SDGNelson

Q: Why is material painting only working with a few materials?

Each terrain tile/chunk can have up to eight unique materials, but auto-converted maps will have all of the eight layers filled already. When you try to paint a ninth material onto the tile it cannot find an empty slot. The solution is to reassign an unused layer:

1. Open the Terrain > Tiles tab. Each tile/chunk of the terrain can have up to eight unique materials which is useful for biome variety, whereas the old terrain only had eight materials across the entire level.
2. Click on a terrain tile to select it. In the bottom right you can see the eight layers and which materials are applied to the tile.
3. Click on one of the eight layers to select it. The selected layer is shown in the top right. You can now click a material from the list to replace it.
4. Painting the reassigned material should work!

Q: How to bake materials?

SDGNelson

The problem: some players were deleting foliage and terrain material files to gain a competitive advantage.

The solution: to prevent this the client now sends foliage and terrain material hashes to the server regardless of whether the asset exists on the client. If the client does not have a hash for the file then the server knows it is missing and should kick the player.

The new problem: unfortunately some maps have references to terrain materials and foliage that were removed during development. For example if a bush was manually placed into the map and then the custom bush asset was deleted or went missing due to a workshop file getting uninstalled then the reference to the bush still existed in the map so that it would not be lost if the deletion was accidental.

For terrain materials an easier fix was introduced in the patch: since the server loads terrain materials it can mark a terrain layer as "known missing" so that clients are not kicked when it is missing from both the client and server.

EDIT af