

I can't deny I bought this game for the survival aspect, and I agree that not enough has been delivered in this aspect. I've reported countless bugs and broken game features/mechanics, and I've done plenty of suggestions. To see plenty of these bugs still in the game at least 2 years later isn't encouraging to go play the game and report some more, or taking time to write up another suggestion topic.

I really like the first implementation of farming, it's a much needed mechanic for explore gamemode. Some suggestions for it: Grass seeds that turn a dirt voxel into grass, Moisture/temperature system for plants. Moisture could be based on the biome, but also improved using irrigation. Temperature could be improved using heaters. It would be nice if plants would have 2 temperature ranges, one range where it will grow, but really slow, and one much smaller ideal range. This won't make farming impossible but will add lategame content as people will have to make multiple "greenhouses"/farming systems for different plant types. Can't wait for more explore content/polishing as that's what made me buy the game in the first place.

Maybe we can have dynamic events such as plain crashes, which can be broken up into resources? I've had a quick glance over the 1.0 release update list but it seems that there's still not really a way of opening a server and set it up in such a way to block most forms of grief, basically limiting you to coop with people you know only. I hope we get a change in this soon!

I'm actually pretty satisfied with this as well, I bought this game mainly for exploration, and seeing that it hasn't been forgotten and will get it's own place is good news!

Interesting timing, as the DayZ devs (BI's previous early access title) just released a status update basically stating that long promised features will never make it to the game, and features that were once implemented won't be coming back. Looking back at the DayZ development process and comparing it to the last 2,5 years of Ylands development the similarities are all too obvious in my opinion. Biggest issue IMO for Ylands is that it clearly lacks it's unique selling point compared to DayZ, and like mentioned it's a competitor to Roblox. I do value Ales' honesty and openness in the latest dev blog, which is what DayZ lacked. For Ylands to not end up like DayZ I think there should be more communication and involvement with the community, and maybe a slight change in priorities. My main concern with the current game state is that it's still not possible to have a good "survival" experience with an online community, for various reasons. Are you guys going to be at gamescom this year again? Adrie

I see an airship in the background there on that chinese edit, any updates on those?