Fog volumes added.
I finally found a nice looking and performant volumetric fog volumes system, and got fog volumes placed around the map.
The views through the fog look super nice. It can be pretty thick sometimes though.
The fog quality setting turns this fog off at lower quality settings if desired.

Fog during the day:
Fog at night:
NPC Hotkeys added.
"Order NPC Move" button, configurable in the input settings but defaulting to "X". Order all follower NPCs to move to where you are pointing. They attack anything in their path and defend the location once they arrive at it.
"Order NPC Follow", defaulted to "C". Undoes NPC Move order and makes NPCs follow the player again.

Water asset "Fluid Flux" updated to Fluid Flux 3.0.
This water update came with about a 3-5 FPS increase in performance.

This update was originally done to fix the issue where the player would bob up in the water and seem to get stuck and then plop back down all at once.
That no longer happens and the player moves much more smoothly up and down as the waves rise and fall under them.

Water improvements beyond the asset update:
Player swimming animations replaced with better ones.
Player swimming above water water sometimes fixed.
Ocean and river/lake water now all uses the same water plane instead of 2 seperate ones for better performance.
Toggle for "Water Interaction" added to settings. (This is the ripples in the water that are made when you swim.)
Some additional chests added underwater. (There are 3 now. This will be an ongoing process, my sanity can't handle hiding chests in the ocean for too long in one sitting.)
Main Menu water on the deck of the ship is now baked instead of runtime simulated for performance and/or battery life on a laptop.
Waves made bigger.
Foliage visuals improved.
An Unreal Engine bug was causing foliage to have an ugly blue sheen on most of the trees after the game was packaged, even though it looked good in the editor. After many hours of trial and error I was able to track down the problem and get it fixed.

Before:
After:
More info than you need:
The problem was related to the trees being set to use LOD 1 or 2 as the base mesh, so the fix was to use the full quality mesh for all the trees. This does subtract from the performance gains made from the water asset update, but the trees sure look good now. They have aggressive LODs so they only render the super high poly version (Some of them around 1 million triangles) when you're very close to the tree.

With the ugly blue sheen gone I increased how much light scatters through the leaves of trees, which I think lead to some pretty stunning improvements, especially when under trees and looking up:
As well as just foliage generally:
Ultra Dynamic Sky/Weather asset updated.
Numerous small bugfixes for sky and weather came from this update.


Bugfixes:
Starting cloth armor arm bones bound to the chest too much and causing weird stretching under the arms fixed.

Some variables such as current day not getting cleared when going from in-game and back to main menu and starting a new game fixed.

The Crow NPC not attacking enemies on guard mode fixed.


Performance:
Cloth simulation on clothes like the dress Lizzy is wearing now properly stop simulating when you get far away.

Above mentioned toggle for "Water Interaction" added to settings. This allows you to save a bit more CPU by not calculating a water physics simulation around the player.


Small Improvements:
Colliders on small saplings and bushes made much smaller so you get stuck on them less running through the forest.

Extra info beyond the update:
I tested Unreal Engine 5.5 (Currently 5.4) that is now "Production Ready", and it mostly works except a few plugins aren't updated for 5.5 yet. (Like DLSS)
So the engine update will have to wait for a future update.
It is supposed to come with a 20% Lumen performance improvement as Epic Games tries to get it to run at 60 FPS on PS5. I didn't really notice much of a difference personally, so not having 5.5 yet is not a big loss at all.

This list of changes includes 0.6.0 (Initial release) - 0.7.3.

Gameplay Improvements:
Enemy waves now give pre-set loot drops with a mixture of equipment, resources to build and craft along with blueprints to unlock new stuff.

As new tower types and stuff get added, I will undoubtedly start having enemies drop the blueprints for them as prizes for reaching certain waves.
IE reaching wave 10 could unlock a flamethrower tower for example.
I would like to add a UI to see what "prizes" are coming up next to make getting to higher waves more rewarding feeling.

Topaz gem added as a rare drop from Copper, Iron, Silver and Gold ore nodes.

Topaz Silver and Gold rings craftable to increase movement speed.

Performance:
Texture VRAM usage optimized project-wide by lowering texture res where it isn't noticable and eliminating unessesary textures.

Tree shaders tweaked to make the leaves look less shiny and overly reflecting the skybox, and shaders optimized a bit.

Bugfixes:
Stats not being added back correctly to a respawned character all the time fixed.

Tree of Life glowy effect moved from the center of the tree to off to the side and spinning around the tree to avoid it being inside larger growth stages of the tree.

Tree of life sticking through the pot in some stages fixed.

BuiltOnLandscape status not being carried over when a structure is destroyed and rebuilt from a "hologram" fixed.

Advanced Repair Kit not crafting fixed.

Magic arrow having the minor craft option twice instead of minor, major and superior fixed.

NPCs blocking players fixed.

Rested bonus counter going into the negatives fixed.


Thanks for reading and happy holidays!

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