[2019] Captain's Log 20: Lunar New Year! 🐷

Ahoy Pathfinders!

The Year of the Pig represents hard work, discipline and overall putting one's nose to the grindstone. It also signifies a focus on generosity and goodwill. We wish all of you a fortunate and rewarding Year of the Pig!

happy year of the pig!

To celebrate, you can now save 17% off ATLAS as part of Steam Lunar New Year Sale! The game will be on offer until February 11th, 2019.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/834910/ATLAS/

weekly patch roundup!

Complete Patch Notes

In our last Captain’s Log, we spoke about some upcoming Design Changes for the game. That’s still a focus for our team and we’ll start to see those changes as we get into March and the months beyond. If you didn’t get a chance to read about, you can do so here:

In the meantime, the team are preparing on getting the major February content patch out. In addition to new content and features, we’ve still been iterating heavily on the live version of ATLAS, releasing two major versions and multiple minor version updates in the past week. Our time was split between various different areas, including many critical bugs and exploit fixes, as well as some major balance changes for our musical instruments, the Kraken, and some more general/misc notes.

released patch notes

up to v18.46

Server Performance
- Eliminated Cannon Animations playing entirely on the server for performance savings
- Multiple serious performance optimisations for companies on servers
- Linux WaveWorks optimisations (Linux Servers will run much better)
- Server optimisation for structures on boats

General Bug & Exploit Fixes
- Fixed an exploit which allowed players to stall out servers
- Added extra protection to inventories to fix and prevent players from bypassing pin codes
- Fixed a case which allowed players to enter the bottom of ships
- Fixed a case which allowed players to clip and stick themselves inside the boat's hull
- Protected against players accessing inventories from outside ships via clipping into boats
- Fixed multiple cases where players would fall through structures upon server restart, login, transition, etc.
- Fixed a crash which would occur when transitioning with the sextant buff
- Fixed Swivel Cannons from firing through walls
- Swapped Mythical and Legendary in the descriptions for tools skills tier 2 and 3, as they were previously incorrect.
- Fixed a bug where beds that were placed beyond the default accommodation limit were destroyed on server load
- Turrets and Cannons will no longer fire underwater and can no longer be mounted underwater
- Fixed a bug allowing players to reset all glider cooldowns by moving the glider between hotbar slots
- Increased the required minimum diving velocity before going into the glide-fall state to reduce gaining/maintaining height
- Ghost Ship has been fixed and will now take damage.
- Fixed a case where players/boats would get stuck playing transition ping-pong between two servers, frequently happened with large boats.
- Fixed multiple server crashes
- Fixed a server startup crash that would effect modded servers
- Fixed a bug which prevented players from being able to demolish structures
- Fixed an exploit related to demolishing structures on Lawless Servers
- Fixed Barshot so that it now targets sails and acts a slow through to incapacitating a ship's movement as intended.
- Fixed a bug which would cause the activity timer on PvE claim flags to tick into the negatives. Also updated so the timer now displays days, hours, minutes, and seconds.
- Fixed an incorrect fibre reference in crafting barshot
- Fixed a bug where Dead Bodies wouldn't be replicated on servers with replication turned off (Freeports and all PVE)
- Fixed a bug where picking up a higher quality structure within the pick up timeframe would result in the common structure, rather than the specific higher quality itself

Balance
- Explosive Barrels can no longer be placed on enemy ships. This is a temporary measure due to undesired gameplay. We are going to be redesigning the barrels from a technical/gameplay point of view to give them more use in the future.
- Whale Counts have been boosted on the Tundra and reduced the spawn interval between whales by 50%
- Wild Dragon damage has been reduced by 30%
- Golden Age Spawns have had their spawn interval increased from 30 seconds to 5 minutes and increased distance from players from 7700 to 9000
- The gold cost has been increased on upgrading higher quality items and structures
- Cooking Recipes spoil time has been increased
- Tamed Dragon lifespan reduced to 3 hours
- Tamed Dragon damage reduced by 33%
- Tamed Dragon health reduced by 33%

Quality of Life
- Allow players to pick-up structures if you're on the same team even if you do not have demolish rights
- Global Number of Ships is now displayed in the player's ATLAS Map UI. We'll be making this more visible on the UI in a future update. It will not display if you do not have any ships and do not belong to a company.
- Added a Crew name filter for company UI
- Ghost ship will now appear every night rather than every 3 nights
- Option to hide territory broadcast messages
- Territory broadcast message boxes now scale according to the character size of the message
- Gunport camera socket has been lowered and moved forward for better viewing when shooting from gunports
- PvE players will now be able to see their claim flag's inactivity timer on the flag itself
- Attacking Player no longer needs to be in range for declaiming progress
- Glider now has a required dive duration rather than a forced dive cooldown (achieves the same nerf effect on glider spam and feels better to use)
- Pinging on an enemy claim flag should show all contesting NPC crew, in addition to players.
- PvE servers will now automatically kill any character that has not been logged in for 4 weeks. Official Network only.
- PvE servers can now use the homeserver option which disables replication on sleeping/logged off bodies. (Non Default but enabled on Official Network).
- PvE claim flags now only allow logged in players to contest the claim

Game.ini:
[/script/shootergame.shootergamemode]
bHomeServerDontReplicateLoggedOutPlayers=1
(enables logged off/sleeping players from replicating on home servers)
bPvEDontReplicateLoggedOutPlayers=1
(enables non-replicating logged off/sleeping players on all PvE servers)

Musical Instruments
- Various buffs/changes made to musical songs played on the Accordion and War Drum.
- Tweaked war drum battle songs to eliminate a big gap in the note sheet preview (just the preview, not the actual song)
- Fixed a bug causing the buff timer shown on the music UI during a looping song that gives a perpetual buff to become off by 1 second from the actual buff timer.
- Fixed a bug causing notes to incorrectly fail when activated near the edges of song loops
- Fixed a bug where client fps stutters could cause notes to fail that should have been auto-played
- Fixed server issue that could disconnect clients if they had a lot of map entities.

Kraken Changes
- Fixed a bug with the Kraken which would have inflicted a high amount of unintended damage
- The Kraken's Barrier will no longer damage ships on collision
- Kraken will no longer give impulses to players for the tentacle slams or tentacle impacts
- Impacts with the Kraken bodyparts will no longer cause ship damage
- Ship of the Damned Kraken minions are now damageable in PvE
- Reduced the damage of the Kraken homing projectiles by 50%
- Increased the damage taken by the Kraken tentacles by 50%

Misc
- Cleaned up an error message when attempting to craft a boat when you were at the maximum global limit
- Added a 12-second delay between playing status voice clips (such as injured or starvation)
- Reduced tutorial background opacity
- Made it so the text wasn't cut off for long paragraphs in the tutorial
- Mod Map Extensions now work (and will not require recooking the mod)
- PvE Claim Flag inactivity timer has been adjusted so that it now scales dynamically. A company with a small number of flags will be declaimable after 3 weeks of inactivity, whereas a company with a large number of claim flags would be declaimable after 3 days of inactivity.
- Top Companies will have their names displayed on the left-hand side of the map and are now granted special nameplates and figureheads
- Improved Ship position on the minimap so that it updates more smoothly
- Company Flags will now update properly onto www.playatlas.com
- Climbing on other boat's ladders now disabled in PvE if the ship is anchored
- Added Effect descriptions to Music and Cooking Recipes

This is just the tip of the iceberg for our upcoming plans and over time we’ll be sharing more and working closely with you to ensure that ATLAS gets one step closer to becoming one of the most ambitious persistent online worlds of all time and fulfilling its destiny as the ultimate fantasy pirate adventure!

Dynamic atlas maps round-up

The ATLAS Dynamic Maps is a system that monitors live in-game territory ownership and indicates which companies dominate over the lands.

Each week with our Captain’s Log, we’ll be including an image to monitor the progress of the maps, taking note of any exits or new arrivals and any drastic changes in the overall claim.

Those who will come to dominate the ATLAS may very well become clear in the days and weeks ahead, though maintaining a large Empire will likely come with its own longer-term challenges…

The companies that have occupied islands for a certain period of time will soon gain the automatic privilege to name them on the in-game and web maps, as it is their land!

Remember you can don your Company’s company flag by stylizing it in the game with a paintbrush! Upload your own images or design it how you like, with the top company flags always being visible on https://map.playatlas.com/

[EU PVP] The Whale's Wrath

Held: French & Ships, The French Monkeys, IVANARMY, ENSLAVED, Frogues Orientales, and Eternal Diamond

Arrivals: OOOOOOOOOF, CHZ!!**, Dark Project Armada, CHEPO

Departures: Bad Company, ETERNIA, Goulou Goulou, Les Spectres, Future

[NA PVP] The Kraken's Maw

Held: Dynasty, High Seas Booty Bandits, TPG, CSTG, OWO, No No No, and The Federation

Arrivals: Destiny, BLDX, Team Casualty

Departures: Barry Sails, The Cartel, Black Butterfiy ?BB???

And whilst there isn’t active PvP on PVE servers, we’d like to recognize the following Companies for their claims!

[EU PVE] The Siren's Call

Held: Compagnie des Indes, Rum ueber Bord, Phantasia, Future Company (HUN), SouL SanD, Dos Bros$, SwiftS.RU, and Black Hand

Arrivals: mochi and Woelfe des Rudels

Departures: Fenrirs Dogs and JomsViking

[NA PVE] The Hydra's Den

Held: Scales & Sails, The Exiles, Atlas Shrugged, East India Trading Co, Paragon, Lotus, Darksea Dawgs, Without Divide and Sons of Orion

Arrivals: Milky Armada

Departures: Narcos

Show 'n Tell Showcase #3

We’re still collecting entries for the Show ‘n Tell! So you have a little longer to astound us with your creations, be they your fleets, building designs, imaginative tatts, entertaining videos, original fanart or scenic screenshots. Don’t be shy and head to the submission thread for a chance to win some booty in the form of a cash prize!

Alrighty, that ’s it for this log! Thank you so much for becoming a part of our crew and we can't wait to show all you scallywags, landlubbers, captains, and seadogs what lies ahead!

Happy Sailing,

Grapeshot Games

For the latest dispatch on #playATLAS keep yer one good eye trained on this here information

Natter n' chatter on Discord: https://discord.gg/playatlas Navigate ye olde Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/playatlas Hear ye, hear ye on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sailtheatlas Watch us scallywags on Twitch: http://twitch.tv/sailtheatlas Plus ye can band with us Pirates on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/playatlasgame

Ahoy Pathfinders!

The Year of the Pig represents hard work, discipline and overall putting one's nose to the grindstone. It also signifies a focus on generosity and goodwill. We wish all of you a fortunate and rewarding Year of the Pig!

happy year of the pig!

To celebrate, you can now save 17% off ATLAS as part of Steam Lunar New Year Sale! The game will be on offer until February 11th, 2019.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/834910/ATLAS/

weekly patch roundup!

Complete Patch Notes

In our last Captain’s Log, we spoke about some upcoming Design Changes for the game. That’s still a focus for our team and we’ll start to see those changes as we get into March and the months beyond. If you didn’t get a chance to read about, you can do so here:

In the meantime, the team are preparing on getting the major February content patch out. In addition to new content and features, we’ve still been iterating heavily on the live version of ATLAS, releasing two major versions and multiple minor version updates in the past week. Our time was split between various different areas, including many critical bugs and exploit fixes, as well as some major balance changes for our musical instruments, the Kraken, and some more general/misc notes.

released patch notes

up to v18.46

Server Performance
- Eliminated Cannon Animations playing entirely on the server for performance savings
- Multiple serious performance optimisations for companies on servers
- Linux WaveWorks optimisations (Linux Servers will run much better)
- Server optimisation for structures on boats

General Bug & Exploit Fixes
- Fixed an exploit which allowed players to stall out servers
- Added extra protection to inventories to fix and prevent players from bypassing pin codes
- Fixed a case which allowed players to enter the bottom of ships
- Fixed a case which allowed players to clip and stick themselves inside the boat's hull
- Protected against players accessing inventories from outside ships via clipping into boats
- Fixed multiple cases where players would fall through structures upon server restart, login, transition, etc.
- Fixed a crash which would occur when transitioning with the sextant buff
- Fixed Swivel Cannons from firing through walls
- Swapped Mythical and Legendary in the descriptions for tools skills tier 2 and 3, as they were previously incorrect.
- Fixed a bug where beds that were placed beyond the default accommodation limit were destroyed on server load
- Turrets and Cannons will no longer fire underwater and can no longer be mounted underwater
- Fixed a bug allowing players to reset all glider cooldowns by moving the glider between hotbar slots
- Increased the required minimum diving velocity before going into the glide-fall state to reduce gaining/maintaining height
- Ghost Ship has been fixed and will now take damage.
- Fixed a case where players/boats would get stuck playing transition ping-pong between two servers, frequently happened with large boats.
- Fixed multiple server crashes
- Fixed a server startup crash that would effect modded servers
- Fixed a bug which prevented players from being able to demolish structures
- Fixed an exploit related to demolishing structures on Lawless Servers
- Fixed Barshot so that it now targets sails and acts a slow through to incapacitating a ship's movement as intended.
- Fixed a bug which would cause the activity timer on PvE claim flags to tick into the negatives. Also updated so the timer now displays days, hours, minutes, and seconds.
- Fixed an incorrect fibre reference in crafting barshot
- Fixed a bug where Dead Bodies wouldn't be replicated on servers with replication turned off (Freeports and all PVE)
- Fixed a bug where picking up a higher quality structure within the pick up timeframe would result in the common structure, rather than the specific higher quality itself

Balance
- Explosive Barrels can no longer be placed on enemy ships. This is a temporary measure due to undesired gameplay. We are going to be redesigning the barrels from a technical/gameplay point of view to give them more use in the future.
- Whale Counts have been boosted on the Tundra and reduced the spawn interval between whales by 50%
- Wild Dragon damage has been reduced by 30%
- Golden Age Spawns have had their spawn interval increased from 30 seconds to 5 minutes and increased distance from players from 7700 to 9000
- The gold cost has been increased on upgrading higher quality items and structures
- Cooking Recipes spoil time has been increased
- Tamed Dragon lifespan reduced to 3 hours
- Tamed Dragon damage reduced by 33%
- Tamed Dragon health reduced by 33%

Quality of Life
- Allow players to pick-up structures if you're on the same team even if you do not have demolish rights
- Global Number of Ships is now displayed in the player's ATLAS Map UI. We'll be making this more visible on the UI in a future update. It will not display if you do not have any ships and do not belong to a company.
- Added a Crew name filter for company UI
- Ghost ship will now appear every night rather than every 3 nights
- Option to hide territory broadcast messages
- Territory broadcast message boxes now scale according to the character size of the message
- Gunport camera socket has been lowered and moved forward for better viewing when shooting from gunports
- PvE players will now be able to see their claim flag's inactivity timer on the flag itself
- Attacking Player no longer needs to be in range for declaiming progress
- Glider now has a required dive duration rather than a forced dive cooldown (achieves the same nerf effect on glider spam and feels better to use)
- Pinging on an enemy claim flag should show all contesting NPC crew, in addition to players.
- PvE servers will now automatically kill any character that has not been logged in for 4 weeks. Official Network only.
- PvE servers can now use the homeserver option which disables replication on sleeping/logged off bodies. (Non Default but enabled on Official Network).
- PvE claim flags now only allow logged in players to contest the claim

Game.ini:
[/script/shootergame.shootergamemode]
bHomeServerDontReplicateLoggedOutPlayers=1
(enables logged off/sleeping players from replicating on home servers)
bPvEDontReplicateLoggedOutPlayers=1
(enables non-replicating logged off/sleeping players on all PvE servers)

Musical Instruments
- Various buffs/changes made to musical songs played on the Accordion and War Drum.
- Tweaked war drum battle songs to eliminate a big gap in the note sheet preview (just the preview, not the actual song)
- Fixed a bug causing the buff timer shown on the music UI during a looping song that gives a perpetual buff to become off by 1 second from the actual buff timer.
- Fixed a bug causing notes to incorrectly fail when activated near the edges of song loops
- Fixed a bug where client fps stutters could cause notes to fail that should have been auto-played
- Fixed server issue that could disconnect clients if they had a lot of map entities.

Kraken Changes
- Fixed a bug with the Kraken which would have inflicted a high amount of unintended damage
- The Kraken's Barrier will no longer damage ships on collision
- Kraken will no longer give impulses to players for the tentacle slams or tentacle impacts
- Impacts with the Kraken bodyparts will no longer cause ship damage
- Ship of the Damned Kraken minions are now damageable in PvE
- Reduced the damage of the Kraken homing projectiles by 50%
- Increased the damage taken by the Kraken tentacles by 50%

Misc
- Cleaned up an error message when attempting to craft a boat when you were at the maximum global limit
- Added a 12-second delay between playing status voice clips (such as injured or starvation)
- Reduced tutorial background opacity
- Made it so the text wasn't cut off for long paragraphs in the tutorial
- Mod Map Extensions now work (and will not require recooking the mod)
- PvE Claim Flag inactivity timer has been adjusted so that it now scales dynamically. A company with a small number of flags will be declaimable after 3 weeks of inactivity, whereas a company with a large number of claim flags would be declaimable after 3 days of inactivity.
- Top Companies will have their names displayed on the left-hand side of the map and are now granted special nameplates and figureheads
- Improved Ship position on the minimap so that it updates more smoothly
- Company Flags will now update properly onto www.playatlas.com
- Climbing on other boat's ladders now disabled in PvE if the ship is anchored
- Added Effect descriptions to Music and Cooking Recipes

This is just the tip of the iceberg for our upcoming plans and over time we’ll be sharing more and working closely with you to ensure that ATLAS gets one step closer to becoming one of the most ambitious persistent online worlds of all time and fulfilling its destiny as the ultimate fantasy pirate adventure!

Dynamic atlas maps round-up

The ATLAS Dynamic Maps is a system that monitors live in-game territory ownership and indicates which companies dominate over the lands.

Each week with our Captain’s Log, we’ll be including an image to monitor the progress of the maps, taking note of any exits or new arrivals and any drastic changes in the overall claim.

Those who will come to dominate the ATLAS may very well become clear in the days and weeks ahead, though maintaining a large Empire will likely come with its own longer-term challenges…

The companies that have occupied islands for a certain period of time will soon gain the automatic privilege to name them on the in-game and web maps, as it is their land!

Remember you can don your Company’s company flag by stylizing it in the game with a paintbrush! Upload your own images or design it how you like, with the top company flags always being visible on https://map.playatlas.com/

[EU PVP] The Whale's Wrath

Held: French & Ships, The French Monkeys, IVANARMY, ENSLAVED, Frogues Orientales, and Eternal Diamond

Arrivals: OOOOOOOOOF, CHZ!!**, Dark Project Armada, CHEPO

Departures: Bad Company, ETERNIA, Goulou Goulou, Les Spectres, Future

[NA PVP] The Kraken's Maw

Held: Dynasty, High Seas Booty Bandits, TPG, CSTG, OWO, No No No, and The Federation

Arrivals: Destiny, BLDX, Team Casualty

Departures: Barry Sails, The Cartel, Black Butterfiy ?BB???

And whilst there isn’t active PvP on PVE servers, we’d like to recognize the following Companies for their claims!

[EU PVE] The Siren's Call

Held: Compagnie des Indes, Rum ueber Bord, Phantasia, Future Company (HUN), SouL SanD, Dos Bros$, SwiftS.RU, and Black Hand

Arrivals: mochi and Woelfe des Rudels

Departures: Fenrirs Dogs and JomsViking

[NA PVE] The Hydra's Den

Held: Scales & Sails, The Exiles, Atlas Shrugged, East India Trading Co, Paragon, Lotus, Darksea Dawgs, Without Divide and Sons of Orion

Arrivals: Milky Armada

Departures: Narcos

Show 'n Tell Showcase #3

We’re still collecting entries for the Show ‘n Tell! So you have a little longer to astound us with your creations, be they your fleets, building designs, imaginative tatts, entertaining videos, original fanart or scenic screenshots. Don’t be shy and head to the submission thread for a chance to win some booty in the form of a cash prize!

Alrighty, that ’s it for this log! Thank you so much for becoming a part of our crew and we can't wait to show all you scallywags, landlubbers, captains, and seadogs what lies ahead!

Happy Sailing,

Grapeshot Games

For the latest dispatch on #playATLAS keep yer one good eye trained on this here information

Natter n' chatter on Discord: https://discord.gg/playatlas Navigate ye olde Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/playatlas Hear ye, hear ye on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sailtheatlas Watch us scallywags on Twitch: http://twitch.tv/sailtheatlas Plus ye can band with us Pirates on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/playatlasgame

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