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Aether Story: Alpha 3 is now Live!

Categories: Aether Story Patch Notes
Written by thephantom on Oct 30 2019

Alpha 3 is now live adding a whole new location to explore, full of quests, plus the existing maps have been updated to include chests, merchants and quest rewards!  This is the biggest update to Aether Story and has been in the making for the past three months.  Countless hours has been put into this release, and we are all very excited to show you it.  If you don't want to read all the new changes, all you need to do is open up the game and it will self patch and start Alpha 3!

The theme of this patch is Items. Let's go over everything that's new and added to the game!

 

Feature: Inventory Menu

 

  • The Inventory Menu lets you manage your inventory of items! You will be able to use potions, destroy unwanted items, and sort and search for anything you may be looking for.
  • Currently weight is not a factor, but be mindful, once you go over your weight limit you will find yourself unable to move.

 

Feature: Journal - Quest Log

  • The Journal Menu will let you view your current goals and objectives in the game.Currently it only has the Quest Log tab available.
  • View your quests and read your character's thoughts of the events unfolding for useful hints and tips. You may also preview what your quest rewards will be once you complete the quest chain.
  • Track which quests to show on the side of your screen.
  • Abandoning a quest will result in it being dropped from your quest log and resetting your progress back to the start.
  • Sharing a quest will automatically start the quest on all party members who are eligible. They will start on the first stage regardless of what stage you are on.

Feature: Quest Overhaul

  • Quests now have notices that will appear in the middle of your screen as you pick up new quests, make progress and when the objectives change. You may turn these notices off in the settings menu.
  • Completing quests now reward you with items, gold and experience.This means, yes you may be able to level up!
  • Some quests give you a choice of a reward. Choose carefully.

 

Feature: Treasure Chests

  • Treasure Chests have been added to the world for you to find and loot.
  • Each chest contains randomly generated loot just for your character. No need to fight other player's for the chest.
  • Once you open a chest you will not be able to open it again on that character.
  • Some chests contain better loot than others, rare chests look differently.Keep your eyes out for them.
  • There are even hidden items scattered around the world… meaning you will have to poke around and look for items that aren't in chests as well!

Feature: Merchants

  • With all the gold and items you will be finding in chests, you will surely need a Merchant.
  • Merchants allow you to buy items, sell unwanted items, and sell all your junk.
  • There are two types of items that you can buy: unlimited items and limited supply items.Limited supply items will have their quantities shared between all players, and the merchant will restock their supply slowly over time.
  • Selling unwanted items will give you gold and reduce your weight.
  • If you have a lot of junk in your inventory you can use the "Sell All Junk" button to quickly get rid of all your useless junk items.
  • If you find a merchant with no items, it just means that another player has cleared them out already. Check back later.
  • More items will be added to the game in future updates, fleshing out all the merchants.

Feature: Settings Menu

  • The Settings Menu allows you to access an array of options, more will be added in future updates.
  • You may now make the game go in full screen mode, adjust the music and sound volume levels, and even customize how status bars appear.
  • Settings will be stored between play sessions, and some settings are character specific, while graphics and audio settings are shared for all using your device.

New Location: Meadows

  • A brand new map has been added to the south of the Outpost full of adventure! Some points of interests that you will surely not want to miss:
    • The Lumber Yard - a corporate Lumber Company that is supplying the lumber for all of Domhan.
    • Honeybrew Meadery - a Dizwin operated meadery located in the southern Meadows known for their world famous Honeybrew!
    • Lanchet Cave - what may appear like a small root cave opens up to a large cavern to explore.
    • The Wolves Den - a dangerous cave full of wolves.
  • The Meadows unlocks three new quest chains with fantastic quest rewards.
  • There are a total of 5 sub-maps to find from the Meadows area: the 4 points of interest listed above, plus the Rookery Entrance.
  • Two new original music tracks composed by Gregg have been added: the cave theme and the Rookery Theme.

 

Miscellaneous

  • Revamped Character Screen: Creating a new character has never looked this good. Be sure to check out the new zooming in and out effects.  The new screen also has class descriptions so you can learn a little bit about the class you are selecting.
  • Typing Messages: NPC's now will talk to you with a typing effect. If you want to skip the delay of having the messages typed out press space to show the full message.  Pressing space a second time will close the message and show the next.
  • Main Menu: Hitting ESC now opens up the Main Menu.The Main Menu allows you access to all the other menus that will be added to the game, plus an overview of your weight and currency.You may also use the Main Menu to exit the game easily. This menu will be fleshed out in future updates.
  • Inn Keepers: The Outpost Inn Keeper now has a room available to those who are wary.  Staying the night costs 10 gold, and will fully restore your health and mana.
  • Player Status Bars: You now have health and mana. Even though there is not combat yet, there are a few ways your health and mana can be depleted, such as spike traps and poisons.
  • Party: You may now invite up to two other players into a party. Being a party currently allows you to share a cross-game party chat using the /party chat command.  Plus, being a party allows you to share the beginning of quests!
    • To access the party feature currently requires you to use chat commands:
      • /invite name
      • /kick name
      • /promote name
      • /leave
  • Rendering: Map Edge Prevention: No longer will you see past the edge of the map, a new level of polish added. You may not even realize the change.
    • As a result of your characters now approaching the edges of the screen certain UI elements will be hidden so you can still see the action around your character.
  • Persistent Position Memory: Your player position will be stored where you were standing. No longer will you appear at the last door or teleport you stepped through. 
  • Notice Alerts: new notice alerts can now appear in the middle of the screen.  These notices do not stop you from moving around or interacting with the world. There are several types added:
    • Telepad Discovered - when you step on a new telepad it now appears as a notice, allowing you to walk past it.
    • Location Title - changing locations will now alert you with the new location's name.
    • Quest Started - Starting quests will show an alert and play an exciting sound effect.
    • Quest Progress - Each time you make progress on a quest an alert will appear.
    • Quest Objective Change - As your objectives change a notice will alert you.
    • Level Up - And when you level a new notice will appear a long side a sound effect!
  • Trickster Class is now unavailable: The Trickster class will be coming in a future update and will no longer be playable in the Alpha.  All Tricksters will now find themselves as Wardens.
  • All Characters have had their quest progress wiped, telepads discovered reset, and their positions sent back to the spawn point.
  • Quest Improvements:
    • More earth worms have been unearthed in the forest, allowing you to find easier.
    • Many quest objectives now appear in the world before you are on the quest. Interacting with them gives you a fun message describing their appearance or hinting at its purpose.
    • Miss Betsy Moo now has a moo sound effect!
    • Miners at the closed down Mine are now waiting around the campfire for the mine to reopen.
  • Other Changes:
    • Pressing F7 now allows you to toggle the FPS/Memory usage screen debugging widget.
    • Pressing F12 now hides all UI elements, great for taking screen shots!

 

Bug Fixes

  • The Chat Input is now more responsive, no longer will the first key stroke be lost.
  • Chat Box has been completely recreated from the ground up, and now has proper alerts and notices appearing on the correct tabs.
  • Many barrels, crates and boxes have had their collisions adjusted and feel less annoying walking around them.
  • Music now properly cross fades when switching between maps.
  • Teleporting now freezes your movement until you are fully rematerialized in the new location.
  • Fixed a nasty bug that resulted in some commands being sent to the server to be lost very rarely.
  • Entities that are outside of the view of the screen are now not rendered or processed.
  • The bug where players appearing 1 or 2 pixels out of alignment has been identified and resolved.
  • The server now uses Mutex to prevent concurrency race conditions that were causing quests to sometimes randomly break.
  • A game crashing memory leak has been identified and now all maps are fully unloaded when leaving them.This does result in a slightly longer load time between maps (around 1 additional second).
  • All fonts in the game have been sharpened and have been improved in quality.
  • All players now show their correct facing when loading into or out of maps.
  • Added back the /roll command allowing you to roll between 1 and 100, only those directly around you will see the system message.
  • Fixed a bug where if the game's context was lost (such as if you change a display setting while the game is open) will no longer cause the game to crash.

 

Patch Notes

  • 0.3.3
    • Removed Poison and Cursed Vials from the Potion Shop Keeper as these did not have a sell price and were not actually purchasable.
    • Reduced the price of Teleport Scrolls, Healing and Mana Potions so you could afford them.
    • Added a new item to the Fishing Shop Merchant... This may go up in price once professions are added, so grab it now.
  • 0.3.4 - 0.3.6
    • Hotkey "J" now opens the Journal Menu directly from the map.
    • Hotkey "I" and "B" now opens the Inventory Menu directly from the map.
    • Attempted to fix the teleport so movement locks while loading. Let me know if it still happens.
    • Attempted to improve chat scroll automatically if scrolled fully down. Let me know if it still occurs.
    • Added a telepad to the Lumber Yard.
    • Attempted to fix the quest tracking bugs: where quests would not track past the first 5 quests. Let me know if it is still happening.
    • Some chests within the game were using the wrong loot table, now some chests in the Outpost and Forest have even better loot than intended.  As a result junk has been removed from "rare" quality chests.
    • Fixed Minimap masking issue where rooms would not show the correct alpha.
    • A mistake was mentioned in the original ALPHA 3 patch notes, all Tricksters were changed to Wardens, not Sages.

Download and Play now!

What are you waiting for? Head on over to the account creation page, create an account or login, and head to the game downloads!  You may also find the game for download in our Discord. !  Alpha 3 is now available to play. That's right, right now! And if you already have the game downloaded, all you need to do is open it, and it will self patch to Alpha 3!

Be sure to leave us suggestions and report bugs on our community forums or Discord.  This release has so much content that we surely missed some bugs!

And don't forget you can watch the development of the Alpha 4 live on the Phanxgames Twitch Dev Stream! We stream every step of development including pixel art, programming, and sometimes even level design!

 

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