6:06pm EST - We just saw a couple commits from Garry come out. Looks like the pie menu is replacing the html context menu and the construction2 branch has merged with the pie menu branch. Looks like these two things will be launching together at some point in the near future. 

1:21pm EST - Some very exciting news from Facepunch today... We have our grief stop gap: The Tool Cupboard. This little guy will stop people other than you and your friends from building within a 50 meter radius. More on that below. First, the state of the game.

State of the game

Since Friday, the game has been very unstable. Servers are experiencing crashes every 12 to 24 hours (sometimes more). These crashes come in the form of mass disconnections. When people try to rejoin they have trouble spawning / waking up and continue getting kicked. The only solution I've found for this is manually restarting the server.

Now, crashes I can deal with; restarting the server is easy and people rejoin quick. The big issue here is locks stop working when the server restarts (read more on the status of this bug here). This results in people being locked in or out of their house. I've tried letting this ride out, however, dealing with broken locks causes many people more frustration than a wipe. On top of that, crashes appear to be more frequent after loading a save. Given this, until this lock bug is resolved, I will be wiping the map when a crash / restart happens.

Listen, I know losing your progress fucking sucks. That being said, my priority is quality of gameplay and I’m of the opinion this is the most workable solution until this lock bug is resolved.

If starting over daily is going to make you insane, I recommend not playing the game right now. If you'd rather deal with being locked in your house, you'll probably want to play on a different server for the time being.

Tool Cupboard

Ok, that frustrating shit aside, holy crap am I excited today! A couple hours ago, Garry added the Tool Cupboard. Here is the description from the admin site:

Placing and authorising with the cupboard will make it so only you can build in a 50 meter radius of it.  If you want your friends to build, they'll need to auth too. You should protect this.

Shortly after this commit, a reddit post quickly popped up mentioning the impact this has on the building realism. The top comment being:

Garry does not want players to "own" anything. I doubt this will happen.

To that, Garry replied:

Players don't really own this though. You can still break into someone's house and destroy or clear their tool cupboard so you're the only person allowed to build.

It's true that I don't like these systems, and I want to avoid them wherever we can. In this case it's to prevent a very specific thing, players building ladders/stairs on your house to gain access. It's a problem I'm hoping we'll solve some other way further down the line that might make this system redundant.

But in the meantime this serves to make the game playable, and lets us add building components like ladders without worrying that they'll be easily exploited.

I couldn't agree more. Sacrificing some realism to make the game more playable is totally worth it in this case. This is an awesome temporary solution to the griefing issues, thank you Garry!

Now, a couple details about my favorite new furniture:

Cost
1000 wood

Time to craft
120 seconds

Availability
Always craftable

More on the admin page

Release note: This was added to the contruction2 branch which is the new iteration of the building system. Therefore, don't expect to see this live in servers until the big building update drops. As I said yesterday, this is a huge change in functionality and may take some time to be production ready. 

11/18 Update: The new radius appears to be 30 meters.

Pie menu

Garry is also playing around with a new menu idea. A pie menu is more effective than listing items in a vertical fashion because it allows the use to select the option they want with less mouse movement. Also, I don't know about you, but spatially speaking, it is easier for my brain to remember placement in a circle than it is on an ordered list. I look forward to seeing how this will be implemented.

Fishing rod

Goose is still moving along on the fishing aspect of the game. Today he is working on the fishing rod models and animations. He already has the model in and the idle, holster and deploy animations complete. Fishing may be in sooner than we expect and I can't fucking wait!

Oh, and the fish view model was posted on trello yesterday. Here's a video.

Tip of the day: Bag outside house

Although griefing will soon be a thing of the past, it is still here. When griefing is happening, often times people get locked in their house and have no way to get out because building is faster than demolition. Here’s an idea: Put a bag somewhere hidden outside your base. Also, drop a stone spear near it. This way, if someone is griefing your base, you can kill yourself, spawn in the outside bag, sneak up and spear the fucker through the back of the head.

Correction on yesterday’s tip:

Yesterday I mentioned eating stacks of meat has the same benefit as one piece. This is great and all, but meat doesn't stack under normal conditions. The only time it does is if you spawn it through the admin inventory.give command. I was spawning meat to test out the hunger / thirst benefits for each type when I came up with this tip. This was a goof on my part, disregard that tip!