Official Update Thread
02-03-2019, 09:18 PM
This Week in Atlas Development: 2/3/2019
Welcome to the first post on our new and improved Atlas update thread! Every Sunday, we’ll be posting a new update to let you know what the dev team has been working on the past week. Since this is our first post since the beginning of the dev period though, we figured we’d start out by filling you in on some of the things we’ve accomplished since October:
Agriculture
For those of you who’ve played on the Survival server, you’ve likely seen Agriculture in action. We’ll be adding dozens of new crops to our roster which will not only be used in new Brewery and Cooking recipes, but will sell to vendors in NPC towns across Atlas! Everything from cotton and tobacco to berries and different kinds of tree fruits.
New (and improved) NPC Towns
We’ve added 3 new NPC Towns to the world of Atlas: the Valderkal stronghold of Teronkal, the tribal settlement of Ayeli-Odalvi, and the reclaimed Shen capital of Shen Zhengyi. Redspire is also now an official NPC Town, complete with merchants and fast travel. In addition, nearly all the existing NPC Towns you remember have gotten a facelift - most notably, the 3 NPC “capitals” that have received major expansions - Telaria, Eastwind, and Port Qi’Shen.
New Main Story Questlines
As we enter Atlas’ first major story chapter, War of Athera, the major world civilizations are already entrenched in a 3-way war. Players will get to choose 1 of the NPC factions and embark on a unique story questline for them that advances the story of the war. You’ll also have the option to reset your alliance (for a price), and experience all 3 sides of the main story. Every few months, we’ll be releasing new chapters to the 3 War of Athera questlines, as the true consequences of the war begin to have real changes on the world!
New Dungeons
So far, we’ve finished adding 2 new dungeons to Atlas - the Shen Catacombs in Port Qi’Shen, and the Fall of Devshire in the Wraithhold. We can’t share too much about them without spoiling the surprise, but we will say that they’re both significantly more difficult than the 2 existing dungeons - so gear up, and prepare for some exciting new challenges!
Leaderboards
With so many different things to do on Atlas, we finally have a way for players to track worldwide scores! With Leaderboards for everything from skills to combat to Nation achievements, there are now more ways to compete than ever - and you’ll be able to visit the website and see Atlas’ top scorers in every category.
Town Leveling
By doing everyday tasks in (or near) your town borders, you will now gain Town Experience, and ultimately level up your towns! There are dozens of categories for town leveling, including mining, building, slaying, fishing, and cooking. Leveling up your towns will unlock unique perks such as passive bonuses, Landmarks, and Citizens. The leveling system itself is complete - the perks are being fine-tuned and tested, and should be ready very soon!
Tomes rework
We’ve updated how 2 of our donator items work: Tomes of Wisdom, which allow you to add custom lore to an item, and Tomes of Knowledge, which allow you to add stat tracking. Both now have their own custom, easy-to-use GUI for players to claim and use them!
Cartography update
Added a highly-requested quality-of-life update: most quests will now automatically add the coordinates of the objective as a Custom Waypoint on your Cartographer’s Compass!
New MythicMobs & World Bosses
We’ve more than doubled our existing pool of custom monsters that spawn throughout Atlas, which has more than doubled the Mythic Loot types that can be gathered and sold! There are also a couple new rare World Bosses that players may stumble upon deep in the wilds...
Fast Travel updates
Some more highly-requested QoL updates: the fast travel system not only utilizes the Shops GUI now (so no more misclicking destinations in chat), but has also been made more robust and interconnected. There are now 75 different fast travel routes across Atlas!
We’ve finished quite a few other things since October, but those are the major highlights for now. As for what’s been in the works this past week:
New Map
As stated in our community update post, we’re working on a custom plugin to help us generate our hand-built ocean elements onto the new map (in the absence of 1.13 WorldPainter.) The build team has been busy adding to our pool of assets, while the new map gets prepped for cave and ocean generation.
World Regeneration
The massive world regen system is nearly finished, but this week has taken a backseat to the more-pressing map generation project. Obviously once we have our new map, we’ll be able to truly start testing this system in its entirety.
Builds
Lots of fine-tuning and detailing to our NPC towns and quest builds (as well as a couple full remodels!)
Luxury Items
You probably saw the screenshot in Discord, but we’ve been testing our new Luxury Items this week - Fine Art, Luxury Maps, and Furniture. We’ve added the Shops and Nations integration these have needed to work, and now just need to finalize some mechanical issues to get these fully ready.
Mob & Dungeon Balancing
We’ve spent a lot of time dying to our own dungeons and monster creations - for science! We want these new features to be challenging without being impossible or (too) annoying, which is obviously a fine line to walk. So the number-crunching and experimenting continues!
Magic rework
The Magic system has gone through several iterations since October, but we’ve finally found a solution we think will work best. We want to do a bit more testing on some of our new spells before going really in-depth with the new details - but one major new feature we think you’ll be excited for is the addition of General Spells, which can be cast by any magic-user, regardless of their chosen class.
Nations & Sieges system balancing
Lots of discussion on the fine points of the Nation and Siege systems, as we begin introducing the new mechanics of Town Leveling and the Siege Exemption Limit. More details on those fine points to come, once we’ve had a chance to test them further ourselves.
Cooking
Our new custom skill, Cooking, has recently finished development and begun testing! Combined with Agriculture, we’re excited to see players discover all the new foods these will bring to Atlas.
And that was this past week in Atlas! Stay tuned every Sunday for new update posts on our development progress, as well as additional teasers and sneak-peeks as we approach launch!