Hello explorers! Welcome to another patch day for Sapphire Safari. Version 020 is about stealth, and getting proper feedback for sneaking around the island. Let’s get into it.

Stealth and UX

As hinted in the last two dev blogs we have been working on getting the UX and UI for stealth feedback working and feeling solid. The way monsters react to you needed to be completely reworked to make the system we will be launching today which is why it took us a little longer than expected to get everything together.

Here is the breakdown of how it all functions:

1. Monsters will now react to the player as they enter their awareness radius.
2. The closer you get to a monster the faster they will be made aware of you.
3. Crouching, sprinting, being spotted, and entering hiding areas will all affect the speed at which they will be made aware.
4. Walking over a noise maker (stepping on a branch, etc) will immediately alert all surrounding monsters.
5. Once the monster’s awareness meter is full, they enter a searching state, and will attempt to visually locate the threat they feels exists.
6. If the player enters the eyesight of the monster after they start searching the alert meter will begin to fill very quickly.
7. Once the alert meter is full the monster will react with a loud shock, this will alert monsters within earshot to your presence.

This UI of the awareness/alerted states will not show up within photos you take, so no need to worry about their presentation affecting your photo scores. Here are some other tips you should know about.

• Entering bushes will “hide” you from any monster girl becoming aware of you.

• Monsters will revert to a normal state if you remain hidden for long enough.
• While there are only vocal recordings for the Rabbit creature, alerting any species will alert surrounding monster girls.
• Currently thrown tools do not create sounds monsters react to, this will change in future patches.

Photo Submission

We overhauled the submission UI for photos, allowing for a cleaner breakdown of the photo submission process. Simply choose which monster girl you want to submit for and it will show off what photo categories are currently applicable. We will be adding a whole lot more categories in the future, so this should help keep it all user-friendly and clean.

DirectX 12 Default

There has recently been a Unreal Engine 5 update making DX12 performance a lot nicer, on modern machines we are looking at roughly 20 frames increase by using DX12 as a renderer. So as of v020 Sapphire Safari is using DX12 as the default rendering solution. Meaning if you have an older system you will need to launch the game with one of the included .bat files which is included in the main directory for the game installation. Please use either DX11 or Vulkan.

Changelog v020

• Added new Stealth system
• Added awareness UI indicators
• Changed species behavior to match the Stealth system
• Set DirectX 12 as the default RHI
• Added improved Photo Submission UI
• Improved Camera Shutter delay time for photo tagging consistency
• Overhauled island water systems
• Improved shadow-based performance
• Fixed Hoereno wool patterns loading issues
• Fixed Hoereno wool colors
• Fixed Hoereno penis texture loading issues
• Added Nest/Burrows environment to Plains
• Added environmental narrative props to Plains
• Added new Guidebook UI elements
• Various UI cleanup

That’s all for now! Be sure to enjoy the new update! I will leave you all with some lovely cuddle photos I was able to take with the new stealth system in play.