Hi there, fellow ylanders! With 0.7 "Cheerful Characters" released, this feels like a good moment to summarize where we are right now. As we've said before we plan to leave the Early Access in the late summer this year. Compared with other games that went through EA (especially other open world games) this is a rather short time but we feel the pressure is necessary to make sure we get to a fun, stable and bug-free game as soon as possible. The development will continue very actively even after that - with the team constantly growing very likely at even a greater pace. So what is the situation now when we're past 1/4 mark into our EA schedule?

Single-player  When it comes to a single-player mode we've already fixed several hundred bugs, but most importantly we've managed to fix most of the critical ones that caused players to lose their progress or prevented them from playing. There are still some really ugly ones that need to be fixed and some that we've never experienced before still appear from time to time but compared with where we stood few months ago the situation is way better and with every new update more and more additional issues get fixed. There's, however, one group of issues that we've failed to address so far - the game crashes/freezes at some older AMD/ATI video cards. We've been unable to pinpoint the exact cause of this since it's very likely caused by something on Unity engine/ video driver level. We just want to let the affected users know that in no way we've given up on them - actually, we're about to send this to AMD which, hopefully, will be able to provide some help.

Optimizations Then there are the optimizations - something that always takes a long time (at least once you've done everything that can be adjusted rather easily) and even though you still don't see any major improvements, it doesn't mean we're not doing anything about it. As some of you who are familiar with software development probably know, making large-scale internal changes takes a lot of time and effort, but it will bear fruits eventually. The first noticeable thing to come out of this will be the absence of the visible lag caused by autosaving.  
We've come a long way from times when only empty log cabins could be built, haven't we?  (Victorian house courtesy of @Damemarianne)
Multi-player The main reason for us to enter Early Access was to get enough feedback on MP and MP-related issues which is something that can't be done with a small number of players. Even though there's still enough time before we plan to leave EA, it's obvious that we would like to have MP fixed as soon as possible so that instead of fixing critical issues we could start focusing on making MP more fun.  The truth is that there are still  far too many issues present, many of which are very frustrating.  But there's also some good news. With the changes we made in 0.7 we're now getting more detailed info and what's more - the dedicated MP programmer we hired some time ago has familiarized himself with the game code and is already working on some of the solutions. Speaking of issues: I would like to ask you (many of you are already doing for which we are really grateful ) that if you encounter a bug  - especially a serious one - and decide to let us know, be sure to include your log files (if it's in MP ideally both host's and client's one). Some issues take a really long time to get fixed because they happen "randomly" and we have a hard time reproducing those. If you provide us with the log files there's a good chance we can find something that will help us identify the issue - very often the actual fixing takes only a little time.  
Dedicated servers Many of you have been running Ylands DS for some time now so during the next week we would like to start discussing with you what changes or improvements you'd like to see in the future DS. If you would like to test DS and are not part of the testing group, let us know via a private message.
  Gameplaye features As for gameplay features -  the ones we're working on right now are mostly enhancements/overhauls of the existing ones (like the combat or the MP map) or ones that address some of the gameplay shortcoming you have been reporting (like no easy way of storing/moving your creations from Explore game to a new one etc.). Actually, the next Dev Diary will be about our updated plans for the features coming to Ylands in the next few months so be sure to drop in, read it and let us know what you think!   And that's all for today. Have a great time, ylanders, and stay classy!