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Greetings friends!

It's taken a while longer to get the new update out than I anticipated. I had to move away from the character controller to refocus the efforts towards finishing up the biome updates and AI fixes for this patch. The current character controller, which is modified and tweaked to work in this particular environment/setting, is highly integrated into many aspects of the game on the back end. Combine this with Networking and it's a challenge that's been above my personal scope(we used to have a network guy that worked on all online aspects of the game). I'm still trying to sort it.

As many of our early supporters know, all the negative reviews early on in the development of the game (after Steam killed positive reviews developers earned from our supporters during their crowd funding and pre-order phases) our company was put into a situation where there would be no coming back. It's a downhill domino effect that for various reasons the bad reviews keep outweighing the good(which are minimal). I don't need to get into the validity of said reviews - its neither here nor there because I and the rest of the crew ceased to care about said opinions long ago(for again, various reasons not worth getting into here). We made mistakes early on and tried like mad to fix and improve those things at the fastest pace that we were able to(we were doing a patch every 2 weeks then). Once the game became a labor of love and there was no return because of the reviews preventing sales, in fact it costs us money to work on this project, we shut the negativity out(reviews and forums) and just focused on putting out patches as we can. The team has been down to 1, me, for a long time now and I also have to work to feed my family, pay bills, etc.. That said, I still love to work on game development as a hobby and will continue to put out patches every few months for Astral Terra. We have a new Cannabis business and we hope to use some of the money we make there to fund new projects the proper way, with proper staff and a better scope(Astral Terra was our first big game, first Steam game and it got out of scope) as well as continue to tinker with Astral Terra. I have the option of scrapping the character controller and making the game a single player game - which in turn would make the entire project so much more manageable and leave me in a capable position. That said - I also tinkered with a VR version of the game last year and we may put that out eventually as a free experience.

For now, my focus will be to try and tweak the current character controller to fix what people don't like(for example pressing down mouse and drag lets you turn but the turn key works at the same time and it spins the character) for the next patch. I also have new character assets we've been considering dropping in to freshen up the look but I'm not entirely sure that's something that we need at this time(kind of more of a want than a need). We have apologized so many time in the past for letting people down or putting out a game that people didn't like or thought was trash. Astral Terra has and never will be a cash grab - it was a labor of love and a chance at turning our 20 years of experience in new media, marketing, graphics design, animation, and love of games, into a company that makes fun stuff that is also a fun place to work at. That hasn't happened yet but we will keep at it as we re-strategize and try to sort where we are going next. Thank you so much to all of you that have been patient or gave the game a chance without crapping all over it and us. We(my partner and wife Amy) really appreciate it - we do this because we think it's a really neat, fun, industry to work in(when you're not stressed out lol). We've learned a lot over the last 4 years and hope to continue to develop our skills and make better products down the road.

Chris Wightman
Tethys Interactive Creative Director, Lead Designer

PATCH NOTES

Beta 1.3
- Forest biome has returned to normal, winter stuff as been removed and replaced with new higher quality forest assets.
- Wind now works on trees and bushes in Forest and Tropical Biome.
- Gameobject pooling and management optimized for better performance.
- Tropical Biome trees and some bushes replaced with new, higher quality assets with a Tropical Fantasy look to them.
- AI Tweaks and fixes.
- Added water back to the Forest biome. Dig down to the lowest level to reveal enough water to create streams and ponds.
- Fixed digging at lower levels.