Now with boats, crossing that water between you and glory has never been easier! Boats are persistant and can be picked up for ease of use, and are currently the fastest and safest way to travel. We certainly plan to add storage and upgrades and much more to boats over time, and with the new small boat in and working all of that will be much easier when the time comes.
Caves, both cold and hot are also new and very useful. Within caves is the only place to find gem veins making gem hunting now possible in place of gem grinding. Lava caves are the first of several "rare" caves planned, showing up roughly once every ten caves. In almost all cases you will need to build a bridge to make it to the other side of a lava cave should you wish to continue diving deeper.

Caves actually make use of a new system that completely side-steps the above ground terrain generation. Now that this alternative system is in and working, it will be much easier to create side "dimensions" or "pockets" for increasingly varied content beyond just more and more biomes.
Harvesting tools and resource nodes have also had their math reworked into a linear system that is now much more balanced across all levels. For high level players still powering through resources with low level tools, this may come as a surprise. With the new harvesting tool enchants however, it's still very easy to get your harvesting strength well above the toughness rating of equal level resources.
Next up on the todo list:
Farming, fishing, and a number of other water related things.
I can't thank everyone enough for their continued support here on Patreon. I've grown in leaps and bounds as a developer over these past six months. Hopefully sooner than later we'll be able to bring on other developers to help improve Solace Crafting faster than is possible as a solo project. The only barrier between here and there is funding, and Patreon very much makes a difference towards that goal.
Lot's more to come!
The cleaned up list of updates since version 0.2.2 are as follows:
Boats
- Added small boat as a known woodworking facility recipe
- Boats can be picked up using the shift+interact radial menu
Caves
- Added cave entrances in place of half of the towers
- Increased cave resources node rarity chances:
Uncommon + 5% (base 5% at T1+)
Rare + 4% (base 1% at T3+)
Elite + 1% (base 0.25% at T4+)
Legendary + 0.4% (base 0.1% at T6+)
- Added ruby, amethyst, emerald, citrine, sapphire, topaz, and diamond gem veins to caves with 5-10 gems each
- Gem veins have a natural toughness of +2 with an increased +2 per rarity
- Gem veins are twice as likely to be a higher rarity
- Added uncommon (1 in 10) lava caves that need to be built across to continue diving deeper
- Lava IS lethal. Inventory items will be dropped on top of lava to make sure they are recoverable.
Harvesting
- Adjusted tool rarity damage bonus from 2.5 to 5 per rarity
- Adjusted harvesting passive strength skills from 1 strength per level to 0.2 per level
- Adjusted harvesting strong skills from 4 + 1.5 strength per level to 4 + 0.5 per level
- Adjusted resource toughness from 15 per tier to 11
- Reworked tool damage and harvestable resources toughness
- Resource toughness now displayed on mouse over
- Damage done to resources now shown using a yellow damage display
- Added 5 harvesting strength enchants
- Harvesting enchants can only be placed on harvesting tools
- Non-harvesting enchants can no longer be placed on harvesting tools
- Harvesting experience is now 1 per harvest (at teir) not 1/10th
- Harvested resources required to level reduced from 250 to 100
- First five harvesting level requirements reduced to 10, 20, 40, 60, and 80
- Harvesting tools now use harvesting levels to check if you can equip them instead of adventuring level
Solaces
- Solaces on the solace travel list can now be assign a color for sorting purposes: black<white<green<cyan<magenta<red
- The solace travel list can now be sorted by number (creation order), color, name, or distance from start, and reverse
- Solace travel listings will now show level, population, and y position
- Underground solaces will show cave number in place of y position
General
- Upgraded engine to Unity 2018.2.2
- The map will now automatically unlock all 8 sections adjacent and diagonal from the currently occupied section. Note that this requires the section be generated at least once meaning near terrain drawing distance will become a limiting factor in map section unlock distance.
- Wall torches and ground torches are now stackable
- Facilities (which includes torches) can now be placed from the hotbars
- Wall torch and ground torch light range upped from 6m to 15m, intensity reduced from 1.5 to 1.2
- Player torch (if equipped) light range upped from 10m to 25m, intensity reduce from 1 to 0.8
- Fixed hot bar keybindings for 11-40 not working
- Improved player collision detection to help prevent falling through cave corners
- Reduced the number wandering Earth Elementals by roughly half
- Control-shift now increases/decreases crafting level and tier by 100
- Turned off the lasting visual effect of the Protect spells
- Hold shift to rotate facilities 3 times faster during placement
- Improved tool descriptions to point out where they go
- Added a helper to point out rotation capabilities during boat/facility/structure placement
- Added a helper to point out keybindings during building construction
- Added warnings to point out when a slot type or a recipe needs to be selected during construction
Fixes
- Fixed solace storage not accepting resources of tiers above 999
- Fixed not being able to construct resource scanners past tier 999
- Fixed tool strength and speed not showing up in item and recipe descriptions
- Fixed uncommon set enchant icons
- Fixed some skills not checking for enough energy/mana
- Fixed Opportune Strike not dealing double damage on backstabs
- Fixed energy and mana bars not updating immediately after skill use
- Destroying an item in a trashbin while selected will now reset the item details to prevent dropping null items
- Disabled draw/sheath weapon and weapon swap during boat/facility/structure/building placement
v 0.3 specific patch notes from the latest beta build:
- Disabled underground towns until properly implemented
- Disabled terraforming until improved
- Fixed abnormal health bar size bugs on enemies
- Fixed shift-interact not working on doors
- Improved corruption detection and handling of map files