according to coronacurve.de there will be several quintillion cases in the US in one year

I think I caught you. I believe you first wrote zstd, and I in fact meant zstd for compression. It's the new fancy hipster algorithm by a guy at facebook, but it's actually good and targets high decompression speeds. The few repos I found for c# target 1.3xx zstd that's a bit outdated already. It's being constantly improved and optimized.
Also I fixed my late night mistake: 4 bits can only hold [-4, 3] don't think you saw that. It's a bit (haha) low, but you will see what works best.
Last but not least, don't forget about the trick Minecraft did to improve compression ratios: when they adopted the Anvil saving format, they began serializing chunks as y,z,x instead of x,z,y. So apparently the algo worked better with their data when saved in that order.

I already commented on the youtube channel, but il post again here,
Really loving the look, the editor is everything i would have expected and more, it is looking spectacular for sure!

Are you going to add a 'snap to grid' function like in stranded II titanium?(which seems to be an inspiration to several things in stranded III). When the game is released an people start modding it, there will be extra things like cities and houses, and it will make things much easier to build.
(in titanium, the 'snap to grid' function is called 'tiles')

Also, if you do add it, you could add options in-game

SNAP TO GRID MENU:
x=(off/on) //include x in grid?
y=(off/on) //include y in grid?
z=(off/on) //include z in grid?

X grid value = (1-1000) //customizes the size of x grid value
Y grid value = (1-1000) //customizes the size of y grid value
Z grid value = (1-1000) //customizes the size of z grid value

Y terrain snap = (off/on) //If the y grid size should be relative to the terrain (ex terrain height + grid value) or flat (only grid value)



Like the low quality image above, but with a z value

Like titanium, you would be able to scroll to raise/lower the object that is being placed by the specified grid value.

Also another in-game option would be necessary:

grid=(on/off) //should the grid be on or off

The spam cooldown is 2 minutes on this thread...

UX: The highlight is barely visible. Just make the letters of a bright/red color for better visibility.

You said you were planning to add notes, for quests. Here's an idea: Let the player themselves take notes in his big notebook/questbook. And instead of writing the encyclopedia yourself, add lines to it like in a school noteboko - so the player adds notes himself.
To keep it useful: it should be shared between missions and multiplayer and only require the player to craft this notebook to access his notes. Campaigns may force an empty notebook for difficulty or story telling.

The dark forest screenshot looks awesome. That's all I wanted to say.

Looks goddamn beautiful DC, just keeps looking better an better.

@ VADemon: Unfortunately I can't do that because the font system I'm using (TextMeshPro which is now part of Unity) is a bit limited. The highlighting is an overlay which is ABOVE the letters (yes, that's as stupid as it sounds). Therefore I can only use a very light transparent color for the highlight otherwise it would cover the letters too much.

It's not a huge problem though. The filter marks the letters you entered so you basically know anyway what it says. Even if you can't read the highlighted part perfectly well.

@ ModJuicer: Didn't think too much about that yet. It would be super easy to add a snap to grid setting to the editor so I guess I'll just do so

For buildings which consist of multiple parts there will definitely be a snapping system (in-game and in editor). Otherwise it would be too complicated to place them properly.

Images in the Stranded III Dev Blog are broken on Page 1 and the beginning of page 2
Just so you know

DC : also, I thought of a different system of building items. If the player is near a special object (like an anvil) the process speeds up and a message is displayed "anvil used to speed process". This would also work if you had special tools in your rucksack, like a hammer speeding up processes that would naturally (in real life) be sped up by a hammer. Different items could stack to reduce building time drastically, ex. using an anvil, a hammer, a heat source (campfire or furnace), and a chisel speeds the process of forming metal shapes tenfold by stacking them together.

Also, a way of mining ore. Make large rocks and cliff faces, and make the rocks last long so they don't all get destroyed leaving the island without any rocks (has happened to me before on Stranded II). If the island somehow still runs out of rocks, make it possible to construct a mineshaft (the mineshaft building would not require rocks to build for obvious reasons ) . The mineshaft would have square-ish rocks inside of it (or some other shape that fits together well, like hexagons or triangles. note: the actual shape would have rough edges, not be a perfect shape) and if a rock is mined, the game would automatically generate rocks behind the rock mined so that it would not have to render a whole bunch of rocks.

Make it possible to find ore in the rocks above or below the surface that can be melted down to pure substances (metals, etc) and also make a small possibility of finding substances if a regular rock is melted down. Also have ore give a random amount of pure material to make the game interesting (like 1-5, 5 being extremely rare, four being rare, three being regular, and two or one being bad luck)

Also, make iron wires (adding copper to the game isn't necessary). They would connect different electric machines for when the player is very far in the world and doesn't have anything else left to build. Electric machines should be the hardest things in the game to build, and wires should be able to go through walls and doors that have cracks and spaces that the wire could travel through

S3 cant be so complicated, I love how simple game series is and let it be like it, also carrying anvil isnt great option on an island.. its about survival, not building an island resort. S3 will be more complex than S2 for sure, and let DC work on it his way and left place for modders do they work after release

Maps will be bigger and more populated in stuff so ores wont be a problem I guess

@ kevin00756: Thanks! Fixed the broken images.

@ ModJuicer: I actually had similar plans for most of these things. For crafting there will be combinations which require you to be close to certain objects (or maybe the crafting options will be displayed when you use the objects). Giving a buff on something when being close to certain objects or when owning certain items is also a nice idea though.

Regarding ore Assassin moder is right. Most islands will be much bigger therefore it's quite unlikely that you won't have enough resources. I do plan however to have some huge indestructible rocks as well which basically give you infinite stone/ore.

There's also a blog post about a possible underground system which could also allow dynamic digging in a very basic way. I'm not sure if this will make it into the game but I would love to add it.

Same for wires and electrics. Would be really cool in my opinion and I would like to work on a system for that but not sure if I will do so.

In general Assassin moder is right. I will focus on the main survival mechanics first. Additional fancy stuff can be added later. Either by me in updates or by people who mod the game.

Yeah. I was mainly thinking about when you get further in the game, so it would make sense to do these after basic stuff. It's just that without a goal ahead (running out of challenges) the only thing you can do is make a new island, and that gets old after a while, so it would be best to minimize this (make so you don't have to start over too constantly). It would be cool for this game to stay fun instead of get boring too soon.

I found this guy on the Unity reddit who posted about his project which looks very Stranded 2 to me: Trees

The style of his water is something I was looking for in S3: Water

@ DC: maybe you should contact him to exchange some ideas and maybe even collaborate?

I think that water is already looking like one you posted @ Hurri04: Trees and graphics is really looking like stranded series. Tge thing i would like to see is randomly generated treea modela which can be hard in custom map making unfortunate

@ Hurri04: I can't tell for sure but I would guess that he's using crest which I'm already using for Stranded III as well.
https://github.com/crest-ocean/crest

Hi Peter. Stranded III is looking amazing!

I remember stumbling upon the original Stranded about 15 years ago after playing Schiffbruch to death and wanting to find another survival game.

Something made me think of Stranded this morning, but I couldn't remember its title for the life of me, so I decided to do some Googling. Imagine my surprise when not only was I able to find your site, but discovered you're still actively developing games!

I was 14 when I first played Stranded, and rediscovering it today has brought back memories I thought I had forgotten. What a treat!

Do you have a Patreon or anything that can be used to help you with future development? I'm also a professional web developer (10+ years), and would happily help if you need anything done to the site.

Yeah, you always insist on doing things alone, never allowing anyone to help you develop Stranded 3. But what about financially? Everyone has a Patreon at this point, why not one for your projects?

thats an excellent idea! id pledge to that

I mean, I'm personally not in a financial situation that would allow me to regularly donate, but it's still a good idea because I know there must be a lot of people who can and would.